When I was the appropriate age certain books started appearing in my book-shelf. Of course I had to see what it was, and it was various books explaining why my body was going bonkers on me:-p (ie puberty)... And of course various degrees of information about sex and all that goes with it. The detail in the books increased over the years as they put new books on the shelf.
Worked wonders:-p
Then again... I grew up and hit puberty before the internet existed..... These days I dont see how -any- kid can avoid getting some kind of sex-ed... What it boils down to these days is this:
Would you rather they learn about it on facebook, myspace or hell even a porn site? Or perhaps a more controlled curriculum in a classroom situation.
Up to the parents I guess, but sticking ze head in ze sand sure as hell wont work:-p
Command and Conquer 4 - Tiberium Twilight was cracked.
* Gameplay worked fine * XP accumulates properly * Campaign worked fine * Skirmish works fine
Considering the mountain of crap the game has gotten in various blogs due to the change in gameplay I am glad I didnt buy it. I tried out a few missions but found it very repetative. A friend of mine did buy it and was very disappointed as he could blast through the entire single-player campaign in one sitting... (4-5 hours). That is not worth the money.
I spend quite a lot of money on games, but I -never- buy a game until I've had a chance to try it out using a cracked version. I've been burned by games too many times in the past to trust anything but my own review;)
Most of the games I buy these days come through Steam due to the incredibly convenient way of buying them. The DRM while there is non-intrusive. I've yet to have any issue with it at least.
Using the number of seeders/peers on a torrent listed on a site is stupid. It is not nearly accurate, just an indication.
It lists direct tracker users and not DHT / peer exchange. Most shows can be found for years.. You can still easily find torrents of most tv shows broadcast in the last 10 years. You just have to be patient.
Look into the ACTA treaty and you see you could be in a world of hurt for those "fell of the truck" goods...
Southern europe has already gone nuts on it. People seen with fake purses etc get stopped on the street and fined 5000 euros on the spot on a regular basis already.
But when it comes to a lot of material I cant legally get hold of it. Delayed DVD releases is one thing that pisses me off.
And then there is the retardedness of pricing....
I went to buy the 7 seasons of Macgyver a while back and what was the price-tag? 600 fucking dollars. I am -not- paying that kind of money for 7 seasons of a tv-show from the 80s... I'ms orry.... It is a novelty to have on my shelf for geek cred, but I am NOT paying that much.
Hell, the local price of the Star Trek TNG series was 134 USD per season up until recently when they just plain stopped selling em as nobody bought em...
I'm sorry but for flippin' sake get the prices within the limits of sanity. If the 7 seasons of macgyver had been 150 dollars I would have had em sitting on my shelf right now instead of on my media-server... Probably in a lot better quality too!... Arg....
Disclaimer: I'm sleep deprived and annoyed at real life asshattery atm so my post is heavily colored by that:-p
My father buys quite a lot of dvds. A whole lot more than he should in my mom's eyes;)
That said.... He absolutely HATES the forced anti-piracy clip at the front of every blasting dvd in sale now... He hates it enough that he has now started ripping his movies to ISO files and watch them using his win7 laptop connected to the TV. He usually watches the movies while on a fatburner-bike and the last thing he wants to do when he goes for a 30 min 'trip' is to spend the first few minutes watching a damn anti-piracy clip.
Also.... He bought a blu-ray movie as his new spiffy laptop had a bluray drive. What happened? His sony hdcp-capable tv went blank when he tried watching it. It came with blu-ray capable software and was advertised as working "out of the box". He was quite annoyed that it didnt work. He spent a little time trying to get it to work, as he is quite computer literate but gave up with the feeling that it was just not worth it.
So he has written off the whole bluray format as "not worth it"... This is the kind of person who fits right in the 40-50 year old demographic who spend a lot of money on movies....
When he asks for movies for christmas or birthdays he asks to get them in pre-ripped ISO so he doesnt have to deal with the crap. That alone is more than enough of an indication of the failings of the movie industry than anything else. When you piss of the regular uses enough that they seek out ways to avoid it.... you have -failed-.
Give me a legal way to get the files in a decent format that I can play on any device (win7, winxp, linux, portable) which is priced at a point where a DVD doesnt look cheap in comparison then MAYBE they can salvage the failing industry.
I think you missed his point entirely. Maybe because it was somewhat clunky written?
Spotify is only available in a small number of countries. Mostly due to licensing issues I bet.
