8MB cards (flash memory) for about 50 times the price of regular flash memory.
that's another way they rip off gamers.
why the hell can't they include a standard compact flash (none of that bastardized DRM cards, like insecure digital and magic gate memory stick) drive?
just an aside, have you seen the "magic gate" words emblazoned on the sony memory sticks? as if it were a beneficial feature.
i suppose calling it "Digital Handcuffs" wouldn't be as popular among the "consumers".
now who'll help me dunk him in a large vat of hot grits. no i'm not building a new meme, just trying to give him 3rd degree burns. Mr James would approve...
people don't need blizzard's permission or any other software vendor's to do what they wish with their purchased software.
that some incompetent group of judges decided on the behalf of a 1600lb gorilla, is of no consequence in the overall scheme of things.
software is a product and so long it is a product it will HAVE to abide by the rules governing commercial transactions i.e. you buy something, then you can do with it whatever you want.
of course the software industry isn't going to let people do that. it's in the best interest of vendors to milk their supposed customers for every drop. you want ring tones? sure, 3 bucks a pop. you want to use the esc key during a cutscene? no prob, 50 cents per occurence.
no, seriously. once they have you at their mercy, they can and will do all sorts of shit. DRM and other types of encryption coupled with the DMCA and those bullshit "EULAs" will make them your masters over anyone who purchase^H^H rents one of their "products".
go ahead and check out STEAM for some of the sorts of things that are possible. when combined with Insidious Computing, it'll be far worse. for you and me that is. as far as i'm concerned, they've broken their side of the agreement in the commercial marketplace. if a customer cannot do what they wish with what they have PURCHASED and not rented, then it's not a completed transaction. the vendor still owers you a product. if you want to rent software, say so in VERY BIG BOLD LETTERS ON THE FRONT OF THE SOFTWARE BOX, otherwise one could convince a competent attorney general that vendors are commiting fraud. among other things.
please don't think of this and other situations like it as "just games". because it involves ALL software. eventually (nope not slippery slope, it's just coming along more slowly than anyone can observe while inside the model). this is what software merchants have been clamoring for, for decades. those crippled floppies and other failed copy-prevention schemes of the 80's and 90's were the maximum amount of control they could assert. if they had the kind of DRM Insidious Computing will provide, not only would they wet themselves, but then afterwards they would impose through well-thought out technical means, restriction after restriction. hardware hacking is a far far more difficult (not impossible) thing to counter than purely software.
the point is, this is what they have been after since software was written for commercial purposes. it's just a logical progression, like 2 comes after 1 and 3 after 2. it's natural for them to want the protections offered by copyright law but to deny full rights to customers of their products. it's natural but it's also pure bullshit. it angers their clued-in customers and thoroughly annoys the ones who don't know the score.
think of it this way... you paid 50 bucks for WoW, then you pay 15 bucks a month for service... if you can buy WoW then play on free or community servers, you have THAT RIGHT. you paid for a copy of the software. they can intice you to pay 15 bucks a month to adventure with thousands of others and for extra benefits but it's not right morally or legally (hello competent judges/legislators) for blizzard to DENY your right to use that copy of WoW software wherever you please.
the potential exists for real theft and copyright infringement but you don't see lawn mowers with DRM and phone-home features to prevent lawful use? you don't see TVs with the above features (well they're coming) that require you to call the manufacturer to get permission to view? if you don't fight for your rights under property law, you are guaranteed that in the near future you will be more and more locked out of things for which you lawfully paid for.
you will get more products like blu-ray and the like that require you phone home, get permission, get denied permission and even have the ability to disable your player. effectively rendering it dead. and no, it won't be rejected by the public as much as we'd like
or what if licenses that restrict HOW you use software is invalid from the get-go?
copyright only allows you to restrict distribution through the courts, not through technical or pseudo-legal means. those are extra-copyright terms, to which the public never agreed to.
i'd be far more content to let the RIAA/MPAA/software cartels sue each and every infringer than for them to artificially and against the customer/owner of the products, restrict their usage.
sue as in civilly, not criminally. copyright infringement has only recently turned criminal.
Free as in speech.... but you're using their megaphones, which they're sharing with you in the spirit of freedom, to announce your unequivocal support for DRM, software patents and general anti-customer rhetoric.
kindly stop using their megaphone if you feel you don't like their way of doing business.
perhaps you are one of the many who defines political to mean something other than what it ought to be.
