I don't think that pirated DVDs do any real dent in their sales, but try thinking about it this way: I own PlayStation games. I don't own a PlayStation.
See the point? Does owning a DVD automaticaly entitle you to the software to play it? (And hardware, if you don't have both a DVD drive and the software to decode DVD movies.)
I'm personally not going to lose any sleep if you or anyone else copies their DVDs so they can watch them. I have a few movies of my own on my computer, all pirated from my the network here at school. There is a difference, however, between taking something knowing it's stealing, and believing that you are entitled to it.
I think that the charges you are facing is rather ridiculous, but I have to wonder: Why Windows? If the motive of you and the group you worked with was to have a DVD player for Linux, why release this program that works only under Windows?
A manic depressive, or someone with OCD, obsessive type personality, clinical depression, etc., does not mean they are insane or nuts.
That's one of the problems with public perception of mental disorders: People think if you have one, you'r nuts. Thus, they don't want to admit they have one. Christ, this is a great thing. So many people have mental disorders that go undiagnosed because they think they HAVE to live like that, they're SUPPOSED to feel like shit all the time. This is no different than them offering better medical care for physical ailments.
And for the record, many mental disorders (like manic depression/bipolar) have PHYSICAL causes. People are scared to get treatment because they think if they are prescribed drugs, it will "change their personality." Our brain works on chemicals, and if the proportion of chemicals gets screwed up, our head gets screwed up. People who are bipolar don't have the right seratonin levels in their brain (it breaks down too quickly). SSRIs like prozac (everyone's favorite whipping boy), zolaft, luvex, and more I am unaware of, help regulate the seratonin to normal levels. Drugs for other disorders try to do similar things.
"Or anyone with a brain that has infomation to share."
Some of these people could be using a Windows based OS, or using IE as their internet browser. Some people don't have the time to care about whose computer product they're using, yet are still highy intelligent in things outside of a techie's world. What you propose is an elitist internet, which I find disgusting. I want walls taken down, not built.
First of all, all MS is really doing is limited the number of people who can connect to your computer with Workstation and Server.
But this article isn't about servers, it's about OSes and web browsers. O'Reilly uses servers as an analogy (albeit a lengthy one, but extremely accurate) to the Win98/IE anti-trust trial. In NTW, chaning two registry entries (and one of those really just polices the other, critical, one) makes it NTS. That's it. In Win98, changing a few entries in the registry (or maybe it was the kernel itself, I'm not sure) stops IE from running in the background. MS knows this can be done, but still maintains the program is integral to the functioning of their OS.
Except, if they can publish two versions of NT, Server and Workstation, then they certainly are capable of publishing two versions of Win98, with and without IE running in the background.
And since the thrust of their argument is that Win98 must have IE to work, their argument falls apart. It therefore becomes an unfair business practice to use their position as an OS maker/distributer to put their browser on a PC.
I'm hardly a network administrator (or any other catch-phrase you want to tack onto the job), but during the two years I was on my high school newspaper, I was the tech guy responsible for the nine computers (Macs), one laser printer, and two scanners. (It was my official job the first year, but the second year, I unofficialy kept the job after gaining even more jobs--but I liked it).
We just used the system of whoever used the computers named them. Usually two editors would work on one computer, so the name for the computer they used would often have some sort of relation to them, or most likely their nicknames. One girl who loved polyester named hers Polyfreak, for instance.
I wanted to name our printer The Millenium Falcon, but I never got around to it. (Like the Falcon's warp drive, the damned thing never worked when we really needed it--like, say, midnight the night before a publication date).
What did I name my computer? If you've ever worked with PageMaker (a very memory intensive program) on aging Macs on a network, you'll get this: Crash.
Tomb Raider 4 is coming out, but I can't for the life of me figure out why. The second game did marginally good--not as good as EIDOS had hoped, but better than a lot of other games do. The third bombed. The fourth will do the same. People just don't care about it anymore.
While I'm not positive (I wasn't in the know for PC games at that time), I thik that Tomb Raider was designed initially as a console game. I say this mainly because all of EIDOS' games are done like this--Legacy of Kain and its sequel Soul Reaver are two examples.
