Personally I think Apple has it wrong. I'm subscribed to Listen.com. I get access to 20000 CDs, no downloads, all streaming (well, it downloads the song it's going to play next but it doesn't save it).
I pay $10 a month and can listen to over 200,000 songs. I listen to new music everyday. If I was instead on Apple's system I'd have to spend about $200 for 15-20 CDs of music and then that's all I could listen to without having to spend more and more money.
I know that this approach doesn't work for everybody but as a programmer I'm in front of my computer at work 6-10 hours a day. My computer at home is connected to my stereo so when I'm at home I log in, select a few CDs from Listen.com or a playlist or one of their playlists and go.
Sure, I **might** like to fill an iPod with music but the truth is I really don't have much of a need for an iPod. I'm either at the computer at work, at home or in my car, places I don't need an iPod. Almost any other time I'm not doing something where an iPod would come in handy. And, even if I was it wouldn't be the majority of my music time.
Oh, I suppose I should have made it a real link so click here to see them (Flash required). At the bottom, click the Java button, then above it click "2" to see shots of Ridge Racer and Intelligent Cube running on it.
It's also got a 1megapixel camera and a 320x240 display (double most phones)
Here in Japan, Massive Attack's latest release was DRMed. I don't know if it was in the states.
The funny thing is, in Japan, your can rent music. In fact Tsutaya, the Blockbuster video of Japan, rents music (CD) at all their stores and even crazier, they sell black CDs and MDs at the counter!:-p
Pachinko is GAMBLING!!! I have friends that make there living playing off the money they make playing pachinko 8 to 10 hours a day.
You buy some balls, you put them in the machine, when you are done you cash the balls out. If you end up with more balls then you started you are ahead.
The funny thing is, gambling is illegal in Japan. They way they get around it is the pachinko place pays you in prizes, kind of like trading in tickets from skeetball. BUT, then, you take your prizes around to the back of the building (or usually the building next door). There is a little window that looks like a bank teller window. You *sell* your prizes to them for cash. The windows are of course run by the pachinko parlors. The police all know it but nobody really cares so they look the other way.
It's not hard to understand that GAMBLING is popular. Just go to any city where it's legal and see all the people doing it.
Not just alot is about porn. 98% of it is about porn. Which is arguably why the companies look the other way. They can't themselves put out the porn since the general public would get upset. So if they can't put it out, it doesn't hurt them.
The question is, when is it okay and when is it not? Sure, it's sounds and nice and warm and fuzzy when a Japanese company lets their fans make and sell dojinshi. But if one of those Dojinshi ever sells a million + copies I think they would stop ignoring it.
We all seem to agree it's okay for jill fan to make a small fan story about Lord of the Rings. In Japan it appears to be okay for her to sell a few hundred copies. So, is it okay for Disney then to start making a Lords of the Rings animated series without permission and without paying? If not, why? Explain your reasoning? When is it just fan stuff and when is it wrong? Should Sony be able to make a Mario game?
You do not pay for content for most newspapers. Advertising pays for the content. That's why the paper is only 25 cents a day or less. The only exception is highly specialized newspapers of which there are very few.
They are called Call Boxes. They are lined up down the freeway in bright yellow boxes with a sign. They are for emergency use only. Maybe that's all we need anymore.
I come from the game industry so maybe my opinion is skewed but: Although many packages are good, a few packages are more likely to get you a job in the 3D industry all other things being equal.
Those packages are #1 Maya, #2 Softimage or Softimage XSI and for games in the U.S., 3DS Max.
Lightwave is, for all intents and purposes, not used and neither is pretty much any other package (yes, I'm sure you can find 1 or 2 developers out there using something else...that's my point. It's 1 or 2)
Of course I said "all other things being equal". The most important thing is that you do impressive work. The better your work the more likely you are to get hired.
But, if you work is most likely going to be somewhat average, which 98% of all submissions I've seen are, then next in the list is "does this guy have experience using the tools we use?" Those tools are not Lightwave, they are not Electric ?!?!? whatever, they are not Blender or Shade or.... So, as Maya is the only of the big 3 that's currently on the Mac that's my recommendation. Learn Maya
We all know that Sony will be #1 this Christmas. It should be clear that XBox will be #3. Why? Because the one possible AAA title mentioned above is not going to come close to the demand for The Legend of Zelda or Metroid Prime. Two of the most anticipated games ever in the history of games. That means there is no way in hell XBox can beat Gamecube this Christmas.
