Blah, blah, "fair use," blah, blah. Unfortunately, there are any number of people in the world who feel perfectly empowered to illegally copy and distribute whatever material they want. What, exactly, are these people - who spend millions upon millions of dollars to generate this content (well, at least in the case of movies - music, apart from marketing, has relatively low overhead) - supposed to do to try to prevent this? Everyone gets uppity if the MPAA/RIAA files suit against someone for "sharing" their movies and/or music online and people like you tell them they shouldn't have copy protection. They can't win coming or going on the Interwebs in general or Slashdot in specific. I suspect that the only way they COULD win is by just giving away everything they produce for free and asking nicely for donations, you know, if you feel like it.
Seriously, BluRay and HD won't be common place until 2012 at this rate.
At what rate? Any predictive analysis of future BD or HD-DVD penetration based on less than a year of data is pointless at best and dishonest at worst. DVD grew faster than any other similar technology (CD and VHS being two significant examples) and it still took 8 years to pass VHS. This, despite the last few years when DVD players have been virtually an impulse buy at under $100.
I picked up a DVD player in its second year of availability and it was still another two years before the people around me (who enjoy watching movies and quite liked DVD based on seeing mine) jumped in. Cost and movie volume were the two major factors preventing my friends and family from buying in.
We won't be able to adequately judge the market's desire for high-definition optical discs until players have been available for under $300 (total - the HD-DVD addon to the 360 doesn't count) over a 12-month period. Until then, it will be an early-adopter situation and, as such, success and failure are impossible to predict.
IMHO, this complaint has become tiresome. The people generating these sites are trying to make money off doing so. Instead of trying to get people to pay subscription fees (and thus turn interested people away), they do so with ads, and they probably make some money off of views of the ads and can rotate different ads per load. Having to go to more than one (or 10) pages for an article with actual information generated by actual people getting paid for their work doesn't seem like a very high price to pay.
Personally, I find the layout of most [H]ardOCP articles to be pretty well done - for example, when they're reviewing hardware gaming performance, unless they're comparing several pieces of hardware, they don't give each game/test an individual page; their conclusions are typically on a single page; and the introduction, explaining what they're doing, is usually on a single page.
In other words, I can typically look at 3-4 pages of each review and get the information about which I'm most concerned. In this particular case, you can get the relevant information off about 4 pages - considering the amount of data, pictures and videos they offer, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I would also note that some people (like me) don't want to spend a lot of time scrolling down one or two very long pages. Dividing the pages actually helps me quite a bit since I often read articles such as this over a few viewings instead of sitting down and reading it all in one shot.
It's funny. I was arguing on this site with someone who felt that people shouldn't complain if they don't like something about World of Warcraft - my take was that paying money for the service absolutely entitles one to complain if there's something they don't like. On this, I'd take the other side and tell you to stop griping about free stuff. Even if it is just a money-grab for [H]ardOCP, they're not grabbing that money from you, and clicking a few extra times shouldn't be that taxing.
Of course he's just arguing to argue. There's no point to be made here. I can't imagine that he pays for something and then doesn't complain when he's not satisfied, nor can I imagine that he doesn't understand that Blizzard has decided to do this themselves (why would they bow to customer pressure to do something they don't want to do when their subscriptions just keep going up and up?).
In retrospect, I shouldn't have fed this particular troll, but, like most good trolls, his viewpoint isn't uncommon. I can't count the number of times I've seen or heard someone complain about a product or service and witness people respond with "Well, why don't you just return it?" or "Why don't you just quit?" It's as if a complaint indicates complete dissatisfaction, when it's actually more common for people to complain about products and services that they like because otherwise most people wouldn't care enough to go to the effort.
Your argument is about as ignorant as any I've seen. It seems to be that if you don't like something about a service you're purchasing, you can either shut up and keep paying or quit the service entirely. On the contrary, I would assert that paying the monthly fee entitles one to voice their complaints about the game. You certainly don't have to read said complaints if you don't care about them.
Games like FF11 required a HD for the PS2 and people still bought that game....
