That's true, the cost of using MS media could have been huge. That said, I think the biggest mistake they made with UMD (especially UMD Video) was not including video out with the original PSP.
It was stupid to sell movies on UMD for $20 (the price of a DVD) which at the time could only be watched on the PSP's tiny screen. If people had the option to hook up their PSP's to their TV and watch the movies on a bigger screen, then I could definitely see a larger proportion of people shifting money from DVD purchases to UMD purchases (and thus made the $20 pricing more acceptable).
Heck, UMD's could have made inroads replacing DVD's for long car trips (by using external screens connected to the PSP's video out).
Of course with how cheap flash memory is, the point is now moot.
I own a PSP (got it as a gift) and enjoy the ability to play games I own in physical form (Genesis, SNES, NES cartridges) in an easy and portable format. It's like having a Sega Nomad with awesome battery life and the ability to play games from many other consoles.
If people are going to generalize and say that hacked PSPs are only used for piracy then you might as well lump in ipods and any other mp3 player that allows you to play non-drm'd media since after all, *nobody* uses those to play their backed up CDs... Those same people may as well support the position that it's wrong to use snippets of music from your own collection as ringtones, and that you must pay to use your music on each device you own.
Of course, by trying to re-patch PSPs with firmware downloads from new games, Sony has ensured that I won't buy any games for it. Oh and about the DS flashcard I've considered getting one for my wife, it would allow her to keep several games in her DS while the originals are safe at home.
I've always thought that these companies should get their heads out of their asses, help develop emulators and open their own ROM app store. Sell old game ROMS for.99 ea or bundles that are $4.95 which include 5-10 games. This would allow them to sell games for *EVERY SYSTEM* that has an emulator! If it works for music, it should work with classic games.
This would include PSPs, Wii's, Game Parks, Mac, Windows, Linux, XBOXs, etc, etc! They could even include ROMS for games as promotional items included with whatever their newest game is!
I'll give another example: Hulu streams (full screen) are choppy on my HTPC while 1080p videos will barely peg the CPU (thanks VDPAU!) and 720p will play just fine w/o VDPAU enabled (30-70% CPU usage).
Also add to this that MythVodka (MythTV Hulu app which no longer works due to changes at Hulu) could play Hulu videos smoothly. Keep in mind that MythVodka had to first download the video using a script, convert it on the fly to some other format, and *then* play it and fullscreen it! All of that consumed less CPU cycles than simply trying to fullscreen Hulu videos using flash!
This has been asked before, but... where's the Linux version? And will we need a liquid cooled Phenom x4 processor to render the Adobe video in full screen?
The main issue is that they had DVD's with them in space, but they never thought of making sure they had the capability of playing it before going up. Gotta wonder how much time, fuel, and aggravation they could have saved if instead of coming up with a DVDs (though the article didn't say how many) they instead came up with a 32gb thumbdrive filled with h264 compressed movies and the necessary software.
If you want an example, just open your audio mixer and try to enable digital out. Now do this in the shoes of a user who has *no clue* what IEC98 is...
Or find a current scanner that works with Linux. While there's the list at xsane's website, you have to dig through tons and tons of models that are no longer easily found in retail to find the few that'll work (and are buyable).
Lastly, I can't count the endless grief from programs that fail silently for my non-technical friends. "Just run it from the command line and get to get an actual error message" is not intuitive to them (or most users). All they see is a bouncy icon/ busy icon, then nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan and satisfied Linux user since 2003, but I'm also very technically competent and *still* get frustrated from time to time with issues which should have been solved a long loooong time ago in the interest of usability and newbie friendlyness.
Some readers over there got a hold of their phone numbers and were dissecting their automated phone system (figuring out all the extensions, unprotected inboxes, etc).
Best Ideas from that thread:
1. Put up billboard ads with their number with the following text: "If you give up when we hang up, you're not what we want. $120 per hour cash. (800) 499-5711"
2. Put up personal ads in Craigslist with their number
If this was coupled with the phone company appending the incoming Caller ID to your call record then it would be easy to enforce.
Say you get a telemarketing call with a bogus caller ID, you simply request the phone company send you that information for that time and date and with that you can prove that the company was violating this law (since it would be a matter of record). They would have the originating phone number + the ID they used on a piece of paper you can then forward to the necessary parties.
Re:first weeks is exclusively "warez"
on
Why Bother With DRM?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"same effect as buying the game second hand as far as the publisher is concerned"
The publishers need to focus on games that have replay value (so more people will want to keep them) and being competitive (adaptive pricing). The reason used video game stores exist is that many people aren't willing to pay $50 to $60 for a new game.