I have all 3 so I don't care which one wins. I just want to play the best games. This Christmas it's clear they will not be on XBox. Maybe next year.
While the creation of tools and level editors makes it possible for fans to make new levels, making a REAL GAME requires 15 to 40 people working 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week, for 1 to 2 years!!!!!! Even if you have NO programmers.
All the 3d models, textures, effects, cutscenes, animations, sound effects, scripting, etc all take massive ammounts of time for the majority of games. Sure you can whip out another level for Quake by reusing someone else's graphics. That's fine, it's fun, you get some more game play but that's not what sells. What sells, with few exceptions, are the games that took major resources to make. The fans or 4th party, generally do not have the required time to put in.
You only have to look on the net. There are over 300+ 3D engine/game engines out there. There are very few complete total conversions of any games including all cutscenes and dialog etc. The reason is a game engine can be made in a couple of months by one or two people. The content for the game can't.
That's why even though you can get cheap 3D software and video cameras there is no fan made Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, etc (that are any good) because they require too much work and therefore too much time and money for people not doing it for a living to do.
I agree that at some point we may have replicators which will take the same arguments to the design of phyiscal objects instead of just information.
I don't how ever agree that "creative types" will not just sit on their ass. It's easy to see people making small individual contributions to open source projects, web pages, and music. It's quite another to get 40 people to work 70 hours a day for 2 years to make Metal Gear Solid 2 or 300 people 70 hours a day for 4 months to make Minority Report. 250 of those 300 people are only doing it because they need the paycheck. If there was no more monitary incentive although a few individuals would still put in crazy hours for their "art", getting a group of 40+ people to do it for long periods of time would be nearly impossible.
On top of that, even if all phyiscal items become non-scarce there are other scarce things.
Land for example. There's only so much beach front property, not enough to go around, there are only so many penthouses or secluded islands. That means there will still need to be someway to decide who gets *the good stuff*. Typically that is through money. That means that the Star Trek vision WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
Let's take the opposite side. Assume that you did own all ideas you came up with on your own time even if they are related to your work.
Great, so now every employee will do his best to NOT think while working. That way, any solutions or ideas he comes up with will be his and he'll charge the company extra.
Company: Your next job is to optimize our backend system
You: Okay.
So, you read/. till 6pm, then you think about a solution. The next day:
You: I have a solution but I came up with it after company hours therefore it's mine and you're going to have to pay me extra for it.
Hopefully you can all see this would be incredibly unworkable. The company would never own anything, they'd be paying you for nothing because you could claim every idea you ever had was thought of outside work "The solution came to me in a dream". "I was taking a shower and I thought this up". "During lunch I was talking about this with Joe and we both came up this this solution".
Also, just fyi, but by federal law, salaried employeed do not have fixed hours. The assumption is that being salaried you are a professional and will get the job done on time but in your own way. Having no fixed hours could also be a way of saying that in effect, you are always working. They pay you $50K, $100K, $150K a year for your ideas.
Of course you can sign something that lets you keep your ideas. Fortunately my bosses todate have been cool with that. I program games, I wanted to make a small shareware product on my own time, I asked for permission just to be safe, got it (in writing).
It is part of a bluetooth based home automation system. Push a button, Junior's location appears on a map. (of course the tracking device does not use bluetooth)
Of course it might be nice to have some minimal format that is transferable. Currently the minial format is too minimal (DXF).
The problem is there is an infinite way of making/generating 3D data and no standard can cover them.
3DS Max has 2 ways to make a sphere. One is the Lattitude-Longitude way, the other is the geodesic dome way. Maya only has one of those ways so if I save the file to that format it will be lost.
This is just one example. Some products have cloth, some have meta-balls, some have nerbs, some have only b-splines, some have subdivision serfaces, some of displayment maps, some support multple UVs and color sets per vertex...etc,etc,etc Some support lambert and phong, others support blinn and ansiotropic. Some have 10 procedural textures. Others have 30.