What it does do in those countries though is quite interesting. It has become a phenomenon here (Norway). Everyone use it. I would be willing to wager that music piracy has lost 'sales' so to speak since it became huge. It is at the right pricepoint. It costs much less per month than a single CD (26usd or so per cd here, 16.6 for spotify) per month. And again: It just works.
Before starting to use spotify I had upwards of 200gb of mp3s (mostly badly sorted, tagged) that I used as a music library and downloaded huge amounts of music. These days I dont bother. Most of what I want is on spotify and I pay for a "premium" service with no ads. Was nice to reclaim those gigabytes;)
I love it. It is available everywhere. My playlists are stored server-side so if I make one at home I can fire it up at work and resume where I left off at home. It just -works-.
Hopefully it will become available to more people soon.
One thing that the "other os" function did was to chop of a huge part of the skilled hacker scene.
Namely those that just want to run linux on the thing. Look at the original Xbox, the hacks there were mostly created by motivated and skilled linux hackers. (That 'pirates' jumped on it is no surprise though).
What they managed to do is avoid these people wanting to hack the security. And now they game is on... I look forward to the battle;)
When I buy DVDs (which I do more than I should..) the only time the disc is ever touched is when I rip it to drive.
I have a media server with 2.7TB of drive space and I hate fiddling with discs. I have scripts set up to rip and convert the movie to a high quality file with a more decent filesize than raw DVD.
Using this setup I have a whole lot more flexibility when it comes to what I want to watch when... Oh and there is no annoying as hell buzzing from the dvdrom....
The movie industry can, as so eloquently said by the bartender in "Boondock Saints":
"Why dont you make like a tree and get the fuck out of here".
The problem is that by "movie studio" or "distributor" standards you -are- causing them lost sales.
They want you to buy a digital copy for your CinemaTube. A digital copy that costs them almost nothing to make but would cost you about the same as a DVD.
That is one of the reasons they want to ban any kind of ripping. They want us all to buy the content twice or more.
Fuck em is all I can say to that. Physical media is going to die eventually and when it does I hope we have some sort of solution or market collapse....
Blizzard is a big enough tail to wag the dog methinks.
Considering the huge amounts of money they rake in on one title alone...
And Blizzard has a lot to lose. I am quite a pirate. I never buy a game unless I've tried it. The reason for this is that so many games look spiffy but turn out to suck.
Not so with blizzard. I buy blizzard games without pirating first as I know they will be excellent. I've bought Starcraft 2-3 times due to losing the cds/keys during apartment moves but I dont mind. Same with Warcraft 3.. Now imagine if their next game sucked. I suspect they would see a lot less loyalty and a whole lot more piracy.
Though, if anyone can fuck it up, activision... well....fuck...I'll start making a spiffy tombstone:-p
And this is so expensive to do that most recovery companies with a high volume of drives coming through will keep a library of working drives of all brands and models. If the electronics are fried, swap out the electronics, if the heads are screwed, replace em.
The last chance special reading devices are expensive enough to use that you try to avoid using it... (expensive in terms of time, you want to use it on the drives that need it the most)
In the offshore industry you still have those panels....
They are called "CAP" or "Critical Action Panel" and are connected directly to the low level controllers in the process and safety system bypassing all HMI.
Sometimes you want a hardwired connection to the device responsible for releasing a deluge valve. Gas-producing rigs in the north sea would be one such place *grin*
While an amusing joke, they still exist to some degree!
Much the same in the control system part of the offshore industry.
To put it in perspective for those not in the know....
Quite a few rigs and refineries run 1-2 mhz token ring coax networks for critical operation data traffic. There might be 30000 data points that update at least every 60 seconds, many change every 250 milliseconds (interrupt based updates with a timeout).
Serial ports are a way to extend IO that is very simple to work with, and it does work quite well. When you have to test for every possible input to prove that output will be consistent then you really do not want to have any added complexity.... Especially if you are working on a safety system where a bug could shut down a refinery;)
I'm sure there will be a replacement at some point, but I do not see it coming in the next 10 years. Considering most of the equipment on the rigs are late 80s, early 90s equipment slowly being replaced. Even if everything was replaced now, it would still be 10-20 years until the serial ports went away... Assuming the actual measurement devices are not serial. Quite a few of them are moving to things like profibus but serial is still king for some devices.
*crawls back into his dark cave to sleep some more... this winter needs to end*
So, you had problems getting Windows-based, proprietary software running on Ubuntu, and that is Ubuntu's fault?
While not Ubuntu's fault, it is Ubuntu's problem. Most users dont understand why Ubuntu cant just run their software like always. While both you and I know why and can most of the time get it going with some fiddling the average user cant and will end up with the oh so common "ubuntu sucks" viewpoint. This is unfortunate but I have seen it happen over and over again.
