The current thought is that the Blood Elves are joing the Horde and the Draenei are joining the Alliance specificly because they are allied, in the Outlands.
The thinking is, Illidan has sent them to play both sides against each other as part of a master plan to wipe all his enemies out in one fell swoop.
The elves are joining through the Foresaken, whose leader was once a High Elf and sympathetic to the fact that they are outcasts. The Draenei are joining Allaince through the druids, using the fact that the Draenei were sort of druids of their own world before they were slaughtered by the orcs.
Consider that many linux users do not have full power drivers for their video card.
Consider that creating a software rendering engine which can be put in place of DirectX means that's one less barrier to Linux gaming.
Consider one of the goals of the company is to release linux compatable games for other developers.
Seems like the point is "Hey! Look at us! We can make your game work in Linux with little effort! Why not contract with us to make your game Linux compatable and we'll deliver the geek market to your door!"
Perhaps, in a season or two, I'll want the complete collection for Lost. Today, I just want to catch up a bit on the background.
Perhaps, in a year, I'll be able to shell out $70 for two seasons of a show. Today, I'm more than willing to shell out a couple of dollars of 'expendable' money to get a few episodes as they come out.
This isn't a hard concept. People buy small when they want big all the time, if they didn't places like Rent-A-Center would never even be in business.
Sure, this isn't the 'perfect' medium to you. It isn't meant to be, it's meant to be the 'good enough that I don't feel ripped off' medium for everyone out there who aren't sitting around figuring out how much they pay per episode for a DVD set, who aren't sitting around calculating how much more they spent on their furniture because they got it from Rent-A-Center instead of purchasing it outright.
And for that purpose, I think it's hit the exact right spot.
Lets see the music industry try to squeeze Apple now. They are no longer the only content providers for iTMS. There is no chance of Apple caving in now. Especially with the price points they are setting for the vidoes.
Well, I realize it was tounge in cheek, but here's my short list:
1. Gmailstaff doesn't spam me with messages pimping all those features in GSN that I'm missing out on. 2. My Gmail account won't go away if I don't check it for a month. 3. My Gmail account doesn't use a cruddy, intrusive authentication system like Passport. 4. My Gmail account rarely has spam in it.
I completely agree, the web:search engine metaphor is a good one. However, how many of these sites are really that deep in terms of what they cover? The last time I hit a "listen to what you do and recommend" site, they told me I would like George Micheal because I listened to Garbage. The last time I went to 'search' site, I came to the conclusion that the entire music world was composed of only video game soundtrack remixes, punk, and metal.
Right now, the tools out there cover maybe 10% of what's avaliable and are about as sophisticated as pre-Google, pre-altavista, Yahoo (I.E. not very). I'm sure that if I put time and effort into it, I would find some gems. But right now, I've been spoilt, I expect things to work as well as Google.
To be honest, the variety avaliable now via the internet is just as bad as the absense in variety in the mainstream media.
If it's not playing I'm unlikely to go looking for it. It's not that I think the top X lists are at all worthy of paying attention to, but my time is precious and spending it filtering the out the 10k possible artists that I might like down to something that I could resonably listen to doesn't seem to be worthwhile. By the time I get it narrowed down, I'm dead.
They may have been behind the iPod, but they were late to the podcast party. It existed (and evolved) for quite a while before they even gave it a nod. Even now their current implementation is about a generation behind, having no builtin support for things such as bittorent downloads, different feed types, prebuilt OPML lists of feeds, or even feed:// links.
Working for EA is the loss for these people, not the settlement.
It's obvious they are working for a company that does not value the work done as much as it values the bottom line, when you work for a company like that your two options are typically put up or leave. Yes, you can try to force the company to create a better working environment, as this lawsuit attempted to do, however it's about as useful as sitting the school bully into a the group of his normal victims and telling everyone to get along.
EA doesn't care, they figure they can find more cheap labor shoping themselves to the newly minted 'idiots' coming out of college that are still inexperienced enough to not realize that they are signing up for a death march rather than a trial by fire.
