Ah, but what they don't tell you is that they also look for the British spelling of "realise" -- most Canadians follow the Yank spelling. I smell a honey pot!
Dongles (which is what you're talking about) are easily bypassed by crackers. They have been for yeeeaaarrrsss -- AutoCAD, for instance, used them in the last century.
Take a look at the market now. What's going to have more of an effect on a company's bottom line: me buying Spore and passing it out to five friends, or the multitude of torrent sites (i.e. one torrent on mininova reporting just under two hundred thousand completed downloads) that allow anybody to quickly and easily pirate a game? Regardless of whether casual piracy was a major issue in the past, it certainly is much less of a concern than the fact that a game can be ripped, uploaded, and spread across the Internet in a matter of hours.
Aside: Of course, the entire issue with DRM and Spore is not piracy, but EA attempting to prevent used copies from being sold.
WRT54G V1.1, Linksys firmware version 4.21.1. I've owned this router for four years now. After I installed the current firmware, I haven't had to reboot it. Not once. This thing is a tank.
You seem to think that this would be a problem for US Customs. I travel to the US by car once every two weeks or so, and it doesn't matter to them if they need to hold up a car for five seconds or five minutes; their shift ends when it ends. It's more work for each individual traveller to the States, but all in all, it's still a day's worth of work to the average customs officer.
He hasn't been sentenced yet. He's been convicted, which means that he faces five years in prison. I seriously doubt he's going to get more than probation and maybe a fine.
It seems like the overriding issue in this case was the fact that this music was pirated prior to its street date release. The wired article even makes mention of the fact that, if you pirate a song here and there, you're not likely going to be in trouble. The fact that it's related to copyright doesn't have that much to do with sharing, in other words.
I've got a penny laying around here someplace. Given that most credit card companies charge merchants money for each credit card transaction (~$0.50 or so), Metallica would be paying for me to download their CD. That sounds about right.
The point of being in class is to get insights and other explanations from an expert which may bring to light other ways of thinking about the material.
Funny: I thought the point of being in class was to bring in money to the university so the professor and his buddies could continue to fund their research. If a student can get 100% in a class without showing up, then the prof is doing something wrong. In my teacher ed program, the content of the course was all straight from the textbook, and assessment was based on two - count them, two - multiple choice exams. After everybody received an A (class average over 95%) on the first exam, do you think anybody showed up to class for the second half of the class?
I know it's cliche, and people have been spouting it for a over a decade, but I suspect that the general populace has come to a point where they can see that dollars and cents are in favor of not being tied to a corporation that makes money by selling solutions for the same problems over and over again.
I'm not sure the issue is that people with XP are unwilling to fund Microsoft. The issue from where I'm standing is two-fold: first, XP works. It's a fairly stable system, and one that people have been using for the past *seven* years. Second, everybody has "heard" that Vista is terrible. My dad, not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, simply refuses to use it. Why? Well, it's not because of first-hand experience -- it's because a few of his co-workers "heard" that it was a terrible OS. More tech-oriented people are more resistant because we don't really see the advantage of switching over to a new OS when the old one works just fine. The general populace is not as savvy as you might think. They're not as concerned about Microsoft's monopoly as they are about spending an extra couple of hundred dollars to upgrade to a new OS that they've "heard" is not so great.
Besides, their business model is just fine. The product that they're selling, on the other hand, has a terrible reputation - deserved or not. I've used Vista, but I haven't put any real time into it, and I'm completely unwilling to do so until... well, I suppose until I have a final-patched Windows XP SP3 system that's been hacked because of an unfixed security hole. Let's see what happens in two years.
I completely, completely agree. In the PC indie scene, there are fantastic games being made that have limited graphics (Aquaria, Spectromancer, and Armageddon Empires come to mind). A game doesn't have to be pretty to be engaging. Personally speaking, I'd also love an RPG that's half-way between a virtual console release (*cough* Chrono Trigger *cough*) and a full Wii game (like the upcoming Opoona or Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn).
But that's just me. Can't wait to see what kind of WiiWare games will be released this year!
If M$ has this kind of problems with their executives, perhaps they are more rotten at the core than most people even realize. And Amazon paying $30M to start? Come now, that would hire 300 programmers for a year.
More if the programmers qualified under Amazon's "Get 4 for the price of 3" promotion.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
I'm not too thrilled about Office 2007, either, but I don't use OSX. I like Writeroom - anything like that on the Windows side? Anyone?
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
Funny guy..doc is backwards compatible with Office 97-2003..docx is compatible with 2007 and backwards compatible with 2003 with a plugin. If you're using anything older than Word 97, all bets are off (though Word will *read* most documents from older versions, including Word 6 - I checked.)
Are you sure about that? If they're producing as many Wiis as they possibly can, the only way to create more supply is by opening another factory. How many billions will that cost?
"Not to be rude" is a rhetorical device used to lessen the impact of the rest of the sentence. Without it, the GP would have come off as a troll; as it is, we can tell that he's very annoyed, but enough in control that we're not offended by his comment. (It can also be used to sound argumentative and/or snarky, though I'm not sure that was what he/she was going for.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but what they don't tell you is that they also look for the British spelling of "realise" -- most Canadians follow the Yank spelling. I smell a honey pot!
