Nobody pirates newspapers, magazines and books. The publishing industry doesn't beat it's chest in anger at the sale of photocopiers, that could easily destroy their entire industry.
Hardly anybody even pirates books electronically - even though their an ideal target due to their low size when transcoded to a txt file.
Look elsewhere in the media, there aren't any pirate TV stations that've started up broadcasting TV without the adverts. In the last couple of examples people buy books and watch normal regular TV as the legitimate option is low cost and it's convenient.
Piracy only starts to spring up when people are dissatisfied with the leggitimate option - either on price or availability. I'm 28 and since I had a job the price of games isn't so much of a problem, when I was a student it was. I had the option of piracy or nothing, and I chose the former.
Availability is a problem. I want to play Psychonauts and currently in the UK I'm going to be twiddling my thumbs until mid-September...unless I....
with a Masonary nail through it.
Over the years I've had problems with most brands (or helped out people who have), so am a little bit dubious of the quality of all drives.
I'm working, drives are cheap, I just wish they'd stop crashing. Anybody think there's room in the market for a drive that costs 50% more, but gives you double your money back if it fails in warranty? (I know that would be open to abuse, but something where the manufacturer has an incentive other than the postage cost of a repaired drive).
'why' MS is doing this.
It's evident that there are plenty of people who are now less likely to buy Longhorn *looks around*, but surely making your product unattractive is not really any way to be a capitalistic market gorilla.
So - there must be an upside to this somewhere. Maybe there is, I hate the idea of DRM, but think of the iPod/iTunes. All those nifty litttle DRM devices suddenly spawned an online music market. Maybe when there is a large market of DRM supporting desktops out there, we'll suddenly get some other legitimate services - video on demand, software on demand?
Not sure I like it myself, but surely you can all devote a little more thought to it other than "MS Baaaaad"
yes it's a nice idea, but so are hovercars, lightsabres and deathrays.
It's not an original idea and it's neither in production nor even a working prototype (i.e. couldn't even be bought however deep your pockets).
Since when did rendering your wet-dreams get you on slashdot?
is because the latest and greatest graphics cards guzzle power like there's no tomorrow and development of batteries is lagging way behind all the other bits.
Oh and cooling them isn't too easy either.
Even when laptop versions of GPUs are released, they're usually castrated versions with lower clocks and fewer pipelines (and occasionally completely different cores than the name would suggest).
As with all things, you have to compromise. You want the fastest performance - you have to pay a premium. You want the latest and greatest graphics card - you can't buy a laptop.
Consoles fairly/unfairly get branded as vacuous playthings for those that don't like reading.
If say MS bundled a protein folding app with Live it'd be good PR for MS and unite the live users with a warm fuzzy feeling.
It would also get some nice coverage in print, in the non-gaming press and hopefully raise awareness that gaming and consoles aren't 'just' about violence and most console owners are pleasant, responsible people who contribute to society.
I dunno - just seems that the initial investment to get this off the ground is so low, it seems a shame not to give it a try - just give it a pretty screen saver and I'll be happy.
Actually if Live had some sortof RSS/widget functionality then people would be more likely to leave their xbox on and that'd leave plenty of CPU free for the Heavy Folding.
I'm a PC user, that toys with the idea of switching to a Mac, but one of the things that stops me is knowing they'll be a load of stuff I can't do any more (like playing games).
I know emulation's not 'bad' but I'm not going to be playing HL2 with a PPC CPU tucked in my machine.
Was just thinking that whilst most of the people here seem to be getting in a tizzy about getting MacOS onto a previously windows only setup, surely getting the huge library of windows software running on a Mac is a bit more exciting.
In fact if I think about it a bit more, if Apple bundled something that allowed you to run windows software on a Mac, then microsoft are a bit screwed.
if you randomly pick a Mac in the wild it's going to need a new graphics card to run games - and that's ignoring the iMac/iMini owners who can't upgrade (and for that matter the laptop owners - although to be fair most windows laptops are non-gaming machines).
but I disagree. I got a 3rd generation and had nothing but trouble. Almost from the first day it randomly decided to lock up. One of the things I wanted it for was on long car journeys, first trip I took up the country it locked up on me. Contacted Apple and was told just to let the battery discharge (which took so long it was still waiting discharging for the trip back down) - no music for me. Battery was also bad from the start and got worse - although new firmware helped a bit with the random lockups. After 9 months I'd had enough, and apple replaced it for me (and I must say their customer service was excellent).
The replacement didn't lock up, but the battery life got worse and worse. It wasn't just the play time, the annoying thing was it went flat when it was turned off (and yes I did turn off the clock and power it off properly). If I went away by train overnight I had to take the charger as the next morning it would have to be fed again.