Well, actually, Final Fantasy XI came with the hard drive and was the only game (at least in the US - FFXI for PS2 was much more popular in Japan and might have spurred more hard drive titles) that made any important use of it. I suspect the same was true all over the world since Sony removed the hard drive capability from their "slim" revision of the PS2. In other words, the PS2 hard drive was pretty clearly a failure.
Though I hate to bring up the hated EA here, SSX 3 did some nice things with [admittedly, mostly lame] prerecorded music in that game. While in the air, the music would transition seamlessly to just the rhythm section, and the song would continue when you hit the ground. Despite all the bad things about EA, I'm looking forward to an SSX 4.
I wouldn't be suprised if we have 5-6 good to great games by March (in 2007 only) and double that before august.
Why wouldn't you be surprised? Publishers hold back games for the holidays all the time - almost as often as they rush buggy and incomplete games to make the holiday rush.
I'm sure that the Wii will have more releases between January and August than the Gamecube had during it's first year, but that won't be too hard at all. That said, though, the "news" (rumor) that big-name Nintendo properties may be pushed back to 4Q 2007 is disappointing to many, and, to some degree, those people will feel like it's a "drought" if those delays come to pass. The Gamecube had few launch games at all, but there was definitely a "Where's Mario?" factor involved, too. People love that little plumber and will buy a Nintendo system just to get him on the screen. While the Wii does have Zelda going for it, that positive is tempered somewhat by the fact that the Gamecube version is virtually the same as the Wii version apart from the controller (I think this is why Nintendo pushed the Gamecube version's release back, so that they could get a nice Zelda push on Wii units).
If the third-party market performs as Nintendo hopes and analysts project, then they'll have no problems and Wii owners won't miss Mario and Metroid too much. If it doesn't, then look for much gnashing of Wii owners' teeth between now and 4Q 2007.
Again I ask, though, how much can Square charge for something that, without copyright protection, is freely available once the first copy is "in the wild?" They would have to do something like distribute the game on a medium which is only readable by a single device and add "DRM" like crazy.
Everyone wants to tell me how people will make money somehow without specifying where that money is going to come from or why the money would be paid.
Heck, maybe a company like Square, with an established base of rabid fans, could continue to make money by building their games. But, that doesn't help a company just starting out that might be capable of making the greatest game of all time - fans won't pay money in advance on pure speculation, investors won't pay money when there's no decent business model light at the end of the tunnel (well, going by the past, smart investors wouldn't), who's left with an interest in getting a game made?
Until I see a reasonable answer to the above, then I have to consider anti-copyright arguments foolish and short-sighted.
Oh yeah, and programmers have been making software on spec and getting paid later once they can start selling their programs (made possible by both copyright and patent laws, by the way) for a very long time - again, without those laws they'd have made diddly for those efforts. Thus, your job, in particular, is a poor example to hold up on this issue. The number of software products that would never have been made without copyright protection and the concomitant chance to make money from selling copies is staggering.
That being said, I do support copyright - with reasonable limitations. Durations of 75 years after the death of the creator isn't even close to being reasonable. Ten years total duration, with a possible extension to fifteen would be reasonable.
In other words, you don't disagree with me at all. Note that I never stated agreement with the current, ridiculous copyright laws which are created to profit corporations instead of aiding artists in making a living...Well, we disagree a bit since I would consider 20-25 years a better term, but that's what negotiation is for.
I get that artists work for the love their art, but I consider copyright a smart way of allowing them to at least potentially make a living from doing so. Without copyright, all you're left with are live performances, and let's face it: Fine authors would starve if they were required to entertain people in person in order to make a living.
The bottom line is that society values its entertainment as much as - sometimes more than - other, physical products, and copyright allows some measure of ownership of products that are more ephemeral. In our society, I honestly believe that without copyright we'd lose a lot more than we gain, and that art (particularly music, literature, movies and TV - oh, and videogames, which many on this site value) would stagnate, and a couple of those industries would contract significantly or die outright. Just as an example, it would take a team of hobbyists working in their spare time 10 years or more to produce a game on the level of a Final Fantasy, and the likelihood is that it would just never happen. Without copyright, NONE of the videogame companies would have a reason to exist since their product could be copied and distributed by anyone, in the open and without fear of reprisal.