And this will continue until EA has such a poor repuation overall in the industry that they will HAVE to pay top dollar for people to work for them, which will likely be a long, long time. The only way for these people to 'win' this is to leave EA for companies that don't think that employee's are disposable resources.
Horray, lets dream of the death of the hobbist programmer.
Waiver of damages non-enforcable? Someone asks how to perform a task on their server and I throw up a quick perl script to show how to do it? You want to hold me liable for damages when it turns out that their server runs their home security system and because they didn't know what they were doing they happened to nuke it? Please!
You sound like those idiots out where my parents live that wanted to sue because they were trespassing on our land and happened to accidently shoot their thousand dollar coon dog because they were too drunk to realize it wasn't a bear.
Grow up and learn to take responsiblity for your mistakes. If you put it on YOUR system, it's YOUR problem unless you've specificly talked me into making it MY problem.
Wow, you impress me sir. Do you think you could introduce me to General Lud someday? I've always wanted to meet that guy.
First of, the majorty of successful identity theft cases out there have been proven to be the result of social engineering. Meaning, there were no bugs and there were no clever hackers exploting the computer systems. Instead, there were con-men tricking people into giving them information, there were theives sifting through the trash of some careless individual that threw out personal information with out destorying it. It means the problem isn't the 'bad bad programers' it's the idiots out there who are too stupid to think about what they are doing before they do it.
And you are right, I think THOSE people should be held accountable. And I also think that if you develop software for a company that is in control of that sort of information, it's their responsibilty to ensure that your software works or to make you responsible for making sure it works. THEY put the software and information on the same system. It was their decision to do so. Unless they've secured a guareentee that your software is safe from you, then it's THEIR responsibility. And amazingly enough, that's the way the courts see it too.
But that has nothing to do with a standard EULA. People do not steal identities by hacking Quicken. And even if they did, it was YOUR choice to put that software on your computer and make that information avalaible to it. Especially AFTER they've made you agree to a license telling you they aren't responsible for any bugs in the program. If you don't like that EULA, then follow their advice and DON'T USE THE SOFTWARE.
What he wants is guarentees on the cheap. You can get guarentees, just not cheap.
The point of the license is to point out that you aren't getting guarentees, so expecting an guarentee in the license is missing the whole point. You are agreeing to the license for the right to use software that probably cost the developer several million to develop and roll out. You are paying, in most cases, less than $100 for that software.
If you want a certain level of reliablity for software, go for something business classed, pay $10k and sign up for a $1k a month support contract. Then, when something breaks you have the guarentee that their people will fix it or you can go after them for it.
Don't expect that level of support unless you are willing to pay for it.
Actually in all cases there is that option. Just because no one is willing to pay $150,000 to a software development firm to create a knockoff version of Quicken and guarantee a certain level of reliablity doesn't mean it's not an option.
What this guy is complaining about is the fact that he expects consumer level software to come with the same quality of proffessional level software. It's a bit idealistic and unreasonable.
If you aren't willing to pony up the money for quality, you shouldn't complain about the quality of the what you get.
Because it's not just unlocking your phone to use other networks, it's unlocking features such as custom ring tones, unrestricted bluetooth, and etc., which the networks normally charge hefty fee for limited use of.
I hope that this gets slapped silly in court. If the networks want to control my phone they need to either rent it to me, actually sell me a phone which isn't capable of doing the things they don't want me to be capable of, or actually write into the contract that I won't do certain things while the contract lasts.
Incredible! Tell me what right do you, or a mega-corporation such as Google, Inc, have to provide the full content of a copyrighted book available on the web - even if it is just for searching or indexing purposes?
Ever hear of Public Domain? Fair Use? Copyright is something granted to a creator with the understanding that their work, is actually the property of the public, part of our culture, and that their ability to restrict copies is given solely to allow them to profit from their endeavors.
This is not making the full content of a book available online. You can not search for a phrase in a book and get back the entire book, or even the entire page the phrase is on, UNLESS the author OPTS-IN to that part of the program. By default, you are given a short snippet of the paragraph the phrase was found in and the bibliographic information pertaining to the book. That is by definition Fair Use.
