It's not just the EULA- it's always been upheld, for all forms of media, that you do not have the right to retain a copy of media you gave up through a commercial transaction. This is a far more reasonable doctrine that would protect you in the car theft example, but you couldn't make a business out of copying CDs as the GP suggested even if the EULA was struck down or not present.
Autorun is turned off by default on Macs, and there's never a good reason to turn it on. There's no way this could interfere with the usual insert/launch iTunes/click Rip method most people use.
Just to play devil's advocate, what makes you think lightning would strike twice? Game designers can be one-hit wonders just as much as musicians can. John Romero was a highly respected industry superstar back in the late 90s (stop laughing, I'm serious).
Not being able to run servers has more to do with the imbalance between upstream and downstream bandwidth costs and the chance to charge a premium for "business" service.
IBM may have run into the same problems with the Cell that they did with the PowerPC 970- the chip breaks some fundamental assumptions GCC makes, and to add the best optimization possible it would necessary to modify the compiler more drastically than the GCC leads would allow (to keep GCC completely platform-agnostic).
MMORPGs are resistent to this because they model a real economy- if something is being whored, the excess supply will bring its price and value down until it's not considered worth whoring any more (in theory). FPSes don't have this ability- there's an infinite supply of everything. Perhaps that's the main mistake of Battlefield- it should have some system by which if everyone and their brother jump into helicopters then helicopters become rarer or weaker automatically. (Or the game could just be unbalanced.)
I don't know about Napster, but if a physical store treated me the way Apple's did I would be happy to go there again and again. Have you ever even tried it, or just gone off on a knee-jerk DRM/fringe platform rant?
Remember that this is a legal document we're reading. Each word has an extremely specific meaning that may or may not be the same as the colloquial meaning, and using a different one would have changed the legal meaning of the text.
If you steal it, you will just strengthen their argument that piracy is a threat that must be countered by any means necessary. The correct reaction is to not obtain the music by any means. Let it be known that DRM makes music less desirable, not just the act of purchasing a CD.
There's another benefit to selling a console that gets modded- it pushes up the installed base numbers they use to make pitches to game companies and crow about their console's success in the media. The whole "I'll buy a loss leader console and never any games for it! Take that, evil megacorporation!" argument is stupid and will never make a meaningful negative impact on MS's bottom line.
Considering that they kicked their most experienced competitor out of that "very distant and very sloppy second", I'd say they did pretty well. Also, you're not accounting for games that tanked (of which MGS financed more than a few) and investments in the Xbox Live infrastructure.
This is how MS has always worked- the first version sucks and loses a ton of money (the Xbox somehow dodged the former), but they do learn from their mistakes when they're actually forced to compete with someone.
Got to disagree with point 4- the color pallet is clearly a deliberate aesthetic decision, not the result of a technological limit. It gives the wasteland its character as a place where no human has ever set foot for a tremendously long time, where life is just barely holding on as small animals and straggly grass, and I think it fits the rest of the game very well.
Also, saving at altars isn't really that important- if you fail a colossus fight, you just go back to the moment you first saw it, so you don't really lose that much time.
That was only true of the hacked version of 10.3.7 that shipped with the original G5 models. Tiger has a fully 64-bit kernel but some userland libraries are not yet available in both 32- and 64-bit versions.
This is mostly a matter of getting used to it. If you use an iPod for a long time (i.e. once you own one instead of playing with a friend's for a minute) you get used to it and it's no different from using a trackpad.
Ever tried to change the star rating for a song? It's far too sensitive.
This I agree with.
Ever tried to switch off your iPod by holding play down- but slide your finger ever so slightly, so the iPod thinks it's a scroll and completely ignores the button press?
No. (Seriously.) I don't have any trouble *not* scrolling when I try to press the button (the problem is making very fine movements- see above).
It's not just marketing, it's the combination of marketing, good design, and a set of interlocking products and services that cover everything most users might possibly want to do with their music (and playing music on 6 computers, burning the same CD 8 times, or using ogg is not something "most users" consider important).
The thing is, console games typically don't suffer from this. Since it's a closed platform, the game can be carefully tuned so that it runs at 60fps all the time, period. When there's nothing much on the screen, the game uses vertical synch and only spends 20% of the time rendering frames (the rest is idle). When things get busy, that 20% creeps up to, say, 70%, but the frame rate stays at 60 because the console has power to spare. The scenario is designed so that there are no "really detailed rooms" that violate these conditions- a particular room filled with detail and monsters might take 95% of the console's available power to run at 60fps but it will still never drop below that.
