It's not a life-or-death issue, but it's still important to me.
In the end, we are all getting a shitty deal here. The games are still very expensive, and yet we are only "renting" them. The publisher can pull the plug whenever, and we can't resell them. The cost is the same as last year's games, but the value is less.
I have no reason to accept such a crap deal. If your man in the supermarket is happy to be ripped off by Ubisoft, then all I can say is, "a fool and his money are soon parted".
If a game comes with DRM that you don't like, you really mustn't buy it. If you do, it rewards Ubisoft or EA or whoever, and the DRM scheme will either be used again or made worse!
Pirating the game sends the same message. The publishers do have some idea of the numbers of peopls who are copying their games, and if there are many more than expected, then the DRM scheme will be made worse!
Therefore, it's very important to check the "Requirements" for a game before you buy, even if your PC will clearly be capable of running it. Respectable stores like Steam will warn you about the types of DRM used by the game in clear terms, and you can decide whether it's too much. This information isn't in large text in the centre of the screen as it should be ("Warning: SecuROM", "Danger - Game Published By Ubisoft") but it's there, and these days you must always check for it.
Can you fight DRM with patience? Well, yes or no, it's your only option. Voting with your wallet is your only way to discourage this sort of thing. Eventually the price will be lowered and (maybe) the DRM will be removed to pick up extra sales. Then you win.
It entirely depends on what suits you best. I didn't want to buy a special nettop, mini-ITX or similar because I wanted everything to be very, very cheap. Therefore, I only used spare parts. I could probably build a quieter or more energy efficient solution if I spent $$s, but I think it would be a false economy. Sans hard disk, the machine is already very quiet.
However - I think it's quite normal to have a whole range of devices attached to your TV for playing media in different formats. It's the modern equivalent of a hifi that includes several machines for playing LPs, CDs and tapes. Now, we end up with a stack of different consoles and a PC, because each plays a different sort of media.
If you want a machine to play video files in any format, then may I suggest an old PC? A powerful machine isn't needed, so whenever you upgrade, you get a new "free" media player. (I was amazed at how quiet my old desktop became, once I'd replaced the hard disk with a USB stick and downgraded the graphics card.)
I love the idea of the Liberal Democrats but I don't think they have any genuinely liberal principles any more. They seem to have been infected by the same "liberal" populist authoritarianism that's possessed the other two major parties over the last few decades, and now it is very hard to see how they offer anything different. "Liberal" in name only.
I think you can judge a party by its actions while in opposition, and in that regard, both the Cameron Conservatives and the Lib Dems have been so utterly useless and unprincipled that we might as well re-elect Labour.
In my opinion, the result of democracy should be that everyone can do as they please as long as their actions do not hurt "little ones".
Many would agree with you. But they would quibble over the definition of "hurt". A government could ban almost anything on the grounds that it might "hurt the children".
It looks like you haven't watched enough Michael Moore documentaries. Rich and stupid white men are to blame for all problems. That's not racist, it's just a fact:).
I hate games that do this. "Free to play" has become a warning. It means: "Danger! This game doesn't have a monthly subscription or upfront cost, but the "real money transactions" will turn out to be more expensive than a monthly subscription".
In all games of this sort, the game designers can alter the game design to maximise the amount of money they take from you. They figure out what you want to do and charge you for it. And if what you want to do changes, they nerf the game once more, again maximising profit at your expense.
It makes them more money than a monthly subscription, clearly, otherwise they wouldn't do it! The "free" parts of the game are arbitrarily crippled, and you have to pay and pay and pay to undo this. See for example the Facebook game "Farmville" (can't select an area of farmland by clicking and dragging unless you rent this facility) or the MMO "Runes of Magic" (the default bag is tiny and you must rent a bigger one to progress through the game).
The "free to play" model is a rip-off's charter. It is not a good thing. Do not support it. Pay up front, pay a fixed subscription, or play games that are genuinely free.
Thankyou for your reply. What you say makes sense, but also highlights that there is a choice, and although you do have to choose a phone that's less than perfect, you don't have to choose one that's locked down like the iPhone.