Art for art's sake doesn't feed an individual, let alone a family.
It's posts like yours that actually make me appreciate a little more the idiots in Congress. Better a 100-year copyright term than no copyright at all.
There are legitimate reasons for restricting speech (falsely shouting fire, etc.) but eliminating competition for people who want to sell that same speech isn't one of them.
Oh, please. If I'm a writer and spend a year of 40+-hour weeks to write a book, should I not be able to profit from that effort if I choose? With no copyright law, I'm pretty much screwed once I show the book to any publisher or sell my first self-published copy to someone who decides to "share" because there's nothing illegal about doing so.
For example, if you're a band and you expect your next album to cost $50,000 to produce and sell 5000 copies, then instead of recording it at your own expense and hoping to break even by selling copies for $10, just collect $10 from 5000 of your fans ahead of time and eliminate the risk.
And that helps a band with their first album, how? And without copyright (which you imply in the quote above should be done away with), how does even the established band with fans that you describe make any money beyond their costs?
If you believe that people shouldn't be able to profit from their jobs that's fine, but that belief doesn't fit into the economy, or society, of the US or the rest of the "western" world.
You can't crack the encryption on a DVD to extract a clip for your review, but you can still connect the DVD player's analog output to a capture card, or point a camcorder at the screen.
Yeah, but then it's analog, and I bought digital content, and I should be able to copy that digital content as much as I want, and I should be able to pass copies around to my friends, and they should be able to pass them around to their friends, and copyright laws are fundamentally wrong, and art should be created for its own sake, and artists should be supported by voluntary contributions, and why isn't everything free like Linux?
As a geek, I would contend that any deviations from standard "good news" usage in that episode should be ignored due to the possibility that NONE of the alternate realities shown were truly the Futurama Prime reality.;-)
It would be inappropriate since news about new Futurama episodes is actually good. Now, if the story was about said episodes being cancelled, THEN "Good news everyone!" works just fine.:)
My weird Futurama reaction: Every time I watch an episode with Zap in it, I get misty thinking about how that character should have been voiced by Phil Hartman...
Ah, okay, I didn't understand that you were talking about playing non-official XNA-developed games. You're right that $100 a year is too much for that, but even that's understandable since Microsoft wants people to buy games from Xbox Live.
Oh yeah, and off-topic, how about my lack of preview skills? "Rightwad"???:)
They sort of have that with XNA Creators Club, but the barrier to entry is high ($49 for 4 months, $99 for a year)...
Are you being sarcastic here? $99/year is not a "barrier to entry." It's virtually a "nominal fee" in terms of game development, particularly game development for a console. Sometimes I think exposure to open source free software makes people real rightwads...
Gameplay is critical, but in most of the best games there is a point to the gameplay beyond "shooting bad guys." If Legacy had most of the story cut out and things happen to advance a story point that is missing, then that damages the game.
For example, I really enjoyed the gameplay of the first MGS. It was fantastic. But, without the story - silly as it was - the game wouldn't have been as good. It certainly wouldn't have been as beloved, nor would it have spawned the franchise which is now considered by fans a PS3 system seller despite being at least 10-12 months away from release.
Let's face it: Just like KOTOR2, which was very disappointing compared to the first KOTOR, if the story was cut down or out in Star Trek Legacy, then it was done to get the game released and not to make the game better. That's bad and, IMHO, can't be spun as a good thing.
Not really. The early DVD players (mostly pre-2000) were slow to start, too, and HD-DVD/Blu-ray players haven't even been available for a year. As costs came down and the hardware improved, DVD players sped up nicely. The same will happen with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players over time.
I don't know about others, but I didn't say anything about "blame." My point was only that it doesn't make one an idiot if their Wiimote goes flying during play, just, I suppose, as it wouldn't make one an idiot if someone gets a little excited with their tilting of the PS3 controller and gives somebody an unintentional smack - heck, I've had the same thing happen with non-motion-sensitive controllers.
Or you are a little kid, or you have some carpal tunnel, or you have some arthritis, or you just generally have some trouble with gripping/coordination and haven't gotten used yet to moving your hand/arm around in the fashion encouraged by the Wiimote.
