We need a revolution! Government of the people, by the people, for the people! Bring down the ruling classes! Power to the proletariat!
Oh, wait. I think that's been tried before...
(All facetiousness aside, I actually agree with a lot of what the parent poster said. Either I'm getting more and more cynical, or the world is getting more and more horrible. Or both.)
Very good point. If the next generation consoles are designed around a subscription model, then it's highly unlikely I'd bother getting one, because:
1: I'm no longer a 'hardcore' gamer, as I have other things going on in my life (so what the hell am I doing on/.? Yeah, yeah...), so paying a regular subscription fee for something I might only use intermittently doesn't appeal.
2: Sturgeon's Law applies just as much to games, which is why I get most of mine second-hand apart from the occasional GTA or whatever. Don't like it? Only a few quid lost. But if every game requires the equivalent of Steam to play, what happens to the second-hand market?
Us (or US, even): "This is great! We can send armed robots into the most dangerous areas so our troops don't even have to risk their lives! Go get 'em, Clanky!"
Them: "First they attack from afar with missiles and bombs, and now they send soulless robots against us! They don't have the courage to fight us in person! They are using machines to kill our brothers! Rise up! Join us! Strike against the infidels in their own homes!"
I mean, it's obviously pointing in the wrong direction! It shouldn't be looking out into space, it should be pointed down at the ground to spot Osama Bin Laden!
Oh wait, the administration really couldn't care less about finding him any more, could they?
Corporations cannot own 'intellectual property' created by individuals, they can just have it licenced to them by said individuals for a fee and a time period decided by said individuals.
Holy shit, I just solved the creative world's woes. Call me 'DUH!-Man'. Next!
Oh, please. If somebody posted stolen CIA documents on the internet, then that's not only a potential national security issue, but it could cost people their lives.
The ThinkSecret thing? All that amounts to is a website saying "Hey, Appleites, if you've got any cool info you want to share with us, here's the email address to send it to!"
And that harms? Exactly nobody.
Oooh, a corporation may experience a tiny fluctuation in its share value, and as a result a bunch of fatcat fucks may lose a tiny, tiny percentage of their potential return on those shares! In the meantime, Apple will still release its new products, and they will still be exactly as successful as they would have been had the leak not occurred. It's not as though Dell could have beaten them to market in the week and a half or whatever between ThinkSecret posting its story and Steve Jobs announcing the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle, any more than Apple's security staff's failure to take the film/memory cards from the cameras of people who snapped the 'life is random' banner from MacWorld a day early would have ruined the Expo. (Not that they didn't try!)
Do you own millions of shares of Apple stock? No? Then here's something: THEY DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU. Apple make cool products, granted, but ultimately ALL THEY WANT IS YOUR MONEY. You have no reason to defend them.
If somebody from Apple broke their NDA and gave ThinkSecret information about upcoming products, that's Apple's (and the employee's) problem. Not ThinkSecret's. All that's at stake is a fraction of a penny for the stockholders. You know what? Fuck them. If they've got enough Apple stock to be worried about this, then they have more than enough money already and can take the hit!
AFAIK, Apple's power supplies support both 110 and 220V. I've taken my iBook to the States and used a cheap adapter (no voltage conversion, just 3-pin UK to 2-pin US) with no problems.
Of course, it only struck me that I might have made an expensive mistake after plugging it in, but luck and sensible engineering were on my side. So if your new US Mac Mini goes BANG! and melts into a pool of bubbling slime at power-up, it's not my fault!
Morale could be helped a lot by sharing the wealth and kudos. It does not help if a company earns 50 million off of an employee's idea, but only gives him/her a T-shirt. What message does that send to employees? At least give the inventor a nice fat bunus. Some people and companies are just so fucking greedy that it blows the mind. Their greed is beyond rationality. If you want yet another 50-million invention to come along, then share the wealth a bit to prime the pump for the next idea. Otherwise you are just biting the hand that feeds your greed.
