Oh and this is good that it is "only" a $100 per employee? I can only presume the press release hasn't got the full details but let me paint a horror picture here.
Say I run a labor intensive production process that somewhere runs a small sun server to keep track of some data. Now a big factory like say a food processing plant can easily have a thousand + workers. Does that make for a 100.000 license fee? Each and every year? Ouch.
You see I doubt this. And those type of setups probably will be allowed to use the existing models.
But you claiming that this is better then MS because MS charges more is missing a point. MS charges for people USING the software directly. It doesn't charge you for the cleaning lady and the night guard.
If Sun really want not to loose business to linux and windows (who else can they be talking about) they need to get cracking. They make excellent high end server solutions. I wonder if this makes it affordable for a small shop to own a sun.
Who don't they just destory the disks? Mmm, yeah after all destorying a HD is pretty easy, screw it open and shred the platters. I found out a few years ago that my laptop drive contains GLASS platters. Well I say platters, mine contained shards but I presume they once were platters.
Anyway so why don't banks do it? I think they may walk into a whole mess of employment rules. You see you need proper equipment, proper safety equipment, proper enviromental protection. Banks just ain't equipped to handle this. So they outsource it. Handling it internally costs to much.
Secondly what do think sells better, a complete second hand machine, or one that needs to be fitted with expensive new disks?
First I didn't say it justified it. It justifies it for me. I have a very big collection of paid for games. Probably a couple of hundred and that is just from the CD era. the diskette bought games got lost in a move.
I easily bought 2-3 games a month, I made the money and I had the time. I have however grown fedup with current game makers. I used to get nice thick manuals with seperate hint-cards for the controls. I used to get games that actually seemed
tested. When bugs were of the nature. If you do that and that move and that and that point without having done that, you will need to reload. Not oops we said we had tested the game with force feedback wheels but we lied and we are going to take a year to bloody fix it.
Mafia for me was a real turning point. No more I say. As I live in europe we always been getting the short end of the stick. I already learned to ignore those little postcard wich ask you to register with postage paid, in america. Nor do we quality for any price draws/rebates/special offers.
I will now only buy games from companies that have threated me right in the past. Papyrus (racing games), Bioware are the big exception from whom I will still buy games. Most of the others have screwed me over to much.
So why not simply not play their games? Yeah like that is going to make a difference. They simply blaim any loss in sales on piracy anyway. May as well prove them right.
Complain to them directly? Ha. Been tried. They don't listen I am trying to make them feel.
Second point
As for the comments about the Halo being a beta so I can't judge its graphics yet. Mmmm, I did say this didn't I? I was talking about the general level design. Not textures. The ship level just seemed very boring and old in design. None of the WOW look at that! factor that every other FPS seems to want to achieve.
They may optimize the engine but they are not going to remake the maps. Textures can increase in size but they are not going to make entiryly new art. Sound quality may increase, but they are not going to rewrite the story. That is what betas are for. To give you a pretty good idea of what the final game is going to be like. And it is going to be like this, "great if it had come out when it was supposed to, to little to late".
So I can just ignore this game, sadly that is not how I or many others work. We have been hyped about this for years now. I am going to take a look at it. Probably play it through in a couple of hours and then never touch it again. I am not going to pay money for this and that is going to make me feel good, make me feel like I am sticking it to the "man", and I can spend the money on a company that doesn't try to rip me off. Deus Ex2 Half-Life 2 and Doom3 are getting my money instead. (oh and yes I do have legal copies off the prequels to these games even doom)
So spare me the holier then thou attitude.
Third point
Microsoft used the title very, very successfully to sell the X-box, and people bought into it. No they didn't. The x-box has bombed. They wanted to compete with the PS2, they are competing with the gamecube. What they wanted was for all the PC fans who had been looking forward to this hyped product to give up their expensive PC's and buy an x-box. It didn't work. Fuck them we said we will just play different games. MS has for years made good money of gamers and it screwed them over to promote a new article. You know what might have worked? A dual release. Then PC owners could have modded the game and via Live MS could have then given this free content to the x-box people. Double your pleasure. They did not do this. They wanted us to buy windows machines and consoles. Double their income. (oh and yeah I did use to buy all the versions of MS-Dos. Until windowns 95 Extra pack came out. Another 100bucks to add screensavers? Fuck you.
So I call them wrong for wanting to ripp me off. Me pirating their software is wrong. Well guess what, in my b
Read the last paragraph. It is about the darkest period in human and science history. Up to then I was smiling and laughing but the last one wiped the smile away really good.
So Nascar judges can just alter the cars they are given to test? Nice. Turn a finely tuned machine in for testing, get a tricycle in return.:D
In europe we do things differently. You see cars are tested for compliance. If it doesn't comply you get a reason handed to you why not and the car is handed back without them modifing a single thing. Damn lazy bastards why can't they just fix and tune it like they do in the states:(
You see noone is allowed to mess with your car. An exception is perhaps the police. See your car needs a license to take part in regular traffic as well. If they find something wrong they will sometimes give you permission to remove it on the spot or they will remove it on the spot. They will certainly not FIX the car. But even if they did the police is goverment controlled and any cop doing anything to a car will be required to fill in an awfull lot legal papers wich he has to explain in a court of law if I want.
So yes you gave a nice analogy. You got a point but you are missing out on the fact the MS messes with YOUR possesions WITHOUT telling you. Noone except the police is allowed to do this in the real world and even they got a lot of restrictions placed upon them. Why should computerhardware be any different?
Would you accept it if Intel came to your house and replaced the defective P3's (you know the ones with the processor ID disabled) with working ones, you know with proper processor ID enabled?
Not to be a mac basher or anything but this is hardly the same thing. Apple just doesn't have the market share to make it attractive to publish games for it.
The PC on the other hand has proven itself as a large enough market to make games for. In fact the x-box is a pc. Anyway look at some of the games coming out on both console and PC. Generally the PC version is superior if you like stuff like mods and high-res graphics. But I guess it all depends on what kind of game you like wich platform you buy or even if you gotta own several.
However on to Halo the game stolen from the pc.
Having been one of the naughty people who played with the beta I can't say I have been to impressed. Yes this was a beta so I can forgive the bugs. Just that an awfull lot of the features of the game seem like they weren't all that had when it first came out.
