Even better, do everything through Tor or another anonymous proxy, and document the security measures you're taking. Set up a deadman's switch email to be sent out to news organizations and some trustworthy friends in the event that you do get investigated, detailing exactly the security measures you took, and what laws and constitutional rights the NSA would have to circumvent to find you anyway.
Artists don't literally sign their name away with record deals. The most they usually do is sign an agreement for X number of cds, and some terms that get them completely shafted on royalties. They CAN shift labels, though, and often do so even without consumer backlash over this kind of thing.
Exactly. Pirating music that gets put out with these crap restrictions just lets them yell about how they need even stricter hardware controls. Just refuse to even LISTEN to anything that's released this way. Don't pirate it at all. If you hear a song on the radio and like it, but the disc is rootkitted and DRMed to hell and back, send the artist an email telling them how much you like their music, but regretfully can't purchase it because of the copy protection. I guarantee artists will flee labels that insist on sticking with this ridiculous idea.
As for the difficulty of the hardware... I've seen about twice as many games announced for the Revolution as for the PS3, and even if I missed something, early announcements don't necessarily indicate what the industry is going to find cost effective down the road. If the Revolution costs 1/10th as much to develop a game for, as many people are predicting, and sells as well as many people expect, it may just not be worth it to KEEP making games for the PS3 after the first wave ships.
I AM somewhat of a film hobbyist, actually. And from what you're saying, I'm not sure what you want exactly. The average television, viewed at the average distance, is going to cause you to squint to see small faces emoting, whether it's HD or SD. Before you get to the point that resolution becomes a problem, you're going to get into problems with the size of the image. Doesn't matter how much resolution you have, you can't see the expression on a face the size of a quarter halfway across the room. The human eye just isn't that good. This is what I don't understand... HD is NOT going to allow some fantastic new shots that weren't possible before, because the size is the issue, not the resolution. There is no new range of expression that's going to come from HD, just sharper images portraying the same range we have already. The improvements in HD are at such a fine scale that they make absolutely no impact to the overall art form. It's like debating using a.1 inch pencil tip or a.05 inch pencil tip when you're drawing a pointilist image on a 30 inch canvas. It's all background noise, not content.
Ok, you bought it and it works well. But does it work as well as another less heavily marketed choice? Does it accomplish something that you could have done without buying this particular item? Or is it something you could have gone without entirely? The thing that freaks me out is, with advertising, my opinions are no longer my own. That's why I started to avoid it as much as possible, and although it may be a coincidence, the amount of stuff I buy has gone down since. I'm not saying salesmen are evil, but a lot of the stuff that the average American purchases seems quite pointless to me, and it seems that they buy it because advertising tells them they need it to be happy, rather than because it's something they will actually use.
Please note I didn't say I approve of the Web 2.0 hype;-)
And yes, it's a very old concept that the sites that do best are those that use member input. There's simply no way to generate as much content as a dedicated user-base will, especially for cheap.
You're right, binary file formats present a problem. It still seems to me, though, that it would be simpler for the application to provide a diff utility for its custom file format, than to reimplement version control all over again. Archiving binary blobs along with change comments seems like all you'd need, provided the authority on the format could show you the differences between two documents.
It depends how much you're affected by marketing. Would you rather see ads for things you would never buy in a million years, or for things that you were thinking about anyway? If I see ads for something I later purchase, how do I know whether I bought it because it really was the best choice, or because I really needed it? How do I know how much of my decision was the subconcious effect of the advertising? Personally, that freaks me out.
They're giving it up voluntarily, but most probably weren't anticipating that what they gave up would be used to target them for marketing, especially since it's going to happen after the company is bought out by a 3rd party. They were definitely irresponsible to just put their lives into this software, but the expectation at the time was not that some nameless corporation would be able to datamine their list of friends.
Part of the definition of Web 2.0 is traditionally, "social networking, user-contributed content, etc". Building your sites not to run off YOUR content, but building it to run off user-submitted content, and user-created connections. I'd guess that's what the author is referencing. It's the more philosophical side of 2.0, separate from the technical details of asynchronous access and client-side functionality.
