Physical media will always be far superior to digital.
1) Can buy the game used. Instead of paying $60 for a game, you can wait a few weeks and get it for $35-40. Within a few months, it's available for $20-30 while Steam still sells it for $60.
2) It can be resold. After you spend 10 hours finishing that game, you can turn it around and resell it for 80% of its buying price. You can then apply that money towards #1 and buy another game for cheap.
3) You're not stuck with it. How many games, honestly, do you still play after a year? Maybe one or two. Why be permanently stuck with a game that you'll never play again? And why be stuck with a game that sucks? How about those poor saps that paid $60 for Terminator Salvation, discovered the game could be beaten in 5 hours, and had absolutely no replay value?
4) You can trade games. The ultimate barter. Tired of a game and need a break? Trade with a friend for a month. Want to see if a game is really fun? Borrow it from a friend. Downloadable demos do not compare.
5) A visual reminder. Having a physical boxed item is a visual reminder that you have a game that you can play. I compare this to the Humble Games bundle I bought a few weeks back. I honestly keep forgetting that I have these games to play, since they're just icons on my desktop along with dozens of others. It's different than being bored and walking to a bookcase to view through a physical collection.
What about for those who haven't seen it?
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
I've never seen a single episode of Lost, ever. But, I want to. I generally wait for shows to release on DVD and watch them over a few weekends.
With Lost closing up, is that still recommended? Everything I hear is about the bad story arcs and plot lines that go nowhere. If it worth watching from beginning to end? Are there rehash episodes that would make more sense to watch?
Purely a setup. Notice how the presence of a black bar insinuates that it's covering something offensive? If you look at the picture, there's all fully clothed, the straps to their tops are visible, including the top themselves under and above the bar.
He's wrong for viewing pictures of girls in bikinis while on government time... but there is no porn here.
"Graphics" != "latest hardware". Graphics are important, but to a limited extent. The graphics created on five-year old tech pleases the vast majority of the market. The common gamer does not see a need to move to DX11 when games produced on DX9 are "good enough". I never said that graphics were unimportant, just suggested that continually pushing the graphical envelope is a fruitless journey.
That all sounds completely backwards. Console game developers don't have ballooning budgets and team requirements because they're on a console. Those are attributed to the blockbuster games, on PC and console alike. Additionally, developers shouldn't be learning whole new systems on a continual basis. This is what makes bad games and delays advancement. Once a developer has the code for a system perfected, they can turn their attention to focusing on the gameplay itself. Console games allow developers to opportunity to devote more of their development time towards game play and less on building/reworking game engines and device support.
PC gaming is its own worst enemy with non-standard device drivers and APIs and designing games for wide varieties of end performance. The development community knows this and found the answer in designing games for the console so that they can advance their art.
Why are modern games being judged based on their technological prowess? How is this holding back PC games? Games produced for five year old tech still run on modern machines. So what if games are targeted towards years-old technology? Are they fun? Are people buying them? There's more to a game that shading effects and the hundreds of hours that dedicated teams put into making realistic water ripples.
Games are sold based upon gameplay and fun. In this current market, those are more easily found in the console market. I don't see that changing.//PC Gamer since 1986///Now happily a 100% console gamer////Though I love to play Cave Story
WTF is wrong with you submitter? This is negligent homicide by the family. They left a loaded, cocked, pistol on a table where a three year old can get it. A three year old does not have a concept of life and death, and does not commit suicide. By throwing around the S-word you're taking the blame off the people it truly belongs to: the parents. People who cannot treat firearms with the respect they deserve should not have them.
Already the news is making an issue out of the fact that it's a Wii-related death. It's not. It's a loaded gun left out in the open. It doesn't matter if the Wii gun "looked" real, it wasn't. You can have a real, pink, Hello Kitty revolver there. It doesn't matter. A loaded and cocked gun was left where a curious child can get it.
You miss the concept of core work hours.:) Work schedules are likely 6-3, 7-4, 8-5, 9-6. Look at the overlap and the core hours where nearly everyone is at work is 9-3.
