If you look at the post-mortem reports on Half-Life1, it was NOT that they were creating another FPS that "just happened" to be fun and ran on low-end hardware. It's guys like you that "blow off" the efforts of game developers.
They were lucky to have the right people working on the project. They were lucky the mod community picked them. They were lucky Unreal Tournament didn't quite fit the appetite of as many gamers, etc..
I'm not blowing off the efforts of developers; just recognizing they had an element of luck to their product's popularity.
I was on the Planetside beta and really enjoyed it for a while. Once it went retail, all the fun was gone. I was paying $12.99 a month for a game that was updated less often than most mods, such as Desert Combat for the BF1942 engine. I recall two months of waiting for the promised new features, then they just added that anti-aircraft buggy and nerfed those dual cycler armor suits. Oh, and all the lag.. Jeez, it was not fun after a while.
If they go with the monthly payment thing, it had better be $3-5/mo. This would make sense to pay for the bandwidth costs associated with Steam. It definitely would not be worth the $12.99/mo standard fee for MMORPG-types.
If they do try to pull off turning it into a monthly payment cash generator, it'll hopefully hurt sales to the point they have to drop it.
I'd rather buy a game, patch from my own sources, and not be bound in some contract and fork over money every month.
For now, I'll keep playing Desert Combat. If anyone reading this has Battlefield 1942 and are bored with it, grab this mod from http://www.desertcombat.com.. It'll make things entertaining again.
"We're pretty sure that the $9.95 guys are going to get the better value, as we've been pretty good over the years at generating a lot of content."
Yeah, uh, right. I recall the Half-life website going over 2 years without a single update. I downloaded Steam 2.0 and not a single feature has been added to any of the games in months and months.
The Counter-Strike crew did most of their work before joining the ranks of Valve. The Half-life engine was riddled with hacks and cheats, which took months to get patched.
My take on the Sierra/Valve thing is they had the right game at the right time. A good 32 player supporting engine that ran on your average machine of the day. TFC, even though it's graphics were bad compared to others, had great potential for people to actually work in teams. All this stuff was extrodinary at the time.
Yes, Tribes2 looked nicer and was a more advanced game, but you need a serious machine to run it. What fun is multi-player when it's requirements are so demanding that only a very few people will be able to play?
I guess what I am saying, in so many words, is.. Don't get too excited about a game that hasn't come out yet. The whole industry is geared around hype surrounding sequels. We, as the customers, fall for it every time. We get excited, hoping to re-live the excitement of what once was new. This hasn't been happening lately, as most studios are investing millions into making a game look pretty and have all the latest beats, but forget to make it fun.
The banks should have 0'd or trashed these drives before selling them. I see this type of neglect as soley the responsibility of the bank.
Why? Well, if you hire an accountant and don't double check his work, it's your arse. Why should it be any different with a corporation's responsibility when it comes to guarding customer data?
Personally, I would like to see more laws guarding US. Not slapstick anti-terrorism laws directed at destroying personal privacy, but real laws that protect real people. As we are the source of America's economic might. At the point where citizens don't have money to throw at giants, then the giants won't exist anymore. At least, not inside our borders.
Wait a minute.. Where are screenshots? How about a link to the project? I remember reading about 3D interfaces, getting excited, then seeing them and thinking 'oh crud'. I'd like to see the 'award winning' one, please.
Gallon for gallon, diesel fuel is far more damaging to the enviroment.
I used to own a 99 model. It, at about 20k miles, became one of the worst running cars I had ever owned. The assembly is done in Mexico, which isn't bad, but the plant's management needs some serious QA.
The first month I owned it, the battery failed. I was informed that there was no warranty to cover battery failures. $60 to get taken care of.
Then within another month, I pressed the switch to roll the window down and the whole plate broke off in my hand. I barely touched it, too. Guess what? Non-warranty repair. $115...