For god's sake, please, PLEASE let them not cram yet another change tracker into a format that shouldn't support it. Change management already exists in so many forms it's not even funny (cvs, svn, source safe, etc), and works off the shelf with any document format. If people would just learn to put existing tools together instead of shoehorning all functionality into every application, things would be a lot simpler.
That's a ridiculous claim, though. The resolution on SD-DVDs is more than enough to communicate everything you list there, and more. If I had to name something that I think would help communicate better through film, it would be HDRI. Resolution is more than adequate as it is, and peoples' lackadaisical attitude towards upgrading shows that a lot of people agree. It's not that they're not visual people either -- which is an extremely elitist attitude by the way -- it's that the difference in HD is such that you have to be actively watching for it to even notice. It's certainly not worth the thousands of dollars the industry wants each of us to invest in it.
Only hardcovers cost $25, you can always wait for paperback. Any decent book will take significantly longer than 5 hours. Not if you're reading the latest Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel crap-fest, granted, but REAL books can take 12-15 hours to finish, even if you're a fast reader (see: anything by Vernor Vinge). And finally, while they cost less to produce, you're paying for a commodity that's much less popular. Video games sell orders of magnitude more than most books, so you're paying to be part of a pretty small audience.
Yes, although I agree most are. My point though, is that movies are about the overall image. It's about the actor's facial expressions and mannerisms, not how well-defined every hair on their head is. From that viewpoint, SD resolution is perfectly fine for conveying everything you need to enjoy the experience. HD doesn't make a damn bit of difference to me, and I suspect not to most other people either.
Not once have I been watching tv and thought, "wow, I'd like to see the pores on the actor's nose with just a little more clarity". If they want to offer it to us for the same price as regular, they're welcome to, but the fact remains that "resolution" isn't a selling point for most people when it comes to television.
Not quite so ridiculous when you remember that the Hypertransport system on newer motherboards can transfer around 1000 MB/s between main memory and the graphics card...
THIS gen... but with backwards compat broken on the PS3, and relegated to a "case by case" basis like the PS2, how much of that library will translate has yet to be seen, and how many people will go through the hardware hassles to release new ones is an even bigger unknown.
Yeah, YOU wouldn't pay for them as open source, but would YOU pay for them if they were closed source? And more importantly, would the people who DO pay for them as closed source pay for them under the GPL?
Amen, brother. I've had Speakeasy for about 6 months, and I've NEVER not been able to get at least the bandwidth promised in my service plan.
I too have been curious how this Net Neutrality crap will affect them. I don't know whether they have direct connections to the major peering points, or if they're just reselling Verizon bandwidth. If they're actually running their own Tier 1 service, I'd expect they can just ignore the whole thing and keep up with the old model, which would make me respect them all the more. Still don't know for sure, though.
Why do you think that selling GPL software won't make money? Why would it make any less than selling non-GPL software? You can already pirate any piece of software on the market, open sourced or not. Do you really think there's THAT many people out there thinking, "gosh, I'd like to get all this software for free, but it's so dang illegal. But now that this guy's selling a piece of software I like and it's LEGAL for me to download from a third party for free, well, I'm all over it."? No. The people that pay for software will pay regardless of the license, and the people who pirate commercial software will find a 3rd party providing your GPL software for free. The only difference is you won't have legal recourse to stop them, but what small developer can afford to try that anyway?
Actually, it does frequently pay the developer for adding on features and documentation/training, if 3rd parties want them. But that's beside the point -- you can sell GPL software that you wrote correctly from scratch. Sure, other people can try to sell it as well, but they can't guarantee support from the person who wrote it in the first place. So sell a GPL product. The people who would pirate it anyway will get it for free elsewhere, and you'll make money selling to those who want the option of support from the original developer, as well as added interest in their feature requests for the next version.
Agreed, but the entire point of the constitution and especially the bill of rights is to minimize that behavior by the government. Too bad we don't really apply them anymore...
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Even better, do everything through Tor or another anonymous proxy, and document the security measures you're taking. Set up a deadman's switch email to be sent out to news organizations and some trustworthy friends in the event that you do get investigated, detailing exactly the security measures you took, and what laws and constitutional rights the NSA would have to circumvent to find you anyway.
