facebook.com
myspace.com
last.fm
blogspot.com
discogs.com
local clubs & DJs
music forums
Many, many ways to advertise for free online and get people to listen to your music. You won't get huge audiences overnight. You'll probably start by attracting the attention of enthusiasts who spend lots and lots of time discovering new music, but these are the people who you want hearing you because you can bet they'll spread the word if your music's worth hearing. That's really the trick, isn't it? There's already a lot of good music out there. It's hard to make something that sounds good and offers something new. It's a lot easier being young, attractive, untalented, and selling out to the record companies.
Vega Strike has been in beta for how many years now? I've seen it before and it strikes me as the typical open source project - the developers seem more interested in monkeying around with the code as a mental exercise than actually getting to version 1.0. Which is fine. It's their toy, they get to do what they want with it. But for anyone not associated with the dev team I think I covered it under the no-name indie category.
EVE is good at what it does, but there's a reason it doesn't have more players and that's not because of the scifi theme. I pull this opinion out of my ass, but consider for a moment the plethora of MMOs (or even single player games) with a fantasy background. Any style of MMO fantasy gameplay that you could possibly want is covered. PvP, PvE, free, paid, large group, small group, free-for-all, instanced...
Now what about a space sim MMO? Aside from a few no-name indie offerings or a Freelancer hack to play multiplayer on a server with a few other people, your only option is EVE. One shard, PvP centric, click-orbit-wait navigation, learning curve like an overhanging cliff - love it or leave it.
Now maybe I give the JGE team too much credit, but I fully expected for them to deviate from this. It would only make sense that they not go for the exact same niche that EVE fills. Duh. So we get collision detection and some sort of real navigation - great. But now they're balancing around PvP? C'mon, seriously? So now we'll have EVE with point & click navigation and EVE with something else. And you can play the former in a universe already several years old with many bugs worked out or you can start in a fresh universe that's completely empty. This is seriously the most retarded thing I've heard from JGE to date.
And no, I don't believe JGE can properly balance PvP and PvE. It's never been done. You either focus on one or the other and whatever you don't focus on becomes some half-assed wannabe minigame that players will complain about until the end of time. See PvP in WoW and PvE in GW as examples...
The only reason this works for the *AA is because most people don't know any better. They want music. They go buy music. End of story. Try to explain it to a technologically illiterate person and their eyes will glaze over before you've finished saying MP3.
Have you listened to the radio lately? Besides NPR I really have no idea what value there is to it anymore. Unless you live in a big city you have a couple of pop hip-hop stations and a couple of pop country stations and they're all owned by the same broadcasting company. They play the same loop of 5 songs over again for months before finding 5 more songs that sound virtually identical to replace them with. And despite the fact that they all claim hours of uninterrupted music they somehow sneak in advertisements or commentary after every few songs.
I'll pass on that. There are plenty of great places online to discover new music and if a band is smart they'll let me download their music for a few bucks right on their website. Then we can cut out the radio stations and their monopoly, cut out the distributors and their monopoly, and just have me, the band.... and the telecom monopoly. Not a perfect world, but certainly better than radio.
I bet TPB could make a killing selling the rights to this saga/soap opera/farce to Hollywood to make into a movie....and then they could index the torrent for it.
I'm as cynical as the next moderately informed/.er, maybe more so, but I've gotta hand it to the folks at EFF. They're one of the few groups making any noticeable impact on corporate and government actions that threaten us little people.
There was nothing wrong with the game Hellgate London [snip]
Slightly off-topic, but there was plenty wrong with HGL. We could start with poor class choices (the only melee character is a holy warrior? wtf...), end with poor itemization (let's see, I need 54 more sizzling doodads to get +4 damage to my blue uzi, or I could just get a glitched rocket launcher by farming an early quest boss), and hit every point along the way where Flagship utterly failed to listen to any bit of beta reviewer commentary that didn't begin and end with OMG THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVAR! But really, let's not go there.
Paying a couple bucks a month for a solid game I can play with friends online with a neat scifi/demonic background, sure. Paying anything for a rushed, unbalanced, buggy grinder with a gimmicky background by a couple of big names who seem to no longer be able to put out any decent games? No thanks. Roper's done some good stuff for Blizzard and gaming in general, but if this is the direction he's taken he'd better buy his Pacific island now while he's still got investors sponsoring his craptastic new gaming endeavors.
Rock Band + WoW = Raids where 25 people get together to play epic 5-6 hour medleys. There is no death penalty in game, but players may become exhausted and pass out. It is recommended that you play with a buddy so that, in case you do pass out, your buddy can flip you on your stomach so you don't choke on your own vomit and die. Should you complete the raid you will be rewarded with an animation of the final boss's head exploding to the background applause of a cheering stadium and you'll have the chance to advance to the next raid medley.
Most websites don't need to be ridiculously complicated to be effective. Go ahead and call me a luddite, but does everyone need comments on their website? Fancy sliding menus? Pop-up image galleries? Flash or other web programming up the wazoo?
