The first laptop I had was from the Sharp MM series. It was really a netbook form factor, but much more expensive, rather than less expensive. And I dare say, it looked sexy -- I remember leaving it on a table, looking over at it and seeing a girl stroking it, caressing it... I am not making this up.
The second laptop I had was a Powerbook. The Macbook look hasn't changed much since then -- still shiny aluminum with those sleek curves.
So, maybe you don't want it to look "manly" -- maybe you want it to look sexy and stylish, even feminine. Not because that's what you are, but because it's actually aesthetically appealing, to both sexes -- and because if she does end up being bisexual, all the better!
By the way: While I suspect the above is true, you should take it as humor.
More seriously, "cute" is fine. It's like walking around with a cute puppy. And honestly, what you're wanting to do is like trying to mod that puppy into a rottweiler -- even if you were completely successful, that's going to scare away more women than it attracts.
If they're talking to you at all, that's an opening. You don't even need a witty one-liner -- studies show that the best pick-up line is "Hi." It's quite possible that you have plenty to say about your laptop, and a lot of it in terms they might even understand.
Alright, alright, one possible mod: if the video card doesn't completely suck, put Compiz on it. That should keep the conversation going.
The word used was "loaning". If they meant copying, they should've said copying.
Used game sales aren't good for the original developer. If a game is bought for $50, then resold four times for $10-30 each time, how much does the original developer make? $50.
That assumes that the game can be sold at the same price, even when users know they can't resell them. Would you buy a car you couldn't re-sell?
It also assumes that someone who would buy a game for $10-30 would have bought it for $50 if it wasn't available at the lower price.
With a book, possession directly implies access. If I loan out a book, I can't read it until it's returned. Software is different; It's dishonest to loan out my copy of Office 2007 to my friends to install, if can still use it.
Agreed. But this is not always the case.
Obvious example: Console games.
Much less obvious example: Steam games, and MMO accounts. These are discouraged by the fact that it's a much more valuable item, and it's probably against the EULA. But it's allowed.
But it is somewhat compensated by the "resume anywhere" feature
Which I addressed -- Steam has that feature already, among many other advantages, and many users still consider it unacceptable. That feature alone isn't nearly enough.
There really are some people out there who can be foiled by it.
The question is whether these same people would be intelligent enough to use a CD burner, if there was no DRM.
So something like this could be a fair compromise. It'll still stop anyone that DRM is going to stop, but it isn't a real big deal for legit customers.
That's a good way of putting it.
Of course, I still find it kind of offensive, but it is something I can live with.
Their best strategy is to discourage loaning, which has been a side-effect of hand-held console cartridges for some time. Carts have a finite amount of space for save game slots, and as a result you don't want to loan your cartridge to someone careless who will overwrite your "hard work" with their own progress.
So let me get this straight -- you want to discourage, not copying, but loaning?
Since these are so often compared to physical objects, let's compare. With a console game, no one really minds loaning them -- the biggest concern is that you won't have it while they're borrowing it, and it might get scratched.
But if anything, this opens up new markets -- game rentals, and used games. And it does drive up the value of a game, if you know it can be re-sold.
It's only very recently that content providers have even toyed with the idea of "selling" a book, or a movie, which couldn't be transferred.
The supposed purpose of DRM is to "keep honest people honest", by preventing things like actual copyright infringement. But your comment does tend to indicate the true purpose of DRM -- to prevent people from doing perfectly honest things (like lending) that you'd rather be able to charge for.
This could be implemented in a similar fashion by moving storing saves online, and limiting the amount of slots available.
If you're already forcing them to be online, why do you need to limit the number of saves? Just don't allow more than one person to be online at once.
The customer loses some flexibility by being unable to save locally,
and by having a limited number of saves,
but benefits by not losing progress when reinstalling, or transitioning between different computers.
That is a benefit. I should point out that it is one of the benefits of Steam.
And hey, I can lend games on Steam. I just have to lend the whole account at a time, and if I lend my account credentials, I risk losing the account. That's really all the incentive I need -- to limit the number of saves on top of that really serves no purpose, other than to save you disk space. And with all the data Steam gathers about me, disk space clearly isn't an issue.
Many people are not willing or knowledgeable enough to go through the time/effort to download a torrent
Even those who don't use a torrent (for whatever reason, "not knowledgeable enough" seems unlikely) are certainly capable of writing the serial number on that burned CD.
In other words, it's a form of DRM which is easily defeated by a Sharpie.
it really doesn't require additional effort on my part
No, what wouldn't require additional effort is selling a digital download which came unlocked and ready to go, whether it was serial-locked or not.
Typing in 30-40 alphanumeric characters to convince the computer I'm not a pirate is pretty much the definition of "additional effort".
Now, granted, DRM schemes have gotten so absurdly draconian that this is a genuine improvement. But it doesn't magically stop being DRM when it gets to "acceptable" levels. Steam was acceptable for me years ago, while physical disk checks are not. CD keys are borderline.
But that's all personal choice. The only way a publisher can avoid pissing someone off with their DRM is to not include DRM. And as a show of good faith, it would help if they (and these Slashdot headlines) would stop claiming that something has "no DRM" when it, in fact, contains DRM. That's far worse than any "cloud computing" buzzword.
As I understand it, attempted copyright infringement is not a crime. Actual copyright infringement is a crime. And with this in place, it will be quite difficult to prove actual copyright infringement.
By offering VPN they are no longer passive facilitators, but active ones.
I don't see the difference. The VPN is a general-purpose service -- it applies to all traffic, not just torrents.
And it doesn't have to be a flagrant violation of criminal code, if it's close enough the BSA, RIAA, and MPIAA will simply throw enough money into a civil suit to make it unprofitable
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but they've tried that. Repeatedly. It doesn't work -- it really serves no other purpose but to humiliate people like you, who seem to believe a mere anti-copyright attitude should be enough to convict someone.
expressing their clear intent, as if "Pirate Bay" wasn't enough of an outright confession.