It is as if you are hoping that jailbreaking will eventually convince Apple (and others) that the restrictions are a bad idea. I strongly believe you are mistaken in this. What you are actually doing is telling Apple that you are willing to compromise because you buy the device in spite of the restrictions. Apple sees this and knows that you are probably willing to compromise further; that you'll accept a device with even tougher restrictions, which is even more inconvenient to jailbreak.
Picking your battles is important, I agree. But you can go too far. In my view, jailbreaking is acceptance of everything that the enemy demands.
It's sad that jailbreaking is now considered normal by so many.
You shouldn't have to hack into a machine that you own just in order to be able to use it. It's not normal. It's not natural.
To have to download a grey-market third party hack just so you can install Java... do you never stop and think "What the fuck am I doing?" or "Do I really have to do this?"
I really cannot get my head around the mindset of the jailbreaker who despises the restrictions imposed by the manufacturer but still votes for those restrictions with his wallet.
If the restrictions are so bad, why don't you just stop fighting the manufacturer, and buy something that doesn't need to be "jailbroken" in order to be useful?
I don't think people design a system on the basis thatt "we'd better not use x86 in our system because people will expect us to run popular x86 programs."
Yeah, I basically agree with you, especially with this bit. The thing is not so much x86 compatibility but PC compatibility. If the new system is PC compatible, then that's a good thing, because the compatibility requirement strongly limits the possibility for lock-down. That's what I'm getting at.
Thankyou for replying. What you say does make sense and is correct but I still think you are missing the point I'm trying to make.
I do not blame any CPU architecture for anything. Rather I say that maintaining direct hardware compatibility with an old, established architecture prevents a lock-down, since such a lock-down would break older software. In this sense, backwards compatibility is highly desirable.
A transition to a new, incompatible architecture provides a possibility for lock-down. Especially if the old applications can now only be run in an emulation environment, as in PPC code on x86, or M68K code on PPC.
I am glad that Microsoft does not have much control of emerging platforms. Competition is good. What is not good is the new platforms often have something worse than Windows: software ecosystems that are heavily locked down - app stores, central approval of applications, royalties. This would not be possible if the new platforms were PC compatible, because PC compatible means "able to load your old applications".
Opposition to the government literally dies out if the government has sufficient control of what children are taught. This is the reason for the Hitler Youth, or the "Spies" in Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four.
When an opponent declares, "I will not come over to your side," I calmly say, "Your child belongs to us already... What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community."
Adolf Hitler
Good. Raising children is the job of parents, not the Government, and it should be perfectly ok for parents to opt out of the school system if it doesn't suit them for any reason. Fascistic governments hate the idea that parents have the freedom to teach their children whatever they want. In Britain we have seen the Government attempting to smear home educators by getting their mouthpieces to spread fear about unchecked child abuse. The pieces are being put into place for an outright ban, and the sad thing is that so-called "liberals" will probably support it on the grounds that it will stop "the children" being "brainwashed" about Jesus, not realising that they are undermining their own freedom to oppose the Government.
Why not indeed. The PPC architecture is very nice, and at one time there were some pretty cool SoCs from PA Semi. I assume ARM only because of the name and number scheme and because of the iPhone's CPU.
That's pretty rude, Bill_the_Engineer. I'm not sure anyone on this site is unaware that compilers and Linux distributions exist for ARM-based platforms. However, you have given me an opportunity to re-iterate the point I was making.
The point is that when a non x86 based system is designed, built and sold, there is a break with backwards compatibility at the binary level. This is both good and bad. Good, because it provides an opportunity to get rid of legacy cruft, no longer required by modern applications. Bad, because it provides an opportunity to lock the system down with DRM. Users do not expect that their old applications will continue to work on the new platform because there is no backward compatibility: the new platform is not a PC.
The obvious example is the iPhone, but I'm not going to bash Apple on apple.slashdot.org when I can pick on Microsoft. So, consider the XBox 360. It's not a PC. This is a good thing, because it makes the hardware cheaper and the software more efficient. However, it is also a bad thing, because no compatibility with Windows and DOS applications is expected by the users. "Not being a PC" gives Microsoft the opportunity to control the admission of applications to the platform, through XBox Live and the approval process for games sold on disc. The price of getting rid of the legacy cruft of the PC is that you also lose one legacy feature that really really matters: the lack of DRM.
