Yeah, now those of us who can actually code (and not just in Java or some Web 2.0 crap!) Erm... In what way is that not "actually coding"?
have no term to differentiate ourselves from the morons who run around posting 4chan memes everywhere and/or watching unhealthy amounts of anime. Well, 4chan memes and unhealthy amounts of anime is hopefully very different than "Java or some Web 2.0 crap"...
Well if you had the register specs you could get a bunch of Chinese VHDL hackers to make a compatible card. Maybe I'm missing just how crucial "register specs" are, but we already have something like that -- we already have an API spec. Two, at least. It would now take Chinese VHDL and software hackers to do it, but it could be done.
They're also probably worried that someone would sue them for patent infringement if the released specs allowed ATI to find something. Possibly, but they could check that themselves -- after all, ATI has released specs.
I doubt very much that it's either of these. Remember, we only need specs for an interface, it doesn't have to be schematics for the whole card.
No, the real reason very likely has to do with the geForce/Quadro scam. Specifically, the fact that you can take a geForce (typically, what, $200?) and soft-mod it into a Quadro (at least $500, and most are $1k and up).
Not make the highest possible revenue, but to turn the highest profit. Digital distribution brings the cost of a copy down to almost nil -- not as if a pressed DVD cost that much, either. So higher revenue is pretty much higher profit, unless it takes more work...
And doing DRM takes more work. Does it bring in enough revenue to cover that?
Good post, but you're a fool if you don't think software is currently sold at profit maximizing prices. Publishers aren't just pulling these prices out of their asses, they study price elasticity and (who knew) have economics models that tell them what level maximizes profit. Those aren't infallible. It could be simply that they haven't tried. How do you test price elasticity without changing it?
For an example of this failing miserably, look at the music industry.
If people made more money selling games for less and with no DRM, in America of all places, they would. Some do -- or at least, without the crippling DRM.
Example: Bought the Penny Arcade game. $20 for an episode, and total copy protection is entering a key, once -- and I can re-download and reinstall as many times as I want.
Pretty much the same model has been used by indie developers for a long time. Introversion is another...
After June 30, when Microsoft takes Windows XP out of print You know, they said they would before. I'll believe it when I see it.
will PC gamers flock to eBay to buy copies of Windows XP for new machines that they build? Those who already use eBay to buy OSes might. The rest will likely pirate it.
Just pointing out that cartridges aren't, by themselves, a solution. If you're suggesting hardware specific to each game, you may as well recommend a USB dongle.
Given that nVidia already makes Linux drivers, it seems to me that the only way they could spend less money on them short of not supporting Linux at all would be to open specs and source, thus getting the Linux community to write their drivers for them.
And those drivers would actually be better. Better Linux support for less money.
But nVidia is the last to publish specs, or any sort of source code. ATI and Intel already do one of the two for pretty much all of their cards.
So, in the long run, nVidia loses. It's possible they'll change in the future, but when you can actually convert a geForce to a Quadro with a soft mod, I very much doubt it'll be anytime soon.
Actually, cartridges are frequently pirated. Here's some recent examples.
Nothing will end piracy of game software. The best way to deal with it is to stop recoiling in horror and start treating it as a legitimate competitor. It's not, but if you treat it that way, you might actually be able to beat it.
And they just lost another purchase -- I might have bought NWN because of the Linux port, but I'm not going to tolerate a complete lack of an offline mode, with no features to make up for it...
I beg to differ -- first, do this in a TT font. Second:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
That, at a minimum, applies to pretty much any DRM scheme. Here's the key, here's the encrypted content. Please don't put them together! Pretty-please with puppy eyes and sugar on top!!!
It is like the trusted path for blueray content in vista, but then for software. You cannot run software unless it is in a signed environment. Allow me to demonstrate how well that's working for Blu Ray.
For that matter, I understand that consoles, like the Xbox 360, already work under the same principle. Behold its uncrackability.
Point is, it only takes one person to crack it, and it's cracked for all time. And we have physical access to everything that's normally needed to play the game -- therefore, we have physical access to everything that will be needed to crack it.
There is, however, a RAM hole. And if we somehow get fast enough crypto for that (not bloody likely!), there's the CPU register hole. Only slightly less practical than the theoretical "analog hole" of HD playback over HDMI/DVI -- the equipment needed to intercept and encode/store that would be pretty insanely expensive.
