They also sell a digitizer for LPs. Visit the link?
The cost of a consumer converter to move any analog recording to a digital format is going to be incredible cheap for the foreseeable future. There's no reason not to offer to sell them, whatever the volume until the last of the media is likely fallen to bits 50 years before*. Even constructing the mechanism to do the conversion is likely to be trivial.
*People still recover and convert (parts of) celluloid film, when you can find it intact.
Is this "study" excluding corporate buys? What about servers which are sold as desktop configurations? I did buy a notebook this year (for the first time) but I can balance that against 5 others who bought desktops and the ungodly number of desktops my company buys per month from DELL.
Document DRM is even simpler to circumvent. Tiny cellphone/digital cameras. Screenshot much? Notepads? A really good memory is anti-ddrm. The best you can do is log access, but once it is accessed, there is no control over specifications. YMWNV.
I am speaking generally about the US MMO market when I say the MMO market. I don't read foreign game sites or forums.
RMT - Real Money Transaction vs Microtransaction
I don't see much difference between these concepts, although some ( http://tagn.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/rmt-and-microtransactions-rant/ ) may disagree. Both terms describe paying real money (for an effect that cannot be obtained any other way) BEYOND your subscription fee. The surviving niche and aging MMOs have switched to RMT added value (if you will), because it's an easy revenue model to implement, that works. There isn't more justification needed for controllers (of the purse strings). For most cases, the number of people who would give up on a game SWITCHING to RMT are usually pacified by making the RMT benefits cosmetic. Changing appearance is seen by gamers as an acceptable vanity issue. How many MMO player groups find a member bidding for a relatively weaker or even inappropriate (strategic) item for appearance's sake? (healing staff on a fire wizard) I dare say, it's commonplace.
While Asian based MMOs take RMT for granted, America has a similar mentality toward obtaining possessions. There is a market for players who are accepting of RMT for stronger items (+90 sword only available for 30$). I would say the demand is much lower than the casual MMO base and is antithetical of the shared beliefs of aging players who "walked through the lizard temple both ways for a year to get this Fungal Vest". Currently, most MMOs are about aquiring personal power, at whatever cost the game has set up.
From the context of the overall habits of gamers, it's very apparent to Comic and Game shops that CCGs have fallen out of favor in the light of the MMORPG phenom. Now players cam compete in the abstract against a wider variety of people, with almost no effort. They don't even have to travel anywhere. It's a larger playing field, yet they can still feel equal in terms of capability, for an overall lower cost (now that you don't have to save to buy 4 of the clutch cards for tournament decks every X months, see M:TG who rotates what sets are allowed). There are number of CCGs which are played almost exclusively online.*
In the Asian MMO market, if you put in purchasable power items and you will lose some audience. The balance seems to always favor including RMT for Power items. To what degree would it affect MMOs in the US? Americans seem very tolerant of Collector's (or Pre-order) Edition bonus items that are low or medium on the gamewide scale of power. Buying gold with real money or characters with real money has been going on since gold farming was coined. This gold is used for "twinked" alternate characters or even the individual "best" items, through a communal player's market. It's part of the accepted MMO landscape. To that extent, isn't RMT already in every game? It's in iTunes. What's more, RMT can eliminate gold farming, when it happens that you can buy gold from the MMO itself (some claim many gold farmers ARE from the game makers, running a masquerade). Other than perceived tradition (see no RMT, hear no RMT), there doesn't seem to be a compelling bias against it. Overwhelmingly, it's the visibility of the RMT that seems to cause players to complain. Perhaps a fear of raising the bar for games that may already seem like a chore.
I agree RMT is the future. Is it really that hard to accept a tradeoff? Some of the die-hard idealists will outright quit, a subset of those, permanently. In exchange, the game (and some people's careers) will receive a longer lifespan. I think it's just a metagame about player expectations at this point.
*I use BoardGameGeeks.com forums to monitor the closing of shops, which are all but extinct in Southern California.
It's a matter of degree. The formalization of the win is literally irrelevant to a geek, unless something UNEXPECTED happens./. has never frontpaged individual US senatorial seat totals, because it isn't relevant. Go to a US-centric political site for that.
Maybe someone should frontpage the scandal over selling Obama's seat? Electoral process isn't geek news. It's not even interesting news. It's fucking, hundreds-of-years-old news.
See details about the Magnavox Odyssey 2 here, including mentions of the Arcade ports that were relatively unpopular in the US but more successful in other countries:
I think the argument he tried to make is, how can you say dropping an anvil on a Roadrunner is ok when you don't think Coyotes should kill Roadrunners. One is a precursor to the other. This makes them effectively the same, for most cases (excepting where physics stops working for no reason, etc).
