I'm really tempted by the HTC Desire - I'd love to be able to hang on until summer and see what the next iPhone has to offer, that was my original plan, but having seen what the Desire does I can't see the next iPhone leapfrogging it, I have a feeling I'd be disappointed if I did wait. Of course, if I cave and buy a Desire next month, you can bet the next iPhone will be the most amazing technological jump forward known to man, I'm pretty much damned if I do and damned if I don't - and "rumours" are no use to me whatsoever...
Well then they should fix that in the UI - that's meant to be their speciality after all. It can't be that difficult to find some way to alert people when multiple programs might be slowing down the system and give the option to easily locate and close some of them?
I wish they could do something about the battery life though.
They are, a faster processor, higher resolution and second camera should do something about battery life. Of course, it won't be something positive, but you can't have everything:)
If it's all about security, I wonder why they don't ban flash on safari for desktops? I assumed it was because flash is a major resource hog and it chokes the processors in phones.
I can see both sides of the argument. Rumble can provide some excellent feedback when used well, and your example is one. I've also played other games where it was abused so much that I've had to disable it in the system settings before I can play the game without feeling like I'm suffering Vibration White Finger.
Actually, in a way, I can see the point. Seeing a health bar on the screen painted differently wouldn't cause anyone to think that they experienced a realistic simulation of being shot (*), and no dev claimed so. Whereas the whole thrust of this vest seems to be that if they vibrate a bit over that spot, it's teh real deal. That kind of a claim _is_ kinda trivializing it.
Yes, in the same way that using a Wiimote to play some Wii tennis trivialises the years of training that a world champion has to go through - i.e. it doesn't trivialise it much. Likewise if I crash my car in GTA and the gamepad vibrates, that's hardly trivialising road traffic accidents, it's just providing more user feedback. If anything the fact that the main protagonist in most games can take a ridiculous amount of punishment and in many cases instantly heal from bullet wounds by either collecting a first aid kit or hiding for a bit is the real trivialising aspect, but that's a core part of the gaming experience and it kind of has to be that way or most games would feature a lot of hiding followed by a brief, messy gunfight and game over.
Well it's not games, but here's some "non-anecdotal proof" on the music front for you, courtesy of the BBC.
Now let me ask you something, what percentage of that 71.2% of people would have bought the game even if it wasn't possible to pirate? The reason I ask is that the iPhone is massively copied in Asia (I saw a site listing something like 100 different iPhone clones, I can't find it now but there's plenty of evidence of the practice if you Google it). Considering piracy is so rampant there, and the vast majority of pirates wouldn't buy the game at any price, it's possible that they are very heavily skewing the piracy percentage for the game but it's a meaningless statistic because it's not lost revenue in any way.
The problem is the people publishing the statistics don't want you to know that, because they have an ulterior motive in suggesting things are worse than they are. I would love to see the figures broken down by region, because my suspicion is that piracy in the West is much lower (even though it's just as easy to do over here), and really this is the market where games companies make all their money.
I love movies, music and games - these days I don't have enough time for any of them but I still push a lot of disposable capital their way. If I had bags of time and less money (i.e. was still a student) then I'd probably be the one pirating this stuff, it would be in their interests to keep someone like that on side because that's the kind of person who, when they do get a job, will be their main source of income.
Well if the game's up for him then the game's up, he should accept that and go gracefully, instead he's still wailing on the people who put money in his pocket in order to try and appeal to the content providers, who won't care because they've seen enough of his type to know there's no money there for them. To be honest, I'm more than happy for the **AA to go after the people who are profiteering on their products, less so when it's individuals who are just fans of the products and aren't selling those products on.
It would be useful to know how they arrived at those figures (never automatically trust the figures from people with ulterior motives - we all know the ridiculous figures music labels bandy around for instance), but notwithstanding that, if piracy is the reason for high prices then platforms which don't suffer piracy (PS3, Ubisoft's new DRM) should have considerably lower (on the order of those figures, at least 85% lower) prices. The fact that this isn't true would seem to suggest an admission on the part of the publishers that piracy does very little to the bottom line (and in fact, the more locked down console platforms have higher prices than the more craked PC platform, suggesting the prospect of piracy is encouraging lower prices rather than higher), it's just a convenient excuse for high prices. If they ever totally crack the piracy situation, they'll find another convenient excuse.