Headlamp burned out soon after that. Hey hey, not warranty. I was going to replace it myself, but I didn't have the special wrench needed to remove the EIGHTEEN BOLTS from the nose so I could get part of the body off to get to the lamp enclosure. $290 at the dealership; I made a remark about driving the car through their showroom window and had this paid for by a nervous sales manager.
I was mentally impared enough to order the gas turbo 1.8 model. I had this car six months before finding out the piston rings were not properly installed and it was burning a quart of oil every 2 tanks of fuel. Guess what? Wasn't recalled yet so they basically told me I had to live with it.
I had been an avid owner of VW's for years, but learned they designed this car for looks and didn't invest into anything functional or reliable. I went back to being a Volvo owner and never looked back. VW lost what was going to be a life-long customer.
I would suggest avoiding after-market chips. If you ever had a catastrophic engine failure, the warranty auditor would notice it from the OBD data they pull off your car anytime it's serviced. VW's keep a running log of the last 75 runs, if I am not mistaken. These include statistics all the way down to how many times you locked and unlocked your car with the remote.
I don't know, man. I'd rather have people who did what I paid them to do and not a bunch of cowboys with attitudes. Save it for Stargate or another action packed drama.
You neglect to see the importance of someone's convictions when it comes to keeping food in the fridge and bills paid..
Yeah, we all have our breaking points on what we can handle to be a part of, but must adjust them to survive in a bad economy.
I remember back in '84 when I had my new 300 baud modem, the telecoms were trying to weasle their way into charging people extra for data connections. Their fear, I guess, is that people were able to exchange data at a much more rapid pace than spoken word, thus stay connected less; resulting in less profits for the telephone providers.
I really hate it that data can't just be considered data by telecommunication providers. It's all just bits to them.
I attempted to do the same thing a while back. I have an aging P2 400, 4 port ethernet card, and small HDD in the system. I figure it burns probably around 75-100 watts sitting there, plus it generates some noise.
When Compusa had a sale on those silver netgear routers, I grabbed one for ~$50. It sounded so simple, just plug it in, configure via web interface and you are done.
Then I tried to get it to work with SecuRemote VPN, and no luck. The box said in big, bold letters 'Supports VPN!'. So I dropped them an email and found they had shipped them without a VPN enabled firmware and I upgraded so it would work as advertised. The new firmware worked with my VPN client, but only one session at a time. Then it started hanging and not passing traffic every couple of hours. I'd have to reboot the thing several times a day. After reading on forums, I found the VPN firmware was buggy as all get out.
So I take it back and grab an SMC. This worked flawlessly, then started requiring a daily reboot after a couple of weeks usage. There were no firmware revisions to swap out, so I took it back to the store.
Since then, I hooked up my old P2 400 with IPCop and found it to be rock solid. It's been up for about 4 months without a reboot and, not once, have I had to trouble-shoot any problems with it.
If you get paranoid, Snort is there and simple to use via the web interface. I would definitely suggest this distro to anyone who's a Linux noob. You can download the ISO, burn it, pop it in, answer it's questions and have a very stable router running in about 30 minutes.
Yes, for security's sake OpenBSD would be a better choice, but this Linux distro will make setup much less painful. If you are concerned about security enough to point out the flaws of Linux and preach BSD, you don't need to be running this distribution anyway, as you are likely versed enough to set up your own BSD solution. In my case, I'm lazy and the ability to just grab security updates via a web interface fits my needs a bit better.
Yeah, my local telco jacked me around for 2 years. Not only them, but so did the cable company. They would always say "very soon" or "in a few months".
It's been 5 years and the family members I left back in the rurals still don't have it.:(
It discusses some of the issues and ideas behind broadband, but seems to focus on: Where is it?
Well, let's see. It's everywhere except back-woods rural areas. I don't see the big deal with this issue.
Broadband is just about everywhere in urban areas. You know, those areas where most IT people work and live.
If you are in a rural area and have no land-based broadband options, perhaps you should consider that Directv broadband service. Yeah, I know it sucks, but it's 'broadband' in the sense that P2P, webpages, and email will download quicker.