No "standard" format will cover any of that since each year a bunch of new ways of generating them from different sets of inputs comes out.
The best you can hope for is a low-level format (polygons only, basic materials, and textures, simple hierarchy, possibly very simple animation) But, you lose all the info that made your model easy to use in one package (constraints, expressions, effects, etc)
Those format already exists. VRML, the.X format from DirectX, etc. The issue is getting each package to support them. Maya and Max and XSI all export.X. Unfortunately none of them import. If they did this would already be a non-issue.
What about the idea that it's not MY money. If we are going to get married then it really is OUR money or OUR debt.
I had this experience. As it happened I got a engaged just about the time I got a bonus. Before I met her my plan was to pay off my credit card debt with that bonus. Instead I bought her the ring. So, she got the ring but she also got no spending money for several months while WE paid it off.
I can't say we would still be together if I had not bought the ring but I can say we would have gone out to dinner and other activities alot more if we had had the money instead of the ring.
A good thing not a threat
on
The Mod Squad
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· Score: 1
I only see good things from the ability to make mods. I suppose on some small level it's competition for the commerical developers but generally, depending on the game, it's not likely that mods will stack up to the commerical game for the shear reason of resources. That's not to say there will not be some great mods. There will/are. But, it's just like the movies, Just because anybody can buy a video camera, edit video on their PC and make 3D graphics on their PC does not mean that everybody can make the next T2, Gladiator, Jurassic Park or Star Wars. It's not just about ability it about time and money. To make one of those movies generally requires hundreds of people to work FULL time, 8 to 12 hours a day for several months. That's not generally the kind of work you can get out of people AFTER their day job. The same is true of games. Metal Gear Solid 2, 40 people full time 2 years. Jak and Daxter, 30 people full time 2 years. Halo I'm sure is the same.
It might take an hour or two to make a new Q3 Arena using pre-made parts but it takes thousands of hours of work to make a truly new game with new enemies, weapons, geometry, textures, dialog, music, sound effects, cut scenes, etc.
When you go to the doctor what are you paying for? He doesn't give you anything PHYSICAL. When you call a plumber to come over what do you pay him for? He also is unlikely to give you anything PHYSICAL unless you consider his $200 bill for 1 ft of lead pipe to be a bargin.
When you steal software you STEAL LABOR!!!!
If some guy/group/company spends 2000 hours making a piece of software they want/need at least 2000 hours of money to make the worth while.
2000 hours = 1 man year FYI.
There are a few ways to do this
What's resonable amount of money for 1 hour of labor? You pay the plumber $50 an hour? You pay the doctor like $600 an hour. Programmers in America get on average about $35 an hour ($35 = $70K a year)
2000 * 35 = $70K so if you want his piece of software you pay $70K and it's yours. The problem is most people can't afford $70K so instead he decides to charge $500 and hope he can sell at least 140 copies. Except that Joe Asshole Warez Pirate borrows a copy and puts it on the net and now no one needs to buy a copy since they can STEAL IT FOR FREE even thought they didn't PAY FOR THE LABOR HE PROVIDED.
Stealing an APPLE or a CAR is EXACTLY LIKE stealing software. Why? Why is an apple 50 cents? Is there 50 cents of material in an apple? NO! There's 50 cents of LABOR to get that apple to you. That 50 cents covers the LABOR to get water to the apple to grow it, LABOR to pick it. LABOR to wash it. LABOR to get it near you. etc etc. The APPLE itsself was FREE, picked off a tree provided by Mother Nature.
The big thing in Japan through J-Phone is not video conferencing it's video e-mail. Take a short 5 or 10 second video of you blowing a kiss to your girlfriend and e-mail it from your phone to her's. I'm not sure how popular sending this video e-mail is but sending just still pictures is huge.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out this guy
http://come.to/6955
He does performances using several gameboys wired to some custom equipment
Personally I think Apple has it wrong. I'm subscribed to Listen.com. I get access to 20000 CDs, no downloads, all streaming (well, it downloads the song it's going to play next but it doesn't save it).
