OK, technically they have CSS, but it's so totally broken I don't even understand why they bother with it anymore.
As with the earlier poster, I would have bought a player and disks, but not until they're as 'open' as current DVDs. I have no desire to be forced to watch them the way the IP Barons want me to watch them, rather than the way I want to watch them; for example, the fucking stupid piracy ads on recent DVDs that are unskippable with a 'closed' player that sticks to official standards. I don't need to spend two minutes being told not to pirate disks every single time I put a disk I've paid for into a player... I've bought the fucking disk in the first place.
"ISS conducts experiments that cannot be conducted on earth due to gravity - some of which includes (and has included in the past) pharmaceuticals which save lives."
Name some. Then explain why that's worth $100,000,000,000.
"Why did explorers explore the earth?"
Money, in most cases. Columbus, for example, was looking for a new trade route to India.
I hate to tell you, but there's no-one to trade with in this solar system.
"Might be interesting to see what happens on that PC when dropping the display to 640x480 and 256 colors."
Last time I tried running in 256-color mode, it was slower than 32-bit. And a modern PC graphics card can fill the screen thousands of times a second even at high resolution, so dropping to 640x480 won't help much.
It's the bloated OS and apps that slow us down, not the graphics.
And then you try to copy 700MB using copy and paste from the old CD-R disk you put in the drive, Windows gets 5MB into the files and gets a CRC error. Which means it stops copying. Which means you have to manually figure out which file has the CRC error and only copy the rest, otherwise the copy will stop at that file every time.
Windows CD handling is another thing that's horribly broken.
"if RAM is available for a cache, RAM should be used for a cache."
The real problem with caching in Windows is that it will throw out applications I'm using in order to make the bloody cache larger. Even with 2GB of RAM, if I leave my PC switched on at night so the Defender scan runs and scans through many gigabytes of disk files, when I get up in the morning it has to swap the bloody desktop back in because the bloody disk cache swapped it out to cache files that were never going to be read again.
"Socially, women can afford (more than men) to demand additional perks from a job."
Are you seriously claiming there's a lack of men willing to do IT jobs without 'additional perks', so that companies have to offer those perks to women to fill the jobs?
"You promised me that I could take my produce to market on it from my farm. Sure, I had 30 acres back then but now I have 3,000 but you didn't specify reasonable limits because you thought I was going to be reasonable."
Now, instead of your spurious attempt, let's try an analogy that actually bears some resemblance to what we're seeing here.
They promised and you paid for a bandwidth of 3,000,000 chickens per month along their toll road, and when you had thirty acres and were only shipping 30,000 chickens per month that was no problem. Now you have 3,000 acres and actually try to ship the full 3,000,000 chickens per month you were paying for, you find the road is too congested to ship them. Why do you think that's an acceptable situation?
If they weren't going to deliver the bandwidth, they should never have promised it in the first place.
"Well we've always had this here in Britain, and it seems to work."
In what sense? For a few days I tried to listen to the radio while driving to and from work, but the music to inane yattering ratio was approximately one to ten.
British radio seems to play anything _but_ music.
Re:What about piracy psycology though?
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 1
"Alternatively, saying "you need to change your business model" is equivalent to a little child saying "it's not fair he wants to charge me for his work". No, it isn't fair. Get over it."
And you merely demonstrate that, like most copyright fans, you haven't even bothered to think about what you're saying.
He's not 'charging for his work', he's charging for bits... in a world with hundreds of millions of sophisticated bit-copying machines.
If I went to him and said 'I want something that sounds like this' and he said 'sure, that'll be $100 an hour', then he would be charging for his work. But that's not what he's doing.
Now, you'd say 'but he put a lot of work into making these sounds and now he wants to get that money back by selling them to lots of people', but that's a broken business model in a world full of computers.
We can either cripple every computer on the planet so it can't be used to copy arbitrary bits, or people who want to sell bits can change their business model. I know which solution I prefer.
"But all users whitelist their browsers in their firewall software to make outbound connections."
Speak for yourself. I have Zonealarm block every IE connection unless I specifically allow it... no way will I trust that piece of crap to go talking to random web sites without permission.
