Agreed, this is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The problem is that now EVERYTHING we eat has crap tons of HFCS in it, way more than we should be eating. Then to cover up the fact that we're using HFCS and sweeteners, we end up using more salt, and more... ugggh. Just go back to natural cane sugar please.
I drink mexican cokes and throwback mountain dews whenever I can. They're better for you, but they taste better too! So, what the hell?
All the government has to do is stop subsidizing HFCS so goddamn much. They don't need to regulate the population, only THEMSELVES.
“The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that’s beautiful.” - Ron Swanson
Thats true, but that's always been true, and hasn't changed. Its always the few popular acts which can promote their music and sell it to everyone who make a killing, and the less popular bands do what they can. This is about the big names saying they get less money from the modern music industry than before, and if anything, I would think that is because the no-name bands are more accessible with the internet, so they get a fairer share. Its the big names who aren't making insane money anymore, and I don't feel bad for them at all.
I never meant to insinuate that every music group instantly becomes megarich. Obviously this isn't the case or everybody would be playing music. My point was about the popular bands which rake in lots of money, and I think it is a very fair point. They may be making less, but that's how it should be.
I heard on a radio interview with someone from Blink-182 that they originally thought "Adam's Song" was a bad song and were surprised it ended up being a #2 on the US Modern Rock Charts. In an environment were you only get to release "hits" it probably wouldn't have been released.
No part of the new digital sales business model is an environment where you only get to release "hits". It is merely a market where you can choose how much or how little to buy. Songs are still free to be popularized through radio or youtube, and the song can always sit there for sale. If anything, since its digital, it costs almost NOTHING to offer every song you've ever written for sale. Who cares? Even if the song is meh, you can put it out there, if a few people like it, they can buy it, and you can make as much money as possible. That is ENTIRELY different from forcing consumers to buy extra songs. I don't think "Adam's Song" was popular because we were forced to have it on our CD players. No, it was just that they didn't realize it would be a hit. Entirely different.
I personally like every song on "Let it Ride" by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, my favorite song on that disk is also not even one that got a video or I have ever heard played in another other place.
I love the Bosstones too!:) But again, that has nothing to do with digital distribution whatsoever. If anything, once again, with digital distribution, its EASIER to distribute niche material. You reach a wider audience, for less manufacturing and distribution cost. So you can do MORE crazy niche songs.
Not every non-hit song is crap. And variety is good. Even if you don't love every song on a disk by an artist you like, you probably do like one or two that never would have made it onto the radio. I'm kindof sad the venue to try out songs you aren't as comfortable with is sortof going away. I feel like I'm going to miss out on alot of music I might have enjoyed.
And you're always free to buy more for.99 cents. Not being forced to do something isn't the same as not being allowed to do it.
just like almost every line of business these days. break even or lose on 90% of your customers and make your profit on the rest. something like 4% of dropboxe's customers pay them, yet they make A LOT of money
I really wish Hollywood would wake up and realize this, and stop fighting Netflix. They're ruining their own industry, and blaming it on piracy.
What was the quote from Tywin Lannister when he heard they had killed Ned Stark? "Stupidity. Stupidity and Foolishness." Something like that.:P
If the artists aren't making as much money as they used to, how about they do the logical thing and vertically integrate? With music stores like iTunes now, there's almost no need for a publisher, where before you were completely dependent on one.
Cut out the middle man, sell directly to consumers, keep all the profits, and probably end up making more money.
There are more music acts than ever, and they are each individually able to reach a FAR greater audience than before. The number of people and the amount of spare money the public has to spend on entertainment has been fairly constant. So, of course, each individual artist is going to make less. There's new genres and new artists every day.
Futhermore, now we have videogames and other new media competing for our entertainment dollars.
Its not that artists are making less money. Its that there aren't as few mega "rock stars" as before. You don't have the beatlemania where people are going crazy for a particular one act, who effectively has a monopoly on popular music.
