Update: Due to a miscommunication, we had updated the original piece, stating that PC and Xbox 360 Survival Packs would be paid. However, Valve again contacted Edge to say that it hasn't ruled out the possibility of the price being "$0.00." Sorry for any confusion.
From what I understand, Microsoft requires DLC to be for-pay; Valve's stance, reiterated on January 14th, has been that free DLC is a more effective sales catalyst. And then you get the guy on RPS claiming that Gabe emailed saying PC DLC is "free".
The Zune problem was that they started with a great idea, and then removed its testicles in committee. PMP + Wifi? Yes. Music is something humans are hard-wired to share.
Then it hits committee. Share music? That's illegal! Oh wait, it depends? Well, even if it's not illegal, we need to monetize this feature.
Just like "Vista-Capable" was a good idea, until they decided to change the standards to suit their suppliers.
Xbox 360? You're on the money. Committees don't see shifts. People do. And when you give a committee lots of money and say "make version II", you see something very expensive.
Netbooks? Microsoft saw them coming. That's why they came up with the UMPC specification. Oh wait, you mean something cheap? Again, committee think. It's why GM cars have all the cupholders.
You mean, like the one the plaintiffs cited in their motion? (subsequently amended and so on)
There's a lot that doesn't make sense here. I mean look at Plaintiff's opposition to a protective order to seize the parents' hard drive. Whatever shift in Tenenbaum's perceived behaviour might have come about from the fact that moved from acting pro se to having competent representation, the RIAA admits that defendant provided them with an exhaustive list of everyone who could have come in contact with the computer, and which computers he used. Part of the meat of their motion here is that defendant has not shared vital pre-discovery information. In fact, they state in the motion they were perfectly willing to discuss an Oppenheim deposition, once defendant complied to the RIAA's liking with Rule 26. But not even in their motion do they specify what they think defendant should do and has not done -- they cite the schedule set last January and one of their own motions as evidence. If you want to talk about Bulldogs, those would be the people making motions that they refuse to substantiate.
First of all, the universe does not revolve around the Sun any more than in revolves around the Earth. So, Galileo was not "simply stating the TRUTH" (as if there were such a thing). Secondly, his troubles came from asserting a state of things as TRUTH without enough scientific or religious proof. There were plenty of ways he could have stated his case without making an ass of himself, but he chose the pompous ass route. Bertolt Brecht's Galileo is not the historical one, any more than Washington Irving's Christopher Columbus is the historical one.
Destroy your convenient myths and face up to the inconvenient truths. All of them.
Er, this description says they're buying COTS stuff, and then looking to customize it and deploy it to labs. The set of requirements out there sounds suspiciously like the [url=http://virtualbattlespace.vbs2.com/]VBS[/url] platform. Heck, the even snuck the title "Virtual Battle Space" in there. And as a "21st-Century" replacement for DARWARS Ambush! (technically a 21st-century platform, as it is basically Operation Flashpoint), what better than the next generation of the same game?
Disclaimer: I do not have access to any information on this affair beyond the press release.
Hey, if you want to be a slave to the dollar, don't go to college. Liberal Arts aren't supposed to get you higher wages; they're the mark of someone free from wage-slavery. That's where the name comes from.
Seriously, if you consider university in terms of profit and loss, you're better not going. And if you can get a degree doing something that inspires you, and you can afford it, why should you worry whether it'll make you rich?
I've got no idea. As an undergraduate, I took a bunch of courses with a crazed philologist (long before I realized that all philologists are crazed, and that I must bury somewhere in the apparatus the note that I am an historian), and he'd spout out random "facts," most of which I found out later were false. But Swift worked pretty well, and I have no idea where he picked that one out. He followed it up with one that claimed that if you take the opening of Lazarillo de Tormes and play acrostic with the first lines, you can bring out the name of Hurtado de Mendoza. I wasn't convinced by that one then.
Don't disrespect it. In fact, steganography has had many many uses over the years. Naming just one case, steganography is the ultima ratio of intellectual property protection. Gulliver's Travels, for example, was published pseudonymously and "signed" steganographically. Even better, it was signed at least two ways, one using a "Soft" method, the other a "Hard" one. Right on the first page, Gulliver states: "Soon after my return from Leyden, I was recommended by my good master, Mr. Bates, to be surgeon to the Swallow." Evidently, Swallow is a synonym for "Swift", and the onanistic gag is thrown in for good measure. That's the one you're supposed to catch. Really fun, however, is the incipit: "My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons."
