Re:You Muslim fuckers have no sense of irony...
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Nope, I chose to wave away his (your?) irrelevant racist opinions with a wave of my hand and a sarcastic jab to his ribcage. If that's enough for you to derive my actual intelligence then well done! You must also be highly intelligent!
Agreed, but you've totally avoided answering the core question, namely:
What is the justification for games companies punishing legitimate users with ever-more restrictive copy protection mechanisms?
Stardock have just got rid of the protection mechanism and denied copied games owners access to online updates. To me that seems one reasonable answer to that question.
You're talking about all the different mechanisms for protection but, as a buyer of the games I play, I just want to be able to play the game, store the CD/DVD on a shelf once I've installed it (because there's no chance of getting a free replacement from the games company if it gets damaged), get updates if they're needed and then be left alone and I don't want to see ANYTHING that makes it more difficult for me to do those things.
Re:You Muslim fuckers have no sense of irony...
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· Score: -1, Troll
The Pope is a wanker, Al Qaeda are wankers and your mum has asked me to ask you to get out of bed, put your dad's laptop away and come down for breakfast as your shock therapy session at the local loony bin starts in half an hour.
...but when someone puts a new word like "buckyballs" in the title of a posting, rather than trying to outsmug the rest of us by looking more intelligent, can they also briefly explain in the first paragraph what that word actually is?
There's me over here in "The Old World" looking at the article thinking "Buckyballs? What are they then? Some brand of American breakfast cereal or cured meat product being a spherical version of beef jerky? How can processed foodstuffs be used as containers for hydrogen? And why when there's perfectly good pressurised cannisters available?"
A brief explanation of a word allows me to quickly decide if an article is going to be of interest to me or not - in this case, it's all that high-brow hoity-toity chemistry nonsense where there's absolutely bugger all chance of talking about Linux, music, computer games or laughing at the Vista users.
So basically I'm off to better threads.
Thanks for listening and "Toodle Pip" from Blighty!
Look, I'm a geek computer user with 80% of my time on (Gentoo) Linux and 20% on XP so I know how my bread is buttered, okay? Plus me being a Brit and you being a Canadian we both quite like "'Er Majesty" and enjoy free healthcare so we're kind of Linux brothers across the sea, as it were - but leave the Linux advocacy for another thread, will you? It just starts all the Mac/Windows people off about zealotry and god knows what else and we should both be above that.
Anyway, onto your subject of CD cracks. Yep, they may be officially legal in Canada but anywhere else I doubt anyone with an official copy of a game is ever going to be hauled up in front of a judge for using one.
As for having to put the CD in to play it, that's a hangover from when PCs first started getting CD-ROM drives. Go back to a game like Redneck Rampage (a true-to-life depiction and social statement of a typical American family and their struggles against adversity and farmyard animals) and to avail your ears of the most excellent Beat Farmers singing "Baby's Liquored Up" (R.I.P. Country Dick Montana) while playing the game, you had to leave the CD in the drive - that was good because hard disks were small then and the game installer copying all the CD tracks to hard disk would have filled the drive up quickly.
So the fact that CDs/DVDs need to be put in drives started out as mainly a technical requirement but the fact that not too many people complained about it then gave the games companies the go ahead to keep doing it, even though these days just about everything on the CD\DVD gets put on the hard drive.
Whilst I rightly agree that all Starforce programmers should hereby be rounded up and sodomised with a baseball bat with nails in it, I don't think it's a big issue having to get a CD crack for a game to be able to put the game CD on a shelf somewhere.
I do think it's the quality and price of games that is the real big issue here though.
But as the game developer, do you get any say about the protection on it?
I would have thought it was the suited bean counters with their Excel spreadsheets of "Potential Lost Sales" that get in the evil-looking weaselmen from Starfoce to stamp their mark on each game disk. Or am I wrong?
Go back 15 years and I was doing the same thing with games on the Commodore Amiga - I had stacks and stacks of real games and copied games, copying more all of the time, archiving them, cataloguing them, etc.
These days, I can count on two hands the names of the games I actually played and thoroughly enjoyed on the Amiga. Had I not spent so much time getting them, copying them, etc., I would have probably played and remembered quite a lot more.
Cool! But I don't see too many supplicants kissing your feet, oh great l33t pirate lord!
How about putting your money where your mouth is and using some of those obviously fantastic programming talents into an Open Source gaming project instead so you can really show everyone what you can do?
I don't think that it is "truly" online activation. You get a registration key with the Galactic Civilizations 2, that lets you install it and play it.
You need to activate the game online to go and get updates and addons. So if someone has a pirated copy then they can't get the updates - well, if it's that important they should just go by the game.
I've had the game since I bought the disk version in a shop, I recall with one update I had to re-enter the registration key again (or they sent me a new one by email, something like that) but that was it.
Yes, there is a degree of protection built in because of the registration key but DRM is far too strong a word for it. Don't get me wrong, DRM is thoroughly evil and implies that there are restrictions on your expected usage of the product. But as far as I'm aware, I can install the game and play it (without putting the DVD in the drive) on as many machines as I like as many times as I like. I don't think there's anything more I could be expected to do with the game.
If you're going to go after a games company for protection or DRM, then how about the fact that Starforce-like protection forces your drives to work a lot harder meaning they wear out quicker? Or how about Bioshock where you only have a few installations of it before you have to get a new registration key all over again?
Believe me, nobody more than me has utter disdain for games companies because they totally take the piss out of games players - especially PC games players who are constantly shit upon by buying beta versions of games that need to be patched several times afterwards before they will play the way the packaging says they will. Not to mention the overhype of games, the fact that FPSes in the main are getting prettier but shorter and more linear, recycled sequels, etc. etc.