Finally, they can't force us to buy 12 song albums with 2 hits and 10 crap songs anymore. We've broken their hold on that business model. Now we expect to be able to pay.99 cents to get the 1 song we want. That isn't "unfair" to artists, rather, it was unfair to the consumer before, and now its been made right.
I'm so sorry you can't afford to drink top shelf champagne on your private jet anymore.
This is the 1% fucking with the 1%. I approve of this.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these companies truly represent the epitome of corporate greed and corruption in america.
Nobody will disagree with you here.
You got that right brother, and those slimy selfish a-holes had it coming.
The part that sucks though is when you remember that we just bailed these same companies out for billions of dollars. So its only OUR money they've wasted on this stupid IPO. Ugggggggggggh.
Company filings after the market closed on Friday night however revealed the extent to which the banks who led Facebook’s initial public offering - in which $16bn of shares were sold to new investors - were forced to move in to the market and buy shares in order to keep the price above the $38 level. Morgan Stanley, Facebook’s lead financial adviser, ended the day with 162m shares, worth $6.16bn. Other banks including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs also bought shares, ending the day with $3.2bn and $2.4bn holdings respectively.
Nearly 6/8ths of facebook's stock is currently held by its underwriters; Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs.
And if anything, all the changes they're adding, all the ways they're going to try to come up with to make more revenue, is if anything only going to drive users away at a very fast rate. People use facebook because it isn't myspace, but that is exactly where it is headed. All the standards are gone. Everybody's page used to look the exact, exact same, with a very clean interface, mostly black text on white with a blue menu. Now everything is a complete mess, and I'm forced into using awful UI like the timeline even if I don't want to. Google+ isn't a very good alternative, so people stick with facebook. But as soon as something comes out that is simpler and cleaner, the facebook to facebook's myspace, you'll see users moving. Especially as they find out that facebook is selling their personal information more and more to make money.
Mod parent up infinity. This is the scariest thing I've read all year. Holy moly, nearly 12/16ths, 6/8ths of Facebook stock is held by the banks propping them up?
The same banks which just got HANDED tons of cash because they screwed up so many bad investments trying to scam money?
I have no clue where the profit is gonna come from to back this up, and I don't think anybody else does either. Facebook's IPO is over 100x their last year's income, which is pretty scary.
The worst part of this is how facebook's quality is going to go massively downhill now as they try to monetize it and squeeze more profit from ads, which in turn will drive users away, requiring them to make more and more money per user, which... Yeah. bad.
Absolutely. What the hell happened that businesses suddenly think they get to dictate terms to the market? Control how your customers use your product? Goodness they've gotten entitled. And now we have people defending these companies! "If the corporation makes a product, you should be happy, sir! IF it works, you just be thankful you got the privilege to buy it!" Uh, no, that's not how it works at all.
I remember hearing this phrase once upon a time that went "the customer is always right". Yeah, its not true when they're being unreasonable, but within reason, the customer is right. The customer makes the deal. If you try to control the customer, your product loses value.
This is only working because there is no alternative. (Oh wait, there is... Netflix. Which, of course, providing a legal alternative, is HUGELY popular with just about everybody I've ever met. Sadly, the tv and movie industry is too scared of losing what they have to embrace the future. As soon as somebody puts all their new media on Netflix, that somebody is going to dominate the market). You can push your customers around as long as you have a monopoly, and all content creators have an inherent monopoly on their media, they have a copyright on that art, a state-sponsored monopoly.
But what is the point? Why do we try so hard to apply scarcity to virtual goods which scarcity doesn't apply to? Are we so used to the physical world we cannot consider anything else?
