So what? Every state/district/neighborhood deserves to have people fighting for it. The USA is such a large stretch of land with such a diverse bunch of people/communities, that for many problems there isn't just one solution that's "best for the country."
Also they can always leave themselves the option of going back to 3rd party ARM chips or whatever the new big thing is if they fall too far behind with their own efforts. If they keep this option in mind as they move forward, they can certainly leave themselves in a position where doing so isn't even particularly difficult or painful. They've made some serious architecture switches with the Mac platform already, they know how to handle that sort of thing.
Actually he talked at length about that exact phenomena in the linked article.
He maybe didn't make the distinction between whether to blame the developers or the marketers, but from the consumer's point of view it doesn't really matter how it got screwed up or who's fault it is, they don't want to pay money for a bad game.
But the whole point of the "Birdmen" article is about how developers/publishers/marketing/whoever have taken the wrong lesson from Nintendo's success, thinking that what people want is a game that treats them like a stupid kid, when what they really want is a game that doesn't require a serious time investment just to start to get comfortable with the gameplay.
I'm sorry to hear that you're blind, as that's the only way that I can figure that you don't see graphical improvements. Having put plenty of hours into the 90's NBA Jam, I think that this new version appears to have the perfect blend of realism and cartoon-ish feel to really fit what I expect.
Of course the gameplay is basically the same. It wouldn't be NBA Jam if it wasn't. While innovation is great and all, there's certainly something to be said for taking a successful formula, and giving it a little update from time to time.
That's not always true. While one instance certainly isn't enough data to completely explore and explain a phenomena, it can certainly establish that said phenomena exists.
And it's not like we're talking about a data-set of one plane canceling a flight. We're talking about a couple of days, and tens of thousands of flights, all across a big stretch of the planet. That's more than just an anecdote.
Unless they're just remaking the exact same game with more colorful graphics, I think you can fairly say that it's pretty much a brand new game. I imagine that the characters will only be similar to the original characters in very basic ways, and the gameplay will likely be far more similar to other franchises out there than it is to the original Kid Icarus.
I think most people can agree that there are some Android phones that equal and even surpass the iPhone in many ways. But that doesn't mean that the iPhone doesn't equal and surpass the Android devices in other ways, and that certain features from either side might be more important to different consumers.
The smartphone market is still wide open. Most people don't have one yet. The iPhone doesn't have to fail for Android to be successful, and vice-versa. They can both be popular.
While construction costs do vary by location, the bigger premiums in houses generally have more to do with the cost of the land, which is a separate issue from my little cost exercise.
No doubt that big chunk of landing the middle of dc is quite valuable.
They're making products with the goal of appealing to people with money to spend. For every person here on/. whining about the evils of Apple's "walled garden", there's a customer out there who sees that controlled environment as a positive aspect, and 100 customers who couldn't care less.
Also, we all know that long term contracts suck, but again, it's a choice that people make in order to get a subsidized phone. For those who don't want to enter into one of those deals, there are unlocked phones available. Maybe not the exact one that you want, but really, life is nothing if not a series of settling for not exactly what you wanted.
Pick the product that best aligns with your priorities and get on with your life. That's what most people do and it seems to work out ok for them.
It's pretty tough to come up with an accurate number for a building that complicated without a decent amount of work, but we can ballpark some numbers just to give us something to think about. According to whitehousehistory.org, there's about 55,000 sq. ft. worth of space in the building. The typical american stick-frame house usually runs somewhere between $100 to $200 per square foot, depending on the design/finishes/etc. If we split that, and go with $150 per sq. ft., we're already up to $8.25 million. I think once you add on the fact that it's not 2x4 wood framing (there's actually a steel frame that replaced the original heavy timber framing), and that you've got stone facade rather than vinyl siding, probably some very nice finishes, plus the fact that a bunch of people work there all day, plus all the security stuff, plus facilities for tours coming through, etc...you'd probably be looking at at least three or four times that. Buildings are expensive.
Yeah, except you're not saving the world from cruel corporate overlords, you're complaining over the internet. All publishers are not going to turn into Disneyland, that's a silly argument to make. As long as there's demand for more open systems, then someone will find a way to supply that demand.
You're right, and that's what makes all this doomsdaying about Apple taking over the world so silly. Let Apple make whatever rules they want for their devices/store, and let consumers decide to buy in or go elsewhere. If there's a market for less controlled hardware/content (and there is), then someone will fill that gap. And that's exactly what's happening. It's not magic, it's not an epic battle of good vs. evil, or even open vs. closed. It's different people having different priorities. It happens all the time.