Irrelevant. As you've pointed out:
it's pretty much like a gun shop called "Cop Killer's Paradise" in a city with the highest fatal shootings of officers.
Probably. But you can't legally shut down the shop because it's called that.
First and second amendments.
Now, if they really believe guns are a problem, they could make it harder to own a gun, or try to make it illegal to sell guns in the city. But those would have to apply to all such shops, whether they're called "Cop Killer's Paradise" or "Law Enforcement Armory".
I don't remember FileFront, but I agree with Rapidshare, and especially Fileplanet. I honestly couldn't figure out how Fileplanet stayed in business -- I can't think of a single customer who actually liked it, let alone wanted to pay for it.
The gaming industry is growing up. Amazon S3 is a genuine option. So is Steam, for those trying to sell a game. In fact, I'm pretty sure Fileplanet predates BitTorrent -- and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen it change much since then.
Granted, others are saying FileFront was better, but I really don't care. At the end of the day, what they're offering is a hard disk attached to an HTTP server. That's like ten minutes of work for a competent admin, and both have been commoditized -- as a single entity, with things like Amazon S3.
So, even if it was a good ludicrously obsolete relic of the dot-com boom, it's still a ludicrously obsolete relic of the dot-com boom.
I would be quite surprised if a modern computer can't encode MP3 at more than the maximum transfer rate of a typical media player.
The difference in speed is very noticeable. We're talking about minutes vs hours to transfer a few albums.
Maybe if you used a crappier-but-faster encoder, or if it was a slow flash disk. But to an iPod classic, it absolutely is faster to just transfer the files.
the point was, a 120G iPod classic costs $250. I can walk into Best Buy, that overpriced mecca of electronic goods, and buy a terabyte USB drive for $150. And the classic is the iPod with the best 'storage vs cost' ratio.
How's that relevant? If you never fill the 120 gigs, even with a lossless format, I don't really see how it matters.
That 4G shuffle costs $79 and it's nearest cousins, the 8G iPods cost $150.
That makes sense. Well, the Nano -- the Shuffle really isn't comparable, because it's, well, shuffle.
Wasting portable storage on something that would only be used at home, is pointless to the extreme.
That's why I'd also put Rockbox on it -- and probably choose something other than an iPod (and likely cheaper) -- so I could natively play flacs.
Point is, fill up the storage, then start worrying about using it efficiency. Not the other way around.
I didn't really mean it in the price aspect because that adds a bunch of extra unnecessary arguments.
Well, if you don't consider price, it's a much weaker argument. Consoles have tougher DRM, but not necessarily more restrictive.
you have a set number of copies of a console game.
True.
Many pc games are local friendly since they can be installed on the hard drive and connected at the lan.
And many aren't. The only real advantage is that a PC game can come without DRM.
For instance: I love Steam. I consider it to be a fair tradeoff, even compared to consoles. But technically, well, console games don't require that I be online for a single-player game, whereas Steam does.
Thus one person with one copy, can play with everyone simultaneously, since you don't need the "cartridge/cd/disc" to play anymore. This is not, absolutely not, piracy.
Seems very much like piracy to me...
Piracy is an offensive term misconstruing all forms of "IP infringement" (logical fallacy there), copyright infringement, and labeling fair use a part of all of the above.
Fine, we'll call it copyright infringement.
Nothing is being stolen, no copyright is being infringed, mostly because gaming companies are smart enough to encourage this legally.
Somewhat true. They don't encourage it -- they encourage everyone to buy a copy, and that's really much more convenient.
However, they do look the other way. For instance, hlds and srcds have a LAN mode which can be turned on. With LAN mode off, you can have random people wander in from the Internet; with LAN mode on, anyone can connect, but it won't show up in any server list except within that LAN.
The problem is, you still need to have everyone login to steam, then put it in offline mode. Other games aren't usually better. It ends up being easier just to buy the damn game -- which comes to some $20/person these days.
Everyone needs the capability (a console), but you're not limited to a set number, only the max that a server is set to handle.
Well, that is also often true of a console game. I suppose it depends on the game.
I do see your point -- a console might handle 16 players. Maybe. I can easily build a server to handle 32 players in Natural Selection, and really, with less than 10 or 12 players, NS isn't nearly as fun.
But if you start with the assumption that each supports 16 players, you can put 16 players on 4 consoles, or 16 computers. With each computer costing more than a console, that doesn't seem right.
And each computer is likely more powerful than the console -- so technically, it's just as much a limitation that you can't play split-screen on most PC games as it is a limitation that you can't share the same game disc across multiple consoles.
Meh. If it's an argument of freedom, PCs win because of Nexuiz and Tremulous anyway.
I would pay 80$ if I could get 100mb at this point
Not to be too smug, but the $65/mo is internet+phone. At $85/mo, you get phone+TV, or internet+TV -- where the TV is actually some sort of IPTV (network cable going to a set-top box).
The TV is HD-capable, but the $85/mo is only the basic stuff -- HD alone is another $10/mo, and stuff like HBO is obviously more.
Unfortunately, there's no cheaper option -- but $65/mo is worth it for internet. I see the phone line as a toy.
Oh, and it is closer to 50 mbits in practice, to the Internet -- but that's a limit somewhere upstream. I've tested from point to point in this town, and I've gotten 11 megabytes per second over scp.
Well, 100 fps isn't really perceptible on an LCD -- 60 fps is what you want. I realize most gamers are used to a CRT, where it may make sense, but the only reason to go above that here is if you want to do things like motion blur (which blends several frames into one) -- but motion blur produces the exact same number of frames going to the video device, it's just now 60 artfully blurred frames per second.
Just a nitpick...
