$60 games are going up though. Yeah, the graphics are getting better but is the gameplay really that radically different that we should have to shell out nearly twice as much as we used to pay?
Better graphics mean more money to produce. If you value gameplay and not graphics, stick to older games. If you value both, you'll just have to pay the extra. The fact that a game isn't any more "fun" doesn't change the fact that it cost orders of magnitude more money to write, unfortunately.
I think your parent post somewhat underrepresented the meaning of "multiple" there -- what was meant was "many", not just an understandable small number.
Good points, well made. The way I'm seeing it is that media companies are desperately trying to leverage all the influence they can buy to preserve a means of profit which has been outmoded — this is the worst kind of abuse of a capitalist system.
These companies built up economies around intellectual property as a commodity which required capital investment to bring to market, acting as the conduit helping artists become successful. Then, as was to be expected, they became greedy, overestimating and overstating their own importance, demanding more and more of a cut. But now we've reached the point where the fundamental principle which brought them to power – the difficulty of bringing content to the people – simply no longer holds.
Instead of embracing the freedom of information we've achieved through technology, they're attempting to restrain it. Cutting back a technology which is beneficial to mankind because it threatens an outdated business model is a backwards move — these companies are afraid of giving up the power they gained, afraid to change with the times.
So they use their influence, their resources to try and cut back on people's newfound rights before people realise what happened. They're undermining the new freedoms many don't even realise that we've achieved. And that is insidious.
But that is not an excuse to infringe others' copyrights any more than your grocer increasing prices is an excuse to steal from him (this is not intended as a "piracy is theft" analogy, that's a whole different, and generally irrelevant, issue). We've concluded that the old firm are frightened because media distribution and creation has become so ubiquitous that they are no longer needed, so the question we should be asking is where are the pioneers of these new methods? Where are the companies using new technology to give artists more freedom, and us more value? And where do I sign up?
In my experience, just not true. Sure, people get pissed when they can't "just send" a file. But when I tell them why, they just don't care enough to do anything about it.
Many of these services have the ability to share files with a limited number of acquintances (iTunes certainly does) and that is enough to placate most people. They just don't care.
Besides, the way you describe it, it sounds like I'm hanging out with non-geeks! I don't know anyone other than complete geeks who've tried to actually hook a VCR up to tape a DVD... most people are content when its wired up sufficiently to make it play!
The bottom line is that people in general don't care enough about DRM to make a DRM-free system economically viable. If the record companies had something significant to gain from not using DRM (other than probably paying a fairly insignificant licencing fee, which some salesman probably justified to them), they'd be a lot more likely to stop using it.
Even if people were told "what's wrong" with DRM, they wouldn't care, in most cases. It's the same story as Free Software -- no-one but us geeks care -- but at least with Free Software people can see a price advantage (in general).
I don't disagree with the point. It was the ignorance of the political viewpoint undermining it which caught me out.
Just because there's never been a non-totalitarian communist government doesn't mean they're the same thing, though. There's never really been a Marxist communist government, to be completely fair. But I'm not a supporter of communism.
It worked for a while, but in the end you got their formula. There were two main scares:
Room goes dark
Enemy spawns behind you
That was basically the whole of Doom 3's range of "scary". I mean, it was, but it was cheap horror flick scary, not really psychologically scary (although the journal entry things were ok in a "I wish we'd developed System Shock 2, that game was awesome" sort of way).
"Borrowing ideas"? I disagree. Ideas are precisely what id are lacking -- they have aesthetic finesse, but their games are as simple as games were years ago, without any of the more clever elements of plot and gameplay that people have been creating over that time. id's games focus on the engine, which ends up being great, but the game that gets tacked on the side often little more than a tech demo. Other producers licence the engine, because it saves them having to write an excellent engine, and allows them to focus on putting an excellent game on top of it.
Communism. Thats the problem causing the Great Firewall of China, not Google or Microsoft or Cisco, but the underlying Totalitarianism of China.
Be consistent which is it? Totalitarianism or communism? One does not necessarily imply the other.
Additionally, to call China "communist" has been laughable for more than a decade now. Don't be confused, the reason for this is totalitarianism, not communism. Whether their previous status as a communist state is the reason for their current totalitarianism is a debate for another day, but it's clearly neither what they are now, nor what is (or even would be) causing this problem.
User's benefit from faster downloads in a P2P environment, but it's still nowhere near as fast as a direct download from a fat pipe (at least in my experience).
There's an overhead because the protocol is more complicated (and the file is split into pieces), but it's really not very significant in the big picture. You'd be unlikely to notice a difference in rate between your fat pipe download and the same fat pipe seeding a torrent. The difference being that if the fat pipe was seeding a torrent, when the number of users downloading the file increased, the other downloaders can help each other download and take strain off of the server, making the download faster.