That's not really correct. You don't directly perceive the time dilation, in that time seems to be passing the same to you. Only compared to an outside observer do you experience time dilation effects. Assuming that tidal forces/radiation/etc. weren't an issue, you wouldn't really notice much of anything different as you actually crossed the event horizon.
While you're busy writing essays about how much it sucks that everything in the world isn't perfect, the rest of us will continue to enjoy talking about things we find interesting, enjoy well done or amusing advertising, and not go around looking for a reason to hate every single thing we see or read about.
There's plenty of instances of hierarchical structure and intra-species violence in nature, it's not just limited to modern humans. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect that even before agriculture humans competed for resources.
The biggest change that we started seeing 5000 years ago was that technology started to increase the scale of those conflicts.
Just to expand on your ideas, because they're really good...
You're almost never going to be able to take a decent game or book and turn it verbatim into a decent movie. Something really well designed to work for one purpose should not be expected to automatically work just as well for a different purpose. Sticking two extra wheels on a nice motorcycle does not make a nice car. You've got to tear the game/book down, pick and choose the pieces that are useful, and then assemble them back with some new pieces to get something that works as a movie.
There's really three good sources in a game from which you can potentially to draw ideas for a movie. Different games have these in different amounts, so you need to be careful about how you draw it. The three sources are Story, Characters, and the game's "Universe". Note that the other big element in games, namely the Gameplay, is basically useless for translating to a movie. Your example of Doom is the perfect illustration of this for all the reasons you described. The story is filler, there are no real characters, there's very little consistent "universe" to draw from except for some types of guns that have been consistent through most of the games. The positive experience of Doom was almost entirely due to gameplay (and to some degree that it generally represented a pretty cool technological achievement in terms of 3D graphics).
Anyways, story and characters are tough to translate, because the pacing in a decent story driven game is generally much slower than a movie, especially if it's well integrated into the gameplay. It's meant to unfold through hours and hours of playtime, compared to movies which are pushing things at two hours long.
Characters are even more dicey, because so much of a character's meaning to gamers is tied up in how they personally chose to play them. You as a movie writer/director/whatever would have to choose one of those personalities, and it's bound to be different in some fundamental ways from the personality that many players projected onto their playthroughs, and that's going to leave everyone unhappy with the end result.
This really leaves a gaming "universe" as fertile ground for movie ideas, and although building on that foundation can potentially lead to a good movie, its connection to the actual games that people are familiar with is likely to be incidental, and that will upset people who naively expect to see their game memories somehow displayed on a movie screen. Warcraft being a great example of a franchise with lots of backstory from which some good writers could probably come up with some awesome stories. But how many Warcraft fans are actually familiar with that backstory and will appreciate a new exploration of that universe, verses how many will see it just as a cash-in where they just attached Warcraft to the name in order to sucker people into watching?
You also brought up Mario, which I think is an amazing example, because as you mentioned the long running series of games has actually built an expansive and reasonably consistent universe that is familiar to millions of people. But as you mentioned, it's such a bizarre universe, consistent only within itself. It's tied so strongly to gameplay elements, yet in an abstract enough way that they can make decent games in all sorts of unrelated genres using all of the peculiarities of the Mario universe, and it makes intuitive sense to gamers. I automatically know a green shell can be used to attack my enemies, whether I'm 2D scrolling, 3D exploring, riding a go-kart, or playing soccer.
So anyways, your post apparently inspired me to write all of that out instead of working for the past 15 minutes. Nicely done.
Interesting theory, but going after MS and Apple doesn't really fit the RIAA's style. MS and Apple can afford scary lawyers and fight back.
Honestly, I don't even think this is about making money for the RIAA anymore. I think they're past that point. Most of the people they sue can't afford anywhere near the number they throw around, and then end up settling for amounts that are pocket change as far as the RIAA is concerned. Basically, they're watching their business model becoming obsolete, there's nothing they can do about it, and so they're just throwing big temper tantrums. They know that they're sinking, and are just trying to take down whoever they can with them, just out of spite.
GDP is a pretty fuzzy number and hard to conceptualize for me. Perhaps a simpler way of looking at it, in the last fiscal year, the US collected just over a trillion dollars in income taxes.
This guy is arguing that on top of all the money people did spend on music, we would've chosen to spend an additional amount well larger than the IRS managed to collect last year with the force of law and by automatically deducting from most people's pay checks?
There's just no way they can seriously be suggesting this. They have to be trolling.