The indoor levels are frankly boring and suffer from extremly bland graphics. The difficulty level seems soly to depend on how many bullets the enemies can soak up. Personally I am getting fed up with FPS were the enemies can soak up anti-armor missles, come on give us AI, not idiotic hitpoints. Despite the fact that AI works and you have vehicles to many levels are still, walk alone into a maze and fight your way in and out again. BORING! espcially when the levels are so bland.
On the positive side, for once you are not alone. First level is a running fight with plenty of other soldiers fighting. There is a nice if short beach assault and you really feel that your fellow soldiers are fighting with you. The AI is also not bad. I like sticking grenades to the enemy.
It is not a bad game but I think it would have been an "also ran" when it first was supposed to be out. Now all it can hope is that it hits the shelfs before the real PC games like Deus Ex 2, doom3 and Half Life 2 come out. Only if it is first does it stand any chance.
Oh well bungie sold out. This will be one of the games I have absolutely no bad feelings about pirating, just like any Gathering of Developer game (1 whole year for a mafia patch!!!!!), they fucked up.
Now lets see how badly valve is going to loose its karma.
RTFA, it is because Gnutella is designed to be de-centralized. This is needed to avoid being targetted by dimwitted judges. If you no longer need to fear them you can go back to the centralized method that napster used and for that matter bittorrent.
Gnutella and its ilk are a nightmare on searching. They consume an awfull lot of bandwidth on the protocol not on the actual exchange of files. For the moments that is how its got to be. But it is not efficient.
Oh and filesharing is legal people. It is copyright violation that you can at the moment be sueed for.
I think it is something like the TV license. Not sure if the rest of the world has it so I will explain.
In England and Holland you have to pay a license fee to the goverment (well a subset of it) for each receiver. It was originally a sum made up out of the number of radios, bw tv's and color tv's you had. Later this was simplified at least in holland.
From this license fee the programs were funded. In england this is the BBC who own a couple of stations and are required by the law to supply programming to the intrest of the nation. In the netherlands we have license holders who according to the number of members they have, membership fee is about 5 dollars last time I checked, get a number of hours to fill on the various radio channels and a amount of slots on the tv channels. In holland they also get income out of advertising. England doesn't have ads. Hmmmm adfree simpsons.
Because you need to pay the license fee on the basis of owning a receiver, not based on actual consumption you can say it is compusery. When the original home computers came out they used ordinary tv's, with receivers for their displays. This of course meant a hike in your license fees despite the fact that you did not watch any tv with them.
On the other hand the fee was hardly gigantic and it ensured that tv was of a reasonable quality. BBC programs are known around the world for their execellence (no I don't mean their news service). Dutch programs slightly less because of the language barrier nonetheless they used to win international prices routinely.
Plus it assured a restrained amount of ads. They are only allowed between programs. Plus programs are thightly regulated on things like sponsoring.
Okay now I explained tv licenses. You may have heard of the BBC director proposing to put all their content on the net. You see because it is a semi-goverment company paid by the citizens according to written law you could say that these citizens have paid for the creation of the content and therefore OWN the content. So copyright in this case becomes far less of an issue. Even more because the BBC can rely on its income from the licenses it doesn't rely have to worry about how the content it creates is watched. No ranting about people not watching the ads, like fox did, because there aren't any. No ranting about people recording eps, in fact they have several time olds series they lost but they found copies made by viewers, and then sharing them because as long as their is a tv involved they paid to view the content.
In holland we stopped the license fee since it was suggested that everyone owns a receiver anyway. So it is now collected through regular taxes. So it can be reasonably argued that any program is taxpayer owned.
So their are some clear benefits to doing it this way. Sure americans probably hate it but they are a silly bunch anway.
So why not use something similar for other content? Well the BBC is a monopoly, they get the all the money and they decide what to make with it. Of course there are all kinds of bounds and checks but a monopoly it is.
In holland we got competition between license holders. Currently one license holder BNN is having an ad campaign to get more people to become members of them. They need X amount of members to get Y amount of tv/radio hours. The bigger you are the more and better hours you get. Although there are some minority stations that get some according to intrest group.
But how would you do this with music? There is a lot of different companies. How would you decide how to distribute the money?
But I think that a compulsary license would work something like what I described above. In any case at least for TV it has been proven to work.
On the other hand we also have a different compulsary license in holland. Each DVD recordable has a.50/1.00 euro tax (depends on if it is + or - format) attached. Yes you read that right. The money goes to the movie industrie to compensate them for illegal copies. Of cour
Sigh, okay if they spend their time answering the phone that can't spend it calling/making money. If they answer the phone for an outraged citizen they can't take a sales call. When there lines are getting inbound traffic they cannot do outbound traffic.
So this did hurt them. How much depends on what profit margins these companies have. I know there are plenty of business were one lost day of work can make the difference between a loss and a profit. So keep it up.
Oh and the claim about lost jobs doesn't work. These telephone sales people are taking the jobs of shop sales people.
Re:Welcome To The New World, Geek Fewl...
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Really? Ancient business models failing? You mean the one where I produce something for a certain cost and then I sell it for cost + profit? I could swear most of us take part in that model at least once a week. Well at least those I presume are capable of typing. It is called shopping.
Of course this ancient and still going strong model is based on a certain principle. Namely that is a substantial part of the cost of the item being sold is the production of the item itself. So that producing X times the number of items will incur X times the cost or at least close to that. Although cost per unit tends to go down as the number of units goes up this is not a steep curve nor for that matter an infinite one no matter how the charts look. If it was then at a certain number of units the cost of production would fall to zero. Perhaps even go negative:)
What is outdated is the idea that this model applies to all things being sold. The technologies that made the internet possible have allowed some of the basics behind the cost of producing items to be changed. If it costs me X to produce a digital product then it doesn't cost me X*number of items. The cost of material and production capacity that ensures the rather smooth curve in the normal world is gone. Really the only thing keep the cost from being zero is the cost of distribution wich are low for digitals products.
Producing a billion or a thousand digital items makes no difference. This is new. Also new is that distribution costs are pretty much equel no matter the distence. I now have a truly worldwide audience. Compare this to the rather limited distance a product like say milk goes.
So for digital products a number of changes have occured.
Cost of production of a single item is pretty close to production of an infinite number of items. This is because we can make an excact copie of it without loss at neglible costs.
Cost of storage has plummted. Where in the normal world I have to store every item made a digital product needs to store only 1 item, the original. www.kernel.org holds only 1 copy of a kernel at a time. Not one for everyone who uses linux.