Now if PC game companies were more aggressive with their pricing then they could compete with the used market. Just look at console games "Greatest Hits", "Players Choice", and "Platinum" titles. If a game has a 2nd hand market, many publishers will re-release the game at $20 to $30, taking the wind out of the 2nd hand market (why pay $17.49 for a used copy of game X when you can get it new for $20!).
"need permission from their friendly gene provider to reproduce."
Nah, just like the Canadian RIAA got a tax passed on blank CDs, the gene providers can lobby congress to put a tax on liquor, massage oils, and Barry White CDs.
Agreed, these should be payments done on behalf of the Pirate Bay's fine. And they definitely should have gone about this in a different way. They should have started a "Save the Pirate Bay Fund!". There they could have "innocently requested" that people help pay the fines incurred by TPB and do so by making the payments directly to the law firm since the TBP themselves won't accept donations.
Somewhere it could be indicated that the owners of TPB would be very insulted if any individual paid more than anybody else and as such everybody is encouraged pay the minimum (1 RUK) as equals.
They could have called it "1 RUK, 30 million strong!"
Then they could of had plausible deniability when confronted about their supporters costing the law firm more than they collected.
It should be: At $.40 a mile a 30 mile commute each way costs you $12 each way and $24 round trip (60 miles *.40/mile), plus tolls, plus whatever your driving time which you can't use doing anything else. So your 5 day a week commute comes up to $120 or about $520 a month ($120*4.333 weeks/month).
That's a good point, but I prefer to see it as my car having a lifespan of say 250,000 miles after which it may be more costly to repair/maintain than to buy a newer, less failure prone model.
So for ease of calculation lets say it's a $25,000 car, then that's $.10 a mile. Then add in gas, (Oil Change)/3500 miles, (Tire Cost)/50,000 miles, other scheduled maintenance, etc and you get the true cost per mile to use your car.
So hypothetically if you come up with $.40 a mile then your 30 mile commute each way costs you $12 round trip (60 miles *.40/mile), plus tolls, plus whatever your driving time which you can't use doing anything else. So your 5 day a week commute comes up to $60 or about $260 a month.
You can also calculate the "salvage amount" (what you expect your car to be worth when you sell it to a teenager's parent, trade it in, or charge people to whack it with a baseball bat) and subtract that from the initial cost to determine the cost per mile.
Of course it's true cars also depreciate per year that you own them, but the assumption here is that you plan on keeping your car until the end of its (usable) life.
I used this when I was commuting to school and realized I was spending almost as much in my adjusted commute cost as it would be to simply get an apartment next to the campus (not to mention the hour and a half I ended up saving each day not driving).
Fwipps said:"Obligatory car analogy: If you owned a rental car company, would you outfit your fleet with a self-destruct procedure that could be initiated remotely?"
Great, I can now see the car companies doing this, and taking it one step further. After you rent your car, they setup an auction on eBay:
"Utterly Destroy Fwipp now! rare! low reserve!
You are bidding on the rights to remote detonate the vehicle being driven by Fwipps. Detonation will take place *after* payment is received and verified. Additional options available. Paypal only. Email with any questions!!!
Note the reserve price covers the cost of one 2008 Ford Festiva."
Now to see if the XBMC and MythTV plugin (MythVodka) are working again, so far a quick google search is bringing up pages upon pages of posts of when it stopped working in February....
For the uninformed (mods, looking at you), among other things, the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act (unless I've mixed up Supreme Court Cases) puts the burden on the manufacturer to prove that an aftermarket part or enhancement caused the defect for which the product needs to be serviced.
The homebrew channel would fall under this and since it is easy to remove be no cause for voiding a warranty (like Ford refusing an engine repair because you installed an aftermarket radio...).
Best example of this I've seen was American Pie 2. The movie was perfect as it was cut in the theater. The extended version however dragged scenes (and jokes) for way to long, had extended akward moments, and really felt amateurish at times.
I ended up selling that one online and purchasing the theater cut.
Slashdot Mirror
That's true, the cost of using MS media could have been huge. That said, I think the biggest mistake they made with UMD (especially UMD Video) was not including video out with the original PSP.
It was stupid to sell movies on UMD for $20 (the price of a DVD) which at the time could only be watched on the PSP's tiny screen. If people had the option to hook up their PSP's to their TV and watch the movies on a bigger screen, then I could definitely see a larger proportion of people shifting money from DVD purchases to UMD purchases (and thus made the $20 pricing more acceptable).
Heck, UMD's could have made inroads replacing DVD's for long car trips (by using external screens connected to the PSP's video out).
Of course with how cheap flash memory is, the point is now moot.
