I think that the reason that they don't want people running Mac OS on regular hardware is because of piracy. Most home users I know either run a pirated version of windows, or they run the OEM version that came with their computer. Microsoft is fine with all the piracy, because it supports their monopoly, and they make lots of money off the businesses that run windows. Mac OS is another thing entirely. If Mac OS was released for regular PCs, I think that the usage would spike, as there's probably a lot of people who would love to run it, but there probably aren't a lot of people who would pay for it. They would have a huge following, yet I don't think they'd see more than a 10% sales increase, and they would lose all their hardware sales. Since who would pay more for the exact same hardware (Apple makes very little of their own hardware, they actually just make shiny boxes for other people's hardware). I think that maybe it might work in the long run if they could get enough people running Mac OS to get more businesses on board, but I don't know if they could survive the short term profit loss that would happen if they abandoned their hardware business. Plus, I'm not sure how many businesses are interested in running Mac OS, since they seem to be be pushing towards a "less work, more play" kind of operating system.
I find that you get exactly the same results if you type a document in MS Word 97 and open it in MS Word 2000. Even though they are supposed to be completely compatible, the documents always look different. The same can also happen between the same version of MS Word if the computers have different printers attached to them. I don't know why the printer makes a difference, but it does. What it comes down to is the simple fact that.Doc is not a publishing format. It isn't meant to maintain 100% of the document formatting across all computers and it almost never will. Add that to the fact that it's proprietary, which means that OO.o will have a really hard time making anything look "exactly" the same. PDFs are different. They are built for the sole purpose of ensuring that the document looks the same on every computer using the document.
That's one case. I can find multiple retailers with the same price, all over my city. So either every retailer in the city isn't paying the levy, (which I find hard to believe), or they are paying the levy for me, which I also find hard to believe. I was very much under the impression that becuase of the low cost of CDRs, that there was no levy. Apparently there is one, yet I can't see how it's being accounted for.
Yet I still don't think that the levy is being charged. Almost every store sells CDRs for around $0.30 or less. This would mean that all these stores are losing money on CDRs. Also, the CDRs are the equivalent to what you would pay in the US for blank media, accounting for exchange rates. So, I guess i am wrong, and that there is a levy, yet i fail to see any instance of a consumer actually having to pay a levy. It's impossible for me to believe that they are charging a 21 cent levy on a product that only costs 24 cents for me to buy. And I'm not even trying to find the lowest price, just finding a low price that I know they can be bought at.
That really depends on who the providers are. I hardly ever remember my cable going out, yet people I talk to with satellite often have it lose signal, even with just cloud cover. Plus, sometimes having the first 80 channels in analog is a nice thing. Because you can split the cable and record stuff on your old VCR while watching something else, without getting a PVR. Oh, and analog often looks better than digital (cable or satellite) due to the compression. As long as there isn't any interfering broadcast channels (which are few and far between) where I am, I'd much rather have digital cable.
Re:Great idea
on
30 Days of DRM
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· Score: 2, Interesting
They can be used, does not they must be used. There are so many other uses of CDs that it's pretty much impossible to charge a levy. When you look at audio cassettes, there are very few uses apart from recording audio, so it's easy to argue that a levy should be charged. If there is a levy in Canada, how much is it? Because I can go to the local discount computer store and get 50 CDs for $12. That works out to $0.24 for each CD. The Canadian copyright board states that they levy on CDRs is supposed to be $0.21 per CD ($0.77 for CDR-Audio). I find it highly unlikely that the levy is being charged, and that I'm only paying $0.03 per CD including retail markup, transportation, manufacturing, and all the other costs of delivering CDRs to the end user. Also, to reiterate, there is absolutely no levy on DVD+/-Rs.
Re:De-regionalize your DVD player
on
30 Days of DRM
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· Score: 1
But under the DMCA, isn't that illegal? Isn't this what were arguing against here? Not the fact that it can be done, but rather something as honest as playing a DVD you own, in a player you own should actually be illegal.