Traditional downloads are likely to be marginally faster when the source has excess bandwidth to requirements, but anything less than that and you'll start seeing Bittorrent showing its advantages. And even below that, the hosting costs go down with Bittorrent downloads, so it's just more attractive in general.
What you describe is called : "no vendor support", it is identified since a long time ago, is not a flaw of Linux but a flaw of the vendor, and it is being addressed.
But people like you think FOSS drivers can come faster than the manufacturer of the soundcard.
At least, in the FOSS world, we are realistic.
Lack of vendor support is still a mark against Linux, until it can be rectified. It's not that it's not a flaw in Linux --- it is a flaw in Linux --- but the point is that it isn't Linux developers' fault. This is probably nitpicky, but I'm on "monkey-see, monkey-do" mode at the moment.
Yeah, exactly. Apple's "It just works (in 4 different colours of identical computer!)" is a bit of a dodge. I often wonder if it would be worth someone's while writing a Linux distribution designed to work on a specifically narrow range of hardware, and then marketing that. Although it's not a great overall solution, it would get past a lot of the problems that cause people to denounce Linux as difficult to use.
What I don't understand, is how someone can associate a free online support service with a failure or blaming users. It is there to help them on the contrary.
Whoops, missed this part initially (sorry for disjoint reply). I'm not referring to the lack of support at all -- to the contrary, the free support for Linux is by-and-large fantastic on the internet. This is not the issue here -- the issue is that in a lot of cases where people have to go and seek support, if the OS were doing all it could, they would not have to. The bottom line of all of this is that there are a good few people going around saying that the reason that a lot of people find Linux "too hard to use" is because they're unwilling to learn. Although there's truth in that, 90% of desktop users have no good reason to learn -- other OSs don't require them to learn to use a command line just to have a working system.
Linux is improving in this aspect all the time, but my objection was with people complaining about users being too "clueless" etc. to use the system, when really it's not the user's fault at all. In a lot of cases there are extenuating circumstances to stop Linux having the support it needs (hardware manufacturers catering specifically to Windows and OSX, and foregoing all else forcing a far more difficult driver creation process for others, in particular), but that doesn't mean it doesn't need the support.
Do you really think I'm trolling? What I said may haev been harsh (that was intended), but it certainly wasn't trolling -- the less an OS "just works", and the more effort the user has to put in to circumnavigate that, the worse that OS is doing. It's just that simple. And yes, I realise it applies (less so in a lot of cases, moreso in a few, in my experience) to Windows, and OSX too. It's not useful to reply to what is intended as constructive criticism with "you're a troll!" You're avoiding the subject that there is a problem, and it can be made better.
I agree wholeheartedly -- myonly argument is that to complain that the users are simply too ignorant to use Linux, and that's why it doesn't work for them is every bit as much of a cop-out. You can't provide something that "just works" all the time, but something "just work" a lot more than others, and to improve that has to be a target of Linux if it wants to be accepted on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Better graphics mean more money to produce. If you value gameplay and not graphics, stick to older games. If you value both, you'll just have to pay the extra. The fact that a game isn't any more "fun" doesn't change the fact that it cost orders of magnitude more money to write, unfortunately.
You're right, the two-party system breaks a lot of things, suddenly you're as much fighting against the other party as you are fighting for yours.
If I were (a little) more cynical I'd say it helps business by reducing the number of people to bribe, too. ;)
Looks a lot more like HTML4/CSS, but it's a hell of a good step forward...
I think your parent post somewhat underrepresented the meaning of "multiple" there -- what was meant was "many", not just an understandable small number.
Good points, well made. The way I'm seeing it is that media companies are desperately trying to leverage all the influence they can buy to preserve a means of profit which has been outmoded — this is the worst kind of abuse of a capitalist system.
These companies built up economies around intellectual property as a commodity which required capital investment to bring to market, acting as the conduit helping artists become successful. Then, as was to be expected, they became greedy, overestimating and overstating their own importance, demanding more and more of a cut. But now we've reached the point where the fundamental principle which brought them to power – the difficulty of bringing content to the people – simply no longer holds.
Instead of embracing the freedom of information we've achieved through technology, they're attempting to restrain it. Cutting back a technology which is beneficial to mankind because it threatens an outdated business model is a backwards move — these companies are afraid of giving up the power they gained, afraid to change with the times.
So they use their influence, their resources to try and cut back on people's newfound rights before people realise what happened. They're undermining the new freedoms many don't even realise that we've achieved. And that is insidious.