I was the third of five sons: Cross out the third and fifth words, and the first letters of the remaining words form an anagram for "swift".
Numerous other cases abound. I'm sure many of us have little coding tricks in which we "sign" our names. A watermark on a jpeg is nice, but it's even nicer if the guy who's going to swipe your images doesn't even know they're signed.
Sometimes it helps to publish something anonymously; at other times, you might have a legitimate worry about your work being appropriated. In those cases, steganography has always been a savior.
Actually, it's because the iPhone uses the data network more often. I throw my GSM on the table by my speakers, and it'll buzz once or twice a day for reasons unrelated to incoming messages/calls. But if you have an iPhone that tries to automatically check your email every few minutes and does so across the network, it's going to be a real PITA.
No need to rat them out. Just give the boss the 411 on the "Hidden Costs" of doing things that way. Ethical arguments are well and good, but when you're asked to do something like this, it's clear that the ethical arguments mean nothing compared to economic ones. Guaranteed system-wide outages and worse catastrophic failures (=poisoned data) are going to cost a lot. Since you cannot predict when they will happen (only that they will happen), or what they will look like, you can't give an estimate for the downtime while you develop counter-countermeasures; nor can you guarantee that those counter-countermeasures will succeed for more than a brief period (especially once they're "on to you").
The fact is, what he's proposing will be more expensive and disruptive than doing it the legit way. And it is your job to point that out. You can also then point out that while you personally consider it unethical, the industry-standard reaction does not usually involve a lawsuit, but rather to deploy simple countermeasures that disrupt and embarass the amateurs stupid enough to perpetrate it.
Slashdot gives you one line every two weeks. You get more when other people submit your stories.
At least, that's my theory. But there's a better one. You might see this as a "ridiculous and doomed motion," but you're absolutely on the money when you imply this is a desperate act by a doomed elite.
There are many other fine historical examples of this phenomenon (e.g., Chivalry).
What makes this "desperate act" newsworthy (and why Wired is keen on it) is that not only are they seeking sanctions about you, but they're doing so because you keep a blog about your campaign.
We're living in a time when corporations freely foist upon us unconscionable "EULAs" that oblige us to seek arbitration for any dispute with the large owner-corporations. As you know, the advantages of arbitration are that the costs incurred are prohibitive to individuals, and the proceedings are not public, so the owner-corporations can accumulate the benefit of experience at the expense of their client-citizens.
Those so-called "EULAs" are unconscionable for a reason. That reason is the same one that makes Groklaw showcase material for 21st-century citizenship, and what makes your blog (no shame in taking inspiration from the best) so valuable to many people. And that same value has made them both targets for the plaintiffs.
Yes, we read what you have to say because we have an interest in the war. And if we can contribute, we will. That's our duty as citizens. If the RIAA wants to sue thousands of Americans, it has that right. That does not exclude it from the penalties it may incur in doing so. And that certainly does not allow it to turn a public, legal proceeding into some pro-corporation arbitration scheme. The people have a right to public information, and all your web campaigning comes down to that: you publish information on the RIAA's tactics, successful and unsuccessful. I've been able to track the cases, and see among the defense teams who has been paying attention and who hasn't. The RIAA have seen that too. I believe they mocked you in the oral debate during when the Jammie Thomas case was (mis)tried. Since then, I'm confident that your website has helped redress the predatory imbalance the RIAA has been exploiting. And now they're feeling the tide turn.
Without sites like yours, there can be no equity.
P.S., I didn't see your post on Elektra v. Barker either. I guess that helps put a price tag on how much the RIAA's proposed sanctions are really worth.
Maybe you keep hearing it because there's some truth to it. Note, he said "within 6 months" and "better quality than SOME guys."
Don't knock the liberal arts. Just because someone gets a degree befitting a free citizen doesn't mean that person is incapable of doing work suitable for slaves. As the other respondent (the corporate troll computer scientist) pointed out, intellectual curiosity and a disciplined approach to learning, regardless of field, will get you further than rote coughing up of buzzwords. That doesn't make non-CS majors inherently better; rather it explains why some people who do not have extensive formal training in IT can beat the pants off of some others who do. They'd probably do even better if they'd taken more CS courses.