This can be done in multiplayer also- Halo 2 simply does not slow down, no matter how many players and explosions are on the screen.
If they have enough power available to run the world at 120fps, they would be much better off dropping it to something near the refresh rate of the display device at all times and adding more effects.
The problem is, with the fickleness and lack of accountability of the blog world, slander and unfounded scares are just as easy to pull off as justified whistleblowing. When Apple got dingedby ipodsdirtysecret.com, the creators of the video and furor conveniently left out the fact that the problem was much rarer than they made it sound and that they hadn't made a reasonable effort to resolve the matter privately before raising their online lynch mob. When it died down Apple was guilty of at worst a minor support snafu instead of a vast conspiracy to force repeat iPod purchases.
There are a couple of major benefits to this "abstracted currency", at least from Microsoft's perspective:
It's international. The exchange rate of real currency to live points only matters when a user buys some points, which is a transaction with their local MS subsidiary; after that the points have the same value anywhere in the world.
There could be ways to get points without directly spending money on them. Since creating points costs MS nothing, they can give them out as prizes at the drop of a hat. Someone wants to hold a tournament on Live? give them some points to distribute to the top players. Sales of some peripheral doohickey not what you hoped? Put a points voucher in the box.
Any multiplayer game that wants to have an in-game currency could use the live points service instead, and leave to MS the problems of implementing transactions, integrity, and security. Of course, it would be tricky to do this without opening the door for some sort of cross-game arbitrage (earn a ton of cash in an action game you're good at, spend it outfitting characters in an MMORPG)
What you seem to consider "real code" is something that one can only write after years of experience and formal training. Give the kid a break- your first program was probably just as "cute" as his, only it printed a list of numbers to stdout instead of popping up dialog boxes.
The 360 was never going to use HD-DVDs. The initial 360 shipments were always planned to have normal DVD drives, they just admitted they were keeping open the option of including HD-DVD drives in the future. That was a reasonable position as they assumed (correctly) that the format war would not be resolved until after the 360 was released, or so close to the release as to make guessing which horse to back too risky even for Microsoft.
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It's not just the EULA- it's always been upheld, for all forms of media, that you do not have the right to retain a copy of media you gave up through a commercial transaction. This is a far more reasonable doctrine that would protect you in the car theft example, but you couldn't make a business out of copying CDs as the GP suggested even if the EULA was struck down or not present.
Quicktime did have the option under OS 9. I never noticed it was gone in X, thanks.
Autorun is turned off by default on Macs, and there's never a good reason to turn it on. There's no way this could interfere with the usual insert/launch iTunes/click Rip method most people use.
Just to play devil's advocate, what makes you think lightning would strike twice? Game designers can be one-hit wonders just as much as musicians can. John Romero was a highly respected industry superstar back in the late 90s (stop laughing, I'm serious).
Not being able to run servers has more to do with the imbalance between upstream and downstream bandwidth costs and the chance to charge a premium for "business" service.
went out of their way to make the music not work every few months on the music player I choose to use
You only ask permission once, then your computer (and iPod) remain authorized until you explicitly deauthorize or reformat.
IBM may have run into the same problems with the Cell that they did with the PowerPC 970- the chip breaks some fundamental assumptions GCC makes, and to add the best optimization possible it would necessary to modify the compiler more drastically than the GCC leads would allow (to keep GCC completely platform-agnostic).
MMORPGs are resistent to this because they model a real economy- if something is being whored, the excess supply will bring its price and value down until it's not considered worth whoring any more (in theory). FPSes don't have this ability- there's an infinite supply of everything. Perhaps that's the main mistake of Battlefield- it should have some system by which if everyone and their brother jump into helicopters then helicopters become rarer or weaker automatically. (Or the game could just be unbalanced.)
I don't know about Napster, but if a physical store treated me the way Apple's did I would be happy to go there again and again. Have you ever even tried it, or just gone off on a knee-jerk DRM/fringe platform rant?
Remember that this is a legal document we're reading. Each word has an extremely specific meaning that may or may not be the same as the colloquial meaning, and using a different one would have changed the legal meaning of the text.
