I largely agree, that's why the only downloadable content I buy has been very inexpensive so I don't care enough. I did have one ugly experience that soured me. I bought "Lost Cities" for xbox 360 from the downloadable arcade (don't know if those are the right words, but you get the idea). That was a great game, but then one day my HD died. I bought a pretty expensive replacement and then I went to download all the things I had earlier. It was mostly okay, pretty much all the games I cared about I was able to redownload, there were some videos I could not find again or had been free before and now cost something, so I skipped those. None of that bugged me enough to be upset at all. But I simply could not find "Lost Cities." It was easily the game I had played the most before but I had not played it in a while.
After a bunch of google searches I learned that when Activision bought Vivendi/Universal there was some fall-out that prevented people from buying "Lost Cities" anymore. This was many pages in of google results. So I called Microsoft and they could not do a thing. I expected them to refund the MS points but they said they could not, I could to fax a letter the fellow suggested, but I did not, I assumed it would just get ignored or rejected. (Maybe I should have tried, that might be unfair.) Also they could not do anything like extend my Live Gold for a free month or anything like that. That really surprised me since I have bought two 360s and have had 3 repairs and it was pretty routine for MS to throw in a free month of Gold card as a band aid.
So that really irked me. It dawned on me then how they could take something away like that game. I just assumed that with the MS approach I would be able to redownload whatever I wanted for a few years at least, but it seemed like that was not the case in practice. Admittedly it's rare though. So I just treat anything l download as pretty ephemeral to me and do not download anything that may be too valuable (so no more $10+ downloads for me, only up to $6 now, I buy a lot of TG16 VC). I was also upset about the customer service too, I could sort of see MS not being able to refund the MS points, seeing as they gave a cut to Vivendi/Universal already which they could not get back, bit to not even give a free month of Gold, something I had bought two years of already, that was pretty low. It's like they wanted to drive home how ugly this no media/download only stuff really can be.
I also bought two 360s, that has been more painful. I have had three breakages in a third of the time-span. Ever since the NetFlix streaming disc came-out for Wii, I have left the most recent dead 360 be. So I guess I just had a little bit higher thresh hold than you.
I much prefer the approach where I do not need to sign in to play my VC like now. With modding Nintendo has no iron clad way to know that the old license will-be/was invalidated. They also did not do this when they made their system, instead only offering ways to transfer content when you send in a unit for repair. I guess it made sense to them, while your approach makes sense to others. I wish I could simply redownload, but I guess that was too frightening to Nintendo that there was no other way to guarantee that the old copies would no longer play.
Get real, my Wiis cost me $250 each, not $2500. I have bought maybe $100 of VC, averaging something like $7 each most likely. I treat it a lot like a movie or something like that. I expect that when the next generation of console comes-out I will not have those games anymore, at $7 a pop I'm okay with that.
Nintendo needs to know that the copies I downloaded are gone before I get new ones. I think it's a decent compromise. Should they have wired $250 to a courier that zipped to Target and raced over with my new Wii to satisfy you? Even 10 days is not something to get worked-up about.
The thing that bugs me is that if I send in my Wii now that I had the homebrew channel installed, it is likely that the repair will cost extra. They were doing that a while back, they may still. I can see that as something to get worked-up about. But that I need to send in my Wii for repair to get games copied over if I care enough about it? Come-on at this point I may be interested in only downloading 1/4 of those again, so it may not even be worth it anymore. You need to get some perspective, or at least don't spend your money on this if you don't agree with how it works.
Recent Nintendo updates (for a few months back) have been updating the same boot loader that you installed into, the one that you would use to restore with. You have disabled the network update, but at some point one of these situations will occur:
You will want to use the Shop Channel, but it will ask you to update to the new version with the network update.
You will buy a game that requires a newer IOS, there will be an update on the disc.
At that point the update may over write that bootloader you installed into.
The problem with that approach is that they have no way of knowing if the games on your white Wii have been erased before you download them again to the Black Wii.
I have bought 2 Wiis, requiring a total of 4 repairs. I have to say that Nintendo was one of the easiest companies to deal with. One repair was out of warranty. The price was very reasonable, at the time a new Wii cost $250 and the repair was $90. I simply sent them the broken Wii and they sent back a new one. All the downloaded stuff was copied over. I have never had to pay any shipping directly, it was always free in warranty and included in the repair price when not. It has never taken more than 10 days for the turn-around.