To be honest, I doubt that the real issue is what the Author's Guild is really saying it is. Anyone with basic reading ability and knowledge of copyright law knows this is a doomed suit to begin with.
But consider what winning would mean... If they won, you could not index books without the copyright holder's consent. Which I'm sure they would be happy to give for a modest, recurring, license fee.
Lets be honest here, if most of the people in the Guild circulate fewer than 5,000 copies of their works, they aren't going to be that confident that Goggle is going to suddenly burst open the gates of buyers ready to purchase their book. The easy money is in royalties from licensing their books to the index.
And technically, it was three movies so the whole point about "not enough time to develop everyone" could be ignored for more than three main chracters anyway.
Your first statement contradicts your second. If AAC files are of lesser quality than a CD, then converting them to CD to be able to play them where ever (which iTunes allows) would not reduce the quality of the file.
If AAC files are of a greater quality then a CD, then your first argument that you are paying the same price as a CD is meaningless.
The fact of the matter is iTunes DOES allow you to burn to CD. So anytime you wish to remove the DRM, you can do so. And if you truly wished to do so, you could even use a program such as Playfair or Hymn to allow you to remove the DRM without converting the file in anyway whatsoever.
People who complain about something as lax as iTunes' version of Fairplay are the ones who are never going to 'get it'.
The WHOLE point of copyrights was to assure the author that their works would not be stolen enmass as soon as they were released. In the world before digital, this was fairly simple. Copies were either guaranteed to be of lesser quality than the original or would require so much effort to create that there were few who would find the work and risk of punishment worth doing.
That is NO LONGER TRUE. Anyone can rip off a work if it's not protected and just as the RIAA has unwittingly proven, there is no way you can possibly catch everyone doing it once it gets to that point.
You need to wake up and realize, just as the music and movie industries need to, that the world has changed and sitting there bitching about how it's so unfair that they expect you to compromise is the equivalent of the RIAA sitting around bitching about how the internet is killing the music industry.
You are both stuck in the old world analog view of life.
DRM is the compromise the consumer makes to have available to them a quality digital version of a work. Without DRM, there is no incentive for the artist to provide the digital version, as DRM'less digital versions can be immediately redistributed.
A good DRM scheme is one where the consumer's ability to use the work in the manner they wish isn't impacted while the ability to simply redistribute millions of copies is curtailed.
iTunes' implementation of Fairplay is such a system in my eyes. Yes, the AAC files are protected. But you can authorize up to five computers to play them, you can stream the music over the network, you can even reduce the quality of the file by burning it to CD and then re-ripping it into a DRM'less version.
As many people bitch about the fact that the music industry not adapting to the new age of digital (which I whole heartedly agree with), a lot people still seem stuck in the whole "Tape" generation of thinking where copies weren't detrimental because they never came close to the quality of the original. That isn't true anymore and you need to stop acting as if it were. Unauthorized copies, while not as a horrible threat as the suits want to make it seem, are a problem.
It doesn't take a white beard and half a century of experience in the world to realize that anytime you have a setup that depends on everyone playing along, a setup where one person can screw it up for the rest of us, that not only is that person going to exist but they are going to make it their goal in life to screw it up just to be an A-hole.
Your goals should not be to stamp out DRM but to work to find a setup where both sides of the equation feel as if they have gotten a fair trade out of the deal.
DRM is not inheritantly evil. Unreasonably restrictive DRM is evil.
I have no problem with iTune's Fairplay implementation, and I have every confidence that Google would be able to come up with something just as good in terms of comprimise between the content producer and the consumer.
You might do that as an individual. But I don't think you've ever been in a situation where you were part of a large group of people doing anything if you think that two men with guns would be able to stop them.
Mobs don't stop to think, even if the front of the mob broke up and ran, the ones behind them still have to, and the people behind THOSE ones are pushing them forward because the people behind THEM are pushing....
Once a mob forms about the only way to deal with it is to rout it, break it into pieces where the 'group think' isn't being reenforced on all sides.
Slashdot Mirror
I am VERY interested in YOUR comments. PLEASE specify more where YOU heard this INFORMATION. Was it PERCHANCE at a heavy METAL rock concert?
