If people know they need anti-virus they must know it's a pretty stupid idea to pay for it on a machine that's currently compromised. I know absolutely nothing about cars, but if someone told me my break line had been cut (even if they were scamming me) I'd know enough not to drive to the garage to get it fixed. If you seriously thought your PC was unprotected and you still went ahead and entered your credit card details, what would you expect to happen? Is it so much hassle to go to the store and get an AV package, or ask a friend/relative to order you a copy?
Only when it hits them financially - maybe if banks offered better rates or incentives to people who had passed some kind of basic internet competency exam, we'd see people making the effort to educate themselves (or lots of people falling for fake competency exam scams).
Yes, because it's impossible to educate yourself on any of this stuff. What we need is some kind of global information resource available to pretty much anyone, pretty much anywhere, that people could use to educate themselves. Seriously, you can't blame users for starting from a point of ignorance, but when they choose to remain in a state of ignorance then they're hardly blameless. People manage to learn how to drive largely without everyone killing themselves or each other the first time they get in a car. If it's possible for people to learn the dangers of that activity, how hard is it for people to similarly educate themselves (or have someone else educate them) on the dangers of the internet (sure it's not your life that's in jeopardy online, but it could well be your house, all your savings, your job, your credit-worthiness...)
Indeed - the threat is users who don't make the effort to educate themselves to the dangers. Online marketing is a threat in the same way that a swimming pool is a threat, if you dive in without knowing what you're doing you might well get in trouble, but most people can feel their way as they go and not have any real issues, while people who really know what they're doing can enjoy all the benefits with virtually zero risk - just look at all the free content we get because of online marketing, do you really want to pay for every single site you view?
Not sure how it's even stealing, when it's a subscription rental service. If anything, paying them for movies that you're then not watching using their bandwidth has to be a net win - you get a better experience, they cut costs and the studios still get their cut. Sure, you might decide one day to end your scubscription - well you might do that anyway if they make it hard for you to watch stuff how you want and someone else offers an alternative.
Besides, when you're paying a flat fee for the service and can re-watch anything you want without having to pay again, it's even more ridiculous to think people would bother copying/storing this stuff. Why should I waste disk space when I can have them do it for me. Sure, you might get the odd guy who decides to download their entire library then cancel his subscription, but if people like that are really determined they'll get the content anyway, even if they have to install a stream ripped (or just go to a torrent site and get the full box set rips without the fee).
True, but just because he doesn't have a games console, doesn't necessarily follow that he doesn't have a DVD player (after all, you can pick up a reasonable quality DVD player for next to nothing these days).
I'm guessing if you're watching movies on a phone it's more of an opportunistic than a planned event - you find yourself with a little unexpected time to kill or whatever so decide to watch something, in which case a wait of a couple of days plus some format shifting is not going to work.
Offered the chance to monetise a distribution channel that dwarfs even bit torrent, you really think the studios would choose to take their content home and sulk? Sure, they might decide long term to screw Netflix over by forming their own distribution channel, but sure term they'd still want their slice of the money pie. They might stamp their feet and make a fuss, but when it came right down to it, if Netflix had the guts to put itself on the line over this, the studios would have to give in. We've seen it before with record labels and music DRM, we'll see it again with publishers and book DRM. Netflix won't take this stance of course, like most big companies they're risk-averse, but someone else will come along and do it instead, then Netflix will either have to jump on the bandwagon or see their own pie being eaten.
Netflix won't care until it hits their bottom line. If customers cared, and avoided Netflix, citing DRM as the reason, you can bet Netflix would be in there fighting the studios every inch of the way, but for now the status quo, while probably a little more costly technically, is good enough for them. The tricky part is getting customers to care - most people only care about DRM after they've been burned by it.
It effectively already is impossible to stop someone renting the content and saving a permanent copy, with or without DRM, so why make the experience poor for your honest customers? Maybe they could try a new business model based around trust and respect - I give them my money, they trust me not to distribute my copy to everyone on the planet. Then focus on going after the people who actually profit from ripping off others (i.e. the ones selling ripped disks or ad-hosted torrent sites) instead of making all of your customers feel like criminals.
Indeed - companies always argue they need DRM because of piracy and that piracy drives up the cost of our media, yet we know from masses of evidence that any time a company successfully controls the supply of a product they will abuse the hell out of that control to drive up prices. We've seen it time and again throughout history - more control does not mean lower prices - yet they expect us to buy into DRM on vague suggestions that less piracy means lower costs.
All logically sound, but what the above doesn't take into account is how many sales they will lose as a result of DRM rather than piracy. Okay, it might not seem like a lot if a few geeks take a stance and refuse to buy, but if they tell their friends, who then write on their blogs, whose commenters then go and tweet about it... It's probably even more difficult to track sales lost this way than it is to put a figure on what piracy costs.