Politics is a community's ethics (morals) broadcast outside of itself.
roughly it means that what policies govern a group of people determines their interaction with everyone around them. i'm trying to be vague enough and specific enough to cover most contingencies.
even a mainstream media site like MSNBC mentions the CARNIVORE project.
no, steam will not by itself do all those things, yet it is another injection point. soon EA will have it's own online "game delivery" mechanism, then UBISOFT, then microsoft, then blizzard and so on.
seems like a perfect oppertunity. hell, even supermarkets around the world track everything you buy and links it to you personally. every store and company and agency does the same thing.
you're living in denial if you cannot see these patterns. they keep accumulating yet you choose not to see. that's fine, that's your right.
gee, isn't that what reasonable people have been saying since it was announced?
but instead maybe you should mod them down and ridicule them for stating the obvious.
Emotion engine? synegistic processing elements?
that alone should be enough to send a warning that it'll be hyped to infinity and beyond.
in-order ppc core with 8(7 usable) vector processors with a measly 256KB ram bolted on.
clearly, it doesn't take billions of dollars to bolt on simd units to a ppc core. they probably spent most of the money writing the software to get any usable performance out of it and make it possible to program a game within the lifetime of the console. not to mention the massive marketing and hype but then again, their fanatic boys do that job for free.
all next gen units will perform approx the same... while the devil IS in the details, i doubt most users will care when they're playing their games.
they made the same mistake with the ps3 as they did the ps2... multi-threaded programming is very fu**ing hard, even more so when the problems they expect to tackle (AI, physics) aren't easily parallelizable.
and the 360 isn't much better. it has 3 cpus with 3 altivec units... sounds like a nightmare. and no one knows what nintendo has planned.
except DOS games didn't have encryption to make sure you couldn't OWN them.
you can play DOS games 100 years from now but you cannot say the same for hl2. it's massive encryption will prevent any brute force decryption for the next thousand or more years.
sigh, your hate for rational discussion also surpasses any logic.
you're a waste of time, but your comment lines up perfectly with why companies like valve that restrict customers' rights continue to do so well: clueless users like you.
steam is the reason i didn't buy half life 2. it went against all my principles and as it turned out (and will), i was right. people couldn't play the game they bought at launch time. lots of people apparently also got banned (even though they paid for the game) without any apparent reason.
that's why they want an online component. the distribution is only half of the reason; the other half is greater control of software, software which you paid for.
the "pirates" are playing half life 2 just fine and also the source ver of counter strike. there are apparently even occuring updates to the infringed versions to keep the game current. and they even get to choose (what a concept) when or if they want to patch the game. a lot of the forced updates are causing many problems. upgrading is not necessarily the utopia it's made out to be, at least not universally true for everyone. there are times when it's best not to upgrade.
as i mentioned before, there is a clause in "EULA" which allows them to terminate your ability to play the game for any reason they choose at any time. this includes your single player capability, since by definition, steam and half life 2 can NOT be seperated. if we have more un-bribed reviewers, they would treat the 2 as it should be: one. it's as part of half life 2 has the physics, textures and control etc.
this allows them an unprecidented amount of control over your purchases. software by any reasonable measure of logic, does not require a license to use though the legal system obviously kowtows to the software industry. your hard earned money buys you the right to use it, why people assume they also need a license is because the software industry has a very good PR and marketing and lawyer dept. they've convinced people throughout the years that they need licenses to survive and then before anyone knew it, it was the standard. but that's a slightly different issue.
imagine in the future, like say 10-15 years... the wet dream of the software industry will come true... per individual DRM which is connected to the internet 24/7. you want to play a game wopr? you'll have to get permission from the copyright holder (not necessarily the author... what a public service). you want to write a term paper at 2 am? the internet connection you have is down? no problem, just flunk. you want to view porn and relieve your manly pressure? the dept of homeland security has deemed porn is anti-american. you're out of luck.
there is no slippery slope, it's just the logical progression of their desire. they couldn't control software in the 70's, 80's and 90's as much as they wanted to. think back to all the corrupt floppy disk schemes. the word lookup copy prevention schemes, the cardboard wheels, etc etc. they just used what they had at the time to prevent people from making use of the rights that copyright grants them. don't say that copyright doesn't grant purchasers the right to use because why else would we give wholesale protection to authors and then expect them to lock up their works? no, it's when a customer buys a copy, that they can use it and this limited monopoly would then fall back, notice the word back, into the public domain.
