I play PC games all the time, on a machine that hasn't seen a single component upgrade since 2002. It's finally getting to the point where even some of the $5 clearance games won't run very well on it, so I'm thinking about upgrading.
But the point is, many people are not interested in worrying about keeping their hardware state-of-the-art, and there are also many developers who aren't interested in worrying about constantly having to learn how to exploit new hardware.
Take a look at the quality of the first year or so of PS2 games vs. the stuff that came out 5 years later. It takes developers a while to really learn how to take advantage of a particular piece of hardware, and the consistency across the entire installed base of that console allows them to really tune their games beyond anything you'll see in the PC world.
I never really considered it that much of a buzz-word, but just more as a particular way to group together all the newer consoles. What other word would you have used? "The new consoles"?, "The next consoles"? I guess you could call them the current consoles, but sort of coming back to the point of the article, the PS2 is just as much a current console, because there are tons of them sitting in living rooms .
I think the 360, wii, PS3 will be referred to collectively as the next-gen consoles until we start hearing whispers about the next round of hardware. Then today's "next-gen" will turn into the "current-gen", there will be a new "next-gen", and the PS2 will just be referred to as the PS2, because it'll be the only older console that statistically significant.
It's likely a little bit of both, Google seems to be run by people with enough imagination to see places where the public interest and their interests as a corporation can match up nicely. There are plenty of ways to make decent profits that don't require screwing over your customers as much as you can get away with.
This is just a thought based on no real experience, but it seems to me that a potential way to approach the type of problem that you're talking about would be for a parent/older sibling/whatever to not only teach their child/younger sibling/whatever about things, but also to learn with them.
Basically, don't always be the expert showing the other person what they're doing wrong. Pick an activity that neither of you have any experience with, and learn together. Let them see you make mistakes just like they do. Let them see that even with all you know and have experienced, sometimes you have to work hard for the answers, sometimes you get frustrated, and sometimes you need help.
So instead of teaching them how to play the trumpet or whatever, you're teaching them how to learn, and hopefully at the end of it, you've both picked up a new skill.
Yeah, because taking an idea (that you haven't even really bothered to understand) and extrapolating it to some ridiculous extreme is a really useful way of discussing it. Thanks for contributing so much to the conversation.
The problem with something like desktop linux is that (for the average user) the changes either don't show enough immediate benefit to make relearning worth while, or don't offer enough of a difference to make the change interesting.
Using the Wii as an example as you did, the Wiimote is a pretty big change in how controllers work. Even if you don't see the potential of it right away, it's so different and a little bit wacky and so it's interesting enough that you want to give it a shot. But let's say that instead of using the Wiimote, Nintendo decided to use their gamecube controller design, but they mirrored the front of it so that the buttons were on the left and the stick/pad was on the right. And they backed up that decision with lots of testing that found it was more comfortable or something. It'd be a pretty significant change to controller design, but how well do you think it'd go over? I imagine it would be rather frustrating, and I think it'd be a tough sell convincing people that that change was worth retraining their thumbs.
Linux just isn't different enough from windows, at least not in ways that matter to an everyday person. All that backend stuff, command line stuff, none of that matters. At a desktop level, Linux doesn't really do anything significantly different than windows does, so why bother with it? Change for the sake of change isn't necessarily productive, old and comfortable often means efficient and cost effective. Apple has historically had the same problem competing against windows. I think there are a lot of ways that you can pretty decisively say that the MacOS has been easier to use, or more consistent, or more pleasant, etc. than its windows counterpart; but the differences have generally been a bunch of minor things. It's hard to get excited about a bunch of little things, unless they pertain to a subject that you already have a serious interest in. Most people don't have a serious interest in computer operating systems, so they don't care.
The big wrench in all of this is that things like malware have created a situation where there's a big difference, in that windows is far more likely to have very apparent problems than MacOS or Linux. Apple seems to be making an attempt to capitalize on that with advertising and such, but Linux unfortunately doesn't really have the same marketing budget.
I don't think you're being particularly fair. A hammer is a much simpler device than a computer. While there are certainly ways to refine your skills with a hammer and a bunch of neat little tricks with one you can pick up, the basic functioning of a hammer is very straight forward. Rudimentary but useful understanding of a hammer can be taught in about a minute.