Consider this: If you would not buy it now, if you say "i'll buy it in a year", then you are not a lost sale. You've said you won't buy it now (can't afford it, it isn't available for purchase, whatever) so if you then pirate it, it isn't costing anyone anything except for your internet bandwidth and that of the peers you transfer from. If you weren't going to buy it, there's no opportunity cost, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Unless, because you watch it now, you suddenly change your mind and don't buy it in a year. I don't think that is likely at all. I think its very, very likely you can say to yourself "I can't afford HBO, this is dumb, I'm not paying monthly fees to watch just one show, I don't care about the rest of HBO. I'll buy this show on DVD as soon as its available, and I'll go ahead and download it now."
Hell, it was ruled that using VCRs to timeshift shows was legal. TiVo's legal, right?
So this is just timeshifting in the other direction. Instead of taking a show that's aired and watching it later, I"m taking a show I will buy in the future and watching it now.
*sigh* in b4 "but piracy is theft!" argument. (No, it isn't, its copyright infringement, and its about equally bad as recording a song off the radio onto a cassette, listening to it a few times, and then deciding to buy that CD or not in the store).
Not to mention that all of that profit isn't due to early-to-market. The same sales would likely be made just the next day. The profits wouldn't be as nearly effected. You lose a few sales to people who decide to get a different phone, but pretty tiny numbers all together. Getting the product out the door a single day earlier (and we're talking about minutes saved here) makes very little cost difference, unless its a holiday or something.
Agreed. This is proving to be the perfect PR nightmare that we need to wake the population up to just how unacceptable DRM really is. Its completely assbackwards, punishing your loyal fans to somehow "get back" at pirates, who are completely unaffected. Its the height of arrogance and stupidity.
Companies are not about justice, companies are not about fair or punishing the wicked. Companies are about serving a market demand. You serve your customers, and you don't bother thinking about non-customers, except to wonder how you might turn them into paying customers. (note: DRM does not make pirates become customers. It makes customers become pirates).
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 1
You're wrong about:
-textures take up more space than models. Models are simply a list of 3 points.
-animations will often take up less space than models depending on the model/animation system. Most are now bone/etc based, so an animation isn't multiple copies of the same model, it's instructions applied to the base model.
-code is very small, but a lot more than 5MB
Wrong. By your logic Textures are simply a list of color values. So? Did you mean to say a list of 3D points? Because its not just three points lol, its a great deal many of them. It depends upon the poly count, but then again your texture resolution is as well. But there's a lot of points.
You're pulling these numbers out of nowhere and you're wrong. A 512x512 game texture is going to be in the kilobytes. A player model is going to be in the megabytes. Entire factors of 10 off from each other.
And most game executables are indeed about 5MB, even for AAA games. Maybe more like 10-20MB for really modern games? And okay, if we want to include all the.dlls, we're talking another 10-20MB. But those.dlls could be loaded into your system already somewhere else, so those don't count as the game size. Code is just a series of binary instructions, its extremely small once compiled. The entire game really is like 10MB. Go check.
By comparison, we were saying a single texture was a few kb, and a single model was a few mb. You then consider the thousands and thousands of textures and models needed in a modern game, and thats where all your gigabytes of game data come from. Art assets. Its never code. Code is tiny.
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 1
What am I wrong about? It'd be more helpful if you pointed out something. Especially if you could cite how I'm wrong.
Queuing for single player would be bad. But right now, Diablo 3 is in the extremely embarrassing position of not even letting you play single player AT ALL.
Seriously, this has got to be one of the worst game launches of all time. #error37 is trending like CRAAAZY on twitter.
First the game wasn't actually out at midnight, even though there were midnight releases. Its out at midnight PDT, which is 4 am on the east coast. Yay!
Second, you get online, and the servers were so hit at midnight PDT that you couldn't get in. Great.
Then this morning, servers went down.
They said after an hour of maintenance, we could play. For early morning, this is fine.
An hour later, still can't play.
Now they say that by 1:30 PDT (which is 3:30 to 5:30 throughout the US) the game would finally be playable. Ugggggh.
It is still unplayable. Servers are STILL down. NOW they've updated and said 3:30 PDT.