"It was fun when you got friends, lived in a player city, and were a master at your profession."
Maybe... but who's going to stick around that long in a game that isn't fun?
When I think of 'Star Wars' I think of flying around in spaceships, fighting in big battles, and shagging Natalie Portman. But all I could find to do in SWG was spend thirty minutes running from one city to another doing Fedex deliveries to NPCs who often weren't even there (or wait around for ten minutes for a shuttle which ate up most of the profit and caused a big loss if the NPC wasn't there), or fight monsters that would probably kill me if I didn't run away.
As to Jedis, whoever came up with the brilliant idea of preventing the majority of players from becoming Jedis should have been sacked on the spot. I don't care what Lucas' 'vision' may be, a large fraction of people who play SWG games play them because they want to be a Jedi, and don't want to have to jump through weird unpredictable hoops just to do that; they should either have been left out of the game altogether, or made a character creation option for every player.
Which is odd, because I've hardly seen a solo quest since level 12. Sure, I could grind, grind, grind killing the same damn mobs over and over and over, but I got bored of that crap years ago.
The problem with world-changing events in an MMO is that everyone wants to be there when it happens; the players who were at work when the demon army invaded (or whatever) will be pissed that they missed the phat lewt drops when they're paying the same as the people who were home at the time.
That's one of the reasons why MMOGs have to be limited compared to single-player games. In a single-player game you're one adventurer (or a small party) in a world full of monsters and normal people, in a MMOG you're one of a bazillion adventurers in a world where almost everyone is an adventurer.
Just imagine, for example, a LOTR MMO where only one person could ever do the 'Ring Quest', or a Star Wars MMO where only one person could ever blow up the Death Star. Don't you think most players would be pissed?
Given how much SWG sucked a few years ago when I played a trial version (and uninstalled it after 2 days) I can't see how they could have made it worse. And they definitely improved EQ2 over the last couple of years.
Well, Vanguard as planned had a lot of potential; unfortunately they planned far more than they could deliver. Even the version they released was great fun up to the teen levels, but then the compulsory grouping to access much of the content turned it into a boring grind for casual players who just want to log on for short periods and get something done.
I agree about the performance though; I logged on for the last time at the weekend before unsubscribing and my PC would chug and thrash the hard disk for a couple of seconds every ten seconds while I was running around. OK, it's not the most modern system ever, but it has a 3GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 7800 card, there's no justification for performance that poor.
"So I have no grudge against AMD; I used them because they performed very well for a low price."
That's odd. When I built my current PC in 2003 I looked seriously at using an AMD CPU rather than Intel, and discovered that the 'equivalent' AMD CPU was not only slower than the Intel CPU, but more expensive too. And, unlike someone who's never used an Intel CPU in their PC, I have no aversion to using which ever one is better.
The simple fact is that AMD had a brief period where they were technically better than Intel, and then Intel took back the lead. Right now Intel chips are simply better than AMD's, and unless the next generation beat Intel they're going to be in trouble.
Personally I hope they do recover, because the more competition we have in the CPU market the better, and some of the new features they've talked about do appear to have the potential for a useful performance boost. That said, I'm not buying any AMD stock.
"Perhaps you missed the part where these were grade 6 students... hardly people capable of physically overpowering a grown adult."
Half a dozen of them with pointy sticks could beat one adult with a pistol; surely we should have realised by now that all lying on the ground does is make them an easy target.
Better yet, let them carry Tasers... at a minimum it would liven up boring lessons.
"What you are saying might be more reasonable to expect in a high school... but not from a group of 11 and 12-year olds."
Some of the 12-year olds I went to school with could certainly have overpowered a typical 'school shooter'; they're hardly the most athletic of adults.
"First off, if the site can't make it's case for getting you to pay them, why would you pay them?"
So if someone links to a site from Slashdot, no-one's going to read it because the site will expect you to pay them $20 up front for 2000 page views that you're never going to use?
"Do you, buy everything you see in a store? No? Didn't think so."
