No, the parasites are the ones who change the edition of the book every 6-12 months, making the used book market nonexistant and allowing for inflation like this...
$170 is a little high, but to be fair, if that's the book I think it is, it would easily more than cover three semesters of calc class. $60 for a textbook for a semester class really isn't that bad.
The obnoxious part about it then is not so much the high price right off the bat, it's the fact that you're forced to get all three classes at once. (Even the shorter, volume-based editions mentioned by another poster don't go too far toward fixing this issue.)
Photoshop is the only piece of software Adobe does well, maybe you were thinking of Illustrator?
I don't use Photoshop, but I do use Lightroom, and I love it. I have only minor complaints; it's just a joy to work with. And considering how much I hate software, that's something to be happy about.
Therefore, if the price is even close to comparable, it makes sense to spend a little more for better reliability.
I'll agree, of course. That being said... what are you doing to your hard drives that you lose 4 or 5 in a year?! I had one drive pseudo-fail in my desktop a few months ago, and that was the first failure I've seen in a few years, and was in a 4 1/2 year-old drive. I do have a laptop too... no problems there, and it's maybe 3 years old now. (By pseudo-fail I mean I think it was exhibiting signs of failure -- plug in the drive and the computer wouldn't even POST, unplug it and everything would work fine -- but it's seemingly worked since then. I pulled it anyway, of course.)
Like later you talk about how the cost of a hard drive gets lost in the noise, even though it could be, let's say 5% difference. But in my experience the frequency of replacing drives when they die is so low that the benefit of SSDs would get lost in the noise there.
Speed is nice and all, but flash provides minimal speed boost during the 99.9% of the time that you're not booting or launching an application. You can get the same benefit with just a few gigs of flash cache for a lot less money than a full SSD.
You say that, and of course it's workload dependent, but there are plenty of workloads where lot's of people say otherwise; Linus for instance says "In fact, I can't recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine". And that's probably on a desktop, in comparison to a 7200 RPM drive (and maybe faster); what would the difference be on a laptop with a slow laptop drive?
If I can't carry my photos with me, there's little point in having taken them in the first place.
How 'bout your parents' (or your, depending on your age) photo albums? I doubt they carry those with them, but would you say there was little point in taking those?
The big reason to move away from spinning drives to SSDs is not performance. It's reliability.
What? Says you.
1) The portable market is bigger than the desktop market for good now, but it's not like the desktop market is inconsequential or anything. 2) It's not like you can avoid backups just because you have an SSD.
I'm sure everyone has their own opinion on what's important, but if you ask me, the benefits to an SSD (even in a portable device) are (1) speed, (2) power, and maybe then (3) reliability.
Buy 1 reasonable SSD for your OS and apps, then use a secondary HD for mass storage...since large files and heavy writing doesn't benefit from SSD
Sure they do. Maybe. Videos and sound don't if you're just watching, but that's because there is a limit to how fast they need to be consumed. (They still could benefit if you're processing them for instance.)
But at least drives like the Intel SSDs now beat out all but the fastest rotational disks even in sustained reads. So if you ARE doing things that involving reading in a lot of data as quickly as you can (e.g. loading a level in a game or batch processing a bunch of photos), you probably will see a benefit from SSDs, though not as much as for lots of random accesses of course.
In fact, I can't recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine.... Everything performs well. You can put that disk in a machine, and suddenly you almost don't even need to care whether things were in your page cache or not. Firefox starts up pretty much as snappily in the cold-cache case as it does hot-cache. You can do package installation and big untars, and you don't even notice it, because your desktop doesn't get laggy or anything.
Jeff Atwood (admittedly, where I saw Linus quoted):
And, frankly, I was blown away by the performance difference compared to the 300 GB Velociraptor I had in my system before. That drive is not exactly chopped liver; it's incredibly fast by magnetic platter drive standards.... In my humble opinion, $200 - $300 for a SSD is easily the most cost effective performance increase you can buy for a computer of anything remotely resembling recent vintage. Whether you prefer the 80 GB X25-M SSD or the 128 GB Crucial SSD, it's money well invested for people like us who are obsessive about how their computer performs.