Yes, physical security, you're away from your home. So are a vast majority of people from between the hours of 9AM to 3PM every day. There's been a lot of backlash over this site, including Twitter suspending their account, which is just silly. It's the same level of surveillance that someone can do by just parking in front of your home. It's just that now they can see you over FourSquare (speaking of silly...). It's the same as posting on Twitter that you're stuck in traffic, or sending an email from a work-only address. Just another in a very, very long list of ways to see where you're currently at.
Criminals will still just sit out in front of your house and wait for the cars the leave.
SageTV on XP is what I use and love. I've been using it for about two years now and it has a pretty high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). My 5-yr old also uses it with ease to watch all his shows.
I spent an entire three months fighting with MythTV to get it to operate cleanly, and it was extremely stressful. A friend turned me onto SageTV. After one evening it was setup and I never had to touch it ever again. It just works.
This entire discussion, and no mention of Syngress? Syngress is an awesome little shop that has published hundreds of technology books. A lot of their books are security related, but also cover certifications and even fiction-tech.
In January, Moss gave a keynote presentation at the DoD Cyber Crime Conference. I wonder if his presence there helped put him into this new position. It really made him public to the government there:)
And what is YOUR idea? It's easy to tell someone to come up with something original, but you give it a shot. What is a brand new idea that no one has ever done, that would be good as a video game and sell a million copies?
Because I have a feeling that this was an AC post from someone within Valve, I'll make a few notes:
If Steam, or any other digital provider, allowed a way to transfer licenses between people then it would absolutely change my stance on the issue. That's the only change that needs to be made. A way for a user to say "Transmit license to abc@xyz.com", assuming that abc@xyz.com is a valid account on the same service. The two users can then work out buying/renting arrangements on their own.
If that was implemented, I'd change my stance of {0% Online: 100% Retail} to about {66% Online: 33% Retail} (the other 1% will just go to piracy... joke!).
I would still back up my games to media "just in case", but an online play license would be perfectly fine. As long as it prevented me from continuing to install and play that game after I transferred my license.
Will it be implemented? Nope. Publishers see that as lost sales. They fully intend for every single person who has played that game to pay MSRP for it.
Think of a world in which everything was 100% digital distribution, no license transferring, and iD was still forcing people to pay $49.99 for Daikatana....
I buy 100% retail boxed, tangible products. I want to be able to exercise the First-Sale Doctrine to re-sell my games after I complete them so that I can raise more money to buy more games. I also want the market to control the pricing of a product. Historically, after a few weeks on the market, retail-boxed items can be found for half the price of their digital counter-parts. Why? The game sucks. It may be fun at a $30 or $40 price point, but is a regret at a $60 price point. The market realizes this, and boxed games can be found for $40 whereas the digital copies are still at $59.99 (ooh, but free shipping and no tax!)
Digital copies are just a way to destroy the used-game market, undercut pawn shops (e.g. GameStop), lock out libraries, and permanently tie a person to a product so that they can never get rid of it.
This is, by far, the most troublesome issue we've had with OOo 3.
We've taken a large number of new computers, removed the trial of Office 2007, and installed OOo 3. Ever since, I've been handling hundreds of support tickets over the most basic of options: file associations.
OOo 3 removed the ability for OOo to take over document associations upon installation. It doesn't even give you choice of whether you want to or not, it just refuses to do it. You can't do an install Repair and re-associate; you have to associate them all manually. Which means walking people through "Right click, Open With, Browse, Program Files, OpenOffice, find something called oowriter... wait, no, it's called swriter.exe now. OK, five more associations to go..."
Removing functionality, even an optional function, from an OSS tool goes against everything that it stands for. IMO, of course
...tech/IT security books, I've run across many pitfalls along the way.
