I stopped buying CDs when they started producing more and more CDs that were actually "music discs" and not CDs. I found that I could no longer rip them as easily and eventually just gave up. I like having my music in ogg, which no music store has, so I gave up on the idea of downloading legally. And I don't want to be the target of a lawsuit, so I refuse to download illegally. As a result, my music collection is getting kind of stale and the music industry is missing out on the 20-30 CDs a year I used to buy.
It seems that every step they take to reduce piracy just makes it that more unlikely that I'll buy legitimately from them. They make CDs rip-proof and I won't buy CDs. They make online music stores use DRM and I won't buy MP3s (or more technically WMAs or AACs).
I can't speak for every individual obviously, but if they were to just totally stop all of their anti-piracy initiatives, I'd be buying $300-$400 more music each year. There is definitely a cost to trying to stop piracy.
Email me and I'll send you the address you can send my new TV to.
Seriously,/. is not a representative sample. We're tech people so of course we all have cable/satellite, have known about the transition since the beginning, and know how to download shows off the Internet. For us, Feb 17th is just another day, but for a lot of people it's going to be a big surprise.
For example, my cable company has been running ads that make Feb 17th sound like the end of a sale their having, not the end of analog broadcast. Other people may have bought HDTVs and think that the "D" stands for digital.
"Catch-22" implies a no-win situation. Comcast (and the other ISPs) have done this to themselves. They advertise unlimited Internet access (or make it seem like they're offering unlimited access) and then get upset when someone tries to use it.
The ISPs should start advertising their download speed, upload speed, and bandwidth caps openly. Offer additional speed and bandwidth for a reasonable price. And if your infrastructure is such that sometimes you'll need to throttle someone, make it clear upfront how and when such throttling will happen.
Right now, on Comcast's sale page, they only list the download speed of their connections. I couldn't find their upload speeds or the bandwidth caps (which I know to be 250GB). As far as I know, Comcast customers have no way to check to see if their being throttled or if they're near the bandwidth cap.
It's really no surprise then that customers are upset.
Ah, the false dichotomy! The government has a magical ability when it comes to spending money and that ability is to borrow money with almost no limit. Instead of taking dollars out of the private sector, the government can borrow from other countries to finance the project and then back them back later when the project pays off.
I had an RCA TV in the middle of the 90's that had a commercial skip function. You'd hit the button on the remote and a 30-second countdown timer would appear on the screen. You kept pressing the button until you had set in the expected length of the commercial break. Then, you could channel surf as much as you wanted and when the countdown timer hit zero, you'd be flipped back to your original station. It was dead simple and worked surprisingly well.
Please don't confuse philosophy and physics. They are two separate fields. The physics here is suggesting that the Universe might behave. Plato was commenting on the difference between human perception and reality.
Release it and then just patch it repeatedly for months on end, fixing some things and breaking others in the process. Eventually, say the phone is past the end-of-life and instead of fixing anything, suggest that your customers buy your newest phone.
This seems to work for most other businesses.
fire samzepus now
on
The Ouroborus
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Steve is just one employee out of thousands. He didn't design the ipod, or the iphone, or any of the macs. He didn't build the chips, he didn't write os x, and he didn't figure out how to make a laptop shell out of a single piece of aluminum. Sure, it was his "vision" that has guided the company the past decade, but the hard work has been done by the same set of employees who were there last week. I fully expect nothing to change in his absence.
My understanding is that ext4 provides some very nice features, but faster data access isn't necessarily one of them. I'd imagine that an ext2 fs, which doesn't have journaling to slow it down, should be even faster.
...I'm not looking forward to USB3 all that much. With USB2, copying from one flash drive to another takes my CPU utilization to 100%. My speeds are constrained by my processor, not the USB bus. Does anyone know if USB3 is less dependent on the processor? Someone else posted about one using PMI and the other using DMA, but would someone like to break that all down?
Instead of buying a $400 video card, now you're paying AMD to buy that video card for you, paying them for the management of that card, and paying your ISP for the bandwidth. The only possible way this works is if you only use your card 10% of the time, then AMD can utilize it at 100%, selling you just one-tenth the total.
Of course, that's great for gamers, who will sporadically play throughout the day, but awful for movie studios who could probably keep a render farm at 100% anyway.
I'm going to have to disagree with you on Mario Kart Wii. I found the steering wheel control to be about the best idea ever. For the first time, it actually felt like I was really racing. A large selection of tracks, characters, and karts, as well as a ton of unlockable content made this a real winner for me.
The monthly online competitions are a ton of fun. And being able to race with up to three of my friends, plus 8 cpu characters makes for a real fun time. One of my friends isn't the best at racing games, but the bonus items (bullet, lightning, etc) that she gets makes the game worthwhile for her. And I'm a pretty decent player - the 8 AI opponents keeps me on my toes. If we were playing a standard racer one-on-one it wouldn't be any fun at all, because I'd just spend the entire time lapping her, but in Mario Kart, we both feel challenged.