I don't think it's fair to outright accuse them of an undetermined finding, in an article title, regardless of the entities involved. If an organization that wasn't so maligned (like Apple) was to be accused, there would be no small amount of grandstanding on this point. IANAL and neither are the editors involved in the proceedings.
I have my original copy I played long ago. It had supply trucks to restock ammo and some good AI to govern how they pathed around to supply low turrets and such. Dune2/C&C harvesters exhibited a simpler version of the AI, looking for their appropriate fields and returning.
The US attempted to reconstitute the army after realizing that releasing the only natives with combat training and no source of income could effectively serve as the army AND were often the perpetrators of the looting. WHAT A SURPRISE. It wasn't a matter of trying to protect everything, it was a matter of the US destabilizing the country on multiple levels. The news is old, you should have kept track.
It's interesting that some of her statements are not strictly inaccurate. I might even say enlightened, without the enlightenment.
No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful.
Amen to this. There is always an associated upkeep to software, alluded to by the reply about releasing improvements incrementally.
Kids aren't a commodity, you have to take the rotten apples with the good ones. School teachers are just people who have a lot of different kids to deal with. Imagine grading kids' papers, errors, and half-thoughts for years. I'll cut that person a little slack for what they get paid. Much like my 6th Grade teacher (with a Master's in Psychology) who was at a loss to figure out how to properly spell Chameleon (stuck in the Ca and Ka sections of the Dictionary), people are ignorant about different things. Welcome to the world. I'm surprised she wrote a letter. I saw it as a plea for help worded in a defensive manner. Now she gets educated. The circle is complete.
I'm not sure why something that is a technological paradox (the advances needed to plan the project, negate the purpose of the project), should scare anyone. Never going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
They also sell a digitizer for LPs. Visit the link?
The cost of a consumer converter to move any analog recording to a digital format is going to be incredible cheap for the foreseeable future. There's no reason not to offer to sell them, whatever the volume until the last of the media is likely fallen to bits 50 years before*. Even constructing the mechanism to do the conversion is likely to be trivial.
*People still recover and convert (parts of) celluloid film, when you can find it intact.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/electronics/digital-conversion/
There are lots of services and gadgets around to do VHS to Digital. These guys sell something like that, I think.
Is this "study" excluding corporate buys? What about servers which are sold as desktop configurations? I did buy a notebook this year (for the first time) but I can balance that against 5 others who bought desktops and the ungodly number of desktops my company buys per month from DELL.
DRM is broken by design.
Document DRM is even simpler to circumvent. Tiny cellphone/digital cameras. Screenshot much? Notepads? A really good memory is anti-ddrm. The best you can do is log access, but once it is accessed, there is no control over specifications. YMWNV.
More soapbox wisdom from the aggrandizers at that shithole, Techdirt. It's in their charter to assemble flamebait out of rumor. Not news.
Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler
Why would I audit my security logs? I have a shell script running for that.
I am speaking generally about the US MMO market when I say the MMO market. I don't read foreign game sites or forums.
RMT - Real Money Transaction vs Microtransaction
I don't see much difference between these concepts, although some ( http://tagn.wordpress.com/2008/12/12/rmt-and-microtransactions-rant/ ) may disagree. Both terms describe paying real money (for an effect that cannot be obtained any other way) BEYOND your subscription fee. The surviving niche and aging MMOs have switched to RMT added value (if you will), because it's an easy revenue model to implement, that works. There isn't more justification needed for controllers (of the purse strings). For most cases, the number of people who would give up on a game SWITCHING to RMT are usually pacified by making the RMT benefits cosmetic. Changing appearance is seen by gamers as an acceptable vanity issue. How many MMO player groups find a member bidding for a relatively weaker or even inappropriate (strategic) item for appearance's sake? (healing staff on a fire wizard) I dare say, it's commonplace.
While Asian based MMOs take RMT for granted, America has a similar mentality toward obtaining possessions. There is a market for players who are accepting of RMT for stronger items (+90 sword only available for 30$). I would say the demand is much lower than the casual MMO base and is antithetical of the shared beliefs of aging players who "walked through the lizard temple both ways for a year to get this Fungal Vest". Currently, most MMOs are about aquiring personal power, at whatever cost the game has set up.