The record company doesn't have to extract damages if the laws make it a criminal offense to break copyright protections. At that point, the record company doesn't even have to make a complaint. You local police could come and arrest you if they had significant evidence that you had broken the protections. I am unaware of the circumstances, but I think that copyright is a civil issue, whereas the DMCA makes it a criminal issue.
Re:This is great, but....
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Joe Sixpack does care, to the extent that it starts to bother him. My GF recently got an iPod, and despite me telling her not to, still bought a couple tracks off iTunes. She quickly learned that she was unable to burn an "MP3" CD, to listen to them on her stereo. She also got quite a big scare when she deleted all her music and thought she had lost the music (she had just deleted them from the library, and they were still on the computer). She also gets quite annoyed when she plugs her iPod into another computer to charge it, and all the tracks get erased because that iPod isn't registered with that computer. She would also love to be able to just drag and drop from windows explorer right onto her iPod, but it seems as though that doesn't work either. Once DRM starts to infringe on people's rights enough, they will start to care. I'm still waiting for an MP3 player to come out that's actually better than the iPod, then watch all the iTunes users rise up, because they don't really own any of their music, but rather just own the right to play it on an iPod (yes i'm aware you can burn and rerip, but that loses quality on an already inferior quality copy).
Re:Great idea
on
30 Days of DRM
·
· Score: 1, Informative
As a Canadian, I can tell you that there are no such levies on CDs or DVDs, because they are argued as being used for computer data. This is why you can go to Walmart and get 100 DVD+/-Rs for $30. There was at one time, or maybe still is, some CD-Audio CDs, which are the same as regular CDRs except that they cost about $5 each an do contain the levy. I think they only cost so much because they are so wildly unpopular, due to the fact that they cost more than the regular CDRs, and do not offer any extra features. Some stand alone CD recorders will only record on this type of media.
Re:But youtube isn't usually funny!
on
Bob Saget 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yes, but the summary states that it is a similar HTML doc with lots of nonsense put at the end so that the hash matches. I very much doubt in this case that the files are the same. Plus, if you know something about the document, lit the size, or the fact that the file should be XHTML 1.0 compliant, without any trailing garbage that doesn't make any sense, then it makes the hash a whole lot harder to crack. The thing is, if you rely 100% on the hash, then you could get screwed, however, if you verify the hash, and then perform some additional check on the file, it's much harder to get screwed.
I'm not saying that they should protected, or that it's the "fair" thing to do, or that it wouldn't piss off a fair number of people, but in their own best interests, if they want to protect their content, wouldn't that be the easiest way? It seems that as soon as you bring computers into the mix, it becomes evindent, that eventually the DRM will be broken, and usually it's broken pretty easy. However, if the hardware to read the discs isn't available for PC, it makes it extremely hard to for the average Joe to copy the content. People don't want to spend days downloading DVD quality content, and they won't for some time to come. Yet, many of them, even the ones who aren't technically inclined, can easily put a disc in the drive, and click on the "rip" button.
They probably limited it, because by spending $300 on an extra barracks (which was very cheap, the equivalent of 3 infantry), you could create units at twice the speed. This kind of thing really changes the dynamics of the game from how strategic you can be, to how fast can you build an army.
Although you're right, I still don't think that many people would be disappointed by not being able to play the movies on their computer. In the end, I think that people like being able to play movies on their computer, but if the media companies have a choice between allowing computers and having to worry about everybody being able to easily pirate the content, and not allowing computers, and only having a select few top pirating agencies copy the content, then I don't understand why they allow these things to run on PCs. Think about it. Allowing CDs to be read on computers means CDs can easily be duplicated onto CDR, or stored on my Hard drive. Allowing DVDs to be read on computers means I can slip a DVD in the drive, run a program, and 30 minutes later have a copy of a movie I rented on a DVD-R. I believe the same will happen with HD-DVD and BluRay no matter how well they thought through their DRM schemes. When it comes to the user, I can understand that they want to play movies on a computer. What I can't understand is why the media companies keep on allowing it.