Why is that just because one person doesn't have a particular issue, that means that anyone who does have the issue is either dumb or "doing something pretty stupid?" I mean, clearly Nintendo saw losing the Wiimote during play as a possibility or there wouldn't be a wrist strap in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
Blah, blah, "fair use," blah, blah. Unfortunately, there are any number of people in the world who feel perfectly empowered to illegally copy and distribute whatever material they want. What, exactly, are these people - who spend millions upon millions of dollars to generate this content (well, at least in the case of movies - music, apart from marketing, has relatively low overhead) - supposed to do to try to prevent this? Everyone gets uppity if the MPAA/RIAA files suit against someone for "sharing" their movies and/or music online and people like you tell them they shouldn't have copy protection. They can't win coming or going on the Interwebs in general or Slashdot in specific. I suspect that the only way they COULD win is by just giving away everything they produce for free and asking nicely for donations, you know, if you feel like it.
At what rate? Any predictive analysis of future BD or HD-DVD penetration based on less than a year of data is pointless at best and dishonest at worst. DVD grew faster than any other similar technology (CD and VHS being two significant examples) and it still took 8 years to pass VHS. This, despite the last few years when DVD players have been virtually an impulse buy at under $100.
I picked up a DVD player in its second year of availability and it was still another two years before the people around me (who enjoy watching movies and quite liked DVD based on seeing mine) jumped in. Cost and movie volume were the two major factors preventing my friends and family from buying in.
We won't be able to adequately judge the market's desire for high-definition optical discs until players have been available for under $300 (total - the HD-DVD addon to the 360 doesn't count) over a 12-month period. Until then, it will be an early-adopter situation and, as such, success and failure are impossible to predict.
Note: I intended to reply to the OP - too many "reply to this" buttons in front of me and I ignored that part of the preview page. :)
IMHO, this complaint has become tiresome. The people generating these sites are trying to make money off doing so. Instead of trying to get people to pay subscription fees (and thus turn interested people away), they do so with ads, and they probably make some money off of views of the ads and can rotate different ads per load. Having to go to more than one (or 10) pages for an article with actual information generated by actual people getting paid for their work doesn't seem like a very high price to pay.
Personally, I find the layout of most [H]ardOCP articles to be pretty well done - for example, when they're reviewing hardware gaming performance, unless they're comparing several pieces of hardware, they don't give each game/test an individual page; their conclusions are typically on a single page; and the introduction, explaining what they're doing, is usually on a single page.
In other words, I can typically look at 3-4 pages of each review and get the information about which I'm most concerned. In this particular case, you can get the relevant information off about 4 pages - considering the amount of data, pictures and videos they offer, it seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I would also note that some people (like me) don't want to spend a lot of time scrolling down one or two very long pages. Dividing the pages actually helps me quite a bit since I often read articles such as this over a few viewings instead of sitting down and reading it all in one shot.
It's funny. I was arguing on this site with someone who felt that people shouldn't complain if they don't like something about World of Warcraft - my take was that paying money for the service absolutely entitles one to complain if there's something they don't like. On this, I'd take the other side and tell you to stop griping about free stuff. Even if it is just a money-grab for [H]ardOCP, they're not grabbing that money from you, and clicking a few extra times shouldn't be that taxing.
Of course he's just arguing to argue. There's no point to be made here. I can't imagine that he pays for something and then doesn't complain when he's not satisfied, nor can I imagine that he doesn't understand that Blizzard has decided to do this themselves (why would they bow to customer pressure to do something they don't want to do when their subscriptions just keep going up and up?).
In retrospect, I shouldn't have fed this particular troll, but, like most good trolls, his viewpoint isn't uncommon. I can't count the number of times I've seen or heard someone complain about a product or service and witness people respond with "Well, why don't you just return it?" or "Why don't you just quit?" It's as if a complaint indicates complete dissatisfaction, when it's actually more common for people to complain about products and services that they like because otherwise most people wouldn't care enough to go to the effort.