There are plenty of us who currently use Windows and still don't want to install Silverlight. I already have one bloated plugin for playing annoying ads installed on my system, I thought the plan was to migrate away from the likes of Flash, meanwhile MS is still trying to push us down the road of having yet another variation on this same theme installed. Well I've managed to avoid it so far (despite them pushing more and more of their own content via Silverlight, i.e. everywhere on xbox.com).
I'm not sure what you were celebrating 9 years ago, but Apple was one of the biggest distributors of DRM encumbered music until as recently as 2007, and it didn't go wholly DRM-free until 2009 (and even then, it embeds tags in the tracks to try and discourage sharing). Needless to say it's volte face came about not due to some internal benevolent decision, but primarily because it was under increasing pressure from consumers, competing DRM-free offerings and from Europe, to drop DRM - so I wouldn't be so quick to salute it as a bastion of the breach on DRM dogma.
In short, DRM is entirely ineffective. All it's doing is making it a hair more inconvenient to pirate than to buy.
If only that were true you might still be able to just about justify DRM as a means to deter casual piracy, but actually it's more likely to make it more inconvenient to buy than to pirate. Having to sit through ads/anti-copyright spam on DVDs I've paid for, or having games fail to run because the DRM decides it doesn't like my setup, or not being able to back up an expensive game disk before letting the kids loose with it, or having to jump through hoops to format or device shift music - these are all only concerns for the legitimate customer, the pirate can safely ignore them all and enjoy a truly unencumbered experience. As someone who does pay for his media, it's really frustrating to know that people are not only getting the same thing free, but that they're getting a substantially better experience in the bargain, and let me clarify that it's not the pirates I'm angry at, it's the companies. When will these big companies listen to what I - the person putting money into their pockets in the first place - want from my media, instead of chasing shadows?
Does the average person have anywhere close to 45,000 tracks on their phone or laptop? Besides, it's not like they couldn't give us the high quality and let us resize it to suit, it'd be nice to have the best quality lossless files for the home media system even if you did then encode at a much compressed rate for your PMP of choice.
People who understand the technology can predict what will happen if it goes wrong and get annoyed about that. People who don't understand the technology only get annoyed when it does go wrong. That's the only real difference. Other than that, once people understand the technology, be they geek or layman, the main response is almost universally, "why?"
It's not even close. With the 360 you have the option (choose "configure" when setting up the card) to only use part of it for the 360 storage and the rest as standard file storage (I don't know what format this is as I've not tried it but I know the option is definitely there). On top of that, the USB can still be read in a PC - I've used this method to back up my game saves before by just imaging the whole disk. Finally, the USB can be read in any 360 - the whole reason I used this is because I switch between two consoles a lot - while the phone memory is effectively locked to that phone and, if I understand correctly, can't even be used in an identical model of phone. On top of that, as you said, it's trivial to recover the USB by just reformatting.
Unless you're eating pancakes at this nice restaurant, eggs and four are probably not the "major" components of your meal. If you order a steak, what do you think accounts for most of the cost of your meal, the steak or the fries? Unless you're suggesting that the miscellaneous costs are double the major costs for this device, I think it's not unreasonable for GP to suggest they're probably making a profit, even if it's not nearly as much as the figures might suggest.
The development costs only matter if they're making a loss on each one they sell, because it will efectively mean each unit sold for non-gaming purposes takes money out of their pocket and denies them sales. If they're making a profit, as GP suggests, then each unit sold for non-gaming purposes might take games sales out of their pocket but it still makes them a profit, which goes towards paying off those development costs. So long as they don't have any kind of major supply issues, it's always going to be better to sell more units in those circumstances (unless they had plans to do stuff with this on the PC and are afraid it will cannibalise a major future revenue stream).
I thought we'd already pretty much ruled out Minority Report style interfaces for the same reason we don't have a lot of vertical touchscreen interface usage (outside of a few specialist areas): gorilla arm syndrome. It would be really cool to use this for about two minutes, and after that you'd want to throw it through the window (although I guess if you came up with a really reliable way to track the hands without them necessarily being held up towards the device you could neatly solve that, the arms could point downwards and still be used for navigation purposes).
Well you'd probably not want to network the software that controls basic motor functions in that case, and the guys in the suits can always just remove them in the worst case scenario, I guess?
Besides, the point is it doesn't need to be the average soldier, it can be any soldier. You don't need guys trained to lift huge weights when anyone, even relatively untrained support personnel, can wear this and throw ammo crates around, it might even be a way for soldiers injured in combat to still participate in the logistics side of things, and because it's a suit and doesn't rely on the skills/strength of the wearer, you can keep it running close to 24/7 if you need to.