And if it is a bug in the JDK, then submit a bug report to Sun, and get them to fix it, so you don't have to keep on patching all the future versions of the JDK you happen to want to use.
So what? There's probably plenty of holes in the signed drivers that let you execute whatever code you want. Maybe you could just run it in a VM and have complete access to everything, even beneath the kernel level. I'm not convinced that there's anything that is in the 64-bit version that stops people from being able to circumvent the copy protection. Even if they only allow signed drivers, there's still lots of other ways in.
Which is why I don't even understand why they bother letting these formats play on a PC. The media companies are big enough to make up their own format, which can't be read on computers, except for the use of black market hardware. Think about Gamecube type media which is only playable on the the GC. Sure there's ways of modding the hardware, but for most users, that's too much trouble, and the games aren't pirated as much. If you did this with video, I don't think that many users would care that they couldn't play the video on their computer, because watching a movie on a computer screen sucks. I think they'd get a lot further in protecting their content if the data couldn't even be read on a regular PC.
We're not talking about people who want to break encryption, we're talking about companies like Cyberlink who want to make programs like Power-HD-DVD/Power-BluRay, or other companies who may way to produce media players for windows just for legal competition. If nobody is allowed to make software that plays HD-DVD content, then nobody will be able to play it, and the format will fail.
Where exactly do you get a Mac Mini with a BluRay or HDDVD drive? Or maybe you could buy a USB/FW drive for it? But I don't think those exist yet either.
I specifically remember that you could have 2 factories, and 2 barracks, or any number thereof. And when you built the extra one, it would build units twice as fast. It's really fun to build 3 or 4 barracks, and watch the units just appear in a second.
But you don't need a firewall for that. Simply putting it behind a router with no ports forwarded will pretty much ensure that the script kiddies and worms can't get in.
This is exactly why it makes me so mad that you can't select as many units as you want. C&C was the first RTS I played, and frankly i think that modern RTSs could learn a lot from it. Not only could you select as many units as you wanted, but there was many other good features. You only had 1 resource to collect. After playing Warcraft 2, and having to manage 3 different resources, you didn't have time to do any actual fighting or exploring. I met some people who thought that starcraft was the best game ever, so I tried it out, but you could only select 12 units. Heaven forbid you wanted to move 13 units accross the map. Also was the problem with having to continually upgrade the buildings. You never knew which ones needed to be upgraded and when. you had to click on every one of them to find out when to upgrade. It's like playing Simcity and an RTS at the same time. I still think that C&C is one of the best, because it doesn't try to load you up with tons of stuff that make the game less fun.
I played a demo of an rts 5 years back, I think it was Warzone 2100. It had a lot of features to cut down on the amount of clicking and moving you had to do. You could set up "programs" of what you wanted to build, and it would build it. You could tell it to build 3 infantry, then a tank, then 2 humvees, and then some other stuff, and it would continually repeat that loop. I find that the biggest problem with RTS games is that you have to constant go back and forth to your base, building stuff, all same time trying to fight a war. Oh, and the other thing that bothers me, is not being able to select enough units. Many games are limited to 12 or something stupid like that. I want to be able to select 100 units and group them if I so choose.
Another feature that would work well for RTS is to have 2 or more people working on the same team (online obviously). Not 2 separate teams who happen to work together, but the same team where they can both control the same units. That way, you could have one guy in control of guarding the base, while the other guy fights the battle, and maybe a third person to go off on scouting missions.
I don't understand why apple employees should even have to be downloading it in the first place. You'd think that Apple would love to have employees testing out new products, and give it to them for free. I'm aware that apple likes to have a shroud of secrecy over everything it's doing, but it obviously isn't working if people can download it. So they might as well let the employees have it to test out, so they can tell everyone how good it is, and get people to buy it. Especially with software, which costs about $0 to give out to employees.