This is a joke. I cannot believe a company as big as Blizzard is having this much trouble. These guys RUN World of warcraft. Doesn't it have like 10 million subscribers? HOW DO THEY NOT UNDERSTAND SERVER LOAD YET?
What the hell was the point of the open beta, blizzard?!??!
Re:Hate to put a damper on the celebration
on
Diablo III Released
·
· Score: 0
Here's a good way of thinking about the relative sizes:
Code is 1 dimensional. Its just a straight line of instructions.
Textures are 2 dimensional. You have color in a square array of pixels.
Models are 3 dimensional. you have points in space combined to make polygons.
Animations are 4 dimensional. You have points in space combined to make polygons moving as a function of time.
See? The largest game code is like 5MB. Meanwhile, pictures (Textures) can easily be around 5MB, more for high resolution. Then Models are much, much bigger than that, and animations are MUCH, MUCH bigger than that.
All the code is done server-side. Its purely rendering and controls on the client side, a very thin/dumb client. But rendering is pretty much EVERYTHING when it comes to both size and computing power of modern games. The actual game logic is trivial, and requires very little data, just some static values. Not the lookup tables you have for texture colors or model vertex positions.
“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.
If they're attacking computers without authorization, they're in breach of all kinds of criminal law. It doesn't matter if those computers are participating in infringing or not. Sounds all kinds of illegal, at least in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, this is treating the symptoms, not the disease. The problem is that now EVERYTHING we eat has crap tons of HFCS in it, way more than we should be eating. Then to cover up the fact that we're using HFCS and sweeteners, we end up using more salt, and more... ugggh. Just go back to natural cane sugar please.
I drink mexican cokes and throwback mountain dews whenever I can. They're better for you, but they taste better too! So, what the hell?
All the government has to do is stop subsidizing HFCS so goddamn much. They don't need to regulate the population, only THEMSELVES.
“The whole point of this country is if you want to eat garbage, balloon up to 600 pounds and die of a heart attack at 43, you can! You are free to do so. To me, that’s beautiful.” - Ron Swanson
Thats true, but that's always been true, and hasn't changed. Its always the few popular acts which can promote their music and sell it to everyone who make a killing, and the less popular bands do what they can. This is about the big names saying they get less money from the modern music industry than before, and if anything, I would think that is because the no-name bands are more accessible with the internet, so they get a fairer share. Its the big names who aren't making insane money anymore, and I don't feel bad for them at all.
I never meant to insinuate that every music group instantly becomes megarich. Obviously this isn't the case or everybody would be playing music. My point was about the popular bands which rake in lots of money, and I think it is a very fair point. They may be making less, but that's how it should be.
I heard on a radio interview with someone from Blink-182 that they originally thought "Adam's Song" was a bad song and were surprised it ended up being a #2 on the US Modern Rock Charts. In an environment were you only get to release "hits" it probably wouldn't have been released.
No part of the new digital sales business model is an environment where you only get to release "hits". It is merely a market where you can choose how much or how little to buy. Songs are still free to be popularized through radio or youtube, and the song can always sit there for sale. If anything, since its digital, it costs almost NOTHING to offer every song you've ever written for sale. Who cares? Even if the song is meh, you can put it out there, if a few people like it, they can buy it, and you can make as much money as possible. That is ENTIRELY different from forcing consumers to buy extra songs. I don't think "Adam's Song" was popular because we were forced to have it on our CD players. No, it was just that they didn't realize it would be a hit. Entirely different.
I personally like every song on "Let it Ride" by Mighty Mighty Bosstones, my favorite song on that disk is also not even one that got a video or I have ever heard played in another other place.
I love the Bosstones too! :) But again, that has nothing to do with digital distribution whatsoever. If anything, once again, with digital distribution, its EASIER to distribute niche material. You reach a wider audience, for less manufacturing and distribution cost. So you can do MORE crazy niche songs.
