pros and consequences
on
Zune DRM Cracked
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Given the zunepass subscription model, someone could effectively grab a ridiculous amount of free music for any player (including ipods). Heck, you can even download the zuneplayer without owning a zune, but don't think it will let you subscribe without one. And then cancel the zunepass subscription when they are done. Given sheer logistics, its probably impossible to grab the entire marketplace, but you probably could grab just about everything you wanted, at least until they patch this and i'm sure they have people working overtime on this. Because the danger is that the RIAA would pull their stuff out of the marketplace if they don't feel confident microsoft can protect their content, they're already overly nervous about something like a subscription and wifi sharing, to the point where they'd crippled much of the device's potential.
I use a zune, mainly for the subscription model, the player is nice for some things but there are times I'd rather use my sony ericsson phone because its a lot smaller, heck, i use it sometimes although that's limited to my none-zune marketplace content... My zune is more used in my car and at my desk. But I take it with me elsewhere at times because of the greatly expanded content I have access to on it. at least till now, where this would allow me to listen to it on that device. I'd happily keep paying my subscription fee if I had a means to listen to it on the device of my choice. You know, like that playsforsure concept...
I mean they do it to protect witnesses? The informant on Michael Vick sounds like he's 7' tall and drinks crude oil for breakfast, at least on ESPN.
The old xbox live used to have some cheesy voice mods, but they've got to have better tech by now.
That being said I don't really ahve any interst in using voice chat. I can type it at least as fast as I can say it, and am not interested in hearing what others really sound like.
How the hell are they going to handle daytime / night time?
I mean it doesn't make sense to have 50% of your game time useless to a significant (majority?) percentage of your population... but at the same time not having dayling crimps advantages of the non-kindred types. Possibilities - make it real time (but no seasonal variation) thus your peak hours are night, and allow the others who can play during the day to do so....have quick daylight cycles, make them pass quickly, but still have everyone be in terror and setting their watches to make sure it don't come up on them... etc etc..
Or just have the entire world be dark, and gimp everyone else.
One place where the game became surreal to me was the shire quests involving delivering pies. I mean, cmon . Pies? Avoiding nosy hobbits?
You get experience you can use to level up your character for delivering pies?
This lead to the following line of thinking:
As we know, the one ring's power easily swayed the minds of men and elves and dwarves. Hobbits, however, were resistant to its effects, which is why one of them made an ideal ringbearer.
The Dark Lord Sauron knew he would need something of a different nature to tempt the hobbits. And thus the dark lord learned the craft of pie-making. There in the ovens of mount doom, he baked the master pie, the one pie to tempt them all.
Soon the aroma of this pie wafted over the free lands, and an army of hobbits went to mordor to take it. Sauron, holding the pie aloft in one hand out of their reach, and his mace grond in the other, fended them off until one of the river hobbits climbed up his back and took it from his hand. Sauron went down beneath a wave of hungry halflings while Isilgol snuck off into a cave with the pie. There he ate some of it and it transformed him into a creature unable to eat more pie, yet eternally taunted by its pleasant aroma... Fleeing the hobbits he hid beneatht he misty mountains, whose frequent fog and pine trees and wolves would mask the smell He lived in a state of torture with the pie for thousands of years...
Until one day Bilbo in the company of some dwarves (who were going to get back some beer a dragon had stolen from them) crossed those mountains and smelled the pie...
I have a zune, had it for some time now. I do like it, i really do. But it is very frustrating too.
First off, there has been a skipping issue on some units (mine included), a workaroudn for it meant leaving display on 100% of the time, which did wonders for the battery. Plus, at times navigating in its menus, while they were laid out, it would just lag behind your clicks and presses, then suddenly catch up and do everything you did in frustration.
Okay, they had a patch in the works for this, firmware 1.3. Rumor had it would be out yesterday.. it actually did make it out today. But even the execution of this shows carelessness...
For example. the www.zune.net website was down 24 hours tuesday for maintenance. Okay, I understand sometimes you gotta do that, but you're telling me they couldn't put up a mirror? All attempts to do stuff on that day produced an error, and when it did, it would direct you to www.zune.net/support. which didn't come up. You didnt' get the maintenance message even unless you went to www.zune.net (even zune.net failed to do this).