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I think that the reason that they don't want people running Mac OS on regular hardware is because of piracy. Most home users I know either run a pirated version of windows, or they run the OEM version that came with their computer. Microsoft is fine with all the piracy, because it supports their monopoly, and they make lots of money off the businesses that run windows. Mac OS is another thing entirely. If Mac OS was released for regular PCs, I think that the usage would spike, as there's probably a lot of people who would love to run it, but there probably aren't a lot of people who would pay for it. They would have a huge following, yet I don't think they'd see more than a 10% sales increase, and they would lose all their hardware sales. Since who would pay more for the exact same hardware (Apple makes very little of their own hardware, they actually just make shiny boxes for other people's hardware). I think that maybe it might work in the long run if they could get enough people running Mac OS to get more businesses on board, but I don't know if they could survive the short term profit loss that would happen if they abandoned their hardware business. Plus, I'm not sure how many businesses are interested in running Mac OS, since they seem to be be pushing towards a "less work, more play" kind of operating system.
I find that you get exactly the same results if you type a document in MS Word 97 and open it in MS Word 2000. Even though they are supposed to be completely compatible, the documents always look different. The same can also happen between the same version of MS Word if the computers have different printers attached to them. I don't know why the printer makes a difference, but it does. What it comes down to is the simple fact that .Doc is not a publishing format. It isn't meant to maintain 100% of the document formatting across all computers and it almost never will. Add that to the fact that it's proprietary, which means that OO.o will have a really hard time making anything look "exactly" the same. PDFs are different. They are built for the sole purpose of ensuring that the document looks the same on every computer using the document.
That's one case. I can find multiple retailers with the same price, all over my city. So either every retailer in the city isn't paying the levy, (which I find hard to believe), or they are paying the levy for me, which I also find hard to believe. I was very much under the impression that becuase of the low cost of CDRs, that there was no levy. Apparently there is one, yet I can't see how it's being accounted for.
Yet I still don't think that the levy is being charged. Almost every store sells CDRs for around $0.30 or less. This would mean that all these stores are losing money on CDRs. Also, the CDRs are the equivalent to what you would pay in the US for blank media, accounting for exchange rates. So, I guess i am wrong, and that there is a levy, yet i fail to see any instance of a consumer actually having to pay a levy. It's impossible for me to believe that they are charging a 21 cent levy on a product that only costs 24 cents for me to buy. And I'm not even trying to find the lowest price, just finding a low price that I know they can be bought at.
That really depends on who the providers are. I hardly ever remember my cable going out, yet people I talk to with satellite often have it lose signal, even with just cloud cover. Plus, sometimes having the first 80 channels in analog is a nice thing. Because you can split the cable and record stuff on your old VCR while watching something else, without getting a PVR. Oh, and analog often looks better than digital (cable or satellite) due to the compression. As long as there isn't any interfering broadcast channels (which are few and far between) where I am, I'd much rather have digital cable.
They can be used, does not they must be used. There are so many other uses of CDs that it's pretty much impossible to charge a levy. When you look at audio cassettes, there are very few uses apart from recording audio, so it's easy to argue that a levy should be charged. If there is a levy in Canada, how much is it? Because I can go to the local discount computer store and get 50 CDs for $12. That works out to $0.24 for each CD. The Canadian copyright board states that they levy on CDRs is supposed to be $0.21 per CD ($0.77 for CDR-Audio). I find it highly unlikely that the levy is being charged, and that I'm only paying $0.03 per CD including retail markup, transportation, manufacturing, and all the other costs of delivering CDRs to the end user. Also, to reiterate, there is absolutely no levy on DVD+/-Rs.
But under the DMCA, isn't that illegal? Isn't this what were arguing against here? Not the fact that it can be done, but rather something as honest as playing a DVD you own, in a player you own should actually be illegal.