And dealing with all that micropayment stuff would be just as annoying as dealing with web ads, and a whole bunch of cool websites would go out of business. Or I guess those websites could pay the bills by selling tshirts that you wouldn't wear.
It must be a miserable existence you live, where you're entirely unable to mentally block out advertising and get on with whatever it is you're doing, seeing as ads are everywhere.
I won't argue that some websites have ridiculously intrusive ads, but the simple solution there is to not visit those sites. For every website with flashy popup ads, there's another with similar content but tasteful ads.
Without advertising, half the websites out there wouldn't even exist, so I'd argue that ads make the web more useful.
PR is still important. It's important because the anger of the citizens does effect how hard the government comes down on BP. It makes a difference on how much BP ends up paying in monetary damages. It makes a difference in how stringent the inevitable new drilling regulations are. It makes a difference on whether or not the government feels compelled to press criminal charges against the executives.
The only problem is that there's no good solution here. BP's people aren't the only ones trying to stop the leak, you've got engineers from all of the big companies working on this. They all see the damage that this spill is doing to their industry and want it stopped. The point is that nobody knows how to stop this, short of relief wells. There's already a ton of uncertainty about how much oil has leaked, how much more is going to leak, what's going to happen to all that oil under the water, what happens when a hurricane tears through the gulf, whether or not the oil will find its way around florida and up the east coast, and who knows what else is going to happen in the next 6-8 weeks before the relief wells have drilled deep enough.
There's just way too much uncertainty about when the leak will be fixed, what the actual ecological and economic damage will be, and how hard the government will eventually come down on BP. I don't think that anyone who really looks at the situation could reliably predict what sort of financial liabilities you'd be purchasing if you bought BP. You'd be insane to seriously consider buying them right now.
Well, understand that there are already lots of apps on the AppStore that have ads. There are a number of different companies that have systems that you can integrate into your App that will serve ads. The only big things that iAds is changing is that now Apple is the one serving the ads, and the ads will be able to display without exiting the app and going to safari.
If you're thinking about spending money to purchase an App, I'd suggest taking a few minutes to read some reviews of it on the web, they're bound to mention if it includes ads, iAd or otherwise. Or at least read the comments for that app in the App store. There's lots of information out there.
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So what? Every state/district/neighborhood deserves to have people fighting for it. The USA is such a large stretch of land with such a diverse bunch of people/communities, that for many problems there isn't just one solution that's "best for the country."
Also it's not about the web specifically, it's about the infrastructure that brings the entire internet (including the web) to the american people.
Also they can always leave themselves the option of going back to 3rd party ARM chips or whatever the new big thing is if they fall too far behind with their own efforts. If they keep this option in mind as they move forward, they can certainly leave themselves in a position where doing so isn't even particularly difficult or painful. They've made some serious architecture switches with the Mac platform already, they know how to handle that sort of thing.
Actually he talked at length about that exact phenomena in the linked article.
He maybe didn't make the distinction between whether to blame the developers or the marketers, but from the consumer's point of view it doesn't really matter how it got screwed up or who's fault it is, they don't want to pay money for a bad game.
But the whole point of the "Birdmen" article is about how developers/publishers/marketing/whoever have taken the wrong lesson from Nintendo's success, thinking that what people want is a game that treats them like a stupid kid, when what they really want is a game that doesn't require a serious time investment just to start to get comfortable with the gameplay.
I'm sorry to hear that you're blind, as that's the only way that I can figure that you don't see graphical improvements. Having put plenty of hours into the 90's NBA Jam, I think that this new version appears to have the perfect blend of realism and cartoon-ish feel to really fit what I expect.
Of course the gameplay is basically the same. It wouldn't be NBA Jam if it wasn't. While innovation is great and all, there's certainly something to be said for taking a successful formula, and giving it a little update from time to time.
That's not always true. While one instance certainly isn't enough data to completely explore and explain a phenomena, it can certainly establish that said phenomena exists.
And it's not like we're talking about a data-set of one plane canceling a flight. We're talking about a couple of days, and tens of thousands of flights, all across a big stretch of the planet. That's more than just an anecdote.
Unless they're just remaking the exact same game with more colorful graphics, I think you can fairly say that it's pretty much a brand new game. I imagine that the characters will only be similar to the original characters in very basic ways, and the gameplay will likely be far more similar to other franchises out there than it is to the original Kid Icarus.
Nintendo has practically been printing money for the past few years with their Wii and DS sales. They can easily afford to develop their next console.
I think most people can agree that there are some Android phones that equal and even surpass the iPhone in many ways. But that doesn't mean that the iPhone doesn't equal and surpass the Android devices in other ways, and that certain features from either side might be more important to different consumers.