The current thought is that the Blood Elves are joing the Horde and the Draenei are joining the Alliance specificly because they are allied, in the Outlands.
The thinking is, Illidan has sent them to play both sides against each other as part of a master plan to wipe all his enemies out in one fell swoop.
The elves are joining through the Foresaken, whose leader was once a High Elf and sympathetic to the fact that they are outcasts. The Draenei are joining Allaince through the druids, using the fact that the Draenei were sort of druids of their own world before they were slaughtered by the orcs.
Appearently, if you made a video game about it, they would!
"Oh... you load sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt..."
I can see that working, can't you? After all, people played SWG!
Consider that many linux users do not have full power drivers for their video card.
Consider that creating a software rendering engine which can be put in place of DirectX means that's one less barrier to Linux gaming.
Consider one of the goals of the company is to release linux compatable games for other developers.
Seems like the point is "Hey! Look at us! We can make your game work in Linux with little effort! Why not contract with us to make your game Linux compatable and we'll deliver the geek market to your door!"
Doesn't it?
My views:
Someday I'll own a PVR.
Today, I own a computer.
Perhaps, in a season or two, I'll want the complete collection for Lost.
Today, I just want to catch up a bit on the background.
Perhaps, in a year, I'll be able to shell out $70 for two seasons of a show. Today, I'm more than willing to shell out a couple of dollars of 'expendable' money to get a few episodes as they come out.
This isn't a hard concept. People buy small when they want big all the time, if they didn't places like Rent-A-Center would never even be in business.
Sure, this isn't the 'perfect' medium to you. It isn't meant to be, it's meant to be the 'good enough that I don't feel ripped off' medium for everyone out there who aren't sitting around figuring out how much they pay per episode for a DVD set, who aren't sitting around calculating how much more they spent on their furniture because they got it from Rent-A-Center instead of purchasing it outright.
And for that purpose, I think it's hit the exact right spot.
Lets see the music industry try to squeeze Apple now. They are no longer the only content providers for iTMS. There is no chance of Apple caving in now. Especially with the price points they are setting for the vidoes.
1. Imagine, in North Korea, beowulf clusters of old people IM you!
2. ?
3. Profit!
Well, I realize it was tounge in cheek, but here's my short list:
1. Gmailstaff doesn't spam me with messages pimping all those features in GSN that I'm missing out on.
2. My Gmail account won't go away if I don't check it for a month.
3. My Gmail account doesn't use a cruddy, intrusive authentication system like Passport.
4. My Gmail account rarely has spam in it.
I completely agree, the web:search engine metaphor is a good one. However, how many of these sites are really that deep in terms of what they cover? The last time I hit a "listen to what you do and recommend" site, they told me I would like George Micheal because I listened to Garbage. The last time I went to 'search' site, I came to the conclusion that the entire music world was composed of only video game soundtrack remixes, punk, and metal.
Right now, the tools out there cover maybe 10% of what's avaliable and are about as sophisticated as pre-Google, pre-altavista, Yahoo (I.E. not very). I'm sure that if I put time and effort into it, I would find some gems. But right now, I've been spoilt, I expect things to work as well as Google.
And they don't, not by a long shot.
To be honest, the variety avaliable now via the internet is just as bad as the absense in variety in the mainstream media.
If it's not playing I'm unlikely to go looking for it. It's not that I think the top X lists are at all worthy of paying attention to, but my time is precious and spending it filtering the out the 10k possible artists that I might like down to something that I could resonably listen to doesn't seem to be worthwhile. By the time I get it narrowed down, I'm dead.
They may have been behind the iPod, but they were late to the podcast party. It existed (and evolved) for quite a while before they even gave it a nod. Even now their current implementation is about a generation behind, having no builtin support for things such as bittorent downloads, different feed types, prebuilt OPML lists of feeds, or even feed:// links.
Working for EA is the loss for these people, not the settlement.
It's obvious they are working for a company that does not value the work done as much as it values the bottom line, when you work for a company like that your two options are typically put up or leave. Yes, you can try to force the company to create a better working environment, as this lawsuit attempted to do, however it's about as useful as sitting the school bully into a the group of his normal victims and telling everyone to get along.
