The level of piracy I'm talking about is the kind of level where you just put the original and a blank into two sides of a tape deck and push a button.
The difficulty of cracking an ISO or a straight copy of the game folder tree might have decreased, but it's still cracking, and still requires extra effort... I remember the second era of my gaming childhood, 16-bit games on disk, where you had a profusion of cracked game distributions and disk copying tools. In this case you became dependent on the cracking crews - either to produce a cracked copy, or a tool that copied disks with better fidelity.
If you assume that DRM will be broken within 24 hours of your game release, regardless of it's cost, the limiting factor for it's spread becomes the upload bandwidth of the set of people with a cracked copy.
Since the vast majority of people can't crack games, basic DRM cuts this initial spread of your game immensely. If you have zero DRM, that set of spreaders is potentially everyone who bought the game.
Of course, in the internet era, that's not saying much. In the "playground era", it typically meant that the number of people you could source games from dropped in number, which limited their spread a bit.
And as you point out, it's easy for even non-crackers to spread a virgin ISO, but I'd be willing to bet that the requirement to crack the game and source those cracks still slows the initial spread somewhat... whether it's significant, who knows. I don't think anyone ever ran a randomized controlled trial on it and I don't see how you could.
I think there are possibly two tiers of copying though.
When I was a kid, the (ZX Spectrum) games were on audio tapes. Almost every kid I knew who was into games had a twin tape deck. This produced an imperfect analogue copy of the game and obvious wasn't much good for more than one or two generations.
A smaller subset had a Multiface, which was basically a hardware non-maskable interrupt generator - it would halt your machine and swap a few kilobytes of the RAM for a debugger - which just happened to have a facility to dump the running state to tape - who'd a thunk that this would get used for piracy! This produced a copy that was as good as your tape hardware. You could even use an audio encoding that was much faster than the original game media (with somewhat mixed results on bad hardware).
We didn't have the internet, or things would have been much easier - most of the difficulty of piracy back then was finding a kid that a) had the game you wanted and b) liked you enough to let you copy it. Some years later, I found myself immensely pleased with how easy it was to download archived Spectrum games from Norwegian FTP sites - largely because a game that used to take 4 minutes to load into the computer was taking around 4 seconds to download.
In the modern world... a game with zero DRM can be copied just by shoving in a flash drive. This is the same "playground" level of piracy - easy, social, no consequences, and essentially free of cost. People thought no more about doing it than they thought about making mix tapes for friends.
For DRM,the cracking groups will remove it anyway. But to get their product, you have to search online, download large amounts of data, take the risk that someone shoved a trojan into the installer, take the risk that it's actually 4GB of Estonian donkey porn, etc. Which is a fixed cost regardless of how expensive the DRM was.
And it's a higher cost than saying "Hey Chuck, I hear you got Estonian Donkey Smasher II, mind if I copy that?" and copying it onto your USB drive, which will be faster and have lower risk. I know people who trade NDS ROMS like this 16GB at a time (you need a special device to take advantage of this, but unlike the Multiface, it doesn't cost about 4 times what the games cost).
When I was a kid and pirated games like crazy, I couldn't afford to buy them. Back then, the cost getting a pirate copy was low compared to the £10 or £20 (in 80s money) that I just didn't have.
These days, I buy my games, because the price of the game is low compared to the hassle of finding a copy from a reputable cracking crew, working out who's a reputable cracking crew in the first place, downloading it, etc, etc etc. And because I think artists deserve to be compensated. The glaring exception is NDS games... I'll pirate them first in general ; and I don't feel guilty because most of them are utter trash, and no way am I taking the £20 hit of buying them, playing them for 20 minutes, finding out they're crap, and selling them back to the game store so they can do the same thing to some other poor sucker. Things I actually enjoy like Zelda and Professor Layton get bought, new and not pre-owned. The DS has a "demo" facility where you use the WiFi link to try things out in stores, but none of the UK stores run demos.
When I was a kid, I didn't have anything to offer them, so I feel no guilt about my years of piracy - I was too young to have a job and there's no way in hell that my parents would have paid for my games habit.
I find a small amount of DRM acceptible (just enough to make it difficult to "casually" copy is fine by me), but it gets too much when the game won't run reliably because of the extremely edgy disk checks or whatever. I liked Assassins Creed, but there's no way I'm buying the sequel.