Now, granted, this is not necessarily as easy as the analog hole. There's still the matter of fooling the game into thinking it's still under copy protection -- or finding all checks for that and stripping them out. There's even the matter of obtaining the key itself. By all counts, it's a difficult problem.
But I know of no way to make it impossible to do, short of requiring people to play the game on thin clients, and keeping the server under your control -- and that is prohibitively expensive.
Well, if you can't afford it, don't play it. Not the point. Some people will anyway. The question is, what do you do about it?
Because saying "if you can't afford it, don't play it" is not a solution.
I'm not in favor of these measures, but I hardly see why the developers should give a crap about people who can't afford their product. They're, ultimately, not the customer (in any sense). Basic economics. If lowering the price by less than 50% will more than double the number of people who want to play your game, that's a win. (It's more complicated than that, but the principle is the same.) They may not have been customers before, but they could easily be potential customers.
It's amazing how many people toss economics out the window in favor of vigilantism where piracy is concerned.
Adding an encryption chip may prevent the piracy from those who can afford it, but like something for nothing. No it won't. Those people will go to The Pirate Bay or GameCopyWorld and download a crack and/or the full game. DRM does not work, and cannot work.
I think that neatly addresses your other point:
They are under no obligation to provide cheaper games if they're maximizing their profits by selling them at a higher price. I don't think they're maximizing their profits. By selling them at a higher price, and including DRM, the most common scenario is one where it's not only cheaper and more convenient to pirate -- just type "Game I want" into The Pirate Bay and click Download -- but you actually get a better product, because the draconian DRM measures are already removed.
There are certain DRM schemes I will tolerate, but most of them, even if I buy the game legitimately, I will go straight to the Internet for a crack.
So, piss off the more technically savvy customers, and still lose at least as many customers to piracy as before. Sounds like a no-brainer lose situation for the developers.
No encryption scheme is 100% Wrong. Encryption can be very much uncrackable, given certain conditions, such as the assumption that no viable quantum computers exist yet.
Oh, and the other (obvious) assumption that an attacker doesn't already have the key.
The confusion arises from assuming encryption can be applied to copy protection. It can't. That fails the second test above -- the "attacker" is the end-user, and if they didn't have a working key in some form, they couldn't play the game. Because they have the key, they can copy the game, full stop.
It might take awhile, but it's not the encryption that's flawed, it's the very concept of DRM. As the old saying goes, "Trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet."
The only real result of most of these schemes is to piss off the end-user to where we'll actually buy the game, and then download a crack. I'm argue that DRM causes at least as much piracy as it solves.
So, (oversimplifying) "2+2=4" should not be copyrightable but "Two plus two is equal to four" should be? I didn't say that. I said that it shouldn't be patentable.
If it's not patentable, then any way you write "two plus two is equal to four", I can rewrite the same equation (or function, or proof, etc) and distribute that -- although I do believe that sentence is too short to be copyrightable.
In cases where it is patentable, the very idea of addition could be off-limits. Or, in a less extreme (but very real) example, it's my understanding that it's not the MP3 format itself, but some mathematical function you need to encode/decode that format, which is patented. Because of this, any implementation of MP3 must pay royalties, even if it was developed entirely independently.
If you simply copyright an implementation of MP3, that's fine -- I can always reverse engineer it and write my own.
It's a publicity stunt by an amusement park, promoted with a photo of a child wearing a policeman's helmet. Alright, I read TFA. There is, indeed, a child wearing a policeman's helmet.
And a headline that says "PDA's banished to oblivion..."
What part of that article says "This is just a cute joke, you can keep your PDA if you want"?
Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with? Sometimes.
The concept has its merits, but RMS makes a good point here. Using the term "Intellectual Property" distracts from what we're really talking about: Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents.
And, within that, it's possible to break things down even more. Math should never be patentable. English prose should pretty much always be copyrightable. And so on.
That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? Oh, it absolutely is illusory. Big fat "duh" on that point. What you're asking is whether or not we should behave as though it's equivalent to physical property.
I do believe IP -- especially copyright -- is a valuable concept. It's not equivalent to physical property. Specifically, copying something to which you do not have the right is not equivalent to physical theft -- and, more importantly, the only way to "steal" intellectual property would be to obtain legal copyright for something you shouldn't have.
And I believe we're far too early in the game to even know what the ethics around this should be.
If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system? That's a bit over my head, but if your concern is things like DRM, that's absurdly easy to deal with: Just don't. It is entirely possible to make money without DRM.