I pay $10 a month and can listen to over 200,000 songs. I listen to new music everyday. If I was instead on Apple's system I'd have to spend about $200 for 15-20 CDs of music and then that's all I could listen to without having to spend more and more money.
I know that this approach doesn't work for everybody but as a programmer I'm in front of my computer at work 6-10 hours a day. My computer at home is connected to my stereo so when I'm at home I log in, select a few CDs from Listen.com or a playlist or one of their playlists and go.
Sure, I **might** like to fill an iPod with music but the truth is I really don't have much of a need for an iPod. I'm either at the computer at work, at home or in my car, places I don't need an iPod. Almost any other time I'm not doing something where an iPod would come in handy. And, even if I was it wouldn't be the majority of my music time.
Oh, I suppose I should have made it a real link so click here to see them (Flash required). At the bottom, click the Java button, then above it click "2" to see shots of Ridge Racer and Intelligent Cube running on it.
It's also got a 1megapixel camera and a 320x240 display (double most phones)
http://www.j-phone.com/JSH53/sh53.html
Okay, Ported playstation games but they have quiet a few companies porting their older PS1 titles to it including Sega and Namco.
Missing from that list is the 12Mbps ADSL in Japan and the 24Mbps ADSL in Korea
Here in Japan, Massive Attack's latest release was DRMed. I don't know if it was in the states.
:-p
The funny thing is, in Japan, your can rent music. In fact Tsutaya, the Blockbuster video of Japan, rents music (CD) at all their stores and even crazier, they sell black CDs and MDs at the counter!
Here in Japan, 80% of the country has access fiber to the door and 100Mbps connections for under $40 a month.
And we have video on demand over ip.
House of the Dead 3 from Sega, the Arcade version, runs on XBox hardware. It's already in game centers in Japan. Has been for a few months.
Pachinko is GAMBLING!!! I have friends that make there living playing off the money they make playing pachinko 8 to 10 hours a day.
You buy some balls, you put them in the machine, when you are done you cash the balls out. If you end up with more balls then you started you are ahead.
The funny thing is, gambling is illegal in Japan. They way they get around it is the pachinko place pays you in prizes, kind of like trading in tickets from skeetball. BUT, then, you take your prizes around to the back of the building (or usually the building next door). There is a little window that looks like a bank teller window. You *sell* your prizes to them for cash. The windows are of course run by the pachinko parlors. The police all know it but nobody really cares so they look the other way.
It's not hard to understand that GAMBLING is popular. Just go to any city where it's legal and see all the people doing it.
Not just alot is about porn. 98% of it is about porn. Which is arguably why the companies look the other way. They can't themselves put out the porn since the general public would get upset. So if they can't put it out, it doesn't hurt them.
The question is, when is it okay and when is it not? Sure, it's sounds and nice and warm and fuzzy when a Japanese company lets their fans make and sell dojinshi. But if one of those Dojinshi ever sells a million + copies I think they would stop ignoring it.
We all seem to agree it's okay for jill fan to make a small fan story about Lord of the Rings. In Japan it appears to be okay for her to sell a few hundred copies. So, is it okay for Disney then to start making a Lords of the Rings animated series without permission and without paying? If not, why? Explain your reasoning? When is it just fan stuff and when is it wrong? Should Sony be able to make a Mario game?
You do not pay for content for most newspapers. Advertising pays for the content. That's why the paper is only 25 cents a day or less. The only exception is highly specialized newspapers of which there are very few.
They are called Call Boxes. They are lined up down the freeway in bright yellow boxes with a sign. They are for emergency use only. Maybe that's all we need anymore.
I come from the game industry so maybe my opinion is skewed but: Although many packages are good, a few packages are more likely to get you a job in the 3D industry all other things being equal.
.... So, as Maya is the only of the big 3 that's currently on the Mac that's my recommendation. Learn Maya
Those packages are #1 Maya, #2 Softimage or Softimage XSI and for games in the U.S., 3DS Max.
Lightwave is, for all intents and purposes, not used and neither is pretty much any other package (yes, I'm sure you can find 1 or 2 developers out there using something else...that's my point. It's 1 or 2)
Of course I said "all other things being equal". The most important thing is that you do impressive work. The better your work the more likely you are to get hired.