I think Earthlink (EarthStink) re-sells this deal, too. But they are outsourcing all their tech support to India, so I'd avoid them.
Again, M$ is not the problem here. The legal system is for having a law like the DMCA.
It's become rather boring for me to read articles, lately. All I ever see is people whining about wanting new features, such as DRM for documents, then when a software comes out that supports it, people whine and scream twice as loud. Sorry, M$ and other software vendors are in it for the money.
If you want a product, pay for it. If you don't want it, then don't buy it. If you want competition for M$, get off your collective butts and write it. I really don't mean to sound sarcastic, but that's the only way anything is going to change. The DMCA isn't going anywhere for a while, nor are any other laws. If anything, there's going to be more additions to the DMCA and laws added.
Until then, use PGP and other tools to encrypt your documents and email.. It's not DRM, but it's your best protection for free.
In my last car, I spent about $4500 on a nice audio system. It was one of the first new beetles to hit the south-east, so I fixed it up a bit to make it more of an attention grabber.
I'd put some fresh mp3's on CD, then hop in and drive to work. I'd be in the middle of a good head banging session, then comes a 'BONK DING, KASLAM' or that infamous 'UH OHHH' from WS_FTP at 93db.
On the expensive stereo thing; no, I don't listen to boom boom stuff. Usually, the windows are up and some Westley Willis (RIP buddy, thanks for the headbutts) or Black Sabbath is playing. Just had to extinguish thoughts of a stereo-typical ricer before they get started..:)
Then you couldn't leech 1 song off 15 different machines at once. These P2P programs use the MD5 to locate and send a file's parts to you after finding the appropriate matches during the search phase.
It's possible, but not incredibly likely. From my understanding of most CD drives, when you rip audio, it's entering the PC as analog audio, then converted to digital. I see this generating non-identical copies, especially when you work in the tiny differences of timing in cd players, CPU speeds, etc. Put all these factors together and you are likely going to get a new MD5 due to slight differences in the way it was encoded.
That's a pointless question as it doesn't relate, at all, to my point. I didn't say anything about it being a single step process to tracking down the origins.
What I did say was how it can be used for data collecting. Something that never hurts in the even that you happen upon some other evidence that puts all the bits and pieces together.
They can go ahead and charge away. Nobody will pay up. Not as long as there's alternatives. For instance, I don't know anyone who uses MSN anymore. Everybody I know uses ICQ, AOL, and Jabber. If AOL, ICQ and MSN started charging, you would immediately see new players jump in and do ad-supported, free alternatives.
It really gets boring dealing with the negative, doomsday-predicting attitudes on here. Microsoft sucks. They are the worst thing to happen since the old days of IBM. They'll screw up at some point, then never recover fully. Someone else will step in to be the big, scarey monster you people need so badly to sleep at night.
I really can't imagine any modern company doing business any differently than M$ does, given the position they are in. The company, itself, is not an evil entity. The evil entity is the US legal system for making the way they conduct business remain profitable. Who runs that legal system? Last time I checked, We the People do.
"The make it free and allow 3rd party clients so they can get the user base. Now they have that user base, its time to start freezing out the free clients. When that's done, there'll only be on free messenger program for MSN. How long do yur suppose the pay clients will last after that? Espcially once MS starts messing about with the protocol to bugger them up."
Oh they are so terrible? I tell ya what. Since you are obviously not like them, that is, you seem upset with their practices, why don't you: go develop a functional IM client, build a network to house it, get a few colo boxes, then a few million users. Oh yes, you HAVE to support it on banners alone AND allow 3rd party developers to write software for, and charge for it, while keeping it completely free to the end user.
Um, yeah. You'll be rich. riiiiiiight.....
1: Run free, but costly service 2: ??? 3: Profit!/much needed sarcasm
The MD5 thing isn't for tracking the same song ripped by different people. The thread on this, so far, has left me scratching my head as to why folks feel the need to restate that encoding an mp3 with different settings/software will result in a different md5. Right, this is slashdot and we all know this already.
