Well, as with all statistics, it's not a lie, just a creative interpretation of the numbers.
I'm fairly sure 99% of the gamers that actually bought Spore were more or less Ok with the DRM. That is, if you ignore the loads and loads who, after learning about it, decided to not buy it at all.
Sure, count those out and you get a very small percentage of naysayers.
And, for the record, apparently I'm in that 0.2% because Spore was on my buy list until I learnt about 3 activations and SecuROM.
I have hands free in the car and I find it useful to take the occasional call, so I wouldn't use this in a car.
You are, of course, aware that the main problem of doing phone calls while driving isn't that you have one less hand, but that you are distracted, right?
Old busses used to have a sign that said "don't speak to the driver while he's driving" or some such notice. That had the same reason.
This is trying to solve a human problem with technology. The problem is opt-out. You must have opt-out, otherwise it would be just a very dumb idea, given that people ride as passengers, or drive on busses and trains as well. However, once you have opt-out, the exact kind of people who need this the most are the ones who will use it aggressively.
Most people are fairly reasonable. They don't take calls while driving anyways. The fucking idiots who drive with one hand on the phone and the other around a cup of coffee are the ones who'll use opt-out by default.
so why make them download and install Silverlight.
Because you can.
Seriously, a lot of things with MS are just power games. The MS keys on your keyboard are an example. By my best estimate, about 1% of users ever use them for anything not an accident.
Every Department gets a budget. If they don't fully use that budget then the next year their budget will get cut.
That was 30 years ago. Unless your place is the one right in front of the "End of the World" sign, it's not been true for at least 10, more probably 20 years. But it's a well-beloved Urban Myth and not going away that easily.
Don't think in terms of "what", think "what for" - I don't really care what my tax dollars are spent on, as long as it helps the purpose, in this case of education. If iPhones do and the cost/benefit analysis works out (which might require a trial to test, that's fine) then that's ok with me. If HD projectors do, fine thing. Heck, if a daily blowjob for every student does, I'd be ok with that.
On the surface "more books" might sound like it's "more educational". But that's the surface. I know lots of books in university libraries are never read even once during their shelf life. So what, exactly, did they contribute to education?
I don't mind a site displaying advertisements as long as they are not annoying and tasteful.
And then there's people like me, who think that every unwanted advertisement is annoying. Also, most of the crap isn't tasteful by my standards.
I'd even pay for an AdBlock extension for the iPhone, where the (sometimes considerable) additional loading time of ads you don't even want becomes more noticeable than on a broadband connection.
Well, that's the trouble with textbook inventions: They don't translate 1:1 into the real world any more than mathematics does. Or have you ever seen an actual Bell Curve or met a Pythagoras Theorem for dinner?
"Free Market" is an abstraction, simplification, model of description, whatever you want to name it. Expecting to encounter an actual one in the real world is delusional.
The authors then go on to discuss a variety of economic terms that they think apply to publishing
Which is probably the most problematic point.
While even in the current crisis "market models" are still hip, they don't give the answers to all questions. A scientific conclusion that starts with "if X were a market" must question, among all the other validations, the "if" part as well.
And while economy provides interesting theories that are helpful in many cases - just like evolution, it does not fit everywhere. So the very first thing that would've to be established is that the model fits.
In this case, I've not seen enough of that, so any conclusions drawn are meaningless until then.
Which is an idea that I reject absolutely. What we're dealing with her is neither a phone and PDA, nor a notebook. What we're dealing with her is a portable computing platform the exceeds both the capabilities and portability of a laptop while also exceeding the functional capabilities of either a phone or PDA.
You missed the point. The argument wasn't about computing power and technological functionality. Heck, a $5 mobile phone today has more CPU power and almost the graphical capabilities of my first computer.
But the lack of a full-size keyboard or alternate entry method alone means that no pocket-sized device will compete with a notebook until someone comes up with a solution. Storage capacities are still vastly different, and will likely remain so because storage demand is growing as quickly as supply.
The users are what's all important, not the technical specs and geeky features. Specs don't buy phones, and geeks are a tiny percentage of the market.
And it will continue to not count that much...right up until a killer app is released for the Android platform which can't be ported to the iPhone because of the restrictions.