*) If you're just starting out, use Word. That makes it easier to pitch to publishers. *) If you have a publisher, they will give you a Word DOT template. *) You can write the material in something else, but you will almost always have to submit it in Word. *) The pay sucks and so do the hours. Many tech book publishers give a three month window and around $5,000 per book. At 20 hrs/week, that's roughly $20/hr. And you'll sink many hours into it. *) As a new author, you will be taken advantage of. You may be brought in on other projects and asked to write a quick chapter in a week, even before a contract has been signed. You may receive an email from your tech editor about changes with a deadline of _1 hour_, while you're in the middle of your day job. *) Make sure you're writing the book for the right reason. If it's for money or esteem, the book will stink. If it's to generally teach someone a concept, it probably will do alright. *) Sales on tech books stink. Don't expect any royalties unless you're a big time speaker or your book is picked up for a university course. Most tech books expire within six months, so there's a strong push to write the book months before the technology becomes popular, and then ride that wave. *) Get a second pair of eyes on everything. There may be some little tool or process that everyone in the world knows about except you. When you write on another one instead, you will ostracize many of your readers. *) Keep humor to a minimum. Most people stink at humor, even if they think they're funny. *) Give lots and lots of case studies and examples. *) Double check and triple check everything that is sent to the publisher. I've been screwed MANY times by this. Go LINE BY LINE, WORD BY WORD, through the whole thing. In one case, the copy editor accidentally removed a paragraph and repeated the previous one twice. The paragraph she removed was the one that gave credit and citation for the entire chapter to the original tool authors. Quite a few were pissed off to see me writing about a tool and not mentioning who wrote it and where it came from. *) Don't send anything to the publisher unless it's exactly what you want in the book. I made this mistake big time. I wrote a quick chapter, threw in screenshots for everything, and submitted it for them to review. My plan was for them to review it while I worked on redacting information from the screenshots. Chapter went through fine, I sent my new, redacted images, and they published the old ones instead. So, my entire familys' names and emails are now Google-searchable from that book:(
That's it from the top of my head. I got my name on some books, I met some good people, and I had some fun. But, the publishers eventually wore me down.
"gamers start buying used copies which generates money that goes into GameStop's pocket"
This sounds more like a tirade against GameStop than anything else, mostly because they're an upscale video game pawn shop.
For most people, games are sold used on normal channels such as eBay and Craigslist. That puts money back into the gamer's pocket so that they can buy more games.
Picked it up this weekend for $30 at Target's Black Friday sale. Saturday night the stores still have tons of Dead Space in stock. I would never pay $60 for any new game (well, maybe Fallout 3), but it was definitely worth the $30. Especially when you can beat it and sell it used for $45:)
You're right, I was talking a bit out of my ass on that. I guess I've been so brainwashed by the media to think all video games are violent:)
We have a wide selection in our home. There's a lot of Xbox games that I let him be around and play on a timer. He loved Eternal Sonata, Beautiful Katamari, and LOVED the mini games in the new Roller Coaster game. Yet, I also have GTA4, Dark Sector, Bioshock, etc that are only played when he's not around. As an adult I just tend to steer towards the more violent ones (and quirky ones, we had a good time playing Mr. Mosquito!)
Video games are violent, per the majority. For most, the point of a game is to kill other people. I'm an avid game player of Xbox and Wii, and my four year old has his games that he plays (Simpsons, The Bee Movie game, Kung Fu Panda). Last year we noticed that when I was playing Zelda on the Wii, he loved to mimic my actions. He started collecting "swords" and "shields" out of anything at hand and would play fight. Every now and then we watched me play Lost Odyssey, where the characters run up to the mob, attack, and run back (and that's how he named the game - "the one where you run up and hit the bad guy and run back"). When I fought, he would orchestrate himself fighting our chair with a sword.
Even when the game is over and unplayed for months, he would still act out those movements. Is he aggressive? He's a child, and he does have aggressive tendencies like all other boys. The point of this article: can it be pinned on the games? I doubt it. Just as young boys are attracted to guns, army guys, and fighting, he is attracted to games that have him fighting people - even if it's just jumping on their heads.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, IMO.
Then again, I think there are many parents out there who expect their kids to be little adults. They want them to shut up, sit down, be quiet, and follow strict rules. And, when the kids act like kids, the parents stretch for something to blame for them being "unruly". When ritalin isn't helping, let's blame the video games. IMO
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry for your loss.
Physical media will always be far superior to digital.