The thing that really annoys me is that I feel Apple sold me an ipod for £400 (~$750) that would last 12 months. I'm used to 12 month guarantees on stuff - but you normally expect them to last a bit longer. iPods just seem to continuously die and when you buy one you just get your 12 months life support.
You make money in business/consultancy/whatever by getting yourself customers and retaining them, whilst extracting as much profit as you can from them.
If you need customers, then sell something at cost to get them through the door - surely nothing wrong with that.
When they keep returning asking to buy from you, then sell to them at a price that gives you a profit, but keeps them coming back.
If you gouge them and they feel cheated, then they'll leave and not come back - but there's no point carrying on selling at cost, unless you've got a way of recouping lined up.
You're in business to make money.
If you don't like the price that something's being offered at, then you just don't have to buy it.
There's no legal obligation that car dealers have to give everybody the same lowest price that they ever sold a car for.
I'm not sure about the idea mentioned in the article that regular customers will get lower prices though - surely it should work the other way around. You get the customers landed with cheap prices and as they keep coming back you gradually tap them up until their visits start to drop off and then you start to lower them back down.
but would just like to point out that the PSP is quite nifty as a movie machine. Today I slogged my way back from Kuwait to the UK (planes, trains and automobiles) and the PSP saved my sanity. Few episodes of The Shield, couple of episodes of 24 and a couple of hours of Lumines kept my quite entertained thankyouverymuch AND the battery is still at 48%.
The problem with the PC platform is that software is designed to run on 'most' PCs out there. If you've got some bleeding edge number cruncher, then you can probably stick up the resolution, have nicer textures and all manner of extra little bits of gilding - but the basic game running underneath it is still constrained by the weakest PC in their target market.
The 'nice' thing about consoles (and there are many nice things) is that code can be optimized for the hardware (compare a game running on an Xbox with the PC version running on a machine of the same spec) and that everybody has the same base. For example the Xbox360 appears to be able to support a massive chunk of simple raw processing - you can have a game that has complex physics as an integral part - you know it'll run on all machines. If you tried it on low spec PC it just wouldn't run (and I suspect a high-spec PC isn't going to be showing up the 360 any time soon).
and would just like to add that surely the best people to write games, or any other application, are those that have used a lot previously.
I've not 'created' a lot, but where I have it's usually when I've seen what there was and decided I could do better myself.
For example you could ship a single multilanguage disk. Whilst the space for dialogue isn't going to fill a blu-ray disk, if you re-rendered all the cut scenes to lip-synch to the audio, then you've suddenly got a lot of data.
You can also use surplus space to compensate for CPU - why waste resource decompressing something, when it can be spooled off raw?
We've heard the same argument when CDs came out, when DVDs came out etc etc. Having the extra space loses you nothing and gives the developer an opportunity to offer you something you didn't have before.
the problem at the moment is that the efforts of the music industry only affect a small number of people. We hear about some toddler being sued for thousands and tut-tut, but nobody really does anything as it doesn't affect us.
Currently legislation is trickling in and slowly screwing us over, but nobody is motivated enough to do much as our rights erode.
I say the only solution is to give the industry as much rope as they can grab with their evil little mits. Let them have more tax. As much tax as they want - across Europe.
A $1,000 tax on an iPod is precisely the sort of thing that's going to be hard to explain to potential owners that don't read slashdot. Suddenly Apple's going to wade in and bat for the consumer.
Oh you get the point, the industry seems to have completely lost it's senses and dropped any pretence of hiding it's greed - it's taking itself beyond parody - let it hang itself.
You lot just love to whinge don't you?
You've just been given an other option - this is a good thing. Whether you're going to take it or not is entirely up to you, but if you're going to get your knickers in this much of a twist over it, I suggest you pretend none of this ever happened.
Your ignorance will be my bliss.
when he mentioned the retail fee. We're all used to buying/renting physical items and don't get upset by it. We understand the rules.
When I pop into Blockbuster to rent a DVD for £3, I understand that I've got his film to watch for a couple of nights and then I have to return it. People don't protest against this, I've never heard of anybody refusing to rent films as they have to return them.
We're also used to the model of buying CDs and DVDs. I go into a shop, I give them some money and they give me a piece of entertainment to take home and put on my shelf. It's mine. I can make a thousand copies of the CD and rip it to any format I want, whenever I want. In reality I can't remember the last time I copied a CD and I just rip it once to m4a - but I know I have the option to if a friend wants it, or I upgrade to a non-iPod.