Stores don't expect me to give them $2000 and then take my purchases out of that downpayment. And in a store, I don't have to buy things before I see them. Nor are there three billion stores in town all trying to get my business.
I just don't understand why you're so adamant that this can be made to work when there are so many obvious problems with the whole idea?
Oh, and don't forget the other big problem: you have to pay before you view the page, but you can't tell whether it's worth paying for until after you've viewed it.
Nor, of course, can you prevent people from saving the page and sending it to other people who don't pay. The whole idea of paying for sites in this way is just broken.
"And you don't need to CHARGE micropayments, you just account for them. E.g. I give you $20 and it's good for [say] 2000 page views"
So every time I go to www.halfassedlittlesite.com I have to give them $20 up front to pay for viewing 2000 pages when all I really want to read is one page that was linked from some other site?
"Sure each page only costs me a cent"
'Only a cent'? How many people are going to pay one cent for every page they view? Including reloads and stepping back and forwards I probably view thousands of pages a day, I'm sure not paying hundreds of dollars a month just for reading web pages.
"If the service was actually of any value people would pay to support it. If subscribers don't meet the budget they'd have to scale back or fold."
But few people will pay $20 a month (or whatever) for every web site they visit. It would have to be more like $0.001 per page, which is far more difficult to collect.
With micropayments you also run into the problem of having to continually ask the user whether or not they want to pay for a page. If your page that I want to visit includes a frame pointing to www.givemeyourmoneyiwanttogetrich.com demanding $1 per view, I don't want to have to continually click 'no I don't want to give money to those idiots'. Nor do I want to accidentally leave my web browser sitting at a page that continually refreshes and discover in the morning that it's cost me $1000 overnight.
Slashdot Mirror
"You buy (I'd wager) dvds, and those have DRM."
No they don't.
OK, technically they have CSS, but it's so totally broken I don't even understand why they bother with it anymore.
As with the earlier poster, I would have bought a player and disks, but not until they're as 'open' as current DVDs. I have no desire to be forced to watch them the way the IP Barons want me to watch them, rather than the way I want to watch them; for example, the fucking stupid piracy ads on recent DVDs that are unskippable with a 'closed' player that sticks to official standards. I don't need to spend two minutes being told not to pirate disks every single time I put a disk I've paid for into a player... I've bought the fucking disk in the first place.
"ISS conducts experiments that cannot be conducted on earth due to gravity - some of which includes (and has included in the past) pharmaceuticals which save lives."
Name some. Then explain why that's worth $100,000,000,000.
"Why did explorers explore the earth?"
Money, in most cases. Columbus, for example, was looking for a new trade route to India.
I hate to tell you, but there's no-one to trade with in this solar system.
If they don't speak Klingon, they're not worth talking to...
"Might be interesting to see what happens on that PC when dropping the display to 640x480 and 256 colors."
Last time I tried running in 256-color mode, it was slower than 32-bit. And a modern PC graphics card can fill the screen thousands of times a second even at high resolution, so dropping to 640x480 won't help much.
It's the bloated OS and apps that slow us down, not the graphics.
And then you try to copy 700MB using copy and paste from the old CD-R disk you put in the drive, Windows gets 5MB into the files and gets a CRC error. Which means it stops copying. Which means you have to manually figure out which file has the CRC error and only copy the rest, otherwise the copy will stop at that file every time.
Windows CD handling is another thing that's horribly broken.
"if RAM is available for a cache, RAM should be used for a cache."
The real problem with caching in Windows is that it will throw out applications I'm using in order to make the bloody cache larger. Even with 2GB of RAM, if I leave my PC switched on at night so the Defender scan runs and scans through many gigabytes of disk files, when I get up in the morning it has to swap the bloody desktop back in because the bloody disk cache swapped it out to cache files that were never going to be read again.
Utterly horrible and braindead design.
"What isn't Microsoft trying to sue the hell out of it?"
What for? You don't have to be doing anything illegal to get sued, but a judge is likely to throw the case out if they're not breaking any laws.
What laws are the WINE developers breaking?
"Socially, women can afford (more than men) to demand additional perks from a job."