Artists don't literally sign their name away with record deals. The most they usually do is sign an agreement for X number of cds, and some terms that get them completely shafted on royalties. They CAN shift labels, though, and often do so even without consumer backlash over this kind of thing.
Exactly. Pirating music that gets put out with these crap restrictions just lets them yell about how they need even stricter hardware controls. Just refuse to even LISTEN to anything that's released this way. Don't pirate it at all. If you hear a song on the radio and like it, but the disc is rootkitted and DRMed to hell and back, send the artist an email telling them how much you like their music, but regretfully can't purchase it because of the copy protection. I guarantee artists will flee labels that insist on sticking with this ridiculous idea.
Backwards compatibility is yet another promise that Sony may end up breaking, wholy or in part. http://www.gamespot.com/news/6136677.html
As for the difficulty of the hardware... I've seen about twice as many games announced for the Revolution as for the PS3, and even if I missed something, early announcements don't necessarily indicate what the industry is going to find cost effective down the road. If the Revolution costs 1/10th as much to develop a game for, as many people are predicting, and sells as well as many people expect, it may just not be worth it to KEEP making games for the PS3 after the first wave ships.
I AM somewhat of a film hobbyist, actually. And from what you're saying, I'm not sure what you want exactly. The average television, viewed at the average distance, is going to cause you to squint to see small faces emoting, whether it's HD or SD. Before you get to the point that resolution becomes a problem, you're going to get into problems with the size of the image. Doesn't matter how much resolution you have, you can't see the expression on a face the size of a quarter halfway across the room. The human eye just isn't that good. This is what I don't understand... HD is NOT going to allow some fantastic new shots that weren't possible before, because the size is the issue, not the resolution. There is no new range of expression that's going to come from HD, just sharper images portraying the same range we have already. The improvements in HD are at such a fine scale that they make absolutely no impact to the overall art form. It's like debating using a .1 inch pencil tip or a .05 inch pencil tip when you're drawing a pointilist image on a 30 inch canvas. It's all background noise, not content.
Ok, you bought it and it works well. But does it work as well as another less heavily marketed choice? Does it accomplish something that you could have done without buying this particular item? Or is it something you could have gone without entirely? The thing that freaks me out is, with advertising, my opinions are no longer my own. That's why I started to avoid it as much as possible, and although it may be a coincidence, the amount of stuff I buy has gone down since. I'm not saying salesmen are evil, but a lot of the stuff that the average American purchases seems quite pointless to me, and it seems that they buy it because advertising tells them they need it to be happy, rather than because it's something they will actually use.
Please note I didn't say I approve of the Web 2.0 hype ;-)
And yes, it's a very old concept that the sites that do best are those that use member input. There's simply no way to generate as much content as a dedicated user-base will, especially for cheap.
To respond to both you and your previous sibling:
You're right, binary file formats present a problem. It still seems to me, though, that it would be simpler for the application to provide a diff utility for its custom file format, than to reimplement version control all over again. Archiving binary blobs along with change comments seems like all you'd need, provided the authority on the format could show you the differences between two documents.
It depends how much you're affected by marketing. Would you rather see ads for things you would never buy in a million years, or for things that you were thinking about anyway? If I see ads for something I later purchase, how do I know whether I bought it because it really was the best choice, or because I really needed it? How do I know how much of my decision was the subconcious effect of the advertising? Personally, that freaks me out.
They're giving it up voluntarily, but most probably weren't anticipating that what they gave up would be used to target them for marketing, especially since it's going to happen after the company is bought out by a 3rd party. They were definitely irresponsible to just put their lives into this software, but the expectation at the time was not that some nameless corporation would be able to datamine their list of friends.
Part of the definition of Web 2.0 is traditionally, "social networking, user-contributed content, etc". Building your sites not to run off YOUR content, but building it to run off user-submitted content, and user-created connections. I'd guess that's what the author is referencing. It's the more philosophical side of 2.0, separate from the technical details of asynchronous access and client-side functionality.
