Don't draw conclusions from buzzword names. If 'netbooks' were solely about surfing the web, they wouldn't be sold with XP and be using X86 processors and have large amounts of memory. Netbooks are Laptops which can do 99% of what people want to do, just without being huge.
Personally, I think anything bigger than 10 inches is clumsy to be carrying around all day. I can get everything I need to get done on a 9'' netbook.
Trust me, it's about piracy. They still don't like used games, but that's barely a problem for the PC market. Dongles are just too expensive to implement properly. Even on a $40 game, there isn't much space for a $5 Dongle after the store takes their cut and the fixed costs are counted for.
Mozilla, Opera, various Linux companies somehow manage that, though I don't know how.
Mozilla's income is mainly from search box deals and a majority of work is done by volunteers. That's not how games work. People have become so cushy about not having to pay for software that they forget that some stuff costs a lot of money. Guess what's probably the no. 1 usage for Amazon's search box in Firefox? Games.
Uniqueness is not sufficient to be patentable. It has to be new and inventive. Just because you were granted a patent doesn't mean you're especially qualified here. Most of us would disagree with many of the patents which we discuss here, because they are indeed overly broad and unoriginal.
The thing is that business has realized this and we have a status quo where everyone owns a billion patents but hardly ever uses them as intended but collects them for negotiating power. Thus many important patents are never scrutinized.
And even if patents are granted and in rare cases be upheld, we are perfectly entitled to comment on the technical merits and on the approval process of the patent office.
Linking to Wikipedia articles you haven't even read isn't a good way to drive your points home. Words like "reasonable" are up to interpretation, so unless you can tell us which specific patent they are withholding and what contract they are breaching you shouldn't be jumping to conclusions.
Apple went after Nokia when they couldn't get a free ride for Nokia's patents. This is a different matter. They're going after a hardware manufacturer because they make a directly competing product. This is particularly worrying for free software because without the support of major phone manufacturers free platforms are going to lose.
Normally a major non-troll company wouldn't have the guts to sue everyone over shitty GUI patents. I thought Apple was past that, but apparently not. Make no mistake, this is an attempt to spread FUD in the market.
Conceivable, but without having access to the source it could be a huge challenge to program something that would work properly. They could do just save a few parameters in a file, but if they're serious about this then they'll make it so that every time the game looks for a saved parameter the game crashes.
Are you fucking serious? By that reasoning the entire game code should be reproducible by hooking a second PC to a keyboard and watching the video output.
There are many parameters in savegames. Even the tiniest amount of reprocessing could make the data unrecognizable. And unless you have a pretty perfect reproduction of that, it would be easy for the game to recognize it wasn't processed by Ubisoft's servers.
The protocol isn't the only problem. After all, the protocol is interpreted by your machine running code you have access to. The thing is, you don't know what the server is doing with the data it receives. If it just sends a carbon-copy of the bitstream it receives, it would be a stupid system. If it processes the data extensively and has other kinds of obfuscated checks scattered around the game, it becomes a different matter.
RTFA! This isn't about checking a connection or authorizing a copy. Basically, the game is split up among two distant machines. Without the connection, the program is incomplete data on your computer will simply not be able to execute properly. Without the vital "chunks" of your game that Ubisoft holds, it won't work. Even if you were to obtain the server code, it would be a considerable engineering challenge to stitch the game together seamlessly.
That's assuming the DRM doesn't work. But the whole point of this aggressive approach is to prevent it from being cracked. From a technical standpoint it will certainly give the crackers a real hard time. Let's wait and see.
People claiming that DRM never works because you can download games from torrents don't know what they're talking about.
The big publishers aren't really as interested in the PC market compared to the profitability of the console market. That's why they're released months later. Maybe they even decided to keep the PC version out of the holiday season to avert the risk of it being cracked. Until the PC offers a secure enough system as consoles, the trend to consoles will probably continue and they probably won't be too concerned about lackluster PC sales.
Not quite that extreme, but the iPod did have a huge halo effect on Apple's products. Without the iPod there wouldn't be an iPad or an iPhone and there would be a lot less Apple stores and they would have sold a lot less iMacs and Macbooks.
