They've been running email servers since 1989, they write books about running email systems, they teach admins how to do email, they sponsor and take part in Linux events and the boss himself answers questions on Reddit. The system even shows you whether your recipient's mail server is able to receive your message via encrypted channels, right in the recipient box.
I've switched back to Debian from Ubuntu recently, too. "Sidegrading" from 9.10 to Debian squeeze while keeping all your application configs (and your entire homedir) intact is an absolute breeze:
You haven't really researched this a lot, otherwise you wouldn't say that. Check out Operation Clambake (http://www.xenu.net). Usually, religions aren't all about money and mind control. Scientology is:
"The Church of Scientology is a vicious and dangerous cult that masquerades as a religion. Its purpose is to make money. It practices a variety of mind-control techniques on people lured into its midst to gain control over their money and their lives. Its aim is to take from them every penny that they have and can ever borrow and to also enslave them to further its wicked ends." (cited from xenu.net)
Switzerland is the same, you have to ask permission of every person visible in the picture.
The federal data protection officer pointed this out to Google, then Google said "oh, but we're blurring everyone's faces", and the officer said "alright, fair enough". The problem is that their algorithm doesn't catch everyone's faces (even though Google had promised that), so the data protection officer is now pissed.
Then you'd be happy to hear that Runes of Magic requires neither purchase nor grinding:)
Also, the items for sale there are convenience items. They are both truly useful and not required to complete the game. You should really try out the game before forming an opinion, chances are you'd even like it.
If you want a more difficult WoW, you probably need to go back to old-school games like Shards of Dalaya. It needs good coordination, strategy, planning and all that, but the downside is that you are forced to find a group (as early as level 6) because you simply won't survive without a balanced group of roles. It all has advantages and disadvantages, I don't think they'll ever succeed at making a game design that is easy but challenging, group-friendly but solo-friendly etc. There are many opposites that players want to have BOTH of, and that won't work.
I don't see the potential for impulse buying as a problem at all. You play the game for a week, you think "bah, I'd like to travel faster", so you buy a few transport runes or rent a horse. Horses are cheap to rent with pure in-game currency too, by the way. After a week you find out that you won't have time to play much in the next three weeks, so you won't be spending any money on the game either. With a subscription-based game, you'd still be paying money.
For people like me with our three hours a week game time, free RMT-based games are perfect and subscription-based games would be a waste of money, since I'm paying for time I can't use anyhow.
But seriously, download RoM, play it for a month. Then form an opinion. I see many people who are so opposed to the idea of trying an RMT game that they keep repeating mantras they've heard from some people who tried some OTHER RMT-based game -- every game is different, and you have to try them first-hand to really have an opinion that counts.
Most Americans (at least judging by American MMO bloggers' postings) don't really like the concept of MMOs running on RMTs, but if you want a preview of the Asian style of MMO, try Runes of Magic. You'll notice that most Asian games come with a lot more convenience features than you'd find in e.g. WoW, where basic things turn into a chore. In RoM you have auto-walk, auto-find-NPC, your quest journal's important words are linked directly to an auto-walk path to the monster/person you need to find, there are many methods of instant or fast transport, free player housing from level 1, permanent mount available for purchase from level 1 etc.
If you can for one second swallow your hate of mouse-based walking (there's WASD too, for chrissakes) and RMTs, you'll see that a game doesn't become stupidly easy just because it is convenient to play.
You can find some of that in Perfect World and Jade Dynasty or any of the Aeria games as well, but I wouldn't recommend those. Runes of Magic is very well-adapted to the Western audience. Many other Asian MMOs are endless grindfests, because it seems that people there don't mind grinding to achieve things in a game. Radiant Arcana (as the original Runes of Magic is called in China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea) is a much more grindy game than Runes, since Frogster figured that Western players don't have the patience for a grindfest. I think they may be right.
So before someone writes an article about Eastern vs. Western-style MMOs, they should perhaps look at deeper game design elements rather than just imply "oh wow, mouse control is so you can smoke with your other hand". Also, I think the author of TFA didn't even notice that Aion's Western version had a lot of grind removed and is faster to play than the original. If he thinks the leveling curve is bad here, he should play the Korean one.
