Have you ever seen a baby cheetah? Awh, cute cuddly and barely able to stand upright let alone run. Yet within a year or two it will out accelarate a ferrari.
Some people are worried about DRM and Trusted Computing. Not because of what it is today but of what it might become in the future.
Examine your own words. You claim that Apples DRM is the obstrusive and user UN-friendly. Oh not as bad as others but what kind of recommondation is that? Sniffing pee ain't as bad as sniffing pure amonia. Do you want to clean my toilet?
Yes there are worse DRM at the moment but they are not a success. Apples is and while Steve Jobs at the moment is labelled as the saviour of consumers (I doubt it, this is Steve "Disney" Jobs we are talking about but that is another story) it is still very clear that the content owners are not happy with it and pressuring Apple to increase the DRM.
Is Apple really going to keep standing up to them. Is this the maximum level of DRM OR is this the famous baby step. Getting us used to DRM so that it can be slowly increased overtime until we have no rights left?
Lets not forget that BEFORE iTunes came along DRM was unacceptable. Now it is accepted by a lot of people. The first step has already been taken.
Yes a lot of this reeks of paranoia but the thing about paranoia is that it ain't real paranoia if they are really out to get you.
Not Apple perse (although again the disney link makes me doubtfull) but has the record industry found a usefull ally in Apple nonetheless? Not that they seem very gratefull but a lot of mankinds worse moments arrived through stupid coincedences and people thinking that for now the lesser of two evils is all for the best.
There are three camps in this battle. Those who believe that all DRM and Trusted Computing is a path to hell, those who believe it will be good and the saviour of mankind and those in the middle who just want their content. The problem is that the two extremes must be extremes. DRM and Trusted computing can't be half measurers. They require ABSOLUTES. In away Apples DRM is just a piss poor copy protection easily circumvented. For someting to be really DRM you must not be able to circumvent it.
So if you want to be in the middle good luck. You might find out that once you made that first step the next steps come a lot easier. Especially when billion dollar companies are tugging on your arms.
If Apple increases its drm, can you resist?
No reign of terror comes without a warning sign. The trick is to regonize the warning signs. Prophets and madman are good at it. The funny thing is that they are often the same person. They just go from madman to prophet after it is too late and we wonder why nobody said something before it all went to hell.
If anything MMO's need to learn to copy less and do their own thing. Eve has its way of dealing with game time vs advancement, WoW has another, Second life is totally different again. All three seem to work, the companies behind them make a profit and can continue to do business.
The whole "level advancement" thing can't be fixed by a one size fits all solution. Different players just want different things out of game. As Second Life seems to prove you don't even have to have levels, therefore no level grind at all.
You claim EVE as the great saviour but basically what you are saying that no matter how good I am or how much time I spend playing I will advance just as much as that guy that just logs in once an hour?
Oh wait, but that ain't the whole truth is it? I will have gained far more wealth and that buys me the best tools and that is EVE's version of levelling up isn't it? So it is still the player who puts in the most time/effort who has the biggest ship/avatar/epenis.
Any game in wich effort is not rewarded will be very shortlived. Eve just does it in a slightly different way. It works for Eve players, other players want something different. I would hope that any new MMO games try their own unique blend of gameplay rather then just copycat. Why yes, I do believe in Santa Claus, why do you ask?
Do windows games only run on windows? An odd fact is the reak Microsoft games like Flight and train simulator are very light on the DRM. The last versions I bought didn't even seem to have any at all.
Nothing is stopping you from making it possible to run MS games on say Linux or Macs. In fact several projects are doing just that, legally.
Yes this is stretching things but that is because this is a very difficult subject. Laws are ancient and mostly written down before the idea of media containers. With this I mean things like a VHS cassete wich contains media/content wich is married to a specific device.
Think about it for a second. Two hundred years ago you didn't have this problem (I think). Most items you buy and trade do not depend on another device. If you buy wood it will work work with any brand of saw. Nothing says you can only wash your clothes in a Miele washing machine. A book can be read with any pair of glasses.
Since the legal system moves incredibly slowly and has to be changed by people with no real skills like politicians who are controlled by that dumbest of all critters, the voter we still haven't learned to deal with how to regulate media formats.
That leaves the consumers who choose wrongly out in the cold. People often bring up betamax vs VHS in this context. But what about the poor shmucks who choose V2000 eh? For that matter what about those who bought into laserdisc?
V2000 was a really crap choice. If you made the mistake of choosing betamax you at least could still get new players for your old content as Sony kept supporting its standard. Your V2000 tapes were useless once the standard disappeared and the players stopped being made instantly. This is bad for the consumer and the task of an Ombudsman is to protect the consumer.
There is however a problem. With physical media containers like tape cassetes or laserdiscs there is no easy way to set a standard. You can't make VHS accept a laserdisc or vice versa so the consumer just had to pray he choose the right standard.
This ain't just bad for consumers it is also bad for business. Remember the CD? I rememeber a lot of stories about slow mass adoption because people weren't sure this would the future format.
But again there was no way around it. LP couldn't be upgraded so no in between option was possible to make adoption less painfull.