From the context of the overall habits of gamers, it's very apparent to Comic and Game shops that CCGs have fallen out of favor in the light of the MMORPG phenom. Now players cam compete in the abstract against a wider variety of people, with almost no effort. They don't even have to travel anywhere. It's a larger playing field, yet they can still feel equal in terms of capability, for an overall lower cost (now that you don't have to save to buy 4 of the clutch cards for tournament decks every X months, see M:TG who rotates what sets are allowed). There are number of CCGs which are played almost exclusively online.*
In the Asian MMO market, if you put in purchasable power items and you will lose some audience. The balance seems to always favor including RMT for Power items. To what degree would it affect MMOs in the US? Americans seem very tolerant of Collector's (or Pre-order) Edition bonus items that are low or medium on the gamewide scale of power. Buying gold with real money or characters with real money has been going on since gold farming was coined. This gold is used for "twinked" alternate characters or even the individual "best" items, through a communal player's market. It's part of the accepted MMO landscape. To that extent, isn't RMT already in every game? It's in iTunes. What's more, RMT can eliminate gold farming, when it happens that you can buy gold from the MMO itself (some claim many gold farmers ARE from the game makers, running a masquerade). Other than perceived tradition (see no RMT, hear no RMT), there doesn't seem to be a compelling bias against it. Overwhelmingly, it's the visibility of the RMT that seems to cause players to complain. Perhaps a fear of raising the bar for games that may already seem like a chore.
I agree RMT is the future. Is it really that hard to accept a tradeoff? Some of the die-hard idealists will outright quit, a subset of those, permanently. In exchange, the game (and some people's careers) will receive a longer lifespan. I think it's just a metagame about player expectations at this point.
*I use BoardGameGeeks.com forums to monitor the closing of shops, which are all but extinct in Southern California.
It's a matter of degree. The formalization of the win is literally irrelevant to a geek, unless something UNEXPECTED happens. /. has never frontpaged individual US senatorial seat totals, because it isn't relevant. Go to a US-centric political site for that.
Maybe someone should frontpage the scandal over selling Obama's seat? Electoral process isn't geek news. It's not even interesting news. It's fucking, hundreds-of-years-old news.
I didn't make the claim. I distilled the point using a simplified metaphor. I don't think there is a direct causal link. *shrug*
I don't recall even posting on anything related to Obama. This isn't about Obama, it's about /.
Do we see posts on who is the new PM of Iraq, the new Pope is, or howabout what Obama had for breakfast?
That's a negative little ducky.
Unless there is an upset or irrational event on such an "important" event, the mechanics of the US political infrastructure do not matter.
My Googlefu is strong and I believe you are talking about:
http://www.gamespy.com/articles/490/490363p1.html
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqddFGYvfgs
See details about the Magnavox Odyssey 2 here, including mentions of the Arcade ports that were relatively unpopular in the US but more successful in other countries:
http://www.allgame.com/cg/agg.dll?p=agg&sql=5:17
I think the argument he tried to make is, how can you say dropping an anvil on a Roadrunner is ok when you don't think Coyotes should kill Roadrunners. One is a precursor to the other. This makes them effectively the same, for most cases (excepting where physics stops working for no reason, etc).
I don't think it's fair to outright accuse them of an undetermined finding, in an article title, regardless of the entities involved. If an organization that wasn't so maligned (like Apple) was to be accused, there would be no small amount of grandstanding on this point. IANAL and neither are the editors involved in the proceedings.
I have my original copy I played long ago. It had supply trucks to restock ammo and some good AI to govern how they pathed around to supply low turrets and such. Dune2/C&C harvesters exhibited a simpler version of the AI, looking for their appropriate fields and returning.
The US attempted to reconstitute the army after realizing that releasing the only natives with combat training and no source of income could effectively serve as the army AND were often the perpetrators of the looting. WHAT A SURPRISE. It wasn't a matter of trying to protect everything, it was a matter of the US destabilizing the country on multiple levels. The news is old, you should have kept track.
Freedom, just like software, has a cost when you take it off the shelf and use it.
"...is right twice a day."
What are you even talking about? Software vs biology? Dumb and an AC, like peanut butter and honey.
Solaris was considered a "server" OS when their hardware was epic. Now they aren't much better or worse, imo.
OSX and Solaris both have dtrace, which is a truly invaluable runtime debugging tool.
OpenSolaris is attempting to take the best ideas from everyone else's desktop initiatives and to implement them similarly or better. Good for them.
They might actually sell a secure OS in VR
It's interesting that some of her statements are not strictly inaccurate. I might even say enlightened, without the enlightenment.
Amen to this. There is always an associated upkeep to software, alluded to by the reply about releasing improvements incrementally.
Kids aren't a commodity, you have to take the rotten apples with the good ones. School teachers are just people who have a lot of different kids to deal with. Imagine grading kids' papers, errors, and half-thoughts for years. I'll cut that person a little slack for what they get paid. Much like my 6th Grade teacher (with a Master's in Psychology) who was at a loss to figure out how to properly spell Chameleon (stuck in the Ca and Ka sections of the Dictionary), people are ignorant about different things. Welcome to the world. I'm surprised she wrote a letter. I saw it as a plea for help worded in a defensive manner. Now she gets educated. The circle is complete.
I think you meant to say PHP for RAD. Python is very Pascal.
I'm not sure why something that is a technological paradox (the advances needed to plan the project, negate the purpose of the project), should scare anyone. Never going to happen.