Someone get a Taiwanese, a Korean, a Japanese, a British and an American game journalist to work on an article, that way they'd talk to each other and debunk some of the myths:P
I like how the original author had to add proper headings and subheadings to their Word documents after copy/pasting them into MediaWiki. This probably means they didn't use proper heading levels in the original document (Why? A technical writer should surely do this?). OpenOffice Writer is more in-your-face about that, or at least it seems that way. That still doesn't prevent the occasional idiot simply boldfacing a bit of text and manually changing the font size on every single "heading" they create, but at least the proper way is more visible.
Extra bonus, copy/paste from OpenOffice Writer to one of the JavaScript-based GUI editors in e.g. MediaWiki preserves those titles automatically. Also, there's scripts to export to MoinMoin if that's your kind of wiki.
The article lists only Three Rings and hints at what some other operators make, but it completely skipped the big names in the industry. Frogster and Runewaker (Runes of Magic), Aeria Games (Luminary, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine and a dozen other MMOs), Nexon (Mabinogi), Ankama (Dofus) and all the others. Where's Barunson, NCSoft (the Korean version) and gPotato? These companies usually localize multiple games from Asia (or France in the case of Ankama) and then launch them as free-to-plays in Europe and the USA. Aeria reported several million players on a bunch of their games, and Frogster reports over a million RoM players in Europe.
If the figures Three Rings gives can be applied to these games as well and 10% of the players pay, there could be several hundred thousand a year in each game. And that's just for operating and translating. In their home countries, these games likely do even better since Asia doesn't like subscription-based MMOs.
Also, there's been discussions about F2P and subscription pricing and the cultural differences between MMO markets these last few months in the MMO blogs. Read Tesh, Wolfshead and Chris F.
It's nice to see real numbers in an article, but it would have been more interesting to get numbers from the heavyweights.
There are still enough people who don't get it and will try to rape a programming language/framework into their language no matter how hard it struggles against it.
Proof, a bunch of Ruby on Rails projects I know are written in German. "But hold on," you ask, "doesn't Rails pluralize things using English pluralization rules? And isn't that one of the killer features anyway?"
Well, you're right. So the program ends up being in German with English pluralization and English flow control statements. It's a joy to maintain and extend.
And has anyone mentioned all the localized variations of Visual Basic yet? There is hell. About heaven, I'm not sure.
I've torrented and uploaded a bunch of art movie torrents to The Pirate Bay. They're licensed under Creative Commons, but TPB is just a very convenient way to spread the torrents.
TPB is also fine for content you're actually allowed to share:P
To my company, the best Lenovo could manage was a "If you bulk purchase 100 laptops of the same type we can negotiate downgrading them to Vista Home, but we will not refund the license.", after about a dozen e-mails.
Dell, on the other hand, refunds licenses after just two minutes on the phone.
Disclaimer: I've been trying to purchase brand-name laptops without an operating system for more than eight years now. Recently I've signed up as reseller for several big laptop manufacturers, who will remain anonymous. It's still impossible to get even a single one of them to accept the EULA and refund licenses to my customers. Also, the EULA says that my company would have to refund my customer, but none of the manufacturers so far gave me a way to get my money back from them. So if you're wondering why every store tells you that refunds don't exist, this might be it.
If you want to sell brand-name stuff without OS, the only choice you have is to contact another reseller who is a key account with the big guys. These resellers can sometimes get you built-to-order machines. Those, on the other hand, are often more expensive than a similar stock machine WITH Vista Pro, so if you think your customers are saving any money there, think again. All you get is the added inconvenience of waiting for the BTO.
If the manufacturers would at least honor the EULA, I could buy those machines with Windows and return the licenses myself, passing the savings on the customer. Since they don't, I can't even do that.
You can try Finnish or Turkish for languages that are a bit more logical (and don't have genders -- not sure about Turkish, but certain about Finnish). I think Hungarian and Estonian would also qualify.