Not every non-hit song is crap. And variety is good. Even if you don't love every song on a disk by an artist you like, you probably do like one or two that never would have made it onto the radio. I'm kindof sad the venue to try out songs you aren't as comfortable with is sortof going away. I feel like I'm going to miss out on alot of music I might have enjoyed.
And you're always free to buy more for .99 cents. Not being forced to do something isn't the same as not being allowed to do it.
Add, "...on a computer", noob.
I don't want to live on this planet anymore. -Farnsworth
just like almost every line of business these days. break even or lose on 90% of your customers and make your profit on the rest. something like 4% of dropboxe's customers pay them, yet they make A LOT of money
I really wish Hollywood would wake up and realize this, and stop fighting Netflix. They're ruining their own industry, and blaming it on piracy.
:P
What was the quote from Tywin Lannister when he heard they had killed Ned Stark? "Stupidity. Stupidity and Foolishness." Something like that.
If the artists aren't making as much money as they used to, how about they do the logical thing and vertically integrate? With music stores like iTunes now, there's almost no need for a publisher, where before you were completely dependent on one.
Cut out the middle man, sell directly to consumers, keep all the profits, and probably end up making more money.
There are more music acts than ever, and they are each individually able to reach a FAR greater audience than before. The number of people and the amount of spare money the public has to spend on entertainment has been fairly constant. So, of course, each individual artist is going to make less. There's new genres and new artists every day.
.99 cents to get the 1 song we want. That isn't "unfair" to artists, rather, it was unfair to the consumer before, and now its been made right.
Futhermore, now we have videogames and other new media competing for our entertainment dollars.
Its not that artists are making less money. Its that there aren't as few mega "rock stars" as before. You don't have the beatlemania where people are going crazy for a particular one act, who effectively has a monopoly on popular music.
Finally, they can't force us to buy 12 song albums with 2 hits and 10 crap songs anymore. We've broken their hold on that business model. Now we expect to be able to pay
I'm so sorry you can't afford to drink top shelf champagne on your private jet anymore.
Should the government bail out poor Facebook investors . . . ?
Don't you even joke about that >_>
This is the 1% fucking with the 1%. I approve of this.
JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, these companies truly represent the epitome of corporate greed and corruption in america.
Nobody will disagree with you here.
You got that right brother, and those slimy selfish a-holes had it coming.
The part that sucks though is when you remember that we just bailed these same companies out for billions of dollars. So its only OUR money they've wasted on this stupid IPO. Ugggggggggggh.
However, they would not have any monatary loss since they would not have any shares left on theri books
As posted elsewhere in the comments, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/9276699/Facebook-IPO-fight-back-begins-share-price-implausible-says-analyst.html
Company filings after the market closed on Friday night however revealed the extent to which the banks who led Facebook’s initial public offering - in which $16bn of shares were sold to new investors - were forced to move in to the market and buy shares in order to keep the price above the $38 level. Morgan Stanley, Facebook’s lead financial adviser, ended the day with 162m shares, worth $6.16bn. Other banks including JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs also bought shares, ending the day with $3.2bn and $2.4bn holdings respectively.
Nearly 6/8ths of facebook's stock is currently held by its underwriters; Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan, and Goldman Sachs.
And if anything, all the changes they're adding, all the ways they're going to try to come up with to make more revenue, is if anything only going to drive users away at a very fast rate. People use facebook because it isn't myspace, but that is exactly where it is headed. All the standards are gone. Everybody's page used to look the exact, exact same, with a very clean interface, mostly black text on white with a blue menu. Now everything is a complete mess, and I'm forced into using awful UI like the timeline even if I don't want to. Google+ isn't a very good alternative, so people stick with facebook. But as soon as something comes out that is simpler and cleaner, the facebook to facebook's myspace, you'll see users moving. Especially as they find out that facebook is selling their personal information more and more to make money.
