Comment Re:First Collisions? (Score 1) 324
Better late than never?
Read what he posted, the resellers are able to sell it cheaper because they buy keys from a different region of the world where the game is actually priced cheaper than it is in his native country. This is not illegal, as long as you abide by the tax laws in your country importing is perfectly legitimate.
It may not be illegal like killing is illegal, but distributing software between regions is either copyright infringement (unauthorized software distribution) or at minimum an EULA violation. Part of Steam's DRM is policy enforcement. If you hack, your entire steam account may be disabled. If you have a game installed that you shouldn't have (say you have multiple Steam accounts with different games) it won't let you play those games -- even though they're installed.
What Valve don't like is the fact he has bought it cheaper because he worked around their price fixing mechanism that aims to squeeze as much money out of people in different parts of the world as possible.
That is exactly it. But realize that different markets have different pricing. Sometimes software may be cheap (or free!) but you could incur nominal per-minute playtime charges. In a different region the software may be $49 and incur no playtime charges. Whether that is for economic, cultural, or legal reasons doesn't matter -- they have no interest in letting you game the system.
Let's say you are a mechanic. You charge $1,000 to fix things, then offer free, unlimited, lifetime support. Other mechanics, however, offer free parts but charge labor. A crafty consumer may try to get free parts, then switch "regions" and get free labor. Can you see why mechanics might not feel it is your right to do that-- even if you feel that by not letting you do it they are unfairly squeezing as much money out of you as possible?
Note that this would effect you identically if you for example bought a copy cheaper whilst in Asia on holiday and took it home to play in say the UK or US where it's more expensive.
Or bought a DVD in Asia and tried to play it somewhere else? It's copyright infringement when you do it for DVDs too.
They are basically creating their own additional import laws outside of those already imposed by the country into which he is importing goods. It is similar in a way to DVD region encoding, which was used to try and block people in Europe getting films early because they were released 6 months earlier in the US, and also getting them cheaper because the US prices were lower than European prices for example.
Or how software is cheaper for educational users, even though 1 block away is a corporation needing the same software but has to pay more! Why does the geographical boundary exist? Why can't the corporation buy the educational version at a discount, then use the cheaper software instead?
If Microsoft modified Windows 7 64-bit edition to BAN support for AMD 64-bit processors, and therefore encourage users to utilize only Microsoft Approved or Microsoft Manufactured hardware that utilizes Intel microprocessors.
Microsoft would be in court, at the wrong side of a lawsuit, pretty fast...
Are you really implying that Microsoft, a confirmed monopoly, would get sued for... not expanding their monopoly as much as possible? I think that if Microsoft stopped supporting AMD 64-bit processors they might see less court time. As a matter of fact, if they stopped supporting Intel 64-bit processors too, you could say they don't have a monopoly at all! (for 64-bit platforms anyway)
When companies decide not to support something, it is a cost decision. In this case Apple has no economic reason to support hardware they don't produce. Maybe Apple intentionally broke support, maybe they simply introduced optimizations that work on their hardware but cause problems on other hardware. Maybe they don't test unsupported hardware to know there was a problem, and maybe they do know but simply don't care. However it worked it out, they have the right to support, or not support, whatever hardware they wish.
Likewise, if Microsoft decides to stop supporting certain hardware, that's fine too. Virtual PC stopped supporting Linux when Microsoft acquired it. All that did was help move people to VMWare and other products. If it's more economic for Apple to require people to move to Windows/Linux/whatever on non-Apple hardware rather than letting them using OS-X, well that sounds like fair game to me. You don't buy the OS-X software, you lease it. Use of the software is governed by the EULA. Those users had no right to use it anyway.
Apple is making a statement. Perhaps they are saying that the software cost, assuming those users actually buy OS-X, isn't significant. Maybe Apple loses money overall on the software and rely on hardware sales for profit? Perhaps Apple does make money from the software, but it doesn't cover the cost of maintaining unsupported configurations due to the additional development time? Perhaps none of the above is true, and they simply want to push their brand of "it just works," and to keep the brand value high -- which to them is worth more than allowing flaky computers out there giving their OS a bad name. Because, in the end, it doesn't matter if you think the other processors work "just fine" or not. And having Atom support removed, if it was in fact deliberately removed, may have little to do with whether the Atom processors work "just fine" or not.
Unless you're a share-holder, your opinion probably doesn't matter much. If you are a share-holder, realize that their decision was made with the intention of making you more money, not bringing world peace (or whatever other values you think they should make their decisions on).
Be sure to get a disk notcher so that you can use both sides of the disk. Also... get off my lawn.
It's not illegal to make Gold. It's not illegal to Give Gold. It's not illegal to Give real Money to someone else.
But somewhere along the way, selling Gold online becomes illegal.
