Can't say I disagree. Capitalism is a double-edged sword.
Oh, definitely. I just recall that the original rationalisation for copyright was that if artists did not get compensated for their work, then they wouldn't be able to continue to produce art, and thus that we would all suffer culturally. Hence, by the original rationale, copyright shouldn't apply in this situation.:)
Agreed that the investors should be compensated, my thought was just that game assets tend to be more of a white elephant than a real asset to the investors, whereas the dev team may still be able to make something of the codebase.
You must be joking. There's lots of apps for Android. Probably fewer than for iPhone, but not dramatically so. I was able to find an app for any task I needed.
And about gaming, I have plenty of games! Myst, Marathon... photoshop...:/
You must be new to software. The developers did the work probably 20 times over, and the management structure was so messed up that 90% of said work got thrown away. The problems are twofold:
Programmers and artists generally aren't "people persons" and as such are happy to focus on their passion and let someone else manage
Management is like investment banking. It's very difficult to tell the difference between good management and bad management until the shit hits the fan, and by then it's too late.
So what you end up with is either (as happens in successful software companies) someone forceful seizes control of the development process, and the success or failure of the team rests on their shoulders, or (as usually happens) no-one really takes charge, and everyone with vague job descriptions wastes all their time doing nothing (or doing meaningless busywork) while Rome burns.
It's generally a good sign of a software company's health if it has a clearly defined process not just for actual software development, but for planning and milestone setting. Even with a clear process in place, and even with management staff committed to transparency, it still takes a long while at the start of the project to weed out the idiots who slipped into management roles, and replace them with competent people. Once the weeding-out process is close to completion, the actual development work can start in earnest.
If you're in a position of power over a company you can already extort things from them. ("You owe us six months rent, let us use your soundtrack or find a new office" works just fine under the current system.)
The problem with using software as part of a company's hard assets, and trying to liquidate it to pay debts, is that part-built software is near useless without the people working on it. At the very least, it costs 3+ months of development time to get a new team up to speed on the codebase. I'd say it's probably more likely to actually be released if given to the dev team as 'you work on it in your own time, you can publish it'.
I recently watched the games company I worked for come within inches of liquidation while our almost-ready-to-launch title sat on the shelf going nowhere. They seem to be back on their feet now, thankfully, but it was a very rough 6 months for them and they lost most of their staff (including myself).
The thing that really got to me, a little at first and then more and more, was what would happen to the game that we'd all worked so hard on. The parent company had proven very inept at finding a publisher (two deals came to the final meeting before our directors walked away claiming the terms weren't good enough) and they owned the copyright on the code and assets. Most likely the game would just have ended up mothballed permanently.
I'd like to see some provision whereby almost complete products owned by a freshly deceased company could be freed (open sourced, or just released unencumbered by any copyright). Surely the cultural loss of media like this is far greater than the cultural loss claimed by copyright proponents as due to lack of compensation.
You will always, ALWAYS end up with 1 too few case screws. I dunno how it works but even if you have 500 other screws and odds and ends left over, you'll be one case screw short. Most cases these days use thumb screws (screws with big easily gripped heads on them for turning with finger and thumb, not the torture device). Hence buy a bag of thumb screws.:)
No, but if I phone Toyota and say "I'd like to buy a left hand door glass" they generally say "certainly, that will be $300", not "You need to replace a car window? The car is stolen, isn't it?"
Pretty sure that's compressed, bro. The ear does substantial processing itself, including conversion to the frequency domain. Not being digital, it's also lossy.
Hydrogen is already obsolete. I mean, come on, [...bunch of very true things snipped...]
Hydrogen was obsolete from the start. Or rather, it was never physically possible to make a hydrogen fuel cell car, fuelled by renewable hydrogen, that could compete with battery-electric cars. The entire 'hydrogen economy' goal was pure fabrication, a colossal red herring designed by car manufacturers to protect their central product base. It was then taken up by the U.S. Government because hydrogen sound cool while "battery powered car" makes you think of the Super Hornet r/c car you had when you were a kid that you could never play with because it needed 8 AA batteries and they were always flat. All the government blahblah about the "hydrogen economy" neatly forgot to mention where we would GET this hydrogen, or if it was mentioned, there was handwaving about nuclear power plants and subsequent quiet mumbles about "aw fuckit we can just crack fossil fuels into hydrogen for now".
Consider the disadvantages of electric vehicles compared to traditional petrol vehicles, from the point of view of a company like GM or Ford:
Require a factory retool - apart from the rolling chassis and interior, they are mechanically very different.
Bulk of vehicle cost is in the battery, which is built by someone else.
Virtually no parts replacement business - B.E.V.s are mechanically vastly simpler than petrol vehicles.
No dealer service plans - B.E.V.s don't require oil changes etc.
The last three are all real deal-killers. For one, around half the cost of an EV is in the battery. Short of buying a nano-lithium-battery manufacturing plant, there's no way for them to make a profit on the batteries. Car manufacturers also derive a substantial portion of their income from spare parts sales, and the only replacement parts EVs are likely to need (barring collisions) in their first 5-10 years are tyres and brake pads. Lastly, new vehicles are generally dealer-serviced to keep the warranty, and again, EVs don't need regular servicing the way normal cars do. So financially, there's a strong incentive for car manufacturers to try and maintain the status quo.