Every penny given as a bonus to some really smart guy who comes up with a great invention = a penny not given as a dividend to some fat fuck with a stock portfolio. Welcome to modern business.
So when the England star players - Kev, Bev and the two Trevs - mysteriously malfunction during the World Cup, will Sam Slade: Robo-Hunter be hired to investigate?
"Okay, kids. If you'd bothered to read the terms and conditions for your fancy new phone, you would have realised that each text you send will cost you $217.53 and grant the phone company the legal right to harvest the organs of your pets to make sandwich paste for their executives, while each photo of your friends you take with your phone-camera will mark that person for termination when the New World Order comes. Now do you realise why mastering English and Mathematics is so important?"
It could just send its own highly technologically-aware cops to India to cover their lack of experience. Why, with that whole half-day of training on Windows 95, I'm sure all the Roscoe P Coltranes at the FBI and Homeland Security would kill for the chance to earn some extra cash by beating geeky suspects with belts, especially at the current exchange rate!
Every player in every store now has a hastily applied sticker saying "Multi-Region!"
They don't even bother doing that any more, because it's pretty much taken as read that all players, certainly here in the UK, are multi-region out of the box. I just bought a cheapy-cheapo 14" TV/DVD portable for the bedroom, which didn't have any mention of multi-region, but that didn't bother me much because the bulk of my DVDs are now R2. But I tried an R1 disc anyway - and whaddya know, it worked!
AFAIK, the only name-brand players on the high street that aren't already multi-region (or at least hackable via remote) are Sony, because their ties with Columbia-Tristar mean they have a vested interest in maintaining the blatantly consumer-unfriendly region coding system alive. But even then, you can probably get chipped Sony players for a minimal premium from places like Richer Sounds anyway.
Considering how DVD has taken off - way above what the corporations behind it expected - I think they've made a rod for their own profit-projecting backs. VHS has had a highly profitable lifespan of, what, 20+ years? No way is Joe Consumer going to buy his favourite films all over again in just five years simply because there's new premium-priced hardware to sell and stronger region coding/DRM to enforce!
Slashdot Mirror
Could you please stop being silly and instead try and do something worth while. Says the man posting on Slashdot...
Oh, wait. I think that's been tried before...
(All facetiousness aside, I actually agree with a lot of what the parent poster said. Either I'm getting more and more cynical, or the world is getting more and more horrible. Or both.)
1: I'm no longer a 'hardcore' gamer, as I have other things going on in my life (so what the hell am I doing on /.? Yeah, yeah...), so paying a regular subscription fee for something I might only use intermittently doesn't appeal.
2: Sturgeon's Law applies just as much to games, which is why I get most of mine second-hand apart from the occasional GTA or whatever. Don't like it? Only a few quid lost. But if every game requires the equivalent of Steam to play, what happens to the second-hand market?
...nobody cares.
I can't get to TFA. Did we just slashdot China?
Them: "First they attack from afar with missiles and bombs, and now they send soulless robots against us! They don't have the courage to fight us in person! They are using machines to kill our brothers! Rise up! Join us! Strike against the infidels in their own homes!"
But who cares what They think, right?
Oh wait, the administration really couldn't care less about finding him any more, could they?
I guess poor Hubble is fucked either way, then...
Holy shit, I just solved the creative world's woes. Call me 'DUH!-Man'. Next!
(Flies off to solve world hunger.)
The ThinkSecret thing? All that amounts to is a website saying "Hey, Appleites, if you've got any cool info you want to share with us, here's the email address to send it to!"
And that harms? Exactly nobody.