And that would be?
No, seriously. What can you imagine? Consider the fact that the restrictions so far are simply arbitrary decisions by Apple that it could change if necessary.
Perhaps not directly, but over time the Android platform will likely build up a more impressive library of apps written by tinkers and hobbyists who did care. Even non-geek users will eventually notice the difference.
Android isn't the only mobile platform to allow 3rd party software. Some of the other ones have been around for many years. And yet, within 3 months, the iPhone and its App store beat them all and left them bloody by the roadside. Some developers are on the record stating that they made more profit in one month of App store sales than they make in a year for other mobile platforms.
I wish Google best of luck, after all competition is good. But to compete with the iPhone on that level, they'd need an end-to-end solution, where everything from the dev tools to the online shop comes out of the same hands and is readily available not only for the developers, but most importantly to the customers as well. By my modest estimate, the App store tie-in will win out in the end, because it brings developers and customers together. And that's where the rubber meets the road. If Android can't offer something similar, it'll end up like FreeBSD - an interesting curiosity with lots of technical advantages that nobody really cares about.
The only reason they don't care is because they haven't seen that the grass is greener on the open side of the fence.
Mostly because it simply isn't. It's more customizable, open, whatever, but it's not "greener". 90% of the things that Android has over the iPhone matter little to nothing to everyone but the most geeky power-users.
And I say that as a power-user (and iPhone owner) - who finds an open mobile phone platform interesting, but still couldn't care less about the first Android phones coming out now.
Because the iphone had a cool new interface that no other phone had. But its going to be a tough battle for Apple to keep ahead of the other platforms when they are deliberately excluding software that people want.
So far, the people I've seen complaining are the developers, not the users. As a user, I personally think the App store has rather too much, not too little, in it. At the end of the day, it's a phone and PDA, not a notebook.
It used to be that you had your kids within a year after reaching puberty. And you died by 40.
That's said so often, but I'm not so sure it's right.
One, when you read stuff like "early 30s", you're reading about the average life expectancy. But that usually includes the fact that half of the kids died before they were 5. Figure that in and a 60 year old farmer in the middle ages isn't so unusual anymore.
Two, there is also the claim that puberty used to be earlier in life. A thousand years ago, kids were married when the girl was 14 and the boy 16. However, puberty was likely around 12 in that time. That's 2-3 years after puberty for the first kid, if we assume most of the girls didn't get pregnant prior to marriage (which was a death penalty offence in some regions, and a stigma everywhere else, so it's likely that it was avoided).
That's exactly the point, and has been for at least a hundred years. If you look it up you notice the same trend everywhere: With rising income, social status and education, the average number of children falls. Which, on a large scale, is why european and american families have 1,x children each and indian, african, etc. families have 5+. On the small scale it works just as well - low-income, low-education families have more kids than high-income, high-education families.
Or, in other words: We don't progress because those who do are outbred by those who don't.
This is true as long as you accept that at least a part of intelligence, success, willpower, etc. are genetic traits. The scientific judgement is still out on that one, but evidence collected so far makes it highly likely that some of it is - what is very much unclear is how much. This is also true if you accept that education and upbringing make it likely that you remain in your social class. While we have considerably more movement than in the middle ages, chances are still good that if you were born into a middle-class family, your own family as an adult will also be middle-class. Same for low and high. So your kids will more likely than not be brought up in an environment comparable to the one you were brought up in.
Combine with higher birthrates for lower social classes and you come to the same conclusion.
Of course the MMORPG economic system is trivial, simplified, etc. compared to real world.
However, I pointed out one specific aspect, and for all I know it is still true: scarcity. All the MMORPGs that I played do indeed follow the rule that rare items are more expensive than common ones.
City of Heroes/Villains also had a feature like that, in which you could become the "sidekick" of some higher-level player and when you do you're brought up to his level minus one. I liked that as well, and it fit well into the game's theme.
The other alternative was Guild Wars, where the level cap was at 20 and - at least in Factions and Nightfall - was reached very, very quickly, so the majority of gameplay happenend at Lvl 20 anyways. I didn't like that very much, because character advancement is one of the most interesting parts of the game for me.