In that same minute, I could teach a person about how to use a mouse to manipulate a cursor, and how to double click. But a minute of instruction leaves you far less prepared to effectively use a computer than it would for a hammer.
No, I'm not basing it on any sort of data or observations, because as far as I know no terrorists have detonated nukes lately. But, I sort of agree with your general point. Bin Laden isn't too concerned with blowing up parts of America right now because the ultimate goal of the attacks on the WTC and such were not just to kill people, it was to spur the US into making certain responses (and we've probably been following the script pretty closely). Even if the death count from 9/11 was much higher and 20,000 people had died, it wouldn't have made much of tactical difference for anyone. It was most certainly a strategic move. Bin Laden's real goal is not to literally have all americans killed, or even to have our country fall apart or anything. He wants the west out of the middle east and he wants more power for himself.
But anyways, my point wasn't so much about what's motivating al-qaeda right now, but instead what the use of nuclear weapons might be to a terrorist. As you said, it's certainly possible with smaller and spread out attacks to keep up the general level of fear of terrorism, as has been happening. But if that's your tactic, I don't see how a nuke really helps you. It seems like a lot of overkill in that situation, and requires a lot of work to procure. I like to believe that nuclear weapons are pretty well protected in general, so why would you take all the risks and commit all the resources required to get your hands on one if there's all these easier ways to accomplish your goals.
The original commenter seemed to be saying that a terrorist that's gone to all the trouble of getting a nuke probably wouldn't bother trying to shield it if they decided to move it into a target country. I don't think that makes sense. Once you've got a nuke, getting it securely into the target area would give you way more options than having to set it off unplanned somewhere random.
Uhhh...it seems to me that generally a terrorist involved in a destructive act has as a main goal the largest body count they can manage. While a nuke going off on a ship in a harbor would no doubt be very destructive and possibly kill thousands of people and cause a lot of panic everywhere, the effect would certainly be greater if you managed to get the bomb into the downtown area of a big city and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Either way you're likely to see some serious retaliation, so why not take the extra effort to get maximum destruction from your bomb. I'm not a nuclear arms dealer either, but it seems to me that compared to the effort required to procure a nuclear weapon, figuring out a way to effectively shield it would be pretty easy.
Actually, I'm not really sure that that's a fair statement. Trial and error can certainly be a very important part of experimentation, which is certainly a very important part of science, but just because you're using trial and error does not mean that you're accomplishing scientific research.
I can take 20 different jars of baby food and give a spoonful of each to a baby until I find a list of flavors that she likes, that's some pretty basic trial and error. But at the end of the day, have I accomplished any science? No, I just found out what the kid will and won't eat.
Using trial and error to test theories or refine an understanding of something is certainly a valuable part of scientific research, and it's one of the most basic ways to test things, but at a fundamental level, it only produces data. The compiling, understanding, and trying to explain that data is what makes it science.
I think the other side of that coin was providing a reasonable alternative. Napster made it very obvious that there was a large group of people interested in getting music online. Sure, some of those people were only interested in the lack of a price tag, but others also appreciated the ability to get music basically immediately, without leaving their house, and having a humongous library of songs to choose from.
Lots of people are willing to pay for music offered that way. The RIAA gave us very crappy online stores at best, and tried to take away the more useful alternatives. It's true that there are some people out there who will never pay for music online, but it was a big mistake for the RIAA to act as if we were all like that.
The fact that the lawsuits that the RIAA has filed were often very haphazard, and the sorts of people they went after seemed more spiteful than productive. The damages that they claimed were ridiculous, and the fact that they settle for a tiny percentage of what they claimed shows how full of crap they are.
I can assure you that more people bought the Wii for WiiSports than for Zelda. And WiiSports hardly has any IP in it, the characters are Mii's that the players created themselves.
Sony and MS would kill for an IP like Mario. It's not going to be any harder for anyone to come up with a new IP for the Wii than it will be for the PS3 or the 360.