But the real problem is, if it really does what it says, and it doesn't do video streaming, it makes no sense. I suppose they could be transferring scene data, but that basically means they'd need as much bandwidth as games currently have between the system and the video card -- in other words, they'd need a network as fast as PCI Express.
And it still means you've basically got a video card attached to a network. Which means that's a piece of hardware you'll have to upgrade, so the "no upgrades" is complete BS.
It makes more sense if they assume a lot more RAM locally, and some amount of logic, meaning they can transfer a representation -- like a level, say. Which only adds to the amount of local hardware that must be upgraded at some point.
The only way this makes any sense is if it uses video streaming. But video streaming is actually physically impossible. So WTF?
That may work within a LAN, but even there, it's stretching it. The longest extension I see is 60 meters, and that's switching from HDMI to a pair of cat5 cables -- which immediately makes me wonder how much quality it's dropping.
Quick calculation: 1920*1080 * 24(bits per pixel) * 60 (hz refresh rate) = around 3 gigabits. Even if you assume it's 24 frames per second, that's still 1.1 gigabits. Cat5 is only designed to handle 100 mbits, so they're packing a 1.1 gigabit signal into 200 mbits.
I must be missing something...
Anyway, that's 60 meters, and it's likely cheating. How is this supposed to get from me to my ISP and back? And I'm not even counting audio and input devices.
I don't know about Windows Azure, so I can only speak about Amazon Web Services...
It's all about pricing.
That's it. You can skip the rest of this post unless you're interested in specifics. But the entire thing is about flexible pricing of server hosting. Specifically, traditional hosting bills by the month -- AWS bills by the hour for VMs, and by how much you actually use (per gig of bandwidth/storage).
Let me put it this way: Compare just Amazon EC2 + S3 + EBS to Slicehost, which sells remote VMs. For the purposes of this argument, I'm comparing an EC2 Small Instance to a Slicehost 1 gig slice. Here are the main differences:
Slicehost is billed by the month. With that 1 gig instance, you will pay $70/mo, no matter how much you use. If you need to scale up, you might bump up to a 2 gig slice and pay $130/mo, or go higher...
Here's the most important difference: EC2 is billed by the hour.
Let's suppose you're using that instance to run some sort of business app that needs to be online during working hours -- so, 8 hours a day. Round it up to 10 hours to allow some flexibility, but suppose you shut it down every night. It now costs 10 cents an hour, times 10 hours a day, times 30 days a month = $30/mo.
Or, let's suppose you get Slashdotted. You can scale up from 2 VMs to 20 in a matter of minutes, run those 20 VMs for a day or so until the Slashdot effect dies down, then shut down the extra capacity. A quick calculation: 24 hours * 10 cents/hour * 18 extra VMs = $43.20. Compare to Slicehost's billing by the month, and 18 extra VMs * $70/mo = $1260.
Now, they aren't strictly comparable. You can investigate the differences yourself, but it roughly works like this: You get 1.5 gigs of RAM with EC2, vs 1 gig with that slice. You get 40 gigs of disk space on the slice, on RAID 10 -- it's not meant to ever go down. You get 160 gigs of disk space with EC2, but if anything happens to the hardware, your instance, and all its storage, could go away.
That sounds dangerous, and it is. But in practice, this doesn't happen often, and you can cover for it by creating redundant instances, or backing up to S3 -- and redundancy/backup is what you have to do anyway, to cover any hardware failure. EC2 just makes it more explicit.
S3 is the same kind of pricing model, extended to storage -- you pay 10 cents per gig per month, but that seems to scale with precisely however long you store it. If you need 100 gigs for 3 days, that'd cost about $1, the same as 10 gigs for 30 days.
Slicehost provides bandwidth as part of the cost of a slice -- that 1 gig slice comes with 400 gigs of bandwidth. Overages are 30 cents/gig.
None of the Amazon Web Services include any bandwidth -- that's charged as-needed. Last I checked, it's 10 cents/gig to upload to AWS, 17 cents/gig to download from AWS. However, services within AWS typically have free bandwidth to/from EC2 -- so it's essentially free to download 10 gigs from S3, change it locally, then upload the changed version back to S3.
The one serious downside, for a long time, was the fact that S3 is built on HTTP, and is very limited in what it lets you do. For instance, you can't really run a traditional database off S3. What you'd have to do with MySQL is, run two instances, a master and a slave, and occasionally have the slave dump itself to S3.
EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides a local block device to an EC2 instance, which can easily be snapshotted to EC2, cloned to another instance, or detached from one instance and then reattached to another. It costs ten cents per gig per month of allocated space, plus ten cents per million IO requests.
Except unlike the local instance storage, EBS is actually quite reliable, even if you don't take snapshots and such.
So that means, if you suddenly feel the need to attach a terabyte disk to your instance for three days, that's $10.
What does this all mean?
Well, you should know by now: Absolutely not vaporware. Whether it makes sense depends great
Read my sig. $65/mo, no installation fee. It's actually cheaper than the DSL, but I just moved across town, outside the fiber zone, so it'll be a few months of 1 mbit before I'm back to 100 mbit.
Lans' are 100megabits? Wha? You can buy an 8 port gig switch for 40 bucks
I have this. It actually runs about 400 mbits. And yes, I have tested -- a gigabit crossover can run much faster.
The no piracy claim tells me that this is vaporware, really.
Not really. If it works the way they say it does, piracy is pretty much impossible. Unlike audio and video, they're not transferring everything needed to play the game -- they're only sending the generated audio and video, which is only useful to a "pirate" if you intend that everyone should play that level precisely the same way you do. Even if they end up sending scene data, that still doesn't include any of the logic.
In other words, it works because gaming is interactive.
The reasons it doesn't work are a combination of current technological limitations and the speed of light. It's possible it could work someday, but it's really not something I think we'd ever want. Consider:
I'm just saying being able to play all the games off a local network with only one host would be nice for consoles which aren't really friendly to that idea right now.