As a matter of fact, Eve's concept has always struck me as an excellent choice for more casual players (like me).
I've got a life, you know? The one that includes a job, a girl, and activities that don't involve computers. There's no way I can compete with school kids who start playing at 2pm and stop playing when mommy shuts down power at 1am - every day. That's fine with me, I don't have to proof I'm cool in a fantasy world. But it does kind of bug me that I can't play with many others who fall in that category, that I always have to find new groups to go questing with, because the old friends from last week are now several levels ahead of me.
In Eve, they wouldn't be. They'd have gained some money in the meantime, and some stuff, but not advanced beyond compatability.
At the same time, it did bug me in Eve that no matter how good I am, I can never catch up to someone who started playing a year before me.
But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?
If the in-game economy depends on players, then yes it does potentially damage you. MMORPGs have economic systems built into them which usually work like real-world systems - prices depend on scarcity of items, among other things. So if automated playing makes rare items readily available, the economy changes.
For a normal player, this might result in the game "not working" anymore. If game progress requires gold, and most of the ways to gain gold depend on the economy being intact, e.g. you being able to loot, or craft, rare items and sell them for good value, then that part of the game might break down for you, and with it everything that depends on you having enough gold available.
On the other hand, game balance in PvP games might also become problematic. I stopped playing Guild Wars when not having all-green (green being the rarest item category) equipment had become a kind of mark. If everyone has a full set of "unique" items, they aren't unique at all.
My own game, for example, includes code that does actually limit the number of unique items - the more there already are in the world, the less the chance that a new one can be found. Which, on the other hand, also requires that items deteriorate over time and then vanish from the game - something that not every MMORPG player will want to happen with his equipment. (my game isn't a MMORPG and the items not very important, so it works in that context.)
As you can see, it can have quite extensive effects.
flash memory storage and you have access to customer data that's useful in support of identity theft.
And you think you can stop digital data from being copied by disabling USB ports? Not learnt anything from DRM, CSS, every copy protection ever invented?
If I want data out of your system, I will get it. Disabling USB ports makes it a tiny bit more inconvenient, that's all. I know of what I speak, been there, done that.
If you want to use your ergnomic mouse, simply ask for it to be added to the list of approved devices.
As I said: A hassle and a burden.
Personal mobile phones are an issue if they have a camera and you're handling documents that can be used to prove a customer's identity.
Because a 2 megapixel photograph of an ID card will get me anywhere where a simple photocopy or scribbling down the data on a blank sheet won't?
And so the list goes on. You need to put on the mindset of a criminal.
I do. Your hurdles are exactly that. What they're not is barriers.
I'm with you on the security needs and all. I disagree about your methods. Making personal phones a problem because you're afraid of pictures, in a time where almost all phones do have a camera, doesn't gain you anything. What you need is a strictly enforced policy that no customer data leaves the premises, no matter how, and stop worrying about enumerating the infinite.
What's your threat model?
Unintentional leaks? I doubt any employee will accidentally photograph customer data. Malicious employees with no technical knowlege? Low-tech attacks work, even against high-tech defenses. Intentional, skilled attackers? You're slowing them down at most, and even that is maybe.
What's your real issues?
If people are intentionally using other phones to circumvent your monitoring - maybe there's something wrong with the monitoring? If nothing else, its acceptance. If people don't understand that customer data doesn't belong on Facebook, then what the fuck are they doing handling customer data? If you're seriously afraid of that, your training sucks.
And so on.
You need to put on the mindset of a user with no ill intentions, who must abide by all these (to him) pointless regulations.
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Well, as with all statistics, it's not a lie, just a creative interpretation of the numbers.
I'm fairly sure 99% of the gamers that actually bought Spore were more or less Ok with the DRM. That is, if you ignore the loads and loads who, after learning about it, decided to not buy it at all.
Sure, count those out and you get a very small percentage of naysayers.
And, for the record, apparently I'm in that 0.2% because Spore was on my buy list until I learnt about 3 activations and SecuROM.
I have hands free in the car and I find it useful to take the occasional call, so I wouldn't use this in a car.