Absolute rubbish - you own the right to play the song in any format. This was already tried and tested in court long before the internet became more than an academic plaything and digital music formats were created - the record labels already tried this argument when people starting recording vinyl onto tape. Format shifting within the bounds of fair use (I want to listen to my favourite records in the car, etc) was declared perfectly valid. Nothing about this new media invalidates those findings, much to the dismay of the record labels.
I hadn't even realised they don't offer this by default - every online retailer I've used (particularly Play where I get most of my music) allows me to download my files as many times as I like to as many different devices as I want once I've bought them. Maybe there's some limit on the number of times I can do this, but if there is I've never hit it. The bandwidth costs are pretty negligible. Support the cost with a few ads if it means you can enable this service by default to everyone, I honestly can't understand the logic behind not doing so. Bandwidth costs, to someone like Apple, is not a valid argument. If Warez sites could offer this service for free and suck up the bandwidth costs back in the day then I'm pretty sure Apple could find a way to deal with it (and if they don't want to charge extra or show ads, just do what everyone else does and offload the cost onto customers via some kind of encrypted torrent stream, maybe). The cynical side of me suspects that they're just happy with the majority of consumers having to buy their content again if they lose it, but that they'll offer this service to those who complain too verbally as they don't want anyone looking too closely at their practices.
You're confusing the issue by trying to suggest that real world technical limitations with physical media are in any way comparable to completely artificial limitations on a digital format. DRM on a digital file isn't the same as only being able to play a record on a record player, it's more like you buy the record from them, but whenever you want to listen to it you have to call them up or pop around to their office and they'll play it for you, even though you have your own device capable of playing the record. Oh, and at any time they can refuse to play the record for you.
If this had been the case back in the days of record players, would be have complained about the artificial restrictions? You bet they would. Just as the people who understand the issue or who have run into the artificial restrictions these days are complaining, the only difference is that the delivery method for the restrictions is not so visible to the average user, otherwise I'm sure a lot more people would be complaining already.
Your last sentence is also badly flawed. Tell me the last time you bought a DRM encumbered piece of media and the retailer talked through with you exactly what the limitations were in terms of transferring between devices, format shifting, backing up, getting replacement copies, etc. And I don't just mean burying this as part of some auto-click-through EULA type agreement, but actually explaining in clear, concise terms that Joe Public can understand? I've never seen this happen, and until it does I think it's hardly fair to say that we're paying for content "aware of its limitations" - sure, the people who use/. are maybe aware of the limitations, but we're hardly the norm, and even here it's clear some people are confused about the issues, legal and otherwise (are we buying a product, renting a servive, buying a license to listen, does the DRM just limit the devices we play the music on or does it have other limitations, number of replayes, format shifting, expiry dates, can the retailer pull it at any time they choose, for content that requires communication with DRM servers, what happens when the servers are down, when they die for good, etc, etc).
The problem is publishers can't be trusted not to abuse the system. Already in Dragon Age you have to buy DLC in order to increase your backpack beyond a tiny limit. For a game that involves a fair bit of trawling dungeons and collecting junk to sell, having sufficient storage space for your non-quest items, while not being critical, does make life a hell of a lot easier. By allowing essential game components to be pushed into one time use DLC, they can kill the used market or charge ridiculous prices for their DLC.
Erm, by that yardstick, the same PCs that run Google search, Gmail, Google docs, Wave, Youtube, Chrome, Earth, Maps, Picasa, Doubleclick, Analytics, Blogger, Google Calendar, Orkut...
This is demonstrated by their initial reasoning for complying - that it was better for there to be some service, even neutered, rather than none - completely ignoring that China already has a deeply entrenched Google equivalent. Google put a spin on the fact that they were going after a chunk of that pie, and they put another spin on backing out when the pie was too hot for them. Not necessarily a bad thing that they're no longer doing business there, but let's not be fooled as to their motives in both cases.