The smartphone market is still wide open. Most people don't have one yet. The iPhone doesn't have to fail for Android to be successful, and vice-versa. They can both be popular.
While construction costs do vary by location, the bigger premiums in houses generally have more to do with the cost of the land, which is a separate issue from my little cost exercise.
No doubt that big chunk of landing the middle of dc is quite valuable.
Who are you to decide what their job is?
They're making products with the goal of appealing to people with money to spend. For every person here on /. whining about the evils of Apple's "walled garden", there's a customer out there who sees that controlled environment as a positive aspect, and 100 customers who couldn't care less.
Also, we all know that long term contracts suck, but again, it's a choice that people make in order to get a subsidized phone. For those who don't want to enter into one of those deals, there are unlocked phones available. Maybe not the exact one that you want, but really, life is nothing if not a series of settling for not exactly what you wanted.
Pick the product that best aligns with your priorities and get on with your life. That's what most people do and it seems to work out ok for them.
It's pretty tough to come up with an accurate number for a building that complicated without a decent amount of work, but we can ballpark some numbers just to give us something to think about. According to whitehousehistory.org, there's about 55,000 sq. ft. worth of space in the building. The typical american stick-frame house usually runs somewhere between $100 to $200 per square foot, depending on the design/finishes/etc. If we split that, and go with $150 per sq. ft., we're already up to $8.25 million. I think once you add on the fact that it's not 2x4 wood framing (there's actually a steel frame that replaced the original heavy timber framing), and that you've got stone facade rather than vinyl siding, probably some very nice finishes, plus the fact that a bunch of people work there all day, plus all the security stuff, plus facilities for tours coming through, etc...you'd probably be looking at at least three or four times that. Buildings are expensive.
Yeah, except you're not saving the world from cruel corporate overlords, you're complaining over the internet. All publishers are not going to turn into Disneyland, that's a silly argument to make. As long as there's demand for more open systems, then someone will find a way to supply that demand.
You're right, and that's what makes all this doomsdaying about Apple taking over the world so silly. Let Apple make whatever rules they want for their devices/store, and let consumers decide to buy in or go elsewhere. If there's a market for less controlled hardware/content (and there is), then someone will fill that gap. And that's exactly what's happening. It's not magic, it's not an epic battle of good vs. evil, or even open vs. closed. It's different people having different priorities. It happens all the time.
That's not really correct. You don't directly perceive the time dilation, in that time seems to be passing the same to you. Only compared to an outside observer do you experience time dilation effects. Assuming that tidal forces/radiation/etc. weren't an issue, you wouldn't really notice much of anything different as you actually crossed the event horizon.
Wow, that's some first class complaining there.
While you're busy writing essays about how much it sucks that everything in the world isn't perfect, the rest of us will continue to enjoy talking about things we find interesting, enjoy well done or amusing advertising, and not go around looking for a reason to hate every single thing we see or read about.
There's plenty of instances of hierarchical structure and intra-species violence in nature, it's not just limited to modern humans. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to expect that even before agriculture humans competed for resources.
The biggest change that we started seeing 5000 years ago was that technology started to increase the scale of those conflicts.
Just to expand on your ideas, because they're really good...
You're almost never going to be able to take a decent game or book and turn it verbatim into a decent movie. Something really well designed to work for one purpose should not be expected to automatically work just as well for a different purpose. Sticking two extra wheels on a nice motorcycle does not make a nice car. You've got to tear the game/book down, pick and choose the pieces that are useful, and then assemble them back with some new pieces to get something that works as a movie.
There's really three good sources in a game from which you can potentially to draw ideas for a movie. Different games have these in different amounts, so you need to be careful about how you draw it. The three sources are Story, Characters, and the game's "Universe". Note that the other big element in games, namely the Gameplay, is basically useless for translating to a movie. Your example of Doom is the perfect illustration of this for all the reasons you described. The story is filler, there are no real characters, there's very little consistent "universe" to draw from except for some types of guns that have been consistent through most of the games. The positive experience of Doom was almost entirely due to gameplay (and to some degree that it generally represented a pretty cool technological achievement in terms of 3D graphics).
Anyways, story and characters are tough to translate, because the pacing in a decent story driven game is generally much slower than a movie, especially if it's well integrated into the gameplay. It's meant to unfold through hours and hours of playtime, compared to movies which are pushing things at two hours long.