1) Can buy the game used. Instead of paying $60 for a game, you can wait a few weeks and get it for $35-40. Within a few months, it's available for $20-30 while Steam still sells it for $60.
2) It can be resold. After you spend 10 hours finishing that game, you can turn it around and resell it for 80% of its buying price. You can then apply that money towards #1 and buy another game for cheap.
3) You're not stuck with it. How many games, honestly, do you still play after a year? Maybe one or two. Why be permanently stuck with a game that you'll never play again? And why be stuck with a game that sucks? How about those poor saps that paid $60 for Terminator Salvation, discovered the game could be beaten in 5 hours, and had absolutely no replay value?
4) You can trade games. The ultimate barter. Tired of a game and need a break? Trade with a friend for a month. Want to see if a game is really fun? Borrow it from a friend. Downloadable demos do not compare.
5) A visual reminder. Having a physical boxed item is a visual reminder that you have a game that you can play. I compare this to the Humble Games bundle I bought a few weeks back. I honestly keep forgetting that I have these games to play, since they're just icons on my desktop along with dozens of others. It's different than being bored and walking to a bookcase to view through a physical collection.
I've never seen a single episode of Lost, ever. But, I want to. I generally wait for shows to release on DVD and watch them over a few weekends.
With Lost closing up, is that still recommended? Everything I hear is about the bad story arcs and plot lines that go nowhere. If it worth watching from beginning to end? Are there rehash episodes that would make more sense to watch?
I stand corrected :)
Purely a setup. Notice how the presence of a black bar insinuates that it's covering something offensive? If you look at the picture, there's all fully clothed, the straps to their tops are visible, including the top themselves under and above the bar.
He's wrong for viewing pictures of girls in bikinis while on government time... but there is no porn here.
"Graphics" != "latest hardware". Graphics are important, but to a limited extent. The graphics created on five-year old tech pleases the vast majority of the market. The common gamer does not see a need to move to DX11 when games produced on DX9 are "good enough". I never said that graphics were unimportant, just suggested that continually pushing the graphical envelope is a fruitless journey.
That all sounds completely backwards. Console game developers don't have ballooning budgets and team requirements because they're on a console. Those are attributed to the blockbuster games, on PC and console alike. Additionally, developers shouldn't be learning whole new systems on a continual basis. This is what makes bad games and delays advancement. Once a developer has the code for a system perfected, they can turn their attention to focusing on the gameplay itself. Console games allow developers to opportunity to devote more of their development time towards game play and less on building/reworking game engines and device support.
PC gaming is its own worst enemy with non-standard device drivers and APIs and designing games for wide varieties of end performance. The development community knows this and found the answer in designing games for the console so that they can advance their art.
Why are modern games being judged based on their technological prowess? How is this holding back PC games? Games produced for five year old tech still run on modern machines. So what if games are targeted towards years-old technology? Are they fun? Are people buying them? There's more to a game that shading effects and the hundreds of hours that dedicated teams put into making realistic water ripples.
Games are sold based upon gameplay and fun. In this current market, those are more easily found in the console market. I don't see that changing. //PC Gamer since 1986 ///Now happily a 100% console gamer ////Though I love to play Cave Story
WTF is wrong with you submitter? This is negligent homicide by the family. They left a loaded, cocked, pistol on a table where a three year old can get it. A three year old does not have a concept of life and death, and does not commit suicide. By throwing around the S-word you're taking the blame off the people it truly belongs to: the parents. People who cannot treat firearms with the respect they deserve should not have them.
Already the news is making an issue out of the fact that it's a Wii-related death. It's not. It's a loaded gun left out in the open. It doesn't matter if the Wii gun "looked" real, it wasn't. You can have a real, pink, Hello Kitty revolver there. It doesn't matter. A loaded and cocked gun was left where a curious child can get it.
You miss the concept of core work hours. :) Work schedules are likely 6-3, 7-4, 8-5, 9-6. Look at the overlap and the core hours where nearly everyone is at work is 9-3.