Your argument is about as ignorant as any I've seen. It seems to be that if you don't like something about a service you're purchasing, you can either shut up and keep paying or quit the service entirely. On the contrary, I would assert that paying the monthly fee entitles one to voice their complaints about the game. You certainly don't have to read said complaints if you don't care about them.
Well, actually, Final Fantasy XI came with the hard drive and was the only game (at least in the US - FFXI for PS2 was much more popular in Japan and might have spurred more hard drive titles) that made any important use of it. I suspect the same was true all over the world since Sony removed the hard drive capability from their "slim" revision of the PS2. In other words, the PS2 hard drive was pretty clearly a failure.
Though I hate to bring up the hated EA here, SSX 3 did some nice things with [admittedly, mostly lame] prerecorded music in that game. While in the air, the music would transition seamlessly to just the rhythm section, and the song would continue when you hit the ground. Despite all the bad things about EA, I'm looking forward to an SSX 4.
Why wouldn't you be surprised? Publishers hold back games for the holidays all the time - almost as often as they rush buggy and incomplete games to make the holiday rush.
I'm sure that the Wii will have more releases between January and August than the Gamecube had during it's first year, but that won't be too hard at all. That said, though, the "news" (rumor) that big-name Nintendo properties may be pushed back to 4Q 2007 is disappointing to many, and, to some degree, those people will feel like it's a "drought" if those delays come to pass. The Gamecube had few launch games at all, but there was definitely a "Where's Mario?" factor involved, too. People love that little plumber and will buy a Nintendo system just to get him on the screen. While the Wii does have Zelda going for it, that positive is tempered somewhat by the fact that the Gamecube version is virtually the same as the Wii version apart from the controller (I think this is why Nintendo pushed the Gamecube version's release back, so that they could get a nice Zelda push on Wii units).
If the third-party market performs as Nintendo hopes and analysts project, then they'll have no problems and Wii owners won't miss Mario and Metroid too much. If it doesn't, then look for much gnashing of Wii owners' teeth between now and 4Q 2007.
Again I ask, though, how much can Square charge for something that, without copyright protection, is freely available once the first copy is "in the wild?" They would have to do something like distribute the game on a medium which is only readable by a single device and add "DRM" like crazy.
Everyone wants to tell me how people will make money somehow without specifying where that money is going to come from or why the money would be paid.
Heck, maybe a company like Square, with an established base of rabid fans, could continue to make money by building their games. But, that doesn't help a company just starting out that might be capable of making the greatest game of all time - fans won't pay money in advance on pure speculation, investors won't pay money when there's no decent business model light at the end of the tunnel (well, going by the past, smart investors wouldn't), who's left with an interest in getting a game made?
Until I see a reasonable answer to the above, then I have to consider anti-copyright arguments foolish and short-sighted.
Oh yeah, and programmers have been making software on spec and getting paid later once they can start selling their programs (made possible by both copyright and patent laws, by the way) for a very long time - again, without those laws they'd have made diddly for those efforts. Thus, your job, in particular, is a poor example to hold up on this issue. The number of software products that would never have been made without copyright protection and the concomitant chance to make money from selling copies is staggering.
In other words, you don't disagree with me at all. Note that I never stated agreement with the current, ridiculous copyright laws which are created to profit corporations instead of aiding artists in making a living...Well, we disagree a bit since I would consider 20-25 years a better term, but that's what negotiation is for.
I get that artists work for the love their art, but I consider copyright a smart way of allowing them to at least potentially make a living from doing so. Without copyright, all you're left with are live performances, and let's face it: Fine authors would starve if they were required to entertain people in person in order to make a living.
The bottom line is that society values its entertainment as much as - sometimes more than - other, physical products, and copyright allows some measure of ownership of products that are more ephemeral. In our society, I honestly believe that without copyright we'd lose a lot more than we gain, and that art (particularly music, literature, movies and TV - oh, and videogames, which many on this site value) would stagnate, and a couple of those industries would contract significantly or die outright. Just as an example, it would take a team of hobbyists working in their spare time 10 years or more to produce a game on the level of a Final Fantasy, and the likelihood is that it would just never happen. Without copyright, NONE of the videogame companies would have a reason to exist since their product could be copied and distributed by anyone, in the open and without fear of reprisal.