The record company doesn't have to extract damages if the laws make it a criminal offense to break copyright protections. At that point, the record company doesn't even have to make a complaint. You local police could come and arrest you if they had significant evidence that you had broken the protections. I am unaware of the circumstances, but I think that copyright is a civil issue, whereas the DMCA makes it a criminal issue.
Joe Sixpack does care, to the extent that it starts to bother him. My GF recently got an iPod, and despite me telling her not to, still bought a couple tracks off iTunes. She quickly learned that she was unable to burn an "MP3" CD, to listen to them on her stereo. She also got quite a big scare when she deleted all her music and thought she had lost the music (she had just deleted them from the library, and they were still on the computer). She also gets quite annoyed when she plugs her iPod into another computer to charge it, and all the tracks get erased because that iPod isn't registered with that computer. She would also love to be able to just drag and drop from windows explorer right onto her iPod, but it seems as though that doesn't work either. Once DRM starts to infringe on people's rights enough, they will start to care. I'm still waiting for an MP3 player to come out that's actually better than the iPod, then watch all the iTunes users rise up, because they don't really own any of their music, but rather just own the right to play it on an iPod (yes i'm aware you can burn and rerip, but that loses quality on an already inferior quality copy).
As a Canadian, I can tell you that there are no such levies on CDs or DVDs, because they are argued as being used for computer data. This is why you can go to Walmart and get 100 DVD+/-Rs for $30. There was at one time, or maybe still is, some CD-Audio CDs, which are the same as regular CDRs except that they cost about $5 each an do contain the levy. I think they only cost so much because they are so wildly unpopular, due to the fact that they cost more than the regular CDRs, and do not offer any extra features. Some stand alone CD recorders will only record on this type of media.
Kind of like all those +4,+5 posts on Slashdot. :P
Yes, but the summary states that it is a similar HTML doc with lots of nonsense put at the end so that the hash matches. I very much doubt in this case that the files are the same. Plus, if you know something about the document, lit the size, or the fact that the file should be XHTML 1.0 compliant, without any trailing garbage that doesn't make any sense, then it makes the hash a whole lot harder to crack. The thing is, if you rely 100% on the hash, then you could get screwed, however, if you verify the hash, and then perform some additional check on the file, it's much harder to get screwed.
I'm not saying that they should protected, or that it's the "fair" thing to do, or that it wouldn't piss off a fair number of people, but in their own best interests, if they want to protect their content, wouldn't that be the easiest way? It seems that as soon as you bring computers into the mix, it becomes evindent, that eventually the DRM will be broken, and usually it's broken pretty easy. However, if the hardware to read the discs isn't available for PC, it makes it extremely hard to for the average Joe to copy the content. People don't want to spend days downloading DVD quality content, and they won't for some time to come. Yet, many of them, even the ones who aren't technically inclined, can easily put a disc in the drive, and click on the "rip" button.
They probably limited it, because by spending $300 on an extra barracks (which was very cheap, the equivalent of 3 infantry), you could create units at twice the speed. This kind of thing really changes the dynamics of the game from how strategic you can be, to how fast can you build an army.
Although you're right, I still don't think that many people would be disappointed by not being able to play the movies on their computer. In the end, I think that people like being able to play movies on their computer, but if the media companies have a choice between allowing computers and having to worry about everybody being able to easily pirate the content, and not allowing computers, and only having a select few top pirating agencies copy the content, then I don't understand why they allow these things to run on PCs. Think about it. Allowing CDs to be read on computers means CDs can easily be duplicated onto CDR, or stored on my Hard drive. Allowing DVDs to be read on computers means I can slip a DVD in the drive, run a program, and 30 minutes later have a copy of a movie I rented on a DVD-R. I believe the same will happen with HD-DVD and BluRay no matter how well they thought through their DRM schemes. When it comes to the user, I can understand that they want to play movies on a computer. What I can't understand is why the media companies keep on allowing it.