But, if you work is most likely going to be somewhat average, which 98% of all submissions I've seen are, then next in the list is "does this guy have experience using the tools we use?" Those tools are not Lightwave, they are not Electric ?!?!? whatever, they are not Blender or Shade or
That makes perfect sense since RMS is just like Sauron. GPL:One license to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. ;-(
We all know that Sony will be #1 this Christmas. It should be clear that XBox will be #3. Why? Because the one possible AAA title mentioned above is not going to come close to the demand for The Legend of Zelda or Metroid Prime. Two of the most anticipated games ever in the history of games. That means there is no way in hell XBox can beat Gamecube this Christmas.
I have all 3 so I don't care which one wins. I just want to play the best games. This Christmas it's clear they will not be on XBox. Maybe next year.
While the creation of tools and level editors makes it possible for fans to make new levels, making a REAL GAME requires 15 to 40 people working 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week, for 1 to 2 years!!!!!! Even if you have NO programmers.
All the 3d models, textures, effects, cutscenes, animations, sound effects, scripting, etc all take massive ammounts of time for the majority of games. Sure you can whip out another level for Quake by reusing someone else's graphics. That's fine, it's fun, you get some more game play but that's not what sells. What sells, with few exceptions, are the games that took major resources to make. The fans or 4th party, generally do not have the required time to put in.
You only have to look on the net. There are over 300+ 3D engine/game engines out there. There are very few complete total conversions of any games including all cutscenes and dialog etc. The reason is a game engine can be made in a couple of months by one or two people. The content for the game can't.
That's why even though you can get cheap 3D software and video cameras there is no fan made Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the Rings, etc (that are any good) because they require too much work and therefore too much time and money for people not doing it for a living to do.
I agree that at some point we may have replicators which will take the same arguments to the design of phyiscal objects instead of just information.
I don't how ever agree that "creative types" will not just sit on their ass. It's easy to see people making small individual contributions to open source projects, web pages, and music. It's quite another to get 40 people to work 70 hours a day for 2 years to make Metal Gear Solid 2 or 300 people 70 hours a day for 4 months to make Minority Report. 250 of those 300 people are only doing it because they need the paycheck. If there was no more monitary incentive although a few individuals would still put in crazy hours for their "art", getting a group of 40+ people to do it for long periods of time would be nearly impossible.
On top of that, even if all phyiscal items become non-scarce there are other scarce things.
Land for example. There's only so much beach front property, not enough to go around, there are only so many penthouses or secluded islands. That means there will still need to be someway to decide who gets *the good stuff*. Typically that is through money. That means that the Star Trek vision WILL NEVER HAPPEN.
Let's take the opposite side. Assume that you did own all ideas you came up with on your own time even if they are related to your work.
/. till 6pm, then you think about a solution. The next day:
Great, so now every employee will do his best to NOT think while working. That way, any solutions or ideas he comes up with will be his and he'll charge the company extra.
Company: Your next job is to optimize our backend system
You: Okay.
So, you read
You: I have a solution but I came up with it after company hours therefore it's mine and you're going to have to pay me extra for it.
Hopefully you can all see this would be incredibly unworkable. The company would never own anything, they'd be paying you for nothing because you could claim every idea you ever had was thought of outside work "The solution came to me in a dream". "I was taking a shower and I thought this up". "During lunch I was talking about this with Joe and we both came up this this solution".
Also, just fyi, but by federal law, salaried employeed do not have fixed hours. The assumption is that being salaried you are a professional and will get the job done on time but in your own way. Having no fixed hours could also be a way of saying that in effect, you are always working. They pay you $50K, $100K, $150K a year for your ideas.
Of course you can sign something that lets you keep your ideas. Fortunately my bosses todate have been cool with that. I program games, I wanted to make a small shareware product on my own time, I asked for permission just to be safe, got it (in writing).
It is part of a bluetooth based home automation system. Push a button, Junior's location appears on a map. (of course the tracking device does not use bluetooth)
Of course it might be nice to have some minimal format that is transferable. Currently the minial format is too minimal (DXF).
.X format from DirectX, etc. The issue is getting each package to support them. Maya and Max and XSI all export .X. Unfortunately none of them import. If they did this would already be a non-issue.
