I wouldn't quite say its a long lasting fad. For instance, if you look at the average price of the arcade game Centipede (which most can agree is a popular game, but not cult-popular like Pac Man or Space Invaders) for now vs 10 years ago, you'd easily be able to see that a game like that was much cheaper (even taking into account inflation) 10 years ago compared to now. Even if you look at Nintendo and their NES-style Game Boy and the NES ports, you can see that this is simply a retro fad. Games like Pac Man and Space Invaders always have been popular and probably will be for a long time. But that's true of any popular game, and I doubt that many people forget games like Mario Kart 64 or GTA3 for a long time, if ever.
While this sure does sound like a fun expo to go to (if it wasn't 300 miles away that is), I wonder if this is simply nothing other than a product of the recent 'retro is cool' fad.
If you want to sell your product to consumers, you can't really charge an arm and a leg (unless your MS ofcourse). Generally I don't buy any software that runs over $60, OSes excluded ofcourse. Now if you're selling to a business, it varies greatly. For a business, a $600 license for Photoshop is practically a bargain.
Well it can be argued that (to some extent) Grokster does slightly benefit from piracy, it's not their fault that people don't care about copyrights. Think of it this way: can you legally hold an ISP responsible for one users actions? Ofcourse not, and that's why you will have a hard time trying to successfully sue any of todays P2P software providers. Now if the law changes....
That may be true that Sega used the "get it out early" tactic and failed but Sega's consoles weren't exactly the most popular (though they did have a nice following). The analogy I was making was that the PS2 came out a year earlier than the competition and, since the PS1 was king over the N64, that only strengthened Sony's position as this generation's king of the consoles. The situation is the exact reverse in portables, so it will be interesting to see who wins, or if two giants can coexist. If nothing else, perhaps now there will be some good competition in portables.
I mean after all, the Nintendo DS is supposed to come out before the Xmas 2004 buying frenzy, while Sony's PSP is supposed to come out early 2005. After all, wasn't it Sony who used the "get it out early" tactic to win the current generation's console war? Technical superiority (which the PSP undoubtedly has) doesn't always win the war, its all about the games.
Do you really think that people are going to give up the ease of ethernet when your typical broadband maxes out at 1.5Mbit/s? I predict a painfully slow death of ethernet, which will probably go the way of the floppy drive.
While I suppose it is kinda nice that they let the Netscape name live on, as a brower atleast, there really isn't a whole lot of reason for them to do so. I'm pretty sure that Mozilla/Firefox usage far exceeds the usage of Netscape 6/7. On ther other hand I suppose it's nice for anyone who actually needs that AOL garbage or who can't convince that PHB to go with a brower that destroyed Tokyo...
Seriously, this is an optional service pack. It hasn't really been out long enough to consider seriously deploying it on critical machines. Just give some time for the apps to catch up and sometime in the future this will be a non-issue. On the other hand, shame on the developers for not testing their apps with the release canidates to work out any bugs.
Considering that MD5 is mostly use to "sign" programs, how likely do you think it is that someone could "trojan" your app while keeping the MD5 sums the same. On another note, there could be big problems when we uses these in, oh, a password database. I guess the severity of the problem really depends on how you're using it.
While it sure does sound good, I high doubt that anyone will want to throw away the billions invested in good old RGB tvs and monitors. After all, they're "good enough."
Honestly, thats probably the most non-intrusive copy protection there could be. The problem is why did they include it without telling anyone? These people paid for it, so don't they deserve an explanation? And even more odd is that, since their "protection" scheme is now known, whats to stop, say, a pirate from altering the archive and putting it on P2P?
For those who have played Wario Ware (either on the GBA or GameCube, they're mostly the same game), you know how very strange of a game it is. Yet you (most people anyways) enjoy this game and somehow it becomes addictive. Probably one of the most original games to come out in recent years. It's kinda the same for Viewtiful Joe; takes the 16-bit era beat-em-ups and takes it to a whole new level.
While their new XP SP2 firewall is somewhat degraded comared to, say, ZoneAlarm, thats not entirely a bad thing. The new firewall is a step in the right direction, especially being on by default. Not only that, but by not including a "top of the line" firewall in XP, they allow for a market where 3rd parties can still sell firewalls as opposed to being yet another software industry crushed by Microsoft.