Well, the price might make that easier, if everyone only pays $50/year. But then, who pays for the server that you'll have to install locally?
Mostly because they're more locked down than any other DRM that exists. It's "you want to play more than 4 people/more than one game at once, you need more consoles".
That isn't really fair. PC games tend not to have local multiplayer, meaning if you want to play more than one person, same game or different games, you need more PCs. And a gaming PC is typically much more expensive than a console.
The only advantage you might be thinking of is, if there's no DRM, you can have a LAN party in which one person shares a game with everyone there -- that is, piracy. But that's even less of a problem, when you think about it. Two consoles and two copies of the game are still much cheaper than eight gaming PCs and one copy of the game.
I like PC gaming, and I want it to continue. I'd love to see it expand -- I love when a game works on Linux. But consoles do have an advantage, there.
Considering most people use a sync suite to manage their MP3 player couldn't this be part of the sync system?
Well, couldn't re-encoding be part of the sync system, too? Store flacs, and re-encode to mp3s on sync? Amarok can do exactly that.
The only advantage is, re-encoding is time consuming, so it's nice if you only have to do it once, and then you store both versions on the desktop. And apparently, the lossless format is storing some sort of delta from the lossy version -- the combined file is bigger than a flac, but smaller than the space required for both a flac and an mp3.
But honestly, this doesn't seem to matter much. How many CDs will you rip at once -- or how many Flacs will you download at once? After you sync them, the mp3 (or aac) is already on the device. Unless you frequently swap out which files are on the device, it seems to me you'd store the lossy file on the device, and the lossy one on the desktop.
In the sense that it does not appear to apply technological inhibitions against otherwise lawful behavior.
DRM is about applying technological inhibitions against unlawful behavior. By its very nature, these tend to also inhibit lawful behavior.
DRM proponents often talk about a "perfect DRM" scheme, in which all lawful behavior is allowed. If such a system could be built, I'd be all for it, but I consider it to be impossible by definition.
This sounds more like a desperate attempt to distance themselves from the label "DRM", because consumers have (rightly) started to associate that with something bad.
However, if you read the press release, it says quite clearly that this scheme compliments the existing DRM. So even supposing it's merely a watermark scheme (which is what it looks like), it's no improvement to the consumer until I can play my Steam games offline, indefinitely, forever, and ideally get patches without requiring a steam account (or verifying that I have a unique game). That would be a Steam without DRM.
As it is, I honestly don't care. Steam, as-is, is an acceptable amount of DRM, so long as games don't add anything. I am required to be online and never share my account, and in return, I can download the games as many times as I want, on as many computers as I want, burn them to DVDs and restore them, plus the community (and achievements), plus the ability to have Valve host my settings and savegames.
DRM is any digital measure that attempts to stop piracy by restricting what you can do.
Whether or not it's acceptable DRM is a different question. I have Steam, and I consider it an acceptable trade.
But put another way, this is like claiming an iPod sold for $20 is "free", or has "no cost". Bullshit! It cost you $20! You may consider that to be more than fair price, considering what iPods usually go for, but it is in no sense free.
Now, someone else has pointed out that it may instead be a watermark system. Here, we could have a lively debate -- I consider a watermark to not be DRM, because it actually doesn't restrict you from doing anything. Others consider a watermark to be DRM, because it is a potential privacy hazard, and possible to abuse -- for instance, depending on the watermark scheme used, someone may be able to replace their details with someone else's, thus framing someone else for the piracy.
However, nothing in the press release suggests that this is a watermark instead of Steam's built-in DRM. Instead, it says quite clearly:
Headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology that compliments the already existing anti-piracy solution offered in Steamworks.
Why don't large cities have this already? Manhattan has 1.6 million people packed into 22.6 square miles. Can they get that good a deal?
Yes, it has something to do with difference in land mass. However, even in high population density areas, the US lags well behind the rest of the world. Comcast would never survive in Japan.
Also worth mentioning: Even assuming you've got a magical encoding machine which only adds a few milliseconds to the latency, there's the simple fact that most video streamed over the Internet is done through a relatively large buffer.
In fact, Flash audio and video (Youtube and friends) seems to just download as much of the video as it can, as fast as it can, and start playing once it thinks it has enough.
This means it's possible for your connection to drop out completely for a second, or just vary by the amounts Internet traffic typically does, and so long as it comes back in time, your video will just keep playing.
This applies even to most sane "live" broadcasts.
Trying to do it actually live, within a few milliseconds, is completely different. The slightest blip in connectivity, which a sufficiently buffered stream would skip right over, is going to be catastrophic here.
And just in case it wasn't obvious: Buffers inherently add latency, proportional to their size. Add a buffer that can handle even half a second of connection trouble, and you've just added half a second between the time the player says "turn left", and the time they see the camera turn left.
I mention all of this because I suspect that the reason you'd think this is a good idea is, you've got a Roku, or you've used YouTube, or even Skype, and you've concluded that the Internet is now fast enough to do video. Maybe, but I don't think it's fast enough to do the kind of high quality, live, low-latency video demanded by a gamer.
Slashdot Mirror
The first laptop I had was from the Sharp MM series. It was really a netbook form factor, but much more expensive, rather than less expensive. And I dare say, it looked sexy -- I remember leaving it on a table, looking over at it and seeing a girl stroking it, caressing it... I am not making this up.
The second laptop I had was a Powerbook. The Macbook look hasn't changed much since then -- still shiny aluminum with those sleek curves.
So, maybe you don't want it to look "manly" -- maybe you want it to look sexy and stylish, even feminine. Not because that's what you are, but because it's actually aesthetically appealing, to both sexes -- and because if she does end up being bisexual, all the better!
By the way: While I suspect the above is true, you should take it as humor.