Exactly the point I was about to make - even the people who reject the idea that humans are responsible for global warming admit that it's still happening. My point of view is that I'm open to be convinced, but at the moment it seems to me to be arrogance on behalf of we humans to assume we can have a significant impact, although I suspect we're contributing in a minor way. I also agree we should move to cleaner fuels and be less wasteful in general (hey, there's no reason not to hedge our bets), I think even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow the earth will continue to warm and we need to start thinking of ways to live with that if tackling it is impossible. The problem is the whole topic is so clouded and has now been subverted by groups on both sides with ulterior motives, I don't know who or what to trust anymore.
Maybe they can work with Wikipedia, by asking for a list of article stubs or proposed articles Wiki would like to see researched and written. It could be something that benefits both parties.
But do Blizzard enforce that against individual users (by disabling accounts) or against the developers of the software? (Genuine question, I don't follow WoW). If it's the latter then this is analogous, if it's the former then FB would have to start deleting the accounts of users who visited their site while using this script. Somehow I can't see their user base being too happy about this.
As long as this is about being able to modify the website once it hits the browser, and not about simple trademark infringement (this being/. and it being almost lunch, I don't intend to RTFA:) then I should think the browser developers would also want to back this guy up. It would decimate a lot of plugins, and even functionality such as resizing text, serving your own custom css, disabling javascript/flash/etc might fall within the scope of this, so it has massive implications.
Ironically, the first time I played C&C (Tib Sun) was on a friend's LAN, he had one official copy but also had it pirated specifically to have LAN games. I enjoyed it so much I went out and bought myself a copy to play online. I've also bought pretty much every one since then, all on the back of that first play, and now the thing that will likely stop me buying any more is their anti-piracy DRM, despite the fact that if piracy didn't exist I'd have likely never bought/played any of these games in the first place.
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I'm really tempted by the HTC Desire - I'd love to be able to hang on until summer and see what the next iPhone has to offer, that was my original plan, but having seen what the Desire does I can't see the next iPhone leapfrogging it, I have a feeling I'd be disappointed if I did wait. Of course, if I cave and buy a Desire next month, you can bet the next iPhone will be the most amazing technological jump forward known to man, I'm pretty much damned if I do and damned if I don't - and "rumours" are no use to me whatsoever...
As long as those computers aren't hooked up to the internet, otherwise they'll waste all their time looking for monkey pr0n.
Well then they should fix that in the UI - that's meant to be their speciality after all. It can't be that difficult to find some way to alert people when multiple programs might be slowing down the system and give the option to easily locate and close some of them?
I wish they could do something about the battery life though.
They are, a faster processor, higher resolution and second camera should do something about battery life. Of course, it won't be something positive, but you can't have everything :)
If it's all about security, I wonder why they don't ban flash on safari for desktops? I assumed it was because flash is a major resource hog and it chokes the processors in phones.
Cinemas could cut down the costs by hiring vagrants to sit beside you and punch you when the protagonist gets shot. They'd probably work for popcorn.
How about a reference that covers them both?
I can see both sides of the argument. Rumble can provide some excellent feedback when used well, and your example is one. I've also played other games where it was abused so much that I've had to disable it in the system settings before I can play the game without feeling like I'm suffering Vibration White Finger.
Actually, in a way, I can see the point. Seeing a health bar on the screen painted differently wouldn't cause anyone to think that they experienced a realistic simulation of being shot (*), and no dev claimed so. Whereas the whole thrust of this vest seems to be that if they vibrate a bit over that spot, it's teh real deal. That kind of a claim _is_ kinda trivializing it.
Yes, in the same way that using a Wiimote to play some Wii tennis trivialises the years of training that a world champion has to go through - i.e. it doesn't trivialise it much. Likewise if I crash my car in GTA and the gamepad vibrates, that's hardly trivialising road traffic accidents, it's just providing more user feedback. If anything the fact that the main protagonist in most games can take a ridiculous amount of punishment and in many cases instantly heal from bullet wounds by either collecting a first aid kit or hiding for a bit is the real trivialising aspect, but that's a core part of the gaming experience and it kind of has to be that way or most games would feature a lot of hiding followed by a brief, messy gunfight and game over.