Earlier this week infact I visited the statue. Let me just say that security was incredibly tight, even moreso than at airports. To take the boat over to the island you first had to go through the standard metal detector/xray as you would at any airport. Next, if you wanted to get into the statue (and had a ticket to do so), you had to put all backpacks and large purses into one of these neat lockers. And after that, you went through a rather interesting machine that "sniffs" you for explosive materials and then go through another metal detector/xray. And even after all that security, you can only walk through the statue (actually the pedestal) while being watched and guided by a park ranger as well as several national park security gaurds. All and all it felt a bit like overkill, but considering that the statue is probably one of the most important symbols of America, it makes sense to so heavily gaurd it.
While it's quite true that many of the games made by companies gobbled up by EA have become nothing but crap, that is irrelevent as RenderWare is not a game. At best, RenderWare will continue developing its software for license to other parties and will probably be used more and more in EA's projects. At worse, they'll turn it into EA-internal-only product and I'll suck. In either case, who cares? Developers can use anything they want to make their games, and those already in the process aren't going to suddenly find that the software stops working. All that matters to the consumer is having a good game.
While it's nice to know that they're planning on doing something that will take away a few more headaches, whose to say that this will ever get out the door and to the consumers?
While that sure does seem like the ultimate remote, who in their right mind would put $700 down for something as simple as a remote? Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't lowering the price quite a bit make 'em sell like hotcakes?
So the main reason it's not likely that an open source project will get sued is simply because they don't have any money. Unfortunately what would likely happen if they did sue is that it would cripple or kill that project. Fortunately I'd suspect that if some open source project had a big company (say Sun or IBM) backing it, I doubt this whole thing would be a problem.
Perhaps this is because their drives are more reliable? I seem to remember most companies lowering the warranty range on consumer level drives from 3 years to 1 year not so long ago, so this is a welcome change.
Slashdot Mirror
I wouldn't quite say its a long lasting fad. For instance, if you look at the average price of the arcade game Centipede (which most can agree is a popular game, but not cult-popular like Pac Man or Space Invaders) for now vs 10 years ago, you'd easily be able to see that a game like that was much cheaper (even taking into account inflation) 10 years ago compared to now. Even if you look at Nintendo and their NES-style Game Boy and the NES ports, you can see that this is simply a retro fad. Games like Pac Man and Space Invaders always have been popular and probably will be for a long time. But that's true of any popular game, and I doubt that many people forget games like Mario Kart 64 or GTA3 for a long time, if ever.
While this sure does sound like a fun expo to go to (if it wasn't 300 miles away that is), I wonder if this is simply nothing other than a product of the recent 'retro is cool' fad.
Wouldn't this patent also cover setuid, as that's a way you can have an app run under superuser privs for a regular user?
Hope they don't have any Fry's Electronics stores in Ohio...
If you want to sell your product to consumers, you can't really charge an arm and a leg (unless your MS ofcourse). Generally I don't buy any software that runs over $60, OSes excluded ofcourse. Now if you're selling to a business, it varies greatly. For a business, a $600 license for Photoshop is practically a bargain.
Well it can be argued that (to some extent) Grokster does slightly benefit from piracy, it's not their fault that people don't care about copyrights. Think of it this way: can you legally hold an ISP responsible for one users actions? Ofcourse not, and that's why you will have a hard time trying to successfully sue any of todays P2P software providers. Now if the law changes....
That may be true that Sega used the "get it out early" tactic and failed but Sega's consoles weren't exactly the most popular (though they did have a nice following). The analogy I was making was that the PS2 came out a year earlier than the competition and, since the PS1 was king over the N64, that only strengthened Sony's position as this generation's king of the consoles. The situation is the exact reverse in portables, so it will be interesting to see who wins, or if two giants can coexist. If nothing else, perhaps now there will be some good competition in portables.
I mean after all, the Nintendo DS is supposed to come out before the Xmas 2004 buying frenzy, while Sony's PSP is supposed to come out early 2005. After all, wasn't it Sony who used the "get it out early" tactic to win the current generation's console war? Technical superiority (which the PSP undoubtedly has) doesn't always win the war, its all about the games.