This is not ideal. Compare for instance with the difference in how new book technologies make their way into the market. We have had far more print improvements because the moment a new tech is invented in printing it can be put into place as long as the printer is willing to buy a new press. He then doesn't need to hope people will upgrade their eyes to his new format. Silly? Well not as silly as the movie industry.
They try to fit every new tech onto the old format by inserting it in the weirdest places on the film to make sure old theathers without the latest projector can still use the latest film. Because banking on everyone adopting your new unique format is risque.
So now back to apple. With purely digital containers it is actually silly we still have needs for certain players. We no longer have the physical restrictions so why can't we just play aac on any player out there?
The old format wars were a necessity because of the physical differences but digital formats can play anywhere. Who thinks it is silly you need to Quicktime player for.mov files, the DivX player for.divx files and Windows Media Center for.avi and Realplayer for.rm files?
If you are the least bit computer literate you will probably have setup your machine to play all these different media containers through one player. Yes because it is digital you can player your "laserdisc" on a "lp player". Amazing eh?
So now that this is possible perhaps it is also possible for an Ombudsman to ensure consumers no longer loose out in the format wars? Could we introduce laws th
You are saying that people shouldn't force other people to do stuff because they don't like it. Wich means you are telling people to stop doing something because you don't like it. Ah, the irony. One rule for you and one rule for everyone else right?
The european countries have different rules about consumer protection. They actually think that companies that become to influential should be put under controls to ensure that the consumer doesn't come under the control of a companies whims.
Silly stuff like making sure the countries laws apply and not whatever EULA a company lawyer dreams up next. Making sure that not one company can achieve a de-facto monopoly making it impossible for new companies to innovate.
You seem to favor companies over people because Apples DRM is forcing itself on these countries because Apple does not like their laws.
Europe is an "opt in" monopoly, they force not one company to start trading in the EU or use the EURO. Sound familiar?
Oh I am sorry, I play DVD on the PC
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and don't have any of that silly crap as I can just select all the segments from a little menu very easily.
So what is your point again? Oh that limited consoles try to extend playtime in an artificial way while the PC just gives you what you want as you want it.
They actually tell you that they have been gouging the market by selling retro games for the handhelds at highly inflated prices that turned people off.
So basically what you are saying that Nintendo after years of charging full price of decade old games finally lowered the price to a mera 5 dollars for games that are a few megabytes and cost next to nothing to distribute and for wich they don't have to pay any license fees?
Oh yeah. They ain't gouging. They just decided to reduce themselves to raking it in.
It is a smart business move but don't make them out to be some kind of gaming heroes. A game 10 years old that cost only a few megabyte of bandwidth to distrubute does not deserve a 4.50 price tag. They might be able to charge it but lets face it, the markup on that must make Apple blush. Hell, it would make Sony blush.
I notice this problem with people talking about digital downloads. 1 dollar/euro for an iTune song? I am sorry, you just skipped all the costs of distrubuting and stocking CD's and I don't see any reduction in the cost of an album? And it is only because Jobs knows exactly how much you can get away with that the RIAA doesn't get its way and raises the price even higher. Where are the cost savings going? As if I need to ask.
At least with the retro games for the various gameboys you got the excuse of the cost of the catridge, and distrubtion/stocking costs.
Love the fact that you can play all the old games without needing a ton of old consoles etc etc but Nintendo is going to laugh all the way to the bank. More power to them but that don't make them into some kind of heroes for me.
So I can give you a game with say 6 hours playtime BUT I force you to first play it on low difficulty, then medium, then hard and then I tell you to play it through on hard with no saving in a 6 hours game session and if anything happens like a crash then you got to start over.
To you that equals 36+ hour playtime? (3x6 difficulty 1x6 no save run)
I think I prefer a game that just gives me real hours thank you very much. Unlocking difficulty levels to me seems nothing more then an artificial way to make the game seem longer then it is.
But ultimately this seems like a PC vs Console story. PC games tend to be open from the start while console games tend to come with lots and lots of unlock stuff.
As a PC gamer I don't mind "extra's" like say the secondary and even hidden mission objectives in X-wing but I balk at having to unlock difficulty levels or being forced into hour long gaming sessions if you want to unlock the limited save element.
It really tells me that the game industry is still incredibly immature. Just try to translate the unlock content element to other entertainment. You got to listen to music 3 times in without skipping to unlock stereo mode. You can only watch the directors cut of a movie AFTER you found the hidden frame.
The game industry needs to grow up and put away the elements from say the arcade days. High score? Yeah right, I am on my home system, who is going to be impressed. My cat?
Ah but going for that highscore is what kept you putting in more and more money. True. This was a smart business move in an arcade.
But home games are already paid for. Rather then getting more money as the gamer tries for the highscore you might actually run the risk of the gamer never buying a game from you again if he can't get the highscore. Nobody likes to loose especially in a game they paid for.
It is the same with savepoints. They never existed in arcade machines forcing you to either keep spending coins to complete the game (notice how arcades gave you unlimited lives in exchange for cash). But why didn't arcade home versions not have savepoints? After all the gamer again already paid for the game.
And that is the ultimate point. The gamer PAID for the game. Let him then play it as he sees fit.