The reason for md5 matching is so they can nail someone as the 'origin' of the ripped song, then hold them liable for all the copies of a matching md5 on P2P networks. It would be more a demonstration of "look how much damage one copy did to us!".
They are actually being used at concerts. I think we all realize that some singers sound different -- much different -- live than they do on CD's, but this just seems so, so, what's the word: fake?"
Okay, this guy has no background in music. For starters, you really do not want most of your music to sound like it does while live.
There are so many variables outside of the artist's control in any public gathering. You are starting off with some of the worst materials for good acoustics, such as steel, concrete floors, etc. Once you've compensated for as much of these things as you can, then you have to deal with being able to jump around, dance, whatever you do to put on a performance while singing. I doubt most of the people making their remarks about this device can dance, let alone dance and sing at the same time. Then do it flawlessly for a 30-60 minute set. If you can, and you are posting on slashdot about how this is fake, then you should really consider a career in performance.
Now guitars, for instance, were originally played by plucking strings with bare fingers. As a result, a guitarist's hands would be hard as a rock from the friction and could bang out tunes excessively loud and clear. Are modern musicians fakers because they use a plastic pick to pluck the strings? What about when they insterted coils into a guitar and ran it to an amplifier? Using your logic, then anyone who uses an electric guitar is fakey.
You've got to face reality. Musicians are going to do what makes their life easier, too. Music isn't about being a gifted-by-god singer, it's about getting tunes out of your head and into people's ears.
Slashdot Mirror
If you look at the post-mortem reports on Half-Life1, it was NOT that they were creating another FPS that "just happened" to be fun and ran on low-end hardware. It's guys like you that "blow off" the efforts of game developers.
They were lucky to have the right people working on the project. They were lucky the mod community picked them. They were lucky Unreal Tournament didn't quite fit the appetite of as many gamers, etc..
I'm not blowing off the efforts of developers; just recognizing they had an element of luck to their product's popularity.
Yes, that's for sure.
.. It'll make things entertaining again.
I was on the Planetside beta and really enjoyed it for a while. Once it went retail, all the fun was gone. I was paying $12.99 a month for a game that was updated less often than most mods, such as Desert Combat for the BF1942 engine. I recall two months of waiting for the promised new features, then they just added that anti-aircraft buggy and nerfed those dual cycler armor suits. Oh, and all the lag.. Jeez, it was not fun after a while.
If they go with the monthly payment thing, it had better be $3-5/mo. This would make sense to pay for the bandwidth costs associated with Steam. It definitely would not be worth the $12.99/mo standard fee for MMORPG-types.
If they do try to pull off turning it into a monthly payment cash generator, it'll hopefully hurt sales to the point they have to drop it.
I'd rather buy a game, patch from my own sources, and not be bound in some contract and fork over money every month.
For now, I'll keep playing Desert Combat. If anyone reading this has Battlefield 1942 and are bored with it, grab this mod from http://www.desertcombat.com
"We're pretty sure that the $9.95 guys are going to get the better value, as we've been pretty good over the years at generating a lot of content."
Yeah, uh, right. I recall the Half-life website going over 2 years without a single update. I downloaded Steam 2.0 and not a single feature has been added to any of the games in months and months.
The Counter-Strike crew did most of their work before joining the ranks of Valve. The Half-life engine was riddled with hacks and cheats, which took months to get patched.
My take on the Sierra/Valve thing is they had the right game at the right time. A good 32 player supporting engine that ran on your average machine of the day. TFC, even though it's graphics were bad compared to others, had great potential for people to actually work in teams. All this stuff was extrodinary at the time.
Yes, Tribes2 looked nicer and was a more advanced game, but you need a serious machine to run it. What fun is multi-player when it's requirements are so demanding that only a very few people will be able to play?