Do you know how dreadfully dull Western Civ is? Ever wonder why it's the junior history professors and TAs who get dumped with it in the Universities?
The History of Nintendo is what they do for fun: it's got a manageable subject and it has fascinating resonances in social, political, economic and intellectual history. Western Civ is such a vague, artificial concept that no matter how small you slice it, it's still too big to give people more than a taste of real history. I mean, you can make it fun and enlightening, but it requires real work, and you're left with the nagging doubt about the stuff you had to leave out.
Maybe the same kinds of fools who trust their money with someone else.
Seriously, cloud storage is very useful as part of a backup strategy -- offsite, maintained to professional standards. It's even more useful for geographically-disperse projects (or when I need to get at my files on the move).
But running a company that provides this sort of service is like running a bank. It's too bad Nirvanix thinks that this isn't their problem. Even if it's a screwup by an administer from the part of the old company that's now MediaMax/The Linkup, they are associated intimately with this loss. Making statements like "It's not our fault; Barney disassociated the files. That would never happen here," is just stupid. Even worse is "We have the data, but can't get at them, because to do so requires our client's front end." Guess what? It did happen here and you do have the data. It's charming that you guys managed to get into a contractual dispute over other people's data. Any contracting business now knows exactly what to expect from you.
Now, what kind of fool trusts his data with clowns like these?
Hey, there's no need to examine the source code, just to see if it calls up the location service. And if you're worried about rogue programs calling up the location service "in the wild" when they don't "in the lab", then you should be either A) using a whitelist for the service, or B) using a blacklist for _all functionality_. If they're breaking privacy rules, you don't answer in half measures.
Slashdot Mirror
From what I understand, Microsoft requires DLC to be for-pay; Valve's stance, reiterated on January 14th, has been that free DLC is a more effective sales catalyst. And then you get the guy on RPS claiming that Gabe emailed saying PC DLC is "free".
The Zune problem was that they started with a great idea, and then removed its testicles in committee. PMP + Wifi? Yes. Music is something humans are hard-wired to share.
Then it hits committee. Share music? That's illegal! Oh wait, it depends? Well, even if it's not illegal, we need to monetize this feature. Just like "Vista-Capable" was a good idea, until they decided to change the standards to suit their suppliers. Xbox 360? You're on the money. Committees don't see shifts. People do. And when you give a committee lots of money and say "make version II", you see something very expensive. Netbooks? Microsoft saw them coming. That's why they came up with the UMPC specification. Oh wait, you mean something cheap? Again, committee think. It's why GM cars have all the cupholders.
They also 'took' Bruce Artwick to develop it for them.
You mean, like the one the plaintiffs cited in their motion? (subsequently amended and so on)
There's a lot that doesn't make sense here. I mean look at Plaintiff's opposition to a protective order to seize the parents' hard drive. Whatever shift in Tenenbaum's perceived behaviour might have come about from the fact that moved from acting pro se to having competent representation, the RIAA admits that defendant provided them with an exhaustive list of everyone who could have come in contact with the computer, and which computers he used. Part of the meat of their motion here is that defendant has not shared vital pre-discovery information. In fact, they state in the motion they were perfectly willing to discuss an Oppenheim deposition, once defendant complied to the RIAA's liking with Rule 26. But not even in their motion do they specify what they think defendant should do and has not done -- they cite the schedule set last January and one of their own motions as evidence. If you want to talk about Bulldogs, those would be the people making motions that they refuse to substantiate.
First of all, the universe does not revolve around the Sun any more than in revolves around the Earth. So, Galileo was not "simply stating the TRUTH" (as if there were such a thing). Secondly, his troubles came from asserting a state of things as TRUTH without enough scientific or religious proof. There were plenty of ways he could have stated his case without making an ass of himself, but he chose the pompous ass route. Bertolt Brecht's Galileo is not the historical one, any more than Washington Irving's Christopher Columbus is the historical one.
Destroy your convenient myths and face up to the inconvenient truths. All of them.