Or we will have more remakes then you can shake a stick at. If they learned from the game industry we could have Casablanca Original, Casablanca Technicolor, Casablanca Cinemascope, Casablance 3D, Casablanca THX etc etc. Just as the game civilization has gone through numerous versions while the game itself really hasn't changed. Still the same tech tree, still the same endings just using more recent tech to display it.
We would also have movies wich wouldn't have the correct ending until the 3rd patch. George Lucas would love it.
They would give us heroes who remain silent for the entire movie or in extreme cases go back to the dawn of film and force us to read endless cue cards.
You wouldn't be able to stop your video when watching a movie but would be forced to resume from the beginning of the scene because of the lousy save system.
Movies would come with insane copy protection schemes.... oh wait a minute. That they already learned.
But worst of all, if Hollywood learned from the game industry all the movies would be directed by Uwe Boll.
But gaming does stimulate our pleasure centers. It is perhaps a bit like that rat wired up to an electrode that when it does something stimulates its brain. It will then prefer this artificial stimulant over real life activities like eating.
Gaming is like this because it allows us to shorten the path between activity and reward. MMORPG's are an excellent example. For all the complaints about grinding you can level up an awfull lot faster then in real life. Just you try to become master in any craft in a month or two. In WoW this is no problem.
I don't think gaming itself is addictive but rather this rush of a quick fix. After a long day at work where you didn't get anything done and were even the remotes chance of a promotion is years away you can simply go into a game and achieve a level, complete a quest in a night with the game telling you are the best player ever.
We all like to be complimented and when I am on a rampage in Unreal Tournament I feel good. Oh sure it is shallow over a real life promotion in my job or being told you are loved by your partner BUT I can go on a rampage a dozen times in a night. Being told I am the best by my gf I max out at maybe 2-3 a night.... okay week.... year....alright I am happy if I can get a cat to pur, happy?
In a way I think games are like soaps are for women. There certainly is an element of addiction in how some of them follow soaps. The point is that soaps to speed up the action -> reward cycle. A soap family can go through more stuff in one episode then most people have in their entire life giving you the rush of their artificial life quicker then you could ever get yourselve.
Yes offcourse it is artificial but so is masturbation. However when masturbation is a locked door away and sex with another person means at minimum finding a desperate person with a drinking problem it becomes a question of what you prefer. Quick fix now or possible good fix after lots and lots of hard work.
Games allow us to be heroes, that is a hard drug to resist.
Reading the posts so far it is depressing to see how many so called geeks fall for this piece of crap journalism. What next? Elvis seen at Sony? Ballmer is an alien?
Other posts have already clearly shown how this story takes a fact completly out of context and then makes a stupid claim.
To recap, it is the same as AGP being slow to read from in a PC. It is write speed that matters. That is high.
Even if you do not understand all the technicall explenations all you got to do is ask yourselve. Would IBM screw up this badly?
You would think that on a geek site people would be able to use reason. What is more likely Sony/IBM/Toshiba screwing up next generation chip OR the tabloit newssite twisting the facts?
7I hope it is 1% but I doubt it. But this will allow us to see exactly what percentage of the world is willing to turn away people themselves rather then let some anonymous police force do it (that they vote for, pay taxes for etc etc).
Offcourse they might hide the usage stats of this surveillance system BUT that would be very telling in itself.
If nobody tunes in then it will be clear just how much support their is but if as I fear plenty of people will be willing to turn in their jewish neighbours to the gestapo, oops what am I saying, I mean turn these illegal immigrants over to the border police, then we will know exactly how the average american thinks about.
Oh offcourse this nothing like the holocaust (yet). I can't help feel that some indians are very confused about all of this.
Now what makes you think voters in mexico, the usa or for that matter anywhere else, have turned sensible?
As long as people vote for parties because their dad used to or because they are the "right" religion or promise to lower taxes (no goverment can lower taxes, ever. It is a rule of nature, if you hear someone claim they can lower taxes you got a lunatic or a liar on your hands).
People voted for Bush because he was not Kerry. WTF? Bush started two real wars, a war on porn, took domestic spying to unprecedented levels and is bankrupting the county. What the hell could Kerry have done worse?
But Kerry was an intellectual not in touch with the common people. Right, Bush knows about as much about being "common" as the queen of england and since when do you not want somebody who is smarter then you running your country?
Bit like saying, well I don't like that cab driver, he looks to good at driving.
No, the world will keep electing idiots because voters are idiots.
It is that "average intelligence" horror thing. Think of a person of average intelligence. Now realize that half the people on this planet are less intelligent then that. Now realize that they have 50% of the votes. Get the picture?
Democracy is the dictatorship of the masses and the masses are dimwitts who think evolution is hocus pocus.
The same goes in reverse. East germany is still piss poor with runaway crime and now with the world cup to be held in germany non-whites have been warned not to visit east german cities for fear of ethnic violence.
Yeah, the east german really do well now the stasi is gone.
You call in a disturbance, what would the border patrol do. Immidiatly launch a fullscale intercept OR check the video feed of the area you just mentioned?
As for creating a diversion well that is already possible. If illegal immigrants were some kind of noble human beings that do operate according to the principal of everybody for themselves. You know, like every other human being on this planet.