In fact the DRM is not ideal. It would be nice to be able to redownload when you buy a new Wii. You can send them two Wiis and they will do it for you, so it is not impossible. But at least when their support was based near Seattle they were incredibly nice. I had one Wii break, I sent it in for repair and then they sent me a replacement. Then after a couple of hours that one broke. The person on the phone was very sympathetic. They arranged a this setup:
They expressed a new Wii to me. I had one 2 days later. In that box I returned the broken Wii, that took about 4 days. Then when they had it I called back, they added back the Wii Points and I was able to redownload the games that I had before.
So I had a working Wii in 2 days, and a week later I had all my downloaded VC titles again. From dealing with many companies over the years, this was handled very well. You might wish that there was no DRM, but I wish I had a pony for my daughter. The compromise was pretty decent.
Good luck installing a new boot loader on the new Wiis, like the ones sold for 1.5 years. You can replace the third stage basically, while you can replace the second on older units. I agree though, done carefully installing something like the homebrew channel has very little chance of bricking your wii, less than some of the recent Nintendo updates. Now the stuff from groups that let you pirate stuff, it generally uses more fragile tricks patching lots of IOSs and what not that is more dangerous.
Early reports are in claiming that it was in the process of becoming a production well and the explosion occurred as the second cement seal was being set.
It used to (the SOAP one) the AJAX and REST ones do limit you to the first four sets of 8 results each though. Also a referer needs to be sent. A bunch of the terms and conditions would be troublesome to scroogle as well.
Read the terms of use for why they would not want to. Then read the docs to see that even they wished to not honor the troublesome clauses in the terms of use for them, they could not do what they wanted to anyway with the API.
White rabbit is cool, but it requires NICs and PHYs to have uncommon functionality. You need a phy that allows you to lock carrier. You also need a phy and nic that will pass back bad and runt frames, stuff EOF mid stream, and you lose any hardware cksuming and need to do yourself.
But I think we may just be lucky about the not breaking DNS backwards compatibility part. One of the rules in the two DNS RFCs I know about is that a dash cannot follow another dash in labels used in IN A records. But all these start with xn--, breaking that rule. I ran dig on xn--bcher-kva.ch and I got back an IN A record. Did we just get lucky nothing broke? Can someone point out the RFC that allows '--' in IN A records?
Read it again, he registered tfosorcim with the registrar for [NEWGTLD] so in a fancy new browser that supports RTL and world wide fonts he could make a subdomain moc that would look like this to an American:
The scribbles could look like those for "Al-Saudiah" or "Misr" for example. It's an interesting thought and it all comes down to how carefully the registrars will police themselves and that those scribbles do look funny and are not arbitrary, so even is someday we allow.österreich as well as.at say, it still will not be LTR. So as long as the top level domains created will look generally funny to latin users, I think it's pretty safe. The look alike characters issues are more of a worry for registrars that don't check applications.
But that surpised that there was a record, since I thought that DNS insisted that there is never a hyphen following a hyphen. Do you know which RFC changed that?
Do you understand that unisys charged for creating compressed gifs not viewing them? See how even when they started charging for open source compressors Navigator and IE could get away without paying? This is very different in the h.264 case. Right now there are all sorts of exceptions that allow people to create, serve, and view royalty free. It could potentially survive if only royalties needed to be paid for creating. It could also survive if source code were not permitted to be distributed, though what a blow that would be to open source. Right now the distribution of source code for simply decoding h.264 is already in a gray area. Do you now see how the situation is different and potentially much worse?
The problem was that I could not go to a store and buy a program for Linux or FreeBSD. That is why I bought an eMac 8 years ago. Things have changed, there is little reason to buy software anymore, there is so much great open source stuff available now-a-days. In fact if the whole google docs style approach takes-off we have even less reason to buy software ever again (for better or worse). Now I cannot buy software for that aging eMac anymore, my wife and kids are smart, they can pick-up some other GUI again. It may finally be time, I only need to find a replacement to iMovie at this point;editing xml files in vim and running dvdauthor and mkisofs really isn't going to cut it:)
They can keep launchd, have you ever had to look at it? It's a bunch of special cases and spaghetti code! I think the real reason launchd was created was because they did not want a shell on future products.
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I largely agree, that's why the only downloadable content I buy has been very inexpensive so I don't care enough. I did have one ugly experience that soured me. I bought "Lost Cities" for xbox 360 from the downloadable arcade (don't know if those are the right words, but you get the idea). That was a great game, but then one day my HD died. I bought a pretty expensive replacement and then I went to download all the things I had earlier. It was mostly okay, pretty much all the games I cared about I was able to redownload, there were some videos I could not find again or had been free before and now cost something, so I skipped those. None of that bugged me enough to be upset at all. But I simply could not find "Lost Cities." It was easily the game I had played the most before but I had not played it in a while.
