Uhm... and what is a reasonable punishment as an honest user?
DRM. But music is my main hobby in life and few, if any CDs these days are DRMed. Therefore they don't punish me at all.
Steam is partial DRM - I don't like it but I do like Half-Life, Portal and Team Fortress. I therefore consider that punishment but not enough to not buy and play the games.
DRM as implemented by Activision and others is too much punishment - therefore I don't buy the games.
Before you accuse anyone else of being an idiot, check your grammar - it's "you're" not "your".
Yes, I like nice shiny CDs with good music on them, yes I buy lots of them, probably because I'm a rich, music-loving retard. But what the hell, I'm enjoying it, having fun, and that's all that matters.
I actually enjoy truly funny geek humour like this, XKCD has grown up around this concept of "If you like it then you're a cool dude" whereas in reality, as stated previously, it's badly drawn and not very funny.
And if we all do that, then you will have nothing to download on BitTorrent since nothing will be released as no-one would be prepared to pay good money for it - your logic is flawed because it depends on honest users like me subsidising your entertainment.
Personally, I don't give a shit about immoral media companies. As a consumer, all I care about is that the stuff I buy is good value for money and doesn't punish me too much as an honest user - that just means I do a lot of research before I do buy anything and never, ever get coerced by advertising to ever feel that I *MUST* buy something.
Consequently, in buying stuff at the cheapest prices I can find and knowing all about it before I buy it, I am rarely disappointed and therefore am prepared to go out and buy more stuff.
...if you're a Windows user who never has the intention of being a Linux user, at least take some good advice from we Linux users:
1. Don't use any Internet applications that embed themselves too deeply within the OS - this means *DEFINITELY* avoiding Internet Explorer and getting rid of Outlook where possible.
2. Stop using your PC with full admin rights - create a restricted user account for normal day-to-day stuff like surfing the Internet. If you don't have the permission to make big changes to Windows then just about anything you run shouldn't be able to either.
3. Use Firefox and install the "NoScript" addon - fairly self-explanatory but at least you can limit Javascript to only the sites you trust.
My missus recently changed mobile phones and went for the iPhone; she likes it and gave me her iPod Touch.
The Touch is a neat little music player with some nice Internet apps, but I was pleased I got to mess about with it first because when I changed mobile phones, I went for the HTC Hero - and I'm happy with it.
Here's why HTC and Android wins for me:
1. iTunes - I have a large music CD collection that I've MP3ed onto a network drive, far bigger than the Touch's 16GB capacity. Therefore, whenever I sync to the Touch, I want to copy just the music I select and I *don't* want iTunes touching the original MP3s, though I don't care what it does to the files copied to it. However, iTunes seems to like messing around with the original MP3s and, despite being a long term Windows & Linux person, iTunes "scares" me because I never really know if it's going to delete the original music collection. Compare that to the HTC where I can just mount it as a disk and copy the files to it manually, or use MediaMonkey in Windows.
2. Linux - you have to use iTunes to do anything useful with a Touch or an iPhone, and iTunes doesn't run natively on Linux.
3. OS agnosticism - one reason I changed phones in the first place was to escape being locked into a single OS since I use Windows and Linux equally. Having owned a Windows Mobile phone previously, I had to use ActivSync and Outlook to sync anything to the phone - going to the iPhone would have been just as restrictive. With Android, the syncing to Google apps and mail is transparent, it doesn't care about Windows or Linux, it just does it.
Maybe the iPhone does have a slightly neater interface but I don't think Android is far behind and I'm waiting to see the imminent new Android release. But I am more than happy to sacrifice eye candy for a more open platform and I therefore don't regret not going for iPhone.
I agree with you about the Fallout 3 guide, it's a very impressive piece of work.
To be honest, there's an example of how a game should be sold and marketed correctly - I bought the original game, two of the DLCs and the Prima Guide but for the hundreds of hours entertainment the game has given me so far, that still works out at great value for money... and I still keep going back to it to explore new locations that I've never been to before.