But I do give Stardock credit for being the best of a bad bunch and the fact is I've had hundreds of hours of gameplay out of GalCiv2 without Stardock bothering me too much about registration keys and updates. So they're okay in my book and when I've got cash to go and buy a game, I'll probably go see what they have that's new and worth buying before I go look elsewhere.
Let me throw a couple more questions for you to ponder also since you are defending iTunes and I am attacking it:
1. You've admitted that you still buy CDs. Therefore iTunes does not have the range of product that is available on CD which is therefore one major failing of it. (Incidentally, I am the same - most of what I listen to is quite obscure and I source virtually all of my CDs online so I do take your point entirely.)
2. I'm a lot more discerning in what music I buy these days but it used to be the case that I'd get bored with some albums and sell them on, whether privately or on eBay. So what happens with iTunes music? Are you able to do the same when you get bored with it?
The points I am trying to make here is that the limitations of iTunes (and any other DRM-protected media distribution method) are far more than they have ever been before with other distribution methods. And we all got so used to the older methods that we've taken for granted what we could do with music before.
If people understand those restrictions and still want DRM-ed music, then fine, we're in a capitalist supply-and-demand market and people should be allowed to buy what they want.
But I say to you again, iPods, mobile phones, PDAs, etc. etc. are sold as these pretty little fashionable gadgets that makes you cool if you have one and a total jerkoff if you don't. But the fact is, they all have these restrictions that are kept hidden from the advertising campaigns because a lot of people are too stupid to check these things out first.
Becasue it's primary use is to sell Apple iPods, not anybody elses hardware, and other companies want to make money from music sales, where as Apple seems to want iTunes to be simply a value add to the hardware they want to sell. Vertical applications work best in the scenario.
iTunes is a music distribution method tied to a specific piece of hardware - it's like buying a CD and only being able to play it on a Sony CD player.
Your definition may be correct but it's irrelevant. It still the same behaviour that allowed Microsoft to become a monopoly.
I ahve been buying music one way or another for over 27 years. Other then the type of plastic the music is printed on, and where I buy my music, not much has changed.
If I buy a CD myself, I can lend it to a friend to listen to, for example. The same was the case with LPs, cassettes, etc. If I buy an iTunes song, unless I give my friend the player, I can't let him listen to it. Therefore more restriction has been placed on music as a result of the distribution method that is iTunes. Or am I missing something and iTunes now lets you download DRM-free MP3 tracks that you can give to that friend on, say, a USB stick to listen to on his (possibly non-iPod) music player?
Most consumers no there are people in the industry that want us to pay every time we listen. really, it's been that way forever and it's not new.
Yes, but it's never been enforceable until now - with DRM. You are missing the point entirely, I'm afraid. DRM is a workable method to enforce more restrictive use of music and iTunes backs DRM.
Then why are there more ways then ever before to play and use music? Why did they license to other companies that don't do that?
There are more ways to play music but the usage (e.g. changing formats, loaning to others, more restrictive public broadcasting rules) has changed.
I have no idea what you are asking in the second question.
That's nice that you buy CDs, so do I and it's very quaint.
"Quaint" is your opinion only, it has no relevance to the argument. A CD gives me complete freedom to enjoy and use music the way I consider fair usage - in other words, I don't copy it or upload it to the Internet but I can play it as long as I like, as many times as I like, rip it how I like, etc.
There where peopel in the industry that didn't want blank cassettes to be sold, wanted money for each one sold, and want to sell fewer tracks for more money.
Perhaps this has more to do with technical limitations of the formats? I never used 8-track, I just know it was a bigger physical tape than cassette. I do remember recording onto the likes of C60, C90 and C120 cassettes and that, generally, the longer the tape you used, the worse the quality of the recording got and the quicker it degraded. So maybe by restricting the size of an album allowed shorter but better quality recordings to be made.
This is no different to the 76 minute limit of audio CDs where a lot of stuff is being remastered now with additional tracks because CDs have the space to do that.
These dream of they control all music all the time will never happen. The market is way to nimble for that to happen.
Believe me, I hope you're right. I've nothing against people wanting compact players and MP3, OGG, etc. are all great open formats for portability of music. But DRM is evil, it restricts how you use music (as I said earlier) meaning that there is intrinsically more freedom (and better music quality) in buying a CD than buying music from iTunes.
And, yes, I'm old-fashioned but with a CD you get something physical that you don't have to backup regularly and won't lose if your iPod breaks or a hard disk crashes.
LAN games aren't effected, (we're not going to buy 8 copies for one LAN party)
Actually, you're wrong. I do like Starcraft and Warcraft a lot, but with Starcraft, it does take a CD crack to stop it asking for a disk on a local LAN network game. I'm not sure that it needed the CD in the drive all of the time, I do recall just putting it in the drive and taking it out again was enough, but it was still a right pain in the ass.
Blizzard should have learnt a good lesson from Epic with Unreal Tournament - when Unreal Tournament reached a certain age and patch version, they just stopped it asking for the CD any more.
I also believe that if you need a unique copy for each presence of the game on a local LAN party, then that should be stated very clearly on the packaging because I seem to recall Red Alert 2 was a right bugger for that also.
I can't stand arrogant games companies in general but I like Stardock a lot. Galactic Civilizations II is fantastic, the expansions just make it better and better, I've had hundreds of hours of fun playing it and it's worth every single penny I paid for it. Plus I have it installed on my desktop PC and my laptop and the original disks are sat in the box on the shelf gathering dust.