I basically agree with you, it'd be great for gamers in general if three or four years from now the market balance ends up similar to where these consoles are now. Microsoft made a much better product with the original Xbox than I expected, and the 360 has been a decent evolution of their strategy and of console technology. They've got enough market share that they'll have a steady stream of games, and there's some good games available. Hopefully they'll manage to start seeing some significant and consistent profit, and we'll get a third iteration of the Xbox somewhere down the line.
Nintendo has done a great job of rebuilding a bunch of the credibility that they lost over the past two generations, and they've done it by innovating and bringing gamers some really new ways to play games with the DS and the Wii. They are still producing very high quality games in house, and the Wii seems to be following the same pattern that the DS did, so we should start seeing some real quality 3rd party games over the next year. Nintendo was never really in danger of going bankrupt, but the piles of money they're making now means that everyone can be confident that their console support won't die out like the dreamcast did.
Sony is still holding out hope that somehow their PS3 strategy will magically work, but even if it does ultimately make them some money down the road, don't expect them to dominate this generation like they did with the PS2. Hopefully this will force them to remember that gaming is about more than cramming expensive silicon into a fancy plastic case, and they'll be a little more reasonable next time. A few years of humbling at the hands of Sony helped Nintendo find its way to its current position, hopefully Nintendo can return the favor.
Throwing your product out there and saying pay whatever you want has traditionally not been a good business model. But as you may have noticed, the world has changed quite a bit over the past decade or so, and all of a sudden the costs of distributing music has dropped to about zero. Also, Radiohead's plan is a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
None of this means that Ford can stop putting prices on their pick-up trucks and just let drivers pay whatever they want, but it does mean that a well-known band can basically give their music away and ask for donations, especially because they can continue to sell physical merchandise in the more traditional manner.
Sure, this new business model won't work for everyone, or not even every musician. But that doesn't make it a failure. Producing a physical product and selling in at a fixed price has been a failing business strategy for at least as many companies as have had success at it. Radiohead looks like they're going to do just fine with their new business model. Other bands might find different things that work for them. Many will likely stick with the more traditional music label structure, but hopefully the changes we're seeing now will give them more leverage to negotiate better contracts.
Simmons is a wanker because he's being angry towards the fans(without which he'd have to get a "real job"), he's not really offering any constructive solutions for any new business models, and because he's arguing for a system that almost everyone agrees is unfair to musicians in general. If the most important part really is the music, then how come the labels have historically been able to screw the majority of their artists so hard?
It's different in this case, however, because you as a user have the choice whether or not to install WoW on your machine. Blizzard's actions are certainly something to take a closer look at, and deciding that it makes you not want to play their game is a perfectly valid personal choice. But to act like they're somehow intrusively ignoring your rights in the same way that a government can is a little extreme, and it adds very little to your argument.
It's important that a person/company be willing to tell a client that their expectations are unreasonable. I've worked for a boss that was completely unable to do so, instead promising the client almost anything they asked for. Many of these promises were not possible, and went unmet. Or the push to get at least something out often resulted in lower quality work. Either way, the client would often end up upset. And maybe even worse, it all stressed out the employees to an amazing degree. We'd end up constantly upset with our boss, upset with our clients, and this spilled over in many ways to get us all upset with each other. It could often be very bad for morale.
A business with no employees is just as dead in the water as a business with no clients.
Oh, was it that simple? Then why was the Supreme Court involved? Were they the ones doing the recount?
It was a much more complex, messier, and horribly mangled process. I'm not going to write it all out for you, because there is plenty of information out there, but your version of how it went is not even close to correct.
Re:aroberts you totally missed the point
on
Blog Action Day
·
· Score: 1
I think a lot of people out there would care, and would like to be more informed, it's just hard to do. You want to blame Lost and pop-culture, and while that's a big part of it, there's also a lot of hardworking people out there who just don't have the time to find out about all of the stuff that's going on. The mainstream news media has really dropped the ball in terms of providing real and useful information, and that's created a great opening for the internet to step in and provide people with info.
The combination of blogs and politics are still in their infancy, so expecting it to have solved all the world's ills is silly. But that doesn't mean that it isn't helpful, and that it doesn't have potential for the future. I learn way more about what's going on by reading some blogs for a half hour each day than I would watching CNN 24/7. The spread of information cannot hurt democracy.