The fact that it works at all is a testament to the skill of open source developers.
While skilled and well appreciated it is just not quite there yet for the average users!
Saying that no one should recommend Linux to Windows users just because of the problems gamers run into is just plain silly.
If your users want windows applications to run natively and have the ability to install any odd windows app they might want then yes, recommending Linux should probably come with a bit of a warning. This is far from a "gamer" only issue. Instant Messenger type clients was also a bit of a mess. At the time few of them could handle file transfers between users without choking. Most extra functions found in the "real" clients were not supported either which lead to annoyances.
Not everyone is a gamer, and not everyone is addicted to games that are next to impossible to get to run on Linux.
True, not everyone wants games.
What I did describe though is my experience of a typical usage pattern of a group of girls age 16 to 24 without any special experience with computers. They use a myriad of things they expect to just -work- and when running Ubuntu they all sadly hated it. Many of the things they had issues with could be fixed but not by them. They had nobody nearby that could help them either as all ran windows...
I am sure there are a lot of instances where running Ubuntu is a great idea. I know quite a few schools here in Norway that have switched to Linux on their desktops and so far it works great. I also am not blinded into thinking that it will work for the average user on a daily basis. Some users sure, but not nearly all.
Linux distros are getting better every day but they are still not nearly as smooth an experience as the alternative. I eagerly await the day that it is but it sadly is not quite here yet.
ps, I never said one shouldnt recommend linux to windows users. I said there are pitfalls that you have to explain before switching them over... unless the fear is that they wont want to with full disclosure:-p
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Books are a wonderful tool for this :)
He didnt target you ;)
"religionists" is defined by some as "exaggerated religious zealotry".
From what you write I doubt you fit that description.
I like how my parents handled the issue...
When I was the appropriate age certain books started appearing in my book-shelf. Of course I had to see what it was, and it was various books explaining why my body was going bonkers on me :-p (ie puberty)...
And of course various degrees of information about sex and all that goes with it. The detail in the books increased over the years as they put new books on the shelf.
Worked wonders :-p
Then again... I grew up and hit puberty before the internet existed..... These days I dont see how -any- kid can avoid getting some kind of sex-ed...
What it boils down to these days is this:
Would you rather they learn about it on facebook, myspace or hell even a porn site?
Or perhaps a more controlled curriculum in a classroom situation.
Up to the parents I guess, but sticking ze head in ze sand sure as hell wont work :-p
Command and Conquer 4 - Tiberium Twilight was cracked.
* Gameplay worked fine
* XP accumulates properly
* Campaign worked fine
* Skirmish works fine
Considering the mountain of crap the game has gotten in various blogs due to the change in gameplay I am glad I didnt buy it. I tried out a few missions but found it very repetative. A friend of mine did buy it and was very disappointed as he could blast through the entire single-player campaign in one sitting... (4-5 hours). That is not worth the money.
I spend quite a lot of money on games, but I -never- buy a game until I've had a chance to try it out using a cracked version. I've been burned by games too many times in the past to trust anything but my own review ;)
Most of the games I buy these days come through Steam due to the incredibly convenient way of buying them. The DRM while there is non-intrusive. I've yet to have any issue with it at least.
Um, no...
Using the number of seeders/peers on a torrent listed on a site is stupid. It is not nearly accurate, just an indication.
It lists direct tracker users and not DHT / peer exchange. Most shows can be found for years.. You can still easily find torrents of most tv shows broadcast in the last 10 years. You just have to be patient.
Yep, it is beyond stupid.
Dont bet on it :-p
Look into the ACTA treaty and you see you could be in a world of hurt for those "fell of the truck" goods...
Southern europe has already gone nuts on it. People seen with fake purses etc get stopped on the street and fined 5000 euros on the spot on a regular basis already.
More like rampant anal-cranial inversion :-p
I buy plenty of stuff. More than I should.
But when it comes to a lot of material I cant legally get hold of it. Delayed DVD releases is one thing that pisses me off.
And then there is the retardedness of pricing....
I went to buy the 7 seasons of Macgyver a while back and what was the price-tag? 600 fucking dollars. I am -not- paying that kind of money for 7 seasons of a tv-show from the 80s... I'ms orry.... It is a novelty to have on my shelf for geek cred, but I am NOT paying that much.
Hell, the local price of the Star Trek TNG series was 134 USD per season up until recently when they just plain stopped selling em as nobody bought em...