You are, of course, aware that the main problem of doing phone calls while driving isn't that you have one less hand, but that you are distracted, right?
Old busses used to have a sign that said "don't speak to the driver while he's driving" or some such notice. That had the same reason.
Actually, while sending this I got an idea how you actually could do it.
Make the phone the ignition key. Car only drives with phone in phone slot, and when phone is in slot it won't take calls. Passengers are unaffected.
Of course, some idiots will still buy second phone just so they can drive and talk, but as I said, you can't solve the human problem anyways.
Wrong approach, sorry no points.
This is trying to solve a human problem with technology. The problem is opt-out. You must have opt-out, otherwise it would be just a very dumb idea, given that people ride as passengers, or drive on busses and trains as well. However, once you have opt-out, the exact kind of people who need this the most are the ones who will use it aggressively.
Most people are fairly reasonable. They don't take calls while driving anyways. The fucking idiots who drive with one hand on the phone and the other around a cup of coffee are the ones who'll use opt-out by default.
Pretty much every big corporation has a code of ethics.
Few abide by it.
So what's the fuzz?
Well, how about a virtual right to your virtual property in the virtual world of your choice?
so why make them download and install Silverlight.
Because you can.
Seriously, a lot of things with MS are just power games. The MS keys on your keyboard are an example. By my best estimate, about 1% of users ever use them for anything not an accident.
Every Department gets a budget. If they don't fully use that budget then the next year their budget will get cut.
That was 30 years ago. Unless your place is the one right in front of the "End of the World" sign, it's not been true for at least 10, more probably 20 years. But it's a well-beloved Urban Myth and not going away that easily.
You fail at Business 101.
Don't think in terms of "what", think "what for" - I don't really care what my tax dollars are spent on, as long as it helps the purpose, in this case of education. If iPhones do and the cost/benefit analysis works out (which might require a trial to test, that's fine) then that's ok with me. If HD projectors do, fine thing. Heck, if a daily blowjob for every student does, I'd be ok with that.
On the surface "more books" might sound like it's "more educational". But that's the surface. I know lots of books in university libraries are never read even once during their shelf life. So what, exactly, did they contribute to education?
I don't mind a site displaying advertisements as long as they are not annoying and tasteful.
And then there's people like me, who think that every unwanted advertisement is annoying. Also, most of the crap isn't tasteful by my standards.
I'd even pay for an AdBlock extension for the iPhone, where the (sometimes considerable) additional loading time of ads you don't even want becomes more noticeable than on a broadband connection.
When have we ever had free markets?
Ever since they were inventend.
Oh, you meant like in the real world?
Well, that's the trouble with textbook inventions: They don't translate 1:1 into the real world any more than mathematics does. Or have you ever seen an actual Bell Curve or met a Pythagoras Theorem for dinner?
"Free Market" is an abstraction, simplification, model of description, whatever you want to name it. Expecting to encounter an actual one in the real world is delusional.
The authors then go on to discuss a variety of economic terms that they think apply to publishing
Which is probably the most problematic point.
While even in the current crisis "market models" are still hip, they don't give the answers to all questions. A scientific conclusion that starts with "if X were a market" must question, among all the other validations, the "if" part as well.
And while economy provides interesting theories that are helpful in many cases - just like evolution, it does not fit everywhere. So the very first thing that would've to be established is that the model fits.
In this case, I've not seen enough of that, so any conclusions drawn are meaningless until then.
Which is an idea that I reject absolutely. What we're dealing with her is neither a phone and PDA, nor a notebook. What we're dealing with her is a portable computing platform the exceeds both the capabilities and portability of a laptop while also exceeding the functional capabilities of either a phone or PDA.
You missed the point. The argument wasn't about computing power and technological functionality. Heck, a $5 mobile phone today has more CPU power and almost the graphical capabilities of my first computer.
But the lack of a full-size keyboard or alternate entry method alone means that no pocket-sized device will compete with a notebook until someone comes up with a solution. Storage capacities are still vastly different, and will likely remain so because storage demand is growing as quickly as supply.
The users are what's all important, not the technical specs and geeky features. Specs don't buy phones, and geeks are a tiny percentage of the market.