I've not checked out Sins yet, but if it's a good game, I will buy it also.
I know strategy titles have a lot more replayability in them than FPS games, but the fact is that games companies are taking the piss out of us with the latter at the moment. Personally, I won't pay £35 for a linear FPS game that last 8 hours, it's that simple. Plus I totally failed to see the big hooha with F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 which used the simple principle of "you go into a dark room and something jumps out at you" over and over again - I got halfway through each game and gave up on them through boredom.
Far Cry I liked a lot but I'll upgrade my PC when I'm ready to rather than because Crysis or Bioshock needs me to, thanks very much.
Valve are "borderline bastards" - Half-Life and all the other associated titles are ace and some thought goes into pricing them. But I've still not worked out how to play the games in Steam when I'm not on the Internet (is it possible?) and that hacks me off. And whilst I fully agree that if you play online, you should have a unique license key, WHY-OH-WHY can I not just fire up Half-Life 2 or Counterstrike 2 on a local LAN for a few drunken friends for an hour or two with one licensed copu? I could do it with Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike!
But all praise to Stardock - they treat me like an adult, they suppot GalCiv II well so they can have some of my money.
The "starving college student" argument doesn't wash with me. If you cannot afford to buy new games, then how about just waiting a while? There will be used cheaper copies on eBay, the prices of games start rapidly dropping after about 6 months anyway so what's the problem?
If you're bowing down to peer pressure by having to impress your friends as the first person to buy the latest titles, then you are your own worst enemy. What's wrong with playing older titles that you can buy for a couple of pounds on eBay? Again, you probably won't do that because it has to be "latest and greatest" with most of your generation.
People in general need to start finding some courage in themselves - nothing to do with entertainment is a "must have", it's just a status symbol. Therefore if something is too expensive then just don't buy it, end of story. If everyone did it, the price would have to come down. That is the best way to send a message to whoever made the item - piracy just tells them "people want it but they just won't pay for it so let's make it harder to copy for everyone".
Don't get me wrong, I love having money and spending it on games, movies, music, etc. but you have to reach a point where you start telling yourself that whilst all this stuff is nice to own, it really isn't that important.
One of the best "anti-retail" therapies you can do is get rid of all your junk on eBay. I had an attic full of old retro computers, LP records, stacks of role-playing games books and boxes of board games I would never use again. I also had several hundred audio CDs in my collection that I no longer listened to. There were hundreds of items, it took me months to sell the stuff on eBay but as I was listing it, I realised just how much I'd spent on all of it. Sure, I got some reasonable prices and was able to treat myself to a load of new stuff with the profits, but it has instilled the attitude in me now that I'm a lot more discerning and I don't accumulate "junk" - if I buy something, I generally get rid of something on eBay which means what I'm buying is a lot cheaper anyway.
Agreed. But if it is just hardware, then how come the specifications to its iTunes software have not been at least licensed to third party music player vendors so they can connect to it? Imagine the scenario of buying a music CD only to be told it can be played on a Sony CD player - it's essentially the same thing. The same could be said for OS X which is only usable on the Mac platform.
Erm... how does Apple have a monopoly on music distribution.
Accepted - to a point at least. However, you've also countered your own argument because you've made a comparison between CDs as a completely open method of music distribution to iTunes which, by virtue of its file format and DRM, is a closed method of distribution (linked to a specific player). This fact alone puts Apple in a very strong position of becoming a monopoly using specific hardware linked to specific software with specific formats - except for the hardware, exactly the way MS became a monopoly. And please don't use the argument that you can load MP3s onto an iPod because you can also load RTF files into Word and CSVs into Excel - that part is irrelevant.
DRM in itself does no such thing. Its perfectly possible to have a DRM scheme that maintains rights without creating a monopoly.
DRM is based on the assumption that most people who currently pay for music do not have the technical skills to bypass it but can be squeezed for more money on the basis that the media they buy is either platform or time limited - in effect, a subscription model.
You sound bitter. That's a shame because life is finite and wasting it on vitriol seems a waste.
Not really. As a CD buyer, there's currently more interesting music out there for me than I could ever possibly listen to so I'm pretty happy with my lot. But it does annoy me that most people get lured in by these pretty little gadgets without realising that one of the basic aims of them is to take away ways of playing and using music that they previously took for granted purely because a few fat blokes want more money.
I need to use a lawn mower to cut my grass every week. Because of that need, it is convenient to store it in the garage and therefore inconvenient to store it in the attic. (I won't use the proper British word "loft" because you pedantic Americans will have trouble understanding it.)
However, if I get rid of the lawn, I no longer need the lawn mower. Therefore, whether I store it "conveniently" in the garage or "inconveniently" in the loft, or indeed sell it, is irrelevant because I no longer need it.
It has nothing to do with the meaning of any word but the relationship between those words.
If you don't like what I'm saying, then come at me with a convincing argument (or even some humour if there's any in you) rather than just picking up on some irrelevance because it's an easy way of venting of your frustrations at being unable to argue intelligently.
I didn't think a fifteen year-old acned teenage boy with no girlfriend, a very large Warhammer 40K orc army and a penchant for dressing in black would be allowed to drive a car.
Or are you an atypical death-metal critique who is something of a connoisseur of bloke singers sounding like they're vomiting nails into a dustbin while the backing musicians are either racing to see who can get to the end of the song first or using slow, low frequency power chords to see who's bowels open up first?
Most music listeners nowadays are prefer buying singles to albums.
I'm not sure that's entirely correct. Certainly in record stores I've been into, the album racks far outweigh the singles ones although I do accept that for downloads the proportion of singles to albums is higher - or at least singles to non-single album tracks.