Well it's not games, but here's some "non-anecdotal proof" on the music front for you, courtesy of the BBC.
Now let me ask you something, what percentage of that 71.2% of people would have bought the game even if it wasn't possible to pirate? The reason I ask is that the iPhone is massively copied in Asia (I saw a site listing something like 100 different iPhone clones, I can't find it now but there's plenty of evidence of the practice if you Google it). Considering piracy is so rampant there, and the vast majority of pirates wouldn't buy the game at any price, it's possible that they are very heavily skewing the piracy percentage for the game but it's a meaningless statistic because it's not lost revenue in any way.
The problem is the people publishing the statistics don't want you to know that, because they have an ulterior motive in suggesting things are worse than they are. I would love to see the figures broken down by region, because my suspicion is that piracy in the West is much lower (even though it's just as easy to do over here), and really this is the market where games companies make all their money.
I love movies, music and games - these days I don't have enough time for any of them but I still push a lot of disposable capital their way. If I had bags of time and less money (i.e. was still a student) then I'd probably be the one pirating this stuff, it would be in their interests to keep someone like that on side because that's the kind of person who, when they do get a job, will be their main source of income.
Well if the game's up for him then the game's up, he should accept that and go gracefully, instead he's still wailing on the people who put money in his pocket in order to try and appeal to the content providers, who won't care because they've seen enough of his type to know there's no money there for them. To be honest, I'm more than happy for the **AA to go after the people who are profiteering on their products, less so when it's individuals who are just fans of the products and aren't selling those products on.
It would be useful to know how they arrived at those figures (never automatically trust the figures from people with ulterior motives - we all know the ridiculous figures music labels bandy around for instance), but notwithstanding that, if piracy is the reason for high prices then platforms which don't suffer piracy (PS3, Ubisoft's new DRM) should have considerably lower (on the order of those figures, at least 85% lower) prices. The fact that this isn't true would seem to suggest an admission on the part of the publishers that piracy does very little to the bottom line (and in fact, the more locked down console platforms have higher prices than the more craked PC platform, suggesting the prospect of piracy is encouraging lower prices rather than higher), it's just a convenient excuse for high prices. If they ever totally crack the piracy situation, they'll find another convenient excuse.
Absolute rubbish - you own the right to play the song in any format. This was already tried and tested in court long before the internet became more than an academic plaything and digital music formats were created - the record labels already tried this argument when people starting recording vinyl onto tape. Format shifting within the bounds of fair use (I want to listen to my favourite records in the car, etc) was declared perfectly valid. Nothing about this new media invalidates those findings, much to the dismay of the record labels.
I hadn't even realised they don't offer this by default - every online retailer I've used (particularly Play where I get most of my music) allows me to download my files as many times as I like to as many different devices as I want once I've bought them. Maybe there's some limit on the number of times I can do this, but if there is I've never hit it. The bandwidth costs are pretty negligible. Support the cost with a few ads if it means you can enable this service by default to everyone, I honestly can't understand the logic behind not doing so. Bandwidth costs, to someone like Apple, is not a valid argument. If Warez sites could offer this service for free and suck up the bandwidth costs back in the day then I'm pretty sure Apple could find a way to deal with it (and if they don't want to charge extra or show ads, just do what everyone else does and offload the cost onto customers via some kind of encrypted torrent stream, maybe). The cynical side of me suspects that they're just happy with the majority of consumers having to buy their content again if they lose it, but that they'll offer this service to those who complain too verbally as they don't want anyone looking too closely at their practices.
You're confusing the issue by trying to suggest that real world technical limitations with physical media are in any way comparable to completely artificial limitations on a digital format. DRM on a digital file isn't the same as only being able to play a record on a record player, it's more like you buy the record from them, but whenever you want to listen to it you have to call them up or pop around to their office and they'll play it for you, even though you have your own device capable of playing the record. Oh, and at any time they can refuse to play the record for you.