More seriously, "cute" is fine. It's like walking around with a cute puppy. And honestly, what you're wanting to do is like trying to mod that puppy into a rottweiler -- even if you were completely successful, that's going to scare away more women than it attracts.
If they're talking to you at all, that's an opening. You don't even need a witty one-liner -- studies show that the best pick-up line is "Hi." It's quite possible that you have plenty to say about your laptop, and a lot of it in terms they might even understand.
Alright, alright, one possible mod: if the video card doesn't completely suck, put Compiz on it. That should keep the conversation going.
The parent was talking about casual copying.
The word used was "loaning". If they meant copying, they should've said copying.
Used game sales aren't good for the original developer. If a game is bought for $50, then resold four times for $10-30 each time, how much does the original developer make? $50.
That assumes that the game can be sold at the same price, even when users know they can't resell them. Would you buy a car you couldn't re-sell?
It also assumes that someone who would buy a game for $10-30 would have bought it for $50 if it wasn't available at the lower price.
With a book, possession directly implies access. If I loan out a book, I can't read it until it's returned. Software is different; It's dishonest to loan out my copy of Office 2007 to my friends to install, if can still use it.
Agreed. But this is not always the case.
Obvious example: Console games.
Much less obvious example: Steam games, and MMO accounts. These are discouraged by the fact that it's a much more valuable item, and it's probably against the EULA. But it's allowed.
But it is somewhat compensated by the "resume anywhere" feature
Which I addressed -- Steam has that feature already, among many other advantages, and many users still consider it unacceptable. That feature alone isn't nearly enough.
In other words, it stops people who don't know how to use a Sharpie.
I assert that people who don't know how use a sharpie also won't know how to use a CD burner.
There really are some people out there who can be foiled by it.
The question is whether these same people would be intelligent enough to use a CD burner, if there was no DRM.
So something like this could be a fair compromise. It'll still stop anyone that DRM is going to stop, but it isn't a real big deal for legit customers.
That's a good way of putting it.
Of course, I still find it kind of offensive, but it is something I can live with.
For me, that code is just a little reminder that "Hey, we're still going to assume you're a pirate until you prove otherwise."
Their best strategy is to discourage loaning, which has been a side-effect of hand-held console cartridges for some time. Carts have a finite amount of space for save game slots, and as a result you don't want to loan your cartridge to someone careless who will overwrite your "hard work" with their own progress.
So let me get this straight -- you want to discourage, not copying, but loaning?
Since these are so often compared to physical objects, let's compare. With a console game, no one really minds loaning them -- the biggest concern is that you won't have it while they're borrowing it, and it might get scratched.
But if anything, this opens up new markets -- game rentals, and used games. And it does drive up the value of a game, if you know it can be re-sold.
It's only very recently that content providers have even toyed with the idea of "selling" a book, or a movie, which couldn't be transferred.
The supposed purpose of DRM is to "keep honest people honest", by preventing things like actual copyright infringement. But your comment does tend to indicate the true purpose of DRM -- to prevent people from doing perfectly honest things (like lending) that you'd rather be able to charge for.
This could be implemented in a similar fashion by moving storing saves online, and limiting the amount of slots available.
If you're already forcing them to be online, why do you need to limit the number of saves? Just don't allow more than one person to be online at once.
The customer loses some flexibility by being unable to save locally,
and by having a limited number of saves,
but benefits by not losing progress when reinstalling, or transitioning between different computers.
That is a benefit. I should point out that it is one of the benefits of Steam.
And hey, I can lend games on Steam. I just have to lend the whole account at a time, and if I lend my account credentials, I risk losing the account. That's really all the incentive I need -- to limit the number of saves on top of that really serves no purpose, other than to save you disk space. And with all the data Steam gathers about me, disk space clearly isn't an issue.
They stop casual copying from being prevalent.
It seems pretty prevalent anyway.
Many people are not willing or knowledgeable enough to go through the time/effort to download a torrent
Even those who don't use a torrent (for whatever reason, "not knowledgeable enough" seems unlikely) are certainly capable of writing the serial number on that burned CD.
In other words, it's a form of DRM which is easily defeated by a Sharpie.
it really doesn't require additional effort on my part
No, what wouldn't require additional effort is selling a digital download which came unlocked and ready to go, whether it was serial-locked or not.
Typing in 30-40 alphanumeric characters to convince the computer I'm not a pirate is pretty much the definition of "additional effort".
Now, granted, DRM schemes have gotten so absurdly draconian that this is a genuine improvement. But it doesn't magically stop being DRM when it gets to "acceptable" levels. Steam was acceptable for me years ago, while physical disk checks are not. CD keys are borderline.
But that's all personal choice. The only way a publisher can avoid pissing someone off with their DRM is to not include DRM. And as a show of good faith, it would help if they (and these Slashdot headlines) would stop claiming that something has "no DRM" when it, in fact, contains DRM. That's far worse than any "cloud computing" buzzword.
Is "acting in bad faith" a crime?
As I understand it, attempted copyright infringement is not a crime. Actual copyright infringement is a crime. And with this in place, it will be quite difficult to prove actual copyright infringement.
...well, you're still allowed to do that. If we're talking about US law, that's a first amendment right.
By offering VPN they are no longer passive facilitators, but active ones.
I don't see the difference. The VPN is a general-purpose service -- it applies to all traffic, not just torrents.
And it doesn't have to be a flagrant violation of criminal code, if it's close enough the BSA, RIAA, and MPIAA will simply throw enough money into a civil suit to make it unprofitable
Maybe you haven't been paying attention, but they've tried that. Repeatedly. It doesn't work -- it really serves no other purpose but to humiliate people like you, who seem to believe a mere anti-copyright attitude should be enough to convict someone.
expressing their clear intent, as if "Pirate Bay" wasn't enough of an outright confession.