Related to the above, no cost for unsold copies. Every copy made is "sold".
Neglible transportation cost. Try sending a letter to the other side of the world. It will cost easily as much as the material itself. Now send an email. Further more the costs don't increase with distance (well not so you notice, again try sending an email)
there are lots of other differences but I think these alone make for the fact that we now can have a different business model. And that is the problem. Not that the old model is obsolete. It still works fine for products that are produced in the old way, no negative meaning being applied to old btw. What the record companies and for that matter most content suppliers have failed to realize that theyre products can use a new business method.
The silly thing is that music sharing is profitable for quite a number of companies. These are called ISP's and the telecoms. They make a bundle out of programs like napster. Or do you really need DSL/t3 to send email?
I for one am still waiting for the following. Every "record" store gets a computer with a couple of outlet points (cd burners firewire connections and such), some terminals, a big HD array say 1 terrabyte (very cheap if you use IDE, it doesn't have to be fast) and a connection to a central network (doesn't have to be the internet for security).
Then all that is needed is for every music owner to catalog their music and make it available on the central network.
I then browse the catalog in the shop and make my selections. Popular songs are already locally available while others are taking from the network, perhaps stored in a cache, and my selection is then burned or put on an mp3 player etc. I then pay the shopkeeper the fee.
Seems a simple enough solution. The shop has every piece of music ever sold on a wide va
Exactly when has IBM in its +100 years history used patents on the offensive? IE not on the defensive when it was attacked first?
I am tired of IBM being attacked just because it has patents. Patents ain't bad, people abusing patents are bad. People doing bad research on new patents are bad. People accepting overly broad patents are bad. People accepting patents with obvious prior art are bad. People accepting the patenting of basic business practices "on the net" are bad". Not the idea of patents itself. They are an inperfect tool in an inperfect world. But can you come up with something better that would be accepted in the real world?
Remember kids, patents don't sue people, people sue people.
At least read the post if you reply to it. Macromedia does have a linux version of flash. It just is only available for the x86 processors. So it wouldn't work on the old NT alpha's either.
Also he is not complaining about CONTENT. If someone makes a flash movie or flash game as the content of a website this is of course perfectly alright. Of course then I could also simply save the flash to the HD and play it standalone.
What he is complaining about is useless flash requirements. Like say the menu being done without a basic HTML version for those without flash.
The real issue here is that the web was designed to be open without out making any presumtions on what hardware/software the other side was using. TCP/IP became the run away success because it doesn't matter what kind of machine is on the other side (you do know that the fast majority of servers out there are not MS right?) as long as it implements the open standard any machine can take part.
Sadly MS itself is not really to blame. Sure they won the game of excluding the competion but it is not like netscape didn't try this just as hard.
Now the only question remains if macromedia wants flash to become a real standard. It shouldn't be to hard for them to port it to PPC hardware afterall Mac uses that as well.
Of course ATI bought all these games. It can't possibly be that a one time graphics card leader fumbled a generation of chips and saw itself over taken by a previous nobody.
Buying a vid-card has always been a gamble. Do I buy the 3dfx or that well established matrox accelartor, what was its name. Do I stick with 3dfx or do I perhaps buy that dual monitor G4XX or perhaps that new upstart Geforce. Do I stick with Geforce or do I perhaps get a radeon.
For me the step has been vga -> Tseng 4000 -> s3 generic ->3dfx -> G400 -> Geforce 3 -> Radeon 9800 pro. This upgrade path worked for me and really convinced me that their is no BEST card. The matrox was joy in quality and drivers. The geforce was fast but a pain in heat and it is the only piece of hardware ever to die on me. The radeon has gorgeos top of the range graphics but is unstable as hell.
It is really like the money market. Past performance is no guarentee for future results or something. The future will tell if Nvidia is going to be another 3dfx.
mmm, Cheapish pc for playing halflife. Do you mean an xbox by any chance? Just kidding. Anyway I doubt a cheap PC will run it. Why not do something smart. Play it at a friends PC instead. Cause any machine capable of playing HL2 and say Doom3 is not going to be cheap. Then again compared to a mac it probably is.
Oh yeah right. Like joe puclic is really going to be deterred by ads being included with a product they for. MS has been doing this forever. And it is hardly like they need the money.
Mandrake does it for survival. MS does it for greed.
No only a few people on slashdot will give a damn about this. Those who have a clue can easily bypass it. Those who don't don't give a damn.
Personally I stopped using Mandrake when during an install I had a hang at the graphical boot. What happened? The VNC server asked for a password at first run. The graphical boot screen was unable to show this request for password and so it "hang". Waiting for me to answer an invisible question.
Well actually akamai uses linux not microsoft. Microsoft has just hired a company to "host" some of their stuff and that company uses linux. Akamai provides web hosting to big companies.
So why does MS use them? Well with the latest worm posed to attack an MS site MS decided to not risk this site going down and instead hired this company to provide caching/mirroring/proxy in such abundance that the worm couldn't possibly take the site down.
So yes it is kinda funny that MS faced with an attack caused by a bug in their own software saw the need to use linux, be it through a third party, to rescue their sites. But MS does not use linux.
MS just doesn't thrust its own solutions to stand up to an attack. But this is easily defended. MS is a software company, not a webhosting firm. Oh wait, MSN is. Never mind.
Oh and no I am not defending MS. I just prefer to laugh at them for the proper reasons. Truth is always more entertaining then fiction.
Ehm no. You are not being forced to pay the "microsoft tax". This is not unlike me complaining about the "tomato tax" at Burger King. The tomatoes they include are disgusting and I always make it a point to remove it. Nonetheless even when I instruct them with the order not to include the tomato they still charge me for it. Nonetheless any complaint on my ground is baseless. I am not being forced to buy their hamburgers. No not even when they are the only store open late at night at the train station. Their hamburger, their policy of what to include at what price. Their PC, their policy of what to include at what price.
Yes this is pedantic. But so are you. Plenty of shops sell clean machines. That you choose to buy from a store that doesn't is your problem. YOU are not being forced to pay for MS products you never use. You CHOOSE to buy from companies that refuse to deduct MS software from the total if requested.