In more depth: What I would do is remove DRM from the game, drop the minimum damages (whatever that's called?) for lawsuits, and try to educate the courts a bit on technology, so that real proof is actually required.
And then, I would let the content creators figure it out for themselves.
As a content creator, I would stop seeing piracy as anything other than a competitor, and start looking at what I can do to compete. For successful examples, look at real-world systems which don't have a serious piracy problem, and also don't employ any of the tactics we despise (DRM, etc). Big, obvious examples: Radio, World of Warcraft, most books, and some indie music sites.
I know all of these arguments about why filesharing isn't necessarily evil; I've made them myself. I'm certainly not arguing that other ways of enforcing copy protection have worked, or are fair.
However, I don't like the idea of institutionalizing it, especially given that none of this money may make it back to the particular artist I was after. It's still very much an assumption being made that may not be true, though not as bad, maybe, as applying the same tax to Internet bills.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt very much that it's either of these. Remember, we only need specs for an interface, it doesn't have to be schematics for the whole card.
No, the real reason very likely has to do with the geForce/Quadro scam. Specifically, the fact that you can take a geForce (typically, what, $200?) and soft-mod it into a Quadro (at least $500, and most are $1k and up).
And doing DRM takes more work. Does it bring in enough revenue to cover that?
For an example of this failing miserably, look at the music industry. If people made more money selling games for less and with no DRM, in America of all places, they would. Some do -- or at least, without the crippling DRM.
Example: Bought the Penny Arcade game. $20 for an episode, and total copy protection is entering a key, once -- and I can re-download and reinstall as many times as I want.
Pretty much the same model has been used by indie developers for a long time. Introversion is another...
Just pointing out that cartridges aren't, by themselves, a solution. If you're suggesting hardware specific to each game, you may as well recommend a USB dongle.
And that doesn't entirely work, either.
Given that nVidia already makes Linux drivers, it seems to me that the only way they could spend less money on them short of not supporting Linux at all would be to open specs and source, thus getting the Linux community to write their drivers for them.
And those drivers would actually be better. Better Linux support for less money.
So what's the holdup?
Possibly Intel, possibly ATI.
But nVidia is the last to publish specs, or any sort of source code. ATI and Intel already do one of the two for pretty much all of their cards.
So, in the long run, nVidia loses. It's possible they'll change in the future, but when you can actually convert a geForce to a Quadro with a soft mod, I very much doubt it'll be anytime soon.
Seems just as ridiculous, though, that someone would go out of their way to go into an Idle story to whine about it.
Actually, cartridges are frequently pirated. Here's some recent examples.
Nothing will end piracy of game software. The best way to deal with it is to stop recoiling in horror and start treating it as a legitimate competitor. It's not, but if you treat it that way, you might actually be able to beat it.
And given how many gamers are smart enough to stay the hell away from Vista...
Still, out of curiosity, I just had to check...
Nope. Doesn't stop piracy.
And they just lost another purchase -- I might have bought NWN because of the Linux port, but I'm not going to tolerate a complete lack of an offline mode, with no features to make up for it...
I beg to differ -- first, do this in a TT font. Second:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(X) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
That, at a minimum, applies to pretty much any DRM scheme. Here's the key, here's the encrypted content. Please don't put them together! Pretty-please with puppy eyes and sugar on top!!!
For that matter, I understand that consoles, like the Xbox 360, already work under the same principle. Behold its uncrackability.
Point is, it only takes one person to crack it, and it's cracked for all time. And we have physical access to everything that's normally needed to play the game -- therefore, we have physical access to everything that will be needed to crack it.
There is, however, a RAM hole. And if we somehow get fast enough crypto for that (not bloody likely!), there's the CPU register hole. Only slightly less practical than the theoretical "analog hole" of HD playback over HDMI/DVI -- the equipment needed to intercept and encode/store that would be pretty insanely expensive.
Now, granted, this is not necessarily as easy as the analog hole. There's still the matter of fooling the game into thinking it's still under copy protection -- or finding all checks for that and stripping them out. There's even the matter of obtaining the key itself. By all counts, it's a difficult problem.
But I know of no way to make it impossible to do, short of requiring people to play the game on thin clients, and keeping the server under your control -- and that is prohibitively expensive.
Because saying "if you can't afford it, don't play it" is not a solution. I'm not in favor of these measures, but I hardly see why the developers should give a crap about people who can't afford their product. They're, ultimately, not the customer (in any sense). Basic economics. If lowering the price by less than 50% will more than double the number of people who want to play your game, that's a win. (It's more complicated than that, but the principle is the same.) They may not have been customers before, but they could easily be potential customers.