I own a PSP (got it as a gift) and enjoy the ability to play games I own in physical form (Genesis, SNES, NES cartridges) in an easy and portable format. It's like having a Sega Nomad with awesome battery life and the ability to play games from many other consoles.
If people are going to generalize and say that hacked PSPs are only used for piracy then you might as well lump in ipods and any other mp3 player that allows you to play non-drm'd media since after all, *nobody* uses those to play their backed up CDs... Those same people may as well support the position that it's wrong to use snippets of music from your own collection as ringtones, and that you must pay to use your music on each device you own.
Of course, by trying to re-patch PSPs with firmware downloads from new games, Sony has ensured that I won't buy any games for it. Oh and about the DS flashcard I've considered getting one for my wife, it would allow her to keep several games in her DS while the originals are safe at home.
I've always thought that these companies should get their heads out of their asses, help develop emulators and open their own ROM app store. Sell old game ROMS for .99 ea or bundles that are $4.95 which include 5-10 games. This would allow them to sell games for *EVERY SYSTEM* that has an emulator! If it works for music, it should work with classic games.
This would include PSPs, Wii's, Game Parks, Mac, Windows, Linux, XBOXs, etc, etc! They could even include ROMS for games as promotional items included with whatever their newest game is!
"What does the Federal Trade Commission have to do with..."
From the article, they were dealing with (among other things):
"illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams"
and:
"the FTC's authority gives it the power to shut down companies that appear to be engaged in unfair and deceptive practices"
"the US specifically banned light bulbs that generate between 310-2600 lumens"
The future looks dim indeed....
I'll give another example: Hulu streams (full screen) are choppy on my HTPC while 1080p videos will barely peg the CPU (thanks VDPAU!) and 720p will play just fine w/o VDPAU enabled (30-70% CPU usage).
Also add to this that MythVodka (MythTV Hulu app which no longer works due to changes at Hulu) could play Hulu videos smoothly. Keep in mind that MythVodka had to first download the video using a script, convert it on the fly to some other format, and *then* play it and fullscreen it! All of that consumed less CPU cycles than simply trying to fullscreen Hulu videos using flash!
This has been asked before, but... where's the Linux version? And will we need a liquid cooled Phenom x4 processor to render the Adobe video in full screen?
The main issue is that they had DVD's with them in space, but they never thought of making sure they had the capability of playing it before going up. Gotta wonder how much time, fuel, and aggravation they could have saved if instead of coming up with a DVDs (though the article didn't say how many) they instead came up with a 32gb thumbdrive filled with h264 compressed movies and the necessary software.
True, so amazingly true...
If you want an example, just open your audio mixer and try to enable digital out. Now do this in the shoes of a user who has *no clue* what IEC98 is...
Or find a current scanner that works with Linux. While there's the list at xsane's website, you have to dig through tons and tons of models that are no longer easily found in retail to find the few that'll work (and are buyable).
Lastly, I can't count the endless grief from programs that fail silently for my non-technical friends. "Just run it from the command line and get to get an actual error message" is not intuitive to them (or most users). All they see is a bouncy icon/ busy icon, then nothing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan and satisfied Linux user since 2003, but I'm also very technically competent and *still* get frustrated from time to time with issues which should have been solved a long loooong time ago in the interest of usability and newbie friendlyness.
Holy crap check out this thread (and load ALL the comments, it gets really good near the bottom):
http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8i1u7/want_the_phone_number_to_the_your_cars_warranty/
Some readers over there got a hold of their phone numbers and were dissecting their automated phone system (figuring out all the extensions, unprotected inboxes, etc).
Best Ideas from that thread:
1. Put up billboard ads with their number with the following text:
"If you give up when we hang up, you're not what we want. $120 per hour cash. (800) 499-5711"
2. Put up personal ads in Craigslist with their number
3. Call them to sell them home insurance
4. Set a fax machine on autodial on them.
5. Call and ask about the auto warranties, then put them on hold and play this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3yiSb6s3AY
6. Call them with one of the popular sound boards (try to get them to sell a warranty to Detective John Kimball).
etc
If this was coupled with the phone company appending the incoming Caller ID to your call record then it would be easy to enforce.
Say you get a telemarketing call with a bogus caller ID, you simply request the phone company send you that information for that time and date and with that you can prove that the company was violating this law (since it would be a matter of record). They would have the originating phone number + the ID they used on a piece of paper you can then forward to the necessary parties.
"same effect as buying the game second hand as far as the publisher is concerned"
The publishers need to focus on games that have replay value (so more people will want to keep them) and being competitive (adaptive pricing). The reason used video game stores exist is that many people aren't willing to pay $50 to $60 for a new game.