If 40% of the music sold is downloaded, that implies 60% is bought on CD which, based on the above, people are more inclined to be buying albums becaue that's what high street stores/online retailers stock the most of - or am I missing something?
This is especially true of younger than 25 listeners, who make up almost half the music market.
I'd also argue they're also the same people downloading most of their music for free from BitTorrent due to less disposable income than someone my age. Just because they're listening to it, doesn't mean they've paid for it.
You're perfectly welcome to continue with your habits. No one is stopping you from buying CDs.
Agreed. But there seems to be this general tone to postings in here that if you're not downloading from iTunes then you must be downloading it free and illegally. I'm merely demonstrating that you can be a legal music enthusiast without owning an iPod.
My car turns on the lights automatically when it turns dark, or when I drive into a tunnel.
I find the "darkness detection system" between my eyes and brain and my "switch the headlights on" system between my brain and hands works pretty well for entering a tunnel also.
That does not invalidate the feature; it's a convenience.
It invalidates the feature for me since I have no need for it. Neither is it a convenience because I have no need of it.
The luxury model of this car (which I don't have) has Lane Departure Warning System.
Good for you. And I bet sitting behind the wheel of your car makes you feel like an Airbus pilot with all those dials and blinking lights. But like I said, if it improves your driving experience then enjoy it - you've probably earnt it.
If you're crossing lanes on a highway without a turn signal enabled, it vibrates your chair in the appropriate direction.
Lovely. And I'm a good enough driver to start my blinkers manually when I change lanes. And you're vibrating chair now makes you feel like captain of the Space Shuttle. Again, we're both happy - please continue to enjoy your driving experience.
Not everything requires a three-page disclaimer, American.
Does the sarcasm, irony and general piss-taking humour not give you the clue? I'm British through and through, me ole' mucka.
Off you go then, don't forget to write - and please continue to enjoy your driving experience, Captain Cosmos of the M25 Space Lanes.
Sorry for the title but I get annoyed with the constant announcements by these annoying little companies that they have made a wonderful breakthough in technology for all of us when, in reality, it's a few neanderthals amongst the entire human race who are too stupid to work out for themselves that the contents of a polystyrene cup might be hot or that when you're tired you probably shouldn't be behind the wheel of a car...
Perhaps I should email that company with a question to see what response I get:
"So if your blue light device is designed such that I no longer need to worry about driving when I'm really tired, does that mean that if I do fall asleep at the wheel, spin out of control and kill an innocent pedestrian, it will have been as a result of the failure of your device to do its job such that I can pass on all legal liabilities to you then?"
0) Radio does not let you queue up your choice of songs in your choice of order.
No, but then I bow down to the greater experience of the radio DJ who is paid to put the songs in a reasonable order. I don't need to have everything "my way", sometimes I just want to sit back, relax and let someone else entertain me.
1) Radio does not let you listen to the same song over and over if you are trying to decide whether you like it.
Good point though I'm more of an album person than individual songs. If a track grabs me then I go find out more about the artist and album it's from, then try to check out the album in its entirety before buying the CD.
2) Radio has ads between the songs.
Most of it, yes, the BBC here in the UK, no.
3) Radio doesn't have a database that links the various songs and artists. I have discovered new artists via Rhapsody: click on "similar artists" links to artists I know I like, listen, repeat.
I just use Amazon. There's enough reviews and people's lists on their site to find something interesting. Plus I don't always listen to similar music anyway, a prefer a bit of variety.
Many of the posters in this topic are either staggeringly naive, gleefully sucking on Jobs' barbed member while they type their comments, eating vast quantities of psychotropic mushrooms, just plain "off their trollies", thicker than two short planks or all of the above.
So rather than dealing with each of the speculative prattlings of these loonies, let's just deal with fact (i.e. that small part of your existence outside your iPod screen):
1. Who truly believes that you'll be able to go into an unlimited download service without signing a contract that ties you in for a year or two?
2. Apple is NOT a charity and Steve Jobs is no more your friend than Bill Gates. As CEOs of their respective companies they have one remit - to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. Therefore, neither will give anything away for free if they can avoid doing so.
3. Even me, a lowly techie, knows enough about business to know that once you've sold a person something, the best next step is to keep that person spending money with you, especially on a regular basis. Hence the creation of a falsified rental model for music to make sure you keep pumping that money backing in. Something you previously purchased & owned (e.g. a CD) is now being loaned to you - the longer it's loaned to you, the more money you will end up paying for it.
4. Microsoft's monopoly on desktop OSes is no different to Apple's monopoly on music distribution. Both are BAD for the consumer. Deal with it.
5. DRM facilitates both a rental model and creation of monopolies. It too is bad.
6. Just because someone doesn't pay for downloads doesn't make them a music pirate. You may have heard of these things called "compact disks" that old wierdos like me still buy because we like putting things on shelves in plastic cases, arranging them alphabetically and reading sleeve notes while we're sat on the toilet burping our colostomy bags. If there's an iTunes subscriber out there who has downloaded and paid for 12000 individual tracks of music, then I will happily bow to that person's superiority because that's about as many legal tracks that I've also paid for across my CD collection.
7. Again, being a doddery old twat, I am happy for music to be "interactive" enough for me to occasionally want to shake my walking stick in the air in time to it or sing entirely in the wrong key to it. However, being an old fashioned type of bloke, I thought that the reason I handed over my money to that spotty student in the record store is because he would give me a CD as a finished product. i.e. I take it home, put it in my CD player and that's it. But apparently not. Now, as part of the overall music experience, I now have to find this desire to prove I am somehow more proficient than both the original musicians, sound editors and producers by pulling songs off the CD, putting them in a different order and possibly mixing up one song with another so that I'm allowed to put the letters "D.J." in front of my name. WHAT'S WRONG WITH JUST SITTING DOWN, LISTENING TO THE ALBUM FROM START TO FINISH WITH A NICE CUP OF TEA AND THEN FINISHING THE EXPERIENCE WITH A SIGH AND SAYING "AHHH. THAT WAS NICE."???