Art for art's sake doesn't feed an individual, let alone a family.
It's posts like yours that actually make me appreciate a little more the idiots in Congress. Better a 100-year copyright term than no copyright at all.
Oh, please. If I'm a writer and spend a year of 40+-hour weeks to write a book, should I not be able to profit from that effort if I choose? With no copyright law, I'm pretty much screwed once I show the book to any publisher or sell my first self-published copy to someone who decides to "share" because there's nothing illegal about doing so.
And that helps a band with their first album, how? And without copyright (which you imply in the quote above should be done away with), how does even the established band with fans that you describe make any money beyond their costs?
If you believe that people shouldn't be able to profit from their jobs that's fine, but that belief doesn't fit into the economy, or society, of the US or the rest of the "western" world.
Yeah, but then it's analog, and I bought digital content, and I should be able to copy that digital content as much as I want, and I should be able to pass copies around to my friends, and they should be able to pass them around to their friends, and copyright laws are fundamentally wrong, and art should be created for its own sake, and artists should be supported by voluntary contributions, and why isn't everything free like Linux?
Now, shopkeepers should definitely be discriminated against. Otherwise, capitalism will run rampant!
As a geek, I would contend that any deviations from standard "good news" usage in that episode should be ignored due to the possibility that NONE of the alternate realities shown were truly the Futurama Prime reality. ;-)
Oh my, yes.
It would be inappropriate since news about new Futurama episodes is actually good. Now, if the story was about said episodes being cancelled, THEN "Good news everyone!" works just fine. :)
URL (the cop bot): "Awwww yeah, you deadbeats are under arrest, and it's a stone cold shame!"
My weird Futurama reaction: Every time I watch an episode with Zap in it, I get misty thinking about how that character should have been voiced by Phil Hartman...
Ah, okay, I didn't understand that you were talking about playing non-official XNA-developed games. You're right that $100 a year is too much for that, but even that's understandable since Microsoft wants people to buy games from Xbox Live.
:)
Oh yeah, and off-topic, how about my lack of preview skills? "Rightwad"???
Are you being sarcastic here? $99/year is not a "barrier to entry." It's virtually a "nominal fee" in terms of game development, particularly game development for a console. Sometimes I think exposure to open source free software makes people real rightwads...
Gameplay is critical, but in most of the best games there is a point to the gameplay beyond "shooting bad guys." If Legacy had most of the story cut out and things happen to advance a story point that is missing, then that damages the game.
For example, I really enjoyed the gameplay of the first MGS. It was fantastic. But, without the story - silly as it was - the game wouldn't have been as good. It certainly wouldn't have been as beloved, nor would it have spawned the franchise which is now considered by fans a PS3 system seller despite being at least 10-12 months away from release.
Let's face it: Just like KOTOR2, which was very disappointing compared to the first KOTOR, if the story was cut down or out in Star Trek Legacy, then it was done to get the game released and not to make the game better. That's bad and, IMHO, can't be spun as a good thing.
Not really. The early DVD players (mostly pre-2000) were slow to start, too, and HD-DVD/Blu-ray players haven't even been available for a year. As costs came down and the hardware improved, DVD players sped up nicely. The same will happen with HD-DVD/Blu-Ray players over time.
I don't know about others, but I didn't say anything about "blame." My point was only that it doesn't make one an idiot if their Wiimote goes flying during play, just, I suppose, as it wouldn't make one an idiot if someone gets a little excited with their tilting of the PS3 controller and gives somebody an unintentional smack - heck, I've had the same thing happen with non-motion-sensitive controllers.
Or you are a little kid, or you have some carpal tunnel, or you have some arthritis, or you just generally have some trouble with gripping/coordination and haven't gotten used yet to moving your hand/arm around in the fashion encouraged by the Wiimote.
Why is that just because one person doesn't have a particular issue, that means that anyone who does have the issue is either dumb or "doing something pretty stupid?" I mean, clearly Nintendo saw losing the Wiimote during play as a possibility or there wouldn't be a wrist strap in the first place.