So I agree - there's no point in them shelling out top dollar for the latest most heinous DRM. They should put on something basic, reliable and cheap, just to prevent "playground" piracy. And they should make games that 30-something professionals want to buy, rather than snot-nosed kids, because they are the guys who have i) enough money to buy games ii) not enough time to screw around securing a pirate copy.
There is some legal impetus to do this. In the states, they are following the commercial route by having insurers offer premium reductions in exchange for fitting these systems.
In the EU and the UK, they are pretending that these systems would be used to implement "road pricing" ; a sort of variable road tax which charges more for driving on roads that are heavily congested (as if that wasn't it's own penalty in the first place). If that was the real aim, you could produce a system with the same functional equivalence with mandatory RFID number plates and pickup loops on these "congested" roads... instead they want a system that can track your whereabouts everywhere, logs it to a black box, and uploads it periodically via a cellular modem, which would be at least an order of magnitude or 2 more expensive to implement and maintain. Applying the razor of Dr Occam.. road pricing is not what they really want it for.
Video games are responsible for some of the best classical music in my collection ; from Final Fantasy, through the Outcast soundtrack, all the way to the tracks from Total Annihilation.
Start the price offensively high, and drop it as the concert date approaches. The organiser gets paid the price the market will bear, the scalpers are out of the loop - because by definition, anyone willing to pay a stupid price for a guaranteed ticket will already have paid it.
You still get the same effective problem - that rich fans are prioritised over poor fans, but more money goes to the artist and the organiser, so they could throw a few benefit concerts or something to sweeten the deal.
As far as I'm concerned they should extend it further. It seems like a good set of principles, why limit it to programs that communicate across a network?
It should be prohibited to install ANY program on a computer without the informed consent of the user. And programs that remove other programs, or block the operation of other programs, without the user being informed, should also be illegal.
Of course, this would cover some of the DRM techniques that block disk image emulation, and probably a few other DRM techniques.
And yes, any program that serves your files up to the internet shouldn't do it without your consent. Until recently, that would have included Windows file sharing....
What then, if that secret, submarine patent is about something else entirely, or for that matter, does not even exist?
If such a thing does exist, then it's secrecy is part of it's power. You can be fairly sure that if it was revealed, there would be an immediate and concerted effort by the open source community to do any or all of the following..
Reimplement patent infringing features without using the patented method
Locate and present prior art for these patents
Debunk the infringed patents as being obvious
Remove inessential but infringing features
I wouldn't be surprised to find that one or more of the major vendors had an engineering group devoted to constructing a case against MS patents. I can imagine that it opens you up to a certain amount of risk though - if you know about an infringement, it lays you open to triple damages. It would be hard for a programmer to function as both a productive developer and a patent underminer. The same goes for an open community effort... reviewing MS patents could leave you liable to accusations of wilful infringement.
Some of the posters are speculating that Amazon was infringing some patent that MS holds and that MS came after them with a devil deal.
I think it's at least possible that the opposite happened - Amazon, with it's history of patent litigation, tried to engage Microsoft on a patent issue... and MS turned around, laughed, and said "Hah! We'll squash you like a BUG. A small one. Unless...."
It's possible no money changed hands. Amazon is a name recognized by far more people than would recognize Novell or SuSE. Just the public announcement of the suggestion that a company as well-known as Amazon thought it necessary to get patent license coverage for their Linux servers from MS must have the Grand High FUDmaster at Microsoft cackling over his lunch.
The metric to count is the number of page faults, an indicator of the number of times that the OS addresses memory that isn't in RAM.
As others point out, measuring just the fraction of memory consumption is stupid. I have 6GB of RAM ; my processes are using about 1.7GB of that, but the OS is claiming that 3.8GB is consumed. So that's 2.1GB of cached data that I no longer have to wait for from disk. Hooray.
TFA hints that they may be measuring page faults, and does mention that Win7 is hitting the disk for virtual memory more often. But they should make that clearer if it's the case.
I wonder how long it will take some enterprising group of phreaks to realise that they could blackmail Ubisoft by DDOSing their "game continuation" servers.
A major factor in what makes open-source software more secure?
The kind of hacks that make people cringe don't survive for long, and are less likely to even make it into the wild.
Imagine you're coding on a closed product, your management demands a feature, and you're pressured into "just doing it". You're likely to just make an ugly kludge, build it, and ship it.
Now imagine you're required to release the source code as well, and you know that at least one coder you respect is going to be reading it.
You can sense part of a laser that reflected off something else, or laser pointers would be completely useless.