Mod parent up infinity. This is the scariest thing I've read all year. Holy moly, nearly 12/16ths, 6/8ths of Facebook stock is held by the banks propping them up?
The same banks which just got HANDED tons of cash because they screwed up so many bad investments trying to scam money?
Our economy is totally FUBAR.
Here comes the web 2.0 bubble.
Facebook gets about $3-5 per person, per year. Which really isn't that much. Google makes much, much more per user, but still nothing crazy.
Revenue per user
I have no clue where the profit is gonna come from to back this up, and I don't think anybody else does either. Facebook's IPO is over 100x their last year's income, which is pretty scary.
The worst part of this is how facebook's quality is going to go massively downhill now as they try to monetize it and squeeze more profit from ads, which in turn will drive users away, requiring them to make more and more money per user, which... Yeah. bad.
Absolutely. Just like $1 Billion for instagram, which comes to $30 per user, which is INSANE. For a free picture app?
Absolutely. What the hell happened that businesses suddenly think they get to dictate terms to the market? Control how your customers use your product? Goodness they've gotten entitled. And now we have people defending these companies! "If the corporation makes a product, you should be happy, sir! IF it works, you just be thankful you got the privilege to buy it!" Uh, no, that's not how it works at all.
I remember hearing this phrase once upon a time that went "the customer is always right". Yeah, its not true when they're being unreasonable, but within reason, the customer is right. The customer makes the deal. If you try to control the customer, your product loses value.
This is only working because there is no alternative. (Oh wait, there is... Netflix. Which, of course, providing a legal alternative, is HUGELY popular with just about everybody I've ever met. Sadly, the tv and movie industry is too scared of losing what they have to embrace the future. As soon as somebody puts all their new media on Netflix, that somebody is going to dominate the market). You can push your customers around as long as you have a monopoly, and all content creators have an inherent monopoly on their media, they have a copyright on that art, a state-sponsored monopoly.
But what is the point? Why do we try so hard to apply scarcity to virtual goods which scarcity doesn't apply to? Are we so used to the physical world we cannot consider anything else?
Consider this: If you would not buy it now, if you say "i'll buy it in a year", then you are not a lost sale. You've said you won't buy it now (can't afford it, it isn't available for purchase, whatever) so if you then pirate it, it isn't costing anyone anything except for your internet bandwidth and that of the peers you transfer from. If you weren't going to buy it, there's no opportunity cost, so there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. Unless, because you watch it now, you suddenly change your mind and don't buy it in a year. I don't think that is likely at all. I think its very, very likely you can say to yourself "I can't afford HBO, this is dumb, I'm not paying monthly fees to watch just one show, I don't care about the rest of HBO. I'll buy this show on DVD as soon as its available, and I'll go ahead and download it now."
Hell, it was ruled that using VCRs to timeshift shows was legal. TiVo's legal, right? So this is just timeshifting in the other direction. Instead of taking a show that's aired and watching it later, I"m taking a show I will buy in the future and watching it now.
*sigh* in b4 "but piracy is theft!" argument. (No, it isn't, its copyright infringement, and its about equally bad as recording a song off the radio onto a cassette, listening to it a few times, and then deciding to buy that CD or not in the store).
For something expensive like a phone anyways, a one-time purchase you save up for and agree to a contract with. Its different for cheap goods.
Not to mention that all of that profit isn't due to early-to-market. The same sales would likely be made just the next day. The profits wouldn't be as nearly effected. You lose a few sales to people who decide to get a different phone, but pretty tiny numbers all together. Getting the product out the door a single day earlier (and we're talking about minutes saved here) makes very little cost difference, unless its a holiday or something.
Agreed. This is proving to be the perfect PR nightmare that we need to wake the population up to just how unacceptable DRM really is. Its completely assbackwards, punishing your loyal fans to somehow "get back" at pirates, who are completely unaffected. Its the height of arrogance and stupidity.