they have never learned. not from the mess of the 80's nor of the optical disc corruption and driver installed invasive starforce/securom/etc system-distabilizing methods of today. they will never learn. they have only made things much worse for paying customers and have not hindered the infringers any. the only logical progression is if it becomes more invasive and anti-customer in the future. i will make a prediction... it will get much worse in the years to come, not in small part due to newer methods of Insidious Computing and the role of the internet in "securing" products from their real owners.
if they simply wished to use STEAM to distribute half life 2 and other games, i wouldn't have a problem with it. they use it to grip more tightly and take away your existing rights (what's left of them). and to add to the absurdi
i wonder if bionicfx took it under consideration the nvidia over-"optimizes" it's drivers. there's the recent shimmering example of the latest 7800gtx series just to name one example.
i would guess those "optimizations" (read benchmark cheating) might damage the accurate calculations required by such applications.
not that ati is a saint but it hasn't even remotely "optimized" as much as nvidia.
any professionals know if it's a reasonable concern?
Slashdot Mirror
8MB cards (flash memory) for about 50 times the price of regular flash memory.
that's another way they rip off gamers.
why the hell can't they include a standard compact flash (none of that bastardized DRM cards, like insecure digital and magic gate memory stick) drive?
just an aside, have you seen the "magic gate" words emblazoned on the sony memory sticks? as if it were a beneficial feature.
i suppose calling it "Digital Handcuffs" wouldn't be as popular among the "consumers".
oh well, in that case...
Dave Chapelle confirms... WoW is good.
now who'll help me dunk him in a large vat of hot grits. no i'm not building a new meme, just trying to give him 3rd degree burns. Mr James would approve...
the software industry wants/says so.
never mind the fact that buying stuff entitles you to use them, that kind of logic is irrelevant in our brave new world.
the software industry almost makes the RIAA/MPAA seem less despicable.
almost.
did someone say ALLOWED?
people don't need blizzard's permission or any other software vendor's to do what they wish with their purchased software.
that some incompetent group of judges decided on the behalf of a 1600lb gorilla, is of no consequence in the overall scheme of things.
software is a product and so long it is a product it will HAVE to abide by the rules governing commercial transactions i.e. you buy something, then you can do with it whatever you want.
of course the software industry isn't going to let people do that. it's in the best interest of vendors to milk their supposed customers for every drop. you want ring tones? sure, 3 bucks a pop. you want to use the esc key during a cutscene? no prob, 50 cents per occurence.
no, seriously. once they have you at their mercy, they can and will do all sorts of shit. DRM and other types of encryption coupled with the DMCA and those bullshit "EULAs" will make them your masters over anyone who purchase^H^H rents one of their "products".
go ahead and check out STEAM for some of the sorts of things that are possible. when combined with Insidious Computing, it'll be far worse. for you and me that is. as far as i'm concerned, they've broken their side of the agreement in the commercial marketplace. if a customer cannot do what they wish with what they have PURCHASED and not rented, then it's not a completed transaction. the vendor still owers you a product. if you want to rent software, say so in VERY BIG BOLD LETTERS ON THE FRONT OF THE SOFTWARE BOX, otherwise one could convince a competent attorney general that vendors are commiting fraud. among other things.
please don't think of this and other situations like it as "just games". because it involves ALL software. eventually (nope not slippery slope, it's just coming along more slowly than anyone can observe while inside the model). this is what software merchants have been clamoring for, for decades. those crippled floppies and other failed copy-prevention schemes of the 80's and 90's were the maximum amount of control they could assert. if they had the kind of DRM Insidious Computing will provide, not only would they wet themselves, but then afterwards they would impose through well-thought out technical means, restriction after restriction. hardware hacking is a far far more difficult (not impossible) thing to counter than purely software.
the point is, this is what they have been after since software was written for commercial purposes. it's just a logical progression, like 2 comes after 1 and 3 after 2. it's natural for them to want the protections offered by copyright law but to deny full rights to customers of their products. it's natural but it's also pure bullshit. it angers their clued-in customers and thoroughly annoys the ones who don't know the score.
think of it this way... you paid 50 bucks for WoW, then you pay 15 bucks a month for service... if you can buy WoW then play on free or community servers, you have THAT RIGHT. you paid for a copy of the software. they can intice you to pay 15 bucks a month to adventure with thousands of others and for extra benefits but it's not right morally or legally (hello competent judges/legislators) for blizzard to DENY your right to use that copy of WoW software wherever you please.