So is Google, yet the site's audience is international.
I think limiting an international site's usefulness to its geographic region is silly. Yes, Slashdot has a large audience from the USA, but "News for nerds" reaches nerds in Iraq as well as Norway, and nerds speak the universal language of nerd (maybe in the dialects geek or in advanced cases hacker).
This is different for politics.slashdot.org, which doesn't want to know about non-USA politics and makes that pretty clear by the choice of images in the header and the color scheme:P
I've fought that battle, and believe me, PC manufacturers are terrified by Microsoft's behind-the-scenes bullying and price manipulations should they dare to try selling machines without Windows. It took me seven years of work and four years of convincing to get ONE brand-name manufacturer to sell me laptops without operating system to sell to my customers, and that manufacturer is Fujitsu-Siemens. Every single other brand chickened out of the deal, including big names like Lenovo (then IBM).
So no, I'm reasonably sure it wasn't possible to get that machine without Windows, which is product tying and illegal (in France and other countries) anyway. Second, she couldn't read the EULA before she bought the product, but as the EULA allows her to return the Windows license for a refund if she doesn't agree with it, she's completely right.
Which is completely fine, because the EULA explicitly allows this. I'm sorry for the shouting, but this is Microsoft's capitalization of the sentence in the EULA:
"YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS EULA BY INSTALLING, COPYING, OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY, OR USE THE SOFTWARE; YOU MAY RETURN IT TO YOUR PLACE OF PURCHASE FOR A FULL REFUND, IF APPLICABLE."
Since the guy couldn't read the EULA before purchasing, and since tying the OS to the computer is illegal in France (and a bunch of other EU countries), he's perfectly right to return the thing and get his money back.
If you're interested in NRK's programs, why not download them straight from NRK? NRK are streaming almost everything! I've written a little Ruby script that scrapes NRK's JavaScript-heavy website until it gets to the raw mms:// URL, which you can then stream or dump via mplayer. I've included a few utility scripts in svn that let you do either.
Currently I'm working on features to recursively list all of a series' episodes, for example. Then they could be queued or downloaded. We could even parse the date from the filename or the link so that you can specify a time frame for your episodes. Any help is really appreciated, as it's just a rough hack so far (but it works).
Before you ask: I'm trying to learn Norwegian and NRK is a fantastic source of training material:)
I think it's great that slowly but surely, everyone seems to learn about what consumes how much power. We recently did a video podcast (there's an Ogg Theora version too) about this subject, too (shameless on-topic plug). Our audience is probably less technical than the people you'd find on Slashdot, but you never know. I've met quite a few IT professionals in my day who didn't even know the amount of power their server rooms consumed, so there are still new heads to educate out there:)
The more people talk about this, the more will the industry be forced to do something. In some areas, they already reacted, especially about the standby problem. Fujitsu-Siemens now makes a monitor that eats exactly 0 Watts in standby. That's the target, everyone.
PS: Podcast's website isn't actually meant to be seen by humans, it's there mostly for Miro users to subscribe to.
A disc buffing system won't help if you lose the discs. That's one reason why backups are allowed and "this right cannot be revoked by contract" in some countries, for example in Switzerland. No matter what the copyright holder says, I am legally allowed to make that backup. And since the consoles won't play backups without a modchip, those are legal too. You can even buy pre-modded Wiis, PS2s and whatnot here, for example at videogame.ch. And if you need your existing console modded but don't feel too confident with the soldering iron, you can get it modded at modding stores such as Modzone.
It's too bad that some places like the USA and the EU are so tightly controlled by Hollywood and the big bucks:P
It's not free in the slightest, Windows OEM licenses that are included with computers cost anywhere between USD 50 and 150 depending on the version of Windows XP, Vista being much more expensive for the top of the line releases. If you go through all the steps to get a Windows refund, your vendor will be legally bound to give you back that amount.
I'm looking at a Lenovo laptop right now where the cost of the forcefully included Windows license is 14% of the purchase price. If we have the budget to buy this thing, you bet I'm going to get that money back from Redmond.