Trust me, you will feel the performance difference of a modern SSD in day to day computing. That's far more than I can say for most of today's CPU and memory upgrades. The transition from magnetic storage to solid state storage is nothing less than a breakthrough.
I can tell you that installing an SSD in my work laptop was the single greatest (relative) performance jump I've ever seen, starting with my 8086/1MB/CGA machine until the present day, including all processor/memory/graphics upgrades I've ever done.
A quick scan of Newegg shows that a SDD costs ~$2.21/GB, where a comparable traditional HDD costs only ~0.33, thats quite a difference, I'm not sure if 15 minutes of battery life, and perhaps (very generously) a second a day in seek/read/write time is worth that much.
I'm generally somewhat with you... waiting for SSDs to halve in price another time or two before I jump in.
That said, you're underselling SSDs a lot here -- a second per-day is not even remotely realistic in terms of saved seek time, and that even ignores the fact that good SSDs now beat most hard drives in raw transfer as well.
There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story) who say that changing from a magnetic hard drive to an SSD is about the biggest single upgrade you could make to a reasonable system today. The random/. poster I mentioned said that upgrading to an SSD was the single biggest speed increase of any upgrade he's ever done. Of course YMMV and this is workload-dependent, but don't understate the benefit of a good SSD either.
To cover all of this with an SSD would cost significantly more than my full computer (which isn't a slouch hardware wise).
Of course, you wouldn't do this; you'd come up with some split between what should be on fast SSD and what should be on a slow magnetic media, and have one drive for each.
You can fit all of your games this year plus the OS on the 80 GB...
But at the expense of having to move things around as they fall in and out of use. As I mentioned in my reply to myself earlier, this becomes especially problematic with Steam, where you have to start messing about with links/junctions/etc. because the damn thing won't let you choose an install location.
I mean yeah, I could do it, but at this point it's still further from zero-maintenance than I'd like. Or maybe I'm just whining.
It's probably another case of "if you're spending $50 per game on that many games, you can probably afford a different drive to store them on" though.
I don't buy this argument though. I mean, I spend maybe $200/year on games on average. (This year is a little higher because of the combination of ME2 and me going a bit wild with the collector's edition of SC2, but not that much higher.) 160 GB is about the smallest drive I'd be likely to get, but on Newegg, the cheapest 160 GB drive is about $300. That'd be basically tied for most expensive component of my PC and be my video game budget for a year and a half. And that's a cheap drive; who knows how good it is. (There is a open-box X25-M for $320 though; if it works, that's a good drive.) Even if you could talk me down to 120 GB, that's still over $200.
When that 160 GB drive hits like $150 though... then I'll probably pounce.
BTW I don't want to say "oh, everyone will have huge games like this" and whatnot, but at the same time, it's also way of an overgeneralization to say "80 GB is plenty".
And to continue my last thought, you could say "just put what you need" on the SSD, but that presents its own problems. How do I decide what to put on there? Do I need to be installing and uninstalling programs as I change which ones I use more? How much more of a pain is this with Steam, where you can't choose an install directory? (BTW, are you listening Valve? Add this feature.)
These sound like a huge pain, which is why I'm holding off on an SSD for a little while longer. When I can have a magnetic "media" drive for huge stuff that doesn't need fast transfers (videos, rips of my CDs as FLAC, etc.) but have an SSD for *all* or basically all my programs and most small personal data, I'll get one. In the meantime, even though I do want one, they basically seem like they'd be a bit of a pain. (I'd guess the former will happen in more than one and less than two years, but we'll see.)
I don't know what programs you're installing, but I have several (games) that are in that range *each*. Starcraft 2 is 12 GB. Portal is close to 10 IIRC; all of the Orange Box is probably close to 20. Mass Effect 2 is 15 GB. Even Windows 7 is in the 10-15 GB range, somehow. There, I just filled 2/3 of that 80 GB drive.