Since you're focusing on Blizzard rather than on China let me correct you -- It's not illegal. You will not get arrested for doing it. It's against the terms of service, the rules you abide by to be able to play the game. If you come over to my house you must take off your shoes before using the hot tub. Those are my terms of service and if you break them I have the right to kick you out of my hot-tub or off of my property. But you won't get arrested.
If Blizzard was smart - they'd offer Gold at a price matching the market and get a cut on this. They've already ruined WoW four times over. Anyone who's played since the beginning can tell you how much more enjoyable it used to be.
Grinding gold to pay for repairs isn't fun. For casual gamers that wanted to see "end-game" they often bought gold to pay for their repairs. Certain aspects were certainly more fun, but the gold-centric aspects of the game were not.
Blizz did address it somewhat in the first x-pac. No more buying Golden Pearls to make that epic cloth item -- now you can simply run an instance and get the crafting material you need (as a drop) to craft your item. Now that those drops are no longer BoP the items have become much more of a commodity and the prices are reasonable due to sellers having competition in the auction house.
The change from making the crafting materials for epic items BoE also means that you don't have to grind instances for materials. Making gold is very easy (doing dailies nets about 400g per day) allowing you to obtain the item any way you want.
Now there are probably a few reasons Blizzard doesn't want gold selling:
1. Gold farmers were always quite annoying. Killing/camping quest mobs and such. Often they would cooperate on differing factions so that one would always be close to harass you (train mobs onto you, use a scroll (or whatever tricks they have to put you into combat also) then vanish.
2. They want you to play the game. To have gold allow you to buy something that it might take months to "earn" in-game is frustrating to those abiding by the ToS. A hint that perhaps the game should be more fun and less of a grind, but Blizz has an interest in keeping things balanced for those following the rules.
3. There are probably legal considerations for brokering (laundering) real money relatively anonymously.
4. People are giving out their account information to get powerleveled and to buy gold. Yes, to buy gold that could be sent in-game. People are getting hacked, messages posted on the forums (often pointing to malicious sites) to hack innocent people, etc.
There are plenty of boring parts of WoW that feel like a grind, which was the reason I stopped playing. However gold has lost its value. From Blizzard's perspective there simply is not a good reason for allowing it, and plenty of good reasons for not allowing it.
There's nothing wrong with making your own patch cables, and it could potentially save you big bucks (compared with buying a $35 patch cable at a local store). However if it's not done right you will kick yourself down the road -- or more likely blame the network electronics, server, network cards, or whatever you normally blame.
For those of us who are not so familiar with the data loss issues surrounding EXT4, can someone please explain this? The first question that came to mind when I read that is "why would the average application need to concern itself with filesystem details?" I.e. if I ask OpenOffice to save a file, it should do that the exact same way whether I ask it to save that file to an ext2 partition, an ext3 partition, a reiserfs partition, etc. What would make ext4 an exception? Isn't abstraction of lower-level filesystem details a good thing?
If you're old enough to remember back to how RAM above 640k was used in the DOS days, it was usually a RAM disk or disk cache (SmartDrv.exe). If you enabled write caching on SmartDrv.exe performance went way up, but of course you could lose data if you hit the RESET button before it had flushed.
... skip ahead a few years
Modern operating systems automatically cache data because it increases performance. Specifics of the size of the write cache and length of time before it's written to disk may vary, and each filesystem will have its own defaults.
EXT3 defaulted to committing data to disk after a maximum of 5 seconds. EXT4 increases that time to 150 seconds. (The exact numbers vary a bit, but you get the idea). Bottom line: When there is a system crash with EXT4 you notice losing data more often because there is a larger window of when data can get lost.
This is a very basic overview, but there are two groups weighing in on this:
Group 1: Things break under EXT4 that worked under EXT3!
Group 2: Look pal, it works fine. If you want your data committed right away so that you don't lose data maybe you should be calling fsync() so that the OS knows to commit your data? Because you know what, even with EXT3 you have data loss. It becomes more noticable with EXT4 because of the longer cache times, but the problem always existed!
Group 1: It worked before! And if commit our data immediately peformance drops!
Group 2: It didn't really work before, in laptop mode the EXT3 write time increases to 30 seconds. The problem has always existed! If you don't like taking the performance hit of committing data immediately, perhaps you shouldn't be writing so many tiny files so often!
Group 1: But it worked before! EXT4 is broken!
Group 2: Okay, look. You're obviously not listening. Why don't we make EXT4 behave more like EXT3 and do some auto-commits. Poorly coded applications will not lose data as often, and properly coded applications will not perform as well as they could.
Group 1: I'm taking this to Slashdot. EXT4 is teh suxx0rz!
Group 2: *sigh*
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!