Er, this description says they're buying COTS stuff, and then looking to customize it and deploy it to labs. The set of requirements out there sounds suspiciously like the [url=http://virtualbattlespace.vbs2.com/]VBS[/url] platform. Heck, the even snuck the title "Virtual Battle Space" in there. And as a "21st-Century" replacement for DARWARS Ambush! (technically a 21st-century platform, as it is basically Operation Flashpoint), what better than the next generation of the same game?
Disclaimer: I do not have access to any information on this affair beyond the press release.
They Live is a documentary thinly veiled as fiction. It's just Frankfurt School Marxism, and nothing more sinister than that.
Zardoz.
And in case you're wondering. The Penis is Evil. It shoots the seed upon the Earth that spreads the Plague of Men.
Good thing you posted as Anon. Coward.
Hey, if you want to be a slave to the dollar, don't go to college. Liberal Arts aren't supposed to get you higher wages; they're the mark of someone free from wage-slavery. That's where the name comes from.
Seriously, if you consider university in terms of profit and loss, you're better not going. And if you can get a degree doing something that inspires you, and you can afford it, why should you worry whether it'll make you rich?
I've got no idea. As an undergraduate, I took a bunch of courses with a crazed philologist (long before I realized that all philologists are crazed, and that I must bury somewhere in the apparatus the note that I am an historian), and he'd spout out random "facts," most of which I found out later were false. But Swift worked pretty well, and I have no idea where he picked that one out. He followed it up with one that claimed that if you take the opening of Lazarillo de Tormes and play acrostic with the first lines, you can bring out the name of Hurtado de Mendoza. I wasn't convinced by that one then.
Don't disrespect it. In fact, steganography has had many many uses over the years. Naming just one case, steganography is the ultima ratio of intellectual property protection. Gulliver's Travels, for example, was published pseudonymously and "signed" steganographically. Even better, it was signed at least two ways, one using a "Soft" method, the other a "Hard" one. Right on the first page, Gulliver states: "Soon after my return from Leyden, I was recommended by my good master, Mr. Bates, to be surgeon to the Swallow." Evidently, Swallow is a synonym for "Swift", and the onanistic gag is thrown in for good measure. That's the one you're supposed to catch. Really fun, however, is the incipit: "My father had a small estate in Nottinghamshire: I was the third of five sons."
I was the third of five sons: Cross out the third and fifth words, and the first letters of the remaining words form an anagram for "swift".
Numerous other cases abound. I'm sure many of us have little coding tricks in which we "sign" our names. A watermark on a jpeg is nice, but it's even nicer if the guy who's going to swipe your images doesn't even know they're signed.
Sometimes it helps to publish something anonymously; at other times, you might have a legitimate worry about your work being appropriated. In those cases, steganography has always been a savior.
pretty thing with flashing colors and random images and sounds intended to draw your attention. How can you not look?
Oh wait, you really don't function at all without coffee, do you?
Actually, it's because the iPhone uses the data network more often. I throw my GSM on the table by my speakers, and it'll buzz once or twice a day for reasons unrelated to incoming messages/calls. But if you have an iPhone that tries to automatically check your email every few minutes and does so across the network, it's going to be a real PITA.
No need to rat them out. Just give the boss the 411 on the "Hidden Costs" of doing things that way. Ethical arguments are well and good, but when you're asked to do something like this, it's clear that the ethical arguments mean nothing compared to economic ones. Guaranteed system-wide outages and worse catastrophic failures (=poisoned data) are going to cost a lot. Since you cannot predict when they will happen (only that they will happen), or what they will look like, you can't give an estimate for the downtime while you develop counter-countermeasures; nor can you guarantee that those counter-countermeasures will succeed for more than a brief period (especially once they're "on to you").
The fact is, what he's proposing will be more expensive and disruptive than doing it the legit way. And it is your job to point that out. You can also then point out that while you personally consider it unethical, the industry-standard reaction does not usually involve a lawsuit, but rather to deploy simple countermeasures that disrupt and embarass the amateurs stupid enough to perpetrate it.
How about training the university admins how to recognize the difference between a naif white hat hacker and someone who really wishes them ill?
Well Ray, it's quite simple:
Slashdot gives you one line every two weeks. You get more when other people submit your stories.
At least, that's my theory. But there's a better one. You might see this as a "ridiculous and doomed motion," but you're absolutely on the money when you imply this is a desperate act by a doomed elite.
There are many other fine historical examples of this phenomenon (e.g., Chivalry).