But that is not an excuse to infringe others' copyrights any more than your grocer increasing prices is an excuse to steal from him (this is not intended as a "piracy is theft" analogy, that's a whole different, and generally irrelevant, issue). We've concluded that the old firm are frightened because media distribution and creation has become so ubiquitous that they are no longer needed, so the question we should be asking is where are the pioneers of these new methods? Where are the companies using new technology to give artists more freedom, and us more value? And where do I sign up?
...and that's my 2, err, pence. I suppose.
I feel that "two wrongs don't make a right" applies here.
"88.2% of statistics are made up on the spot." - Vic Reeves
In my experience, just not true. Sure, people get pissed when they can't "just send" a file. But when I tell them why, they just don't care enough to do anything about it.
Many of these services have the ability to share files with a limited number of acquintances (iTunes certainly does) and that is enough to placate most people. They just don't care.
Besides, the way you describe it, it sounds like I'm hanging out with non-geeks! I don't know anyone other than complete geeks who've tried to actually hook a VCR up to tape a DVD... most people are content when its wired up sufficiently to make it play!
The bottom line is that people in general don't care enough about DRM to make a DRM-free system economically viable. If the record companies had something significant to gain from not using DRM (other than probably paying a fairly insignificant licencing fee, which some salesman probably justified to them), they'd be a lot more likely to stop using it.
Even if people were told "what's wrong" with DRM, they wouldn't care, in most cases. It's the same story as Free Software -- no-one but us geeks care -- but at least with Free Software people can see a price advantage (in general).
I don't disagree with the point. It was the ignorance of the political viewpoint undermining it which caught me out.
Just because there's never been a non-totalitarian communist government doesn't mean they're the same thing, though. There's never really been a Marxist communist government, to be completely fair. But I'm not a supporter of communism.
It worked for a while, but in the end you got their formula. There were two main scares:
That was basically the whole of Doom 3's range of "scary". I mean, it was, but it was cheap horror flick scary, not really psychologically scary (although the journal entry things were ok in a "I wish we'd developed System Shock 2, that game was awesome" sort of way).
"Borrowing ideas"? I disagree. Ideas are precisely what id are lacking -- they have aesthetic finesse, but their games are as simple as games were years ago, without any of the more clever elements of plot and gameplay that people have been creating over that time. id's games focus on the engine, which ends up being great, but the game that gets tacked on the side often little more than a tech demo. Other producers licence the engine, because it saves them having to write an excellent engine, and allows them to focus on putting an excellent game on top of it.
Be consistent which is it? Totalitarianism or communism? One does not necessarily imply the other.
Additionally, to call China "communist" has been laughable for more than a decade now. Don't be confused, the reason for this is totalitarianism, not communism. Whether their previous status as a communist state is the reason for their current totalitarianism is a debate for another day, but it's clearly neither what they are now, nor what is (or even would be) causing this problem.
I love the face that "slashdit.org" features the word "Cleavage" directly below their slogan "What you want, when you want it."
My patience in them is failing, however.
For larger files, it isn't really "latency" that's a problem. but yes, there are great advantages to having sources physically closer to you.
Traditional downloads are likely to be marginally faster when the source has excess bandwidth to requirements, but anything less than that and you'll start seeing Bittorrent showing its advantages. And even below that, the hosting costs go down with Bittorrent downloads, so it's just more attractive in general.
Read the article for the answer to this question, my son.
Yeah, exactly. Apple's "It just works (in 4 different colours of identical computer!)" is a bit of a dodge. I often wonder if it would be worth someone's while writing a Linux distribution designed to work on a specifically narrow range of hardware, and then marketing that. Although it's not a great overall solution, it would get past a lot of the problems that cause people to denounce Linux as difficult to use.
Linux is improving in this aspect all the time, but my objection was with people complaining about users being too "clueless" etc. to use the system, when really it's not the user's fault at all. In a lot of cases there are extenuating circumstances to stop Linux having the support it needs (hardware manufacturers catering specifically to Windows and OSX, and foregoing all else forcing a far more difficult driver creation process for others, in particular), but that doesn't mean it doesn't need the support.
Do you really think I'm trolling? What I said may haev been harsh (that was intended), but it certainly wasn't trolling -- the less an OS "just works", and the more effort the user has to put in to circumnavigate that, the worse that OS is doing. It's just that simple. And yes, I realise it applies (less so in a lot of cases, moreso in a few, in my experience) to Windows, and OSX too. It's not useful to reply to what is intended as constructive criticism with "you're a troll!" You're avoiding the subject that there is a problem, and it can be made better.
I agree wholeheartedly -- myonly argument is that to complain that the users are simply too ignorant to use Linux, and that's why it doesn't work for them is every bit as much of a cop-out. You can't provide something that "just works" all the time, but something "just work" a lot more than others, and to improve that has to be a target of Linux if it wants to be accepted on the desktop.