Environmentalism is slowly making progress. Although technology and such changes rapidly these days, people are still slow to change.
To be fair, there are games of both types, and there's certainly room for both types to co-exist. A good example being games that are heavily story driven. Day of the Tentacle was one of my all time favorite games, but when I took the storyline to its end and finished it, I didn't really have much of an interest in starting over and going through it all again. The bulk of the fun in that game was figuring out the goofy puzzles, as well as seeing the surprises in the story. It's just not as exciting if you already know what to do and what's going to happen.
Compare that to a something like a racing game, or a more "sandbox" game like GTA3, there's a lot more replay-ability there. It's usually created through "random" content generation (pedestrians wondering around the city, racing opponents taking different paths, etc.) or through online-multiplayer gaming.
But that's not to say that story-driven games are inferior, they're just different. And they're not always mutually exclusive, but usually various constraints will force a developer to lean one-way or the other. The storyline in the GTA games was never all that exciting to me, but the sandbox elements allowed me to create all sorts of fun. In the latest Zelda or KOTOR, I had some fun just running around exploring and killing random stuff, but it didn't last too long after I finished the storylines. But those storylines were much more epic and enjoyable than anything I ever got from GTA.
I could play tetris from now until the end of time.
There's a couple things at work for the Wii here I think. First off, the supply of games has been a bit slow, likely due to miscalculations by lots of developers not expecting the Wii to take off the way it did. But on the other hand, the PS3 doesn't have a huge flood of games either, and it more hype than I'd ever seen. It's still early in the lives of both consoles.
Second, Nintendo's "casual gamer" idea seems to really be happening, and the usage patterns of a "casual" hobbiest(is that a word?) are irregular and can leave a console sitting idle. My tennis racket has been sitting untouched in the garage for a couple years, but that doesn't mean that I don't like tennis or that tennis isn't popular. It means that I don't have time to play tennis anymore.
And third, sort of connected to the casual gamer deal, a good number of the games that are out are geared towards more casual and social play, so it's difficult for a hardcore gamer to sit down and spend entire days playing it.
From the point of view of a traditional hardcore gamer, those three things might look pretty discouraging for the Wii. But what Nintendo has discovered is that to have a successful console, it's not really necessary to give that sort of gamer everything they want. A couple months of sales fluctuations to not make a trend, and it seems silly to try and figure that sort of stuff out right now, when the big christmas season is right around the corner.
I would strongly argue against such a law. If a parent wants to purchase a game and let their child play it, then that is their perogative. Hopefully they're being careful enough to ensure that their child is ready to play a game with such content, but either way, that sort of thing is not up to the government to decide.
I doubt I would ban my children from playing Grand Theft Auto until they were 18. I know lots of people who played it at a younger age than that and were not negatively affected by it. But I wouldn't want my 8 year old child playing it, and I would appreciate stores not making it easier for my child to get his hands on the game.
I think Mr. Yee explained pretty clearly why his law is not some sort of brutal attack on the freedom of game makers. His law is all about trying to keep retailers from selling mature rated games to children. It does not restrict at all the type of games that you can make or sell or buy if you're an adult. It does not restrict the rights of consumers, except for a very specific case if you're a minor. We already restrict the rights of children in many ways because they're often not educated and experienced enough to make good choices. The age cut-off of 18 is sort of arbitrary, but there's not really any other feasible way to handle it.
You put locks on your doors to keep the crazies out and away from your kids, but you also put those little cabinet locks under your sink to protect your children from possible harmful results from their own curiosity and lack of understanding. While we certainly can and should discuss how harmful violent games truly are for children, there's not much harm to be done to put a little safeguard in place here as well.
How that damages the right of the artist is not clear to me. Unless your "art" in some way relies on subjecting children to mature content without parental oversight, but that doesn't seem like a very noble endeavor, and I'm not really interested in using the term "art" to protect acts that would otherwise be criticized.
Slashdot Mirror
Meh, I just married a librarian instead.
Meh, I don't play computer architectures, I play games. Who cares what's inside the fancy plastic box?