In a way this is a good idea. You see a lot of people who claim the "average joe" doesn't support the hardline on immigration. Well if that is true then we should see almost no volunteers for this. If however every tom, dick and harry is going to volunteer their free time to keep watch then it is clear for once and all what americans truly think about this.
This guy has a job to do and that is to come up with worste case scenarios and then try to figure out how to stop them from happening.
In a way that smoke detector the fire department tells you to install is no different. How many houses burn down? Not that many actually, the chances of you ever needing the smoke detector are remote. In fact it will most likely go off on a false alarm.
Yet few would argue with the need for smoke detectors in the kitchen. But how about your bedroom? How many electronic gizmo's are near you bed with hot power adapters?
So I don't think this guy is fearmongering. He is doing his job just as a firemen who tells you your house is going to burn down.
As human beings we got to weigh the dangers vs the benefits. Some american idiots live in hurricane zones and earthquake areas, said this dutchie living in an area that is two meters below sea level with only a natural dune protecing him (Amsterdam, Holland).
We need people to come up with the most terrible storms that can happen and then calculate what will happen to the dykes and dunes if those storm happen to coincide with a tide in a period of heavy rain.
Then we can say if we are willing to take the risk OR invest in a better defences.
This guy has the same job. Are any of the attacks possible? Well considering that a lot of people believe the recent american power failure was due to a windows security hole I think there is a possibilty. Are we willing to accept this risk or do accept it as the price of living in this world, as I accept the risk of drowning and LA's people accept the risk of being the meat in a bridge sandwiche?
But calling fearmongering is just stupid. Accepting the risks is one thing. Denial is another.
Lets be honest here, not that many people buy stock to truly invest in the future of a company. It is bought in the hope that in the near future it can be sold for a profit.
These people who signed up thought they were going to get cheap stock and a quick and easy profit. They gambled and they lost. Awh. My heart breaks. Now pay up.
IPO's going wrong is nothing new and you always get these middle class people who thought they were going to get something for nothing bithing that now they find out what stocks were originally for. To invest. Long term.
If you didn't think that Vonage would use the 17 dollars to invest in itself and that this would allow it to pay a small return to you the coming years then you are a speculator.
The filth of the modern world. People who rather see a company go bankrupt then just remain steady because a steady stock can't be speculated with.
Remember all those companies that were punished for just making boring profits during the internet boom by seeing their share price plumet? Purely the result of speculators wanting stock to move so they can gamble.
No these people get no sympathy from me. What next, you do not have to pay the casino unless you win?
Build an OS that's so hard to use only geeks can use it
Charge 50.000 dollars for documentation/support
Profit!
Love those mainframes.
Wouldn't that be straight blackmail
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Since the seller SOLD this laptop he also sold all the information on it. So displaying that information could be legal. However blackmailing someone isn't. The offer to take the site down after the seller repays the buyer is a bit dodgy.
Frankly I don't know how the law will take this. The police are not really about solving every petty dispute they are about keeping the peace and if they can't get it they tend to come down like a ton of bricks on both parties in a fight.
It changed all the fantasy language roadsigns into readable signs. Very simple yet it made the game a lot more real. Instead of having to wait for a hint to popup when you where close you could just read the actuall sign.
It sounds trivial but the change in gameplay is huge. It is like when you first played Doom and could for the first time tell you where about to pickup a chainsaw because it actually looked like a chainsaw. When you didn't need to be told what was health pack because it was clear.
This is where graphics matter. Not purely the looks but in making the world act like our own. In the real world we can check the spines of the books to see what book it is. We don't have to hover close to it to wait for a popup to tell us.
This mod is going to require a more powerfull machine but in return you can now regonize valuable books. Granted there is no real need in game, just as morrowind didn't require you to use the road signs, but you now can.
TES games are best bought a year later and then you can just mod your own game. It is amazing how much better the user mods make the game. Either I just don't like bethseda's game designer or every modder out there can read my mind.
This however does raise a question, what could be done with a game that is fully open and modders do not have to spend the first few months trying to decipher cryptic files?
Between NWN and TES I am getting more roleplaying then commercial companies seem willing to sell. Then again NWN did seem to kill of the stream of Baldur Gate games. Pity.
Windows 98 NEEDS Internet Explorer. MS said so, in court. Then they were proven to be full of it. Oh sure, they spend a lot of time making sure that Windows 98 was super thightly linked to IE making it almost impossible to seperate. To the outsider this made it look like the two needed each other.
What you have to ask yourselve if this "need" was introduced or not. Would MS have been capable of doing DirectX 10 as a patch to XP? I think so. They didn't choose to do so but it had nothing to do with technical limitations. Smarter people then me have examined Vista and a lot of the improvements could easily be back ported. But then people wouldn't pay for an upgrade now would they?
You must be new here. The proper way to say this would be like this.
<sarcasm>Isn't one of the main goals of the olympics to unite diverse people from all over the world, because sport is such a great unifier?</sarcasm>
Unless you were serious in wich case you must be new to this world. Sport is such a big unifier that whenever two soccer clubs meet their fanclubs try to kill each other. When nations meet on the soccer field you get more nationalism then at a Nuremberg rally.