Mosquitos with a phobia of little speckles of blue light would have a serious advantage. Or mosquitos that avoid villages that look like they get aid from rich westerners.
The bullet trains are a great example of the lack of IP enforcement leading to rapid development, with Siemens technology finding its way into Chinese designed and manufactured trains.
While I agree that increased synergism would be a benefit of reduced or refactored IP laws, this is not a good example. The R&D still had to be done, but the cost which was borne by Siemens is being treated as an externality by the Chinese. This is a typical behaviour of the destructive western style of capitalism.
A reactor design using a dense plasma focus is supposed to have two products from which you can directly get electricity, a stream of high velocity helium ions (you get the energy out of them by electrobraking them), and X-rays (the team concerned has a sort of gamma-photovoltaic-cell design consisting of many metal foil layers).
The team has an aggressive timetable... so at least we'll know in less than 30 years whether it's going to work...
You're talking about zapping a very small, supercooled, gold-uranium alloy target with a beryllium sphere containing about 1mg of DT fuel, about 10 times a second.
Have a thought experiment about the engineering involved
Producing the "ammunition" - bear in mind that tritium is one of the rarest and most expensive substances on earth[1]
Positioning it and aligning it - ten times a second
Charging and firing the most powerful laser array on earth - ten times a second
Somehow removing the heat from the reactor vessel without impeding the laser paths
what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce?
DT fusion produces fast neutrons, so some. You're looking at much shorter half-lives ; the reactor core will have the same activity as coal ash after about 300 years.
And will ITER be quickly refactored to take this into account?
ITER is a totally different design, so no. I think ITER is a far more credible design than laser-fusion, given that the engineering challenges seem some orders of magnitude easier.
NIF is just a testbed for nuclear fusion, without the inconveniently illegal use of real nuclear weapons.
[1]
If you're firing at 1mg of fuel, by mass, 3/5 of it is Tritium or 0.6mg so (60 * 60 * 24) seconds in day * 10 per second * 0.0006 g = 518.4 g of tritium per day.
The total production in the USA between 1955 and 1996 was 225kg ; the stockpile in 1996 stood at 75kg
You can configure Chrome to show the system borders in the "Personal Stuff" settings tab, or right click on the border and check the box. Alas, it looks considerably less pretty. It would be good if it merged the system menu into it's own.
The problem I have with Windows isn't that it isn't useful, although the GNU utils just aren't as good on it.
The problem I have with Windows is the security culture, the endless layer on layer of CPU-sucking dreck that corporate policy dictates be installed on it.
I can keep a Windows box clean, because I understand what not to click on, and which programs not to use. My problem with Windows is that most people can't do this (and indeed, it's apparently unreasonable to expect them to), so every machine gets tarred with the same brush.
It's not the only factor - Linux has much faster file IO, and the shell toolset makes Powershell weep (even if it has a much steeper learning curve), both of which are very useful to a programmer.
A really good quality keyboard - with backlighting
I'll second the sibling who learned to touch-type, and add this - the keyboard is AWFUL.
Chiclet keys feel cheap and nasty, the keyswitches have no positive response, and worse of all, they changed the key layout.
Laptop keyboards should stick as closely as possible to to the standard 101-key layout. I understand that there are space constraints, but this is NOT an excuse to move the fricking symbols to the OTHER SIDE of the keyboard. Things like the backslash, things a programmer types about a thousand times a day.
I mean, hell, they even do it to their desktop keyboards.
On this UK layout, eleven symbols in the wrong place, and the addition of two extra symbols that I'd never use in real life. Most notably, the quote, at, backslash, and pipe are all at the opposite end of the keyboard. I understand some of these are in the US layout, but really, I'm not a yank, and I don't feel like typing like one. I've typed on the UK layout since I was 8. Nearly every other PC I use gets this right (certain netbooks being the exception), so why, why, why, when you're paying right through the nose for a certain attention to detail, can I not have a layout that doesn't induce RSI in anyone with any experience using standard layouts?
I suspect they just do it to enhance their tribal effect. Perhaps touch typing matters less to the crowd they target... and by the time they learn, a normal keyboard will feel wrong to them, as the apple feels wrong to me.
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The level of piracy I'm talking about is the kind of level where you just put the original and a blank into two sides of a tape deck and push a button.