Are you seriously claiming there's a lack of men willing to do IT jobs without 'additional perks', so that companies have to offer those perks to women to fill the jobs?
"You promised me that I could take my produce to market on it from my farm. Sure, I had 30 acres back then but now I have 3,000 but you didn't specify reasonable limits because you thought I was going to be reasonable."
Now, instead of your spurious attempt, let's try an analogy that actually bears some resemblance to what we're seeing here.
They promised and you paid for a bandwidth of 3,000,000 chickens per month along their toll road, and when you had thirty acres and were only shipping 30,000 chickens per month that was no problem. Now you have 3,000 acres and actually try to ship the full 3,000,000 chickens per month you were paying for, you find the road is too congested to ship them. Why do you think that's an acceptable situation?
If they weren't going to deliver the bandwidth, they should never have promised it in the first place.
"Well we've always had this here in Britain, and it seems to work."
In what sense? For a few days I tried to listen to the radio while driving to and from work, but the music to inane yattering ratio was approximately one to ten.
British radio seems to play anything _but_ music.
"Alternatively, saying "you need to change your business model" is equivalent to a little child saying "it's not fair he wants to charge me for his work". No, it isn't fair. Get over it."
And you merely demonstrate that, like most copyright fans, you haven't even bothered to think about what you're saying.
He's not 'charging for his work', he's charging for bits... in a world with hundreds of millions of sophisticated bit-copying machines.
If I went to him and said 'I want something that sounds like this' and he said 'sure, that'll be $100 an hour', then he would be charging for his work. But that's not what he's doing.
Now, you'd say 'but he put a lot of work into making these sounds and now he wants to get that money back by selling them to lots of people', but that's a broken business model in a world full of computers.
We can either cripple every computer on the planet so it can't be used to copy arbitrary bits, or people who want to sell bits can change their business model. I know which solution I prefer.
"Hell, a simple text editor written in .net consume 10 Megabytes of memory and take more than a split second to start up. Hurray for progress."
:) !
Yeah, but you try editing a 2^64 character text file in a 16-bit text editor
"All those other 64-bit CPUs you mention aren't x86 compatible and hence irrelevant to the workstation market."
A few years ago, those 64-bit CPUs _WERE_ the workstation market.
"But all users whitelist their browsers in their firewall software to make outbound connections."
Speak for yourself. I have Zonealarm block every IE connection unless I specifically allow it... no way will I trust that piece of crap to go talking to random web sites without permission.
"It was fun when you got friends, lived in a player city, and were a master at your profession."
Maybe... but who's going to stick around that long in a game that isn't fun?
When I think of 'Star Wars' I think of flying around in spaceships, fighting in big battles, and shagging Natalie Portman. But all I could find to do in SWG was spend thirty minutes running from one city to another doing Fedex deliveries to NPCs who often weren't even there (or wait around for ten minutes for a shuttle which ate up most of the profit and caused a big loss if the NPC wasn't there), or fight monsters that would probably kill me if I didn't run away.
As to Jedis, whoever came up with the brilliant idea of preventing the majority of players from becoming Jedis should have been sacked on the spot. I don't care what Lucas' 'vision' may be, a large fraction of people who play SWG games play them because they want to be a Jedi, and don't want to have to jump through weird unpredictable hoops just to do that; they should either have been left out of the game altogether, or made a character creation option for every player.
"Since it's so easy to solo, nobody groups."
Which is odd, because I've hardly seen a solo quest since level 12. Sure, I could grind, grind, grind killing the same damn mobs over and over and over, but I got bored of that crap years ago.
The problem with world-changing events in an MMO is that everyone wants to be there when it happens; the players who were at work when the demon army invaded (or whatever) will be pissed that they missed the phat lewt drops when they're paying the same as the people who were home at the time.
That's one of the reasons why MMOGs have to be limited compared to single-player games. In a single-player game you're one adventurer (or a small party) in a world full of monsters and normal people, in a MMOG you're one of a bazillion adventurers in a world where almost everyone is an adventurer.