As for the olympics. Well any "higher" goal was ripped from it when the US boycotted the Soviet games and the Soviet boycotted the US games. Did not exactly bring these nations together did it?
And what did the wonderfull athletes do when they brother and sisters were slain by terrorist at munich? Well go right on because they need those medals and in four years time you might be too old.
At least during events like tour de france when someone dies the competitors make a statement by allowing the affected team to finish first.
Not the olympics. Sorry but all that is about is people who consume tax payers money and return nothing to live a privileged live to fuel nationalist pride.
Proffesional sport is just a form of entertainment. Do we subsidise hollywood with tax money? (Uwe Boll is tax funded, doesn't that say enough) No? Then why should some sports assholes.
Sorry buy the olympics survice because calling it a sham and a waste of money is politically incorrect.
Oh well at least this crap won't happen. Olympics is for amateurs so any pro-gamer would be barred. I suppose the olympic athletes don't want to compete with people good enough to make a living from their sport. Another reason why it is a complete sham.
Come on, UMD must have seen Sony laughing all the way to the bank. The tech is just mini-disc with a slightly different case. They had a change to resell a lot of old content for a hefty price.
So what if it cooled down. Who would have thought people would pay 20bucks to play a movie that they could have just ripped legally from the DVD they already own and play easily on their machine?
If you mean the PSP as a gaming handheld yeah that ain't doing to well. At least compared to the DS but then that is a real runaway. If the PSP was judged on its own it would be doing far better.
Sony is now suffering the same fate as Nintendo. Nintendo's gamecube was no failure but when judged next to the PS2 sales it just looked like one.
I think the PSP is the same. No it ain't keeping up with the DS but in business second place can be profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people are worried about DRM and Trusted Computing. Not because of what it is today but of what it might become in the future.
Examine your own words. You claim that Apples DRM is the obstrusive and user UN-friendly. Oh not as bad as others but what kind of recommondation is that? Sniffing pee ain't as bad as sniffing pure amonia. Do you want to clean my toilet?
Yes there are worse DRM at the moment but they are not a success. Apples is and while Steve Jobs at the moment is labelled as the saviour of consumers (I doubt it, this is Steve "Disney" Jobs we are talking about but that is another story) it is still very clear that the content owners are not happy with it and pressuring Apple to increase the DRM.
Is Apple really going to keep standing up to them. Is this the maximum level of DRM OR is this the famous baby step. Getting us used to DRM so that it can be slowly increased overtime until we have no rights left?
Lets not forget that BEFORE iTunes came along DRM was unacceptable. Now it is accepted by a lot of people. The first step has already been taken.
Yes a lot of this reeks of paranoia but the thing about paranoia is that it ain't real paranoia if they are really out to get you.
Not Apple perse (although again the disney link makes me doubtfull) but has the record industry found a usefull ally in Apple nonetheless? Not that they seem very gratefull but a lot of mankinds worse moments arrived through stupid coincedences and people thinking that for now the lesser of two evils is all for the best.
There are three camps in this battle. Those who believe that all DRM and Trusted Computing is a path to hell, those who believe it will be good and the saviour of mankind and those in the middle who just want their content. The problem is that the two extremes must be extremes. DRM and Trusted computing can't be half measurers. They require ABSOLUTES. In away Apples DRM is just a piss poor copy protection easily circumvented. For someting to be really DRM you must not be able to circumvent it.
So if you want to be in the middle good luck. You might find out that once you made that first step the next steps come a lot easier. Especially when billion dollar companies are tugging on your arms.
If Apple increases its drm, can you resist?
No reign of terror comes without a warning sign. The trick is to regonize the warning signs. Prophets and madman are good at it. The funny thing is that they are often the same person. They just go from madman to prophet after it is too late and we wonder why nobody said something before it all went to hell.
The whole "level advancement" thing can't be fixed by a one size fits all solution. Different players just want different things out of game. As Second Life seems to prove you don't even have to have levels, therefore no level grind at all.
You claim EVE as the great saviour but basically what you are saying that no matter how good I am or how much time I spend playing I will advance just as much as that guy that just logs in once an hour?
Oh wait, but that ain't the whole truth is it? I will have gained far more wealth and that buys me the best tools and that is EVE's version of levelling up isn't it? So it is still the player who puts in the most time/effort who has the biggest ship/avatar/epenis.
Any game in wich effort is not rewarded will be very shortlived. Eve just does it in a slightly different way. It works for Eve players, other players want something different. I would hope that any new MMO games try their own unique blend of gameplay rather then just copycat. Why yes, I do believe in Santa Claus, why do you ask?
Nothing is stopping you from making it possible to run MS games on say Linux or Macs. In fact several projects are doing just that, legally.
Yes this is stretching things but that is because this is a very difficult subject. Laws are ancient and mostly written down before the idea of media containers. With this I mean things like a VHS cassete wich contains media/content wich is married to a specific device.
Think about it for a second. Two hundred years ago you didn't have this problem (I think). Most items you buy and trade do not depend on another device. If you buy wood it will work work with any brand of saw. Nothing says you can only wash your clothes in a Miele washing machine. A book can be read with any pair of glasses.