The PROPER complaint is that MS uses its position to force companies to include an OS on all machines and imposes penalties on companies that don't or put the a non MS-OS on it. But this has nothing to do with you UNLESS you run such a computer company and are being forced to sell MS software. So the only one who can make a complaint about this are the companies involved. Sadly most of them seem to be to afraid to speak out. So perhaps you should file a complaint but make sure to make the proper complaint.
Why so ANAL? Because this is a real legal opportunity to force MS to stop its illegal business practices. We can't afford for the real legal complaints to be drowned out by well intenioned ramblings. California requires real complaints that are properly worded to have any chance of winning.
Remember the struggle is not to destoy MS, nor is it to get everyone to run linux. It is to allow true freedom for people to choose whatever software solution they want. For the linux users. We don't need everyone to use linux. We just need to create a world in wich enough people use different OSes that noone can afford to close their software/standard/site to only MS users.
So if someone you know thinks about buying an iMac don't laugh, well not to much, but help them with their new machine. They are part of the solution, even if they got no taste.
Just because you use linux/unix/mac you are not safe. As shown two of the worms were aimed at the apache this "webserver" used. Also plenty of tools seem to be available just for linux.
But there is hope. A always keep your system upgraded. The vulnarabilities exploited are all well known. No "new" attacks were found by this honey pot. So if this system had been patched it would have had 0 intrusions. (Or I am readigng it wrong)
Also don't install stuff you don't need. Openssl support for apache may be very usefull as is samba. But for most sites this is not needed. Had these two optionals not been installed then again there would have been 0 intrusions.
Stay uptodate and limit the machine to the software needed and nothing more. Oh well off to post this to my boss who keeps insisting on FTP access because it is so much easier then SCP.
Ehm am I the only who thinks this is a spoof of the N-cage joke? You know the japanese proofing that they can make a joke toy just as good as the europeans?
This thing has the same bad design flaw it looks like. The n-cage you gotta take apart to change the game. Here you gotta change the game to make it a phone:) and just how the fuck do you dial?
Oh well at $110 I think it will share the same success as the n-cage. To expensive for something that can be done by dedicated hardware so much better and more easily.
They are not taking the jobs. American, people like you, yes you are putting the jobs over sea. This is done for two reasons. To increase profit wich ofcourse is good for you, yes you, since you as any american who matters own shares in those companies. What you don't own shares? Then you are an american who doesn't matter.
The other reason is even simpler. Stop people from complaining to much. High unemployment is good for business, it means the workers can't make demands for fear of being replaced.
So don't blame india, blame you own people. The people who said unions are commie ideas. Those who said that business can best be thrusted to look after the economy.
Oh and of course this is not typical america, it is just that good or bad america leads the world so this will be happening in the rest of the world in the not so distant future.
The reason it is not illegal to make a copy of the Mona Lisa is because you are not making a copy. You are making a reproduction. If you could really copy the Mona Lisa you would probably be in very high demand. Not even so much to make perfect copies of it but as an artist in your own right.
For most of human history the art of making copies of works created by others was seen as good work. Monks used to painstaikingly copy works so that their contents could be spread far wider then the single original ever could.
Lets not forget then when Gutenburg's most famous work, a bible was outlawed at the time by the authorities. The church wanted to prevent the public from having easy free access to the bible. Instead they wanted through laws to mandate their outdated way of distributing christianity, it being read in latin by those found suitable. Not just read in the common mans language by anyone.
Oh and of course theft and copyright infringement are different. Same as freeing a slave is different from setting a criminal free. Goodluck explaining that in say the American South PRE-civilwar.
To often nowadays we seem to see laws as goals in and by themselves rather as the always changing guidelines of our society. The prohibition, states prohibiting certain sexual acts between adults, anti-drug laws, mixed race marriages only recently legal in all states, all these are the establisment desperatly hanging on to laws for the laws sake rather then realising that the law should reflect the will of the people.
Then again we must be very carefull that something is really the will of the people and not just a small group shouting loudest.
I will ask you a question. Have you played morrowind? It is available for both the x-box and the pc.
The game was great but it had a lot of loading as you walked through the world. It is a continues world with new areas being loaded in as you move along. This actually went through the point of being annoying as you got spells to move faster. Although it was beautifull to just walk from one city to another the constant loading made it a pain.
Then a expansion came out. The expansion was PC only. Suddenly the areas were much much larger. You could now move in a city without any loading whatsoever. Even in between areas the loading became much much faster? The reason? Well they made use of the PC's far greater memory. Mine got a very convervative 512mb with a further 128mb for the vidcard. Sure I pay a hefty price for that, probably 3-4 x-box'es. But I find it worth it.
So yes play the game on the x-box if you want. The crashes are indeed annoying, not annoying enough for me, but you have your own choice.
Just don't fucking cripple my game. And that is the real problem I have. When I read the interview my heart froze. They made the levels to fit on the x-box? Oh shit. You see level size does make a difference. It make the diffrence between a fake skyline and a skyline that is actual 3D buildings. It means you really can walk multiple routes even routes that are the wrong way.
You say you prefer the x-box version, that is your good right. But we don't get the same choice. DX2 is an X-box game wich will also run on a PC. Hell if the interview is correct we don't even get better textures. So there is only 1 version of the game. Just if you happen to run it on a PC you can choose the mouse and increase the resolution. Big fucking deal. Oh well another game I won't buy.
If you are a linux/mac user you should be used to this. The same as everyone always assumes that your desktop is windows everyone assumes that the gaming platforms are Gamecube/PS2/X-box. For some reason the most powerfull and expensive gaming console, the PC is always left out.
This despite the tact that big companies make their entire living out of providing hardware for this gaming platform without subsidie. Or do you think ati and nvidia could sell the latest video cards to desktop users? Same with Creative Labs. What desktop needs 7.1 audio? I am lucky I am allowed to wear headphones at work.
Don't even start with that the gaming video cards can also be used for 3D apps that are not games. For these purposes other far more expensive and powerfull cards exist. Radeon and NV30 are there for the single purpose of making the PC the HIGH-end gaming platform.
Sadly only a few companies seem to have the balls to publish for this platform.
The PC as gaming platform has ofcourse some obvious advantages.
Open, you can produce any game you want without a platform owner demanding a say or a cut in the profits.
Games can be patched. Yes of course it is annoying when a game needs a patch but at least it is easily possible. Granted consoles are probably also getting this option as they are getting net access.