I guess what I am saying, in so many words, is.. Don't get too excited about a game that hasn't come out yet. The whole industry is geared around hype surrounding sequels. We, as the customers, fall for it every time. We get excited, hoping to re-live the excitement of what once was new. This hasn't been happening lately, as most studios are investing millions into making a game look pretty and have all the latest beats, but forget to make it fun.
I'm just negative..
The banks should have 0'd or trashed these drives before selling them. I see this type of neglect as soley the responsibility of the bank.
Why? Well, if you hire an accountant and don't double check his work, it's your arse. Why should it be any different with a corporation's responsibility when it comes to guarding customer data?
Personally, I would like to see more laws guarding US. Not slapstick anti-terrorism laws directed at destroying personal privacy, but real laws that protect real people. As we are the source of America's economic might. At the point where citizens don't have money to throw at giants, then the giants won't exist anymore. At least, not inside our borders.
Thanks. I went straight to the 'results' site expecting a screen shot there.
5 63 9/1476/F1
For others who didn't find it the first time, here's a decent shot:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/301/
Doesn't look very practical, but I'm always negative.
Your primary source of power consumption is the CPU. The board matters little when considering the power bill.
Wait a minute.. Where are screenshots? How about a link to the project? I remember reading about 3D interfaces, getting excited, then seeing them and thinking 'oh crud'. I'd like to see the 'award winning' one, please.
Gallon for gallon, diesel fuel is far more damaging to the enviroment.
I used to own a 99 model. It, at about 20k miles, became one of the worst running cars I had ever owned. The assembly is done in Mexico, which isn't bad, but the plant's management needs some serious QA.
The first month I owned it, the battery failed. I was informed that there was no warranty to cover battery failures. $60 to get taken care of.
Then within another month, I pressed the switch to roll the window down and the whole plate broke off in my hand. I barely touched it, too. Guess what? Non-warranty repair. $115...
Headlamp burned out soon after that. Hey hey, not warranty. I was going to replace it myself, but I didn't have the special wrench needed to remove the EIGHTEEN BOLTS from the nose so I could get part of the body off to get to the lamp enclosure. $290 at the dealership; I made a remark about driving the car through their showroom window and had this paid for by a nervous sales manager.
I was mentally impared enough to order the gas turbo 1.8 model. I had this car six months before finding out the piston rings were not properly installed and it was burning a quart of oil every 2 tanks of fuel. Guess what? Wasn't recalled yet so they basically told me I had to live with it.
I had been an avid owner of VW's for years, but learned they designed this car for looks and didn't invest into anything functional or reliable. I went back to being a Volvo owner and never looked back. VW lost what was going to be a life-long customer.
I would suggest avoiding after-market chips. If you ever had a catastrophic engine failure, the warranty auditor would notice it from the OBD data they pull off your car anytime it's serviced. VW's keep a running log of the last 75 runs, if I am not mistaken. These include statistics all the way down to how many times you locked and unlocked your car with the remote.
I don't know, man. I'd rather have people who did what I paid them to do and not a bunch of cowboys with attitudes. Save it for Stargate or another action packed drama.
You neglect to see the importance of someone's convictions when it comes to keeping food in the fridge and bills paid..
Yeah, we all have our breaking points on what we can handle to be a part of, but must adjust them to survive in a bad economy.
I'm glad you had better luck than me! :)
I remember back in '84 when I had my new 300 baud modem, the telecoms were trying to weasle their way into charging people extra for data connections. Their fear, I guess, is that people were able to exchange data at a much more rapid pace than spoken word, thus stay connected less; resulting in less profits for the telephone providers.
I really hate it that data can't just be considered data by telecommunication providers. It's all just bits to them.
I attempted to do the same thing a while back. I have an aging P2 400, 4 port ethernet card, and small HDD in the system. I figure it burns probably around 75-100 watts sitting there, plus it generates some noise.
When Compusa had a sale on those silver netgear routers, I grabbed one for ~$50. It sounded so simple, just plug it in, configure via web interface and you are done.