8. I don't want to witter on about cures for diseases, people starving in Africa and Gore-Made Global Warming because I quite enjoy being a lazy fat capitalist with lots of money to spend on nice shiny things. But a small white box of electronics with a little colour screen and a pair of headphones is just that - so let's not get all "hoity toity" over status symbols and little Apple logos, okay? Because, believe me, the more effort you put into posing around the local Starbucks with one of those things, the more the rest of us put an effort into thinking you're an utter twat based on a little-known scientific law called "The Conservation Of Dickheads".
You would end up canceling your subscription the moment you downloaded as much music as your hard drive could hold and that would be the end of it.
Except for the fact that a very nice man in a nice expensive suit sent you a nice copy of a piece of paper with lots of nice words on it that you signed with a nice pen before you joined. That's because the nice man in his suit loves you so much that he doesn't want you running off into the sunset after a month... oh no, he wants you to be his nice credit-card owning friend for ever and ever and ever...
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Nope, I chose to wave away his (your?) irrelevant racist opinions with a wave of my hand and a sarcastic jab to his ribcage. If that's enough for you to derive my actual intelligence then well done! You must also be highly intelligent!
What is the justification for games companies punishing legitimate users with ever-more restrictive copy protection mechanisms?
Stardock have just got rid of the protection mechanism and denied copied games owners access to online updates. To me that seems one reasonable answer to that question.
You're talking about all the different mechanisms for protection but, as a buyer of the games I play, I just want to be able to play the game, store the CD/DVD on a shelf once I've installed it (because there's no chance of getting a free replacement from the games company if it gets damaged), get updates if they're needed and then be left alone and I don't want to see ANYTHING that makes it more difficult for me to do those things.
The Pope is a wanker, Al Qaeda are wankers and your mum has asked me to ask you to get out of bed, put your dad's laptop away and come down for breakfast as your shock therapy session at the local loony bin starts in half an hour.
There's me over here in "The Old World" looking at the article thinking "Buckyballs? What are they then? Some brand of American breakfast cereal or cured meat product being a spherical version of beef jerky? How can processed foodstuffs be used as containers for hydrogen? And why when there's perfectly good pressurised cannisters available?"
A brief explanation of a word allows me to quickly decide if an article is going to be of interest to me or not - in this case, it's all that high-brow hoity-toity chemistry nonsense where there's absolutely bugger all chance of talking about Linux, music, computer games or laughing at the Vista users.
So basically I'm off to better threads.
Thanks for listening and "Toodle Pip" from Blighty!
Anyway, onto your subject of CD cracks. Yep, they may be officially legal in Canada but anywhere else I doubt anyone with an official copy of a game is ever going to be hauled up in front of a judge for using one.
As for having to put the CD in to play it, that's a hangover from when PCs first started getting CD-ROM drives. Go back to a game like Redneck Rampage (a true-to-life depiction and social statement of a typical American family and their struggles against adversity and farmyard animals) and to avail your ears of the most excellent Beat Farmers singing "Baby's Liquored Up" (R.I.P. Country Dick Montana) while playing the game, you had to leave the CD in the drive - that was good because hard disks were small then and the game installer copying all the CD tracks to hard disk would have filled the drive up quickly.
So the fact that CDs/DVDs need to be put in drives started out as mainly a technical requirement but the fact that not too many people complained about it then gave the games companies the go ahead to keep doing it, even though these days just about everything on the CD\DVD gets put on the hard drive.
Whilst I rightly agree that all Starforce programmers should hereby be rounded up and sodomised with a baseball bat with nails in it, I don't think it's a big issue having to get a CD crack for a game to be able to put the game CD on a shelf somewhere.
I do think it's the quality and price of games that is the real big issue here though.
I would have thought it was the suited bean counters with their Excel spreadsheets of "Potential Lost Sales" that get in the evil-looking weaselmen from Starfoce to stamp their mark on each game disk. Or am I wrong?
Go back 15 years and I was doing the same thing with games on the Commodore Amiga - I had stacks and stacks of real games and copied games, copying more all of the time, archiving them, cataloguing them, etc.
These days, I can count on two hands the names of the games I actually played and thoroughly enjoyed on the Amiga. Had I not spent so much time getting them, copying them, etc., I would have probably played and remembered quite a lot more.
How about putting your money where your mouth is and using some of those obviously fantastic programming talents into an Open Source gaming project instead so you can really show everyone what you can do?
You need to activate the game online to go and get updates and addons. So if someone has a pirated copy then they can't get the updates - well, if it's that important they should just go by the game.
I've had the game since I bought the disk version in a shop, I recall with one update I had to re-enter the registration key again (or they sent me a new one by email, something like that) but that was it.
Yes, there is a degree of protection built in because of the registration key but DRM is far too strong a word for it. Don't get me wrong, DRM is thoroughly evil and implies that there are restrictions on your expected usage of the product. But as far as I'm aware, I can install the game and play it (without putting the DVD in the drive) on as many machines as I like as many times as I like. I don't think there's anything more I could be expected to do with the game.
If you're going to go after a games company for protection or DRM, then how about the fact that Starforce-like protection forces your drives to work a lot harder meaning they wear out quicker? Or how about Bioshock where you only have a few installations of it before you have to get a new registration key all over again?