After a bunch of google searches I learned that when Activision bought Vivendi/Universal there was some fall-out that prevented people from buying "Lost Cities" anymore. This was many pages in of google results. So I called Microsoft and they could not do a thing. I expected them to refund the MS points but they said they could not, I could to fax a letter the fellow suggested, but I did not, I assumed it would just get ignored or rejected. (Maybe I should have tried, that might be unfair.) Also they could not do anything like extend my Live Gold for a free month or anything like that. That really surprised me since I have bought two 360s and have had 3 repairs and it was pretty routine for MS to throw in a free month of Gold card as a band aid.
So that really irked me. It dawned on me then how they could take something away like that game. I just assumed that with the MS approach I would be able to redownload whatever I wanted for a few years at least, but it seemed like that was not the case in practice. Admittedly it's rare though. So I just treat anything l download as pretty ephemeral to me and do not download anything that may be too valuable (so no more $10+ downloads for me, only up to $6 now, I buy a lot of TG16 VC). I was also upset about the customer service too, I could sort of see MS not being able to refund the MS points, seeing as they gave a cut to Vivendi/Universal already which they could not get back, bit to not even give a free month of Gold, something I had bought two years of already, that was pretty low. It's like they wanted to drive home how ugly this no media/download only stuff really can be.
I also bought two 360s, that has been more painful. I have had three breakages in a third of the time-span. Ever since the NetFlix streaming disc came-out for Wii, I have left the most recent dead 360 be. So I guess I just had a little bit higher thresh hold than you.
I much prefer the approach where I do not need to sign in to play my VC like now. With modding Nintendo has no iron clad way to know that the old license will-be/was invalidated. They also did not do this when they made their system, instead only offering ways to transfer content when you send in a unit for repair. I guess it made sense to them, while your approach makes sense to others. I wish I could simply redownload, but I guess that was too frightening to Nintendo that there was no other way to guarantee that the old copies would no longer play.
Get real, my Wiis cost me $250 each, not $2500. I have bought maybe $100 of VC, averaging something like $7 each most likely. I treat it a lot like a movie or something like that. I expect that when the next generation of console comes-out I will not have those games anymore, at $7 a pop I'm okay with that.
Nintendo needs to know that the copies I downloaded are gone before I get new ones. I think it's a decent compromise. Should they have wired $250 to a courier that zipped to Target and raced over with my new Wii to satisfy you? Even 10 days is not something to get worked-up about.
The thing that bugs me is that if I send in my Wii now that I had the homebrew channel installed, it is likely that the repair will cost extra. They were doing that a while back, they may still. I can see that as something to get worked-up about. But that I need to send in my Wii for repair to get games copied over if I care enough about it? Come-on at this point I may be interested in only downloading 1/4 of those again, so it may not even be worth it anymore. You need to get some perspective, or at least don't spend your money on this if you don't agree with how it works.
Recent Nintendo updates (for a few months back) have been updating the same boot loader that you installed into, the one that you would use to restore with. You have disabled the network update, but at some point one of these situations will occur:
You will want to use the Shop Channel, but it will ask you to update to the new version with the network update.
You will buy a game that requires a newer IOS, there will be an update on the disc.
At that point the update may over write that bootloader you installed into.
The problem with that approach is that they have no way of knowing if the games on your white Wii have been erased before you download them again to the Black Wii.
I have bought 2 Wiis, requiring a total of 4 repairs. I have to say that Nintendo was one of the easiest companies to deal with. One repair was out of warranty. The price was very reasonable, at the time a new Wii cost $250 and the repair was $90. I simply sent them the broken Wii and they sent back a new one. All the downloaded stuff was copied over. I have never had to pay any shipping directly, it was always free in warranty and included in the repair price when not. It has never taken more than 10 days for the turn-around.
In fact the DRM is not ideal. It would be nice to be able to redownload when you buy a new Wii. You can send them two Wiis and they will do it for you, so it is not impossible. But at least when their support was based near Seattle they were incredibly nice. I had one Wii break, I sent it in for repair and then they sent me a replacement. Then after a couple of hours that one broke. The person on the phone was very sympathetic. They arranged a this setup:
They expressed a new Wii to me. I had one 2 days later.
In that box I returned the broken Wii, that took about 4 days.