Irrelevant. As you've pointed out:
it's pretty much like a gun shop called "Cop Killer's Paradise" in a city with the highest fatal shootings of officers.
Probably. But you can't legally shut down the shop because it's called that.
First and second amendments.
Now, if they really believe guns are a problem, they could make it harder to own a gun, or try to make it illegal to sell guns in the city. But those would have to apply to all such shops, whether they're called "Cop Killer's Paradise" or "Law Enforcement Armory".
Sounds like a waste to me, unless you're downloading something that could get you in trouble.
Or maybe you just don't want your ISP, and Slashdot's ISP, and everyone in between, to have unfettered access to who you are and what you're doing?
RTFA. It's not specifically about BitTorrent at all.
In other words: It's really no more or less than a paid, likely faster version of TOR.
Even supposing you're right, "could get you into trouble" could mean "is against the PRC, and you are in China."
I don't remember FileFront, but I agree with Rapidshare, and especially Fileplanet. I honestly couldn't figure out how Fileplanet stayed in business -- I can't think of a single customer who actually liked it, let alone wanted to pay for it.
The gaming industry is growing up. Amazon S3 is a genuine option. So is Steam, for those trying to sell a game. In fact, I'm pretty sure Fileplanet predates BitTorrent -- and I'm pretty sure I haven't seen it change much since then.
Granted, others are saying FileFront was better, but I really don't care. At the end of the day, what they're offering is a hard disk attached to an HTTP server. That's like ten minutes of work for a competent admin, and both have been commoditized -- as a single entity, with things like Amazon S3.
So, even if it was a good ludicrously obsolete relic of the dot-com boom, it's still a ludicrously obsolete relic of the dot-com boom.
I would be quite surprised if a modern computer can't encode MP3 at more than the maximum transfer rate of a typical media player.
The difference in speed is very noticeable. We're talking about minutes vs hours to transfer a few albums.
Maybe if you used a crappier-but-faster encoder, or if it was a slow flash disk. But to an iPod classic, it absolutely is faster to just transfer the files.
the point was, a 120G iPod classic costs $250. I can walk into Best Buy, that overpriced mecca of electronic goods, and buy a terabyte USB drive for $150. And the classic is the iPod with the best 'storage vs cost' ratio.
How's that relevant? If you never fill the 120 gigs, even with a lossless format, I don't really see how it matters.
That 4G shuffle costs $79 and it's nearest cousins, the 8G iPods cost $150.
That makes sense. Well, the Nano -- the Shuffle really isn't comparable, because it's, well, shuffle.
Wasting portable storage on something that would only be used at home, is pointless to the extreme.
That's why I'd also put Rockbox on it -- and probably choose something other than an iPod (and likely cheaper) -- so I could natively play flacs.
Point is, fill up the storage, then start worrying about using it efficiency. Not the other way around.
I didn't really mean it in the price aspect because that adds a bunch of extra unnecessary arguments.
Well, if you don't consider price, it's a much weaker argument. Consoles have tougher DRM, but not necessarily more restrictive.
you have a set number of copies of a console game.
True.
Many pc games are local friendly since they can be installed on the hard drive and connected at the lan.
And many aren't. The only real advantage is that a PC game can come without DRM.
For instance: I love Steam. I consider it to be a fair tradeoff, even compared to consoles. But technically, well, console games don't require that I be online for a single-player game, whereas Steam does.
Thus one person with one copy, can play with everyone simultaneously, since you don't need the "cartridge/cd/disc" to play anymore. This is not, absolutely not, piracy.
Seems very much like piracy to me...
Piracy is an offensive term misconstruing all forms of "IP infringement" (logical fallacy there), copyright infringement, and labeling fair use a part of all of the above.
Fine, we'll call it copyright infringement.
Nothing is being stolen, no copyright is being infringed, mostly because gaming companies are smart enough to encourage this legally.
Somewhat true. They don't encourage it -- they encourage everyone to buy a copy, and that's really much more convenient.
However, they do look the other way. For instance, hlds and srcds have a LAN mode which can be turned on. With LAN mode off, you can have random people wander in from the Internet; with LAN mode on, anyone can connect, but it won't show up in any server list except within that LAN.
The problem is, you still need to have everyone login to steam, then put it in offline mode. Other games aren't usually better. It ends up being easier just to buy the damn game -- which comes to some $20/person these days.
Everyone needs the capability (a console), but you're not limited to a set number, only the max that a server is set to handle.
Well, that is also often true of a console game. I suppose it depends on the game.
I do see your point -- a console might handle 16 players. Maybe. I can easily build a server to handle 32 players in Natural Selection, and really, with less than 10 or 12 players, NS isn't nearly as fun.
But if you start with the assumption that each supports 16 players, you can put 16 players on 4 consoles, or 16 computers. With each computer costing more than a console, that doesn't seem right.
And each computer is likely more powerful than the console -- so technically, it's just as much a limitation that you can't play split-screen on most PC games as it is a limitation that you can't share the same game disc across multiple consoles.
Meh. If it's an argument of freedom, PCs win because of Nexuiz and Tremulous anyway.
I would pay 80$ if I could get 100mb at this point
Not to be too smug, but the $65/mo is internet+phone. At $85/mo, you get phone+TV, or internet+TV -- where the TV is actually some sort of IPTV (network cable going to a set-top box).
The TV is HD-capable, but the $85/mo is only the basic stuff -- HD alone is another $10/mo, and stuff like HBO is obviously more.
Unfortunately, there's no cheaper option -- but $65/mo is worth it for internet. I see the phone line as a toy.
Oh, and it is closer to 50 mbits in practice, to the Internet -- but that's a limit somewhere upstream. I've tested from point to point in this town, and I've gotten 11 megabytes per second over scp.
Well, 100 fps isn't really perceptible on an LCD -- 60 fps is what you want. I realize most gamers are used to a CRT, where it may make sense, but the only reason to go above that here is if you want to do things like motion blur (which blends several frames into one) -- but motion blur produces the exact same number of frames going to the video device, it's just now 60 artfully blurred frames per second.