Okay, the patch came out next day, the site's back up. It tells me I have an update. Says downloading... then returns an error message of "unable to update sync settings at this time". calling zune support they have me update the zune software. Same. They have me install zune software on another machine. Same. I told them from the start that I've seen others posting about this on some zune boards. uh-huh. Since I'd redone zune software from their own website, the guy now wants me to instead reinstall it from the original CD, which is lying somewhere in a box in a garage. Most drivers and software should like be obselete by the time you get them, but this is apparently their standard procedure, never mind how that is going to fix what isn't coming through from their website.
I'm still trying to get 1.3 on my zune now, some 10 hours after first trying. Oh, and btw, the patch notes they have for the 1.3 are verbatim copied from the patch notes from 1.2, including the note about how this includes everything from 1.1 and earlier. (as if 1.2 is not included). Again, its like how much care and effort are they putting into this.
Oh, but Zune has exciting things on the way, they announced a pink zune. That will get their cool factor going, no doubt.
Given what microsoft did in the past to people who adopted their tech (playsforsure), I have a real uneasy feeling that they'll release some new hardware that abandon the current zune.
I want to like this thing, I really do. But they make it so hard. I *do* like the zune pass, it makes most of the frustrations worth it for me, given that I'd downloaded what would have been about $6000-$7000 worth of songs directly if I'd bought them. I like not caring which version of a song I get. I like the look and feel of the player. But they find a way to kill it. Its like Isaiah Thomas is running the Zune team. I know J Allard is supposed to be in charge of it now, but is it really his main focus? I haven't seen any drastic changes since they put him back in charge of it, and quite honestly in his shoes I'd be wanting to go on to other things by now anyway.
That's pretty much how I feel about it at this time...
Gee, if you took one thing away from the interview about microsoft it wouldn't be "poor documentation", it would be that their marketing is awful. He did complain that it takes time to translate the documentation of the unreal engine docs into japanese, and in that respect the documentation is poor. But I think it incorrect to make that the summary of what he thinks about the 360. He was pretty positive about it overall, and this complaints about marketing are more to the tune of its a great system, too bad the marketing is preventing it from succeeding.
The part where the interviewer turns to the Microsoft PR guy and says, "you should be taking notes" rings particularly true...
The game has a certain quality that makes you keep playing it when you're playing it, looking for just one more orb or taking out one more boss or so on... its mindless fun and it taps into the improvement/levelling vibe in ways few games have...
And for any of those who complain about its lack of social responsibility, its all okay because you're a cop.
I'd love to see them come out with expansion areas for this via xbla...
Who is making things up? A government organization flatly states that there are no compelling reasons to upgrade to Vista and that there are reasons not to. This is bad for Microsoft. It's news.
I work for a government organization that waited two years before windows XP was considered worth upgrading to. And even then it was mostly just allow it on new machines, don't upgrade old machines. And fwiw, even on this day we still have machines running NT4 out there.
This is a non-story. It is perfectly normal for any organization to not adopt a new OS for a significant amount of time after it is released, years, even. There are enough things to harp on Vista without making things up and pretending they have significance...
Is no one concerned about the potential impact this will have, by providing a drag on the waves that would else naturally strike the coast, thus potentially reducing the habitat for species adatped to the wave-heavy environment of Scotland's coast? What about the mollusks and other marine invertebrates who can only spread and prosper via wave transort...
Its just like those people who advocate wind power and never consider the impact of slowing down the world's winds, thus reducing the natural spread of wind-bourne seeds and so on...
Even Vangard is this way, hell they go out of their way to not only claim they aren't like WOW but worse, to dismiss WOW as a kids game. I guess thats one way of convincing yourself.
Its bad PR. And good PR is something the PS3 could use. So it matters on that level.
That being said, while ironic given their stance not too long ago, its probably right, but you'll never hear them say "microsoft was right" on that one. I had an x-box, and bought a 360. Number of times I've booted up my old xbox games in it, even the ones that were compatible? about once. I've since traded all of them in towards 360 games. And in some cases that weren't compatible, such as with burnout: revenge it resulted in criterion releasing an enhanced version of the original game, which is still one of my most played titles.