When did simple, efficient web design that presents content well and doesn't get in the way of it get tossed out the window?
Quality of work may not be directly proportional to compensation, but being well compensated does make a person think twice about doing stupid shit and losing a good job.
Not sure about other places so I'll speak for the US here. If you could have detected something (terrorist, cancer, etc), but didn't, you'll get taken to court for it. If you run tests you're covered no matter what the results. If you didn't, you're negligent and will spend the rest of your life selling paperclips out of a cardboard box.
As an off-topic aside, these ridiculous lawsuits are why healthcare in the US is as bad as it is and no administration is going to admit that or fix it because putting lawyers out of work is the last thing any politician wants to do.
With the utter shit that's come out of many AAA developers recently I can't even justify paying for the game after it's been released, let alone ahead of time.
The idea reminds me of those poor suckers who bought lifetime subscriptions to winning titles such as Hellgate London and Tabula Rasa, or all those who clamored to buy Spore. What guarantee do gamer investors have that a developer won't put out a good idea, take $20 from a few thousand players, and then put out another craptabulous title just to say they did it? No thanks.
I don't like the car analogy. How about this one? An airplane has 100 seats. The airline sells 200 seats. The airline complains when 200 people show up because, clearly, the airplane has only 100 seats and the airline's hands are tied in the matter. However, they do propose a solution, noble and helpful businesspeople that they are. If everyone pays a little more they'll scrap the whole airplane idea and hire a couple of charter buses to get everyone where they need to go.
It's not Wells Fargo we ought to be upset at, it's the legal system that's so borked it requires a company to sue itself. Can we burn the law books yet and just govern ourselves by common sense?
Actually you'd end up with everyone starting as a scantily clad max level female nelf/belf hunter. All the major towns would be burnt to the ground, there would be a huge rainstorm, and all gameplay would afterward revolve around PvP mud wrestling.
There's got to be some give and take. It's all speculation right now, but we possibly get an OS that's fast, simple, and secure and they (Google) possibly get to generate revenue from it in some way. Would you really expect a corporation like Google to sink so many resources into this and then expect no return on it?
Take some comfort in the fact that because this OS has to start out as the underdog it has to earn a foothold in the market. This means that Google would be shooting themselves in the foot by doing something blatantly evil with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it's BOLD, CAPITALIZED WORDS. Neither shocking nor therapeutic.
Not to mention that if they ever get this thing up and running think of all the jobs that will be lost.
facebook.com
myspace.com
last.fm
blogspot.com
discogs.com
local clubs & DJs
music forums
Many, many ways to advertise for free online and get people to listen to your music. You won't get huge audiences overnight. You'll probably start by attracting the attention of enthusiasts who spend lots and lots of time discovering new music, but these are the people who you want hearing you because you can bet they'll spread the word if your music's worth hearing. That's really the trick, isn't it? There's already a lot of good music out there. It's hard to make something that sounds good and offers something new. It's a lot easier being young, attractive, untalented, and selling out to the record companies.
Vega Strike has been in beta for how many years now? I've seen it before and it strikes me as the typical open source project - the developers seem more interested in monkeying around with the code as a mental exercise than actually getting to version 1.0. Which is fine. It's their toy, they get to do what they want with it. But for anyone not associated with the dev team I think I covered it under the no-name indie category.
EVE is good at what it does, but there's a reason it doesn't have more players and that's not because of the scifi theme. I pull this opinion out of my ass, but consider for a moment the plethora of MMOs (or even single player games) with a fantasy background. Any style of MMO fantasy gameplay that you could possibly want is covered. PvP, PvE, free, paid, large group, small group, free-for-all, instanced...
Now what about a space sim MMO? Aside from a few no-name indie offerings or a Freelancer hack to play multiplayer on a server with a few other people, your only option is EVE. One shard, PvP centric, click-orbit-wait navigation, learning curve like an overhanging cliff - love it or leave it.
Now maybe I give the JGE team too much credit, but I fully expected for them to deviate from this. It would only make sense that they not go for the exact same niche that EVE fills. Duh. So we get collision detection and some sort of real navigation - great. But now they're balancing around PvP? C'mon, seriously? So now we'll have EVE with point & click navigation and EVE with something else. And you can play the former in a universe already several years old with many bugs worked out or you can start in a fresh universe that's completely empty. This is seriously the most retarded thing I've heard from JGE to date.
And no, I don't believe JGE can properly balance PvP and PvE. It's never been done. You either focus on one or the other and whatever you don't focus on becomes some half-assed wannabe minigame that players will complain about until the end of time. See PvP in WoW and PvE in GW as examples...
The only reason this works for the *AA is because most people don't know any better. They want music. They go buy music. End of story. Try to explain it to a technologically illiterate person and their eyes will glaze over before you've finished saying MP3.
Have you listened to the radio lately? Besides NPR I really have no idea what value there is to it anymore. Unless you live in a big city you have a couple of pop hip-hop stations and a couple of pop country stations and they're all owned by the same broadcasting company. They play the same loop of 5 songs over again for months before finding 5 more songs that sound virtually identical to replace them with. And despite the fact that they all claim hours of uninterrupted music they somehow sneak in advertisements or commentary after every few songs.