Now if PC game companies were more aggressive with their pricing then they could compete with the used market. Just look at console games "Greatest Hits", "Players Choice", and "Platinum" titles. If a game has a 2nd hand market, many publishers will re-release the game at $20 to $30, taking the wind out of the 2nd hand market (why pay $17.49 for a used copy of game X when you can get it new for $20!).
"need permission from their friendly gene provider to reproduce."
Nah, just like the Canadian RIAA got a tax passed on blank CDs, the gene providers can lobby congress to put a tax on liquor, massage oils, and Barry White CDs.
SW€€T! NOW I CAN US€ THIS ALL TH€ TIM€!
MS is just getting enough cash to run a round of 2 million "Laptop Hunters" commercials.
"We told everybody in the state of New Mexico, you find a laptop for under $2000, you keep it."
Agreed, these should be payments done on behalf of the Pirate Bay's fine. And they definitely should have gone about this in a different way. They should have started a "Save the Pirate Bay Fund!". There they could have "innocently requested" that people help pay the fines incurred by TPB and do so by making the payments directly to the law firm since the TBP themselves won't accept donations.
Somewhere it could be indicated that the owners of TPB would be very insulted if any individual paid more than anybody else and as such everybody is encouraged pay the minimum (1 RUK) as equals.
They could have called it "1 RUK, 30 million strong!"
Then they could of had plausible deniability when confronted about their supporters costing the law firm more than they collected.
The next "I'm a PC, I'm a Mac" commercial is gonna rule!
Mac: Umm... PC.... why are you stabbing yourself repeatedly with that pen...
Gah, math fail.
It should be: .40/mile), plus tolls, plus whatever your driving time which you can't use doing anything else. So your 5 day a week commute comes up to $120 or about $520 a month ($120*4.333 weeks/month).
At $.40 a mile a 30 mile commute each way costs you $12 each way and $24 round trip (60 miles *
That's a good point, but I prefer to see it as my car having a lifespan of say 250,000 miles after which it may be more costly to repair/maintain than to buy a newer, less failure prone model.
So for ease of calculation lets say it's a $25,000 car, then that's $ .10 a mile. Then add in gas, (Oil Change)/3500 miles, (Tire Cost)/50,000 miles, other scheduled maintenance, etc and you get the true cost per mile to use your car.
So hypothetically if you come up with $.40 a mile then your 30 mile commute each way costs you $12 round trip (60 miles * .40/mile), plus tolls, plus whatever your driving time which you can't use doing anything else. So your 5 day a week commute comes up to $60 or about $260 a month.
You can also calculate the "salvage amount" (what you expect your car to be worth when you sell it to a teenager's parent, trade it in, or charge people to whack it with a baseball bat) and subtract that from the initial cost to determine the cost per mile.
Of course it's true cars also depreciate per year that you own them, but the assumption here is that you plan on keeping your car until the end of its (usable) life.
I used this when I was commuting to school and realized I was spending almost as much in my adjusted commute cost as it would be to simply get an apartment next to the campus (not to mention the hour and a half I ended up saving each day not driving).
Fwipps said:"Obligatory car analogy: If you owned a rental car company, would you outfit your fleet with a self-destruct procedure that could be initiated remotely?"
Great, I can now see the car companies doing this, and taking it one step further. After you rent your car, they setup an auction on eBay:
"Utterly Destroy Fwipp now! rare! low reserve!
You are bidding on the rights to remote detonate the vehicle being driven by Fwipps. Detonation will take place *after* payment is received and verified. Additional options available. Paypal only. Email with any questions!!!
Note the reserve price covers the cost of one 2008 Ford Festiva."
Please tell me the soundtrack will be left alone! New Marvel V Capcom 2 players need to be "taken for a ride" and encouraged to "don't give up".
Now to see if the XBMC and MythTV plugin (MythVodka) are working again, so far a quick google search is bringing up pages upon pages of posts of when it stopped working in February....
For the uninformed (mods, looking at you), among other things, the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act (unless I've mixed up Supreme Court Cases) puts the burden on the manufacturer to prove that an aftermarket part or enhancement caused the defect for which the product needs to be serviced.
The homebrew channel would fall under this and since it is easy to remove be no cause for voiding a warranty (like Ford refusing an engine repair because you installed an aftermarket radio...).
Doesn't Europe have the equivalent of the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act ?
Best example of this I've seen was American Pie 2. The movie was perfect as it was cut in the theater. The extended version however dragged scenes (and jokes) for way to long, had extended akward moments, and really felt amateurish at times.
I ended up selling that one online and purchasing the theater cut.
This is Lauren. She told us she wanted a stable OS with an Office Suite and some photo editing software for $0. We told her, you find it, you keep it.