Sure, I wouldn't have to put those on the SSD drive, but at the same time, it'd be nice to be able to.
True, but at the same time, look at it this way: if you got a 2 year contract when the Android was first released, that contract wouldn't even be up yet.
Granted, there are plenty of people who would have upgraded a year or more into their contracts, and a few people who would have bought the phone outright and aren't on a contract (that's me with my N900), but at the same time, I wouldn't exactly expect a glut of used devices out there on the market for a bit more.
The cross is the symbol for cross product and the dot is the symbol for dot product; when used on scalar values they reduce to the same operation -- multiplication.
So first, I'm no authority on mathematical history, but I'll bet you $20 that neither vectors nor the distinction of cross- and dot-products were invented (/discovered) at the time that Oughtred started the use of "×" for multiplication. So no, keeping the distinction between those operations had nothing to do with the selection of ×.
Second, even if separate symbols existed, that's still not an excuse for choosing ×; there are tons of other symbols that could have been used instead.
For some artists, the free distribution of audience-generated recordings is an extremely valuable asset...
The Pink Floyd Pluse DVDs (I think it's that one) has a feature called "bootlegging the bootleggers", where they include bootlegged recordings people made at a couple of their performances. Which, of course, is pretty hilarious.
*sigh* You don't get it. First off, the reason so many people pirate today is because of DRM.
No, that's not "the" reason so many people pirate today. You're fucking posting in a story about how a DRM-free game is holding a sale because of 90% piracy rates, and this is not the first time a similar story has come up on/. The Humble Indy Bundle was distributed without DRM and letting people pay whatever they want (down to a penny!), and a quarter of the people who downloaded the games from their servers were pirating it!
The numbers don't add up to match your anecdotes.
Except that every major studio has switched to DRM to kill used games and to nickel and dime people.
People say the intent of DRM is to kill the used game market, and while that is a fortunate-to-the-studios side effect, I'm not convinced it's the main reason. Look at consoles... the used market in console games is healthy enough.
No, I actually think that, in most cases, the people who decide to use DRM actually think it will help the piracy problem.
The fact that you're defending them for putting it in there makes you a defender of DRM.
Where did I defend them for putting in DRM? I said it's their right to make that decision, and that it's not your right to decide that you're going to play anyway, but I never said that them using DRM was a good decision or that they should do it.
If every car dealer started putting a credit card reader in the dashboard and you had to swipe your credit car and pay to start the car, would you really support the car dealers and say "if you don't like it, don't buy a car"? I doubt it.
So first of all, your analogy doesn't quite line up in a very important aspect. Assuming what you're getting at is that, in your car analogy, you would hack your car, then the analogy is more like "I'll buy the game but try to hack it so that the DRM doesn't do its job." And that I will say is ethical, assuming that you don't then distribute the hacked version. (Distributing instructions on how to do the hack is fine.) But that's not what you're trying to justify doing.
Second, in the analogous world, not every car dealer has installed the interlock, just all the big ones. There would still be a few out there, including some dealers that sell quite nice cars at affordable prices, that don't. And in such a world, why would you go to the big dealers that use the interlock? (Of course this hints at another big problem, which is that you'll probably only have one or two cars, but many games.)
The fact that no DRM has ever stopped piracy is a pretty glaring point that it's not designed to fight piracy.
That's not a very good point considering that (1) DRM by its very nature is essentially impossible and (2) there have been reasonable successful DRM schemes short-term. I mean, consider Assassin's Creed 2, mentioned elsewhere in the comments to this story. That DRM went for about a month before being cracked. If you buy the popular lore that a substantial proportion of the copies of a game are sold shortly after release for most games, then that DRM was actually reasonably successful.
I'll leave you with a quote - "We must all fear evil men. But there is another evil that we should fear most - and that is the indifference of good men". You, my friend, are indifferent. I choose to fight those who desire is to harm and take advantage of people, all while making a profit while their customers lose.