Powerfull hardware. The cheaper platforms have pathetic hardware companred to even a cheap gaming PC. 64mb? Please my vid card alone got more memory. Of course the price is more expensice but that is apperantly an accepted tradeoff for many customers.
User development. Look at games like Half-Life, Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights, the quakes etc etc. These games really shine because a lot of the most expensive part of creation are done for free by idiots ehm dedicated fans who spend their own time and resources making the game a better product. Free infinite monkeys are bound to create gems like Counter Strike and They Hunger.
But now the disadvantages.
An unknown installed base. Exactly how many gaming rigs are there? No one knowns for sure. How many of them will be able to meet your hardware requirements is an even bigger guess. Nothing stops a user from putting the latest vidcard in an P3 celeron PC after all.
Countless hardware configurations. All of the cheaper platforms share an exactly the same architecture. With PC's the only thing you can assume is that the users PC will have differerent hardware from anything you got.
No copy protection. Granted only the gamecube platform seems to succeed so far but the PC is after all well known to be used only by pirates. But console owners need access to a PC to pirate games. PC owners already got a PC for this for reasons I hope are obvious.
There are probably many other pros and cons to the PC as a gaming platform for developers. As a user it saddens me when I see what happened to Halo. (for those who don't know a press beta is being played and while the game is okay it has obviously taken severe damage during the collision witht the X-box.) Now HL2 may get an x-box lobotomy and DeusX 2. Great two games I really enjoyed made to run on hardware 2 yrs old. Yes I am a graphics junkie and yes I am elitist. But I think games require the Horse power a decent PC can give to create intresting worlds. Not just because of graphics but for the AI and physics.
Oh well. All we can do is hope for the best. Perhaps they really are making two seperate game engines just using the same story. You know sorta like you got Tomb Raider for the GBA as well. Right? Yeah, lets hope for that.
Oh and please don't get me wrong. Cheaper console games can be fun. I do own a GBA after all. My taste in games just seems better served with a PC then any console so far. Sometimes crossovers even work. Tombraider 1 was fun. And then stalled because the PC kept getting upgraded and the game engine did not. Splinter cell was okay as well but mainly because of execellent execution then any breakthrough in gaming technology.
If I am free to run an ad program to blok their ads. Then I am free to run any program that bloks ads.
Just because adware programs choose to put other ads on top doesn't stop me from putting a white image on top. Or perhaps not even loading the image in the first place.
Sure this is already possible and lots of people do it. But the legality was often in question. (You are allowed to view the contents of the site in exchange for viewing the ads) Now with this ruling it isn't anymore.
Ad blockers are proven legal in court. That is cause for celebration isn't it?
Slashdot Mirror
Say I run a labor intensive production process that somewhere runs a small sun server to keep track of some data. Now a big factory like say a food processing plant can easily have a thousand + workers. Does that make for a 100.000 license fee? Each and every year? Ouch.
You see I doubt this. And those type of setups probably will be allowed to use the existing models.
But you claiming that this is better then MS because MS charges more is missing a point. MS charges for people USING the software directly. It doesn't charge you for the cleaning lady and the night guard.
If Sun really want not to loose business to linux and windows (who else can they be talking about) they need to get cracking. They make excellent high end server solutions. I wonder if this makes it affordable for a small shop to own a sun.
Anyway so why don't banks do it? I think they may walk into a whole mess of employment rules. You see you need proper equipment, proper safety equipment, proper enviromental protection. Banks just ain't equipped to handle this. So they outsource it. Handling it internally costs to much.
Secondly what do think sells better, a complete second hand machine, or one that needs to be fitted with expensive new disks?
Remember: Where's the money!
First point
First I didn't say it justified it. It justifies it for me. I have a very big collection of paid for games. Probably a couple of hundred and that is just from the CD era. the diskette bought games got lost in a move.
I easily bought 2-3 games a month, I made the money and I had the time. I have however grown fedup with current game makers. I used to get nice thick manuals with seperate hint-cards for the controls. I used to get games that actually seemed tested. When bugs were of the nature. If you do that and that move and that and that point without having done that, you will need to reload. Not oops we said we had tested the game with force feedback wheels but we lied and we are going to take a year to bloody fix it.
Mafia for me was a real turning point. No more I say. As I live in europe we always been getting the short end of the stick. I already learned to ignore those little postcard wich ask you to register with postage paid, in america. Nor do we quality for any price draws/rebates/special offers.
I will now only buy games from companies that have threated me right in the past. Papyrus (racing games), Bioware are the big exception from whom I will still buy games. Most of the others have screwed me over to much.
So why not simply not play their games? Yeah like that is going to make a difference. They simply blaim any loss in sales on piracy anyway. May as well prove them right.
Complain to them directly? Ha. Been tried. They don't listen I am trying to make them feel.
Second point
As for the comments about the Halo being a beta so I can't judge its graphics yet. Mmmm, I did say this didn't I? I was talking about the general level design. Not textures. The ship level just seemed very boring and old in design. None of the WOW look at that! factor that every other FPS seems to want to achieve.
They may optimize the engine but they are not going to remake the maps. Textures can increase in size but they are not going to make entiryly new art. Sound quality may increase, but they are not going to rewrite the story. That is what betas are for. To give you a pretty good idea of what the final game is going to be like. And it is going to be like this, "great if it had come out when it was supposed to, to little to late".
So I can just ignore this game, sadly that is not how I or many others work. We have been hyped about this for years now. I am going to take a look at it. Probably play it through in a couple of hours and then never touch it again. I am not going to pay money for this and that is going to make me feel good, make me feel like I am sticking it to the "man", and I can spend the money on a company that doesn't try to rip me off. Deus Ex2 Half-Life 2 and Doom3 are getting my money instead. (oh and yes I do have legal copies off the prequels to these games even doom)
So spare me the holier then thou attitude.
Third point
Microsoft used the title very, very successfully to sell the X-box, and people bought into it. No they didn't. The x-box has bombed. They wanted to compete with the PS2, they are competing with the gamecube. What they wanted was for all the PC fans who had been looking forward to this hyped product to give up their expensive PC's and buy an x-box. It didn't work. Fuck them we said we will just play different games. MS has for years made good money of gamers and it screwed them over to promote a new article. You know what might have worked? A dual release. Then PC owners could have modded the game and via Live MS could have then given this free content to the x-box people. Double your pleasure. They did not do this. They wanted us to buy windows machines and consoles. Double their income. (oh and yeah I did use to buy all the versions of MS-Dos. Until windowns 95 Extra pack came out. Another 100bucks to add screensavers? Fuck you.