Just a nitpick...
But the real problem is, if it really does what it says, and it doesn't do video streaming, it makes no sense. I suppose they could be transferring scene data, but that basically means they'd need as much bandwidth as games currently have between the system and the video card -- in other words, they'd need a network as fast as PCI Express.
And it still means you've basically got a video card attached to a network. Which means that's a piece of hardware you'll have to upgrade, so the "no upgrades" is complete BS.
It makes more sense if they assume a lot more RAM locally, and some amount of logic, meaning they can transfer a representation -- like a level, say. Which only adds to the amount of local hardware that must be upgraded at some point.
The only way this makes any sense is if it uses video streaming. But video streaming is actually physically impossible. So WTF?
That may work within a LAN, but even there, it's stretching it. The longest extension I see is 60 meters, and that's switching from HDMI to a pair of cat5 cables -- which immediately makes me wonder how much quality it's dropping.
Quick calculation: 1920*1080 * 24(bits per pixel) * 60 (hz refresh rate) = around 3 gigabits. Even if you assume it's 24 frames per second, that's still 1.1 gigabits. Cat5 is only designed to handle 100 mbits, so they're packing a 1.1 gigabit signal into 200 mbits.
I must be missing something...
Anyway, that's 60 meters, and it's likely cheating. How is this supposed to get from me to my ISP and back? And I'm not even counting audio and input devices.
I don't know about Windows Azure, so I can only speak about Amazon Web Services...
It's all about pricing.
That's it. You can skip the rest of this post unless you're interested in specifics. But the entire thing is about flexible pricing of server hosting. Specifically, traditional hosting bills by the month -- AWS bills by the hour for VMs, and by how much you actually use (per gig of bandwidth/storage).
Let me put it this way: Compare just Amazon EC2 + S3 + EBS to Slicehost, which sells remote VMs. For the purposes of this argument, I'm comparing an EC2 Small Instance to a Slicehost 1 gig slice. Here are the main differences:
Slicehost is billed by the month. With that 1 gig instance, you will pay $70/mo, no matter how much you use. If you need to scale up, you might bump up to a 2 gig slice and pay $130/mo, or go higher...
Here's the most important difference: EC2 is billed by the hour.
Let's suppose you're using that instance to run some sort of business app that needs to be online during working hours -- so, 8 hours a day. Round it up to 10 hours to allow some flexibility, but suppose you shut it down every night. It now costs 10 cents an hour, times 10 hours a day, times 30 days a month = $30/mo.
Or, let's suppose you get Slashdotted. You can scale up from 2 VMs to 20 in a matter of minutes, run those 20 VMs for a day or so until the Slashdot effect dies down, then shut down the extra capacity. A quick calculation: 24 hours * 10 cents/hour * 18 extra VMs = $43.20. Compare to Slicehost's billing by the month, and 18 extra VMs * $70/mo = $1260.
Now, they aren't strictly comparable. You can investigate the differences yourself, but it roughly works like this: You get 1.5 gigs of RAM with EC2, vs 1 gig with that slice. You get 40 gigs of disk space on the slice, on RAID 10 -- it's not meant to ever go down. You get 160 gigs of disk space with EC2, but if anything happens to the hardware, your instance, and all its storage, could go away.
That sounds dangerous, and it is. But in practice, this doesn't happen often, and you can cover for it by creating redundant instances, or backing up to S3 -- and redundancy/backup is what you have to do anyway, to cover any hardware failure. EC2 just makes it more explicit.
S3 is the same kind of pricing model, extended to storage -- you pay 10 cents per gig per month, but that seems to scale with precisely however long you store it. If you need 100 gigs for 3 days, that'd cost about $1, the same as 10 gigs for 30 days.
Slicehost provides bandwidth as part of the cost of a slice -- that 1 gig slice comes with 400 gigs of bandwidth. Overages are 30 cents/gig.
None of the Amazon Web Services include any bandwidth -- that's charged as-needed. Last I checked, it's 10 cents/gig to upload to AWS, 17 cents/gig to download from AWS. However, services within AWS typically have free bandwidth to/from EC2 -- so it's essentially free to download 10 gigs from S3, change it locally, then upload the changed version back to S3.
The one serious downside, for a long time, was the fact that S3 is built on HTTP, and is very limited in what it lets you do. For instance, you can't really run a traditional database off S3. What you'd have to do with MySQL is, run two instances, a master and a slave, and occasionally have the slave dump itself to S3.
EBS (Elastic Block Store) provides a local block device to an EC2 instance, which can easily be snapshotted to EC2, cloned to another instance, or detached from one instance and then reattached to another. It costs ten cents per gig per month of allocated space, plus ten cents per million IO requests.
Except unlike the local instance storage, EBS is actually quite reliable, even if you don't take snapshots and such.
So that means, if you suddenly feel the need to attach a terabyte disk to your instance for three days, that's $10.
What does this all mean?
Well, you should know by now: Absolutely not vaporware. Whether it makes sense depends great
Fiber is 100mbits where?
Read my sig. $65/mo, no installation fee. It's actually cheaper than the DSL, but I just moved across town, outside the fiber zone, so it'll be a few months of 1 mbit before I'm back to 100 mbit.
Lans' are 100megabits? Wha? You can buy an 8 port gig switch for 40 bucks
I have this. It actually runs about 400 mbits. And yes, I have tested -- a gigabit crossover can run much faster.
The no piracy claim tells me that this is vaporware, really.
Not really. If it works the way they say it does, piracy is pretty much impossible. Unlike audio and video, they're not transferring everything needed to play the game -- they're only sending the generated audio and video, which is only useful to a "pirate" if you intend that everyone should play that level precisely the same way you do. Even if they end up sending scene data, that still doesn't include any of the logic.