Fear of piracy? I assume you haven't examined the way the console market works for very long. Console makers want 1. a cut of your profit on every game you sell and 2. a barrier so that not any old dweeb can go make a PSP game featuring George W. Bush and Kofi Annan both wearing women's underwear and being in the same room.
1. Is easy, licensing cost. You can't make UMD discs, you're not allowed to put games on UMD discs, you can't sell them. Sony can, and they will sell each and every one of those discs to you.
2. Is harder. It comes in the form of Q&A tests that EVERY game has to pass. If Sony doesn't like what they see in your game, it won't be released. If it crashes way too often, it won't be released (unless it's called Madden 06). If the menu structure is deemed confusing or if the game contains too many politically sensitive scenes, it's back to the drawing board for the developer. Even if the packaging has the name of the game in the wrong place or doesn't feature all the right logos, it doesn't stand a chance. Though I'm sure Sony's own people help with those graphic design/marketing bits.
That, and they charge around USD 10,000 for a development kit for the average console. I'm not sure what the PSP's costs.
Piracy is surely one factor here, but it's not the only one.
This service has also been available in Switzerland for several years, at no extra charge. At least Sunrise have it as a service in cooperation with a music store, so you can just reply to the message you get if you want to order the identified single. Other providers might have it too.
Not very revolutionary nowadays. It's the same technology that enables wristwatches to identify songs on the radio to track user listening behavior, which has been done for about a decade now. The people wearing those watches having agreed to the monitoring, of course;)
Slashdot Mirror
The symbol in the comment subject is supposed to be a Euro symbol (€), it looks like UTF-8 is broken when commenting via mobile browser.
They've been running email servers since 1989, they write books about running email systems, they teach admins how to do email, they sponsor and take part in Linux events and the boss himself answers questions on Reddit. The system even shows you whether your recipient's mail server is able to receive your message via encrypted channels, right in the recipient box.
I've switched back to Debian from Ubuntu recently, too. "Sidegrading" from 9.10 to Debian squeeze while keeping all your application configs (and your entire homedir) intact is an absolute breeze:
http://www.psy-q.ch/blog/articles/2010/04/20/sidegrading-from-ubuntu-9-10-to-debian-squeeze-its-a-breeze/
Although there were a few snags during installation:
http://www.psy-q.ch/blog/articles/2010/03/28/new-adventures-in-debian-land/
You haven't really researched this a lot, otherwise you wouldn't say that. Check out Operation Clambake (http://www.xenu.net). Usually, religions aren't all about money and mind control. Scientology is:
"The Church of Scientology is a vicious and dangerous cult that masquerades as a religion. Its purpose is to make money. It practices a variety of mind-control techniques on people lured into its midst to gain control over their money and their lives. Its aim is to take from them every penny that they have and can ever borrow and to also enslave them to further its wicked ends." (cited from xenu.net)
Switzerland is the same, you have to ask permission of every person visible in the picture.
The federal data protection officer pointed this out to Google, then Google said "oh, but we're blurring everyone's faces", and the officer said "alright, fair enough". The problem is that their algorithm doesn't catch everyone's faces (even though Google had promised that), so the data protection officer is now pissed.
Then you'd be happy to hear that Runes of Magic requires neither purchase nor grinding :)
Also, the items for sale there are convenience items. They are both truly useful and not required to complete the game. You should really try out the game before forming an opinion, chances are you'd even like it.
If you want a more difficult WoW, you probably need to go back to old-school games like Shards of Dalaya. It needs good coordination, strategy, planning and all that, but the downside is that you are forced to find a group (as early as level 6) because you simply won't survive without a balanced group of roles. It all has advantages and disadvantages, I don't think they'll ever succeed at making a game design that is easy but challenging, group-friendly but solo-friendly etc. There are many opposites that players want to have BOTH of, and that won't work.
I don't see the potential for impulse buying as a problem at all. You play the game for a week, you think "bah, I'd like to travel faster", so you buy a few transport runes or rent a horse. Horses are cheap to rent with pure in-game currency too, by the way. After a week you find out that you won't have time to play much in the next three weeks, so you won't be spending any money on the game either. With a subscription-based game, you'd still be paying money.