So I call them wrong for wanting to ripp me off. Me pirating their software is wrong. Well guess what, in my b
Read the last paragraph. It is about the darkest period in human and science history. Up to then I was smiling and laughing but the last one wiped the smile away really good.
In europe we do things differently. You see cars are tested for compliance. If it doesn't comply you get a reason handed to you why not and the car is handed back without them modifing a single thing. Damn lazy bastards why can't they just fix and tune it like they do in the states :(
You see noone is allowed to mess with your car. An exception is perhaps the police. See your car needs a license to take part in regular traffic as well. If they find something wrong they will sometimes give you permission to remove it on the spot or they will remove it on the spot. They will certainly not FIX the car. But even if they did the police is goverment controlled and any cop doing anything to a car will be required to fill in an awfull lot legal papers wich he has to explain in a court of law if I want.
So yes you gave a nice analogy. You got a point but you are missing out on the fact the MS messes with YOUR possesions WITHOUT telling you. Noone except the police is allowed to do this in the real world and even they got a lot of restrictions placed upon them. Why should computerhardware be any different?
Would you accept it if Intel came to your house and replaced the defective P3's (you know the ones with the processor ID disabled) with working ones, you know with proper processor ID enabled?
The PC on the other hand has proven itself as a large enough market to make games for. In fact the x-box is a pc. Anyway look at some of the games coming out on both console and PC. Generally the PC version is superior if you like stuff like mods and high-res graphics. But I guess it all depends on what kind of game you like wich platform you buy or even if you gotta own several.
However on to Halo the game stolen from the pc.
Having been one of the naughty people who played with the beta I can't say I have been to impressed. Yes this was a beta so I can forgive the bugs. Just that an awfull lot of the features of the game seem like they weren't all that had when it first came out.
The indoor levels are frankly boring and suffer from extremly bland graphics. The difficulty level seems soly to depend on how many bullets the enemies can soak up. Personally I am getting fed up with FPS were the enemies can soak up anti-armor missles, come on give us AI, not idiotic hitpoints. Despite the fact that AI works and you have vehicles to many levels are still, walk alone into a maze and fight your way in and out again. BORING! espcially when the levels are so bland.
On the positive side, for once you are not alone. First level is a running fight with plenty of other soldiers fighting. There is a nice if short beach assault and you really feel that your fellow soldiers are fighting with you. The AI is also not bad. I like sticking grenades to the enemy.
It is not a bad game but I think it would have been an "also ran" when it first was supposed to be out. Now all it can hope is that it hits the shelfs before the real PC games like Deus Ex 2, doom3 and Half Life 2 come out. Only if it is first does it stand any chance.
Oh well bungie sold out. This will be one of the games I have absolutely no bad feelings about pirating, just like any Gathering of Developer game (1 whole year for a mafia patch!!!!!), they fucked up.
Now lets see how badly valve is going to loose its karma.
Gnutella and its ilk are a nightmare on searching. They consume an awfull lot of bandwidth on the protocol not on the actual exchange of files. For the moments that is how its got to be. But it is not efficient.
Oh and filesharing is legal people. It is copyright violation that you can at the moment be sueed for.
In England and Holland you have to pay a license fee to the goverment (well a subset of it) for each receiver. It was originally a sum made up out of the number of radios, bw tv's and color tv's you had. Later this was simplified at least in holland.
From this license fee the programs were funded. In england this is the BBC who own a couple of stations and are required by the law to supply programming to the intrest of the nation. In the netherlands we have license holders who according to the number of members they have, membership fee is about 5 dollars last time I checked, get a number of hours to fill on the various radio channels and a amount of slots on the tv channels. In holland they also get income out of advertising. England doesn't have ads. Hmmmm adfree simpsons.
Because you need to pay the license fee on the basis of owning a receiver, not based on actual consumption you can say it is compusery. When the original home computers came out they used ordinary tv's, with receivers for their displays. This of course meant a hike in your license fees despite the fact that you did not watch any tv with them.
On the other hand the fee was hardly gigantic and it ensured that tv was of a reasonable quality. BBC programs are known around the world for their execellence (no I don't mean their news service). Dutch programs slightly less because of the language barrier nonetheless they used to win international prices routinely.
Plus it assured a restrained amount of ads. They are only allowed between programs. Plus programs are thightly regulated on things like sponsoring.
Okay now I explained tv licenses. You may have heard of the BBC director proposing to put all their content on the net. You see because it is a semi-goverment company paid by the citizens according to written law you could say that these citizens have paid for the creation of the content and therefore OWN the content. So copyright in this case becomes far less of an issue. Even more because the BBC can rely on its income from the licenses it doesn't rely have to worry about how the content it creates is watched. No ranting about people not watching the ads, like fox did, because there aren't any. No ranting about people recording eps, in fact they have several time olds series they lost but they found copies made by viewers, and then sharing them because as long as their is a tv involved they paid to view the content.
In holland we stopped the license fee since it was suggested that everyone owns a receiver anyway. So it is now collected through regular taxes. So it can be reasonably argued that any program is taxpayer owned.
So their are some clear benefits to doing it this way. Sure americans probably hate it but they are a silly bunch anway.
So why not use something similar for other content? Well the BBC is a monopoly, they get the all the money and they decide what to make with it. Of course there are all kinds of bounds and checks but a monopoly it is.
In holland we got competition between license holders. Currently one license holder BNN is having an ad campaign to get more people to become members of them. They need X amount of members to get Y amount of tv/radio hours. The bigger you are the more and better hours you get. Although there are some minority stations that get some according to intrest group.
But how would you do this with music? There is a lot of different companies. How would you decide how to distribute the money?
But I think that a compulsary license would work something like what I described above. In any case at least for TV it has been proven to work.
On the other hand we also have a different compulsary license in holland. Each DVD recordable has a .50/1.00 euro tax (depends on if it is + or - format) attached. Yes you read that right. The money goes to the movie industrie to compensate them for illegal copies. Of cour
Sigh, okay if they spend their time answering the phone that can't spend it calling/making money. If they answer the phone for an outraged citizen they can't take a sales call. When there lines are getting inbound traffic they cannot do outbound traffic.
So this did hurt them. How much depends on what profit margins these companies have. I know there are plenty of business were one lost day of work can make the difference between a loss and a profit. So keep it up.