I am not indifferent -- I have passed over games because of their DRM (e.g. Spore, C&C 4). However I don't pretend that I have some right to play the games that I choose simply because their publishers implement unreasonable DRM.
To be snarky, I'm actually usually willing to accept some inconvenience for my principles, unlike you.
You can make all the excuses you want, but you're supporting the assholes in charge of companies who forced things to be this way.
I'm not supporting them, because I don't buy many games. Most of those I do buy are some of those that Steam gives deep discounts on. I got SC2 because... well, because there was basically no way I was not going to, and I got Mass Effect 2 because (1) it's an awesome storyline and (2) it has only a disc check, but I think those are the first full-price games I've bought for a couple years.
You can make all the excuses you want, but you're supporting the assholes in charge of companies who forced things to be this way.
And you can make all the excuses you want, but if you're pirating games you're representative the main reason that crappy DRM is so prevalent.
The choice shouldn't be "do I pirate or do I buy?", it should be "do I buy or do I go without?". Period, IMO.
I'm sympathetic to the "I'm a kid and make no money" pirating argument a bit, because I was in that situation and pirated a bunch of software. And I'm not going to argue someone too much against that. But IMO it's completely unethical to pirate software simply because you disagree with the terms the seller set (i.e. if you disagree with the DRM). If you agree, buy it. If you disagree, walk away.
If companies started losing sales of heavily-DRMed games because people weren't playing them instead of people pirating them, then most of them would snap back to their senses.
If you have any knowledge of Game Theory, you'd realize that this is actually the best solution (given that DRM is used) - they make the same profit regardless of if I pirate or not (since I won't buy a DRM'd game) and I get the added benefit of playing the game.
Except that this isn't an one-shot game; it's iterated. Thanks to people like you, they'll look at the piracy rates and be more inclined to use DRM in the future. You say "they're trying to destroy" your hobby, but from my view you're helping to give them the excuse to do so.
You wanna know why there is so much piracy? it is because developers are retarded! As another poster recently said it is like the entire games industry has decided that Buggati roadsters are the ONLY way to go, and they are cranking out games that are $60+ in a world economy that is so dead I'm surprised peasant revolts aren't breaking out. Nobody has any money, those that do are using it to keep the roofs over their head, and they expect folks to shell out $60+ for a 5 hour game and THEN shell out another $25-$50 for the DLC which they ripped out the game in the first place to "maximize their profit potential". Yeah right!
Except that as this article, and many others, illustrates, you're wrong. Machinarium was $20 and has a 90% piracy rate. World of Goo was $20 normally and had an 80-90% piracy rate. When the Humble Indy Bundle released their games for whatever price you wanted to pay (starting at $0.01), 25% of people downloading it from their servers were pirating it! And that doesn't count out-of-band pirating like TPB or whatever. And you could pay a penny.
No, cost is not why piracy rates are so high.
You could argue it's convenience -- you need a credit card to order the Humble Indy Bundle for example -- but not price. Personally I think it's just 'cause a crapload of people are selfish jackasses.
That works for Python because the visual appearance of the code reflects the syntactic structure. The same cannot be said for C.
(I have two complaints about it that makes me kind of not like the Python approach. One is that crappy forum software will sometimes remove tabs/spaces. If that happens with C code someone posted, no big deal, just paste it into Emacs and indent-region. If that happens with Python code, well, that information is often almost worthless -- reconstructing the indentation can be difficult. Second, even if a code snippet displays correctly, it may not copy/paste correctly. (This is especially true with an older.emacs I had.) These problems come from the fact that it's much easier to lose indentation information accidentally than it is to drop braces accidentally. There are also a couple minor annoyances when it comes to editing, like it's harder to predict when the indentation code in emacs will put the cursor at the right place.)
Two disadvantages: The time it takes to move the head from the inside to the outside, and the time it takes for the drive to physically rotate the data to the head.