Sometimes legacy compatibility is a very good thing. Microsoft may want to Tivoise the PC platform, but they can't do it. It would break too many old applications. We may complain that AMD64 CPUs "needlessly" support the 8086 real mode just in case someone still wants to boot DOS and run Wordstar, but the very fact that you can boot DOS means that you can boot anything. It's not a flaw but a feature of immeasurable value.
Sounds like a close relative of the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9: the line of ARM CPUs specifically intended to run end-user applications rather than embedded control software.
On a related topic, people who pray for the end of x86 should be careful what they wish for, because their desire brings completely closed platforms and proprietary app stores. There is one reason why you can install software on your Windows machine without a "developer key" or Microsoft's explicit approval, and that reason is backwards compatibility.
No, this article is still serving their agenda. All publicity is good. Last week's Apple publicity was about how Apple masterminds controlled leaks. This week's Apple publicity is about how Apple stops leaks. It's irrelevant what the news says, because the key concept is "Apple is doing something".
Sometimes people say "I'm not buying any Apple products in protest against their consistently unethical behaviour". But with a few very rare exceptions, those people were never Apple customers anyway. In a very real sense it is irrelevant what Apple does, provided that something is happening.
While I certainly would not want Windows on my phone, any system capable of running legacy x86 applications would need to be open. On such a system, you would be able to develop applications without a proprietary SDK, and you'd be able to sell your applications without going through the vendor's App Store and dictatorial application approval process. To me, these are invaluable benefits.
I agree but all of those changes are either outside the game engine, or minor changes that simply correct some glitch or other. There was no major engine revision of the sort that would be needed to add a new feature, such as motion blur, true 3D or any other "source port" feature. Therefore I think it is right to say that there were no engine changes at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a life-or-death issue, but it's still important to me.
In the end, we are all getting a shitty deal here. The games are still very expensive, and yet we are only "renting" them. The publisher can pull the plug whenever, and we can't resell them. The cost is the same as last year's games, but the value is less.
I have no reason to accept such a crap deal. If your man in the supermarket is happy to be ripped off by Ubisoft, then all I can say is, "a fool and his money are soon parted".
If a game comes with DRM that you don't like, you really mustn't buy it. If you do, it rewards Ubisoft or EA or whoever, and the DRM scheme will either be used again or made worse!
Pirating the game sends the same message. The publishers do have some idea of the numbers of peopls who are copying their games, and if there are many more than expected, then the DRM scheme will be made worse!
Therefore, it's very important to check the "Requirements" for a game before you buy, even if your PC will clearly be capable of running it. Respectable stores like Steam will warn you about the types of DRM used by the game in clear terms, and you can decide whether it's too much. This information isn't in large text in the centre of the screen as it should be ("Warning: SecuROM", "Danger - Game Published By Ubisoft") but it's there, and these days you must always check for it.
Can you fight DRM with patience? Well, yes or no, it's your only option. Voting with your wallet is your only way to discourage this sort of thing. Eventually the price will be lowered and (maybe) the DRM will be removed to pick up extra sales. Then you win.
It entirely depends on what suits you best. I didn't want to buy a special nettop, mini-ITX or similar because I wanted everything to be very, very cheap. Therefore, I only used spare parts. I could probably build a quieter or more energy efficient solution if I spent $$s, but I think it would be a false economy. Sans hard disk, the machine is already very quiet.
However - I think it's quite normal to have a whole range of devices attached to your TV for playing media in different formats. It's the modern equivalent of a hifi that includes several machines for playing LPs, CDs and tapes. Now, we end up with a stack of different consoles and a PC, because each plays a different sort of media.
A hacked one? :)
If you want a machine to play video files in any format, then may I suggest an old PC? A powerful machine isn't needed, so whenever you upgrade, you get a new "free" media player. (I was amazed at how quiet my old desktop became, once I'd replaced the hard disk with a USB stick and downgraded the graphics card.)