I'll pass on that. There are plenty of great places online to discover new music and if a band is smart they'll let me download their music for a few bucks right on their website. Then we can cut out the radio stations and their monopoly, cut out the distributors and their monopoly, and just have me, the band.... and the telecom monopoly. Not a perfect world, but certainly better than radio.
Hello and welcome to /.
Grandma Mildred couldn't tell a Wii from a toaster oven and will knit the grandkids matching wool mittens.
I bet TPB could make a killing selling the rights to this saga/soap opera/farce to Hollywood to make into a movie. ...and then they could index the torrent for it.
In Soviet America, public domain copyrights YOU!
I'm as cynical as the next moderately informed /.er, maybe more so, but I've gotta hand it to the folks at EFF. They're one of the few groups making any noticeable impact on corporate and government actions that threaten us little people.
There was nothing wrong with the game Hellgate London [snip]
Slightly off-topic, but there was plenty wrong with HGL. We could start with poor class choices (the only melee character is a holy warrior? wtf...), end with poor itemization (let's see, I need 54 more sizzling doodads to get +4 damage to my blue uzi, or I could just get a glitched rocket launcher by farming an early quest boss), and hit every point along the way where Flagship utterly failed to listen to any bit of beta reviewer commentary that didn't begin and end with OMG THIS IS THE BEST GAME EVAR! But really, let's not go there.
Paying a couple bucks a month for a solid game I can play with friends online with a neat scifi/demonic background, sure. Paying anything for a rushed, unbalanced, buggy grinder with a gimmicky background by a couple of big names who seem to no longer be able to put out any decent games? No thanks. Roper's done some good stuff for Blizzard and gaming in general, but if this is the direction he's taken he'd better buy his Pacific island now while he's still got investors sponsoring his craptastic new gaming endeavors.
Rock Band + WoW = Raids where 25 people get together to play epic 5-6 hour medleys. There is no death penalty in game, but players may become exhausted and pass out. It is recommended that you play with a buddy so that, in case you do pass out, your buddy can flip you on your stomach so you don't choke on your own vomit and die. Should you complete the raid you will be rewarded with an animation of the final boss's head exploding to the background applause of a cheering stadium and you'll have the chance to advance to the next raid medley.
Most websites don't need to be ridiculously complicated to be effective. Go ahead and call me a luddite, but does everyone need comments on their website? Fancy sliding menus? Pop-up image galleries? Flash or other web programming up the wazoo?
When did simple, efficient web design that presents content well and doesn't get in the way of it get tossed out the window?
Quality of work may not be directly proportional to compensation, but being well compensated does make a person think twice about doing stupid shit and losing a good job.
Maybe he'll play Hogger.
Not sure about other places so I'll speak for the US here. If you could have detected something (terrorist, cancer, etc), but didn't, you'll get taken to court for it. If you run tests you're covered no matter what the results. If you didn't, you're negligent and will spend the rest of your life selling paperclips out of a cardboard box. As an off-topic aside, these ridiculous lawsuits are why healthcare in the US is as bad as it is and no administration is going to admit that or fix it because putting lawyers out of work is the last thing any politician wants to do.
With the utter shit that's come out of many AAA developers recently I can't even justify paying for the game after it's been released, let alone ahead of time.
The idea reminds me of those poor suckers who bought lifetime subscriptions to winning titles such as Hellgate London and Tabula Rasa, or all those who clamored to buy Spore. What guarantee do gamer investors have that a developer won't put out a good idea, take $20 from a few thousand players, and then put out another craptabulous title just to say they did it? No thanks.
...I'm sure they'll open a couple of windows. I guess this news means their buyout of Congress and the ISP monopolies is going quite well?
I don't like the car analogy. How about this one? An airplane has 100 seats. The airline sells 200 seats. The airline complains when 200 people show up because, clearly, the airplane has only 100 seats and the airline's hands are tied in the matter. However, they do propose a solution, noble and helpful businesspeople that they are. If everyone pays a little more they'll scrap the whole airplane idea and hire a couple of charter buses to get everyone where they need to go.
It's not Wells Fargo we ought to be upset at, it's the legal system that's so borked it requires a company to sue itself. Can we burn the law books yet and just govern ourselves by common sense?
Actually you'd end up with everyone starting as a scantily clad max level female nelf/belf hunter. All the major towns would be burnt to the ground, there would be a huge rainstorm, and all gameplay would afterward revolve around PvP mud wrestling.
Seriously, if SC2 were out already those Asian tweens would have something else to keep them busy.
There's got to be some give and take. It's all speculation right now, but we possibly get an OS that's fast, simple, and secure and they (Google) possibly get to generate revenue from it in some way. Would you really expect a corporation like Google to sink so many resources into this and then expect no return on it?
Take some comfort in the fact that because this OS has to start out as the underdog it has to earn a foothold in the market. This means that Google would be shooting themselves in the foot by doing something blatantly evil with it.