Then I tried to get it to work with SecuRemote VPN, and no luck. The box said in big, bold letters 'Supports VPN!'. So I dropped them an email and found they had shipped them without a VPN enabled firmware and I upgraded so it would work as advertised. The new firmware worked with my VPN client, but only one session at a time. Then it started hanging and not passing traffic every couple of hours. I'd have to reboot the thing several times a day. After reading on forums, I found the VPN firmware was buggy as all get out.
So I take it back and grab an SMC. This worked flawlessly, then started requiring a daily reboot after a couple of weeks usage. There were no firmware revisions to swap out, so I took it back to the store.
Since then, I hooked up my old P2 400 with IPCop and found it to be rock solid. It's been up for about 4 months without a reboot and, not once, have I had to trouble-shoot any problems with it.
If you get paranoid, Snort is there and simple to use via the web interface. I would definitely suggest this distro to anyone who's a Linux noob. You can download the ISO, burn it, pop it in, answer it's questions and have a very stable router running in about 30 minutes.
Yes, for security's sake OpenBSD would be a better choice, but this Linux distro will make setup much less painful. If you are concerned about security enough to point out the flaws of Linux and preach BSD, you don't need to be running this distribution anyway, as you are likely versed enough to set up your own BSD solution. In my case, I'm lazy and the ability to just grab security updates via a web interface fits my needs a bit better.
Yeah, my local telco jacked me around for 2 years. Not only them, but so did the cable company. They would always say "very soon" or "in a few months".
It's been 5 years and the family members I left back in the rurals still don't have it.
It discusses some of the issues and ideas behind broadband, but seems to focus on: Where is it?
Well, let's see. It's everywhere except back-woods rural areas. I don't see the big deal with this issue.
Broadband is just about everywhere in urban areas. You know, those areas where most IT people work and live.
If you are in a rural area and have no land-based broadband options, perhaps you should consider that Directv broadband service. Yeah, I know it sucks, but it's 'broadband' in the sense that P2P, webpages, and email will download quicker.
I think Earthlink (EarthStink) re-sells this deal, too. But they are outsourcing all their tech support to India, so I'd avoid them.
Yeah, let the uprising begin.. I mean, nobody goes to Metallica concerts anymore, right?
Last I heard, they were still selling-out stadiums across the country.
Give me the Arctic Warfare 50 cal, any day of the week.
http://www.accuracyinternational.com/
Get it? Awptimus Prime. Yeah, I rode the bubble playing cstrike a bit too much..
Again, M$ is not the problem here. The legal system is for having a law like the DMCA.
It's become rather boring for me to read articles, lately. All I ever see is people whining about wanting new features, such as DRM for documents, then when a software comes out that supports it, people whine and scream twice as loud. Sorry, M$ and other software vendors are in it for the money.
If you want a product, pay for it. If you don't want it, then don't buy it. If you want competition for M$, get off your collective butts and write it. I really don't mean to sound sarcastic, but that's the only way anything is going to change. The DMCA isn't going anywhere for a while, nor are any other laws. If anything, there's going to be more additions to the DMCA and laws added.
Until then, use PGP and other tools to encrypt your documents and email.. It's not DRM, but it's your best protection for free.
I've had a few of those rips before.
:)
In my last car, I spent about $4500 on a nice audio system. It was one of the first new beetles to hit the south-east, so I fixed it up a bit to make it more of an attention grabber.
I'd put some fresh mp3's on CD, then hop in and drive to work. I'd be in the middle of a good head banging session, then comes a 'BONK DING, KASLAM' or that infamous 'UH OHHH' from WS_FTP at 93db.
On the expensive stereo thing; no, I don't listen to boom boom stuff. Usually, the windows are up and some Westley Willis (RIP buddy, thanks for the headbutts) or Black Sabbath is playing. Just had to extinguish thoughts of a stereo-typical ricer before they get started..