The problem with DRM is that it's being offered with similar terms to physical media with additional restrictions imposed and no real advantage. I can buy an album from iTunes or a physical CD - the CD usually works out cheaper, so why on earth would I want a DRMed digital copy?
The two models I can see working for DRM are rental and subscription (or a combination of the two). Firstly we have the Real Rhapsody system up and working - I pay a fixed price and get all the music I want. This is offering me something that wouldn't have been possible with physical media. Secondly we could have a film rental system. For those days I feel lazy and can't even be bothered to leave the house, it'd be nice to be able to download and watch a film for a couple of pounds.
I think my point is that most people have nothing against DRM, it's jus that currently it's not offering us anything better or cheaper than what we currently have.
that's all possible blah blah
but we don't want to do that. We want to click a button, pay for a tune and get it on our portable player. Apple want you to buy their iPods, so they only support iPods.
It's not a technical problem, it's the way Apple wants it, and the way we get it.
If you're happy with that then I'm happy for you, but please don't feel the need to obfuscate and defend Apple's monopolistic business practices.
Monthly subscription do several things, in this setting: they limit the life of your music, they limit your financial flexibility, and they lock you into a particular vendor
You seem to have got that the wrong way around. If I buy music outright from iTunes I receive a m4p file, which locks me into playing it back on an iPod. I'll have a bit pile of music and the next player I buy has to be able to play them (which pretty much limits me to an Apple iPod).
Now as I'm stuck with an iPod to play my old music, then the only real place I can simply buy DRM music without problems is erm..iTunes.
You see the little loop I find myself in here?
With the rental model I buy device x and keep it loaded for $15 a month. If I suddenly want to change device, then I can buy any I fancy that's supported by a subscription mechanism. I can bin my old player, sign up to any subscription service that supports the new device and with my $15 subscription I'm up and away with all the same music I was listening to last month.
Now not only do I get more choice, but the music provider knows I have choice - and competition is good.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody pirates newspapers, magazines and books. The publishing industry doesn't beat it's chest in anger at the sale of photocopiers, that could easily destroy their entire industry.
Hardly anybody even pirates books electronically - even though their an ideal target due to their low size when transcoded to a txt file.
Look elsewhere in the media, there aren't any pirate TV stations that've started up broadcasting TV without the adverts. In the last couple of examples people buy books and watch normal regular TV as the legitimate option is low cost and it's convenient.
Piracy only starts to spring up when people are dissatisfied with the leggitimate option - either on price or availability. I'm 28 and since I had a job the price of games isn't so much of a problem, when I was a student it was. I had the option of piracy or nothing, and I chose the former.
Availability is a problem. I want to play Psychonauts and currently in the UK I'm going to be twiddling my thumbs until mid-September...unless I....
with a Masonary nail through it. Over the years I've had problems with most brands (or helped out people who have), so am a little bit dubious of the quality of all drives.
I'm working, drives are cheap, I just wish they'd stop crashing. Anybody think there's room in the market for a drive that costs 50% more, but gives you double your money back if it fails in warranty? (I know that would be open to abuse, but something where the manufacturer has an incentive other than the postage cost of a repaired drive).
Every time I want an upgrade I seem to end up shelling out for a new motherboard anyway - bundle them together and I get to save a few pence.
'why' MS is doing this.
It's evident that there are plenty of people who are now less likely to buy Longhorn *looks around*, but surely making your product unattractive is not really any way to be a capitalistic market gorilla.
So - there must be an upside to this somewhere. Maybe there is, I hate the idea of DRM, but think of the iPod/iTunes. All those nifty litttle DRM devices suddenly spawned an online music market. Maybe when there is a large market of DRM supporting desktops out there, we'll suddenly get some other legitimate services - video on demand, software on demand? Not sure I like it myself, but surely you can all devote a little more thought to it other than "MS Baaaaad"
yes it's a nice idea, but so are hovercars, lightsabres and deathrays.
It's not an original idea and it's neither in production nor even a working prototype (i.e. couldn't even be bought however deep your pockets).
Since when did rendering your wet-dreams get you on slashdot?
it's normally accepted to be a good thing.
is because the latest and greatest graphics cards guzzle power like there's no tomorrow and development of batteries is lagging way behind all the other bits.
Oh and cooling them isn't too easy either.
Even when laptop versions of GPUs are released, they're usually castrated versions with lower clocks and fewer pipelines (and occasionally completely different cores than the name would suggest).
As with all things, you have to compromise. You want the fastest performance - you have to pay a premium. You want the latest and greatest graphics card - you can't buy a laptop.