The difficulty of cracking an ISO or a straight copy of the game folder tree might have decreased, but it's still cracking, and still requires extra effort... I remember the second era of my gaming childhood, 16-bit games on disk, where you had a profusion of cracked game distributions and disk copying tools. In this case you became dependent on the cracking crews - either to produce a cracked copy, or a tool that copied disks with better fidelity.
If you assume that DRM will be broken within 24 hours of your game release, regardless of it's cost, the limiting factor for it's spread becomes the upload bandwidth of the set of people with a cracked copy.
Since the vast majority of people can't crack games, basic DRM cuts this initial spread of your game immensely. If you have zero DRM, that set of spreaders is potentially everyone who bought the game.
Of course, in the internet era, that's not saying much. In the "playground era", it typically meant that the number of people you could source games from dropped in number, which limited their spread a bit.
And as you point out, it's easy for even non-crackers to spread a virgin ISO, but I'd be willing to bet that the requirement to crack the game and source those cracks still slows the initial spread somewhat... whether it's significant, who knows. I don't think anyone ever ran a randomized controlled trial on it and I don't see how you could.
I think there are possibly two tiers of copying though.
When I was a kid, the (ZX Spectrum) games were on audio tapes. Almost every kid I knew who was into games had a twin tape deck. This produced an imperfect analogue copy of the game and obvious wasn't much good for more than one or two generations.
A smaller subset had a Multiface, which was basically a hardware non-maskable interrupt generator - it would halt your machine and swap a few kilobytes of the RAM for a debugger - which just happened to have a facility to dump the running state to tape - who'd a thunk that this would get used for piracy! This produced a copy that was as good as your tape hardware. You could even use an audio encoding that was much faster than the original game media (with somewhat mixed results on bad hardware).
We didn't have the internet, or things would have been much easier - most of the difficulty of piracy back then was finding a kid that a) had the game you wanted and b) liked you enough to let you copy it. Some years later, I found myself immensely pleased with how easy it was to download archived Spectrum games from Norwegian FTP sites - largely because a game that used to take 4 minutes to load into the computer was taking around 4 seconds to download.
In the modern world... a game with zero DRM can be copied just by shoving in a flash drive. This is the same "playground" level of piracy - easy, social, no consequences, and essentially free of cost. People thought no more about doing it than they thought about making mix tapes for friends.
For DRM ,the cracking groups will remove it anyway. But to get their product, you have to search online, download large amounts of data, take the risk that someone shoved a trojan into the installer, take the risk that it's actually 4GB of Estonian donkey porn, etc. Which is a fixed cost regardless of how expensive the DRM was.
And it's a higher cost than saying "Hey Chuck, I hear you got Estonian Donkey Smasher II, mind if I copy that?" and copying it onto your USB drive, which will be faster and have lower risk. I know people who trade NDS ROMS like this 16GB at a time (you need a special device to take advantage of this, but unlike the Multiface, it doesn't cost about 4 times what the games cost).
When I was a kid and pirated games like crazy, I couldn't afford to buy them. Back then, the cost getting a pirate copy was low compared to the £10 or £20 (in 80s money) that I just didn't have.
These days, I buy my games, because the price of the game is low compared to the hassle of finding a copy from a reputable cracking crew, working out who's a reputable cracking crew in the first place, downloading it, etc, etc etc. And because I think artists deserve to be compensated. The glaring exception is NDS games... I'll pirate them first in general ; and I don't feel guilty because most of them are utter trash, and no way am I taking the £20 hit of buying them, playing them for 20 minutes, finding out they're crap, and selling them back to the game store so they can do the same thing to some other poor sucker. Things I actually enjoy like Zelda and Professor Layton get bought, new and not pre-owned. The DS has a "demo" facility where you use the WiFi link to try things out in stores, but none of the UK stores run demos.
When I was a kid, I didn't have anything to offer them, so I feel no guilt about my years of piracy - I was too young to have a job and there's no way in hell that my parents would have paid for my games habit.
I find a small amount of DRM acceptible (just enough to make it difficult to "casually" copy is fine by me), but it gets too much when the game won't run reliably because of the extremely edgy disk checks or whatever. I liked Assassins Creed, but there's no way I'm buying the sequel.
So I agree - there's no point in them shelling out top dollar for the latest most heinous DRM. They should put on something basic, reliable and cheap, just to prevent "playground" piracy. And they should make games that 30-something professionals want to buy, rather than snot-nosed kids, because they are the guys who have i) enough money to buy games ii) not enough time to screw around securing a pirate copy.