Do you really think that people are going to give up the ease of ethernet when your typical broadband maxes out at 1.5Mbit/s? I predict a painfully slow death of ethernet, which will probably go the way of the floppy drive.
While I suppose it is kinda nice that they let the Netscape name live on, as a brower atleast, there really isn't a whole lot of reason for them to do so. I'm pretty sure that Mozilla/Firefox usage far exceeds the usage of Netscape 6/7. On ther other hand I suppose it's nice for anyone who actually needs that AOL garbage or who can't convince that PHB to go with a brower that destroyed Tokyo...
Seriously, this is an optional service pack. It hasn't really been out long enough to consider seriously deploying it on critical machines. Just give some time for the apps to catch up and sometime in the future this will be a non-issue. On the other hand, shame on the developers for not testing their apps with the release canidates to work out any bugs.
Considering that MD5 is mostly use to "sign" programs, how likely do you think it is that someone could "trojan" your app while keeping the MD5 sums the same. On another note, there could be big problems when we uses these in, oh, a password database. I guess the severity of the problem really depends on how you're using it.
While it sure does sound good, I high doubt that anyone will want to throw away the billions invested in good old RGB tvs and monitors. After all, they're "good enough."
Honestly, thats probably the most non-intrusive copy protection there could be. The problem is why did they include it without telling anyone? These people paid for it, so don't they deserve an explanation? And even more odd is that, since their "protection" scheme is now known, whats to stop, say, a pirate from altering the archive and putting it on P2P?
For those who have played Wario Ware (either on the GBA or GameCube, they're mostly the same game), you know how very strange of a game it is. Yet you (most people anyways) enjoy this game and somehow it becomes addictive. Probably one of the most original games to come out in recent years. It's kinda the same for Viewtiful Joe; takes the 16-bit era beat-em-ups and takes it to a whole new level.
I think I'll just guess that they don't like piracy... at all.
While their new XP SP2 firewall is somewhat degraded comared to, say, ZoneAlarm, thats not entirely a bad thing. The new firewall is a step in the right direction, especially being on by default. Not only that, but by not including a "top of the line" firewall in XP, they allow for a market where 3rd parties can still sell firewalls as opposed to being yet another software industry crushed by Microsoft.
Earlier this week infact I visited the statue. Let me just say that security was incredibly tight, even moreso than at airports. To take the boat over to the island you first had to go through the standard metal detector/xray as you would at any airport. Next, if you wanted to get into the statue (and had a ticket to do so), you had to put all backpacks and large purses into one of these neat lockers. And after that, you went through a rather interesting machine that "sniffs" you for explosive materials and then go through another metal detector/xray. And even after all that security, you can only walk through the statue (actually the pedestal) while being watched and guided by a park ranger as well as several national park security gaurds. All and all it felt a bit like overkill, but considering that the statue is probably one of the most important symbols of America, it makes sense to so heavily gaurd it.
Now honestly, what diffrence does it make for a game on who publishes it? If it's good people will buy it (sometimes even if it's not).
While it's quite true that many of the games made by companies gobbled up by EA have become nothing but crap, that is irrelevent as RenderWare is not a game. At best, RenderWare will continue developing its software for license to other parties and will probably be used more and more in EA's projects. At worse, they'll turn it into EA-internal-only product and I'll suck. In either case, who cares? Developers can use anything they want to make their games, and those already in the process aren't going to suddenly find that the software stops working. All that matters to the consumer is having a good game.
Do I loose points if the page won't load due to a slashdotting?
While it's nice to know that they're planning on doing something that will take away a few more headaches, whose to say that this will ever get out the door and to the consumers?
While that sure does seem like the ultimate remote, who in their right mind would put $700 down for something as simple as a remote? Maybe it's just me, but wouldn't lowering the price quite a bit make 'em sell like hotcakes?
So the main reason it's not likely that an open source project will get sued is simply because they don't have any money. Unfortunately what would likely happen if they did sue is that it would cripple or kill that project. Fortunately I'd suspect that if some open source project had a big company (say Sun or IBM) backing it, I doubt this whole thing would be a problem.
Perhaps this is because their drives are more reliable? I seem to remember most companies lowering the warranty range on consumer level drives from 3 years to 1 year not so long ago, so this is a welcome change.