the potential exists for real theft and copyright infringement but you don't see lawn mowers with DRM and phone-home features to prevent lawful use? you don't see TVs with the above features (well they're coming) that require you to call the manufacturer to get permission to view? if you don't fight for your rights under property law, you are guaranteed that in the near future you will be more and more locked out of things for which you lawfully paid for.
you will get more products like blu-ray and the like that require you phone home, get permission, get denied permission and even have the ability to disable your player. effectively rendering it dead. and no, it won't be rejected by the public as much as we'd like
or what if licenses that restrict HOW you use software is invalid from the get-go?
copyright only allows you to restrict distribution through the courts, not through technical or pseudo-legal means. those are extra-copyright terms, to which the public never agreed to.
i'd be far more content to let the RIAA/MPAA/software cartels sue each and every infringer than for them to artificially and against the customer/owner of the products, restrict their usage.
sue as in civilly, not criminally. copyright infringement has only recently turned criminal.
as the old saying goes: "you don't get rich by being honest."
neither was gandhi by letting the british beat him and his followers up.
being sharp != doesn't mean what you think it means.
Free as in speech.... but you're using their megaphones, which they're sharing with you in the spirit of freedom, to announce your unequivocal support for DRM, software patents and general anti-customer rhetoric.
kindly stop using their megaphone if you feel you don't like their way of doing business.
and how open is DRM-ed software and how free (as in libre) is patent-encumbered software?
if you'd care to investigate, DRM and patents are the opposite of freedom. they !restrict! freedom, not increase it.
everything in life is "political".
perhaps you are one of the many who defines political to mean something other than what it ought to be.
Politics is a community's ethics (morals) broadcast outside of itself.
roughly it means that what policies govern a group of people determines their interaction with everyone around them. i'm trying to be vague enough and specific enough to cover most contingencies.
that's how i like to define it.
please share your views.
and how does crippling the software with DRM or patents and locking it up help promote the goal of the GPL: keeping software free (as in libre)?
if software that was under the GPL, were encumbered with patents or crippled with DRM, then by definition, it isn't free (as in libre) anymore.
in this world we live in, "kooks" are the most sane and reasonable people it seems.
on a side note, how exactly do you say "meh"?
:)
and on top of that, how do you say it without looking like a fool?
the thing is, i start out sentences one way and then change my mind midway but sometimes forget to change the begining. :)
it runs crazy fast on athlon64's. clearing the city with rockets, nuclear grenades and satellite rain take a lot less time now.
then i would HAVE put on a heat-retardant suit and laughed at your elementary mistake of using of instead of have or even 've.
they won't cripple such a useful invention in order to please the copyright cartel?
right? right...?
and why don't you respond to my post instead of attacking me personally?
2 &cp1=1
ever heard of magic lantern?
that was the FBI's trojan to get on all computers and somehow symantec disabled detection of it on their anti-virus software.
http://www.msnbc.com/news/660096.asp?0na=x21017M3
http://www.google.com/search?q=magic+lantern+fbi
even a mainstream media site like MSNBC mentions the CARNIVORE project.
no, steam will not by itself do all those things, yet it is another injection point. soon EA will have it's own online "game delivery" mechanism, then UBISOFT, then microsoft, then blizzard and so on.
seems like a perfect oppertunity. hell, even supermarkets around the world track everything you buy and links it to you personally. every store and company and agency does the same thing.
you're living in denial if you cannot see these patterns. they keep accumulating yet you choose not to see. that's fine, that's your right.
gee, isn't that what reasonable people have been saying since it was announced?
but instead maybe you should mod them down and ridicule them for stating the obvious.
Emotion engine? synegistic processing elements?
that alone should be enough to send a warning that it'll be hyped to infinity and beyond.
in-order ppc core with 8(7 usable) vector processors with a measly 256KB ram bolted on.
clearly, it doesn't take billions of dollars to bolt on simd units to a ppc core. they probably spent most of the money writing the software to get any usable performance out of it and make it possible to program a game within the lifetime of the console. not to mention the massive marketing and hype but then again, their fanatic boys do that job for free.
all next gen units will perform approx the same... while the devil IS in the details, i doubt most users will care when they're playing their games.
they made the same mistake with the ps3 as they did the ps2... multi-threaded programming is very fu**ing hard, even more so when the problems they expect to tackle (AI, physics) aren't easily parallelizable.
and the 360 isn't much better. it has 3 cpus with 3 altivec units... sounds like a nightmare. and no one knows what nintendo has planned.