Consoles fairly/unfairly get branded as vacuous playthings for those that don't like reading.
If say MS bundled a protein folding app with Live it'd be good PR for MS and unite the live users with a warm fuzzy feeling.
It would also get some nice coverage in print, in the non-gaming press and hopefully raise awareness that gaming and consoles aren't 'just' about violence and most console owners are pleasant, responsible people who contribute to society.
I dunno - just seems that the initial investment to get this off the ground is so low, it seems a shame not to give it a try - just give it a pretty screen saver and I'll be happy.
Actually if Live had some sortof RSS/widget functionality then people would be more likely to leave their xbox on and that'd leave plenty of CPU free for the Heavy Folding.
I'm a PC user, that toys with the idea of switching to a Mac, but one of the things that stops me is knowing they'll be a load of stuff I can't do any more (like playing games).
I know emulation's not 'bad' but I'm not going to be playing HL2 with a PPC CPU tucked in my machine.
Was just thinking that whilst most of the people here seem to be getting in a tizzy about getting MacOS onto a previously windows only setup, surely getting the huge library of windows software running on a Mac is a bit more exciting.
In fact if I think about it a bit more, if Apple bundled something that allowed you to run windows software on a Mac, then microsoft are a bit screwed.
if you randomly pick a Mac in the wild it's going to need a new graphics card to run games - and that's ignoring the iMac/iMini owners who can't upgrade (and for that matter the laptop owners - although to be fair most windows laptops are non-gaming machines).
but I disagree. I got a 3rd generation and had nothing but trouble. Almost from the first day it randomly decided to lock up. One of the things I wanted it for was on long car journeys, first trip I took up the country it locked up on me. Contacted Apple and was told just to let the battery discharge (which took so long it was still waiting discharging for the trip back down) - no music for me. Battery was also bad from the start and got worse - although new firmware helped a bit with the random lockups. After 9 months I'd had enough, and apple replaced it for me (and I must say their customer service was excellent).
The replacement didn't lock up, but the battery life got worse and worse. It wasn't just the play time, the annoying thing was it went flat when it was turned off (and yes I did turn off the clock and power it off properly). If I went away by train overnight I had to take the charger as the next morning it would have to be fed again.
The thing that really annoys me is that I feel Apple sold me an ipod for £400 (~$750) that would last 12 months. I'm used to 12 month guarantees on stuff - but you normally expect them to last a bit longer. iPods just seem to continuously die and when you buy one you just get your 12 months life support.
You make money in business/consultancy/whatever by getting yourself customers and retaining them, whilst extracting as much profit as you can from them.
If you need customers, then sell something at cost to get them through the door - surely nothing wrong with that.
When they keep returning asking to buy from you, then sell to them at a price that gives you a profit, but keeps them coming back.
If you gouge them and they feel cheated, then they'll leave and not come back - but there's no point carrying on selling at cost, unless you've got a way of recouping lined up.
You're in business to make money.
If you don't like the price that something's being offered at, then you just don't have to buy it.
There's no legal obligation that car dealers have to give everybody the same lowest price that they ever sold a car for.
I'm not sure about the idea mentioned in the article that regular customers will get lower prices though - surely it should work the other way around. You get the customers landed with cheap prices and as they keep coming back you gradually tap them up until their visits start to drop off and then you start to lower them back down.
but would just like to point out that the PSP is quite nifty as a movie machine. Today I slogged my way back from Kuwait to the UK (planes, trains and automobiles) and the PSP saved my sanity. Few episodes of The Shield, couple of episodes of 24 and a couple of hours of Lumines kept my quite entertained thankyouverymuch AND the battery is still at 48%.
The problem with the PC platform is that software is designed to run on 'most' PCs out there. If you've got some bleeding edge number cruncher, then you can probably stick up the resolution, have nicer textures and all manner of extra little bits of gilding - but the basic game running underneath it is still constrained by the weakest PC in their target market.
The 'nice' thing about consoles (and there are many nice things) is that code can be optimized for the hardware (compare a game running on an Xbox with the PC version running on a machine of the same spec) and that everybody has the same base. For example the Xbox360 appears to be able to support a massive chunk of simple raw processing - you can have a game that has complex physics as an integral part - you know it'll run on all machines. If you tried it on low spec PC it just wouldn't run (and I suspect a high-spec PC isn't going to be showing up the 360 any time soon).
and would just like to add that surely the best people to write games, or any other application, are those that have used a lot previously.
I've not 'created' a lot, but where I have it's usually when I've seen what there was and decided I could do better myself.
