Bull.

Then provide a link.

Batman: Arkham Asylum had a fake leaked version that crashed at a certain point. Comments on the Assassin's Creed II torrents say it's a 7 gig document of just spaces hidden behind a passworded .rar

No it hasn't. It's not even due to come out until the second week of next month. Going by the moderation system on BTJunkie.org, any Assassin's Creed II torrents currently available are fakes.

I would love to hear an example of a company that managed to figure out exactly how much money they actually lose to piracy.

Both of our comments have something in common--they're lamenting a lack of information that is impossible to collect.

I could almost not reply to this, but I'm having fun with this conversation.

The question I'm at now is: how many extra units must a company sell in order to "break even" on DRM?

So like, if DRM for big budget Game X costs let's say $.5mil and the company makes $10 per unit sold, it would take 50,000 extra units sold to break even on DRM.

So for a high profile game that sells 1mil+ units, the cost of DRM would only represent half a percent of the profits.

Of course, this wouldn't be an option for a smaller studio that doesn't expect to sell more than 200k copies of a game. I think I read somewhere that an MMO can be successful at 50k subscribers, so I guess the lesson we can take away from this exercise in wild speculation is that for now, it's only the big boys that will be able to afford DRM. I guess that's kind of a silver lining.

I read some of your other posts in this thread and I'd like to go ahead and reply to your counterpoint about putting the CD in the CD tray being an annoyance. My TV has a remote that turns it off and on, adjusts the volume, changes the channel, etc. There are buttons on the side of my TV that do this, too, but if I'm in my chair I'm not likely to get up to change the channel--I'll use my remote.

Putting a CD in the drive when everything on that disc has already been copied to my hard drive is an unnecessary step akin to getting up to change the channel on the TV. I have all the technology necessary to live without the inconvenience and yet I'm inconvenienced anyway.

I think lost sales due to using DRM would only encompass a smaller, more savvy audience. I used to work in a game store and I can tell you, most people buy based on the box art. I couldn't count the number of times someone came up to me with "Shitty War Game" and asked, "Is this one good," to which I replied in the negative and recommended "Awesome War Game." Nine times out of ten, they'd buy the shitty one.

The tech support part is a good catch, though. I hadn't thought of that.

I'm very curious as to what those "rough estimate" figures look like.

Negative press + threat of consumer backlash/boycott + ineffectiveness to combat the problem it was meant to solve = MUST BE DOING SOMETHING RIGHT! KEEP IT UP!

...how much these companies pay to have DRM integrated into their product. Or even how much they have to pay for the DRM vs. how much it "gets them back" vs. piracy.

But I'd be really interested to see the numbers they project to lose to piracy vs. how much they're spending on DRM. It seems to me that buying the DRM would only hurt them more--it obviously does very little if anything to deter piracy. Wouldn't piracy be hurting their bottom line like this?:

Income lost to piracy = income lost to piracy + cost of DRM

It's like if you lost some jewelry down the sink so you throw more down there to clog the hole so no more can get through. Just doesn't make any damn sense.

I had a friend with four TV's, four Xboxes, four copies of Halo and sixteen controllers in his apartment who would regularly have Halo/Halo 2 throwdowns (he was a manager of a GameStop).

Countless hours playing Halo at his place later and I'm still not wowed. We all pretty well agreed, the only reason we played Halo all the time was because there wasn't anything resembling an apt suitor on Xbox. Nobody denied that PC FPS's had WAY more to offer (there's nothing Halo did except for the recharging armor that Bungie didn't steal from Half-Life).

It's a slightly-above-average FPS that just happened to drop in exactly the right place at the right time. I have more fun in 4 player L4D and L4D2 on my PC over the internets than I ever did playing Halo in the same room as my opponents.

The campaign level design was extremely lacking. Copy+paste does not good level design make. Putting another player in a co-op situation does nothing to fix the abhorrent level design.

That, and OMG everybody moves so damn slow! I can't stand it!

to append: the only reason we're even considering giving this girl the benefit of the doubt is because her work appeared in the correct venue for truth telling in that particular media--she published a book.

This is how I'm thinking of this.

Words are cheap. Especially in the world of computers where copy+paste roams free.

Music samples are not cheap, at least not in the same way. I understand, when writing books or poetry there's a process involving many people beyond the author: there's publishers and editors and publicists, oh my, but in music samples, there are oftentimes conditions that can never be repeated.