Then you couldn't leech 1 song off 15 different machines at once. These P2P programs use the MD5 to locate and send a file's parts to you after finding the appropriate matches during the search phase.
It's possible, but not incredibly likely. From my understanding of most CD drives, when you rip audio, it's entering the PC as analog audio, then converted to digital. I see this generating non-identical copies, especially when you work in the tiny differences of timing in cd players, CPU speeds, etc. Put all these factors together and you are likely going to get a new MD5 due to slight differences in the way it was encoded.
That's a pointless question as it doesn't relate, at all, to my point. I didn't say anything about it being a single step process to tracking down the origins.
What I did say was how it can be used for data collecting. Something that never hurts in the even that you happen upon some other evidence that puts all the bits and pieces together.
Dude,
They can go ahead and charge away. Nobody will pay up. Not as long as there's alternatives. For instance, I don't know anyone who uses MSN anymore. Everybody I know uses ICQ, AOL, and Jabber. If AOL, ICQ and MSN started charging, you would immediately see new players jump in and do ad-supported, free alternatives.
It really gets boring dealing with the negative, doomsday-predicting attitudes on here. Microsoft sucks. They are the worst thing to happen since the old days of IBM. They'll screw up at some point, then never recover fully. Someone else will step in to be the big, scarey monster you people need so badly to sleep at night.
I really can't imagine any modern company doing business any differently than M$ does, given the position they are in. The company, itself, is not an evil entity. The evil entity is the US legal system for making the way they conduct business remain profitable. Who runs that legal system? Last time I checked, We the People do.
"The make it free and allow 3rd party clients so they can get the user base. Now they have that user base, its time to start freezing out the free clients. When that's done, there'll only be on free messenger program for MSN. How long do yur suppose the pay clients will last after that? Espcially once MS starts messing about with the protocol to bugger them up."
/much needed sarcasm
Oh they are so terrible? I tell ya what. Since you are obviously not like them, that is, you seem upset with their practices, why don't you: go develop a functional IM client, build a network to house it, get a few colo boxes, then a few million users. Oh yes, you HAVE to support it on banners alone AND allow 3rd party developers to write software for, and charge for it, while keeping it completely free to the end user.
Um, yeah. You'll be rich. riiiiiiight.....
1: Run free, but costly service
2: ???
3: Profit!
The MD5 thing isn't for tracking the same song ripped by different people. The thread on this, so far, has left me scratching my head as to why folks feel the need to restate that encoding an mp3 with different settings/software will result in a different md5. Right, this is slashdot and we all know this already.
The reason for md5 matching is so they can nail someone as the 'origin' of the ripped song, then hold them liable for all the copies of a matching md5 on P2P networks. It would be more a demonstration of "look how much damage one copy did to us!".
They are actually being used at concerts. I think we all realize that some singers sound different -- much different -- live than they do on CD's, but this just seems so, so, what's the word: fake?"
Okay, this guy has no background in music. For starters, you really do not want most of your music to sound like it does while live.
There are so many variables outside of the artist's control in any public gathering. You are starting off with some of the worst materials for good acoustics, such as steel, concrete floors, etc. Once you've compensated for as much of these things as you can, then you have to deal with being able to jump around, dance, whatever you do to put on a performance while singing. I doubt most of the people making their remarks about this device can dance, let alone dance and sing at the same time. Then do it flawlessly for a 30-60 minute set. If you can, and you are posting on slashdot about how this is fake, then you should really consider a career in performance.
Now guitars, for instance, were originally played by plucking strings with bare fingers. As a result, a guitarist's hands would be hard as a rock from the friction and could bang out tunes excessively loud and clear. Are modern musicians fakers because they use a plastic pick to pluck the strings? What about when they insterted coils into a guitar and ran it to an amplifier? Using your logic, then anyone who uses an electric guitar is fakey.
You've got to face reality. Musicians are going to do what makes their life easier, too. Music isn't about being a gifted-by-god singer, it's about getting tunes out of your head and into people's ears.