I love the idea of the Liberal Democrats but I don't think they have any genuinely liberal principles any more. They seem to have been infected by the same "liberal" populist authoritarianism that's possessed the other two major parties over the last few decades, and now it is very hard to see how they offer anything different. "Liberal" in name only.
I think you can judge a party by its actions while in opposition, and in that regard, both the Cameron Conservatives and the Lib Dems have been so utterly useless and unprincipled that we might as well re-elect Labour.
In my opinion, the result of democracy should be that everyone can do as they please as long as their actions do not hurt "little ones".
Many would agree with you. But they would quibble over the definition of "hurt". A government could ban almost anything on the grounds that it might "hurt the children".
It looks like you haven't watched enough Michael Moore documentaries. Rich and stupid white men are to blame for all problems. That's not racist, it's just a fact :).
I hate games that do this. "Free to play" has become a warning. It means: "Danger! This game doesn't have a monthly subscription or upfront cost, but the "real money transactions" will turn out to be more expensive than a monthly subscription".
In all games of this sort, the game designers can alter the game design to maximise the amount of money they take from you. They figure out what you want to do and charge you for it. And if what you want to do changes, they nerf the game once more, again maximising profit at your expense.
It makes them more money than a monthly subscription, clearly, otherwise they wouldn't do it! The "free" parts of the game are arbitrarily crippled, and you have to pay and pay and pay to undo this. See for example the Facebook game "Farmville" (can't select an area of farmland by clicking and dragging unless you rent this facility) or the MMO "Runes of Magic" (the default bag is tiny and you must rent a bigger one to progress through the game).
The "free to play" model is a rip-off's charter. It is not a good thing. Do not support it. Pay up front, pay a fixed subscription, or play games that are genuinely free.
Thankyou for your reply. What you say makes sense, but also highlights that there is a choice, and although you do have to choose a phone that's less than perfect, you don't have to choose one that's locked down like the iPhone.
It is as if you are hoping that jailbreaking will eventually convince Apple (and others) that the restrictions are a bad idea. I strongly believe you are mistaken in this. What you are actually doing is telling Apple that you are willing to compromise because you buy the device in spite of the restrictions. Apple sees this and knows that you are probably willing to compromise further; that you'll accept a device with even tougher restrictions, which is even more inconvenient to jailbreak.
Picking your battles is important, I agree. But you can go too far. In my view, jailbreaking is acceptance of everything that the enemy demands.
It's sad that jailbreaking is now considered normal by so many.
You shouldn't have to hack into a machine that you own just in order to be able to use it. It's not normal. It's not natural.
To have to download a grey-market third party hack just so you can install Java... do you never stop and think "What the fuck am I doing?" or "Do I really have to do this?"
I really cannot get my head around the mindset of the jailbreaker who despises the restrictions imposed by the manufacturer but still votes for those restrictions with his wallet.
If the restrictions are so bad, why don't you just stop fighting the manufacturer, and buy something that doesn't need to be "jailbroken" in order to be useful?
Yeah, I basically agree with you, especially with this bit. The thing is not so much x86 compatibility but PC compatibility. If the new system is PC compatible, then that's a good thing, because the compatibility requirement strongly limits the possibility for lock-down. That's what I'm getting at.
Thankyou for replying. What you say does make sense and is correct but I still think you are missing the point I'm trying to make.
I do not blame any CPU architecture for anything. Rather I say that maintaining direct hardware compatibility with an old, established architecture prevents a lock-down, since such a lock-down would break older software. In this sense, backwards compatibility is highly desirable.
A transition to a new, incompatible architecture provides a possibility for lock-down. Especially if the old applications can now only be run in an emulation environment, as in PPC code on x86, or M68K code on PPC.
I am glad that Microsoft does not have much control of emerging platforms. Competition is good. What is not good is the new platforms often have something worse than Windows: software ecosystems that are heavily locked down - app stores, central approval of applications, royalties. This would not be possible if the new platforms were PC compatible, because PC compatible means "able to load your old applications".
1. The XBox 360, the subject of my post, is not an x86-based system.
2. The XBox is x86-based, but not a PC, as the system architecture is quite different.
3. I have absolutely no idea what point you are trying to make.
Opposition to the government literally dies out if the government has sufficient control of what children are taught. This is the reason for the Hitler Youth, or the "Spies" in Orwell's Nineteen-Eighty Four.