The more and more they hype this the bigger embarrassment this will be for them when nobody's interested in it. People liked the iPhone because it done much more than the typical phone. I don't think any netbook user will be happy with the limitations the device imposes.
Bullshit! Nowhere does the DMCA criminalize homebrew.
Keep track of your own writing, here I'm answering to your point about romhacking been illegal (by itself, it's not).
Never said it was. Distributing game ROMs, even if they are slightly modified, infringes on copyright. That's illegal. If you hack it yourself or distribute a patch, it's legal. The DMCA changes nothing.
So you flipflop between them been accepted and not been accepted lame game.
Why do you blatantly ignore what I'm saying? There's a difference between sending a takedown request and suing their asses to oblivion.
Also you forget that as a Japanese company, and one targeted towards young audiences, Nintendo is very limited, legally economically and culturally to what it can do
Try again. Nintendo is a huge multinational company with offices all over the world. It is one of the biggest manufacturers of electronics and biggest distributor of software. This is a legacy which goes right back to the eighties. They also have a long history of legal battles and are renowned for their success.
but it certainly does anything withing their reach to that end.
Like sue the emulation projects? Oh wait, they've never done that.
As someone who has seen their posters admonishing gamers against used game stores, I can see right trough any bullshit about them caring for the law.
WTF? I can see you have some very peculiar ideas about what "the law" really is.
I'm tired of your flipflopping and context switching, won't bother with you anymore.
I'm tired of you putting words in my mouth and making points about things I never said!
Used to be, it hasn't been legally possible since the DMCA.
That's just overzealous speculation. Unless a court convicts a homebrewer, we can pretty much assume that it's legal. The fact that homebrew applications do not violate anyone's copyright also pretty much make it immune from the DMCA.
The writing the patches and applying them to you own roms was legal, before the DMCA. (But yes for old consoles it's still possible).
You've pulled this one from your ass again. The fact that older systems are more popular in the hacking scene has nothing to do with the DMCA, and everything to do with the fact that older games were written in assembly and can be hacked with a hex editor.
Obviously you aren't very into the romhacking or you'd know about the many rom sites that have fallen, hidden, taken down etc.And in fact just linking to available roms is banned even in romhacking forums.
That the roms are still available is more about the persistence of the sites.
Of course they're taken down. It's blatant piracy. Illegal, always been illegal. A letter to the ISP ought to be enough. Persistence be damned.
If Nintendo were serious on cracking down on ROMs, they could sue them to oblivion that no-one would touch a ROM-site with a ten-foot pole. The music industry sues file-sharers for millions of dollars, yet somehow these ROM sites all last a couple of years before a new one pops up. That's a sign that they just don't care very much.
Because that's how profit-driven production works. When you play a game you "wouldn't pay for" you're wasting your time with something that shouldn't exist if it were up to you. Instead, you should be doing something that by your standards is worth doing, and thereby benefit the wealth of you and society in general.
Two examples:
If you do something in your leisure time that costs money, then that contributes to someone making a living and you will have enjoyment from the service you purchased.
If you prefer to do something creative like painting, you get personal fulfillment and your artworks will be a gain for yourself or anybody you wish to give them to.
Both benefit your well-being and society in general.
If you are truly indifferent as to whether the game exists as you claim you are, then playing it is just as much a waste of time and resources as buying it. And you should consider doing something more worthy of your time.
Distributing romhacks has never been legal, and the same goes for ROMs, no matter how old.
But Nintendo have never "came for" the guys who make emulators. And seeing how easy it is to google and download roms from websites I'd guess they haven't really put much effort into taking down rom sites either.
The have ignored legal uses. There are plenty of cards that will run code, and there are plenty of sites with information on doing so.
But when a certain manufacturer started releasing updates to counter every new anti-piracy mechanism in new games, they decided that maybe they should do something.
This is just rediculous reasoning. The iPhone costs $1800 over two years. There are other options which are much cheaper. If you don't have $1800 (over two years), you can't afford the iPhone.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't draw conclusions from buzzword names. If 'netbooks' were solely about surfing the web, they wouldn't be sold with XP and be using X86 processors and have large amounts of memory. Netbooks are Laptops which can do 99% of what people want to do, just without being huge.
Personally, I think anything bigger than 10 inches is clumsy to be carrying around all day. I can get everything I need to get done on a 9'' netbook.