The problem is there is an infinite way of making/generating 3D data and no standard can cover them.
3DS Max has 2 ways to make a sphere. One is the Lattitude-Longitude way, the other is the geodesic dome way. Maya only has one of those ways so if I save the file to that format it will be lost.
This is just one example. Some products have cloth, some have meta-balls, some have nerbs, some have only b-splines, some have subdivision serfaces, some of displayment maps, some support multple UVs and color sets per vertex...etc,etc,etc Some support lambert and phong, others support blinn and ansiotropic. Some have 10 procedural textures. Others have 30.
No "standard" format will cover any of that since each year a bunch of new ways of generating them from different sets of inputs comes out.
The best you can hope for is a low-level format (polygons only, basic materials, and textures, simple hierarchy, possibly very simple animation) But, you lose all the info that made your model easy to use in one package (constraints, expressions, effects, etc)
Those format already exists. VRML, the
Since you are a chick,...
What about the idea that it's not MY money. If we are going to get married then it really is OUR money or OUR debt.
I had this experience. As it happened I got a engaged just about the time I got a bonus. Before I met her my plan was to pay off my credit card debt with that bonus. Instead I bought her the ring. So, she got the ring but she also got no spending money for several months while WE paid it off.
I can't say we would still be together if I had not bought the ring but I can say we would have gone out to dinner and other activities alot more if we had had the money instead of the ring.
I only see good things from the ability to make mods. I suppose on some small level it's competition for the commerical developers but generally, depending on the game, it's not likely that mods will stack up to the commerical game for the shear reason of resources. That's not to say there will not be some great mods. There will/are. But, it's just like the movies, Just because anybody can buy a video camera, edit video on their PC and make 3D graphics on their PC does not mean that everybody can make the next T2, Gladiator, Jurassic Park or Star Wars. It's not just about ability it about time and money. To make one of those movies generally requires hundreds of people to work FULL time, 8 to 12 hours a day for several months. That's not generally the kind of work you can get out of people AFTER their day job. The same is true of games. Metal Gear Solid 2, 40 people full time 2 years. Jak and Daxter, 30 people full time 2 years. Halo I'm sure is the same.
It might take an hour or two to make a new Q3 Arena using pre-made parts but it takes thousands of hours of work to make a truly new game with new enemies, weapons, geometry, textures, dialog, music, sound effects, cut scenes, etc.
When you go to the doctor what are you paying for? He doesn't give you anything PHYSICAL. When you call a plumber to come over what do you pay him for? He also is unlikely to give you anything PHYSICAL unless you consider his $200 bill for 1 ft of lead pipe to be a bargin.
When you steal software you STEAL LABOR!!!!
If some guy/group/company spends 2000 hours making a piece of software they want/need at least 2000 hours of money to make the worth while.
2000 hours = 1 man year FYI.
There are a few ways to do this
What's resonable amount of money for 1 hour of labor? You pay the plumber $50 an hour? You pay the doctor like $600 an hour. Programmers in America get on average about $35 an hour ($35 = $70K a year)
2000 * 35 = $70K so if you want his piece of software you pay $70K and it's yours. The problem is most people can't afford $70K so instead he decides to charge $500 and hope he can sell at least 140 copies. Except that Joe Asshole Warez Pirate borrows a copy and puts it on the net and now no one needs to buy a copy since they can STEAL IT FOR FREE even thought they didn't PAY FOR THE LABOR HE PROVIDED.
Stealing an APPLE or a CAR is EXACTLY LIKE stealing software. Why? Why is an apple 50 cents? Is there 50 cents of material in an apple? NO! There's 50 cents of LABOR to get that apple to you. That 50 cents covers the LABOR to get water to the apple to grow it, LABOR to pick it. LABOR to wash it. LABOR to get it near you. etc etc. The APPLE itsself was FREE, picked off a tree provided by Mother Nature.
The big thing in Japan through J-Phone is not video conferencing it's video e-mail. Take a short 5 or 10 second video of you blowing a kiss to your girlfriend and e-mail it from your phone to her's. I'm not sure how popular sending this video e-mail is but sending just still pictures is huge.