And if it is a bug in the JDK, then submit a bug report to Sun, and get them to fix it, so you don't have to keep on patching all the future versions of the JDK you happen to want to use.
So what? There's probably plenty of holes in the signed drivers that let you execute whatever code you want. Maybe you could just run it in a VM and have complete access to everything, even beneath the kernel level. I'm not convinced that there's anything that is in the 64-bit version that stops people from being able to circumvent the copy protection. Even if they only allow signed drivers, there's still lots of other ways in.
Which is why I don't even understand why they bother letting these formats play on a PC. The media companies are big enough to make up their own format, which can't be read on computers, except for the use of black market hardware. Think about Gamecube type media which is only playable on the the GC. Sure there's ways of modding the hardware, but for most users, that's too much trouble, and the games aren't pirated as much. If you did this with video, I don't think that many users would care that they couldn't play the video on their computer, because watching a movie on a computer screen sucks. I think they'd get a lot further in protecting their content if the data couldn't even be read on a regular PC.
We're not talking about people who want to break encryption, we're talking about companies like Cyberlink who want to make programs like Power-HD-DVD/Power-BluRay, or other companies who may way to produce media players for windows just for legal competition. If nobody is allowed to make software that plays HD-DVD content, then nobody will be able to play it, and the format will fail.
Where exactly do you get a Mac Mini with a BluRay or HDDVD drive? Or maybe you could buy a USB/FW drive for it? But I don't think those exist yet either.
I specifically remember that you could have 2 factories, and 2 barracks, or any number thereof. And when you built the extra one, it would build units twice as fast. It's really fun to build 3 or 4 barracks, and watch the units just appear in a second.
But you don't need a firewall for that. Simply putting it behind a router with no ports forwarded will pretty much ensure that the script kiddies and worms can't get in.
This is exactly why it makes me so mad that you can't select as many units as you want. C&C was the first RTS I played, and frankly i think that modern RTSs could learn a lot from it. Not only could you select as many units as you wanted, but there was many other good features. You only had 1 resource to collect. After playing Warcraft 2, and having to manage 3 different resources, you didn't have time to do any actual fighting or exploring. I met some people who thought that starcraft was the best game ever, so I tried it out, but you could only select 12 units. Heaven forbid you wanted to move 13 units accross the map. Also was the problem with having to continually upgrade the buildings. You never knew which ones needed to be upgraded and when. you had to click on every one of them to find out when to upgrade. It's like playing Simcity and an RTS at the same time. I still think that C&C is one of the best, because it doesn't try to load you up with tons of stuff that make the game less fun.
I played a demo of an rts 5 years back, I think it was Warzone 2100. It had a lot of features to cut down on the amount of clicking and moving you had to do. You could set up "programs" of what you wanted to build, and it would build it. You could tell it to build 3 infantry, then a tank, then 2 humvees, and then some other stuff, and it would continually repeat that loop. I find that the biggest problem with RTS games is that you have to constant go back and forth to your base, building stuff, all same time trying to fight a war. Oh, and the other thing that bothers me, is not being able to select enough units. Many games are limited to 12 or something stupid like that. I want to be able to select 100 units and group them if I so choose.
Another feature that would work well for RTS is to have 2 or more people working on the same team (online obviously). Not 2 separate teams who happen to work together, but the same team where they can both control the same units. That way, you could have one guy in control of guarding the base, while the other guy fights the battle, and maybe a third person to go off on scouting missions.
I don't understand why apple employees should even have to be downloading it in the first place. You'd think that Apple would love to have employees testing out new products, and give it to them for free. I'm aware that apple likes to have a shroud of secrecy over everything it's doing, but it obviously isn't working if people can download it. So they might as well let the employees have it to test out, so they can tell everyone how good it is, and get people to buy it. Especially with software, which costs about $0 to give out to employees.