What makes this "desperate act" newsworthy (and why Wired is keen on it) is that not only are they seeking sanctions about you, but they're doing so because you keep a blog about your campaign.
We're living in a time when corporations freely foist upon us unconscionable "EULAs" that oblige us to seek arbitration for any dispute with the large owner-corporations. As you know, the advantages of arbitration are that the costs incurred are prohibitive to individuals, and the proceedings are not public, so the owner-corporations can accumulate the benefit of experience at the expense of their client-citizens.
Those so-called "EULAs" are unconscionable for a reason. That reason is the same one that makes Groklaw showcase material for 21st-century citizenship, and what makes your blog (no shame in taking inspiration from the best) so valuable to many people. And that same value has made them both targets for the plaintiffs.
Yes, we read what you have to say because we have an interest in the war. And if we can contribute, we will. That's our duty as citizens. If the RIAA wants to sue thousands of Americans, it has that right. That does not exclude it from the penalties it may incur in doing so. And that certainly does not allow it to turn a public, legal proceeding into some pro-corporation arbitration scheme. The people have a right to public information, and all your web campaigning comes down to that: you publish information on the RIAA's tactics, successful and unsuccessful. I've been able to track the cases, and see among the defense teams who has been paying attention and who hasn't. The RIAA have seen that too. I believe they mocked you in the oral debate during when the Jammie Thomas case was (mis)tried. Since then, I'm confident that your website has helped redress the predatory imbalance the RIAA has been exploiting. And now they're feeling the tide turn.
Without sites like yours, there can be no equity.
P.S., I didn't see your post on Elektra v. Barker either. I guess that helps put a price tag on how much the RIAA's proposed sanctions are really worth.
Maybe you keep hearing it because there's some truth to it. Note, he said "within 6 months" and "better quality than SOME guys."
Don't knock the liberal arts. Just because someone gets a degree befitting a free citizen doesn't mean that person is incapable of doing work suitable for slaves. As the other respondent (the corporate troll computer scientist) pointed out, intellectual curiosity and a disciplined approach to learning, regardless of field, will get you further than rote coughing up of buzzwords. That doesn't make non-CS majors inherently better; rather it explains why some people who do not have extensive formal training in IT can beat the pants off of some others who do. They'd probably do even better if they'd taken more CS courses.
Because there are reports circulating that Spore actually has five activations.
In any case, "relaxing to five" is still a kick in the crotch, or would be if EA didn't censor that part of my creatures.
Do you know how dreadfully dull Western Civ is? Ever wonder why it's the junior history professors and TAs who get dumped with it in the Universities?
The History of Nintendo is what they do for fun: it's got a manageable subject and it has fascinating resonances in social, political, economic and intellectual history. Western Civ is such a vague, artificial concept that no matter how small you slice it, it's still too big to give people more than a taste of real history. I mean, you can make it fun and enlightening, but it requires real work, and you're left with the nagging doubt about the stuff you had to leave out.
Okay, so what's the logical fallacy at work here?
Cool. So if I wire it to Flickr, will it spit out the raw image feed from a given KH-12?
You must be new here.
Cloud computing != grid computing.
Maybe the same kinds of fools who trust their money with someone else.
Seriously, cloud storage is very useful as part of a backup strategy -- offsite, maintained to professional standards. It's even more useful for geographically-disperse projects (or when I need to get at my files on the move).
But running a company that provides this sort of service is like running a bank. It's too bad Nirvanix thinks that this isn't their problem. Even if it's a screwup by an administer from the part of the old company that's now MediaMax/The Linkup, they are associated intimately with this loss. Making statements like "It's not our fault; Barney disassociated the files. That would never happen here," is just stupid. Even worse is "We have the data, but can't get at them, because to do so requires our client's front end." Guess what? It did happen here and you do have the data. It's charming that you guys managed to get into a contractual dispute over other people's data. Any contracting business now knows exactly what to expect from you.
Now, what kind of fool trusts his data with clowns like these?
Hey, there's no need to examine the source code, just to see if it calls up the location service. And if you're worried about rogue programs calling up the location service "in the wild" when they don't "in the lab", then you should be either A) using a whitelist for the service, or B) using a blacklist for _all functionality_. If they're breaking privacy rules, you don't answer in half measures.