If I read some song lyrics I like, it's fairly trivial for me to copy those into a new work, but say I wanted to recreate a particular guitar riff from a certain album. Approximating that sound is going to be exceedingly difficult and probably expensive.

If all music were composed and performed in General MIDI, then I could see stealing words equated to sampling. And I guess in both cases it would still be plagiarism.

But I think that's why sampling is considered legitimate. Getting those musicians together again using the same instruments in the same condition they were in at the time of the recording, in the same humidity with the same microphones and the same mix console... You feel me? In that context, copy+paste becomes so much more powerful a tool. With creative sampling (which often involves rearranging source material to the point it's nearly unrecognizable) someone without access to expensive gear/instruments/musicians can produce new, compelling, and most importantly perhaps, PROFESSIONAL SOUNDING recordings.

Like, I'm reading Amusing Ourselves to Death at the moment and he's talking about how form has a lot to do with how truth is perceived. Examples are rhetoric in Ancient Greece, the use of the written word versus spoken testimony in a court of law. Every form of media has a kind of zeitgeist of what is an acceptable form for the transmission of truth--if the truth comes in other forms it will be ignored. For example, let's imagine someone emailed you Blinding Truth but it hit your spam filter because it was also trying to sell you Viagra.

People won't take recorded music seriously unless it "sounds" vaguely like the radio. Just like they won't take the newsletters homeless people make on the same ground as the New York Times. We look to the New York Times (an example) for truth whereas homeless people ask us for money.

I've been using Opera for some time now but I've become very attached to many of their other shortcut keys.

Most indispensable is going forward/back by holding left click and right clicking and vice versa. It's just so intuitive. I catch myself trying to use it constantly in file explorer.

That's what I want. Customizable Windows shortcut keys. Why not?

Bargain bins? For Blizzard games? Oh no-no-no-no-no, this does not happen.

Last year I wanted to pick up a copy of Warcraft III so I could play DotA with a friend of mine. The battle chest, mind you SEVEN YEARS after the game was initially released, was still $40. Amazon still lists it as $39.99 (-$5 discount).

Blizzard does not end up in the bargain bin.

I worked at EA for six months in a development position. As I was leaving, I ran into the studio lead that hired me. He asked me, "How are your hours?" (I was already in the 70's and it was Thursday). He commented, "Aw, shucks, I thought we were all done with that," before launching into a story about how every year, despite swearing he'll never do it again, he ends up in serious crunch. "Hell, just last year Paul and I were doing 110, 120 hour weeks to finish Lord of the Rings."

And so I didn't pursue extended employment at EA.

Wah, this kid tried to deliver my paper this morning and he only managed to throw it halfway up my driveway so I yelled at "MWAH! Don't you kids these days know how to throw? My infant niece can throw better than that!"

Then I went to Starbucks to get my regular drip coffee but they didn't leave enough space at the top of the cup for me to put my cream so I asked the barista, "Where the fuck am I supposed to put my cream? Are you stupid or something? How hard is it to make a cup of coffee with enough room for the cream?"

Then that night, when I didn't think things could get any worse, my wife wanted to bring me to some new steak restaurant with "new and innovative" cooking techniques. I was like, "What the fuck? You take the meat, you put it on the grill. You grill the meat, then it's cooked, then you eat it. What needs to be new or innovative about that? YOU COOK THE STEAK THEN YOU EAT IT."

So then I drowned myself in scotch and called it a night. Where do all these stupid people get off?

I was going to post this, but to expand on it, one should mention the roll off filter.

The idea behind the 44.1kHz number is the highest recorded frequency we're going to want to 20kHz, given that's typically considered the highest pitch (young) people can hear. So you end up with an extra 2.05kHz over that which is used as a roll off for the lowpass filter that's applied before encoding.

The argument for higher sample rates is that you can give the roll off filter a more gentle slope (or eliminate it completely if you're working at >~60kHz or whatever double the highest recorded frequency your physical gear/transducers can handle is). The gentler slope creates much less harmonic distortion than the steep 2.05kHz slope. Consider a 48Khz signal. Now I have double the rolloff space--4kHz. 48kHz sounds better than 44.1kHz not because it's recording more high pitched frequencies and that's what we're hearing, but because the low pass filter that's applied to prevent Nyquist foldover distortion has a more gentle slope which in turn creates less harmonic distortion in the passband.

This is the kind of shit the fascinates me. Get me started about noise-shaped dithering sometime.