The issue is further confused by the mobile ecosystem itself. In a lot of cases, whether an app is "trojan malware" or "legitimately ad-supported product" has become a question of destination rather than behavior: the former will send your phone number, email addresses and/or contact list to some strange server in the far east, the latter will send them to AdMob et al... both major platforms have the same philosophy, it's not an Android/iOS fanboy issue.
In all my years of coding, I've never been able to "un-taint" my mindset, so learning any new language has always boiled down to either "learning it like C, but <differences>" or "learning it like perl, but <differences>"
The most heart-wrenching part of the polygon article was finding out that Amy Hennig was going to be working on a new Star Wars game, but it'll be published by those bastards at EA.
After her work on LOK, I would have loved to see what came of that...
And what do you suggest knowing about it can accomplish? The number of politicians who are the ones to benefit from the broken system barely even constitute statistical noise.
This bullshit about it being the voters' fault is because morons DON'T understand Duverger's law and still cling to the delusion that everything would be unicorn farts and fairy semen if everyone would just "catch on" and vote for fringe 3rd parties.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Hen Housing Project still just gets to choose from two choices for the Vulpine HOA.
Another quirk with GoG's model is that its a bit at odds with paid expansions. For old games, all the expansions that are are ever going to come out have come out, but what about expansions / paid DLC for current still in production indy games. -- And I believe I read its one of the main reasons AI War, for example, is not on GoG. I'm not sure what the solution here is.
How so? GOG already has a number of DLCs and both free and paid expansions (I've only bothered committing the new Shadowrun expansion to memory, though). Where's the issue between that and the No DRM policy?
I can see losing the classic iPods - the cell phone makes them redundant,
Clearly, you don't understand the use case of the iPod Classic: an order of magnitude more storage than a 32GB cell phone is hardly made redundant. The shuffle is more redundant, even if you can personally find a case where you like to use it.
I'm still amazed that Apple, of all companies, is the one that's still actually catering to that segment. I haven't seen another HDD-based music player in years.
"Left" doesn't mean "freedom from opression by the rich and powerful". Never has. It means "authoritarianism".
Bullshit.It means "the other guys" to someone who self-identifies as "right," nothing more. ALL facets of the US political spectrum are high up on the "authoritarian" axis; even the libertarians who are too naive to know that their vaunted "unregulated paradise" would just be feudalism redux.
I'm not trying to defend DRM, but this is not factually correct. There are a number of modern DRMs (including some of the most widely used) that support caching of content and even off-line use.
None of which are used by the Netflix and Hulu cell phone apps, which is the context being talked about here. If you'd bothered to even read it, you'd see that he even explicitly mentions that Google Play allows exactly this.
the basic concept behind copyright law is in the Constitution - creators shall have exclusive right to their works... for a limited time, in exchange for releasing it into the public domain at the end of that period, for the enrichment of American culture
FTFY.
Funny how so many people forget the more important second half.
In the context of the wall of text that is the post/summary, yes it will. The argument wasn't that the bandwidth overhead of DRM is huge, it's that you can't pre-download and cache what you want to watch while on the home network and watch it on the go without chewing up your mobile data plan.
But all that went away when they ported to x86. Nowdays you can run it under virtualization, or if you're willing to limit your hardware choices a bit, you can build a "Hackintosh."
Last time I tried, it still limited your hardware, as it apparently only worked on intel chips (or was it boards?). Admittedly, It hasn't come back around to it on the "bored weekend" ringbuffer yet.
People like me who like to play music in the background while doing other work/play, and so don't want some wonky code in VLC making it chew up a whole core to play an MP3?
What? Forking is a huge part of the OSS concept. "If you don't like the way the devs are going, STFU and change it yourself."
In *practice* it may not work that way very often (the biggest offenders in recent memory are massive projects that it's infeasible for a single or handful of developers to maintain. i.e. browsers, DEs, etc..), but you've got a pretty warped idea of OSS if you think it's "alien" to the concept.
. A very simple change to their service: Allowing users to cache movies locally to be watched later (i.e. I want to watch my movie tonight so I set it up before I go to work...) would have eliminated this problem years ago and the ISPs would have dropped it
[citation needed]
Everything I've read says the opposite: Netflix has ISP-level caches available, which would be even better for the ISPs' bandwidth numbers for every video where #views > 1 (local caching at the user end means it still gets downloaded per-user, just at offpeak times) and were shown the door when they offered it.
I posit that the actual problem is that there doesn't seem to be any legal concept of "conflict of interest" in the US anymore.
Slashdot Mirror
Reference to (Babel, Tower Of).
The story is a biblical "explanation" of why humanity, despite ostensibly originating as a single tribe, uses multiple languages.
The issue is further confused by the mobile ecosystem itself. In a lot of cases, whether an app is "trojan malware" or "legitimately ad-supported product" has become a question of destination rather than behavior: the former will send your phone number, email addresses and/or contact list to some strange server in the far east, the latter will send them to AdMob et al... both major platforms have the same philosophy, it's not an Android/iOS fanboy issue.
and have masses of rip-off in-app purchases and pay-to-win scenarios.
You don't have to be in the "shady" part of the app store for those. That's industry standard now.
How'd you manage to do that? A sincere question.