Since the legal system moves incredibly slowly and has to be changed by people with no real skills like politicians who are controlled by that dumbest of all critters, the voter we still haven't learned to deal with how to regulate media formats.
That leaves the consumers who choose wrongly out in the cold. People often bring up betamax vs VHS in this context. But what about the poor shmucks who choose V2000 eh? For that matter what about those who bought into laserdisc?
V2000 was a really crap choice. If you made the mistake of choosing betamax you at least could still get new players for your old content as Sony kept supporting its standard. Your V2000 tapes were useless once the standard disappeared and the players stopped being made instantly. This is bad for the consumer and the task of an Ombudsman is to protect the consumer.
There is however a problem. With physical media containers like tape cassetes or laserdiscs there is no easy way to set a standard. You can't make VHS accept a laserdisc or vice versa so the consumer just had to pray he choose the right standard.
This ain't just bad for consumers it is also bad for business. Remember the CD? I rememeber a lot of stories about slow mass adoption because people weren't sure this would the future format.
But again there was no way around it. LP couldn't be upgraded so no in between option was possible to make adoption less painfull.
This is not ideal. Compare for instance with the difference in how new book technologies make their way into the market. We have had far more print improvements because the moment a new tech is invented in printing it can be put into place as long as the printer is willing to buy a new press. He then doesn't need to hope people will upgrade their eyes to his new format. Silly? Well not as silly as the movie industry.
They try to fit every new tech onto the old format by inserting it in the weirdest places on the film to make sure old theathers without the latest projector can still use the latest film. Because banking on everyone adopting your new unique format is risque.
So now back to apple. With purely digital containers it is actually silly we still have needs for certain players. We no longer have the physical restrictions so why can't we just play aac on any player out there?
The old format wars were a necessity because of the physical differences but digital formats can play anywhere. Who thinks it is silly you need to Quicktime player for .mov files, the DivX player for .divx files and Windows Media Center for .avi and Realplayer for .rm files?
If you are the least bit computer literate you will probably have setup your machine to play all these different media containers through one player. Yes because it is digital you can player your "laserdisc" on a "lp player". Amazing eh?
So now that this is possible perhaps it is also possible for an Ombudsman to ensure consumers no longer loose out in the format wars? Could we introduce laws th
The european countries have different rules about consumer protection. They actually think that companies that become to influential should be put under controls to ensure that the consumer doesn't come under the control of a companies whims.
Silly stuff like making sure the countries laws apply and not whatever EULA a company lawyer dreams up next. Making sure that not one company can achieve a de-facto monopoly making it impossible for new companies to innovate.
You seem to favor companies over people because Apples DRM is forcing itself on these countries because Apple does not like their laws.
Europe is an "opt in" monopoly, they force not one company to start trading in the EU or use the EURO. Sound familiar?
So what is your point again? Oh that limited consoles try to extend playtime in an artificial way while the PC just gives you what you want as you want it.
So basically what you are saying that Nintendo after years of charging full price of decade old games finally lowered the price to a mera 5 dollars for games that are a few megabytes and cost next to nothing to distribute and for wich they don't have to pay any license fees?
Oh yeah. They ain't gouging. They just decided to reduce themselves to raking it in.
It is a smart business move but don't make them out to be some kind of gaming heroes. A game 10 years old that cost only a few megabyte of bandwidth to distrubute does not deserve a 4.50 price tag. They might be able to charge it but lets face it, the markup on that must make Apple blush. Hell, it would make Sony blush.
I notice this problem with people talking about digital downloads. 1 dollar/euro for an iTune song? I am sorry, you just skipped all the costs of distrubuting and stocking CD's and I don't see any reduction in the cost of an album? And it is only because Jobs knows exactly how much you can get away with that the RIAA doesn't get its way and raises the price even higher. Where are the cost savings going? As if I need to ask.
At least with the retro games for the various gameboys you got the excuse of the cost of the catridge, and distrubtion/stocking costs.
Love the fact that you can play all the old games without needing a ton of old consoles etc etc but Nintendo is going to laugh all the way to the bank. More power to them but that don't make them into some kind of heroes for me.
To you that equals 36+ hour playtime? (3x6 difficulty 1x6 no save run)
I think I prefer a game that just gives me real hours thank you very much. Unlocking difficulty levels to me seems nothing more then an artificial way to make the game seem longer then it is.
But ultimately this seems like a PC vs Console story. PC games tend to be open from the start while console games tend to come with lots and lots of unlock stuff.
As a PC gamer I don't mind "extra's" like say the secondary and even hidden mission objectives in X-wing but I balk at having to unlock difficulty levels or being forced into hour long gaming sessions if you want to unlock the limited save element.
It really tells me that the game industry is still incredibly immature. Just try to translate the unlock content element to other entertainment. You got to listen to music 3 times in without skipping to unlock stereo mode. You can only watch the directors cut of a movie AFTER you found the hidden frame.
The game industry needs to grow up and put away the elements from say the arcade days. High score? Yeah right, I am on my home system, who is going to be impressed. My cat?
Ah but going for that highscore is what kept you putting in more and more money. True. This was a smart business move in an arcade.