EA doesn't care, they figure they can find more cheap labor shoping themselves to the newly minted 'idiots' coming out of college that are still inexperienced enough to not realize that they are signing up for a death march rather than a trial by fire.
And this will continue until EA has such a poor repuation overall in the industry that they will HAVE to pay top dollar for people to work for them, which will likely be a long, long time. The only way for these people to 'win' this is to leave EA for companies that don't think that employee's are disposable resources.
Horray, lets dream of the death of the hobbist programmer.
Waiver of damages non-enforcable? Someone asks how to perform a task on their server and I throw up a quick perl script to show how to do it? You want to hold me liable for damages when it turns out that their server runs their home security system and because they didn't know what they were doing they happened to nuke it? Please!
You sound like those idiots out where my parents live that wanted to sue because they were trespassing on our land and happened to accidently shoot their thousand dollar coon dog because they were too drunk to realize it wasn't a bear.
Grow up and learn to take responsiblity for your mistakes. If you put it on YOUR system, it's YOUR problem unless you've specificly talked me into making it MY problem.
Wow, you impress me sir. Do you think you could introduce me to General Lud someday? I've always wanted to meet that guy.
First of, the majorty of successful identity theft cases out there have been proven to be the result of social engineering. Meaning, there were no bugs and there were no clever hackers exploting the computer systems. Instead, there were con-men tricking people into giving them information, there were theives sifting through the trash of some careless individual that threw out personal information with out destorying it. It means the problem isn't the 'bad bad programers' it's the idiots out there who are too stupid to think about what they are doing before they do it.
And you are right, I think THOSE people should be held accountable. And I also think that if you develop software for a company that is in control of that sort of information, it's their responsibilty to ensure that your software works or to make you responsible for making sure it works. THEY put the software and information on the same system. It was their decision to do so. Unless they've secured a guareentee that your software is safe from you, then it's THEIR responsibility. And amazingly enough, that's the way the courts see it too.
But that has nothing to do with a standard EULA. People do not steal identities by hacking Quicken. And even if they did, it was YOUR choice to put that software on your computer and make that information avalaible to it. Especially AFTER they've made you agree to a license telling you they aren't responsible for any bugs in the program. If you don't like that EULA, then follow their advice and DON'T USE THE SOFTWARE.
What he wants is guarentees on the cheap. You can get guarentees, just not cheap.
The point of the license is to point out that you aren't getting guarentees, so expecting an guarentee in the license is missing the whole point. You are agreeing to the license for the right to use software that probably cost the developer several million to develop and roll out. You are paying, in most cases, less than $100 for that software.
If you want a certain level of reliablity for software, go for something business classed, pay $10k and sign up for a $1k a month support contract. Then, when something breaks you have the guarentee that their people will fix it or you can go after them for it.
Don't expect that level of support unless you are willing to pay for it.
Actually in all cases there is that option. Just because no one is willing to pay $150,000 to a software development firm to create a knockoff version of Quicken and guarantee a certain level of reliablity doesn't mean it's not an option.
What this guy is complaining about is the fact that he expects consumer level software to come with the same quality of proffessional level software. It's a bit idealistic and unreasonable.
If you aren't willing to pony up the money for quality, you shouldn't complain about the quality of the what you get.
Because it's not just unlocking your phone to use other networks, it's unlocking features such as custom ring tones, unrestricted bluetooth, and etc., which the networks normally charge hefty fee for limited use of.
I hope that this gets slapped silly in court. If the networks want to control my phone they need to either rent it to me, actually sell me a phone which isn't capable of doing the things they don't want me to be capable of, or actually write into the contract that I won't do certain things while the contract lasts.
Ever hear of Public Domain? Fair Use? Copyright is something granted to a creator with the understanding that their work, is actually the property of the public, part of our culture, and that their ability to restrict copies is given solely to allow them to profit from their endeavors.