Oh. I see. The apps haven't been made to run on the Droid. They could have been because nobody is stopping the developers from writing for whatever platform they want to write for but the developers decided that other platforms were more profitable. I see.
This is a completely irrelevant point. Somebody *choosing* to develop on a platform for profit is entirely different to the owner of that platform restricting what can be developed and how it can be sold.
You also fail to mention that the iPhone OS platform (having started on the Touch) is a more established platform than is Android - apps will get developed on Android based on what popularity it attains in the future, at the moment it's still a very new platform.
Apple isn't preventing apps from being made - they are preventing apps from being sold through iTunes.
Erm, excuse me??? Isn't the *ONLY* way to download an app onto a (non-jailbroken) iPhone via the App Store??? Or am I missing something?
I actually have a lot of respect for good Windows sysadmins but I've never understood why everything on Windows system administration has to be so bloody convoluted.
What can be simpler than having all your configurations for applications held in your home directory in flat text or XML files that you can just copy off to another machine when you need to or write up a shell script to automatically parse and do clever tricks with?
People moan about UNIX being "difficult" or "unfriendly" but how unfriendly or difficult is the Windows registry to get around??? Not only that, make one minor change in the wrong place and you can end up trashing a machine completely...
I do use Linux and Windows regularly, I quite like them both for their own reasons, but the whole registry idea was a bad, bad architectural design blunder made by Microsoft.
From where I sit, html5 is the innovation and the future of the web here, flash is holding innovation up because it's being forced to do things it was never designed to do.
The second part of the above statement makes no sense whatsoever and seems to be a typical fanboi generalisation.
Whether or not Flash was originally designed to provide multimedia content on the web, the fact is that that is what it is currently doing and, by virtue of the amount of Flash stuff out there, doing it fairly successfully. If someone else has now come along and said it can be done better in HTML 5 then is that not in itself innovation?
And if it is not innovation, then this entirely contradicts the fanbois constant ramming down our throats of how innovative Apple actually are because of their contribution to HTML 5.
So kindly make up your mind as to what it is you are actually saying.
WAP died long before the iPhone came out - check your history, Windows CE and Windows Mobile enabled browsing on phones and devices like Compaq iPaqs as long as 5 or 6 years ago, possibly even longer.
The iPhone just happens to be a pretty front-end device to use wireless and GPRS services that have been around for years...
The game is not "fit for purpose" and, as far as I'm aware, that gives you rights as a consumer in most countries to return the game and get a refund of your money in full.
Therefore you should either be going back to your local game store and creating a scene until you get a refund, or ringing up your bank/credit card company to put the card transaction into dispute if you bought in online.
I love the way people compare an Apple monopoly to Micro$ofts. If Apple get big they must be evil (Strange no-one seems to apply that logic to Google though).
It's very simple - App£e and Micro$oft charge money for closed-source stuff, Google's stuff is open and pretty much free-of-charge.
Re:My experience with Apple...
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
I'm glad to see there's at least one other person for which Apple has minimal impact on their lives.
Admittedly I'm in the UK which means that my 25+ of computing experience started with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum through the Commodore Amiga to PCs running Linux and Windows (the Apple II was pretty much unheard of over here). In all that time, the only Apple device I've ever owned is an iPod Touch which my wife gave me when she upgraded to an iPhone (for my upgrade I went the Android/HTC Hero route and don't regret it either).
Don't get me wrong, the Touch is a neat little music player that also plays a few games on flights, but it sits in the same case as my Asus EEEPC running Gentoo Linux and if I fancy a movie on a flight, the EEEPC just plays it without having to reconvert to play on the Touch.
Where the Touch lets itself down is its closed nature and the dependence on Windows or OS X in order to be able to download music to it. (I'm old fashioned, I buy music CDs and rip them myself, I will NEVER pay good money for a lossy digital download direct from the Apple Store.) Still, here's hoping that one day GTKPod in Linux will support the Touch...