I play PC games all the time, on a machine that hasn't seen a single component upgrade since 2002. It's finally getting to the point where even some of the $5 clearance games won't run very well on it, so I'm thinking about upgrading.
But the point is, many people are not interested in worrying about keeping their hardware state-of-the-art, and there are also many developers who aren't interested in worrying about constantly having to learn how to exploit new hardware.
Take a look at the quality of the first year or so of PS2 games vs. the stuff that came out 5 years later. It takes developers a while to really learn how to take advantage of a particular piece of hardware, and the consistency across the entire installed base of that console allows them to really tune their games beyond anything you'll see in the PC world.
I never really considered it that much of a buzz-word, but just more as a particular way to group together all the newer consoles. What other word would you have used? "The new consoles"?, "The next consoles"? I guess you could call them the current consoles, but sort of coming back to the point of the article, the PS2 is just as much a current console, because there are tons of them sitting in living rooms .
I think the 360, wii, PS3 will be referred to collectively as the next-gen consoles until we start hearing whispers about the next round of hardware. Then today's "next-gen" will turn into the "current-gen", there will be a new "next-gen", and the PS2 will just be referred to as the PS2, because it'll be the only older console that statistically significant.
It's likely a little bit of both, Google seems to be run by people with enough imagination to see places where the public interest and their interests as a corporation can match up nicely. There are plenty of ways to make decent profits that don't require screwing over your customers as much as you can get away with.
This is just a thought based on no real experience, but it seems to me that a potential way to approach the type of problem that you're talking about would be for a parent/older sibling/whatever to not only teach their child/younger sibling/whatever about things, but also to learn with them.
Basically, don't always be the expert showing the other person what they're doing wrong. Pick an activity that neither of you have any experience with, and learn together. Let them see you make mistakes just like they do. Let them see that even with all you know and have experienced, sometimes you have to work hard for the answers, sometimes you get frustrated, and sometimes you need help.
So instead of teaching them how to play the trumpet or whatever, you're teaching them how to learn, and hopefully at the end of it, you've both picked up a new skill.
Yeah, because taking an idea (that you haven't even really bothered to understand) and extrapolating it to some ridiculous extreme is a really useful way of discussing it. Thanks for contributing so much to the conversation.
The problem with something like desktop linux is that (for the average user) the changes either don't show enough immediate benefit to make relearning worth while, or don't offer enough of a difference to make the change interesting.
Using the Wii as an example as you did, the Wiimote is a pretty big change in how controllers work. Even if you don't see the potential of it right away, it's so different and a little bit wacky and so it's interesting enough that you want to give it a shot. But let's say that instead of using the Wiimote, Nintendo decided to use their gamecube controller design, but they mirrored the front of it so that the buttons were on the left and the stick/pad was on the right. And they backed up that decision with lots of testing that found it was more comfortable or something. It'd be a pretty significant change to controller design, but how well do you think it'd go over? I imagine it would be rather frustrating, and I think it'd be a tough sell convincing people that that change was worth retraining their thumbs.
Linux just isn't different enough from windows, at least not in ways that matter to an everyday person. All that backend stuff, command line stuff, none of that matters. At a desktop level, Linux doesn't really do anything significantly different than windows does, so why bother with it? Change for the sake of change isn't necessarily productive, old and comfortable often means efficient and cost effective. Apple has historically had the same problem competing against windows. I think there are a lot of ways that you can pretty decisively say that the MacOS has been easier to use, or more consistent, or more pleasant, etc. than its windows counterpart; but the differences have generally been a bunch of minor things. It's hard to get excited about a bunch of little things, unless they pertain to a subject that you already have a serious interest in. Most people don't have a serious interest in computer operating systems, so they don't care.
The big wrench in all of this is that things like malware have created a situation where there's a big difference, in that windows is far more likely to have very apparent problems than MacOS or Linux. Apple seems to be making an attempt to capitalize on that with advertising and such, but Linux unfortunately doesn't really have the same marketing budget.
I don't think you're being particularly fair. A hammer is a much simpler device than a computer. While there are certainly ways to refine your skills with a hammer and a bunch of neat little tricks with one you can pick up, the basic functioning of a hammer is very straight forward. Rudimentary but useful understanding of a hammer can be taught in about a minute.