For people like me with our three hours a week game time, free RMT-based games are perfect and subscription-based games would be a waste of money, since I'm paying for time I can't use anyhow.
But seriously, download RoM, play it for a month. Then form an opinion. I see many people who are so opposed to the idea of trying an RMT game that they keep repeating mantras they've heard from some people who tried some OTHER RMT-based game -- every game is different, and you have to try them first-hand to really have an opinion that counts.
Most Americans (at least judging by American MMO bloggers' postings) don't really like the concept of MMOs running on RMTs, but if you want a preview of the Asian style of MMO, try Runes of Magic. You'll notice that most Asian games come with a lot more convenience features than you'd find in e.g. WoW, where basic things turn into a chore. In RoM you have auto-walk, auto-find-NPC, your quest journal's important words are linked directly to an auto-walk path to the monster/person you need to find, there are many methods of instant or fast transport, free player housing from level 1, permanent mount available for purchase from level 1 etc.
If you can for one second swallow your hate of mouse-based walking (there's WASD too, for chrissakes) and RMTs, you'll see that a game doesn't become stupidly easy just because it is convenient to play.
You can find some of that in Perfect World and Jade Dynasty or any of the Aeria games as well, but I wouldn't recommend those. Runes of Magic is very well-adapted to the Western audience. Many other Asian MMOs are endless grindfests, because it seems that people there don't mind grinding to achieve things in a game. Radiant Arcana (as the original Runes of Magic is called in China/Taiwan/Japan/Korea) is a much more grindy game than Runes, since Frogster figured that Western players don't have the patience for a grindfest. I think they may be right.
So before someone writes an article about Eastern vs. Western-style MMOs, they should perhaps look at deeper game design elements rather than just imply "oh wow, mouse control is so you can smoke with your other hand". Also, I think the author of TFA didn't even notice that Aion's Western version had a lot of grind removed and is faster to play than the original. If he thinks the leveling curve is bad here, he should play the Korean one.
Someone get a Taiwanese, a Korean, a Japanese, a British and an American game journalist to work on an article, that way they'd talk to each other and debunk some of the myths :P
I like how the original author had to add proper headings and subheadings to their Word documents after copy/pasting them into MediaWiki. This probably means they didn't use proper heading levels in the original document (Why? A technical writer should surely do this?). OpenOffice Writer is more in-your-face about that, or at least it seems that way. That still doesn't prevent the occasional idiot simply boldfacing a bit of text and manually changing the font size on every single "heading" they create, but at least the proper way is more visible.
Extra bonus, copy/paste from OpenOffice Writer to one of the JavaScript-based GUI editors in e.g. MediaWiki preserves those titles automatically. Also, there's scripts to export to MoinMoin if that's your kind of wiki.
Add two points for FOSS?
The article lists only Three Rings and hints at what some other operators make, but it completely skipped the big names in the industry. Frogster and Runewaker (Runes of Magic), Aeria Games (Luminary, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine and a dozen other MMOs), Nexon (Mabinogi), Ankama (Dofus) and all the others. Where's Barunson, NCSoft (the Korean version) and gPotato? These companies usually localize multiple games from Asia (or France in the case of Ankama) and then launch them as free-to-plays in Europe and the USA. Aeria reported several million players on a bunch of their games, and Frogster reports over a million RoM players in Europe.
If the figures Three Rings gives can be applied to these games as well and 10% of the players pay, there could be several hundred thousand a year in each game. And that's just for operating and translating. In their home countries, these games likely do even better since Asia doesn't like subscription-based MMOs.
Also, there's been discussions about F2P and subscription pricing and the cultural differences between MMO markets these last few months in the MMO blogs. Read Tesh, Wolfshead and Chris F.
It's nice to see real numbers in an article, but it would have been more interesting to get numbers from the heavyweights.
There are still enough people who don't get it and will try to rape a programming language/framework into their language no matter how hard it struggles against it.