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If people know they need anti-virus they must know it's a pretty stupid idea to pay for it on a machine that's currently compromised. I know absolutely nothing about cars, but if someone told me my break line had been cut (even if they were scamming me) I'd know enough not to drive to the garage to get it fixed. If you seriously thought your PC was unprotected and you still went ahead and entered your credit card details, what would you expect to happen? Is it so much hassle to go to the store and get an AV package, or ask a friend/relative to order you a copy?
Only when it hits them financially - maybe if banks offered better rates or incentives to people who had passed some kind of basic internet competency exam, we'd see people making the effort to educate themselves (or lots of people falling for fake competency exam scams).
Yes, because it's impossible to educate yourself on any of this stuff. What we need is some kind of global information resource available to pretty much anyone, pretty much anywhere, that people could use to educate themselves. Seriously, you can't blame users for starting from a point of ignorance, but when they choose to remain in a state of ignorance then they're hardly blameless. People manage to learn how to drive largely without everyone killing themselves or each other the first time they get in a car. If it's possible for people to learn the dangers of that activity, how hard is it for people to similarly educate themselves (or have someone else educate them) on the dangers of the internet (sure it's not your life that's in jeopardy online, but it could well be your house, all your savings, your job, your credit-worthiness...)
Indeed - the threat is users who don't make the effort to educate themselves to the dangers. Online marketing is a threat in the same way that a swimming pool is a threat, if you dive in without knowing what you're doing you might well get in trouble, but most people can feel their way as they go and not have any real issues, while people who really know what they're doing can enjoy all the benefits with virtually zero risk - just look at all the free content we get because of online marketing, do you really want to pay for every single site you view?
Not sure how it's even stealing, when it's a subscription rental service. If anything, paying them for movies that you're then not watching using their bandwidth has to be a net win - you get a better experience, they cut costs and the studios still get their cut. Sure, you might decide one day to end your scubscription - well you might do that anyway if they make it hard for you to watch stuff how you want and someone else offers an alternative.
Besides, when you're paying a flat fee for the service and can re-watch anything you want without having to pay again, it's even more ridiculous to think people would bother copying/storing this stuff. Why should I waste disk space when I can have them do it for me. Sure, you might get the odd guy who decides to download their entire library then cancel his subscription, but if people like that are really determined they'll get the content anyway, even if they have to install a stream ripped (or just go to a torrent site and get the full box set rips without the fee).
True, but just because he doesn't have a games console, doesn't necessarily follow that he doesn't have a DVD player (after all, you can pick up a reasonable quality DVD player for next to nothing these days).
I'm guessing if you're watching movies on a phone it's more of an opportunistic than a planned event - you find yourself with a little unexpected time to kill or whatever so decide to watch something, in which case a wait of a couple of days plus some format shifting is not going to work.
Offered the chance to monetise a distribution channel that dwarfs even bit torrent, you really think the studios would choose to take their content home and sulk? Sure, they might decide long term to screw Netflix over by forming their own distribution channel, but sure term they'd still want their slice of the money pie. They might stamp their feet and make a fuss, but when it came right down to it, if Netflix had the guts to put itself on the line over this, the studios would have to give in. We've seen it before with record labels and music DRM, we'll see it again with publishers and book DRM. Netflix won't take this stance of course, like most big companies they're risk-averse, but someone else will come along and do it instead, then Netflix will either have to jump on the bandwagon or see their own pie being eaten.
Netflix won't care until it hits their bottom line. If customers cared, and avoided Netflix, citing DRM as the reason, you can bet Netflix would be in there fighting the studios every inch of the way, but for now the status quo, while probably a little more costly technically, is good enough for them. The tricky part is getting customers to care - most people only care about DRM after they've been burned by it.
It effectively already is impossible to stop someone renting the content and saving a permanent copy, with or without DRM, so why make the experience poor for your honest customers? Maybe they could try a new business model based around trust and respect - I give them my money, they trust me not to distribute my copy to everyone on the planet. Then focus on going after the people who actually profit from ripping off others (i.e. the ones selling ripped disks or ad-hosted torrent sites) instead of making all of your customers feel like criminals.
Indeed - companies always argue they need DRM because of piracy and that piracy drives up the cost of our media, yet we know from masses of evidence that any time a company successfully controls the supply of a product they will abuse the hell out of that control to drive up prices. We've seen it time and again throughout history - more control does not mean lower prices - yet they expect us to buy into DRM on vague suggestions that less piracy means lower costs.
All logically sound, but what the above doesn't take into account is how many sales they will lose as a result of DRM rather than piracy. Okay, it might not seem like a lot if a few geeks take a stance and refuse to buy, but if they tell their friends, who then write on their blogs, whose commenters then go and tweet about it... It's probably even more difficult to track sales lost this way than it is to put a figure on what piracy costs.