If you take your parent's assumption that it's spinning at the same speed, then the rotational latency is independent of diameter.
But I think that's a big assumption: rotating at the same (rotational) speed means that not only do the edges wobble more, but the whole disc is under more stress. It's also generating more heat.
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No, the parasites are the ones who change the edition of the book every 6-12 months, making the used book market nonexistant and allowing for inflation like this...
Why can't both be parasites?
$170 is a little high, but to be fair, if that's the book I think it is, it would easily more than cover three semesters of calc class. $60 for a textbook for a semester class really isn't that bad.
The obnoxious part about it then is not so much the high price right off the bat, it's the fact that you're forced to get all three classes at once. (Even the shorter, volume-based editions mentioned by another poster don't go too far toward fixing this issue.)
The gigabit Ethernet and on-board USB 2.0 means the device could be a media server, a file server or print server for your network.
Print server I can see; that'd actually be pretty spiffy. But a media server? File server? With 512 MB of flash?
Sure you could add an external drive, but at that point why not just get a laptop or something?
Exactly 1 single other platform : Android.
At least two: Maemo.
Photoshop is the only piece of software Adobe does well, maybe you were thinking of Illustrator?
I don't use Photoshop, but I do use Lightroom, and I love it. I have only minor complaints; it's just a joy to work with. And considering how much I hate software, that's something to be happy about.
Therefore, if the price is even close to comparable, it makes sense to spend a little more for better reliability.
I'll agree, of course. That being said... what are you doing to your hard drives that you lose 4 or 5 in a year?! I had one drive pseudo-fail in my desktop a few months ago, and that was the first failure I've seen in a few years, and was in a 4 1/2 year-old drive. I do have a laptop too... no problems there, and it's maybe 3 years old now. (By pseudo-fail I mean I think it was exhibiting signs of failure -- plug in the drive and the computer wouldn't even POST, unplug it and everything would work fine -- but it's seemingly worked since then. I pulled it anyway, of course.)
Like later you talk about how the cost of a hard drive gets lost in the noise, even though it could be, let's say 5% difference. But in my experience the frequency of replacing drives when they die is so low that the benefit of SSDs would get lost in the noise there.
Speed is nice and all, but flash provides minimal speed boost during the 99.9% of the time that you're not booting or launching an application. You can get the same benefit with just a few gigs of flash cache for a lot less money than a full SSD.
You say that, and of course it's workload dependent, but there are plenty of workloads where lot's of people say otherwise; Linus for instance says "In fact, I can't recall the last time that a new tech toy I got made such a dramatic difference in performance and just plain usability of a machine of mine". And that's probably on a desktop, in comparison to a 7200 RPM drive (and maybe faster); what would the difference be on a laptop with a slow laptop drive?
If I can't carry my photos with me, there's little point in having taken them in the first place.
How 'bout your parents' (or your, depending on your age) photo albums? I doubt they carry those with them, but would you say there was little point in taking those?
The big reason to move away from spinning drives to SSDs is not performance. It's reliability.
What? Says you.
1) The portable market is bigger than the desktop market for good now, but it's not like the desktop market is inconsequential or anything.
2) It's not like you can avoid backups just because you have an SSD.
I'm sure everyone has their own opinion on what's important, but if you ask me, the benefits to an SSD (even in a portable device) are (1) speed, (2) power, and maybe then (3) reliability.
Buy 1 reasonable SSD for your OS and apps, then use a secondary HD for mass storage...since large files and heavy writing doesn't benefit from SSD
Sure they do. Maybe. Videos and sound don't if you're just watching, but that's because there is a limit to how fast they need to be consumed. (They still could benefit if you're processing them for instance.)
But at least drives like the Intel SSDs now beat out all but the fastest rotational disks even in sustained reads. So if you ARE doing things that involving reading in a lot of data as quickly as you can (e.g. loading a level in a game or batch processing a bunch of photos), you probably will see a benefit from SSDs, though not as much as for lots of random accesses of course.