In that same minute, I could teach a person about how to use a mouse to manipulate a cursor, and how to double click. But a minute of instruction leaves you far less prepared to effectively use a computer than it would for a hammer.
No, I'm not basing it on any sort of data or observations, because as far as I know no terrorists have detonated nukes lately. But, I sort of agree with your general point. Bin Laden isn't too concerned with blowing up parts of America right now because the ultimate goal of the attacks on the WTC and such were not just to kill people, it was to spur the US into making certain responses (and we've probably been following the script pretty closely). Even if the death count from 9/11 was much higher and 20,000 people had died, it wouldn't have made much of tactical difference for anyone. It was most certainly a strategic move. Bin Laden's real goal is not to literally have all americans killed, or even to have our country fall apart or anything. He wants the west out of the middle east and he wants more power for himself.
But anyways, my point wasn't so much about what's motivating al-qaeda right now, but instead what the use of nuclear weapons might be to a terrorist. As you said, it's certainly possible with smaller and spread out attacks to keep up the general level of fear of terrorism, as has been happening. But if that's your tactic, I don't see how a nuke really helps you. It seems like a lot of overkill in that situation, and requires a lot of work to procure. I like to believe that nuclear weapons are pretty well protected in general, so why would you take all the risks and commit all the resources required to get your hands on one if there's all these easier ways to accomplish your goals.
The original commenter seemed to be saying that a terrorist that's gone to all the trouble of getting a nuke probably wouldn't bother trying to shield it if they decided to move it into a target country. I don't think that makes sense. Once you've got a nuke, getting it securely into the target area would give you way more options than having to set it off unplanned somewhere random.
Uhhh...it seems to me that generally a terrorist involved in a destructive act has as a main goal the largest body count they can manage. While a nuke going off on a ship in a harbor would no doubt be very destructive and possibly kill thousands of people and cause a lot of panic everywhere, the effect would certainly be greater if you managed to get the bomb into the downtown area of a big city and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
Either way you're likely to see some serious retaliation, so why not take the extra effort to get maximum destruction from your bomb. I'm not a nuclear arms dealer either, but it seems to me that compared to the effort required to procure a nuclear weapon, figuring out a way to effectively shield it would be pretty easy.
Actually, I'm not really sure that that's a fair statement. Trial and error can certainly be a very important part of experimentation, which is certainly a very important part of science, but just because you're using trial and error does not mean that you're accomplishing scientific research.
I can take 20 different jars of baby food and give a spoonful of each to a baby until I find a list of flavors that she likes, that's some pretty basic trial and error. But at the end of the day, have I accomplished any science? No, I just found out what the kid will and won't eat.
Using trial and error to test theories or refine an understanding of something is certainly a valuable part of scientific research, and it's one of the most basic ways to test things, but at a fundamental level, it only produces data. The compiling, understanding, and trying to explain that data is what makes it science.
I think the other side of that coin was providing a reasonable alternative. Napster made it very obvious that there was a large group of people interested in getting music online. Sure, some of those people were only interested in the lack of a price tag, but others also appreciated the ability to get music basically immediately, without leaving their house, and having a humongous library of songs to choose from.
Lots of people are willing to pay for music offered that way. The RIAA gave us very crappy online stores at best, and tried to take away the more useful alternatives. It's true that there are some people out there who will never pay for music online, but it was a big mistake for the RIAA to act as if we were all like that.
The fact that the lawsuits that the RIAA has filed were often very haphazard, and the sorts of people they went after seemed more spiteful than productive. The damages that they claimed were ridiculous, and the fact that they settle for a tiny percentage of what they claimed shows how full of crap they are.
Hey wow. Semantically dissecting a comment that I spent all of 90 seconds on sure does make you sound smart.
You know exactly what I meant. Thanks for being a douchebag, it really contributes a lot to the discussion.
I can assure you that more people bought the Wii for WiiSports than for Zelda. And WiiSports hardly has any IP in it, the characters are Mii's that the players created themselves.