My university requires that students have an email address and it requires that the students do not share the password with anyone (it's clearly stated in the TOS). Breaking the TOS is grounds for disciplinary action, up to and including expulsion.
Does this mean that sex offenders can't go to school?
Every keyboard review tends to miss this gem. It's a standard size, good quality, excellent warranty, very low cost, two color options, no gimmicks, and it has angled keys that for me provide the perfect blend of ergonomics with usuability.
...there are companies out there that use a Bayesian filter to sort posts into low scoring and high scoring, and then they have their employees manually sort through the high scoring messages.
I can understand somebody wanting the pirated version of a video game, or even a release-version of an OS, but who in their right mind would tie up their Internet connection for a day and risk the legal trouble and possibility of a virus/worm/backdoor to download a beta copy of an operating system that's built on the most reviled version of Windows since WinMe?
No problem. It's good of you to say so. It's true that even these games had DRM issues. As I recall, "The Print Shop" had a three install limit, which it enforced by writing to the disk how many times it had been installed. It was easy to circumvent, since you could copy the disk and then install the copy up to three times.
It wasn't meant as a troll. Actually, I think it's great that games from 20yrs back are being appreciated today. But if you have a retail copy of Spore or GTAIV (or any other recent release), do you honestly expect to be able to play it in 2018 or 2028? DRM is robbing us of our future history. The next generation of gamers will never (unless they download hacked copies) be able to experience many of today's best games.
From the numbers in the summary, a fully-charged one of these would supply enough energy to propel a 3300lbs (1500kg) car from 0 to 1100mph (500m/s).
Put another way, my laptop battery is 65Wh. This ultracapacitor holds 800 times as much energy as my battery. If the technology could be scaled down, an equivalent ultracapacitor would only need to weigh 281.5lbs/800 =.35lbs. (My battery clocks in at just under a pound.)
With many of the companies that made these games now defunct and out-of-business, how do you expect to connect to the activation servers in order to play these games?
And some of these games likely came on 3.5" disks, unless you happen to have an old disk drive connected to your machine, you're also out of luck, since we all know that you need to have disk #1 in the drive in order to get past the Securom checks.
Besides, I'm sure that most of you have long since used up your 3 installs.
That's true if you have only one device plugged into a USB bus at a time. But if you plug in two USB HDDs on the front of your computer and copy from one to the other, the copy operation will crawl.
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I stopped buying CDs when they started producing more and more CDs that were actually "music discs" and not CDs. I found that I could no longer rip them as easily and eventually just gave up. I like having my music in ogg, which no music store has, so I gave up on the idea of downloading legally. And I don't want to be the target of a lawsuit, so I refuse to download illegally. As a result, my music collection is getting kind of stale and the music industry is missing out on the 20-30 CDs a year I used to buy.
It seems that every step they take to reduce piracy just makes it that more unlikely that I'll buy legitimately from them. They make CDs rip-proof and I won't buy CDs. They make online music stores use DRM and I won't buy MP3s (or more technically WMAs or AACs).
I can't speak for every individual obviously, but if they were to just totally stop all of their anti-piracy initiatives, I'd be buying $300-$400 more music each year. There is definitely a cost to trying to stop piracy.
Email me and I'll send you the address you can send my new TV to.
Seriously, /. is not a representative sample. We're tech people so of course we all have cable/satellite, have known about the transition since the beginning, and know how to download shows off the Internet. For us, Feb 17th is just another day, but for a lot of people it's going to be a big surprise.
For example, my cable company has been running ads that make Feb 17th sound like the end of a sale their having, not the end of analog broadcast. Other people may have bought HDTVs and think that the "D" stands for digital.
Just kill all of the legitimate copies and anyone else who's left is a pirate. Why didn't the RIAA figure this out first? =)
"Catch-22" implies a no-win situation. Comcast (and the other ISPs) have done this to themselves. They advertise unlimited Internet access (or make it seem like they're offering unlimited access) and then get upset when someone tries to use it.
The ISPs should start advertising their download speed, upload speed, and bandwidth caps openly. Offer additional speed and bandwidth for a reasonable price. And if your infrastructure is such that sometimes you'll need to throttle someone, make it clear upfront how and when such throttling will happen.
Right now, on Comcast's sale page, they only list the download speed of their connections. I couldn't find their upload speeds or the bandwidth caps (which I know to be 250GB). As far as I know, Comcast customers have no way to check to see if their being throttled or if they're near the bandwidth cap.
It's really no surprise then that customers are upset.
Ah, the false dichotomy! The government has a magical ability when it comes to spending money and that ability is to borrow money with almost no limit. Instead of taking dollars out of the private sector, the government can borrow from other countries to finance the project and then back them back later when the project pays off.