There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story)
BTW, if you want citations:
Linus on his Intel:
Jeff Atwood (admittedly, where I saw Linus quoted):
Random /.'er rabtech:
A quick scan of Newegg shows that a SDD costs ~$2.21/GB, where a comparable traditional HDD costs only ~0.33, thats quite a difference, I'm not sure if 15 minutes of battery life, and perhaps (very generously) a second a day in seek/read/write time is worth that much.
I'm generally somewhat with you... waiting for SSDs to halve in price another time or two before I jump in.
That said, you're underselling SSDs a lot here -- a second per-day is not even remotely realistic in terms of saved seek time, and that even ignores the fact that good SSDs now beat most hard drives in raw transfer as well.
There are multiple people out there (including Linus Torvolds, Jeff Atwood, and some random poster in this story) who say that changing from a magnetic hard drive to an SSD is about the biggest single upgrade you could make to a reasonable system today. The random /. poster I mentioned said that upgrading to an SSD was the single biggest speed increase of any upgrade he's ever done. Of course YMMV and this is workload-dependent, but don't understate the benefit of a good SSD either.
To cover all of this with an SSD would cost significantly more than my full computer (which isn't a slouch hardware wise).
Of course, you wouldn't do this; you'd come up with some split between what should be on fast SSD and what should be on a slow magnetic media, and have one drive for each.
You can fit all of your games this year plus the OS on the 80 GB...
But at the expense of having to move things around as they fall in and out of use. As I mentioned in my reply to myself earlier, this becomes especially problematic with Steam, where you have to start messing about with links/junctions/etc. because the damn thing won't let you choose an install location.
I mean yeah, I could do it, but at this point it's still further from zero-maintenance than I'd like. Or maybe I'm just whining.
It's probably another case of "if you're spending $50 per game on that many games, you can probably afford a different drive to store them on" though.
I don't buy this argument though. I mean, I spend maybe $200/year on games on average. (This year is a little higher because of the combination of ME2 and me going a bit wild with the collector's edition of SC2, but not that much higher.) 160 GB is about the smallest drive I'd be likely to get, but on Newegg, the cheapest 160 GB drive is about $300. That'd be basically tied for most expensive component of my PC and be my video game budget for a year and a half. And that's a cheap drive; who knows how good it is. (There is a open-box X25-M for $320 though; if it works, that's a good drive.) Even if you could talk me down to 120 GB, that's still over $200.
When that 160 GB drive hits like $150 though... then I'll probably pounce.
BTW I don't want to say "oh, everyone will have huge games like this" and whatnot, but at the same time, it's also way of an overgeneralization to say "80 GB is plenty".
And to continue my last thought, you could say "just put what you need" on the SSD, but that presents its own problems. How do I decide what to put on there? Do I need to be installing and uninstalling programs as I change which ones I use more? How much more of a pain is this with Steam, where you can't choose an install directory? (BTW, are you listening Valve? Add this feature.)
These sound like a huge pain, which is why I'm holding off on an SSD for a little while longer. When I can have a magnetic "media" drive for huge stuff that doesn't need fast transfers (videos, rips of my CDs as FLAC, etc.) but have an SSD for *all* or basically all my programs and most small personal data, I'll get one. In the meantime, even though I do want one, they basically seem like they'd be a bit of a pain. (I'd guess the former will happen in more than one and less than two years, but we'll see.)
80 GB is plenty. 10-15 GB for the OS and program
I don't know what programs you're installing, but I have several (games) that are in that range *each*. Starcraft 2 is 12 GB. Portal is close to 10 IIRC; all of the Orange Box is probably close to 20. Mass Effect 2 is 15 GB. Even Windows 7 is in the 10-15 GB range, somehow. There, I just filled 2/3 of that 80 GB drive.
Sure, I wouldn't have to put those on the SSD drive, but at the same time, it'd be nice to be able to.
Windows NT beat Windows 95 to the market, so while you're correct that 95 was not just a shell sitting on top of DOS, it was also not pre-NT.