For example you could ship a single multilanguage disk. Whilst the space for dialogue isn't going to fill a blu-ray disk, if you re-rendered all the cut scenes to lip-synch to the audio, then you've suddenly got a lot of data.
You can also use surplus space to compensate for CPU - why waste resource decompressing something, when it can be spooled off raw?
We've heard the same argument when CDs came out, when DVDs came out etc etc. Having the extra space loses you nothing and gives the developer an opportunity to offer you something you didn't have before.
the problem at the moment is that the efforts of the music industry only affect a small number of people. We hear about some toddler being sued for thousands and tut-tut, but nobody really does anything as it doesn't affect us.
Currently legislation is trickling in and slowly screwing us over, but nobody is motivated enough to do much as our rights erode.
I say the only solution is to give the industry as much rope as they can grab with their evil little mits. Let them have more tax. As much tax as they want - across Europe.
A $1,000 tax on an iPod is precisely the sort of thing that's going to be hard to explain to potential owners that don't read slashdot. Suddenly Apple's going to wade in and bat for the consumer.
Oh you get the point, the industry seems to have completely lost it's senses and dropped any pretence of hiding it's greed - it's taking itself beyond parody - let it hang itself.
You lot just love to whinge don't you?
You've just been given an other option - this is a good thing. Whether you're going to take it or not is entirely up to you, but if you're going to get your knickers in this much of a twist over it, I suggest you pretend none of this ever happened.
Your ignorance will be my bliss.
but if you ever want to see why map/satellite overlays can be useful, it's a very handy way of spotting what's been left off maps e.g.
1 63500&scale=25000&mapsize=small&rt=overlay.htm 1 68200&scale=25000&mapsize=small&rt=overlay.htm
http://www.multimap.com/map/photo.cgi?x=459600&y=
and
http://www.multimap.com/map/photo.cgi?x=468000&y=
which are Aldermaston and Burghsfield (atomic weapons places in the UK)
and the person who rips it off gets a better product?
when he mentioned the retail fee. We're all used to buying/renting physical items and don't get upset by it. We understand the rules.
When I pop into Blockbuster to rent a DVD for £3, I understand that I've got his film to watch for a couple of nights and then I have to return it.
People don't protest against this, I've never heard of anybody refusing to rent films as they have to return them.
We're also used to the model of buying CDs and DVDs. I go into a shop, I give them some money and they give me a piece of entertainment to take home and put on my shelf. It's mine. I can make a thousand copies of the CD and rip it to any format I want, whenever I want. In reality I can't remember the last time I copied a CD and I just rip it once to m4a - but I know I have the option to if a friend wants it, or I upgrade to a non-iPod.
The problem with DRM is that it's being offered with similar terms to physical media with additional restrictions imposed and no real advantage. I can buy an album from iTunes or a physical CD - the CD usually works out cheaper, so why on earth would I want a DRMed digital copy?
The two models I can see working for DRM are rental and subscription (or a combination of the two). Firstly we have the Real Rhapsody system up and working - I pay a fixed price and get all the music I want. This is offering me something that wouldn't have been possible with physical media. Secondly we could have a film rental system. For those days I feel lazy and can't even be bothered to leave the house, it'd be nice to be able to download and watch a film for a couple of pounds.
I think my point is that most people have nothing against DRM, it's jus that currently it's not offering us anything better or cheaper than what we currently have.
that's all possible blah blah
but we don't want to do that. We want to click a button, pay for a tune and get it on our portable player. Apple want you to buy their iPods, so they only support iPods.
It's not a technical problem, it's the way Apple wants it, and the way we get it.
If you're happy with that then I'm happy for you, but please don't feel the need to obfuscate and defend Apple's monopolistic business practices.
Monthly subscription do several things, in this setting: they limit the life of your music, they limit your financial flexibility, and they lock you into a particular vendor
You seem to have got that the wrong way around. If I buy music outright from iTunes I receive a m4p file, which locks me into playing it back on an iPod. I'll have a bit pile of music and the next player I buy has to be able to play them (which pretty much limits me to an Apple iPod).
Now as I'm stuck with an iPod to play my old music, then the only real place I can simply buy DRM music without problems is erm..iTunes.
You see the little loop I find myself in here?
With the rental model I buy device x and keep it loaded for $15 a month. If I suddenly want to change device, then I can buy any I fancy that's supported by a subscription mechanism. I can bin my old player, sign up to any subscription service that supports the new device and with my $15 subscription I'm up and away with all the same music I was listening to last month.
Now not only do I get more choice, but the music provider knows I have choice - and competition is good.
now please vacate this thread so we can all bitch about and leave you in blissful ignorance.