Believe me, nobody more than me has utter disdain for games companies because they totally take the piss out of games players - especially PC games players who are constantly shit upon by buying beta versions of games that need to be patched several times afterwards before they will play the way the packaging says they will. Not to mention the overhype of games, the fact that FPSes in the main are getting prettier but shorter and more linear, recycled sequels, etc. etc.
But I do give Stardock credit for being the best of a bad bunch and the fact is I've had hundreds of hours of gameplay out of GalCiv2 without Stardock bothering me too much about registration keys and updates. So they're okay in my book and when I've got cash to go and buy a game, I'll probably go see what they have that's new and worth buying before I go look elsewhere.
1. You've admitted that you still buy CDs. Therefore iTunes does not have the range of product that is available on CD which is therefore one major failing of it. (Incidentally, I am the same - most of what I listen to is quite obscure and I source virtually all of my CDs online so I do take your point entirely.)
2. I'm a lot more discerning in what music I buy these days but it used to be the case that I'd get bored with some albums and sell them on, whether privately or on eBay. So what happens with iTunes music? Are you able to do the same when you get bored with it?
The points I am trying to make here is that the limitations of iTunes (and any other DRM-protected media distribution method) are far more than they have ever been before with other distribution methods. And we all got so used to the older methods that we've taken for granted what we could do with music before.
If people understand those restrictions and still want DRM-ed music, then fine, we're in a capitalist supply-and-demand market and people should be allowed to buy what they want.
But I say to you again, iPods, mobile phones, PDAs, etc. etc. are sold as these pretty little fashionable gadgets that makes you cool if you have one and a total jerkoff if you don't. But the fact is, they all have these restrictions that are kept hidden from the advertising campaigns because a lot of people are too stupid to check these things out first.
iTunes is a music distribution method tied to a specific piece of hardware - it's like buying a CD and only being able to play it on a Sony CD player.
Your definition may be correct but it's irrelevant. It still the same behaviour that allowed Microsoft to become a monopoly.
I ahve been buying music one way or another for over 27 years. Other then the type of plastic the music is printed on, and where I buy my music, not much has changed.
If I buy a CD myself, I can lend it to a friend to listen to, for example. The same was the case with LPs, cassettes, etc. If I buy an iTunes song, unless I give my friend the player, I can't let him listen to it. Therefore more restriction has been placed on music as a result of the distribution method that is iTunes. Or am I missing something and iTunes now lets you download DRM-free MP3 tracks that you can give to that friend on, say, a USB stick to listen to on his (possibly non-iPod) music player?
Most consumers no there are people in the industry that want us to pay every time we listen. really, it's been that way forever and it's not new.
Yes, but it's never been enforceable until now - with DRM. You are missing the point entirely, I'm afraid. DRM is a workable method to enforce more restrictive use of music and iTunes backs DRM.
Then why are there more ways then ever before to play and use music? Why did they license to other companies that don't do that?
There are more ways to play music but the usage (e.g. changing formats, loaning to others, more restrictive public broadcasting rules) has changed.
I have no idea what you are asking in the second question.
That's nice that you buy CDs, so do I and it's very quaint.
"Quaint" is your opinion only, it has no relevance to the argument. A CD gives me complete freedom to enjoy and use music the way I consider fair usage - in other words, I don't copy it or upload it to the Internet but I can play it as long as I like, as many times as I like, rip it how I like, etc.
There where peopel in the industry that didn't want blank cassettes to be sold, wanted money for each one sold, and want to sell fewer tracks for more money.
Perhaps this has more to do with technical limitations of the formats? I never used 8-track, I just know it was a bigger physical tape than cassette. I do remember recording onto the likes of C60, C90 and C120 cassettes and that, generally, the longer the tape you used, the worse the quality of the recording got and the quicker it degraded. So maybe by restricting the size of an album allowed shorter but better quality recordings to be made.
This is no different to the 76 minute limit of audio CDs where a lot of stuff is being remastered now with additional tracks because CDs have the space to do that.
These dream of they control all music all the time will never happen. The market is way to nimble for that to happen.
Believe me, I hope you're right. I've nothing against people wanting compact players and MP3, OGG, etc. are all great open formats for portability of music. But DRM is evil, it restricts how you use music (as I said earlier) meaning that there is intrinsically more freedom (and better music quality) in buying a CD than buying music from iTunes.
And, yes, I'm old-fashioned but with a CD you get something physical that you don't have to backup regularly and won't lose if your iPod breaks or a hard disk crashes.
So can you copy your Steam directory onto other machines to do a local LAN party? Or do you need unique CD keys?
Actually, you're wrong. I do like Starcraft and Warcraft a lot, but with Starcraft, it does take a CD crack to stop it asking for a disk on a local LAN network game. I'm not sure that it needed the CD in the drive all of the time, I do recall just putting it in the drive and taking it out again was enough, but it was still a right pain in the ass.
Blizzard should have learnt a good lesson from Epic with Unreal Tournament - when Unreal Tournament reached a certain age and patch version, they just stopped it asking for the CD any more.
I also believe that if you need a unique copy for each presence of the game on a local LAN party, then that should be stated very clearly on the packaging because I seem to recall Red Alert 2 was a right bugger for that also.
Erm, Vista?
I've not checked out Sins yet, but if it's a good game, I will buy it also.