Companies are not about justice, companies are not about fair or punishing the wicked. Companies are about serving a market demand. You serve your customers, and you don't bother thinking about non-customers, except to wonder how you might turn them into paying customers. (note: DRM does not make pirates become customers. It makes customers become pirates).
You're wrong about: -textures take up more space than models. Models are simply a list of 3 points. -animations will often take up less space than models depending on the model/animation system. Most are now bone/etc based, so an animation isn't multiple copies of the same model, it's instructions applied to the base model. -code is very small, but a lot more than 5MB
Wrong. By your logic Textures are simply a list of color values. So? Did you mean to say a list of 3D points? Because its not just three points lol, its a great deal many of them. It depends upon the poly count, but then again your texture resolution is as well. But there's a lot of points.
.dlls, we're talking another 10-20MB. But those .dlls could be loaded into your system already somewhere else, so those don't count as the game size. Code is just a series of binary instructions, its extremely small once compiled. The entire game really is like 10MB. Go check.
You're pulling these numbers out of nowhere and you're wrong. A 512x512 game texture is going to be in the kilobytes. A player model is going to be in the megabytes. Entire factors of 10 off from each other.
And most game executables are indeed about 5MB, even for AAA games. Maybe more like 10-20MB for really modern games? And okay, if we want to include all the
By comparison, we were saying a single texture was a few kb, and a single model was a few mb. You then consider the thousands and thousands of textures and models needed in a modern game, and thats where all your gigabytes of game data come from. Art assets. Its never code. Code is tiny.
What am I wrong about? It'd be more helpful if you pointed out something. Especially if you could cite how I'm wrong.
Queuing for single player would be bad. But right now, Diablo 3 is in the extremely embarrassing position of not even letting you play single player AT ALL.
Seriously, this has got to be one of the worst game launches of all time. #error37 is trending like CRAAAZY on twitter.
First the game wasn't actually out at midnight, even though there were midnight releases. Its out at midnight PDT, which is 4 am on the east coast. Yay!
Second, you get online, and the servers were so hit at midnight PDT that you couldn't get in. Great.
Then this morning, servers went down.
They said after an hour of maintenance, we could play. For early morning, this is fine.
An hour later, still can't play.
Now they say that by 1:30 PDT (which is 3:30 to 5:30 throughout the US) the game would finally be playable. Ugggggh.
It is still unplayable. Servers are STILL down. NOW they've updated and said 3:30 PDT.
This is a joke. I cannot believe a company as big as Blizzard is having this much trouble. These guys RUN World of warcraft. Doesn't it have like 10 million subscribers? HOW DO THEY NOT UNDERSTAND SERVER LOAD YET?
What the hell was the point of the open beta, blizzard?!??!
Here's a good way of thinking about the relative sizes:
Code is 1 dimensional. Its just a straight line of instructions.
Textures are 2 dimensional. You have color in a square array of pixels.
Models are 3 dimensional. you have points in space combined to make polygons.
Animations are 4 dimensional. You have points in space combined to make polygons moving as a function of time.
See? The largest game code is like 5MB. Meanwhile, pictures (Textures) can easily be around 5MB, more for high resolution. Then Models are much, much bigger than that, and animations are MUCH, MUCH bigger than that.
All the code is done server-side. Its purely rendering and controls on the client side, a very thin/dumb client. But rendering is pretty much EVERYTHING when it comes to both size and computing power of modern games. The actual game logic is trivial, and requires very little data, just some static values. Not the lookup tables you have for texture colors or model vertex positions.
“We used a number of servers to make a connection to each and every P2P client that distributed this film. Then Pirate Pay sent specific traffic to confuse these clients about the real IP-addresses of other clients and to make them disconnect from each other,” Andrei Klimenko says.
If they're attacking computers without authorization, they're in breach of all kinds of criminal law. It doesn't matter if those computers are participating in infringing or not. Sounds all kinds of illegal, at least in the US.