Tomb Raider is a console game, did okay on the PC, but it came now where near duplicating the success from the console systems, which is what my point was.
Final Fantasy 7 bombed on the PC. I read the reviews of it for the PC just to see how the other side thinks, and their major complaints were the super-deformed characters, and the save points. (One reviewerd actually called the saving system--FF7's was rather standard as far as console RPGs go--really obscure. Goes to show the differences.) You also needed a pretty good system (for the time) to play that game well. Buggy, if I heard correctly.
Never heard of TOCA, though maybe that should say something.
Grand Theft Auto had mild success on both platforms, nothing spectacular.
Wipeout XL did really well on the PlayStation, but as I recall, it didn't reproduce that for the PC.
Another example would be Resident Evil 2. Did extremely well on the PlayStation (enjoyed the hell out of it myself). The PC port has much-souped up grahics, plus a bunch of options and features that weren't even in the PS re-release. The game didn't do so great. Again, the save system was a big problem. I honestly think that the different save paradigms that people are used to cause this problem more than anything else. On a PC game, you can normally save anywhere you want. That rarely happens on a console game. Not to mention PC games take writability for granted.
My point isn't that ported games don't do well, but that the port of a phenomenaly successful game never does anywhere near that of its original. This is because people look for different experiences when playing the PC and consoles, so a good console/PC game should take into account the idosyncracies of the platform it is on. When ported to the other side, the idiosyncracies are lost on the people looking for a different experience than what they are given.
When they say "display," they mean it can crunch that many polygons at one time.
Anyway, that's the point of having that many polygons. If a person in a game was made of a million polygons, each polygon would be so damned small that you wouldn't be able to pick out any one polygon. This is good, because if you can't pick out what a structure is made of, it looks more true to life. The more polygons something has, it also has greater potential to move more realisticly. Just because you can't see each individual polygon doesn't mean it's not making a difference.
And anyway, if there are a total of ten polygons being "displayed," that doesn't mean you can see all of them at once. One polygon may be blocking your "view" of another. But since they're affecting and being affected by the environment, they still have to be crunched by the processor. This is why very large levels in videogames can cause slow down--way too many polygons for the machine to process. They may not be in view, but they still have to be processed. (Tricks around this have been made, like seemlessly loading new areas, making it all seem like one "world," or "level," while it's really just segments stuck together, and making the number of polygons an object has a function of how far away the "player" is from the object in question.)
But even the cheapest price doesn't always seal the deal. Nintendo64 suffered in the battle with Playstation because it was the last major 64-bit system to market -- after Sega Saturn and long after Playstation. By the time Nintendo launched, Playstation had a critical mass of games on the market. Nintendo never entirely recovered.
First of all, PlayStation and Satunr were 32-bit systems, N64 has been the only 64-bit one.
But beyond that, the generally accepted reason that the Nintendo 64 failed to grab the PlayStation's market was because it used catridges and not CDs. It's due to the N64's medium for games that it has a limited library (cost more to make, quite simpley). A CD costs about $1 to manufacture, while a cartride costs about $30.
More importantly, CDs offer so much more storage. The biggest catridge game so far has been Zelda: The Ocarina of Time for the N64, and it was only 32 megs (you may have heard 256--that's because Nintendo uses megaBITS, not megaBYTES like the computer industry does). CDs, as anyone here knows, can hold 660 MB, and on top of that, you can use multiple CDs for one game. That can't be done with cartridges.
And the info on the Saturn is a bit misleading. The Saturn was released at least two months before the PlayStation (probably longer), and Sega screwed themselves. They actually did a surprise release of the system. Stupid, since none of their third party developers were ready with any games. The Saturn was also difficult to program for (it used two 32-bit processors).
And the reason Nintendo thought they could pull it off is because they did pull it off with the Super Nintendo vs. Sega's Genesis. The Genesis had an impressive library of games by the time the SNES came onto the scene, but Nintendo ended up winning that race. Of course, the storage mediums were both cartridges, and the SNES was, in most respects, the more powerful machine.
Still, I know more about consoles than I probably should, so I can't fault the guy too much. I'm impressed just to notice that he recognizes that Sony's claim of 75 million polygons a second involves using the processor for nothing but crunching polygons, which will just never happen.