True, but at the same time, look at it this way: if you got a 2 year contract when the Android was first released, that contract wouldn't even be up yet.
Granted, there are plenty of people who would have upgraded a year or more into their contracts, and a few people who would have bought the phone outright and aren't on a contract (that's me with my N900), but at the same time, I wouldn't exactly expect a glut of used devices out there on the market for a bit more.
The cross is the symbol for cross product and the dot is the symbol for dot product; when used on scalar values they reduce to the same operation -- multiplication.
So first, I'm no authority on mathematical history, but I'll bet you $20 that neither vectors nor the distinction of cross- and dot-products were invented (/discovered) at the time that Oughtred started the use of "×" for multiplication. So no, keeping the distinction between those operations had nothing to do with the selection of ×.
Second, even if separate symbols existed, that's still not an excuse for choosing ×; there are tons of other symbols that could have been used instead.
For some artists, the free distribution of audience-generated recordings is an extremely valuable asset...
The Pink Floyd Pluse DVDs (I think it's that one) has a feature called "bootlegging the bootleggers", where they include bootlegged recordings people made at a couple of their performances. Which, of course, is pretty hilarious.
*sigh* You don't get it. First off, the reason so many people pirate today is because of DRM.
No, that's not "the" reason so many people pirate today. You're fucking posting in a story about how a DRM-free game is holding a sale because of 90% piracy rates, and this is not the first time a similar story has come up on /. The Humble Indy Bundle was distributed without DRM and letting people pay whatever they want (down to a penny!), and a quarter of the people who downloaded the games from their servers were pirating it!
The numbers don't add up to match your anecdotes.
Except that every major studio has switched to DRM to kill used games and to nickel and dime people.
People say the intent of DRM is to kill the used game market, and while that is a fortunate-to-the-studios side effect, I'm not convinced it's the main reason. Look at consoles... the used market in console games is healthy enough.
No, I actually think that, in most cases, the people who decide to use DRM actually think it will help the piracy problem.
The fact that you're defending them for putting it in there makes you a defender of DRM.
Where did I defend them for putting in DRM? I said it's their right to make that decision, and that it's not your right to decide that you're going to play anyway, but I never said that them using DRM was a good decision or that they should do it.
If every car dealer started putting a credit card reader in the dashboard and you had to swipe your credit car and pay to start the car, would you really support the car dealers and say "if you don't like it, don't buy a car"? I doubt it.
So first of all, your analogy doesn't quite line up in a very important aspect. Assuming what you're getting at is that, in your car analogy, you would hack your car, then the analogy is more like "I'll buy the game but try to hack it so that the DRM doesn't do its job." And that I will say is ethical, assuming that you don't then distribute the hacked version. (Distributing instructions on how to do the hack is fine.) But that's not what you're trying to justify doing.
Second, in the analogous world, not every car dealer has installed the interlock, just all the big ones. There would still be a few out there, including some dealers that sell quite nice cars at affordable prices, that don't. And in such a world, why would you go to the big dealers that use the interlock? (Of course this hints at another big problem, which is that you'll probably only have one or two cars, but many games.)
The fact that no DRM has ever stopped piracy is a pretty glaring point that it's not designed to fight piracy.
That's not a very good point considering that (1) DRM by its very nature is essentially impossible and (2) there have been reasonable successful DRM schemes short-term. I mean, consider Assassin's Creed 2, mentioned elsewhere in the comments to this story. That DRM went for about a month before being cracked. If you buy the popular lore that a substantial proportion of the copies of a game are sold shortly after release for most games, then that DRM was actually reasonably successful.
I'll leave you with a quote - "We must all fear evil men. But there is another evil that we should fear most - and that is the indifference of good men". You, my friend, are indifferent. I choose to fight those who desire is to harm and take advantage of people, all while making a profit while their customers lose.
I am not indifferent -- I have passed over games because of their DRM (e.g. Spore, C&C 4). However I don't pretend that I have some right to play the games that I choose simply because their publishers implement unreasonable DRM.