For god's sake, please, PLEASE let them not cram yet another change tracker into a format that shouldn't support it. Change management already exists in so many forms it's not even funny (cvs, svn, source safe, etc), and works off the shelf with any document format. If people would just learn to put existing tools together instead of shoehorning all functionality into every application, things would be a lot simpler.
That's a ridiculous claim, though. The resolution on SD-DVDs is more than enough to communicate everything you list there, and more. If I had to name something that I think would help communicate better through film, it would be HDRI. Resolution is more than adequate as it is, and peoples' lackadaisical attitude towards upgrading shows that a lot of people agree. It's not that they're not visual people either -- which is an extremely elitist attitude by the way -- it's that the difference in HD is such that you have to be actively watching for it to even notice. It's certainly not worth the thousands of dollars the industry wants each of us to invest in it.
Only hardcovers cost $25, you can always wait for paperback. Any decent book will take significantly longer than 5 hours. Not if you're reading the latest Tom Clancy or Danielle Steel crap-fest, granted, but REAL books can take 12-15 hours to finish, even if you're a fast reader (see: anything by Vernor Vinge). And finally, while they cost less to produce, you're paying for a commodity that's much less popular. Video games sell orders of magnitude more than most books, so you're paying to be part of a pretty small audience.
Yes, although I agree most are. My point though, is that movies are about the overall image. It's about the actor's facial expressions and mannerisms, not how well-defined every hair on their head is. From that viewpoint, SD resolution is perfectly fine for conveying everything you need to enjoy the experience. HD doesn't make a damn bit of difference to me, and I suspect not to most other people either.
Not once have I been watching tv and thought, "wow, I'd like to see the pores on the actor's nose with just a little more clarity". If they want to offer it to us for the same price as regular, they're welcome to, but the fact remains that "resolution" isn't a selling point for most people when it comes to television.
Not quite so ridiculous when you remember that the Hypertransport system on newer motherboards can transfer around 1000 MB/s between main memory and the graphics card...
THIS gen... but with backwards compat broken on the PS3, and relegated to a "case by case" basis like the PS2, how much of that library will translate has yet to be seen, and how many people will go through the hardware hassles to release new ones is an even bigger unknown.
It only costs $90 in the first place... dunno how you expect to save $200 unless you help yourself to some other office supplies as well...
You're not actually making a point for WHY it would be lower, though... you're just saying it would without giving any reasons.
Yeah, YOU wouldn't pay for them as open source, but would YOU pay for them if they were closed source? And more importantly, would the people who DO pay for them as closed source pay for them under the GPL?
Amen, brother. I've had Speakeasy for about 6 months, and I've NEVER not been able to get at least the bandwidth promised in my service plan.
I too have been curious how this Net Neutrality crap will affect them. I don't know whether they have direct connections to the major peering points, or if they're just reselling Verizon bandwidth. If they're actually running their own Tier 1 service, I'd expect they can just ignore the whole thing and keep up with the old model, which would make me respect them all the more. Still don't know for sure, though.
Why do you think that selling GPL software won't make money? Why would it make any less than selling non-GPL software? You can already pirate any piece of software on the market, open sourced or not. Do you really think there's THAT many people out there thinking, "gosh, I'd like to get all this software for free, but it's so dang illegal. But now that this guy's selling a piece of software I like and it's LEGAL for me to download from a third party for free, well, I'm all over it."? No. The people that pay for software will pay regardless of the license, and the people who pirate commercial software will find a 3rd party providing your GPL software for free. The only difference is you won't have legal recourse to stop them, but what small developer can afford to try that anyway?
Actually, it does frequently pay the developer for adding on features and documentation/training, if 3rd parties want them. But that's beside the point -- you can sell GPL software that you wrote correctly from scratch. Sure, other people can try to sell it as well, but they can't guarantee support from the person who wrote it in the first place. So sell a GPL product. The people who would pirate it anyway will get it for free elsewhere, and you'll make money selling to those who want the option of support from the original developer, as well as added interest in their feature requests for the next version.
Agreed, but the entire point of the constitution and especially the bill of rights is to minimize that behavior by the government. Too bad we don't really apply them anymore...