There are plenty of us who currently use Windows and still don't want to install Silverlight. I already have one bloated plugin for playing annoying ads installed on my system, I thought the plan was to migrate away from the likes of Flash, meanwhile MS is still trying to push us down the road of having yet another variation on this same theme installed. Well I've managed to avoid it so far (despite them pushing more and more of their own content via Silverlight, i.e. everywhere on xbox.com).
I'm not sure what you were celebrating 9 years ago, but Apple was one of the biggest distributors of DRM encumbered music until as recently as 2007, and it didn't go wholly DRM-free until 2009 (and even then, it embeds tags in the tracks to try and discourage sharing). Needless to say it's volte face came about not due to some internal benevolent decision, but primarily because it was under increasing pressure from consumers, competing DRM-free offerings and from Europe, to drop DRM - so I wouldn't be so quick to salute it as a bastion of the breach on DRM dogma.
In short, DRM is entirely ineffective. All it's doing is making it a hair more inconvenient to pirate than to buy.
If only that were true you might still be able to just about justify DRM as a means to deter casual piracy, but actually it's more likely to make it more inconvenient to buy than to pirate. Having to sit through ads/anti-copyright spam on DVDs I've paid for, or having games fail to run because the DRM decides it doesn't like my setup, or not being able to back up an expensive game disk before letting the kids loose with it, or having to jump through hoops to format or device shift music - these are all only concerns for the legitimate customer, the pirate can safely ignore them all and enjoy a truly unencumbered experience. As someone who does pay for his media, it's really frustrating to know that people are not only getting the same thing free, but that they're getting a substantially better experience in the bargain, and let me clarify that it's not the pirates I'm angry at, it's the companies. When will these big companies listen to what I - the person putting money into their pockets in the first place - want from my media, instead of chasing shadows?
Does the average person have anywhere close to 45,000 tracks on their phone or laptop? Besides, it's not like they couldn't give us the high quality and let us resize it to suit, it'd be nice to have the best quality lossless files for the home media system even if you did then encode at a much compressed rate for your PMP of choice.
People who understand the technology can predict what will happen if it goes wrong and get annoyed about that. People who don't understand the technology only get annoyed when it does go wrong. That's the only real difference. Other than that, once people understand the technology, be they geek or layman, the main response is almost universally, "why?"
It's not even close. With the 360 you have the option (choose "configure" when setting up the card) to only use part of it for the 360 storage and the rest as standard file storage (I don't know what format this is as I've not tried it but I know the option is definitely there). On top of that, the USB can still be read in a PC - I've used this method to back up my game saves before by just imaging the whole disk. Finally, the USB can be read in any 360 - the whole reason I used this is because I switch between two consoles a lot - while the phone memory is effectively locked to that phone and, if I understand correctly, can't even be used in an identical model of phone. On top of that, as you said, it's trivial to recover the USB by just reformatting.
Unless you're eating pancakes at this nice restaurant, eggs and four are probably not the "major" components of your meal. If you order a steak, what do you think accounts for most of the cost of your meal, the steak or the fries? Unless you're suggesting that the miscellaneous costs are double the major costs for this device, I think it's not unreasonable for GP to suggest they're probably making a profit, even if it's not nearly as much as the figures might suggest.
The development costs only matter if they're making a loss on each one they sell, because it will efectively mean each unit sold for non-gaming purposes takes money out of their pocket and denies them sales. If they're making a profit, as GP suggests, then each unit sold for non-gaming purposes might take games sales out of their pocket but it still makes them a profit, which goes towards paying off those development costs. So long as they don't have any kind of major supply issues, it's always going to be better to sell more units in those circumstances (unless they had plans to do stuff with this on the PC and are afraid it will cannibalise a major future revenue stream).
I thought we'd already pretty much ruled out Minority Report style interfaces for the same reason we don't have a lot of vertical touchscreen interface usage (outside of a few specialist areas): gorilla arm syndrome. It would be really cool to use this for about two minutes, and after that you'd want to throw it through the window (although I guess if you came up with a really reliable way to track the hands without them necessarily being held up towards the device you could neatly solve that, the arms could point downwards and still be used for navigation purposes).
Well you'd probably not want to network the software that controls basic motor functions in that case, and the guys in the suits can always just remove them in the worst case scenario, I guess?
Agreed. If they're not going to at least show him fighting a Big Dog, then it's just a massive wasted opportunity.
Besides, the point is it doesn't need to be the average soldier, it can be any soldier. You don't need guys trained to lift huge weights when anyone, even relatively untrained support personnel, can wear this and throw ammo crates around, it might even be a way for soldiers injured in combat to still participate in the logistics side of things, and because it's a suit and doesn't rely on the skills/strength of the wearer, you can keep it running close to 24/7 if you need to.