Other than that, I keep Windows XP around for a few games and "killer apps", Linux does for eveything else - but never once have I felt the need to buy anything by Apple because there's nothing they make that cannot already be done cheaper and better than the stuff I currently have.
If you're the same AC that I responded to originally then you seem to be very good at writing utter crap.
Firstly, why does someone like me, as an OSS supporter (incidentally, that's on Linux *and* Windows XP as I use OSS tools like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and many others) give a toss about OSS being a "competitive force" in the marketplace? I just *USE* the stuff and try to support the developers of it with useful ideas or feedback, I really could care less whether a low or high percentile of the computer populace is using it also. It fulfills jobs *I* need it to do, end of story.
Secondly, I think the term is "derived" work, much in the same way that Windows, OS X and other GUI-based OSes are all "derived" from the original Xerox GUI to some degree. Get used to it, the whole world of computing is full of derived works and plagiarism...
So please stop making the assumption that everyone who supports OSS is a fanboi. I still have legal Windows XP licenses that I use because I play games and because there are a handful of "killer apps" on Windows that FOSS cannot duplicate as of yet - but at least I can hold my head up and say that every piece of software I use is used legally according to its licensing terms.
Doesn't matter. You obviously weren't in Apple's target market, anyway.
You fanbois really do *NOT* give up, do you?
Why can you just simply not accept that a lot of people simply do *NOT* want to part with so much money for such a device? We're not all drones that simply buy stuff purely because we believe it's being targetted at us...
Slashdot Mirror
...since very few people over here own Macs.
Uhm ... and what is a reasonable punishment as an honest user?
DRM. But music is my main hobby in life and few, if any CDs these days are DRMed. Therefore they don't punish me at all.
Steam is partial DRM - I don't like it but I do like Half-Life, Portal and Team Fortress. I therefore consider that punishment but not enough to not buy and play the games.
DRM as implemented by Activision and others is too much punishment - therefore I don't buy the games.
Does that make sense to you now?
My friend
Before you accuse anyone else of being an idiot, check your grammar - it's "you're" not "your".
Yes, I like nice shiny CDs with good music on them, yes I buy lots of them, probably because I'm a rich, music-loving retard. But what the hell, I'm enjoying it, having fun, and that's all that matters.
I actually enjoy truly funny geek humour like this, XKCD has grown up around this concept of "If you like it then you're a cool dude" whereas in reality, as stated previously, it's badly drawn and not very funny.
And if we all do that, then you will have nothing to download on BitTorrent since nothing will be released as no-one would be prepared to pay good money for it - your logic is flawed because it depends on honest users like me subsidising your entertainment.
Personally, I don't give a shit about immoral media companies. As a consumer, all I care about is that the stuff I buy is good value for money and doesn't punish me too much as an honest user - that just means I do a lot of research before I do buy anything and never, ever get coerced by advertising to ever feel that I *MUST* buy something.
Consequently, in buying stuff at the cheapest prices I can find and knowing all about it before I buy it, I am rarely disappointed and therefore am prepared to go out and buy more stuff.
...if you're a Windows user who never has the intention of being a Linux user, at least take some good advice from we Linux users:
1. Don't use any Internet applications that embed themselves too deeply within the OS - this means *DEFINITELY* avoiding Internet Explorer and getting rid of Outlook where possible.
2. Stop using your PC with full admin rights - create a restricted user account for normal day-to-day stuff like surfing the Internet. If you don't have the permission to make big changes to Windows then just about anything you run shouldn't be able to either.
3. Use Firefox and install the "NoScript" addon - fairly self-explanatory but at least you can limit Javascript to only the sites you trust.
I thought this was a discussion about the ogg format, not totally overrated badly-drawn unfunny crap on the Internet?
Be careful taking Steve Job's manhood so deep into your mouth - you may choke!
My missus recently changed mobile phones and went for the iPhone; she likes it and gave me her iPod Touch.