Characters are even more dicey, because so much of a character's meaning to gamers is tied up in how they personally chose to play them. You as a movie writer/director/whatever would have to choose one of those personalities, and it's bound to be different in some fundamental ways from the personality that many players projected onto their playthroughs, and that's going to leave everyone unhappy with the end result.
This really leaves a gaming "universe" as fertile ground for movie ideas, and although building on that foundation can potentially lead to a good movie, its connection to the actual games that people are familiar with is likely to be incidental, and that will upset people who naively expect to see their game memories somehow displayed on a movie screen. Warcraft being a great example of a franchise with lots of backstory from which some good writers could probably come up with some awesome stories. But how many Warcraft fans are actually familiar with that backstory and will appreciate a new exploration of that universe, verses how many will see it just as a cash-in where they just attached Warcraft to the name in order to sucker people into watching?
You also brought up Mario, which I think is an amazing example, because as you mentioned the long running series of games has actually built an expansive and reasonably consistent universe that is familiar to millions of people. But as you mentioned, it's such a bizarre universe, consistent only within itself. It's tied so strongly to gameplay elements, yet in an abstract enough way that they can make decent games in all sorts of unrelated genres using all of the peculiarities of the Mario universe, and it makes intuitive sense to gamers. I automatically know a green shell can be used to attack my enemies, whether I'm 2D scrolling, 3D exploring, riding a go-kart, or playing soccer.
So anyways, your post apparently inspired me to write all of that out instead of working for the past 15 minutes. Nicely done.
Interesting theory, but going after MS and Apple doesn't really fit the RIAA's style. MS and Apple can afford scary lawyers and fight back.
Honestly, I don't even think this is about making money for the RIAA anymore. I think they're past that point. Most of the people they sue can't afford anywhere near the number they throw around, and then end up settling for amounts that are pocket change as far as the RIAA is concerned. Basically, they're watching their business model becoming obsolete, there's nothing they can do about it, and so they're just throwing big temper tantrums. They know that they're sinking, and are just trying to take down whoever they can with them, just out of spite.
GDP is a pretty fuzzy number and hard to conceptualize for me. Perhaps a simpler way of looking at it, in the last fiscal year, the US collected just over a trillion dollars in income taxes.
This guy is arguing that on top of all the money people did spend on music, we would've chosen to spend an additional amount well larger than the IRS managed to collect last year with the force of law and by automatically deducting from most people's pay checks?
There's just no way they can seriously be suggesting this. They have to be trolling.
And dealing with all that micropayment stuff would be just as annoying as dealing with web ads, and a whole bunch of cool websites would go out of business. Or I guess those websites could pay the bills by selling tshirts that you wouldn't wear.
It must be a miserable existence you live, where you're entirely unable to mentally block out advertising and get on with whatever it is you're doing, seeing as ads are everywhere.
I won't argue that some websites have ridiculously intrusive ads, but the simple solution there is to not visit those sites. For every website with flashy popup ads, there's another with similar content but tasteful ads.
Without advertising, half the websites out there wouldn't even exist, so I'd argue that ads make the web more useful.
PR is still important. It's important because the anger of the citizens does effect how hard the government comes down on BP. It makes a difference on how much BP ends up paying in monetary damages. It makes a difference in how stringent the inevitable new drilling regulations are. It makes a difference on whether or not the government feels compelled to press criminal charges against the executives.
The only problem is that there's no good solution here. BP's people aren't the only ones trying to stop the leak, you've got engineers from all of the big companies working on this. They all see the damage that this spill is doing to their industry and want it stopped. The point is that nobody knows how to stop this, short of relief wells. There's already a ton of uncertainty about how much oil has leaked, how much more is going to leak, what's going to happen to all that oil under the water, what happens when a hurricane tears through the gulf, whether or not the oil will find its way around florida and up the east coast, and who knows what else is going to happen in the next 6-8 weeks before the relief wells have drilled deep enough.
There's just way too much uncertainty about when the leak will be fixed, what the actual ecological and economic damage will be, and how hard the government will eventually come down on BP. I don't think that anyone who really looks at the situation could reliably predict what sort of financial liabilities you'd be purchasing if you bought BP. You'd be insane to seriously consider buying them right now.
Well, understand that there are already lots of apps on the AppStore that have ads. There are a number of different companies that have systems that you can integrate into your App that will serve ads. The only big things that iAds is changing is that now Apple is the one serving the ads, and the ads will be able to display without exiting the app and going to safari.
If you're thinking about spending money to purchase an App, I'd suggest taking a few minutes to read some reviews of it on the web, they're bound to mention if it includes ads, iAd or otherwise. Or at least read the comments for that app in the App store. There's lots of information out there.