This is not making the full content of a book available online. You can not search for a phrase in a book and get back the entire book, or even the entire page the phrase is on, UNLESS the author OPTS-IN to that part of the program. By default, you are given a short snippet of the paragraph the phrase was found in and the bibliographic information pertaining to the book. That is by definition Fair Use.
To be honest, I doubt that the real issue is what the Author's Guild is really saying it is. Anyone with basic reading ability and knowledge of copyright law knows this is a doomed suit to begin with.
But consider what winning would mean... If they won, you could not index books without the copyright holder's consent. Which I'm sure they would be happy to give for a modest, recurring, license fee.
Lets be honest here, if most of the people in the Guild circulate fewer than 5,000 copies of their works, they aren't going to be that confident that Goggle is going to suddenly burst open the gates of buyers ready to purchase their book. The easy money is in royalties from licensing their books to the index.
And technically, it was three movies so the whole point about "not enough time to develop everyone" could be ignored for more than three main chracters anyway.
You mean their deaths were actually due to Microsoft choosing to support their competitors too?
Your first statement contradicts your second. If AAC files are of lesser quality than a CD, then converting them to CD to be able to play them where ever (which iTunes allows) would not reduce the quality of the file.
If AAC files are of a greater quality then a CD, then your first argument that you are paying the same price as a CD is meaningless.
The fact of the matter is iTunes DOES allow you to burn to CD. So anytime you wish to remove the DRM, you can do so. And if you truly wished to do so, you could even use a program such as Playfair or Hymn to allow you to remove the DRM without converting the file in anyway whatsoever.
People who complain about something as lax as iTunes' version of Fairplay are the ones who are never going to 'get it'.
The WHOLE point of copyrights was to assure the author that their works would not be stolen enmass as soon as they were released. In the world before digital, this was fairly simple. Copies were either guaranteed to be of lesser quality than the original or would require so much effort to create that there were few who would find the work and risk of punishment worth doing.
That is NO LONGER TRUE. Anyone can rip off a work if it's not protected and just as the RIAA has unwittingly proven, there is no way you can possibly catch everyone doing it once it gets to that point.
You need to wake up and realize, just as the music and movie industries need to, that the world has changed and sitting there bitching about how it's so unfair that they expect you to compromise is the equivalent of the RIAA sitting around bitching about how the internet is killing the music industry.
You are both stuck in the old world analog view of life.
A good DRM scheme is one where the consumer's ability to use the work in the manner they wish isn't impacted while the ability to simply redistribute millions of copies is curtailed.
iTunes' implementation of Fairplay is such a system in my eyes. Yes, the AAC files are protected. But you can authorize up to five computers to play them, you can stream the music over the network, you can even reduce the quality of the file by burning it to CD and then re-ripping it into a DRM'less version.
As many people bitch about the fact that the music industry not adapting to the new age of digital (which I whole heartedly agree with), a lot people still seem stuck in the whole "Tape" generation of thinking where copies weren't detrimental because they never came close to the quality of the original. That isn't true anymore and you need to stop acting as if it were. Unauthorized copies, while not as a horrible threat as the suits want to make it seem, are a problem.
It doesn't take a white beard and half a century of experience in the world to realize that anytime you have a setup that depends on everyone playing along, a setup where one person can screw it up for the rest of us, that not only is that person going to exist but they are going to make it their goal in life to screw it up just to be an A-hole.
Your goals should not be to stamp out DRM but to work to find a setup where both sides of the equation feel as if they have gotten a fair trade out of the deal.
DRM is not inheritantly evil. Unreasonably restrictive DRM is evil.
I have no problem with iTune's Fairplay implementation, and I have every confidence that Google would be able to come up with something just as good in terms of comprimise between the content producer and the consumer.
You might do that as an individual. But I don't think you've ever been in a situation where you were part of a large group of people doing anything if you think that two men with guns would be able to stop them.
Mobs don't stop to think, even if the front of the mob broke up and ran, the ones behind them still have to, and the people behind THOSE ones are pushing them forward because the people behind THEM are pushing....
Once a mob forms about the only way to deal with it is to rout it, break it into pieces where the 'group think' isn't being reenforced on all sides.