The problem with this is that TV resolution sucks.
Just an interesting note: Console game developers use this to their advantage. The lower resolution actually provides some free anti-aliasing. Hook some of those polygonal games up to your monitor, and you'd probably notice they're a bit more jaggeded looking.
If Microsoft release the X-Box (and I have real doubts they will), it will fail. They seem to be going to console/PC route, and those fail. People want simplicity in consoles; that's their draw. I really don't think console online gaming will pick up much either. I love a good game of Tribes on my computer, but when I sit down to play my PlayStation, I don't feel a need to play in a community.
And on a related note, no game that has enjoyed success on the PC or on a console has done the same on the other platform. The two main problems are the controls (gamepads vs. many keys on a keyboard) and saving points (save-anywhere design of most first person shooters, save after a level design of console platformers, and save in designated areas of console RPGs).
Media outlets rely on their sources for information. To give an organization faulty information, then yell at them for it, is like shooting someone and yelling at them when they bleed.
MTV is, of course, greatly at fault. They obvisously didn't take the time to check the credibility of their sources, which is something every journalist should do for everything.
But I can't help but get a sense that MTV and/or some media outlets can't do right by anyone's eyes around here. I have my gripes with both, but they're not evil incarnate. Imagine for a second if they were given factual, accurate information by these people instead of lies. Maybe it wouldn't have been "interesting" enough for MTV to air, but then again, maybe MTV would have aired the truth.
Except then, with the hacker community being represented accurately, nobody would have anything to complain about, and we just can't have that.
You're kidding, right? The guy's got 80-some-odd-billion DOLLARS. He's the head of a company that's worth $500 billion, more than there is liquid cash in this country, and he's not rich? He has a shitload of money. So he's rich. Pretty simple.
There is a difference between saying "I think that Singer is promoting murder," and saying "MURDERER!" Definintely both are clear language, but one is more of a knee-jerk reaction than the other.
I consider forking over one fifth of your paycheck to charitable organizations as doing something "real." Could he do more? Of course. But no matter how much you give, you can always give more. I know he gives more than I do, and he just may give more than you do.
Simply because the majority agree on something does not make that something an execution of freedom. It makes it an extention of the will of the majority, nothing more.
And why would someone who wants more freedom go to a totalitarian state when there are plenty of other countries in this world that in some aspects, allow a higher degree of freedom than the US? That would certainly be silly.
Who and what has technology or the internet made free?
I wouldn't use the word "free," but technology has definitely enabled the exchange of ideas far beyond what was previous available. Books did it, and now I'd say the internet is doing it.
If the tolerant are indeed tolerant, they will be tolerant of the intolerant. If they aren't, then they're not--they're just like the people they despise. Call it the ultimate test of tolerance.
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I think you made more assumptions than I care to count.
So they come up with vaporware of their own.
It's called creativity. Being creative is fun. Viewing other's creativity is just as fun.
Commmon axiom: Any lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client.
See the point? Does owning a DVD automaticaly entitle you to the software to play it? (And hardware, if you don't have both a DVD drive and the software to decode DVD movies.)
I'm personally not going to lose any sleep if you or anyone else copies their DVDs so they can watch them. I have a few movies of my own on my computer, all pirated from my the network here at school. There is a difference, however, between taking something knowing it's stealing, and believing that you are entitled to it.
My understanding has been that he wrote the GUI for the program, which would involve him with the creation of the Windows program.
I think that the charges you are facing is rather ridiculous, but I have to wonder: Why Windows? If the motive of you and the group you worked with was to have a DVD player for Linux, why release this program that works only under Windows?
They also get more expansive health care than Americans do.
Straight Dope: Are deadly germs the latest terrorist weapon?
That's one of the problems with public perception of mental disorders: People think if you have one, you'r nuts. Thus, they don't want to admit they have one. Christ, this is a great thing. So many people have mental disorders that go undiagnosed because they think they HAVE to live like that, they're SUPPOSED to feel like shit all the time. This is no different than them offering better medical care for physical ailments.