Trust me, it's about piracy. They still don't like used games, but that's barely a problem for the PC market. Dongles are just too expensive to implement properly. Even on a $40 game, there isn't much space for a $5 Dongle after the store takes their cut and the fixed costs are counted for.
Mozilla, Opera, various Linux companies somehow manage that, though I don't know how.
Mozilla's income is mainly from search box deals and a majority of work is done by volunteers. That's not how games work. People have become so cushy about not having to pay for software that they forget that some stuff costs a lot of money. Guess what's probably the no. 1 usage for Amazon's search box in Firefox? Games.
Uniqueness is not sufficient to be patentable. It has to be new and inventive. Just because you were granted a patent doesn't mean you're especially qualified here.
Most of us would disagree with many of the patents which we discuss here, because they are indeed overly broad and unoriginal.
The thing is that business has realized this and we have a status quo where everyone owns a billion patents but hardly ever uses them as intended but collects them for negotiating power. Thus many important patents are never scrutinized.
And even if patents are granted and in rare cases be upheld, we are perfectly entitled to comment on the technical merits and on the approval process of the patent office.
Linking to Wikipedia articles you haven't even read isn't a good way to drive your points home. Words like "reasonable" are up to interpretation, so unless you can tell us which specific patent they are withholding and what contract they are breaching you shouldn't be jumping to conclusions.
Apple went after Nokia when they couldn't get a free ride for Nokia's patents. This is a different matter. They're going after a hardware manufacturer because they make a directly competing product. This is particularly worrying for free software because without the support of major phone manufacturers free platforms are going to lose.
Normally a major non-troll company wouldn't have the guts to sue everyone over shitty GUI patents. I thought Apple was past that, but apparently not. Make no mistake, this is an attempt to spread FUD in the market.
Conceivable, but without having access to the source it could be a huge challenge to program something that would work properly.
They could do just save a few parameters in a file, but if they're serious about this then they'll make it so that every time the game looks for a saved parameter the game crashes.
He said panel antenna, so it's actually emitting a focused beam. Intensity could be negligible or almost full power.
Are you fucking serious? By that reasoning the entire game code should be reproducible by hooking a second PC to a keyboard and watching the video output.
There are many parameters in savegames. Even the tiniest amount of reprocessing could make the data unrecognizable. And unless you have a pretty perfect reproduction of that, it would be easy for the game to recognize it wasn't processed by Ubisoft's servers.
The protocol isn't the only problem. After all, the protocol is interpreted by your machine running code you have access to. The thing is, you don't know what the server is doing with the data it receives. If it just sends a carbon-copy of the bitstream it receives, it would be a stupid system. If it processes the data extensively and has other kinds of obfuscated checks scattered around the game, it becomes a different matter.
RTFA! This isn't about checking a connection or authorizing a copy. Basically, the game is split up among two distant machines. Without the connection, the program is incomplete data on your computer will simply not be able to execute properly. Without the vital "chunks" of your game that Ubisoft holds, it won't work. Even if you were to obtain the server code, it would be a considerable engineering challenge to stitch the game together seamlessly.
That's assuming the DRM doesn't work. But the whole point of this aggressive approach is to prevent it from being cracked. From a technical standpoint it will certainly give the crackers a real hard time. Let's wait and see.
People claiming that DRM never works because you can download games from torrents don't know what they're talking about.
The big publishers aren't really as interested in the PC market compared to the profitability of the console market. That's why they're released months later. Maybe they even decided to keep the PC version out of the holiday season to avert the risk of it being cracked.
Until the PC offers a secure enough system as consoles, the trend to consoles will probably continue and they probably won't be too concerned about lackluster PC sales.
When the Mafia offers substantially better investment opportunities than your bank, you ought to rethink your position.
And the server code...
It can easily be designed in a way that it wouldn't be possible without considerable reverse engineering so that it becomes inconceivable.
Not quite that extreme, but the iPod did have a huge halo effect on Apple's products. Without the iPod there wouldn't be an iPad or an iPhone and there would be a lot less Apple stores and they would have sold a lot less iMacs and Macbooks.
The more and more they hype this the bigger embarrassment this will be for them when nobody's interested in it. People liked the iPhone because it done much more than the typical phone. I don't think any netbook user will be happy with the limitations the device imposes.