Sony and MS would kill for an IP like Mario. It's not going to be any harder for anyone to come up with a new IP for the Wii than it will be for the PS3 or the 360.
I basically agree with you, it'd be great for gamers in general if three or four years from now the market balance ends up similar to where these consoles are now. Microsoft made a much better product with the original Xbox than I expected, and the 360 has been a decent evolution of their strategy and of console technology. They've got enough market share that they'll have a steady stream of games, and there's some good games available. Hopefully they'll manage to start seeing some significant and consistent profit, and we'll get a third iteration of the Xbox somewhere down the line.
Nintendo has done a great job of rebuilding a bunch of the credibility that they lost over the past two generations, and they've done it by innovating and bringing gamers some really new ways to play games with the DS and the Wii. They are still producing very high quality games in house, and the Wii seems to be following the same pattern that the DS did, so we should start seeing some real quality 3rd party games over the next year. Nintendo was never really in danger of going bankrupt, but the piles of money they're making now means that everyone can be confident that their console support won't die out like the dreamcast did.
Sony is still holding out hope that somehow their PS3 strategy will magically work, but even if it does ultimately make them some money down the road, don't expect them to dominate this generation like they did with the PS2. Hopefully this will force them to remember that gaming is about more than cramming expensive silicon into a fancy plastic case, and they'll be a little more reasonable next time. A few years of humbling at the hands of Sony helped Nintendo find its way to its current position, hopefully Nintendo can return the favor.
Throwing your product out there and saying pay whatever you want has traditionally not been a good business model. But as you may have noticed, the world has changed quite a bit over the past decade or so, and all of a sudden the costs of distributing music has dropped to about zero. Also, Radiohead's plan is a bit more complicated than you make it out to be.
None of this means that Ford can stop putting prices on their pick-up trucks and just let drivers pay whatever they want, but it does mean that a well-known band can basically give their music away and ask for donations, especially because they can continue to sell physical merchandise in the more traditional manner.
Sure, this new business model won't work for everyone, or not even every musician. But that doesn't make it a failure. Producing a physical product and selling in at a fixed price has been a failing business strategy for at least as many companies as have had success at it. Radiohead looks like they're going to do just fine with their new business model. Other bands might find different things that work for them. Many will likely stick with the more traditional music label structure, but hopefully the changes we're seeing now will give them more leverage to negotiate better contracts.
Simmons is a wanker because he's being angry towards the fans(without which he'd have to get a "real job"), he's not really offering any constructive solutions for any new business models, and because he's arguing for a system that almost everyone agrees is unfair to musicians in general. If the most important part really is the music, then how come the labels have historically been able to screw the majority of their artists so hard?
It's different in this case, however, because you as a user have the choice whether or not to install WoW on your machine. Blizzard's actions are certainly something to take a closer look at, and deciding that it makes you not want to play their game is a perfectly valid personal choice. But to act like they're somehow intrusively ignoring your rights in the same way that a government can is a little extreme, and it adds very little to your argument.
It's important that a person/company be willing to tell a client that their expectations are unreasonable. I've worked for a boss that was completely unable to do so, instead promising the client almost anything they asked for. Many of these promises were not possible, and went unmet. Or the push to get at least something out often resulted in lower quality work. Either way, the client would often end up upset. And maybe even worse, it all stressed out the employees to an amazing degree. We'd end up constantly upset with our boss, upset with our clients, and this spilled over in many ways to get us all upset with each other. It could often be very bad for morale.
A business with no employees is just as dead in the water as a business with no clients.
Oh, was it that simple? Then why was the Supreme Court involved? Were they the ones doing the recount?
It was a much more complex, messier, and horribly mangled process. I'm not going to write it all out for you, because there is plenty of information out there, but your version of how it went is not even close to correct.
I think a lot of people out there would care, and would like to be more informed, it's just hard to do. You want to blame Lost and pop-culture, and while that's a big part of it, there's also a lot of hardworking people out there who just don't have the time to find out about all of the stuff that's going on. The mainstream news media has really dropped the ball in terms of providing real and useful information, and that's created a great opening for the internet to step in and provide people with info.
