Maes
I like big butts!
Posts: 7955
Registered: 07-06 |
Csonicgo said:
It's not that what theyr'e doing is illegal, it's just really dickish. I mean, really, making people pay again for data on a disc they bought
Well, Windows Vista and 7 also contain all possible editions on the same disc and all discs are functionally identical, only a software-activated key will determine whether you'll "get" Home, Basic, Ultimate etc.
I know, it sounds outrageous to be locked out of something that you PHYSICALLY OWN and somehow being told that yeah, there's more than meets the eye in there but you are not supposed to unlock it lest getting the whole fucking DMCA and RIAA on your ass, but it's part of the future marketing model, get used to it.
Pretty much like you're not supposed to get rid of UOPs and regional lockouts on DVD, or unlock the disabled pipelines on your GPU or overclock your Pentium 166 CPU that is actually just the same at the 200 model, but it's yet another thing that's done for the manufacturers' and distributors' convenience, not the final users'. And it's something that has become a frequent reality only with the advent of digital technology, where the physical production costs between a budget, a mediocre and a superb product are virtually eliminated and only the "spirit" or software, makes a difference anymore.
An extreme example of this would be selling a car range that includes city car and supercar class-performance models, with major differences in pricing, yet mechanically all being exactly the same under the hood, with only software differences: sooner or later everybody and the cat would like to "unlock" or "unfuck" it. The only thing the manufacturer can do is to build in some extreme tamper resistance, resort to "intellectual property" laws, or both.
The same thing had happened with the first-gen Pentiums: they were exactly the same chip, process and design across a frequency range than spawned 100-233 MHz and price ratios of upwards to 5:1 between high-end and low-end. Naturally, certain folk got a bit mad when they learned that ALL Pentiums came from the same "assembly line" and furthermore than lower-frequency ones were actually "less than perfect" higher-frequency ones.
E.J. said:
I can envision a day in the future where video games are an online distribution only. Where you don't "own" the games, but have a "subscription" to them.
That's what happened in arcades for decades, and that's what services like OnLive try to accomplish: effective gamer/user and hardware/software separation and once you stop playing, there's nothing left of the game except for what you can remember of it.
Last edited by Maes on 03-22-10 at 13:32
|
03-15-10 22:17 