To be snarky, I'm actually usually willing to accept some inconvenience for my principles, unlike you.
You can make all the excuses you want, but you're supporting the assholes in charge of companies who forced things to be this way.
I'm not supporting them, because I don't buy many games. Most of those I do buy are some of those that Steam gives deep discounts on. I got SC2 because... well, because there was basically no way I was not going to, and I got Mass Effect 2 because (1) it's an awesome storyline and (2) it has only a disc check, but I think those are the first full-price games I've bought for a couple years.
You can make all the excuses you want, but you're supporting the assholes in charge of companies who forced things to be this way.
And you can make all the excuses you want, but if you're pirating games you're representative the main reason that crappy DRM is so prevalent.
The choice shouldn't be "do I pirate or do I buy?", it should be "do I buy or do I go without?". Period, IMO.
I'm sympathetic to the "I'm a kid and make no money" pirating argument a bit, because I was in that situation and pirated a bunch of software. And I'm not going to argue someone too much against that. But IMO it's completely unethical to pirate software simply because you disagree with the terms the seller set (i.e. if you disagree with the DRM). If you agree, buy it. If you disagree, walk away.
If companies started losing sales of heavily-DRMed games because people weren't playing them instead of people pirating them, then most of them would snap back to their senses.
If you have any knowledge of Game Theory, you'd realize that this is actually the best solution (given that DRM is used) - they make the same profit regardless of if I pirate or not (since I won't buy a DRM'd game) and I get the added benefit of playing the game.
Except that this isn't an one-shot game; it's iterated. Thanks to people like you, they'll look at the piracy rates and be more inclined to use DRM in the future. You say "they're trying to destroy" your hobby, but from my view you're helping to give them the excuse to do so.
You wanna know why there is so much piracy? it is because developers are retarded! As another poster recently said it is like the entire games industry has decided that Buggati roadsters are the ONLY way to go, and they are cranking out games that are $60+ in a world economy that is so dead I'm surprised peasant revolts aren't breaking out. Nobody has any money, those that do are using it to keep the roofs over their head, and they expect folks to shell out $60+ for a 5 hour game and THEN shell out another $25-$50 for the DLC which they ripped out the game in the first place to "maximize their profit potential". Yeah right!
Except that as this article, and many others, illustrates, you're wrong. Machinarium was $20 and has a 90% piracy rate. World of Goo was $20 normally and had an 80-90% piracy rate. When the Humble Indy Bundle released their games for whatever price you wanted to pay (starting at $0.01), 25% of people downloading it from their servers were pirating it! And that doesn't count out-of-band pirating like TPB or whatever. And you could pay a penny.
No, cost is not why piracy rates are so high.
You could argue it's convenience -- you need a credit card to order the Humble Indy Bundle for example -- but not price. Personally I think it's just 'cause a crapload of people are selfish jackasses.
That works for Python because the visual appearance of the code reflects the syntactic structure. The same cannot be said for C.
(I have two complaints about it that makes me kind of not like the Python approach. One is that crappy forum software will sometimes remove tabs/spaces. If that happens with C code someone posted, no big deal, just paste it into Emacs and indent-region. If that happens with Python code, well, that information is often almost worthless -- reconstructing the indentation can be difficult. Second, even if a code snippet displays correctly, it may not copy/paste correctly. (This is especially true with an older .emacs I had.) These problems come from the fact that it's much easier to lose indentation information accidentally than it is to drop braces accidentally. There are also a couple minor annoyances when it comes to editing, like it's harder to predict when the indentation code in emacs will put the cursor at the right place.)
Two disadvantages: The time it takes to move the head from the inside to the outside, and the time it takes for the drive to physically rotate the data to the head.
If you take your parent's assumption that it's spinning at the same speed, then the rotational latency is independent of diameter.
But I think that's a big assumption: rotating at the same (rotational) speed means that not only do the edges wobble more, but the whole disc is under more stress. It's also generating more heat.