The combination of blogs and politics are still in their infancy, so expecting it to have solved all the world's ills is silly. But that doesn't mean that it isn't helpful, and that it doesn't have potential for the future. I learn way more about what's going on by reading some blogs for a half hour each day than I would watching CNN 24/7. The spread of information cannot hurt democracy.
Environmentalism is slowly making progress. Although technology and such changes rapidly these days, people are still slow to change.
To be fair, there are games of both types, and there's certainly room for both types to co-exist. A good example being games that are heavily story driven. Day of the Tentacle was one of my all time favorite games, but when I took the storyline to its end and finished it, I didn't really have much of an interest in starting over and going through it all again. The bulk of the fun in that game was figuring out the goofy puzzles, as well as seeing the surprises in the story. It's just not as exciting if you already know what to do and what's going to happen.
Compare that to a something like a racing game, or a more "sandbox" game like GTA3, there's a lot more replay-ability there. It's usually created through "random" content generation (pedestrians wondering around the city, racing opponents taking different paths, etc.) or through online-multiplayer gaming.
But that's not to say that story-driven games are inferior, they're just different. And they're not always mutually exclusive, but usually various constraints will force a developer to lean one-way or the other. The storyline in the GTA games was never all that exciting to me, but the sandbox elements allowed me to create all sorts of fun. In the latest Zelda or KOTOR, I had some fun just running around exploring and killing random stuff, but it didn't last too long after I finished the storylines. But those storylines were much more epic and enjoyable than anything I ever got from GTA.
I could play tetris from now until the end of time.
There's a couple things at work for the Wii here I think. First off, the supply of games has been a bit slow, likely due to miscalculations by lots of developers not expecting the Wii to take off the way it did. But on the other hand, the PS3 doesn't have a huge flood of games either, and it more hype than I'd ever seen. It's still early in the lives of both consoles.
Second, Nintendo's "casual gamer" idea seems to really be happening, and the usage patterns of a "casual" hobbiest(is that a word?) are irregular and can leave a console sitting idle. My tennis racket has been sitting untouched in the garage for a couple years, but that doesn't mean that I don't like tennis or that tennis isn't popular. It means that I don't have time to play tennis anymore.
And third, sort of connected to the casual gamer deal, a good number of the games that are out are geared towards more casual and social play, so it's difficult for a hardcore gamer to sit down and spend entire days playing it.
From the point of view of a traditional hardcore gamer, those three things might look pretty discouraging for the Wii. But what Nintendo has discovered is that to have a successful console, it's not really necessary to give that sort of gamer everything they want. A couple months of sales fluctuations to not make a trend, and it seems silly to try and figure that sort of stuff out right now, when the big christmas season is right around the corner.
I would strongly argue against such a law. If a parent wants to purchase a game and let their child play it, then that is their perogative. Hopefully they're being careful enough to ensure that their child is ready to play a game with such content, but either way, that sort of thing is not up to the government to decide.
I doubt I would ban my children from playing Grand Theft Auto until they were 18. I know lots of people who played it at a younger age than that and were not negatively affected by it. But I wouldn't want my 8 year old child playing it, and I would appreciate stores not making it easier for my child to get his hands on the game.
I think Mr. Yee explained pretty clearly why his law is not some sort of brutal attack on the freedom of game makers. His law is all about trying to keep retailers from selling mature rated games to children. It does not restrict at all the type of games that you can make or sell or buy if you're an adult. It does not restrict the rights of consumers, except for a very specific case if you're a minor. We already restrict the rights of children in many ways because they're often not educated and experienced enough to make good choices. The age cut-off of 18 is sort of arbitrary, but there's not really any other feasible way to handle it.
You put locks on your doors to keep the crazies out and away from your kids, but you also put those little cabinet locks under your sink to protect your children from possible harmful results from their own curiosity and lack of understanding. While we certainly can and should discuss how harmful violent games truly are for children, there's not much harm to be done to put a little safeguard in place here as well.
How that damages the right of the artist is not clear to me. Unless your "art" in some way relies on subjecting children to mature content without parental oversight, but that doesn't seem like a very noble endeavor, and I'm not really interested in using the term "art" to protect acts that would otherwise be criticized.