Oh and the claim about lost jobs doesn't work. These telephone sales people are taking the jobs of shop sales people.
Of course this ancient and still going strong model is based on a certain principle. Namely that is a substantial part of the cost of the item being sold is the production of the item itself. So that producing X times the number of items will incur X times the cost or at least close to that. Although cost per unit tends to go down as the number of units goes up this is not a steep curve nor for that matter an infinite one no matter how the charts look. If it was then at a certain number of units the cost of production would fall to zero. Perhaps even go negative :)
What is outdated is the idea that this model applies to all things being sold. The technologies that made the internet possible have allowed some of the basics behind the cost of producing items to be changed. If it costs me X to produce a digital product then it doesn't cost me X*number of items. The cost of material and production capacity that ensures the rather smooth curve in the normal world is gone. Really the only thing keep the cost from being zero is the cost of distribution wich are low for digitals products.
Producing a billion or a thousand digital items makes no difference. This is new. Also new is that distribution costs are pretty much equel no matter the distence. I now have a truly worldwide audience. Compare this to the rather limited distance a product like say milk goes.
So for digital products a number of changes have occured.
there are lots of other differences but I think these alone make for the fact that we now can have a different business model. And that is the problem. Not that the old model is obsolete. It still works fine for products that are produced in the old way, no negative meaning being applied to old btw. What the record companies and for that matter most content suppliers have failed to realize that theyre products can use a new business method.
The silly thing is that music sharing is profitable for quite a number of companies. These are called ISP's and the telecoms. They make a bundle out of programs like napster. Or do you really need DSL/t3 to send email?
I for one am still waiting for the following. Every "record" store gets a computer with a couple of outlet points (cd burners firewire connections and such), some terminals, a big HD array say 1 terrabyte (very cheap if you use IDE, it doesn't have to be fast) and a connection to a central network (doesn't have to be the internet for security).
Then all that is needed is for every music owner to catalog their music and make it available on the central network.
I then browse the catalog in the shop and make my selections. Popular songs are already locally available while others are taking from the network, perhaps stored in a cache, and my selection is then burned or put on an mp3 player etc. I then pay the shopkeeper the fee.
Seems a simple enough solution. The shop has every piece of music ever sold on a wide va
I am tired of IBM being attacked just because it has patents. Patents ain't bad, people abusing patents are bad. People doing bad research on new patents are bad. People accepting overly broad patents are bad. People accepting patents with obvious prior art are bad. People accepting the patenting of basic business practices "on the net" are bad". Not the idea of patents itself. They are an inperfect tool in an inperfect world. But can you come up with something better that would be accepted in the real world?
Remember kids, patents don't sue people, people sue people.
Also he is not complaining about CONTENT. If someone makes a flash movie or flash game as the content of a website this is of course perfectly alright. Of course then I could also simply save the flash to the HD and play it standalone.
What he is complaining about is useless flash requirements. Like say the menu being done without a basic HTML version for those without flash.
The real issue here is that the web was designed to be open without out making any presumtions on what hardware/software the other side was using. TCP/IP became the run away success because it doesn't matter what kind of machine is on the other side (you do know that the fast majority of servers out there are not MS right?) as long as it implements the open standard any machine can take part.
Sadly MS itself is not really to blame. Sure they won the game of excluding the competion but it is not like netscape didn't try this just as hard.
Now the only question remains if macromedia wants flash to become a real standard. It shouldn't be to hard for them to port it to PPC hardware afterall Mac uses that as well.
Buying a vid-card has always been a gamble. Do I buy the 3dfx or that well established matrox accelartor, what was its name. Do I stick with 3dfx or do I perhaps buy that dual monitor G4XX or perhaps that new upstart Geforce. Do I stick with Geforce or do I perhaps get a radeon.
For me the step has been vga -> Tseng 4000 -> s3 generic ->3dfx -> G400 -> Geforce 3 -> Radeon 9800 pro. This upgrade path worked for me and really convinced me that their is no BEST card. The matrox was joy in quality and drivers. The geforce was fast but a pain in heat and it is the only piece of hardware ever to die on me. The radeon has gorgeos top of the range graphics but is unstable as hell.
It is really like the money market. Past performance is no guarentee for future results or something. The future will tell if Nvidia is going to be another 3dfx.
mmm, Cheapish pc for playing halflife. Do you mean an xbox by any chance? Just kidding. Anyway I doubt a cheap PC will run it. Why not do something smart. Play it at a friends PC instead. Cause any machine capable of playing HL2 and say Doom3 is not going to be cheap. Then again compared to a mac it probably is.
Mandrake does it for survival. MS does it for greed.
No only a few people on slashdot will give a damn about this. Those who have a clue can easily bypass it. Those who don't don't give a damn.
Personally I stopped using Mandrake when during an install I had a hang at the graphical boot. What happened? The VNC server asked for a password at first run. The graphical boot screen was unable to show this request for password and so it "hang". Waiting for me to answer an invisible question.
So why does MS use them? Well with the latest worm posed to attack an MS site MS decided to not risk this site going down and instead hired this company to provide caching/mirroring/proxy in such abundance that the worm couldn't possibly take the site down.
So yes it is kinda funny that MS faced with an attack caused by a bug in their own software saw the need to use linux, be it through a third party, to rescue their sites. But MS does not use linux.
MS just doesn't thrust its own solutions to stand up to an attack. But this is easily defended. MS is a software company, not a webhosting firm. Oh wait, MSN is. Never mind.
Oh and no I am not defending MS. I just prefer to laugh at them for the proper reasons. Truth is always more entertaining then fiction.
Yes this is pedantic. But so are you. Plenty of shops sell clean machines. That you choose to buy from a store that doesn't is your problem. YOU are not being forced to pay for MS products you never use. You CHOOSE to buy from companies that refuse to deduct MS software from the total if requested.
The PROPER complaint is that MS uses its position to force companies to include an OS on all machines and imposes penalties on companies that don't or put the a non MS-OS on it. But this has nothing to do with you UNLESS you run such a computer company and are being forced to sell MS software. So the only one who can make a complaint about this are the companies involved. Sadly most of them seem to be to afraid to speak out. So perhaps you should file a complaint but make sure to make the proper complaint.