Yes, physical security, you're away from your home. So are a vast majority of people from between the hours of 9AM to 3PM every day. There's been a lot of backlash over this site, including Twitter suspending their account, which is just silly. It's the same level of surveillance that someone can do by just parking in front of your home. It's just that now they can see you over FourSquare (speaking of silly...). It's the same as posting on Twitter that you're stuck in traffic, or sending an email from a work-only address. Just another in a very, very long list of ways to see where you're currently at.
Criminals will still just sit out in front of your house and wait for the cars the leave.
SageTV on XP is what I use and love. I've been using it for about two years now and it has a pretty high WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). My 5-yr old also uses it with ease to watch all his shows.
I spent an entire three months fighting with MythTV to get it to operate cleanly, and it was extremely stressful. A friend turned me onto SageTV. After one evening it was setup and I never had to touch it ever again. It just works.
This entire discussion, and no mention of Syngress? Syngress is an awesome little shop that has published hundreds of technology books. A lot of their books are security related, but also cover certifications and even fiction-tech.
In January, Moss gave a keynote presentation at the DoD Cyber Crime Conference. I wonder if his presence there helped put him into this new position. It really made him public to the government there :)
So they just ported Wikimapia?
Or... dare say, they're using Wikimapia itself?!
And what is YOUR idea? It's easy to tell someone to come up with something original, but you give it a shot. What is a brand new idea that no one has ever done, that would be good as a video game and sell a million copies?
"You see, a pimp's love is very different from that of a square."
Did anyone else picture the opening military scene when reading this summary?
Because I have a feeling that this was an AC post from someone within Valve, I'll make a few notes:
If Steam, or any other digital provider, allowed a way to transfer licenses between people then it would absolutely change my stance on the issue. That's the only change that needs to be made. A way for a user to say "Transmit license to abc@xyz.com", assuming that abc@xyz.com is a valid account on the same service. The two users can then work out buying/renting arrangements on their own.
If that was implemented, I'd change my stance of {0% Online: 100% Retail} to about {66% Online: 33% Retail} (the other 1% will just go to piracy... joke!).
I would still back up my games to media "just in case", but an online play license would be perfectly fine. As long as it prevented me from continuing to install and play that game after I transferred my license.
Will it be implemented? Nope. Publishers see that as lost sales. They fully intend for every single person who has played that game to pay MSRP for it.
Think of a world in which everything was 100% digital distribution, no license transferring, and iD was still forcing people to pay $49.99 for Daikatana....
I buy 100% retail boxed, tangible products. I want to be able to exercise the First-Sale Doctrine to re-sell my games after I complete them so that I can raise more money to buy more games. I also want the market to control the pricing of a product. Historically, after a few weeks on the market, retail-boxed items can be found for half the price of their digital counter-parts. Why? The game sucks. It may be fun at a $30 or $40 price point, but is a regret at a $60 price point. The market realizes this, and boxed games can be found for $40 whereas the digital copies are still at $59.99 (ooh, but free shipping and no tax!)
Digital copies are just a way to destroy the used-game market, undercut pawn shops (e.g. GameStop), lock out libraries, and permanently tie a person to a product so that they can never get rid of it.
This is, by far, the most troublesome issue we've had with OOo 3.
We've taken a large number of new computers, removed the trial of Office 2007, and installed OOo 3. Ever since, I've been handling hundreds of support tickets over the most basic of options: file associations.
OOo 3 removed the ability for OOo to take over document associations upon installation. It doesn't even give you choice of whether you want to or not, it just refuses to do it. You can't do an install Repair and re-associate; you have to associate them all manually. Which means walking people through "Right click, Open With, Browse, Program Files, OpenOffice, find something called oowriter... wait, no, it's called swriter.exe now. OK, five more associations to go..."
Removing functionality, even an optional function, from an OSS tool goes against everything that it stands for. IMO, of course
...tech/IT security books, I've run across many pitfalls along the way.
*) If you're just starting out, use Word. That makes it easier to pitch to publishers. :(
*) If you have a publisher, they will give you a Word DOT template.
*) You can write the material in something else, but you will almost always have to submit it in Word.
*) The pay sucks and so do the hours. Many tech book publishers give a three month window and around $5,000 per book. At 20 hrs/week, that's roughly $20/hr. And you'll sink many hours into it.