There is some legal impetus to do this. In the states, they are following the commercial route by having insurers offer premium reductions in exchange for fitting these systems.
In the EU and the UK, they are pretending that these systems would be used to implement "road pricing" ; a sort of variable road tax which charges more for driving on roads that are heavily congested (as if that wasn't it's own penalty in the first place). If that was the real aim, you could produce a system with the same functional equivalence with mandatory RFID number plates and pickup loops on these "congested" roads... instead they want a system that can track your whereabouts everywhere, logs it to a black box, and uploads it periodically via a cellular modem, which would be at least an order of magnitude or 2 more expensive to implement and maintain. Applying the razor of Dr Occam.. road pricing is not what they really want it for.
Video games are responsible for some of the best classical music in my collection ; from Final Fantasy, through the Outcast soundtrack, all the way to the tracks from Total Annihilation.
Population of China : 1.3B
Population of Germany 82M
So Germany has exports of $14,745 per head, whereas China exports about one tenth of one cent per person.
So more like 134,000%
How about a dutch auction?
Start the price offensively high, and drop it as the concert date approaches. The organiser gets paid the price the market will bear, the scalpers are out of the loop - because by definition, anyone willing to pay a stupid price for a guaranteed ticket will already have paid it.
You still get the same effective problem - that rich fans are prioritised over poor fans, but more money goes to the artist and the organiser, so they could throw a few benefit concerts or something to sweeten the deal.
If it was the underhand, self-installing, not-notifying, law-ignoring kind of P2P software you could still claim ignorance.
"It was them evil HACKERS guv'. I had no idea! You should lock them up, not me."
As far as I'm concerned they should extend it further. It seems like a
good set of principles, why limit it to programs that communicate across
a network?
It should be prohibited to install ANY program on a computer without the
informed consent of the user. And programs that remove other programs,
or block the operation of other programs, without the user being informed,
should also be illegal.
Of course, this would cover some of the DRM techniques that block
disk image emulation, and probably a few other DRM techniques.
And yes, any program that serves your files up to the internet shouldn't
do it without your consent. Until recently, that would have included
Windows file sharing....
Unfortunately, as a gas, getting it inside you is pretty easy.
What then, if that secret, submarine patent is about something else entirely, or for that matter, does not even exist?
If such a thing does exist, then it's secrecy is part of it's power. You can be fairly sure that if it was revealed, there would be an immediate and concerted effort by the open source community to do any or all of the following..
I wouldn't be surprised to find that one or more of the major vendors had an engineering group devoted to constructing a case against MS patents. I can imagine that it opens you up to a certain amount of risk though - if you know about an infringement, it lays you open to triple damages. It would be hard for a programmer to function as both a productive developer and a patent underminer. The same goes for an open community effort... reviewing MS patents could leave you liable to accusations of wilful infringement.
Some of the posters are speculating that Amazon was infringing some patent that MS holds and that MS came after them with a devil deal.
I think it's at least possible that the opposite happened - Amazon, with it's history of patent litigation, tried to engage Microsoft on a patent issue... and MS turned around, laughed, and said "Hah! We'll squash you like a BUG. A small one. Unless...."
It's possible no money changed hands. Amazon is a name recognized by far more people than would recognize Novell or SuSE. Just the public announcement of the suggestion that a company as well-known as Amazon thought it necessary to get patent license coverage for their Linux servers from MS must have the Grand High FUDmaster at Microsoft cackling over his lunch.
The metric to count is the number of page faults, an indicator of the number of times that the OS addresses memory that isn't in RAM.
As others point out, measuring just the fraction of memory consumption is stupid. I have 6GB of RAM ; my processes are using about 1.7GB of that, but the OS is claiming that 3.8GB is consumed. So that's 2.1GB of cached data that I no longer have to wait for from disk. Hooray.
TFA hints that they may be measuring page faults, and does mention that Win7 is hitting the disk for virtual memory more often. But they should make that clearer if it's the case.
I wonder how long it will take some enterprising group of phreaks to realise that they could blackmail Ubisoft by DDOSing their "game continuation" servers.
A major factor in what makes open-source software more secure?
The kind of hacks that make people cringe don't survive for long, and are less likely to even make it into the wild.
Imagine you're coding on a closed product, your management demands a feature, and you're pressured into "just doing it". You're likely to just make an ugly kludge, build it, and ship it.
Now imagine you're required to release the source code as well, and you know that at least one coder you respect is going to be reading it.