No, the DMCA is quite clear in this.
Bullshit! Nowhere does the DMCA criminalize homebrew.
Keep track of your own writing, here I'm answering to your point about romhacking been illegal (by itself, it's not).
Never said it was. Distributing game ROMs, even if they are slightly modified, infringes on copyright. That's illegal. If you hack it yourself or distribute a patch, it's legal.
The DMCA changes nothing.
So you flipflop between them been accepted and not been accepted lame game.
Why do you blatantly ignore what I'm saying? There's a difference between sending a takedown request and suing their asses to oblivion.
Also you forget that as a Japanese company, and one targeted towards young audiences, Nintendo is very limited, legally economically and culturally to what it can do
Try again.
Nintendo is a huge multinational company with offices all over the world. It is one of the biggest manufacturers of electronics and biggest distributor of software. This is a legacy which goes right back to the eighties. They also have a long history of legal battles and are renowned for their success.
but it certainly does anything withing their reach to that end.
Like sue the emulation projects? Oh wait, they've never done that.
As someone who has seen their posters admonishing gamers against used game stores, I can see right trough any bullshit about them caring for the law.
WTF? I can see you have some very peculiar ideas about what "the law" really is.
I'm tired of your flipflopping and context switching, won't bother with you anymore.
I'm tired of you putting words in my mouth and making points about things I never said!
Used to be, it hasn't been legally possible since the DMCA.
That's just overzealous speculation. Unless a court convicts a homebrewer, we can pretty much assume that it's legal. The fact that homebrew applications do not violate anyone's copyright also pretty much make it immune from the DMCA.
The writing the patches and applying them to you own roms was legal, before the DMCA. (But yes for old consoles it's still possible).
You've pulled this one from your ass again. The fact that older systems are more popular in the hacking scene has nothing to do with the DMCA, and everything to do with the fact that older games were written in assembly and can be hacked with a hex editor.
Obviously you aren't very into the romhacking or you'd know about the many rom sites that have fallen, hidden, taken down etc.And in fact just linking to available roms is banned even in romhacking forums.
That the roms are still available is more about the persistence of the sites.
Of course they're taken down. It's blatant piracy. Illegal, always been illegal. A letter to the ISP ought to be enough. Persistence be damned.
If Nintendo were serious on cracking down on ROMs, they could sue them to oblivion that no-one would touch a ROM-site with a ten-foot pole. The music industry sues file-sharers for millions of dollars, yet somehow these ROM sites all last a couple of years before a new one pops up. That's a sign that they just don't care very much.
Because that's how profit-driven production works.
When you play a game you "wouldn't pay for" you're wasting your time with something that shouldn't exist if it were up to you.
Instead, you should be doing something that by your standards is worth doing, and thereby benefit the wealth of you and society in general.
Two examples:
If you do something in your leisure time that costs money, then that contributes to someone making a living and you will have enjoyment from the service you purchased.
If you prefer to do something creative like painting, you get personal fulfillment and your artworks will be a gain for yourself or anybody you wish to give them to.
Both benefit your well-being and society in general.
If you are truly indifferent as to whether the game exists as you claim you are, then playing it is just as much a waste of time and resources as buying it. And you should consider doing something more worthy of your time.
Considering they own a fuckton of other devices and games, yeah, I think they would.
If you wouldn't buy something, the you shouldn't have it. That's how this whole "money" stuff is actually supposed to work.
BTW, I don't think they even know what homebrew is.
Everything but the last point is now illegal
Now who's lying? Homebrew is perfectly legal.
Distributing romhacks has never been legal, and the same goes for ROMs, no matter how old.
But Nintendo have never "came for" the guys who make emulators. And seeing how easy it is to google and download roms from websites I'd guess they haven't really put much effort into taking down rom sites either.
The have ignored legal uses. There are plenty of cards that will run code, and there are plenty of sites with information on doing so.
But when a certain manufacturer started releasing updates to counter every new anti-piracy mechanism in new games, they decided that maybe they should do something.
/disengage reality distorion field
This is just rediculous reasoning. The iPhone costs $1800 over two years. There are other options which are much cheaper.
If you don't have $1800 (over two years), you can't afford the iPhone.