If you steal it, you will just strengthen their argument that piracy is a threat that must be countered by any means necessary. The correct reaction is to not obtain the music by any means. Let it be known that DRM makes music less desirable, not just the act of purchasing a CD.
There's another benefit to selling a console that gets modded- it pushes up the installed base numbers they use to make pitches to game companies and crow about their console's success in the media. The whole "I'll buy a loss leader console and never any games for it! Take that, evil megacorporation!" argument is stupid and will never make a meaningful negative impact on MS's bottom line.
Considering that they kicked their most experienced competitor out of that "very distant and very sloppy second", I'd say they did pretty well. Also, you're not accounting for games that tanked (of which MGS financed more than a few) and investments in the Xbox Live infrastructure.
This is how MS has always worked- the first version sucks and loses a ton of money (the Xbox somehow dodged the former), but they do learn from their mistakes when they're actually forced to compete with someone.
You just described a reason it's a very GOOD analogy. The US never obeyed the Monroe Doctrine either.
Got to disagree with point 4- the color pallet is clearly a deliberate aesthetic decision, not the result of a technological limit. It gives the wasteland its character as a place where no human has ever set foot for a tremendously long time, where life is just barely holding on as small animals and straggly grass, and I think it fits the rest of the game very well.
Also, saving at altars isn't really that important- if you fail a colossus fight, you just go back to the moment you first saw it, so you don't really lose that much time.
That was only true of the hacked version of 10.3.7 that shipped with the original G5 models. Tiger has a fully 64-bit kernel but some userland libraries are not yet available in both 32- and 64-bit versions.
Funny- I find it takes 5, 10, 15, 20 seconds of:
This is mostly a matter of getting used to it. If you use an iPod for a long time (i.e. once you own one instead of playing with a friend's for a minute) you get used to it and it's no different from using a trackpad.
Ever tried to change the star rating for a song? It's far too sensitive.
This I agree with.
Ever tried to switch off your iPod by holding play down- but slide your finger ever so slightly, so the iPod thinks it's a scroll and completely ignores the button press?
No. (Seriously.) I don't have any trouble *not* scrolling when I try to press the button (the problem is making very fine movements- see above).
It's not just marketing, it's the combination of marketing, good design, and a set of interlocking products and services that cover everything most users might possibly want to do with their music (and playing music on 6 computers, burning the same CD 8 times, or using ogg is not something "most users" consider important).
The thing is, console games typically don't suffer from this. Since it's a closed platform, the game can be carefully tuned so that it runs at 60fps all the time, period. When there's nothing much on the screen, the game uses vertical synch and only spends 20% of the time rendering frames (the rest is idle). When things get busy, that 20% creeps up to, say, 70%, but the frame rate stays at 60 because the console has power to spare. The scenario is designed so that there are no "really detailed rooms" that violate these conditions- a particular room filled with detail and monsters might take 95% of the console's available power to run at 60fps but it will still never drop below that.
This can be done in multiplayer also- Halo 2 simply does not slow down, no matter how many players and explosions are on the screen.
If they have enough power available to run the world at 120fps, they would be much better off dropping it to something near the refresh rate of the display device at all times and adding more effects.
The same was true of print before the slander and libel laws
And yet, now we have libel and slander laws, and print is much improved because of them.
The problem is, with the fickleness and lack of accountability of the blog world, slander and unfounded scares are just as easy to pull off as justified whistleblowing. When Apple got dingedby ipodsdirtysecret.com, the creators of the video and furor conveniently left out the fact that the problem was much rarer than they made it sound and that they hadn't made a reasonable effort to resolve the matter privately before raising their online lynch mob. When it died down Apple was guilty of at worst a minor support snafu instead of a vast conspiracy to force repeat iPod purchases.
It would be way more fun with PVP though.
What you seem to consider "real code" is something that one can only write after years of experience and formal training. Give the kid a break- your first program was probably just as "cute" as his, only it printed a list of numbers to stdout instead of popping up dialog boxes.
The 360 was never going to use HD-DVDs. The initial 360 shipments were always planned to have normal DVD drives, they just admitted they were keeping open the option of including HD-DVD drives in the future. That was a reasonable position as they assumed (correctly) that the format war would not be resolved until after the 360 was released, or so close to the release as to make guessing which horse to back too risky even for Microsoft.