Just imagine, for example, a LOTR MMO where only one person could ever do the 'Ring Quest', or a Star Wars MMO where only one person could ever blow up the Death Star. Don't you think most players would be pissed?
Given how much SWG sucked a few years ago when I played a trial version (and uninstalled it after 2 days) I can't see how they could have made it worse. And they definitely improved EQ2 over the last couple of years.
Well, Vanguard as planned had a lot of potential; unfortunately they planned far more than they could deliver. Even the version they released was great fun up to the teen levels, but then the compulsory grouping to access much of the content turned it into a boring grind for casual players who just want to log on for short periods and get something done.
I agree about the performance though; I logged on for the last time at the weekend before unsubscribing and my PC would chug and thrash the hard disk for a couple of seconds every ten seconds while I was running around. OK, it's not the most modern system ever, but it has a 3GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM and a 7800 card, there's no justification for performance that poor.
"So I have no grudge against AMD; I used them because they performed very well for a low price."
That's odd. When I built my current PC in 2003 I looked seriously at using an AMD CPU rather than Intel, and discovered that the 'equivalent' AMD CPU was not only slower than the Intel CPU, but more expensive too. And, unlike someone who's never used an Intel CPU in their PC, I have no aversion to using which ever one is better.
The simple fact is that AMD had a brief period where they were technically better than Intel, and then Intel took back the lead. Right now Intel chips are simply better than AMD's, and unless the next generation beat Intel they're going to be in trouble.
Personally I hope they do recover, because the more competition we have in the CPU market the better, and some of the new features they've talked about do appear to have the potential for a useful performance boost. That said, I'm not buying any AMD stock.
"Perhaps you missed the part where these were grade 6 students... hardly people capable of physically overpowering a grown adult."
Half a dozen of them with pointy sticks could beat one adult with a pistol; surely we should have realised by now that all lying on the ground does is make them an easy target.
Better yet, let them carry Tasers... at a minimum it would liven up boring lessons.
"What you are saying might be more reasonable to expect in a high school... but not from a group of 11 and 12-year olds."
Some of the 12-year olds I went to school with could certainly have overpowered a typical 'school shooter'; they're hardly the most athletic of adults.
"First off, if the site can't make it's case for getting you to pay them, why would you pay them?"
So if someone links to a site from Slashdot, no-one's going to read it because the site will expect you to pay them $20 up front for 2000 page views that you're never going to use?
"Do you, buy everything you see in a store? No? Didn't think so."
Stores don't expect me to give them $2000 and then take my purchases out of that downpayment. And in a store, I don't have to buy things before I see them. Nor are there three billion stores in town all trying to get my business.
I just don't understand why you're so adamant that this can be made to work when there are so many obvious problems with the whole idea?
Oh, and don't forget the other big problem: you have to pay before you view the page, but you can't tell whether it's worth paying for until after you've viewed it.
Nor, of course, can you prevent people from saving the page and sending it to other people who don't pay. The whole idea of paying for sites in this way is just broken.
"And you don't need to CHARGE micropayments, you just account for them. E.g. I give you $20 and it's good for [say] 2000 page views"
So every time I go to www.halfassedlittlesite.com I have to give them $20 up front to pay for viewing 2000 pages when all I really want to read is one page that was linked from some other site?
"Sure each page only costs me a cent"
'Only a cent'? How many people are going to pay one cent for every page they view? Including reloads and stepping back and forwards I probably view thousands of pages a day, I'm sure not paying hundreds of dollars a month just for reading web pages.
"If the service was actually of any value people would pay to support it. If subscribers don't meet the budget they'd have to scale back or fold."
But few people will pay $20 a month (or whatever) for every web site they visit. It would have to be more like $0.001 per page, which is far more difficult to collect.
With micropayments you also run into the problem of having to continually ask the user whether or not they want to pay for a page. If your page that I want to visit includes a frame pointing to www.givemeyourmoneyiwanttogetrich.com demanding $1 per view, I don't want to have to continually click 'no I don't want to give money to those idiots'. Nor do I want to accidentally leave my web browser sitting at a page that continually refreshes and discover in the morning that it's cost me $1000 overnight.