I know strategy titles have a lot more replayability in them than FPS games, but the fact is that games companies are taking the piss out of us with the latter at the moment. Personally, I won't pay £35 for a linear FPS game that last 8 hours, it's that simple. Plus I totally failed to see the big hooha with F.E.A.R. and Doom 3 which used the simple principle of "you go into a dark room and something jumps out at you" over and over again - I got halfway through each game and gave up on them through boredom.
Far Cry I liked a lot but I'll upgrade my PC when I'm ready to rather than because Crysis or Bioshock needs me to, thanks very much.
Valve are "borderline bastards" - Half-Life and all the other associated titles are ace and some thought goes into pricing them. But I've still not worked out how to play the games in Steam when I'm not on the Internet (is it possible?) and that hacks me off. And whilst I fully agree that if you play online, you should have a unique license key, WHY-OH-WHY can I not just fire up Half-Life 2 or Counterstrike 2 on a local LAN for a few drunken friends for an hour or two with one licensed copu? I could do it with Half-Life 1 and Counter-Strike!
But all praise to Stardock - they treat me like an adult, they suppot GalCiv II well so they can have some of my money.
The "starving college student" argument doesn't wash with me. If you cannot afford to buy new games, then how about just waiting a while? There will be used cheaper copies on eBay, the prices of games start rapidly dropping after about 6 months anyway so what's the problem?
If you're bowing down to peer pressure by having to impress your friends as the first person to buy the latest titles, then you are your own worst enemy. What's wrong with playing older titles that you can buy for a couple of pounds on eBay? Again, you probably won't do that because it has to be "latest and greatest" with most of your generation.
People in general need to start finding some courage in themselves - nothing to do with entertainment is a "must have", it's just a status symbol. Therefore if something is too expensive then just don't buy it, end of story. If everyone did it, the price would have to come down. That is the best way to send a message to whoever made the item - piracy just tells them "people want it but they just won't pay for it so let's make it harder to copy for everyone".
Don't get me wrong, I love having money and spending it on games, movies, music, etc. but you have to reach a point where you start telling yourself that whilst all this stuff is nice to own, it really isn't that important.
One of the best "anti-retail" therapies you can do is get rid of all your junk on eBay. I had an attic full of old retro computers, LP records, stacks of role-playing games books and boxes of board games I would never use again. I also had several hundred audio CDs in my collection that I no longer listened to. There were hundreds of items, it took me months to sell the stuff on eBay but as I was listing it, I realised just how much I'd spent on all of it. Sure, I got some reasonable prices and was able to treat myself to a load of new stuff with the profits, but it has instilled the attitude in me now that I'm a lot more discerning and I don't accumulate "junk" - if I buy something, I generally get rid of something on eBay which means what I'm buying is a lot cheaper anyway.
Agreed. But if it is just hardware, then how come the specifications to its iTunes software have not been at least licensed to third party music player vendors so they can connect to it? Imagine the scenario of buying a music CD only to be told it can be played on a Sony CD player - it's essentially the same thing. The same could be said for OS X which is only usable on the Mac platform.
Erm ... how does Apple have a monopoly on music distribution.
Accepted - to a point at least. However, you've also countered your own argument because you've made a comparison between CDs as a completely open method of music distribution to iTunes which, by virtue of its file format and DRM, is a closed method of distribution (linked to a specific player). This fact alone puts Apple in a very strong position of becoming a monopoly using specific hardware linked to specific software with specific formats - except for the hardware, exactly the way MS became a monopoly. And please don't use the argument that you can load MP3s onto an iPod because you can also load RTF files into Word and CSVs into Excel - that part is irrelevant.
DRM in itself does no such thing. Its perfectly possible to have a DRM scheme that maintains rights without creating a monopoly.
DRM is based on the assumption that most people who currently pay for music do not have the technical skills to bypass it but can be squeezed for more money on the basis that the media they buy is either platform or time limited - in effect, a subscription model.
You sound bitter. That's a shame because life is finite and wasting it on vitriol seems a waste.
Not really. As a CD buyer, there's currently more interesting music out there for me than I could ever possibly listen to so I'm pretty happy with my lot. But it does annoy me that most people get lured in by these pretty little gadgets without realising that one of the basic aims of them is to take away ways of playing and using music that they previously took for granted purely because a few fat blokes want more money.
However, if I get rid of the lawn, I no longer need the lawn mower. Therefore, whether I store it "conveniently" in the garage or "inconveniently" in the loft, or indeed sell it, is irrelevant because I no longer need it.
It has nothing to do with the meaning of any word but the relationship between those words. If you don't like what I'm saying, then come at me with a convincing argument (or even some humour if there's any in you) rather than just picking up on some irrelevance because it's an easy way of venting of your frustrations at being unable to argue intelligently.
Or are you an atypical death-metal critique who is something of a connoisseur of bloke singers sounding like they're vomiting nails into a dustbin while the backing musicians are either racing to see who can get to the end of the song first or using slow, low frequency power chords to see who's bowels open up first?
I'm not sure that's entirely correct. Certainly in record stores I've been into, the album racks far outweigh the singles ones although I do accept that for downloads the proportion of singles to albums is higher - or at least singles to non-single album tracks.
If 40% of the music sold is downloaded, that implies 60% is bought on CD which, based on the above, people are more inclined to be buying albums becaue that's what high street stores/online retailers stock the most of - or am I missing something?
This is especially true of younger than 25 listeners, who make up almost half the music market.
I'd also argue they're also the same people downloading most of their music for free from BitTorrent due to less disposable income than someone my age. Just because they're listening to it, doesn't mean they've paid for it.
You're perfectly welcome to continue with your habits. No one is stopping you from buying CDs.
Agreed. But there seems to be this general tone to postings in here that if you're not downloading from iTunes then you must be downloading it free and illegally. I'm merely demonstrating that you can be a legal music enthusiast without owning an iPod.