Oooh, a corporation may experience a tiny fluctuation in its share value, and as a result a bunch of fatcat fucks may lose a tiny, tiny percentage of their potential return on those shares! In the meantime, Apple will still release its new products, and they will still be exactly as successful as they would have been had the leak not occurred. It's not as though Dell could have beaten them to market in the week and a half or whatever between ThinkSecret posting its story and Steve Jobs announcing the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle, any more than Apple's security staff's failure to take the film/memory cards from the cameras of people who snapped the 'life is random' banner from MacWorld a day early would have ruined the Expo. (Not that they didn't try!)
Do you own millions of shares of Apple stock? No? Then here's something: THEY DO NOT GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOU. Apple make cool products, granted, but ultimately ALL THEY WANT IS YOUR MONEY. You have no reason to defend them.
If somebody from Apple broke their NDA and gave ThinkSecret information about upcoming products, that's Apple's (and the employee's) problem. Not ThinkSecret's. All that's at stake is a fraction of a penny for the stockholders. You know what? Fuck them. If they've got enough Apple stock to be worried about this, then they have more than enough money already and can take the hit!
Shouldn't that be Titangen?
Of course, it only struck me that I might have made an expensive mistake after plugging it in, but luck and sensible engineering were on my side. So if your new US Mac Mini goes BANG! and melts into a pool of bubbling slime at power-up, it's not my fault!
Hey, why's my computer squirming... AAAAAARGHHH!
Guess you've never flown first class on Virgin Atlantic, then. They've got a little massage area, too!
Playing The Sims is already boring as hell. Watching The Sims being run by the kind of people who vote for things on reality TV...
Only one question: does Pages have a live wordcount? 'Cause if not, well, maybe I'll wait for iLife '06...
If they have live animals in the snack room, then RUN LIKE HELL!
It won't be Tron without light cycles, Recognizers and those nifty asymetric tanks!
Every penny given as a bonus to some really smart guy who comes up with a great invention = a penny not given as a dividend to some fat fuck with a stock portfolio. Welcome to modern business.
(I generalise for comedic effect...)
Five minutes into the video, does the screen suddenly go black only for the word 'PWNED' to appear?
So when the England star players - Kev, Bev and the two Trevs - mysteriously malfunction during the World Cup, will Sam Slade: Robo-Hunter be hired to investigate?
"Okay, kids. If you'd bothered to read the terms and conditions for your fancy new phone, you would have realised that each text you send will cost you $217.53 and grant the phone company the legal right to harvest the organs of your pets to make sandwich paste for their executives, while each photo of your friends you take with your phone-camera will mark that person for termination when the New World Order comes. Now do you realise why mastering English and Mathematics is so important?"
Now the terrorists will get through undetected and destroy us all!
Damn, I misread that at first. If it had been a robot 10' in height for just $200, I would have been on my way to the store by now!
It could just send its own highly technologically-aware cops to India to cover their lack of experience. Why, with that whole half-day of training on Windows 95, I'm sure all the Roscoe P Coltranes at the FBI and Homeland Security would kill for the chance to earn some extra cash by beating geeky suspects with belts, especially at the current exchange rate!
They don't even bother doing that any more, because it's pretty much taken as read that all players, certainly here in the UK, are multi-region out of the box. I just bought a cheapy-cheapo 14" TV/DVD portable for the bedroom, which didn't have any mention of multi-region, but that didn't bother me much because the bulk of my DVDs are now R2. But I tried an R1 disc anyway - and whaddya know, it worked!
AFAIK, the only name-brand players on the high street that aren't already multi-region (or at least hackable via remote) are Sony, because their ties with Columbia-Tristar mean they have a vested interest in maintaining the blatantly consumer-unfriendly region coding system alive. But even then, you can probably get chipped Sony players for a minimal premium from places like Richer Sounds anyway.
Considering how DVD has taken off - way above what the corporations behind it expected - I think they've made a rod for their own profit-projecting backs. VHS has had a highly profitable lifespan of, what, 20+ years? No way is Joe Consumer going to buy his favourite films all over again in just five years simply because there's new premium-priced hardware to sell and stronger region coding/DRM to enforce!