The Touch is a neat little music player with some nice Internet apps, but I was pleased I got to mess about with it first because when I changed mobile phones, I went for the HTC Hero - and I'm happy with it.
Here's why HTC and Android wins for me:
1. iTunes - I have a large music CD collection that I've MP3ed onto a network drive, far bigger than the Touch's 16GB capacity. Therefore, whenever I sync to the Touch, I want to copy just the music I select and I *don't* want iTunes touching the original MP3s, though I don't care what it does to the files copied to it. However, iTunes seems to like messing around with the original MP3s and, despite being a long term Windows & Linux person, iTunes "scares" me because I never really know if it's going to delete the original music collection. Compare that to the HTC where I can just mount it as a disk and copy the files to it manually, or use MediaMonkey in Windows.
2. Linux - you have to use iTunes to do anything useful with a Touch or an iPhone, and iTunes doesn't run natively on Linux.
3. OS agnosticism - one reason I changed phones in the first place was to escape being locked into a single OS since I use Windows and Linux equally. Having owned a Windows Mobile phone previously, I had to use ActivSync and Outlook to sync anything to the phone - going to the iPhone would have been just as restrictive. With Android, the syncing to Google apps and mail is transparent, it doesn't care about Windows or Linux, it just does it.
Maybe the iPhone does have a slightly neater interface but I don't think Android is far behind and I'm waiting to see the imminent new Android release. But I am more than happy to sacrifice eye candy for a more open platform and I therefore don't regret not going for iPhone.
I agree with you about the Fallout 3 guide, it's a very impressive piece of work.
To be honest, there's an example of how a game should be sold and marketed correctly - I bought the original game, two of the DLCs and the Prima Guide but for the hundreds of hours entertainment the game has given me so far, that still works out at great value for money... and I still keep going back to it to explore new locations that I've never been to before.
A cold shiver ran down my spine as the images of Donny Osmond and L. Ron Hubbard-shaped dildos entered my mind...
Oh. I see. The apps haven't been made to run on the Droid. They could have been because nobody is stopping the developers from writing for whatever platform they want to write for but the developers decided that other platforms were more profitable. I see.
This is a completely irrelevant point. Somebody *choosing* to develop on a platform for profit is entirely different to the owner of that platform restricting what can be developed and how it can be sold.
You also fail to mention that the iPhone OS platform (having started on the Touch) is a more established platform than is Android - apps will get developed on Android based on what popularity it attains in the future, at the moment it's still a very new platform.
Apple isn't preventing apps from being made - they are preventing apps from being sold through iTunes.
Erm, excuse me??? Isn't the *ONLY* way to download an app onto a (non-jailbroken) iPhone via the App Store??? Or am I missing something?
I notice that you didn't argue his "religion" point though...
You're missing the point:
1. If Steve isn't allowing porn apps on the iPhone, then having a swimsuit app and a Playboy app smacks of double standards and hypocrisy
2. How can a manufacturer of a device be allowed to now dictate what that device can and cannot be used for?
I disagree.
Apple is a religion and Apple disciples just accept and do whatever they are told.
I actually have a lot of respect for good Windows sysadmins but I've never understood why everything on Windows system administration has to be so bloody convoluted.
What can be simpler than having all your configurations for applications held in your home directory in flat text or XML files that you can just copy off to another machine when you need to or write up a shell script to automatically parse and do clever tricks with?
People moan about UNIX being "difficult" or "unfriendly" but how unfriendly or difficult is the Windows registry to get around??? Not only that, make one minor change in the wrong place and you can end up trashing a machine completely...
I do use Linux and Windows regularly, I quite like them both for their own reasons, but the whole registry idea was a bad, bad architectural design blunder made by Microsoft.
From where I sit, html5 is the innovation and the future of the web here, flash is holding innovation up because it's being forced to do things it was never designed to do.
The second part of the above statement makes no sense whatsoever and seems to be a typical fanboi generalisation.