But home games are already paid for. Rather then getting more money as the gamer tries for the highscore you might actually run the risk of the gamer never buying a game from you again if he can't get the highscore. Nobody likes to loose especially in a game they paid for.
It is the same with savepoints. They never existed in arcade machines forcing you to either keep spending coins to complete the game (notice how arcades gave you unlimited lives in exchange for cash). But why didn't arcade home versions not have savepoints? After all the gamer again already paid for the game.
And that is the ultimate point. The gamer PAID for the game. Let him then play it as he sees fit.
We would also have movies wich wouldn't have the correct ending until the 3rd patch. George Lucas would love it.
They would give us heroes who remain silent for the entire movie or in extreme cases go back to the dawn of film and force us to read endless cue cards.
You wouldn't be able to stop your video when watching a movie but would be forced to resume from the beginning of the scene because of the lousy save system.
Movies would come with insane copy protection schemes.... oh wait a minute. That they already learned.
But worst of all, if Hollywood learned from the game industry all the movies would be directed by Uwe Boll.
Gaming is like this because it allows us to shorten the path between activity and reward. MMORPG's are an excellent example. For all the complaints about grinding you can level up an awfull lot faster then in real life. Just you try to become master in any craft in a month or two. In WoW this is no problem.
I don't think gaming itself is addictive but rather this rush of a quick fix. After a long day at work where you didn't get anything done and were even the remotes chance of a promotion is years away you can simply go into a game and achieve a level, complete a quest in a night with the game telling you are the best player ever.
We all like to be complimented and when I am on a rampage in Unreal Tournament I feel good. Oh sure it is shallow over a real life promotion in my job or being told you are loved by your partner BUT I can go on a rampage a dozen times in a night. Being told I am the best by my gf I max out at maybe 2-3 a night.... okay week.... year....alright I am happy if I can get a cat to pur, happy?
In a way I think games are like soaps are for women. There certainly is an element of addiction in how some of them follow soaps. The point is that soaps to speed up the action -> reward cycle. A soap family can go through more stuff in one episode then most people have in their entire life giving you the rush of their artificial life quicker then you could ever get yourselve.
Yes offcourse it is artificial but so is masturbation. However when masturbation is a locked door away and sex with another person means at minimum finding a desperate person with a drinking problem it becomes a question of what you prefer. Quick fix now or possible good fix after lots and lots of hard work.
Games allow us to be heroes, that is a hard drug to resist.
Other posts have already clearly shown how this story takes a fact completly out of context and then makes a stupid claim.
To recap, it is the same as AGP being slow to read from in a PC. It is write speed that matters. That is high.
Even if you do not understand all the technicall explenations all you got to do is ask yourselve. Would IBM screw up this badly?
You would think that on a geek site people would be able to use reason. What is more likely Sony/IBM/Toshiba screwing up next generation chip OR the tabloit newssite twisting the facts?
Offcourse they might hide the usage stats of this surveillance system BUT that would be very telling in itself.
If nobody tunes in then it will be clear just how much support their is but if as I fear plenty of people will be willing to turn in their jewish neighbours to the gestapo, oops what am I saying, I mean turn these illegal immigrants over to the border police, then we will know exactly how the average american thinks about.
Oh offcourse this nothing like the holocaust (yet). I can't help feel that some indians are very confused about all of this.
As long as people vote for parties because their dad used to or because they are the "right" religion or promise to lower taxes (no goverment can lower taxes, ever. It is a rule of nature, if you hear someone claim they can lower taxes you got a lunatic or a liar on your hands).
People voted for Bush because he was not Kerry. WTF? Bush started two real wars, a war on porn, took domestic spying to unprecedented levels and is bankrupting the county. What the hell could Kerry have done worse?
But Kerry was an intellectual not in touch with the common people. Right, Bush knows about as much about being "common" as the queen of england and since when do you not want somebody who is smarter then you running your country?
Bit like saying, well I don't like that cab driver, he looks to good at driving.
No, the world will keep electing idiots because voters are idiots.
It is that "average intelligence" horror thing. Think of a person of average intelligence. Now realize that half the people on this planet are less intelligent then that. Now realize that they have 50% of the votes. Get the picture?
Democracy is the dictatorship of the masses and the masses are dimwitts who think evolution is hocus pocus.
Yeah, the east german really do well now the stasi is gone.
As for creating a diversion well that is already possible. If illegal immigrants were some kind of noble human beings that do operate according to the principal of everybody for themselves. You know, like every other human being on this planet.
In a way this is a good idea. You see a lot of people who claim the "average joe" doesn't support the hardline on immigration. Well if that is true then we should see almost no volunteers for this. If however every tom, dick and harry is going to volunteer their free time to keep watch then it is clear for once and all what americans truly think about this.
In a way that smoke detector the fire department tells you to install is no different. How many houses burn down? Not that many actually, the chances of you ever needing the smoke detector are remote. In fact it will most likely go off on a false alarm.
Yet few would argue with the need for smoke detectors in the kitchen. But how about your bedroom? How many electronic gizmo's are near you bed with hot power adapters?
So I don't think this guy is fearmongering. He is doing his job just as a firemen who tells you your house is going to burn down.