I'm sorry but for flippin' sake get the prices within the limits of sanity. If the 7 seasons of macgyver had been 150 dollars I would have had em sitting on my shelf right now instead of on my media-server... Probably in a lot better quality too!... Arg....
Disclaimer: I'm sleep deprived and annoyed at real life asshattery atm so my post is heavily colored by that :-p
My father buys quite a lot of dvds. A whole lot more than he should in my mom's eyes ;)
That said.... He absolutely HATES the forced anti-piracy clip at the front of every blasting dvd in sale now... He hates it enough that he has now started ripping his movies to ISO files and watch them using his win7 laptop connected to the TV. He usually watches the movies while on a fatburner-bike and the last thing he wants to do when he goes for a 30 min 'trip' is to spend the first few minutes watching a damn anti-piracy clip.
Also.... He bought a blu-ray movie as his new spiffy laptop had a bluray drive. What happened? His sony hdcp-capable tv went blank when he tried watching it. It came with blu-ray capable software and was advertised as working "out of the box". He was quite annoyed that it didnt work. He spent a little time trying to get it to work, as he is quite computer literate but gave up with the feeling that it was just not worth it.
So he has written off the whole bluray format as "not worth it"... This is the kind of person who fits right in the 40-50 year old demographic who spend a lot of money on movies....
When he asks for movies for christmas or birthdays he asks to get them in pre-ripped ISO so he doesnt have to deal with the crap. That alone is more than enough of an indication of the failings of the movie industry than anything else. When you piss of the regular uses enough that they seek out ways to avoid it.... you have -failed-.
Give me a legal way to get the files in a decent format that I can play on any device (win7, winxp, linux, portable) which is priced at a point where a DVD doesnt look cheap in comparison then MAYBE they can salvage the failing industry.
Oh dear.... This has potential to be amusing...
The key is finding some that are too small to be worth the time, and not interesting/notorious enough to warrant further work.
I'd give some examples but that would obviously be stupid ;)
I think you missed his point entirely. Maybe because it was somewhat clunky written?
Spotify is only available in a small number of countries. Mostly due to licensing issues I bet.
What it does do in those countries though is quite interesting. It has become a phenomenon here (Norway). Everyone use it. I would be willing to wager that music piracy has lost 'sales' so to speak since it became huge. It is at the right pricepoint. It costs much less per month than a single CD (26usd or so per cd here, 16.6 for spotify) per month. And again: It just works.
Before starting to use spotify I had upwards of 200gb of mp3s (mostly badly sorted, tagged) that I used as a music library and downloaded huge amounts of music. These days I dont bother. Most of what I want is on spotify and I pay for a "premium" service with no ads. Was nice to reclaim those gigabytes ;)
I love it. It is available everywhere. My playlists are stored server-side so if I make one at home I can fire it up at work and resume where I left off at home. It just -works-.
Hopefully it will become available to more people soon.
One thing that the "other os" function did was to chop of a huge part of the skilled hacker scene.
Namely those that just want to run linux on the thing. Look at the original Xbox, the hacks there were mostly created by motivated and skilled linux hackers. (That 'pirates' jumped on it is no surprise though).
What they managed to do is avoid these people wanting to hack the security. And now they game is on... I look forward to the battle ;)
The logo of firefox is protected (either by copyright or trademark, cant remember which).
It is why Debian include "IceWeasel" now instead of firefox. Due to anal licensing requirements. (not saying it is a bad thing, just not for me :-p)
When I buy DVDs (which I do more than I should..) the only time the disc is ever touched is when I rip it to drive.
I have a media server with 2.7TB of drive space and I hate fiddling with discs. I have scripts set up to rip and convert the movie to a high quality file with a more decent filesize than raw DVD.
Using this setup I have a whole lot more flexibility when it comes to what I want to watch when... Oh and there is no annoying as hell buzzing from the dvdrom....
The movie industry can, as so eloquently said by the bartender in "Boondock Saints":
"Why dont you make like a tree and get the fuck out of here".
The problem is that by "movie studio" or "distributor" standards you -are- causing them lost sales.
They want you to buy a digital copy for your CinemaTube. A digital copy that costs them almost nothing to make but would cost you about the same as a DVD.
That is one of the reasons they want to ban any kind of ripping. They want us all to buy the content twice or more.
Fuck em is all I can say to that. Physical media is going to die eventually and when it does I hope we have some sort of solution or market collapse....
Blizzard is a big enough tail to wag the dog methinks.
Considering the huge amounts of money they rake in on one title alone...