I find the "darkness detection system" between my eyes and brain and my "switch the headlights on" system between my brain and hands works pretty well for entering a tunnel also.
That does not invalidate the feature; it's a convenience.
It invalidates the feature for me since I have no need for it. Neither is it a convenience because I have no need of it.
The luxury model of this car (which I don't have) has Lane Departure Warning System.
Good for you. And I bet sitting behind the wheel of your car makes you feel like an Airbus pilot with all those dials and blinking lights. But like I said, if it improves your driving experience then enjoy it - you've probably earnt it.
If you're crossing lanes on a highway without a turn signal enabled, it vibrates your chair in the appropriate direction.
Lovely. And I'm a good enough driver to start my blinkers manually when I change lanes. And you're vibrating chair now makes you feel like captain of the Space Shuttle. Again, we're both happy - please continue to enjoy your driving experience.
Not everything requires a three-page disclaimer, American.
Does the sarcasm, irony and general piss-taking humour not give you the clue? I'm British through and through, me ole' mucka.
Off you go then, don't forget to write - and please continue to enjoy your driving experience, Captain Cosmos of the M25 Space Lanes.
Perhaps I should email that company with a question to see what response I get:
"So if your blue light device is designed such that I no longer need to worry about driving when I'm really tired, does that mean that if I do fall asleep at the wheel, spin out of control and kill an innocent pedestrian, it will have been as a result of the failure of your device to do its job such that I can pass on all legal liabilities to you then?"
No, but then I bow down to the greater experience of the radio DJ who is paid to put the songs in a reasonable order. I don't need to have everything "my way", sometimes I just want to sit back, relax and let someone else entertain me.
1) Radio does not let you listen to the same song over and over if you are trying to decide whether you like it.
Good point though I'm more of an album person than individual songs. If a track grabs me then I go find out more about the artist and album it's from, then try to check out the album in its entirety before buying the CD.
2) Radio has ads between the songs.
Most of it, yes, the BBC here in the UK, no.
3) Radio doesn't have a database that links the various songs and artists. I have discovered new artists via Rhapsody: click on "similar artists" links to artists I know I like, listen, repeat.
I just use Amazon. There's enough reviews and people's lists on their site to find something interesting. Plus I don't always listen to similar music anyway, a prefer a bit of variety.
So rather than dealing with each of the speculative prattlings of these loonies, let's just deal with fact (i.e. that small part of your existence outside your iPod screen):
1. Who truly believes that you'll be able to go into an unlimited download service without signing a contract that ties you in for a year or two?
2. Apple is NOT a charity and Steve Jobs is no more your friend than Bill Gates. As CEOs of their respective companies they have one remit - to make as much money as possible for the shareholders. Therefore, neither will give anything away for free if they can avoid doing so.
3. Even me, a lowly techie, knows enough about business to know that once you've sold a person something, the best next step is to keep that person spending money with you, especially on a regular basis. Hence the creation of a falsified rental model for music to make sure you keep pumping that money backing in. Something you previously purchased & owned (e.g. a CD) is now being loaned to you - the longer it's loaned to you, the more money you will end up paying for it.
4. Microsoft's monopoly on desktop OSes is no different to Apple's monopoly on music distribution. Both are BAD for the consumer. Deal with it.
5. DRM facilitates both a rental model and creation of monopolies. It too is bad.
6. Just because someone doesn't pay for downloads doesn't make them a music pirate. You may have heard of these things called "compact disks" that old wierdos like me still buy because we like putting things on shelves in plastic cases, arranging them alphabetically and reading sleeve notes while we're sat on the toilet burping our colostomy bags. If there's an iTunes subscriber out there who has downloaded and paid for 12000 individual tracks of music, then I will happily bow to that person's superiority because that's about as many legal tracks that I've also paid for across my CD collection.
7. Again, being a doddery old twat, I am happy for music to be "interactive" enough for me to occasionally want to shake my walking stick in the air in time to it or sing entirely in the wrong key to it. However, being an old fashioned type of bloke, I thought that the reason I handed over my money to that spotty student in the record store is because he would give me a CD as a finished product. i.e. I take it home, put it in my CD player and that's it. But apparently not. Now, as part of the overall music experience, I now have to find this desire to prove I am somehow more proficient than both the original musicians, sound editors and producers by pulling songs off the CD, putting them in a different order and possibly mixing up one song with another so that I'm allowed to put the letters "D.J." in front of my name. WHAT'S WRONG WITH JUST SITTING DOWN, LISTENING TO THE ALBUM FROM START TO FINISH WITH A NICE CUP OF TEA AND THEN FINISHING THE EXPERIENCE WITH A SIGH AND SAYING "AHHH. THAT WAS NICE."???
8. I don't want to witter on about cures for diseases, people starving in Africa and Gore-Made Global Warming because I quite enjoy being a lazy fat capitalist with lots of money to spend on nice shiny things. But a small white box of electronics with a little colour screen and a pair of headphones is just that - so let's not get all "hoity toity" over status symbols and little Apple logos, okay? Because, believe me, the more effort you put into posing around the local Starbucks with one of those things, the more the rest of us put an effort into thinking you're an utter twat based on a little-known scientific law called "The Conservation Of Dickheads".
Except for the fact that a very nice man in a nice expensive suit sent you a nice copy of a piece of paper with lots of nice words on it that you signed with a nice pen before you joined. That's because the nice man in his suit loves you so much that he doesn't want you running off into the sunset after a month... oh no, he wants you to be his nice credit-card owning friend for ever and ever and ever...