This concise argument sums up the issues perfectly.
Good. Raising children is the job of parents, not the Government, and it should be perfectly ok for parents to opt out of the school system if it doesn't suit them for any reason. Fascistic governments hate the idea that parents have the freedom to teach their children whatever they want. In Britain we have seen the Government attempting to smear home educators by getting their mouthpieces to spread fear about unchecked child abuse. The pieces are being put into place for an outright ban, and the sad thing is that so-called "liberals" will probably support it on the grounds that it will stop "the children" being "brainwashed" about Jesus, not realising that they are undermining their own freedom to oppose the Government.
Why not indeed. The PPC architecture is very nice, and at one time there were some pretty cool SoCs from PA Semi. I assume ARM only because of the name and number scheme and because of the iPhone's CPU.
That's pretty rude, Bill_the_Engineer. I'm not sure anyone on this site is unaware that compilers and Linux distributions exist for ARM-based platforms. However, you have given me an opportunity to re-iterate the point I was making.
The point is that when a non x86 based system is designed, built and sold, there is a break with backwards compatibility at the binary level. This is both good and bad. Good, because it provides an opportunity to get rid of legacy cruft, no longer required by modern applications. Bad, because it provides an opportunity to lock the system down with DRM. Users do not expect that their old applications will continue to work on the new platform because there is no backward compatibility: the new platform is not a PC.
The obvious example is the iPhone, but I'm not going to bash Apple on apple.slashdot.org when I can pick on Microsoft. So, consider the XBox 360. It's not a PC. This is a good thing, because it makes the hardware cheaper and the software more efficient. However, it is also a bad thing, because no compatibility with Windows and DOS applications is expected by the users. "Not being a PC" gives Microsoft the opportunity to control the admission of applications to the platform, through XBox Live and the approval process for games sold on disc. The price of getting rid of the legacy cruft of the PC is that you also lose one legacy feature that really really matters: the lack of DRM.
Sometimes legacy compatibility is a very good thing. Microsoft may want to Tivoise the PC platform, but they can't do it. It would break too many old applications. We may complain that AMD64 CPUs "needlessly" support the 8086 real mode just in case someone still wants to boot DOS and run Wordstar, but the very fact that you can boot DOS means that you can boot anything. It's not a flaw but a feature of immeasurable value.
Sounds like a close relative of the ARM Cortex-A8 and Cortex-A9: the line of ARM CPUs specifically intended to run end-user applications rather than embedded control software.
On a related topic, people who pray for the end of x86 should be careful what they wish for, because their desire brings completely closed platforms and proprietary app stores. There is one reason why you can install software on your Windows machine without a "developer key" or Microsoft's explicit approval, and that reason is backwards compatibility.
...followed by an attempt to create a free energy device powered by black puddings.
No, this article is still serving their agenda. All publicity is good. Last week's Apple publicity was about how Apple masterminds controlled leaks. This week's Apple publicity is about how Apple stops leaks. It's irrelevant what the news says, because the key concept is "Apple is doing something".
Sometimes people say "I'm not buying any Apple products in protest against their consistently unethical behaviour". But with a few very rare exceptions, those people were never Apple customers anyway. In a very real sense it is irrelevant what Apple does, provided that something is happening.
Wasn't Gibson one of the producers of Johnny Mnemonic? I remember being very shocked to see that in the credits, as in "how did this go so wrong?"
While I certainly would not want Windows on my phone, any system capable of running legacy x86 applications would need to be open. On such a system, you would be able to develop applications without a proprietary SDK, and you'd be able to sell your applications without going through the vendor's App Store and dictatorial application approval process. To me, these are invaluable benefits.
Part of the plan would surely involve getting into the IP core business, like ARM. AMD are doing it, and some Intel researchers already have a prototype.
I agree but all of those changes are either outside the game engine, or minor changes that simply correct some glitch or other. There was no major engine revision of the sort that would be needed to add a new feature, such as motion blur, true 3D or any other "source port" feature. Therefore I think it is right to say that there were no engine changes at all.