And it will continue to not count that much...right up until a killer app is released for the Android platform which can't be ported to the iPhone because of the restrictions.
And that would be?
No, seriously. What can you imagine? Consider the fact that the restrictions so far are simply arbitrary decisions by Apple that it could change if necessary.
The "death by killer app" is not going to happen.
Perhaps not directly, but over time the Android platform will likely build up a more impressive library of apps written by tinkers and hobbyists who did care. Even non-geek users will eventually notice the difference.
Android isn't the only mobile platform to allow 3rd party software. Some of the other ones have been around for many years. And yet, within 3 months, the iPhone and its App store beat them all and left them bloody by the roadside. Some developers are on the record stating that they made more profit in one month of App store sales than they make in a year for other mobile platforms.
I wish Google best of luck, after all competition is good. But to compete with the iPhone on that level, they'd need an end-to-end solution, where everything from the dev tools to the online shop comes out of the same hands and is readily available not only for the developers, but most importantly to the customers as well. By my modest estimate, the App store tie-in will win out in the end, because it brings developers and customers together. And that's where the rubber meets the road. If Android can't offer something similar, it'll end up like FreeBSD - an interesting curiosity with lots of technical advantages that nobody really cares about.
The only reason they don't care is because they haven't seen that the grass is greener on the open side of the fence.
Mostly because it simply isn't. It's more customizable, open, whatever, but it's not "greener". 90% of the things that Android has over the iPhone matter little to nothing to everyone but the most geeky power-users.
And I say that as a power-user (and iPhone owner) - who finds an open mobile phone platform interesting, but still couldn't care less about the first Android phones coming out now.
Because the iphone had a cool new interface that no other phone had. But its going to be a tough battle for Apple to keep ahead of the other platforms when they are deliberately excluding software that people want.
So far, the people I've seen complaining are the developers, not the users. As a user, I personally think the App store has rather too much, not too little, in it. At the end of the day, it's a phone and PDA, not a notebook.
I don't have anything against pursuing what you wanna do with your life, but I'd rater have more smart kids being born.
Given that as a species we still have an overpopulation problem, wouldn't less dumb kids being born work the same, just better?
It used to be that you had your kids within a year after reaching puberty. And you died by 40.
That's said so often, but I'm not so sure it's right.
One, when you read stuff like "early 30s", you're reading about the average life expectancy. But that usually includes the fact that half of the kids died before they were 5. Figure that in and a 60 year old farmer in the middle ages isn't so unusual anymore.
Two, there is also the claim that puberty used to be earlier in life. A thousand years ago, kids were married when the girl was 14 and the boy 16. However, puberty was likely around 12 in that time. That's 2-3 years after puberty for the first kid, if we assume most of the girls didn't get pregnant prior to marriage (which was a death penalty offence in some regions, and a stigma everywhere else, so it's likely that it was avoided).
Thank you! I feel less lonely now.
That's exactly the point, and has been for at least a hundred years. If you look it up you notice the same trend everywhere: With rising income, social status and education, the average number of children falls. Which, on a large scale, is why european and american families have 1,x children each and indian, african, etc. families have 5+. On the small scale it works just as well - low-income, low-education families have more kids than high-income, high-education families.
Or, in other words: We don't progress because those who do are outbred by those who don't.
This is true as long as you accept that at least a part of intelligence, success, willpower, etc. are genetic traits. The scientific judgement is still out on that one, but evidence collected so far makes it highly likely that some of it is - what is very much unclear is how much.
This is also true if you accept that education and upbringing make it likely that you remain in your social class. While we have considerably more movement than in the middle ages, chances are still good that if you were born into a middle-class family, your own family as an adult will also be middle-class. Same for low and high. So your kids will more likely than not be brought up in an environment comparable to the one you were brought up in.
Combine with higher birthrates for lower social classes and you come to the same conclusion.
Of course the MMORPG economic system is trivial, simplified, etc. compared to real world.
However, I pointed out one specific aspect, and for all I know it is still true: scarcity. All the MMORPGs that I played do indeed follow the rule that rare items are more expensive than common ones.