Proof, a bunch of Ruby on Rails projects I know are written in German. "But hold on," you ask, "doesn't Rails pluralize things using English pluralization rules? And isn't that one of the killer features anyway?"
Well, you're right. So the program ends up being in German with English pluralization and English flow control statements. It's a joy to maintain and extend.
And has anyone mentioned all the localized variations of Visual Basic yet? There is hell. About heaven, I'm not sure.
Sounds great! When do you want to start?
I've torrented and uploaded a bunch of art movie torrents to The Pirate Bay. They're licensed under Creative Commons, but TPB is just a very convenient way to spread the torrents.
TPB is also fine for content you're actually allowed to share :P
If you run Steam through WINE and use Gecko as the HTML renderer, performance is much improved. The whole store feels lightning fast.
If they did the same with their Linux version and perhaps used Gecko on Windows as well, maybe they could fix that problem.
You are so very right that even Slashdot runs a story about bloatware right now.
I have very rarely booted a machine that came preloaded with Windows, I didn't even know how much bloatware there is on an average brand-name lappy :)
To my company, the best Lenovo could manage was a "If you bulk purchase 100 laptops of the same type we can negotiate downgrading them to Vista Home, but we will not refund the license.", after about a dozen e-mails.
Dell, on the other hand, refunds licenses after just two minutes on the phone.
Disclaimer: I've been trying to purchase brand-name laptops without an operating system for more than eight years now. Recently I've signed up as reseller for several big laptop manufacturers, who will remain anonymous. It's still impossible to get even a single one of them to accept the EULA and refund licenses to my customers. Also, the EULA says that my company would have to refund my customer, but none of the manufacturers so far gave me a way to get my money back from them. So if you're wondering why every store tells you that refunds don't exist, this might be it.
If you want to sell brand-name stuff without OS, the only choice you have is to contact another reseller who is a key account with the big guys. These resellers can sometimes get you built-to-order machines. Those, on the other hand, are often more expensive than a similar stock machine WITH Vista Pro, so if you think your customers are saving any money there, think again. All you get is the added inconvenience of waiting for the BTO.
If the manufacturers would at least honor the EULA, I could buy those machines with Windows and return the licenses myself, passing the savings on the customer. Since they don't, I can't even do that.
You can try Finnish or Turkish for languages that are a bit more logical (and don't have genders -- not sure about Turkish, but certain about Finnish). I think Hungarian and Estonian would also qualify.
So is Google, yet the site's audience is international.
I think limiting an international site's usefulness to its geographic region is silly. Yes, Slashdot has a large audience from the USA, but "News for nerds" reaches nerds in Iraq as well as Norway, and nerds speak the universal language of nerd (maybe in the dialects geek or in advanced cases hacker).
This is different for politics.slashdot.org, which doesn't want to know about non-USA politics and makes that pretty clear by the choice of images in the header and the color scheme :P
I've fought that battle, and believe me, PC manufacturers are terrified by Microsoft's behind-the-scenes bullying and price manipulations should they dare to try selling machines without Windows. It took me seven years of work and four years of convincing to get ONE brand-name manufacturer to sell me laptops without operating system to sell to my customers, and that manufacturer is Fujitsu-Siemens. Every single other brand chickened out of the deal, including big names like Lenovo (then IBM).
So no, I'm reasonably sure it wasn't possible to get that machine without Windows, which is product tying and illegal (in France and other countries) anyway. Second, she couldn't read the EULA before she bought the product, but as the EULA allows her to return the Windows license for a refund if she doesn't agree with it, she's completely right.
Which is completely fine, because the EULA explicitly allows this. I'm sorry for the shouting, but this is Microsoft's capitalization of the sentence in the EULA:
"YOU AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS EULA BY INSTALLING, COPYING, OR OTHERWISE USING THE SOFTWARE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE, DO NOT INSTALL, COPY, OR USE THE SOFTWARE; YOU MAY RETURN IT TO YOUR PLACE OF PURCHASE FOR A FULL REFUND, IF APPLICABLE."