As human beings we got to weigh the dangers vs the benefits. Some american idiots live in hurricane zones and earthquake areas, said this dutchie living in an area that is two meters below sea level with only a natural dune protecing him (Amsterdam, Holland).
We need people to come up with the most terrible storms that can happen and then calculate what will happen to the dykes and dunes if those storm happen to coincide with a tide in a period of heavy rain.
Then we can say if we are willing to take the risk OR invest in a better defences.
This guy has the same job. Are any of the attacks possible? Well considering that a lot of people believe the recent american power failure was due to a windows security hole I think there is a possibilty. Are we willing to accept this risk or do accept it as the price of living in this world, as I accept the risk of drowning and LA's people accept the risk of being the meat in a bridge sandwiche?
But calling fearmongering is just stupid. Accepting the risks is one thing. Denial is another.
Clever.
America, where a titty is taboo but violence is A okay!
These people who signed up thought they were going to get cheap stock and a quick and easy profit. They gambled and they lost. Awh. My heart breaks. Now pay up.
IPO's going wrong is nothing new and you always get these middle class people who thought they were going to get something for nothing bithing that now they find out what stocks were originally for. To invest. Long term.
If you didn't think that Vonage would use the 17 dollars to invest in itself and that this would allow it to pay a small return to you the coming years then you are a speculator.
The filth of the modern world. People who rather see a company go bankrupt then just remain steady because a steady stock can't be speculated with.
Remember all those companies that were punished for just making boring profits during the internet boom by seeing their share price plumet? Purely the result of speculators wanting stock to move so they can gamble.
No these people get no sympathy from me. What next, you do not have to pay the casino unless you win?
Love those mainframes.
Frankly I don't know how the law will take this. The police are not really about solving every petty dispute they are about keeping the peace and if they can't get it they tend to come down like a ton of bricks on both parties in a fight.
Oh, well it is a good giggle for the rest of us.
It sounds trivial but the change in gameplay is huge. It is like when you first played Doom and could for the first time tell you where about to pickup a chainsaw because it actually looked like a chainsaw. When you didn't need to be told what was health pack because it was clear.
This is where graphics matter. Not purely the looks but in making the world act like our own. In the real world we can check the spines of the books to see what book it is. We don't have to hover close to it to wait for a popup to tell us.
This mod is going to require a more powerfull machine but in return you can now regonize valuable books. Granted there is no real need in game, just as morrowind didn't require you to use the road signs, but you now can.
TES games are best bought a year later and then you can just mod your own game. It is amazing how much better the user mods make the game. Either I just don't like bethseda's game designer or every modder out there can read my mind.
This however does raise a question, what could be done with a game that is fully open and modders do not have to spend the first few months trying to decipher cryptic files?
Between NWN and TES I am getting more roleplaying then commercial companies seem willing to sell. Then again NWN did seem to kill of the stream of Baldur Gate games. Pity.
What you have to ask yourselve if this "need" was introduced or not. Would MS have been capable of doing DirectX 10 as a patch to XP? I think so. They didn't choose to do so but it had nothing to do with technical limitations. Smarter people then me have examined Vista and a lot of the improvements could easily be back ported. But then people wouldn't pay for an upgrade now would they?
Something smells fishy here.
Only amateurs. Kinda of kills the deal doesn't it?
<sarcasm>Isn't one of the main goals of the olympics to unite diverse people from all over the world, because sport is such a great unifier?</sarcasm>
Unless you were serious in wich case you must be new to this world. Sport is such a big unifier that whenever two soccer clubs meet their fanclubs try to kill each other. When nations meet on the soccer field you get more nationalism then at a Nuremberg rally.
As for the olympics. Well any "higher" goal was ripped from it when the US boycotted the Soviet games and the Soviet boycotted the US games. Did not exactly bring these nations together did it?
And what did the wonderfull athletes do when they brother and sisters were slain by terrorist at munich? Well go right on because they need those medals and in four years time you might be too old.
At least during events like tour de france when someone dies the competitors make a statement by allowing the affected team to finish first.
Not the olympics. Sorry but all that is about is people who consume tax payers money and return nothing to live a privileged live to fuel nationalist pride.
Proffesional sport is just a form of entertainment. Do we subsidise hollywood with tax money? (Uwe Boll is tax funded, doesn't that say enough) No? Then why should some sports assholes.
Sorry buy the olympics survice because calling it a sham and a waste of money is politically incorrect.
Oh well at least this crap won't happen. Olympics is for amateurs so any pro-gamer would be barred. I suppose the olympic athletes don't want to compete with people good enough to make a living from their sport. Another reason why it is a complete sham.
So what if it cooled down. Who would have thought people would pay 20bucks to play a movie that they could have just ripped legally from the DVD they already own and play easily on their machine?
If you mean the PSP as a gaming handheld yeah that ain't doing to well. At least compared to the DS but then that is a real runaway. If the PSP was judged on its own it would be doing far better.
Sony is now suffering the same fate as Nintendo. Nintendo's gamecube was no failure but when judged next to the PS2 sales it just looked like one.
I think the PSP is the same. No it ain't keeping up with the DS but in business second place can be profitable.
Just ask Apple.