Make this your home page in Internet Explorer and Firefox, then lend out to anybody who asks.
Have you tried something like Magnatune?
Dongles (which is what you're talking about) are easily bypassed by crackers. They have been for yeeeaaarrrsss -- AutoCAD, for instance, used them in the last century.
It took me a few minutes to get used to a mouse back in the 80s, too; now that I know how to use one, it's intuitive.
Take a look at the market now. What's going to have more of an effect on a company's bottom line: me buying Spore and passing it out to five friends, or the multitude of torrent sites (i.e. one torrent on mininova reporting just under two hundred thousand completed downloads) that allow anybody to quickly and easily pirate a game? Regardless of whether casual piracy was a major issue in the past, it certainly is much less of a concern than the fact that a game can be ripped, uploaded, and spread across the Internet in a matter of hours.
Aside: Of course, the entire issue with DRM and Spore is not piracy, but EA attempting to prevent used copies from being sold.
In Soviet Russia, memes track YOU!
WRT54G V1.1, Linksys firmware version 4.21.1. I've owned this router for four years now. After I installed the current firmware, I haven't had to reboot it. Not once. This thing is a tank.
You seem to think that this would be a problem for US Customs. I travel to the US by car once every two weeks or so, and it doesn't matter to them if they need to hold up a car for five seconds or five minutes; their shift ends when it ends. It's more work for each individual traveller to the States, but all in all, it's still a day's worth of work to the average customs officer.
He hasn't been sentenced yet. He's been convicted, which means that he faces five years in prison. I seriously doubt he's going to get more than probation and maybe a fine.
It seems like the overriding issue in this case was the fact that this music was pirated prior to its street date release. The wired article even makes mention of the fact that, if you pirate a song here and there, you're not likely going to be in trouble. The fact that it's related to copyright doesn't have that much to do with sharing, in other words.
Ah, that's because they didn't turn it up to 11.
Welcome, nomadic. We have recommendations for you.
I've got a penny laying around here someplace. Given that most credit card companies charge merchants money for each credit card transaction (~$0.50 or so), Metallica would be paying for me to download their CD. That sounds about right.
Funny: I thought the point of being in class was to bring in money to the university so the professor and his buddies could continue to fund their research. If a student can get 100% in a class without showing up, then the prof is doing something wrong. In my teacher ed program, the content of the course was all straight from the textbook, and assessment was based on two - count them, two - multiple choice exams. After everybody received an A (class average over 95%) on the first exam, do you think anybody showed up to class for the second half of the class?
Of course not.
I'm not sure the issue is that people with XP are unwilling to fund Microsoft. The issue from where I'm standing is two-fold: first, XP works. It's a fairly stable system, and one that people have been using for the past *seven* years. Second, everybody has "heard" that Vista is terrible. My dad, not a techie by any stretch of the imagination, simply refuses to use it. Why? Well, it's not because of first-hand experience -- it's because a few of his co-workers "heard" that it was a terrible OS. More tech-oriented people are more resistant because we don't really see the advantage of switching over to a new OS when the old one works just fine. The general populace is not as savvy as you might think. They're not as concerned about Microsoft's monopoly as they are about spending an extra couple of hundred dollars to upgrade to a new OS that they've "heard" is not so great.
Besides, their business model is just fine. The product that they're selling, on the other hand, has a terrible reputation - deserved or not. I've used Vista, but I haven't put any real time into it, and I'm completely unwilling to do so until... well, I suppose until I have a final-patched Windows XP SP3 system that's been hacked because of an unfixed security hole. Let's see what happens in two years.
I completely, completely agree. In the PC indie scene, there are fantastic games being made that have limited graphics (Aquaria, Spectromancer, and Armageddon Empires come to mind). A game doesn't have to be pretty to be engaging. Personally speaking, I'd also love an RPG that's half-way between a virtual console release (*cough* Chrono Trigger *cough*) and a full Wii game (like the upcoming Opoona or Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn).
But that's just me. Can't wait to see what kind of WiiWare games will be released this year!Despite what you may have learned on "It's a Wonderful Life," papa and mama dollar bills do not procreate and create baby dollar bills in safes.
More if the programmers qualified under Amazon's "Get 4 for the price of 3" promotion.
I'm not too thrilled about Office 2007, either, but I don't use OSX. I like Writeroom - anything like that on the Windows side? Anyone?
Funny guy. .doc is backwards compatible with Office 97-2003. .docx is compatible with 2007 and backwards compatible with 2003 with a plugin. If you're using anything older than Word 97, all bets are off (though Word will *read* most documents from older versions, including Word 6 - I checked.)
Are you sure about that? If they're producing as many Wiis as they possibly can, the only way to create more supply is by opening another factory. How many billions will that cost?
"Not to be rude" is a rhetorical device used to lessen the impact of the rest of the sentence. Without it, the GP would have come off as a troll; as it is, we can tell that he's very annoyed, but enough in control that we're not offended by his comment. (It can also be used to sound argumentative and/or snarky, though I'm not sure that was what he/she was going for.)
Regardless, so long as you spend a bit more on the 4-disk version, you'll be getting *all* of the versions of the film. It's about time!
Unless they're friends IRL, I remove them as "friends" on facebook the minute I walk out that door.