Why so ANAL? Because this is a real legal opportunity to force MS to stop its illegal business practices. We can't afford for the real legal complaints to be drowned out by well intenioned ramblings. California requires real complaints that are properly worded to have any chance of winning.
Remember the struggle is not to destoy MS, nor is it to get everyone to run linux. It is to allow true freedom for people to choose whatever software solution they want. For the linux users. We don't need everyone to use linux. We just need to create a world in wich enough people use different OSes that noone can afford to close their software/standard/site to only MS users.
So if someone you know thinks about buying an iMac don't laugh, well not to much, but help them with their new machine. They are part of the solution, even if they got no taste.
But there is hope. A always keep your system upgraded. The vulnarabilities exploited are all well known. No "new" attacks were found by this honey pot. So if this system had been patched it would have had 0 intrusions. (Or I am readigng it wrong)
Also don't install stuff you don't need. Openssl support for apache may be very usefull as is samba. But for most sites this is not needed. Had these two optionals not been installed then again there would have been 0 intrusions.
Stay uptodate and limit the machine to the software needed and nothing more. Oh well off to post this to my boss who keeps insisting on FTP access because it is so much easier then SCP.
This thing has the same bad design flaw it looks like. The n-cage you gotta take apart to change the game. Here you gotta change the game to make it a phone :) and just how the fuck do you dial?
Oh well at $110 I think it will share the same success as the n-cage. To expensive for something that can be done by dedicated hardware so much better and more easily.
So now we know why skynet wants to whipe out the human race.
The other reason is even simpler. Stop people from complaining to much. High unemployment is good for business, it means the workers can't make demands for fear of being replaced.
So don't blame india, blame you own people. The people who said unions are commie ideas. Those who said that business can best be thrusted to look after the economy.
Oh and of course this is not typical america, it is just that good or bad america leads the world so this will be happening in the rest of the world in the not so distant future.
For most of human history the art of making copies of works created by others was seen as good work. Monks used to painstaikingly copy works so that their contents could be spread far wider then the single original ever could.
Lets not forget then when Gutenburg's most famous work, a bible was outlawed at the time by the authorities. The church wanted to prevent the public from having easy free access to the bible. Instead they wanted through laws to mandate their outdated way of distributing christianity, it being read in latin by those found suitable. Not just read in the common mans language by anyone.
Oh and of course theft and copyright infringement are different. Same as freeing a slave is different from setting a criminal free. Goodluck explaining that in say the American South PRE-civilwar.
To often nowadays we seem to see laws as goals in and by themselves rather as the always changing guidelines of our society. The prohibition, states prohibiting certain sexual acts between adults, anti-drug laws, mixed race marriages only recently legal in all states, all these are the establisment desperatly hanging on to laws for the laws sake rather then realising that the law should reflect the will of the people.
Then again we must be very carefull that something is really the will of the people and not just a small group shouting loudest.
The game was great but it had a lot of loading as you walked through the world. It is a continues world with new areas being loaded in as you move along. This actually went through the point of being annoying as you got spells to move faster. Although it was beautifull to just walk from one city to another the constant loading made it a pain.
Then a expansion came out. The expansion was PC only. Suddenly the areas were much much larger. You could now move in a city without any loading whatsoever. Even in between areas the loading became much much faster? The reason? Well they made use of the PC's far greater memory. Mine got a very convervative 512mb with a further 128mb for the vidcard. Sure I pay a hefty price for that, probably 3-4 x-box'es. But I find it worth it.
So yes play the game on the x-box if you want. The crashes are indeed annoying, not annoying enough for me, but you have your own choice.
Just don't fucking cripple my game. And that is the real problem I have. When I read the interview my heart froze. They made the levels to fit on the x-box? Oh shit. You see level size does make a difference. It make the diffrence between a fake skyline and a skyline that is actual 3D buildings. It means you really can walk multiple routes even routes that are the wrong way.
You say you prefer the x-box version, that is your good right. But we don't get the same choice. DX2 is an X-box game wich will also run on a PC. Hell if the interview is correct we don't even get better textures. So there is only 1 version of the game. Just if you happen to run it on a PC you can choose the mouse and increase the resolution. Big fucking deal. Oh well another game I won't buy.
If you are a linux/mac user you should be used to this. The same as everyone always assumes that your desktop is windows everyone assumes that the gaming platforms are Gamecube/PS2/X-box. For some reason the most powerfull and expensive gaming console, the PC is always left out.
This despite the tact that big companies make their entire living out of providing hardware for this gaming platform without subsidie. Or do you think ati and nvidia could sell the latest video cards to desktop users? Same with Creative Labs. What desktop needs 7.1 audio? I am lucky I am allowed to wear headphones at work.
Don't even start with that the gaming video cards can also be used for 3D apps that are not games. For these purposes other far more expensive and powerfull cards exist. Radeon and NV30 are there for the single purpose of making the PC the HIGH-end gaming platform.
Sadly only a few companies seem to have the balls to publish for this platform.
The PC as gaming platform has ofcourse some obvious advantages.
But now the disadvantages.
There are probably many other pros and cons to the PC as a gaming platform for developers. As a user it saddens me when I see what happened to Halo. (for those who don't know a press beta is being played and while the game is okay it has obviously taken severe damage during the collision witht the X-box.) Now HL2 may get an x-box lobotomy and DeusX 2. Great two games I really enjoyed made to run on hardware 2 yrs old. Yes I am a graphics junkie and yes I am elitist. But I think games require the Horse power a decent PC can give to create intresting worlds. Not just because of graphics but for the AI and physics.
Oh well. All we can do is hope for the best. Perhaps they really are making two seperate game engines just using the same story. You know sorta like you got Tomb Raider for the GBA as well. Right? Yeah, lets hope for that.
Oh and please don't get me wrong. Cheaper console games can be fun. I do own a GBA after all. My taste in games just seems better served with a PC then any console so far. Sometimes crossovers even work. Tombraider 1 was fun. And then stalled because the PC kept getting upgraded and the game engine did not. Splinter cell was okay as well but mainly because of execellent execution then any breakthrough in gaming technology.
Just because adware programs choose to put other ads on top doesn't stop me from putting a white image on top. Or perhaps not even loading the image in the first place.
Sure this is already possible and lots of people do it. But the legality was often in question. (You are allowed to view the contents of the site in exchange for viewing the ads) Now with this ruling it isn't anymore.
Ad blockers are proven legal in court. That is cause for celebration isn't it?