sounds like a perfect reason to update the game's graphics and maybe sound as well and allow it to run on multiple platforms.
but EA owns the copyright...
oh well.
except DOS games didn't have encryption to make sure you couldn't OWN them.
you can play DOS games 100 years from now but you cannot say the same for hl2. it's massive encryption will prevent any brute force decryption for the next thousand or more years.
sigh, your hate for rational discussion also surpasses any logic.
you're a waste of time, but your comment lines up perfectly with why companies like valve that restrict customers' rights continue to do so well: clueless users like you.
no offense but syndicate wars runs perfectly fine in xp. it runs mostly fine without any modification.
it just happens to be one of the few dos games still on my hd. i never got around to deleting it i guess.
steam is the reason i didn't buy half life 2. it went against all my principles and as it turned out (and will), i was right. people couldn't play the game they bought at launch time. lots of people apparently also got banned (even though they paid for the game) without any apparent reason.
that's why they want an online component. the distribution is only half of the reason; the other half is greater control of software, software which you paid for.
the "pirates" are playing half life 2 just fine and also the source ver of counter strike. there are apparently even occuring updates to the infringed versions to keep the game current. and they even get to choose (what a concept) when or if they want to patch the game. a lot of the forced updates are causing many problems. upgrading is not necessarily the utopia it's made out to be, at least not universally true for everyone. there are times when it's best not to upgrade.
as i mentioned before, there is a clause in "EULA" which allows them to terminate your ability to play the game for any reason they choose at any time. this includes your single player capability, since by definition, steam and half life 2 can NOT be seperated. if we have more un-bribed reviewers, they would treat the 2 as it should be: one. it's as part of half life 2 has the physics, textures and control etc.
this allows them an unprecidented amount of control over your purchases. software by any reasonable measure of logic, does not require a license to use though the legal system obviously kowtows to the software industry. your hard earned money buys you the right to use it, why people assume they also need a license is because the software industry has a very good PR and marketing and lawyer dept. they've convinced people throughout the years that they need licenses to survive and then before anyone knew it, it was the standard. but that's a slightly different issue.
imagine in the future, like say 10-15 years... the wet dream of the software industry will come true... per individual DRM which is connected to the internet 24/7. you want to play a game wopr? you'll have to get permission from the copyright holder (not necessarily the author... what a public service). you want to write a term paper at 2 am? the internet connection you have is down? no problem, just flunk. you want to view porn and relieve your manly pressure? the dept of homeland security has deemed porn is anti-american. you're out of luck.
there is no slippery slope, it's just the logical progression of their desire. they couldn't control software in the 70's, 80's and 90's as much as they wanted to. think back to all the corrupt floppy disk schemes. the word lookup copy prevention schemes, the cardboard wheels, etc etc. they just used what they had at the time to prevent people from making use of the rights that copyright grants them. don't say that copyright doesn't grant purchasers the right to use because why else would we give wholesale protection to authors and then expect them to lock up their works? no, it's when a customer buys a copy, that they can use it and this limited monopoly would then fall back, notice the word back, into the public domain.
they have never learned. not from the mess of the 80's nor of the optical disc corruption and driver installed invasive starforce/securom/etc system-distabilizing methods of today. they will never learn. they have only made things much worse for paying customers and have not hindered the infringers any. the only logical progression is if it becomes more invasive and anti-customer in the future. i will make a prediction... it will get much worse in the years to come, not in small part due to newer methods of Insidious Computing and the role of the internet in "securing" products from their real owners.
if they simply wished to use STEAM to distribute half life 2 and other games, i wouldn't have a problem with it. they use it to grip more tightly and take away your existing rights (what's left of them). and to add to the absurdi
damn straight.
3d just didn't work for the zelda series.
hell, i couldn't play ocarina of time for more than an hour before throwing it in the trash bin.
2d still has plenty of life in it... even if it's a pseudo-2d like that recent mario game.
oh puhlease.
yoshi couldn't carry luigi's jockstrap!
i wonder if bionicfx took it under consideration the nvidia over-"optimizes" it's drivers. there's the recent shimmering example of the latest 7800gtx series just to name one example.
i would guess those "optimizations" (read benchmark cheating) might damage the accurate calculations required by such applications.
not that ati is a saint but it hasn't even remotely "optimized" as much as nvidia.
any professionals know if it's a reasonable concern?
a great company that edits reviews that are negative .
that's why i stopped shopping there and i won't be going back.
there's no reason to reward dishonest merchants, especially if there are comparable vendors easily within reach.