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Given the zunepass subscription model, someone could effectively grab a ridiculous amount of free music for any player (including ipods). Heck, you can even download the zuneplayer without owning a zune, but don't think it will let you subscribe without one. And then cancel the zunepass subscription when they are done. Given sheer logistics, its probably impossible to grab the entire marketplace, but you probably could grab just about everything you wanted, at least until they patch this and i'm sure they have people working overtime on this. Because the danger is that the RIAA would pull their stuff out of the marketplace if they don't feel confident microsoft can protect their content, they're already overly nervous about something like a subscription and wifi sharing, to the point where they'd crippled much of the device's potential.
I use a zune, mainly for the subscription model, the player is nice for some things but there are times I'd rather use my sony ericsson phone because its a lot smaller, heck, i use it sometimes although that's limited to my none-zune marketplace content... My zune is more used in my car and at my desk. But I take it with me elsewhere at times because of the greatly expanded content I have access to on it. at least till now, where this would allow me to listen to it on that device. I'd happily keep paying my subscription fee if I had a means to listen to it on the device of my choice. You know, like that playsforsure concept...
Ludicrous. That would be like the Vice President of the United States flat out lying.
I mean they do it to protect witnesses? The informant on Michael Vick sounds like he's 7' tall and drinks crude oil for breakfast, at least on ESPN. The old xbox live used to have some cheesy voice mods, but they've got to have better tech by now. That being said I don't really ahve any interst in using voice chat. I can type it at least as fast as I can say it, and am not interested in hearing what others really sound like.
How the hell are they going to handle daytime / night time? I mean it doesn't make sense to have 50% of your game time useless to a significant (majority?) percentage of your population... but at the same time not having dayling crimps advantages of the non-kindred types. Possibilities - make it real time (but no seasonal variation) thus your peak hours are night, and allow the others who can play during the day to do so....have quick daylight cycles, make them pass quickly, but still have everyone be in terror and setting their watches to make sure it don't come up on them... etc etc.. Or just have the entire world be dark, and gimp everyone else.
One place where the game became surreal to me was the shire quests involving delivering pies. I mean, cmon . Pies? Avoiding nosy hobbits?
You get experience you can use to level up your character for delivering pies?
This lead to the following line of thinking:
As we know, the one ring's power easily swayed the minds of men and elves and dwarves. Hobbits, however, were resistant to its effects, which is why one of them made an ideal ringbearer.
The Dark Lord Sauron knew he would need something of a different nature to tempt the hobbits. And thus the dark lord learned the craft of pie-making. There in the ovens of mount doom, he baked the master pie, the one pie to tempt them all.
Soon the aroma of this pie wafted over the free lands, and an army of hobbits went to mordor to take it. Sauron, holding the pie aloft in one hand out of their reach, and his mace grond in the other, fended them off until one of the river hobbits climbed up his back and took it from his hand. Sauron went down beneath a wave of hungry halflings while Isilgol snuck off into a cave with the pie. There he ate some of it and it transformed him into a creature unable to eat more pie, yet eternally taunted by its pleasant aroma... Fleeing the hobbits he hid beneatht he misty mountains, whose frequent fog and pine trees and wolves would mask the smell He lived in a state of torture with the pie for thousands of years...
Until one day Bilbo in the company of some dwarves (who were going to get back some beer a dragon had stolen from them) crossed those mountains and smelled the pie...
Can't abandon those Heroclix figs...
Why not? it could continue easily in this format at a fraction of the cost...
As people become desperate to circumvent this, we will return to the Charlie McCarthy era...
All the plants were split into two camps, Green! and Purple! They fought until there was only one kind left.
Actually its here now, but it will take that long to drive them to the dealerships.
I have a zune, had it for some time now. I do like it, i really do. But it is very frustrating too.
First off, there has been a skipping issue on some units (mine included), a workaroudn for it meant leaving display on 100% of the time, which did wonders for the battery. Plus, at times navigating in its menus, while they were laid out, it would just lag behind your clicks and presses, then suddenly catch up and do everything you did in frustration.
Okay, they had a patch in the works for this, firmware 1.3. Rumor had it would be out yesterday.. it actually did make it out today. But even the execution of this shows carelessness...
For example. the www.zune.net website was down 24 hours tuesday for maintenance. Okay, I understand sometimes you gotta do that, but you're telling me they couldn't put up a mirror? All attempts to do stuff on that day produced an error, and when it did, it would direct you to www.zune.net/support. which didn't come up. You didnt' get the maintenance message even unless you went to www.zune.net (even zune.net failed to do this).