It's amazing how many people toss economics out the window in favor of vigilantism where piracy is concerned.
I think that neatly addresses your other point: They are under no obligation to provide cheaper games if they're maximizing their profits by selling them at a higher price. I don't think they're maximizing their profits. By selling them at a higher price, and including DRM, the most common scenario is one where it's not only cheaper and more convenient to pirate -- just type "Game I want" into The Pirate Bay and click Download -- but you actually get a better product, because the draconian DRM measures are already removed.
There are certain DRM schemes I will tolerate, but most of them, even if I buy the game legitimately, I will go straight to the Internet for a crack.
So, piss off the more technically savvy customers, and still lose at least as many customers to piracy as before. Sounds like a no-brainer lose situation for the developers.
Oh, and the other (obvious) assumption that an attacker doesn't already have the key.
The confusion arises from assuming encryption can be applied to copy protection. It can't. That fails the second test above -- the "attacker" is the end-user, and if they didn't have a working key in some form, they couldn't play the game. Because they have the key, they can copy the game, full stop.
It might take awhile, but it's not the encryption that's flawed, it's the very concept of DRM. As the old saying goes, "Trying to make bits not copyable is like trying to make water not wet."
The only real result of most of these schemes is to piss off the end-user to where we'll actually buy the game, and then download a crack. I'm argue that DRM causes at least as much piracy as it solves.
If it's not patentable, then any way you write "two plus two is equal to four", I can rewrite the same equation (or function, or proof, etc) and distribute that -- although I do believe that sentence is too short to be copyrightable.
In cases where it is patentable, the very idea of addition could be off-limits. Or, in a less extreme (but very real) example, it's my understanding that it's not the MP3 format itself, but some mathematical function you need to encode/decode that format, which is patented. Because of this, any implementation of MP3 must pay royalties, even if it was developed entirely independently.
If you simply copyright an implementation of MP3, that's fine -- I can always reverse engineer it and write my own.
It is used to prevent cheating. Sounds like an anti-cheating system, then. They are not using DRM for copy protection.
And a headline that says "PDA's banished to oblivion..."
What part of that article says "This is just a cute joke, you can keep your PDA if you want"?
I didn't say that nothing could provide that redemption. I said, specifically, that this policy isn't going to do it.
The concept has its merits, but RMS makes a good point here. Using the term "Intellectual Property" distracts from what we're really talking about: Trademarks, Copyrights, and Patents.
And, within that, it's possible to break things down even more. Math should never be patentable. English prose should pretty much always be copyrightable. And so on. That is, do you believe that intellectual property is a valid construct equivalent to physical property, or do you think it's illusory? Oh, it absolutely is illusory. Big fat "duh" on that point. What you're asking is whether or not we should behave as though it's equivalent to physical property.
I do believe IP -- especially copyright -- is a valuable concept. It's not equivalent to physical property. Specifically, copying something to which you do not have the right is not equivalent to physical theft -- and, more importantly, the only way to "steal" intellectual property would be to obtain legal copyright for something you shouldn't have.
And I believe we're far too early in the game to even know what the ethics around this should be. If so, how would you go about protecting the rights of intellectual property holders in a way that doesn't require unfair usage limitations or resort to predatory abuse of the tort system? That's a bit over my head, but if your concern is things like DRM, that's absurdly easy to deal with: Just don't. It is entirely possible to make money without DRM.
In more depth: What I would do is remove DRM from the game, drop the minimum damages (whatever that's called?) for lawsuits, and try to educate the courts a bit on technology, so that real proof is actually required.
And then, I would let the content creators figure it out for themselves.
As a content creator, I would stop seeing piracy as anything other than a competitor, and start looking at what I can do to compete. For successful examples, look at real-world systems which don't have a serious piracy problem, and also don't employ any of the tactics we despise (DRM, etc). Big, obvious examples: Radio, World of Warcraft, most books, and some indie music sites.
I know all of these arguments about why filesharing isn't necessarily evil; I've made them myself. I'm certainly not arguing that other ways of enforcing copy protection have worked, or are fair.
However, I don't like the idea of institutionalizing it, especially given that none of this money may make it back to the particular artist I was after. It's still very much an assumption being made that may not be true, though not as bad, maybe, as applying the same tax to Internet bills.