I had an RCA TV in the middle of the 90's that had a commercial skip function. You'd hit the button on the remote and a 30-second countdown timer would appear on the screen. You kept pressing the button until you had set in the expected length of the commercial break. Then, you could channel surf as much as you wanted and when the countdown timer hit zero, you'd be flipped back to your original station. It was dead simple and worked surprisingly well.
Please don't confuse philosophy and physics. They are two separate fields. The physics here is suggesting that the Universe might behave. Plato was commenting on the difference between human perception and reality.
Release it and then just patch it repeatedly for months on end, fixing some things and breaking others in the process. Eventually, say the phone is past the end-of-life and instead of fixing anything, suggest that your customers buy your newest phone.
This seems to work for most other businesses.
my subject says all - this is simply unacceptable
Steve is just one employee out of thousands. He didn't design the ipod, or the iphone, or any of the macs. He didn't build the chips, he didn't write os x, and he didn't figure out how to make a laptop shell out of a single piece of aluminum. Sure, it was his "vision" that has guided the company the past decade, but the hard work has been done by the same set of employees who were there last week. I fully expect nothing to change in his absence.
My understanding is that ext4 provides some very nice features, but faster data access isn't necessarily one of them. I'd imagine that an ext2 fs, which doesn't have journaling to slow it down, should be even faster.
...I'm not looking forward to USB3 all that much. With USB2, copying from one flash drive to another takes my CPU utilization to 100%. My speeds are constrained by my processor, not the USB bus. Does anyone know if USB3 is less dependent on the processor? Someone else posted about one using PMI and the other using DMA, but would someone like to break that all down?
Instead of buying a $400 video card, now you're paying AMD to buy that video card for you, paying them for the management of that card, and paying your ISP for the bandwidth. The only possible way this works is if you only use your card 10% of the time, then AMD can utilize it at 100%, selling you just one-tenth the total.
Of course, that's great for gamers, who will sporadically play throughout the day, but awful for movie studios who could probably keep a render farm at 100% anyway.
What is "port one"?
I'm going to have to disagree with you on Mario Kart Wii. I found the steering wheel control to be about the best idea ever. For the first time, it actually felt like I was really racing. A large selection of tracks, characters, and karts, as well as a ton of unlockable content made this a real winner for me.
The monthly online competitions are a ton of fun. And being able to race with up to three of my friends, plus 8 cpu characters makes for a real fun time. One of my friends isn't the best at racing games, but the bonus items (bullet, lightning, etc) that she gets makes the game worthwhile for her. And I'm a pretty decent player - the 8 AI opponents keeps me on my toes. If we were playing a standard racer one-on-one it wouldn't be any fun at all, because I'd just spend the entire time lapping her, but in Mario Kart, we both feel challenged.
Does this mean that sex offenders can't go to school?
Every keyboard review tends to miss this gem. It's a standard size, good quality, excellent warranty, very low cost, two color options, no gimmicks, and it has angled keys that for me provide the perfect blend of ergonomics with usuability.
...there are companies out there that use a Bayesian filter to sort posts into low scoring and high scoring, and then they have their employees manually sort through the high scoring messages.
I can understand somebody wanting the pirated version of a video game, or even a release-version of an OS, but who in their right mind would tie up their Internet connection for a day and risk the legal trouble and possibility of a virus/worm/backdoor to download a beta copy of an operating system that's built on the most reviled version of Windows since WinMe?
No problem. It's good of you to say so. It's true that even these games had DRM issues. As I recall, "The Print Shop" had a three install limit, which it enforced by writing to the disk how many times it had been installed. It was easy to circumvent, since you could copy the disk and then install the copy up to three times.
It wasn't meant as a troll. Actually, I think it's great that games from 20yrs back are being appreciated today. But if you have a retail copy of Spore or GTAIV (or any other recent release), do you honestly expect to be able to play it in 2018 or 2028? DRM is robbing us of our future history. The next generation of gamers will never (unless they download hacked copies) be able to experience many of today's best games.
From the numbers in the summary, a fully-charged one of these would supply enough energy to propel a 3300lbs (1500kg) car from 0 to 1100mph (500m/s).
Put another way, my laptop battery is 65Wh. This ultracapacitor holds 800 times as much energy as my battery. If the technology could be scaled down, an equivalent ultracapacitor would only need to weigh 281.5lbs/800 = .35lbs. (My battery clocks in at just under a pound.)
With many of the companies that made these games now defunct and out-of-business, how do you expect to connect to the activation servers in order to play these games?
And some of these games likely came on 3.5" disks, unless you happen to have an old disk drive connected to your machine, you're also out of luck, since we all know that you need to have disk #1 in the drive in order to get past the Securom checks.
Besides, I'm sure that most of you have long since used up your 3 installs.
Amen! If they do this, the pirated versions will have this crap removed. Why are they trying so damn hard to alienate their customers?
That's true if you have only one device plugged into a USB bus at a time. But if you plug in two USB HDDs on the front of your computer and copy from one to the other, the copy operation will crawl.