And Blizzard has a lot to lose. I am quite a pirate. I never buy a game unless I've tried it. The reason for this is that so many games look spiffy but turn out to suck.
Not so with blizzard. I buy blizzard games without pirating first as I know they will be excellent. I've bought Starcraft 2-3 times due to losing the cds/keys during apartment moves but I dont mind. Same with Warcraft 3.. Now imagine if their next game sucked. I suspect they would see a lot less loyalty and a whole lot more piracy.
Though, if anyone can fuck it up, activision... well....fuck...I'll start making a spiffy tombstone :-p
A game should not be able to cause an overheat in a card, ever.
The card's firmware or hardware should throttle down before damage occurs.
If not the design is broken. Simple as that.
And this is so expensive to do that most recovery companies with a high volume of drives coming through will keep a library of working drives of all brands and models.
If the electronics are fried, swap out the electronics, if the heads are screwed, replace em.
The last chance special reading devices are expensive enough to use that you try to avoid using it... (expensive in terms of time, you want to use it on the drives that need it the most)
Yet to someone who is not a troll and has technical knowledge it makes perfect sense! :-p
In the offshore industry you still have those panels....
They are called "CAP" or "Critical Action Panel" and are connected directly to the low level controllers in the process and safety system bypassing all HMI.
Sometimes you want a hardwired connection to the device responsible for releasing a deluge valve. Gas-producing rigs in the north sea would be one such place *grin*
While an amusing joke, they still exist to some degree!
Much the same in the control system part of the offshore industry.
To put it in perspective for those not in the know....
Quite a few rigs and refineries run 1-2 mhz token ring coax networks for critical operation data traffic. There might be 30000 data points that update at least every 60 seconds, many change every 250 milliseconds (interrupt based updates with a timeout).
Serial ports are a way to extend IO that is very simple to work with, and it does work quite well. When you have to test for every possible input to prove that output will be consistent then you really do not want to have any added complexity.... Especially if you are working on a safety system where a bug could shut down a refinery ;)
I'm sure there will be a replacement at some point, but I do not see it coming in the next 10 years. Considering most of the equipment on the rigs are late 80s, early 90s equipment slowly being replaced. Even if everything was replaced now, it would still be 10-20 years until the serial ports went away... Assuming the actual measurement devices are not serial. Quite a few of them are moving to things like profibus but serial is still king for some devices.
*crawls back into his dark cave to sleep some more... this winter needs to end*
Amusingly, several oil and gas rigs in the north sea have HMI systems running on windows server 2003.
It is very stable due to the controlled environment of the system. So blanket statements like the one you made just make you look like a zealot ;)
So, you had problems getting Windows-based, proprietary software running on Ubuntu, and that is Ubuntu's fault?
While not Ubuntu's fault, it is Ubuntu's problem. Most users dont understand why Ubuntu cant just run their software like always. While both you and I know why and can most of the time get it going with some fiddling the average user cant and will end up with the oh so common "ubuntu sucks" viewpoint. This is unfortunate but I have seen it happen over and over again.
The fact that it works at all is a testament to the skill of open source developers.
While skilled and well appreciated it is just not quite there yet for the average users!
Saying that no one should recommend Linux to Windows users just because of the problems gamers run into is just plain silly.
If your users want windows applications to run natively and have the ability to install any odd windows app they might want then yes, recommending Linux should probably come with a bit of a warning. This is far from a "gamer" only issue. Instant Messenger type clients was also a bit of a mess. At the time few of them could handle file transfers between users without choking. Most extra functions found in the "real" clients were not supported either which lead to annoyances.
Not everyone is a gamer, and not everyone is addicted to games that are next to impossible to get to run on Linux.
True, not everyone wants games.
What I did describe though is my experience of a typical usage pattern of a group of girls age 16 to 24 without any special experience with computers. They use a myriad of things they expect to just -work- and when running Ubuntu they all sadly hated it. Many of the things they had issues with could be fixed but not by them. They had nobody nearby that could help them either as all ran windows...
I am sure there are a lot of instances where running Ubuntu is a great idea. I know quite a few schools here in Norway that have switched to Linux on their desktops and so far it works great. I also am not blinded into thinking that it will work for the average user on a daily basis. Some users sure, but not nearly all.
Linux distros are getting better every day but they are still not nearly as smooth an experience as the alternative. I eagerly await the day that it is but it sadly is not quite here yet.
ps, :-p
I never said one shouldnt recommend linux to windows users. I said there are pitfalls that you have to explain before switching them over... unless the fear is that they wont want to with full disclosure