City of Heroes/Villains also had a feature like that, in which you could become the "sidekick" of some higher-level player and when you do you're brought up to his level minus one. I liked that as well, and it fit well into the game's theme.
The other alternative was Guild Wars, where the level cap was at 20 and - at least in Factions and Nightfall - was reached very, very quickly, so the majority of gameplay happenend at Lvl 20 anyways. I didn't like that very much, because character advancement is one of the most interesting parts of the game for me.
Just some more angles.
As a matter of fact, Eve's concept has always struck me as an excellent choice for more casual players (like me).
I've got a life, you know? The one that includes a job, a girl, and activities that don't involve computers. There's no way I can compete with school kids who start playing at 2pm and stop playing when mommy shuts down power at 1am - every day. That's fine with me, I don't have to proof I'm cool in a fantasy world. But it does kind of bug me that I can't play with many others who fall in that category, that I always have to find new groups to go questing with, because the old friends from last week are now several levels ahead of me.
In Eve, they wouldn't be. They'd have gained some money in the meantime, and some stuff, but not advanced beyond compatability.
At the same time, it did bug me in Eve that no matter how good I am, I can never catch up to someone who started playing a year before me.
So it all has its good and bad sides.
But on the other hand, does it really ruin the game if someone magically goes from 1 to 70 in two weeks without working for it?
If the in-game economy depends on players, then yes it does potentially damage you. MMORPGs have economic systems built into them which usually work like real-world systems - prices depend on scarcity of items, among other things. So if automated playing makes rare items readily available, the economy changes.
For a normal player, this might result in the game "not working" anymore. If game progress requires gold, and most of the ways to gain gold depend on the economy being intact, e.g. you being able to loot, or craft, rare items and sell them for good value, then that part of the game might break down for you, and with it everything that depends on you having enough gold available.
On the other hand, game balance in PvP games might also become problematic. I stopped playing Guild Wars when not having all-green (green being the rarest item category) equipment had become a kind of mark. If everyone has a full set of "unique" items, they aren't unique at all.
My own game, for example, includes code that does actually limit the number of unique items - the more there already are in the world, the less the chance that a new one can be found. Which, on the other hand, also requires that items deteriorate over time and then vanish from the game - something that not every MMORPG player will want to happen with his equipment. (my game isn't a MMORPG and the items not very important, so it works in that context.)
As you can see, it can have quite extensive effects.
flash memory storage and you have access to customer data that's useful in support of identity theft.
And you think you can stop digital data from being copied by disabling USB ports? Not learnt anything from DRM, CSS, every copy protection ever invented?
If I want data out of your system, I will get it. Disabling USB ports makes it a tiny bit more inconvenient, that's all. I know of what I speak, been there, done that.
If you want to use your ergnomic mouse, simply ask for it to be added to the list of approved devices.
As I said: A hassle and a burden.
Personal mobile phones are an issue if they have a camera and you're handling documents that can be used to prove a customer's identity.
Because a 2 megapixel photograph of an ID card will get me anywhere where a simple photocopy or scribbling down the data on a blank sheet won't?
And so the list goes on. You need to put on the mindset of a criminal.
I do. Your hurdles are exactly that. What they're not is barriers.
I'm with you on the security needs and all. I disagree about your methods. Making personal phones a problem because you're afraid of pictures, in a time where almost all phones do have a camera, doesn't gain you anything. What you need is a strictly enforced policy that no customer data leaves the premises, no matter how, and stop worrying about enumerating the infinite.
What's your threat model?
Unintentional leaks? I doubt any employee will accidentally photograph customer data.
Malicious employees with no technical knowlege? Low-tech attacks work, even against high-tech defenses.
Intentional, skilled attackers? You're slowing them down at most, and even that is maybe.
What's your real issues?
If people are intentionally using other phones to circumvent your monitoring - maybe there's something wrong with the monitoring? If nothing else, its acceptance.
If people don't understand that customer data doesn't belong on Facebook, then what the fuck are they doing handling customer data? If you're seriously afraid of that, your training sucks.
And so on.
You need to put on the mindset of a user with no ill intentions, who must abide by all these (to him) pointless regulations.
That's an interesting argument.
On second thought, wouldn't simply keeping his name secret save the same purpose?