*) As a new author, you will be taken advantage of. You may be brought in on other projects and asked to write a quick chapter in a week, even before a contract has been signed. You may receive an email from your tech editor about changes with a deadline of _1 hour_, while you're in the middle of your day job.
*) Make sure you're writing the book for the right reason. If it's for money or esteem, the book will stink. If it's to generally teach someone a concept, it probably will do alright.
*) Sales on tech books stink. Don't expect any royalties unless you're a big time speaker or your book is picked up for a university course. Most tech books expire within six months, so there's a strong push to write the book months before the technology becomes popular, and then ride that wave.
*) Get a second pair of eyes on everything. There may be some little tool or process that everyone in the world knows about except you. When you write on another one instead, you will ostracize many of your readers.
*) Keep humor to a minimum. Most people stink at humor, even if they think they're funny.
*) Give lots and lots of case studies and examples.
*) Double check and triple check everything that is sent to the publisher. I've been screwed MANY times by this. Go LINE BY LINE, WORD BY WORD, through the whole thing. In one case, the copy editor accidentally removed a paragraph and repeated the previous one twice. The paragraph she removed was the one that gave credit and citation for the entire chapter to the original tool authors. Quite a few were pissed off to see me writing about a tool and not mentioning who wrote it and where it came from.
*) Don't send anything to the publisher unless it's exactly what you want in the book. I made this mistake big time. I wrote a quick chapter, threw in screenshots for everything, and submitted it for them to review. My plan was for them to review it while I worked on redacting information from the screenshots. Chapter went through fine, I sent my new, redacted images, and they published the old ones instead. So, my entire familys' names and emails are now Google-searchable from that book
That's it from the top of my head. I got my name on some books, I met some good people, and I had some fun. But, the publishers eventually wore me down.
"gamers start buying used copies which generates money that goes into GameStop's pocket"
This sounds more like a tirade against GameStop than anything else, mostly because they're an upscale video game pawn shop.
For most people, games are sold used on normal channels such as eBay and Craigslist. That puts money back into the gamer's pocket so that they can buy more games.
Picked it up this weekend for $30 at Target's Black Friday sale. Saturday night the stores still have tons of Dead Space in stock. I would never pay $60 for any new game (well, maybe Fallout 3), but it was definitely worth the $30. Especially when you can beat it and sell it used for $45 :)
You're right, I was talking a bit out of my ass on that. I guess I've been so brainwashed by the media to think all video games are violent :)
We have a wide selection in our home. There's a lot of Xbox games that I let him be around and play on a timer. He loved Eternal Sonata, Beautiful Katamari, and LOVED the mini games in the new Roller Coaster game. Yet, I also have GTA4, Dark Sector, Bioshock, etc that are only played when he's not around. As an adult I just tend to steer towards the more violent ones (and quirky ones, we had a good time playing Mr. Mosquito!)
Video games are violent, per the majority. For most, the point of a game is to kill other people. I'm an avid game player of Xbox and Wii, and my four year old has his games that he plays (Simpsons, The Bee Movie game, Kung Fu Panda). Last year we noticed that when I was playing Zelda on the Wii, he loved to mimic my actions. He started collecting "swords" and "shields" out of anything at hand and would play fight. Every now and then we watched me play Lost Odyssey, where the characters run up to the mob, attack, and run back (and that's how he named the game - "the one where you run up and hit the bad guy and run back"). When I fought, he would orchestrate himself fighting our chair with a sword.
Even when the game is over and unplayed for months, he would still act out those movements. Is he aggressive? He's a child, and he does have aggressive tendencies like all other boys. The point of this article: can it be pinned on the games? I doubt it. Just as young boys are attracted to guns, army guys, and fighting, he is attracted to games that have him fighting people - even if it's just jumping on their heads.
Correlation doesn't imply causation, IMO.
Then again, I think there are many parents out there who expect their kids to be little adults. They want them to shut up, sit down, be quiet, and follow strict rules. And, when the kids act like kids, the parents stretch for something to blame for them being "unruly". When ritalin isn't helping, let's blame the video games. IMO