Then when they had it I called back, they added back the Wii Points and I was able to redownload the games that I had before.
So I had a working Wii in 2 days, and a week later I had all my downloaded VC titles again. From dealing with many companies over the years, this was handled very well. You might wish that there was no DRM, but I wish I had a pony for my daughter. The compromise was pretty decent.
Good luck installing a new boot loader on the new Wiis, like the ones sold for 1.5 years. You can replace the third stage basically, while you can replace the second on older units. I agree though, done carefully installing something like the homebrew channel has very little chance of bricking your wii, less than some of the recent Nintendo updates. Now the stuff from groups that let you pirate stuff, it generally uses more fragile tricks patching lots of IOSs and what not that is more dangerous.
Thank you so very much for the informative reply.
Doesn't it seem incredible that they can inset the original well bore like that? I wish someone could explain that to me.
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20100508/D9FIH0G00.html
Early reports are in claiming that it was in the process of becoming a production well and the explosion occurred as the second cement seal was being set.
It used to (the SOAP one) the AJAX and REST ones do limit you to the first four sets of 8 results each though. Also a referer needs to be sent. A bunch of the terms and conditions would be troublesome to scroogle as well.
Read the terms of use for why they would not want to. Then read the docs to see that even they wished to not honor the troublesome clauses in the terms of use for them, they could not do what they wanted to anyway with the API.
Somebody mod this up please.
Oops sorry it's a tenth of a us, so an order of magnitude better than reading a word off of PCI, sorry.
Still that is not all that impressive, I do real time and entire programs with many function calls routinely run in under a us.
GOD YES! That's a MICROsecond. That's the order of middling IO like reading a word off a of a PCI bus. That is very heavy for a function call.
White rabbit is cool, but it requires NICs and PHYs to have uncommon functionality. You need a phy that allows you to lock carrier. You also need a phy and nic that will pass back bad and runt frames, stuff EOF mid stream, and you lose any hardware cksuming and need to do yourself.
usually to 2 minutes not 2 seconds
But I think we may just be lucky about the not breaking DNS backwards compatibility part. One of the rules in the two DNS RFCs I know about is that a dash cannot follow another dash in labels used in IN A records. But all these start with xn--, breaking that rule. I ran dig on xn--bcher-kva.ch and I got back an IN A record. Did we just get lucky nothing broke? Can someone point out the RFC that allows '--' in IN A records?
Read it again, he registered tfosorcim with the registrar for [NEWGTLD] so in a fancy new browser that supports RTL and world wide fonts he could make a subdomain moc that would look like this to an American:
http://scribbles.microsoft.com/english/
The scribbles could look like those for "Al-Saudiah" or "Misr" for example. It's an interesting thought and it all comes down to how carefully the registrars will police themselves and that those scribbles do look funny and are not arbitrary, so even is someday we allow .österreich as well as .at say, it still will not be LTR. So as long as the top level domains created will look generally funny to latin users, I think it's pretty safe. The look alike characters issues are more of a worry for registrars that don't check applications.
Thanks, that article led me to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDNA
So I did a dig for xn--bcher-kva.ch
But that surpised that there was a record, since I thought that DNS insisted that there is never a hyphen following a hyphen. Do you know which RFC changed that?
Do you understand that unisys charged for creating compressed gifs not viewing them? See how even when they started charging for open source compressors Navigator and IE could get away without paying? This is very different in the h.264 case. Right now there are all sorts of exceptions that allow people to create, serve, and view royalty free. It could potentially survive if only royalties needed to be paid for creating. It could also survive if source code were not permitted to be distributed, though what a blow that would be to open source. Right now the distribution of source code for simply decoding h.264 is already in a gray area. Do you now see how the situation is different and potentially much worse?
The problem was that I could not go to a store and buy a program for Linux or FreeBSD. That is why I bought an eMac 8 years ago. Things have changed, there is little reason to buy software anymore, there is so much great open source stuff available now-a-days. In fact if the whole google docs style approach takes-off we have even less reason to buy software ever again (for better or worse). Now I cannot buy software for that aging eMac anymore, my wife and kids are smart, they can pick-up some other GUI again. It may finally be time, I only need to find a replacement to iMovie at this point;editing xml files in vim and running dvdauthor and mkisofs really isn't going to cut it :)
They can keep launchd, have you ever had to look at it? It's a bunch of special cases and spaghetti code! I think the real reason launchd was created was because they did not want a shell on future products.
When I posted that the site would 403.