And for the record, many mental disorders (like manic depression/bipolar) have PHYSICAL causes. People are scared to get treatment because they think if they are prescribed drugs, it will "change their personality." Our brain works on chemicals, and if the proportion of chemicals gets screwed up, our head gets screwed up. People who are bipolar don't have the right seratonin levels in their brain (it breaks down too quickly). SSRIs like prozac (everyone's favorite whipping boy), zolaft, luvex, and more I am unaware of, help regulate the seratonin to normal levels. Drugs for other disorders try to do similar things.
Some of these people could be using a Windows based OS, or using IE as their internet browser. Some people don't have the time to care about whose computer product they're using, yet are still highy intelligent in things outside of a techie's world. What you propose is an elitist internet, which I find disgusting. I want walls taken down, not built.
But this article isn't about servers, it's about OSes and web browsers. O'Reilly uses servers as an analogy (albeit a lengthy one, but extremely accurate) to the Win98/IE anti-trust trial. In NTW, chaning two registry entries (and one of those really just polices the other, critical, one) makes it NTS. That's it. In Win98, changing a few entries in the registry (or maybe it was the kernel itself, I'm not sure) stops IE from running in the background. MS knows this can be done, but still maintains the program is integral to the functioning of their OS.
Except, if they can publish two versions of NT, Server and Workstation, then they certainly are capable of publishing two versions of Win98, with and without IE running in the background.
And since the thrust of their argument is that Win98 must have IE to work, their argument falls apart. It therefore becomes an unfair business practice to use their position as an OS maker/distributer to put their browser on a PC.
We just used the system of whoever used the computers named them. Usually two editors would work on one computer, so the name for the computer they used would often have some sort of relation to them, or most likely their nicknames. One girl who loved polyester named hers Polyfreak, for instance.
I wanted to name our printer The Millenium Falcon, but I never got around to it. (Like the Falcon's warp drive, the damned thing never worked when we really needed it--like, say, midnight the night before a publication date).
What did I name my computer? If you've ever worked with PageMaker (a very memory intensive program) on aging Macs on a network, you'll get this: Crash.
While I'm not positive (I wasn't in the know for PC games at that time), I thik that Tomb Raider was designed initially as a console game. I say this mainly because all of EIDOS' games are done like this--Legacy of Kain and its sequel Soul Reaver are two examples.
Final Fantasy 7 bombed on the PC. I read the reviews of it for the PC just to see how the other side thinks, and their major complaints were the super-deformed characters, and the save points. (One reviewerd actually called the saving system--FF7's was rather standard as far as console RPGs go--really obscure. Goes to show the differences.) You also needed a pretty good system (for the time) to play that game well. Buggy, if I heard correctly.
Never heard of TOCA, though maybe that should say something.
Grand Theft Auto had mild success on both platforms, nothing spectacular.
Wipeout XL did really well on the PlayStation, but as I recall, it didn't reproduce that for the PC.
Another example would be Resident Evil 2. Did extremely well on the PlayStation (enjoyed the hell out of it myself). The PC port has much-souped up grahics, plus a bunch of options and features that weren't even in the PS re-release. The game didn't do so great. Again, the save system was a big problem. I honestly think that the different save paradigms that people are used to cause this problem more than anything else. On a PC game, you can normally save anywhere you want. That rarely happens on a console game. Not to mention PC games take writability for granted.
My point isn't that ported games don't do well, but that the port of a phenomenaly successful game never does anywhere near that of its original. This is because people look for different experiences when playing the PC and consoles, so a good console/PC game should take into account the idosyncracies of the platform it is on. When ported to the other side, the idiosyncracies are lost on the people looking for a different experience than what they are given.
Anyway, that's the point of having that many polygons. If a person in a game was made of a million polygons, each polygon would be so damned small that you wouldn't be able to pick out any one polygon. This is good, because if you can't pick out what a structure is made of, it looks more true to life. The more polygons something has, it also has greater potential to move more realisticly. Just because you can't see each individual polygon doesn't mean it's not making a difference.