In other words, it works because gaming is interactive.
The reasons it doesn't work are a combination of current technological limitations and the speed of light. It's possible it could work someday, but it's really not something I think we'd ever want. Consider:
I'm just saying being able to play all the games off a local network with only one host would be nice for consoles which aren't really friendly to that idea right now.
Well, the price might make that easier, if everyone only pays $50/year. But then, who pays for the server that you'll have to install locally?
Mostly because they're more locked down than any other DRM that exists. It's "you want to play more than 4 people/more than one game at once, you need more consoles".
That isn't really fair. PC games tend not to have local multiplayer, meaning if you want to play more than one person, same game or different games, you need more PCs. And a gaming PC is typically much more expensive than a console.
The only advantage you might be thinking of is, if there's no DRM, you can have a LAN party in which one person shares a game with everyone there -- that is, piracy. But that's even less of a problem, when you think about it. Two consoles and two copies of the game are still much cheaper than eight gaming PCs and one copy of the game.
I like PC gaming, and I want it to continue. I'd love to see it expand -- I love when a game works on Linux. But consoles do have an advantage, there.
Considering most people use a sync suite to manage their MP3 player couldn't this be part of the sync system?
Well, couldn't re-encoding be part of the sync system, too? Store flacs, and re-encode to mp3s on sync? Amarok can do exactly that.
The only advantage is, re-encoding is time consuming, so it's nice if you only have to do it once, and then you store both versions on the desktop. And apparently, the lossless format is storing some sort of delta from the lossy version -- the combined file is bigger than a flac, but smaller than the space required for both a flac and an mp3.
But honestly, this doesn't seem to matter much. How many CDs will you rip at once -- or how many Flacs will you download at once? After you sync them, the mp3 (or aac) is already on the device. Unless you frequently swap out which files are on the device, it seems to me you'd store the lossy file on the device, and the lossy one on the desktop.
The smallest iPod you can get is 80 gigs.
A full CD-length album, encoded to Flac, comes to around 350 megs.
So you can fit 228 full albums on a basic iPod. You'll just need something like RockBox to play the Flac (assuming it can).
I realize I'm probably behind the curve here, but I simply don't have that many albums in a lossless format.
In the sense that it does not appear to apply technological inhibitions against otherwise lawful behavior.
DRM is about applying technological inhibitions against unlawful behavior. By its very nature, these tend to also inhibit lawful behavior.
DRM proponents often talk about a "perfect DRM" scheme, in which all lawful behavior is allowed. If such a system could be built, I'd be all for it, but I consider it to be impossible by definition.
This sounds more like a desperate attempt to distance themselves from the label "DRM", because consumers have (rightly) started to associate that with something bad.
However, if you read the press release, it says quite clearly that this scheme compliments the existing DRM. So even supposing it's merely a watermark scheme (which is what it looks like), it's no improvement to the consumer until I can play my Steam games offline, indefinitely, forever, and ideally get patches without requiring a steam account (or verifying that I have a unique game). That would be a Steam without DRM.
As it is, I honestly don't care. Steam, as-is, is an acceptable amount of DRM, so long as games don't add anything. I am required to be online and never share my account, and in return, I can download the games as many times as I want, on as many computers as I want, burn them to DVDs and restore them, plus the community (and achievements), plus the ability to have Valve host my settings and savegames.
Let me make this very simple for you:
DRM is any digital measure that attempts to stop piracy by restricting what you can do.
Whether or not it's acceptable DRM is a different question. I have Steam, and I consider it an acceptable trade.
But put another way, this is like claiming an iPod sold for $20 is "free", or has "no cost". Bullshit! It cost you $20! You may consider that to be more than fair price, considering what iPods usually go for, but it is in no sense free.
Now, someone else has pointed out that it may instead be a watermark system. Here, we could have a lively debate -- I consider a watermark to not be DRM, because it actually doesn't restrict you from doing anything. Others consider a watermark to be DRM, because it is a potential privacy hazard, and possible to abuse -- for instance, depending on the watermark scheme used, someone may be able to replace their details with someone else's, thus framing someone else for the piracy.
However, nothing in the press release suggests that this is a watermark instead of Steam's built-in DRM. Instead, it says quite clearly:
Headlining the new feature set is the Custom Executable Generation (CEG) technology that compliments the already existing anti-piracy solution offered in Steamworks.
Not really. See my sig.
Why don't large cities have this already? Manhattan has 1.6 million people packed into 22.6 square miles. Can they get that good a deal?
Yes, it has something to do with difference in land mass. However, even in high population density areas, the US lags well behind the rest of the world. Comcast would never survive in Japan.
Also worth mentioning: Even assuming you've got a magical encoding machine which only adds a few milliseconds to the latency, there's the simple fact that most video streamed over the Internet is done through a relatively large buffer.
In fact, Flash audio and video (Youtube and friends) seems to just download as much of the video as it can, as fast as it can, and start playing once it thinks it has enough.
This means it's possible for your connection to drop out completely for a second, or just vary by the amounts Internet traffic typically does, and so long as it comes back in time, your video will just keep playing.
This applies even to most sane "live" broadcasts.
Trying to do it actually live, within a few milliseconds, is completely different. The slightest blip in connectivity, which a sufficiently buffered stream would skip right over, is going to be catastrophic here.
And just in case it wasn't obvious: Buffers inherently add latency, proportional to their size. Add a buffer that can handle even half a second of connection trouble, and you've just added half a second between the time the player says "turn left", and the time they see the camera turn left.
I mention all of this because I suspect that the reason you'd think this is a good idea is, you've got a Roku, or you've used YouTube, or even Skype, and you've concluded that the Internet is now fast enough to do video. Maybe, but I don't think it's fast enough to do the kind of high quality, live, low-latency video demanded by a gamer.