Personally, if I were running a big car company I'd sink my liquid assets into buying a solid share of A123 Systems, bite the bullet, and switch from building 350 cu in. behemoths to building moderate sized sedans with a 200km pure-electric range and optional (removable for more luggage space) range-extender genset.
Actually cmd is a slightly different (and better) command prompt than command. It supports up/down arrows to select previous lines, among other things.
People bitch about what they know. I spend a month or so in London and public transport there is f**king fantastic. Maybe occasionally a train will be slightly late, but they still run every 10 minutes. And everything's so close to everything else anyway that often it's quicker just to walk the 500m instead of spending 20 minutes on the underground.
Dunno about you but I pay 50c per litre (~6-7c/km) in petrol tax, as well as ~$460 a year in registration fees. I do about 20,000km a year, so that's nearly $1700 a year that I pay to the government to subsidise roads.
I read an interesting related note about mortgages - a high rate of mortgaging is bad for unemployment rates in tough economic times. If you have a mortgage and a house you're less able to move to another city in order to get a job.
- it takes me 25 minutes to reach work in the car.
- it would take 1:30 to get there via public transportation.
This is always the dealbreaker for me. In my job-before-last I was in a perfect situation, 10 minute walk to the train station, 15 minute train ride to a station right next to work. And on a perfect day I could get in in the same amount of time it took me to drive. If I mistimed it, it could easily take 30-40 minutes compared to the 20 it took to drive.
In my current location I'm 45km from work (not my choice) and it takes about 50 minutes to get to work. By public transport it not only takes more than 2 hours but it costs more than petrol plus wear-and-tear on my car. And then I have to sit next to smelly people and I don't have a nice stereo to entertain me. And then I spend an extra two hours a day NOT at home with my wife. No thanks.
As for people who claim that you can't feel the difference between condom and no condom, I find it hard to believe that anyone saying this has actually tried both. It's not a huge difference but it's definitely there. Thinking about it further, possibly it's to do with circumcision? When wearing a condom, the foreskin doesn't move as much, which reduces stimulation. I could imagine someone who'd been snipped would not see this effect (and will be less sensitive anyway due to keratinization).
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Can't say I disagree. Capitalism is a double-edged sword.
Oh, definitely. I just recall that the original rationalisation for copyright was that if artists did not get compensated for their work, then they wouldn't be able to continue to produce art, and thus that we would all suffer culturally. Hence, by the original rationale, copyright shouldn't apply in this situation. :)
Agreed that the investors should be compensated, my thought was just that game assets tend to be more of a white elephant than a real asset to the investors, whereas the dev team may still be able to make something of the codebase.
You must be joking. There's lots of apps for Android. Probably fewer than for iPhone, but not dramatically so. I was able to find an app for any task I needed.
And about gaming, I have plenty of games! Myst, Marathon... photoshop... :/
So what you end up with is either (as happens in successful software companies) someone forceful seizes control of the development process, and the success or failure of the team rests on their shoulders, or (as usually happens) no-one really takes charge, and everyone with vague job descriptions wastes all their time doing nothing (or doing meaningless busywork) while Rome burns.
It's generally a good sign of a software company's health if it has a clearly defined process not just for actual software development, but for planning and milestone setting. Even with a clear process in place, and even with management staff committed to transparency, it still takes a long while at the start of the project to weed out the idiots who slipped into management roles, and replace them with competent people. Once the weeding-out process is close to completion, the actual development work can start in earnest.
If you're in a position of power over a company you can already extort things from them. ("You owe us six months rent, let us use your soundtrack or find a new office" works just fine under the current system.)
The problem with using software as part of a company's hard assets, and trying to liquidate it to pay debts, is that part-built software is near useless without the people working on it. At the very least, it costs 3+ months of development time to get a new team up to speed on the codebase. I'd say it's probably more likely to actually be released if given to the dev team as 'you work on it in your own time, you can publish it'.
I recently watched the games company I worked for come within inches of liquidation while our almost-ready-to-launch title sat on the shelf going nowhere. They seem to be back on their feet now, thankfully, but it was a very rough 6 months for them and they lost most of their staff (including myself).
The thing that really got to me, a little at first and then more and more, was what would happen to the game that we'd all worked so hard on. The parent company had proven very inept at finding a publisher (two deals came to the final meeting before our directors walked away claiming the terms weren't good enough) and they owned the copyright on the code and assets. Most likely the game would just have ended up mothballed permanently.
I'd like to see some provision whereby almost complete products owned by a freshly deceased company could be freed (open sourced, or just released unencumbered by any copyright). Surely the cultural loss of media like this is far greater than the cultural loss claimed by copyright proponents as due to lack of compensation.