If this had been the case back in the days of record players, would be have complained about the artificial restrictions? You bet they would. Just as the people who understand the issue or who have run into the artificial restrictions these days are complaining, the only difference is that the delivery method for the restrictions is not so visible to the average user, otherwise I'm sure a lot more people would be complaining already.
Your last sentence is also badly flawed. Tell me the last time you bought a DRM encumbered piece of media and the retailer talked through with you exactly what the limitations were in terms of transferring between devices, format shifting, backing up, getting replacement copies, etc. And I don't just mean burying this as part of some auto-click-through EULA type agreement, but actually explaining in clear, concise terms that Joe Public can understand? I've never seen this happen, and until it does I think it's hardly fair to say that we're paying for content "aware of its limitations" - sure, the people who use /. are maybe aware of the limitations, but we're hardly the norm, and even here it's clear some people are confused about the issues, legal and otherwise (are we buying a product, renting a servive, buying a license to listen, does the DRM just limit the devices we play the music on or does it have other limitations, number of replayes, format shifting, expiry dates, can the retailer pull it at any time they choose, for content that requires communication with DRM servers, what happens when the servers are down, when they die for good, etc, etc).
The problem is publishers can't be trusted not to abuse the system. Already in Dragon Age you have to buy DLC in order to increase your backpack beyond a tiny limit. For a game that involves a fair bit of trawling dungeons and collecting junk to sell, having sufficient storage space for your non-quest items, while not being critical, does make life a hell of a lot easier. By allowing essential game components to be pushed into one time use DLC, they can kill the used market or charge ridiculous prices for their DLC.
Exactly - and all the PCs that run Windows.
What does China make for Google?
Erm, by that yardstick, the same PCs that run Google search, Gmail, Google docs, Wave, Youtube, Chrome, Earth, Maps, Picasa, Doubleclick, Analytics, Blogger, Google Calendar, Orkut...
This is demonstrated by their initial reasoning for complying - that it was better for there to be some service, even neutered, rather than none - completely ignoring that China already has a deeply entrenched Google equivalent. Google put a spin on the fact that they were going after a chunk of that pie, and they put another spin on backing out when the pie was too hot for them. Not necessarily a bad thing that they're no longer doing business there, but let's not be fooled as to their motives in both cases.
I think you're possibly overstating the irrationality aspect of our cold war fears.
Exactly the point I was about to make - even the people who reject the idea that humans are responsible for global warming admit that it's still happening. My point of view is that I'm open to be convinced, but at the moment it seems to me to be arrogance on behalf of we humans to assume we can have a significant impact, although I suspect we're contributing in a minor way. I also agree we should move to cleaner fuels and be less wasteful in general (hey, there's no reason not to hedge our bets), I think even if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow the earth will continue to warm and we need to start thinking of ways to live with that if tackling it is impossible. The problem is the whole topic is so clouded and has now been subverted by groups on both sides with ulterior motives, I don't know who or what to trust anymore.
Maybe they can work with Wikipedia, by asking for a list of article stubs or proposed articles Wiki would like to see researched and written. It could be something that benefits both parties.
But do Blizzard enforce that against individual users (by disabling accounts) or against the developers of the software? (Genuine question, I don't follow WoW). If it's the latter then this is analogous, if it's the former then FB would have to start deleting the accounts of users who visited their site while using this script. Somehow I can't see their user base being too happy about this.
As long as this is about being able to modify the website once it hits the browser, and not about simple trademark infringement (this being /. and it being almost lunch, I don't intend to RTFA :) then I should think the browser developers would also want to back this guy up. It would decimate a lot of plugins, and even functionality such as resizing text, serving your own custom css, disabling javascript/flash/etc might fall within the scope of this, so it has massive implications.
Ironically, the first time I played C&C (Tib Sun) was on a friend's LAN, he had one official copy but also had it pirated specifically to have LAN games. I enjoyed it so much I went out and bought myself a copy to play online. I've also bought pretty much every one since then, all on the back of that first play, and now the thing that will likely stop me buying any more is their anti-piracy DRM, despite the fact that if piracy didn't exist I'd have likely never bought/played any of these games in the first place.