And anyway, if there are a total of ten polygons being "displayed," that doesn't mean you can see all of them at once. One polygon may be blocking your "view" of another. But since they're affecting and being affected by the environment, they still have to be crunched by the processor. This is why very large levels in videogames can cause slow down--way too many polygons for the machine to process. They may not be in view, but they still have to be processed. (Tricks around this have been made, like seemlessly loading new areas, making it all seem like one "world," or "level," while it's really just segments stuck together, and making the number of polygons an object has a function of how far away the "player" is from the object in question.)
But beyond that, the generally accepted reason that the Nintendo 64 failed to grab the PlayStation's market was because it used catridges and not CDs. It's due to the N64's medium for games that it has a limited library (cost more to make, quite simpley). A CD costs about $1 to manufacture, while a cartride costs about $30.
More importantly, CDs offer so much more storage. The biggest catridge game so far has been Zelda: The Ocarina of Time for the N64, and it was only 32 megs (you may have heard 256--that's because Nintendo uses megaBITS, not megaBYTES like the computer industry does). CDs, as anyone here knows, can hold 660 MB, and on top of that, you can use multiple CDs for one game. That can't be done with cartridges.
And the info on the Saturn is a bit misleading. The Saturn was released at least two months before the PlayStation (probably longer), and Sega screwed themselves. They actually did a surprise release of the system. Stupid, since none of their third party developers were ready with any games. The Saturn was also difficult to program for (it used two 32-bit processors).
And the reason Nintendo thought they could pull it off is because they did pull it off with the Super Nintendo vs. Sega's Genesis. The Genesis had an impressive library of games by the time the SNES came onto the scene, but Nintendo ended up winning that race. Of course, the storage mediums were both cartridges, and the SNES was, in most respects, the more powerful machine.
Still, I know more about consoles than I probably should, so I can't fault the guy too much. I'm impressed just to notice that he recognizes that Sony's claim of 75 million polygons a second involves using the processor for nothing but crunching polygons, which will just never happen.
Just an interesting note: Console game developers use this to their advantage. The lower resolution actually provides some free anti-aliasing. Hook some of those polygonal games up to your monitor, and you'd probably notice they're a bit more jaggeded looking.If Microsoft release the X-Box (and I have real doubts they will), it will fail. They seem to be going to console/PC route, and those fail. People want simplicity in consoles; that's their draw. I really don't think console online gaming will pick up much either. I love a good game of Tribes on my computer, but when I sit down to play my PlayStation, I don't feel a need to play in a community.
And on a related note, no game that has enjoyed success on the PC or on a console has done the same on the other platform. The two main problems are the controls (gamepads vs. many keys on a keyboard) and saving points (save-anywhere design of most first person shooters, save after a level design of console platformers, and save in designated areas of console RPGs).
MTV is, of course, greatly at fault. They obvisously didn't take the time to check the credibility of their sources, which is something every journalist should do for everything.
But I can't help but get a sense that MTV and/or some media outlets can't do right by anyone's eyes around here. I have my gripes with both, but they're not evil incarnate. Imagine for a second if they were given factual, accurate information by these people instead of lies. Maybe it wouldn't have been "interesting" enough for MTV to air, but then again, maybe MTV would have aired the truth.
Except then, with the hacker community being represented accurately, nobody would have anything to complain about, and we just can't have that.
The lack of a sense of humor here is astounding.
You're kidding, right? The guy's got 80-some-odd-billion DOLLARS. He's the head of a company that's worth $500 billion, more than there is liquid cash in this country, and he's not rich? He has a shitload of money. So he's rich. Pretty simple.
There is a difference between saying "I think that Singer is promoting murder," and saying "MURDERER!" Definintely both are clear language, but one is more of a knee-jerk reaction than the other.
I consider forking over one fifth of your paycheck to charitable organizations as doing something "real." Could he do more? Of course. But no matter how much you give, you can always give more. I know he gives more than I do, and he just may give more than you do.
And why would someone who wants more freedom go to a totalitarian state when there are plenty of other countries in this world that in some aspects, allow a higher degree of freedom than the US? That would certainly be silly.
I wouldn't use the word "free," but technology has definitely enabled the exchange of ideas far beyond what was previous available. Books did it, and now I'd say the internet is doing it.
If the tolerant are indeed tolerant, they will be tolerant of the intolerant. If they aren't, then they're not--they're just like the people they despise. Call it the ultimate test of tolerance.