You will always, ALWAYS end up with 1 too few case screws. I dunno how it works but even if you have 500 other screws and odds and ends left over, you'll be one case screw short. Most cases these days use thumb screws (screws with big easily gripped heads on them for turning with finger and thumb, not the torture device). Hence buy a bag of thumb screws. :)
No, but if I phone Toyota and say "I'd like to buy a left hand door glass" they generally say "certainly, that will be $300", not "You need to replace a car window? The car is stolen, isn't it?"
Be sure to drink lots of beer, play a goodly portion of online games, and get good home cookin'. That helps me at least. ;)
That said I bet your friends who tell you you're whipped aren't waking up early to get it on before work. Viva la differance!
And this one guy stands in the cop's way, refuses to move and when the cop's about to taser him, yells IM PEDANT!
Looks like either the majority of slashdotters, or the slashdot servers, self destructed.
Pretty sure that's compressed, bro. The ear does substantial processing itself, including conversion to the frequency domain. Not being digital, it's also lossy.
:D
MOAR PEDANTRY!
What do you think streaming video on the internet is used for, really? And your username is 'karnal' and all! Sheesh!
Hydrogen is already obsolete. I mean, come on, [...bunch of very true things snipped...]
Hydrogen was obsolete from the start. Or rather, it was never physically possible to make a hydrogen fuel cell car, fuelled by renewable hydrogen, that could compete with battery-electric cars. The entire 'hydrogen economy' goal was pure fabrication, a colossal red herring designed by car manufacturers to protect their central product base. It was then taken up by the U.S. Government because hydrogen sound cool while "battery powered car" makes you think of the Super Hornet r/c car you had when you were a kid that you could never play with because it needed 8 AA batteries and they were always flat. All the government blahblah about the "hydrogen economy" neatly forgot to mention where we would GET this hydrogen, or if it was mentioned, there was handwaving about nuclear power plants and subsequent quiet mumbles about "aw fuckit we can just crack fossil fuels into hydrogen for now".
Consider the disadvantages of electric vehicles compared to traditional petrol vehicles, from the point of view of a company like GM or Ford:
The last three are all real deal-killers. For one, around half the cost of an EV is in the battery. Short of buying a nano-lithium-battery manufacturing plant, there's no way for them to make a profit on the batteries. Car manufacturers also derive a substantial portion of their income from spare parts sales, and the only replacement parts EVs are likely to need (barring collisions) in their first 5-10 years are tyres and brake pads. Lastly, new vehicles are generally dealer-serviced to keep the warranty, and again, EVs don't need regular servicing the way normal cars do. So financially, there's a strong incentive for car manufacturers to try and maintain the status quo.
Personally, if I were running a big car company I'd sink my liquid assets into buying a solid share of A123 Systems, bite the bullet, and switch from building 350 cu in. behemoths to building moderate sized sedans with a 200km pure-electric range and optional (removable for more luggage space) range-extender genset.
Actually cmd is a slightly different (and better) command prompt than command. It supports up/down arrows to select previous lines, among other things.
Those are imperial firkins (or maybe just imperial gallons) rather than US units.
That's Reductio ad Hitlerum! :P
People bitch about what they know. I spend a month or so in London and public transport there is f**king fantastic. Maybe occasionally a train will be slightly late, but they still run every 10 minutes. And everything's so close to everything else anyway that often it's quicker just to walk the 500m instead of spending 20 minutes on the underground.
Dunno about you but I pay 50c per litre (~6-7c/km) in petrol tax, as well as ~$460 a year in registration fees. I do about 20,000km a year, so that's nearly $1700 a year that I pay to the government to subsidise roads.
I read an interesting related note about mortgages - a high rate of mortgaging is bad for unemployment rates in tough economic times. If you have a mortgage and a house you're less able to move to another city in order to get a job.
- it takes me 25 minutes to reach work in the car. - it would take 1:30 to get there via public transportation.
This is always the dealbreaker for me. In my job-before-last I was in a perfect situation, 10 minute walk to the train station, 15 minute train ride to a station right next to work. And on a perfect day I could get in in the same amount of time it took me to drive. If I mistimed it, it could easily take 30-40 minutes compared to the 20 it took to drive.
In my current location I'm 45km from work (not my choice) and it takes about 50 minutes to get to work. By public transport it not only takes more than 2 hours but it costs more than petrol plus wear-and-tear on my car. And then I have to sit next to smelly people and I don't have a nice stereo to entertain me. And then I spend an extra two hours a day NOT at home with my wife. No thanks.
However bacteria need nutrient (urine base btw) to do it.
So... you're saying pee on the sand dunes to make them grow? That's awesome!
So long as you can still produce them for under $5000 I'm sure there will be a market.
And the "less pleasurable" - that part is in your head. The big one.
Are you snipped? I'm wondering if that has an effect, because I'm not, and my wife and I can sure as hell both feel the difference.
I like the cut of your jib.
As for people who claim that you can't feel the difference between condom and no condom, I find it hard to believe that anyone saying this has actually tried both. It's not a huge difference but it's definitely there. Thinking about it further, possibly it's to do with circumcision? When wearing a condom, the foreskin doesn't move as much, which reduces stimulation. I could imagine someone who'd been snipped would not see this effect (and will be less sensitive anyway due to keratinization).
You do realise that there's skin on the inside of a vagina, right?