Whether or not Flash was originally designed to provide multimedia content on the web, the fact is that that is what it is currently doing and, by virtue of the amount of Flash stuff out there, doing it fairly successfully. If someone else has now come along and said it can be done better in HTML 5 then is that not in itself innovation?
And if it is not innovation, then this entirely contradicts the fanbois constant ramming down our throats of how innovative Apple actually are because of their contribution to HTML 5.
So kindly make up your mind as to what it is you are actually saying.
As a full-headed 48 year old cohabiting Linux-using uncle who wears a ratty AC/DC t-shirt over my belly, I strongly object to your generalisation!
WAP died long before the iPhone came out - check your history, Windows CE and Windows Mobile enabled browsing on phones and devices like Compaq iPaqs as long as 5 or 6 years ago, possibly even longer.
The iPhone just happens to be a pretty front-end device to use wireless and GPRS services that have been around for years...
...that we don't talk about Usenet.
...the solution is simple.
The game is not "fit for purpose" and, as far as I'm aware, that gives you rights as a consumer in most countries to return the game and get a refund of your money in full.
Therefore you should either be going back to your local game store and creating a scene until you get a refund, or ringing up your bank/credit card company to put the card transaction into dispute if you bought in online.
Backbones and DRM are mutually exclusive...
I love the way people compare an Apple monopoly to Micro$ofts. If Apple get big they must be evil (Strange no-one seems to apply that logic to Google though).
It's very simple - App£e and Micro$oft charge money for closed-source stuff, Google's stuff is open and pretty much free-of-charge.
I'm glad to see there's at least one other person for which Apple has minimal impact on their lives.
Admittedly I'm in the UK which means that my 25+ of computing experience started with the Sinclair ZX Spectrum through the Commodore Amiga to PCs running Linux and Windows (the Apple II was pretty much unheard of over here). In all that time, the only Apple device I've ever owned is an iPod Touch which my wife gave me when she upgraded to an iPhone (for my upgrade I went the Android/HTC Hero route and don't regret it either).
Don't get me wrong, the Touch is a neat little music player that also plays a few games on flights, but it sits in the same case as my Asus EEEPC running Gentoo Linux and if I fancy a movie on a flight, the EEEPC just plays it without having to reconvert to play on the Touch.
Where the Touch lets itself down is its closed nature and the dependence on Windows or OS X in order to be able to download music to it. (I'm old fashioned, I buy music CDs and rip them myself, I will NEVER pay good money for a lossy digital download direct from the Apple Store.) Still, here's hoping that one day GTKPod in Linux will support the Touch...
Other than that, I keep Windows XP around for a few games and "killer apps", Linux does for eveything else - but never once have I felt the need to buy anything by Apple because there's nothing they make that cannot already be done cheaper and better than the stuff I currently have.
If you're the same AC that I responded to originally then you seem to be very good at writing utter crap.
Firstly, why does someone like me, as an OSS supporter (incidentally, that's on Linux *and* Windows XP as I use OSS tools like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, GIMP, and many others) give a toss about OSS being a "competitive force" in the marketplace? I just *USE* the stuff and try to support the developers of it with useful ideas or feedback, I really could care less whether a low or high percentile of the computer populace is using it also. It fulfills jobs *I* need it to do, end of story.
Secondly, I think the term is "derived" work, much in the same way that Windows, OS X and other GUI-based OSes are all "derived" from the original Xerox GUI to some degree. Get used to it, the whole world of computing is full of derived works and plagiarism...
So please stop making the assumption that everyone who supports OSS is a fanboi. I still have legal Windows XP licenses that I use because I play games and because there are a handful of "killer apps" on Windows that FOSS cannot duplicate as of yet - but at least I can hold my head up and say that every piece of software I use is used legally according to its licensing terms.
Doesn't matter. You obviously weren't in Apple's target market, anyway.
You fanbois really do *NOT* give up, do you?
Why can you just simply not accept that a lot of people simply do *NOT* want to part with so much money for such a device? We're not all drones that simply buy stuff purely because we believe it's being targetted at us...