You can sense part of a laser that reflected off something else, or laser pointers would be completely useless.
Mosquitos with a phobia of little speckles of blue light would have a serious advantage. Or mosquitos that avoid villages that look like they get aid from rich westerners.
There are a lot of chimps that spend their entire lives at the most prestigious universities in the world, but you wouldn't call them well-educated.
It still tells you which process is thrashing the disk, which is what he wanted to find out.
The bullet trains are a great example of the lack of IP enforcement leading to rapid development, with Siemens technology finding its way into Chinese designed and manufactured trains.
While I agree that increased synergism would be a benefit of reduced or refactored IP laws, this is not a good example. The R&D still had to be done, but the cost which was borne by Siemens is being treated as an externality by the Chinese. This is a typical behaviour of the destructive western style of capitalism.
Probably the biggest cost saving, presuming you stick with MS Office, is that MS will make Office cheaper to encourage you not to use OOo.
There is... in theory.
A reactor design using a dense plasma focus is supposed to have two products from which you can directly get electricity, a stream of high velocity helium ions (you get the energy out of them by electrobraking them), and X-rays (the team concerned has a sort of gamma-photovoltaic-cell design consisting of many metal foil layers).
The team has an aggressive timetable... so at least we'll know in less than 30 years whether it's going to work...
And can it sustain power generation?
You're talking about zapping a very small, supercooled, gold-uranium alloy target with a beryllium sphere containing about 1mg of DT fuel, about 10 times a second.
Have a thought experiment about the engineering involved
what quantity of nuclear waste will such a machine produce?
DT fusion produces fast neutrons, so some. You're looking at much shorter half-lives ; the reactor core will have the same activity as coal ash after about 300 years.
And will ITER be quickly refactored to take this into account?
ITER is a totally different design, so no. I think ITER is a far more credible design than laser-fusion, given that the engineering challenges seem some orders of magnitude easier.
NIF is just a testbed for nuclear fusion, without the inconveniently illegal use of real nuclear weapons.
[1]
If you're firing at 1mg of fuel, by mass, 3/5 of it is Tritium or 0.6mg so (60 * 60 * 24) seconds in day * 10 per second * 0.0006 g = 518.4 g of tritium per day.
The total production in the USA between 1955 and 1996 was 225kg ; the stockpile in 1996 stood at 75kg
You can configure Chrome to show the system borders in the "Personal Stuff" settings tab, or right click on the border and check the box. Alas, it looks considerably less pretty. It would be good if it merged the system menu into it's own.
I like Linux.
The problem I have with Windows isn't that it isn't useful, although the GNU utils just aren't as good on it.
The problem I have with Windows is the security culture, the endless layer on layer of CPU-sucking dreck that corporate policy dictates be installed on it.
I can keep a Windows box clean, because I understand what not to click on, and which programs not to use. My problem with Windows is that most people can't do this (and indeed, it's apparently unreasonable to expect them to), so every machine gets tarred with the same brush.
It's not the only factor - Linux has much faster file IO, and the shell toolset makes Powershell weep (even if it has a much steeper learning curve), both of which are very useful to a programmer.
A really good quality keyboard - with backlighting
I'll second the sibling who learned to touch-type, and add this - the keyboard is AWFUL.
Chiclet keys feel cheap and nasty, the keyswitches have no positive response, and worse of all, they changed the key layout.
Laptop keyboards should stick as closely as possible to to the standard 101-key layout. I understand that there are space constraints, but this is NOT an excuse to move the fricking symbols to the OTHER SIDE of the keyboard. Things like the backslash, things a programmer types about a thousand times a day.
I mean, hell, they even do it to their desktop keyboards.
On this UK layout, eleven symbols in the wrong place, and the addition of two extra symbols that I'd never use in real life. Most notably, the quote, at, backslash, and pipe are all at the opposite end of the keyboard. I understand some of these are in the US layout, but really, I'm not a yank, and I don't feel like typing like one. I've typed on the UK layout since I was 8. Nearly every other PC I use gets this right (certain netbooks being the exception), so why, why, why, when you're paying right through the nose for a certain attention to detail, can I not have a layout that doesn't induce RSI in anyone with any experience using standard layouts?
I suspect they just do it to enhance their tribal effect. Perhaps touch typing matters less to the crowd they target... and by the time they learn, a normal keyboard will feel wrong to them, as the apple feels wrong to me.
Obligatory link proving that sci-fi thinks of these things