Okay, the patch came out next day, the site's back up. It tells me I have an update. Says downloading... then returns an error message of "unable to update sync settings at this time". calling zune support they have me update the zune software. Same. They have me install zune software on another machine. Same. I told them from the start that I've seen others posting about this on some zune boards. uh-huh. Since I'd redone zune software from their own website, the guy now wants me to instead reinstall it from the original CD, which is lying somewhere in a box in a garage. Most drivers and software should like be obselete by the time you get them, but this is apparently their standard procedure, never mind how that is going to fix what isn't coming through from their website.
I'm still trying to get 1.3 on my zune now, some 10 hours after first trying. Oh, and btw, the patch notes they have for the 1.3 are verbatim copied from the patch notes from 1.2, including the note about how this includes everything from 1.1 and earlier. (as if 1.2 is not included). Again, its like how much care and effort are they putting into this.
Oh, but Zune has exciting things on the way, they announced a pink zune. That will get their cool factor going, no doubt.
Given what microsoft did in the past to people who adopted their tech (playsforsure), I have a real uneasy feeling that they'll release some new hardware that abandon the current zune.
I want to like this thing, I really do. But they make it so hard. I *do* like the zune pass, it makes most of the frustrations worth it for me, given that I'd downloaded what would have been about $6000-$7000 worth of songs directly if I'd bought them. I like not caring which version of a song I get. I like the look and feel of the player. But they find a way to kill it. Its like Isaiah Thomas is running the Zune team. I know J Allard is supposed to be in charge of it now, but is it really his main focus? I haven't seen any drastic changes since they put him back in charge of it, and quite honestly in his shoes I'd be wanting to go on to other things by now anyway.
That's pretty much how I feel about it at this time...
I'm glad we have someone to grammar our articles.
I was kinda banking on the 133 T
Gee, if you took one thing away from the interview about microsoft it wouldn't be "poor documentation", it would be that their marketing is awful. He did complain that it takes time to translate the documentation of the unreal engine docs into japanese, and in that respect the documentation is poor. But I think it incorrect to make that the summary of what he thinks about the 360. He was pretty positive about it overall, and this complaints about marketing are more to the tune of its a great system, too bad the marketing is preventing it from succeeding.
The part where the interviewer turns to the Microsoft PR guy and says, "you should be taking notes" rings particularly true...
now is we can just keep this under wraps, we can....
..
..
(looks around)
DOH!
The game has a certain quality that makes you keep playing it when you're playing it, looking for just one more orb or taking out one more boss or so on... its mindless fun and it taps into the improvement/levelling vibe in ways few games have... And for any of those who complain about its lack of social responsibility, its all okay because you're a cop. I'd love to see them come out with expansion areas for this via xbla...
Its more likely the communists... both craft reported a red shift throughout the galaxy...
This is a non-story. It is perfectly normal for any organization to not adopt a new OS for a significant amount of time after it is released, years, even. There are enough things to harp on Vista without making things up and pretending they have significance...
Is no one concerned about the potential impact this will have, by providing a drag on the waves that would else naturally strike the coast, thus potentially reducing the habitat for species adatped to the wave-heavy environment of Scotland's coast? What about the mollusks and other marine invertebrates who can only spread and prosper via wave transort...
Its just like those people who advocate wind power and never consider the impact of slowing down the world's winds, thus reducing the natural spread of wind-bourne seeds and so on...
Its bad PR. And good PR is something the PS3 could use. So it matters on that level.
That being said, while ironic given their stance not too long ago, its probably right, but you'll never hear them say "microsoft was right" on that one. I had an x-box, and bought a 360. Number of times I've booted up my old xbox games in it, even the ones that were compatible? about once. I've since traded all of them in towards 360 games. And in some cases that weren't compatible, such as with burnout: revenge it resulted in criterion releasing an enhanced version of the original game, which is still one of my most played titles.
Anyway, back to crackdown...
Micro Forte was such a tease....
The pigeons of China today overthrew their human masters in a major political Coo!
(from Miller/SNL/Ecuador sometime circa 1990)
On ships anyway.
Well, if this doesn't pan out they could always use that agreement with SuSE and release Naval Linux...