Since the guy couldn't read the EULA before purchasing, and since tying the OS to the computer is illegal in France (and a bunch of other EU countries), he's perfectly right to return the thing and get his money back.
If you're interested in NRK's programs, why not download them straight from NRK? NRK are streaming almost everything! I've written a little Ruby script that scrapes NRK's JavaScript-heavy website until it gets to the raw mms:// URL, which you can then stream or dump via mplayer. I've included a few utility scripts in svn that let you do either.
:)
Currently I'm working on features to recursively list all of a series' episodes, for example. Then they could be queued or downloaded. We could even parse the date from the filename or the link so that you can specify a time frame for your episodes. Any help is really appreciated, as it's just a rough hack so far (but it works).
Before you ask: I'm trying to learn Norwegian and NRK is a fantastic source of training material
I think it's great that slowly but surely, everyone seems to learn about what consumes how much power. We recently did a video podcast (there's an Ogg Theora version too) about this subject, too (shameless on-topic plug). Our audience is probably less technical than the people you'd find on Slashdot, but you never know. I've met quite a few IT professionals in my day who didn't even know the amount of power their server rooms consumed, so there are still new heads to educate out there :)
The more people talk about this, the more will the industry be forced to do something. In some areas, they already reacted, especially about the standby problem. Fujitsu-Siemens now makes a monitor that eats exactly 0 Watts in standby. That's the target, everyone.
PS: Podcast's website isn't actually meant to be seen by humans, it's there mostly for Miro users to subscribe to.
A disc buffing system won't help if you lose the discs. That's one reason why backups are allowed and "this right cannot be revoked by contract" in some countries, for example in Switzerland. No matter what the copyright holder says, I am legally allowed to make that backup. And since the consoles won't play backups without a modchip, those are legal too. You can even buy pre-modded Wiis, PS2s and whatnot here, for example at videogame.ch. And if you need your existing console modded but don't feel too confident with the soldering iron, you can get it modded at modding stores such as Modzone.
:P
It's too bad that some places like the USA and the EU are so tightly controlled by Hollywood and the big bucks
It's not free in the slightest, Windows OEM licenses that are included with computers cost anywhere between USD 50 and 150 depending on the version of Windows XP, Vista being much more expensive for the top of the line releases. If you go through all the steps to get a Windows refund, your vendor will be legally bound to give you back that amount.
I'm looking at a Lenovo laptop right now where the cost of the forcefully included Windows license is 14% of the purchase price. If we have the budget to buy this thing, you bet I'm going to get that money back from Redmond.
Fear of piracy? I assume you haven't examined the way the console market works for very long. Console makers want 1. a cut of your profit on every game you sell and 2. a barrier so that not any old dweeb can go make a PSP game featuring George W. Bush and Kofi Annan both wearing women's underwear and being in the same room.
1. Is easy, licensing cost. You can't make UMD discs, you're not allowed to put games on UMD discs, you can't sell them. Sony can, and they will sell each and every one of those discs to you.
2. Is harder. It comes in the form of Q&A tests that EVERY game has to pass. If Sony doesn't like what they see in your game, it won't be released. If it crashes way too often, it won't be released (unless it's called Madden 06). If the menu structure is deemed confusing or if the game contains too many politically sensitive scenes, it's back to the drawing board for the developer. Even if the packaging has the name of the game in the wrong place or doesn't feature all the right logos, it doesn't stand a chance. Though I'm sure Sony's own people help with those graphic design/marketing bits.
That, and they charge around USD 10,000 for a development kit for the average console. I'm not sure what the PSP's costs.
Piracy is surely one factor here, but it's not the only one.
This service has also been available in Switzerland for several years, at no extra charge. At least Sunrise have it as a service in cooperation with a music store, so you can just reply to the message you get if you want to order the identified single. Other providers might have it too.
;)
Not very revolutionary nowadays. It's the same technology that enables wristwatches to identify songs on the radio to track user listening behavior, which has been done for about a decade now. The people wearing those watches having agreed to the monitoring, of course