In all my years of coding, I've never been able to "un-taint" my mindset, so learning any new language has always boiled down to either "learning it like C, but <differences>" or "learning it like perl, but <differences>"
People have no moral inclination to follow unjust and ridiculous rules/laws
The many copyright apologists on /. alone suggests that this may not be the case.
The most heart-wrenching part of the polygon article was finding out that Amy Hennig was going to be working on a new Star Wars game, but it'll be published by those bastards at EA.
After her work on LOK, I would have loved to see what came of that...
Of course it can be fixed. It's an entity made up of men and woman
An argument can be made that these two statements are contradictory.
And what do you suggest knowing about it can accomplish? The number of politicians who are the ones to benefit from the broken system barely even constitute statistical noise.
This bullshit about it being the voters' fault is because morons DON'T understand Duverger's law and still cling to the delusion that everything would be unicorn farts and fairy semen if everyone would just "catch on" and vote for fringe 3rd parties.
Meanwhile, back in the real world, the Hen Housing Project still just gets to choose from two choices for the Vulpine HOA.
That might be more of a valid analogy and less of an obvious shill if the "recipient" of overnight delivery was already paying for it.
Is this being done because Obama and the DNC doesn't want it or because Comcast is throwing money around?
I suspect that the latter directly impacts the former.
That's odd. I'm going to bring that up on the GOG forums, but I suspect there's some BS going on at some layer.
Did a quick check: There are several games on GOG with DLC.
Shadowrun (mentioned before)
Sword of the Stars: The Pit
Omerta: City of Gangsters
Strike Suit Zero
Blackguards
Democracy 3
Divinity: Dragon Commander
So I'm not sure where they got that...
Another quirk with GoG's model is that its a bit at odds with paid expansions. For old games, all the expansions that are are ever going to come out have come out, but what about expansions / paid DLC for current still in production indy games. -- And I believe I read its one of the main reasons AI War, for example, is not on GoG. I'm not sure what the solution here is.
How so? GOG already has a number of DLCs and both free and paid expansions (I've only bothered committing the new Shadowrun expansion to memory, though). Where's the issue between that and the No DRM policy?
I can see losing the classic iPods - the cell phone makes them redundant,
Clearly, you don't understand the use case of the iPod Classic: an order of magnitude more storage than a 32GB cell phone is hardly made redundant. The shuffle is more redundant, even if you can personally find a case where you like to use it.
I'm still amazed that Apple, of all companies, is the one that's still actually catering to that segment. I haven't seen another HDD-based music player in years.
"Left" doesn't mean "freedom from opression by the rich and powerful". Never has. It means "authoritarianism".
Bullshit.It means "the other guys" to someone who self-identifies as "right," nothing more. ALL facets of the US political spectrum are high up on the "authoritarian" axis; even the libertarians who are too naive to know that their vaunted "unregulated paradise" would just be feudalism redux.
Not all of us are protagonists from a Final Fantasy game, you insensitive clod!
I'm not trying to defend DRM, but this is not factually correct. There are a number of modern DRMs (including some of the most widely used) that support caching of content and even off-line use.
None of which are used by the Netflix and Hulu cell phone apps, which is the context being talked about here. If you'd bothered to even read it, you'd see that he even explicitly mentions that Google Play allows exactly this.
the basic concept behind copyright law is in the Constitution - creators shall have exclusive right to their works... for a limited time, in exchange for releasing it into the public domain at the end of that period, for the enrichment of American culture
FTFY.
Funny how so many people forget the more important second half.
In the context of the wall of text that is the post/summary, yes it will. The argument wasn't that the bandwidth overhead of DRM is huge, it's that you can't pre-download and cache what you want to watch while on the home network and watch it on the go without chewing up your mobile data plan.
P2P lets you do just that.
But all that went away when they ported to x86. Nowdays you can run it under virtualization, or if you're willing to limit your hardware choices a bit, you can build a "Hackintosh."
Last time I tried, it still limited your hardware, as it apparently only worked on intel chips (or was it boards?). Admittedly, It hasn't come back around to it on the "bored weekend" ringbuffer yet.
People like me who like to play music in the background while doing other work/play, and so don't want some wonky code in VLC making it chew up a whole core to play an MP3?
(I still swear by it for videos, though)
What? Forking is a huge part of the OSS concept. "If you don't like the way the devs are going, STFU and change it yourself."
In *practice* it may not work that way very often (the biggest offenders in recent memory are massive projects that it's infeasible for a single or handful of developers to maintain. i.e. browsers, DEs, etc..), but you've got a pretty warped idea of OSS if you think it's "alien" to the concept.
Fait accompli, apparently. :D
Well played, Theo et al.
Clearly you haven't been paying much attention to the US lately. Clearly, we don't.
. A very simple change to their service: Allowing users to cache movies locally to be watched later (i.e. I want to watch my movie tonight so I set it up before I go to work...) would have eliminated this problem years ago and the ISPs would have dropped it
[citation needed]
Everything I've read says the opposite: Netflix has ISP-level caches available, which would be even better for the ISPs' bandwidth numbers for every video where #views > 1 (local caching at the user end means it still gets downloaded per-user, just at offpeak times) and were shown the door when they offered it.
I posit that the actual problem is that there doesn't seem to be any legal concept of "conflict of interest" in the US anymore.
You think? I'm not, but that's a $24/yr increase. Look at the shit Amazon took over a $20/yr hike on Prime.