You completely missed the point and cherry picked a few arguments that you have a problem with while completely ignoring the overall message. There's no point trying to explain anything further to you.
The size of your monitor has nothing to do with it. Gaming between friends or siblings on a couch is fun, but if you actually look at the gamers of the world, and what they spend their time doing, almost NONE of them actually get on a couch with a friend and play split-screen these days. Nobody plays sitting next to each other, you'd rather have your own chair and your own system and your own screen. Then you can't cheat and watch the other player. And your screen isn't at some ridiculous 16:4 aspect ratio because its split in half horizontally. People simply don't play much split-screen in this world today. We only did it because thats all there was, the only way to play 4 player goldeneye was to get 3 of your buddies over to your house. It was fun, yeah, but it was massively inconvenient to do on a regular basis. Split-screen co-op is usually a rarity, maybe something that happens once every 4 months at a party. And if its a party, you're going to have more than 4 people, and they're going to be trading off, and if the game is hardcore or doesn't have save points... It just doesn't work that well. It isn't really done.
I feel for you, I do. I like co-op myself. But there just isn't much of a market for it, and you have to accept that people are going to spend money making products for things that have an audience. There might be one guy out there who really wants to play a game where you rape dinosaurs, but since there's no mainstream market for that, no serious game studio would ever pick it up. Its BUSINESS. Economics 101. Capitalism. Hm?
THAT ISNT THE CONSOLE BUSINESS MODEL. That was never the plan. Its no being "too stupid", they do it entirely ON PURPOSE.
If a playstation 3 cost $900 (which for a brand new computer with a cell-broadband engine, motherboard, RAM, HDD, modem, etc. is a fair price) how many people would buy it? A few rich assholes, and the rest of us couldn't afford it.
Then, because only 10 people own the PS3, NOBODY would make games for it. You can't spend 100 million on a game that only has 10 people as a target audience. The entire console games industry simply would not work that way.
So the consoles are subsidized. You buy a console for LESS than it costs to manufacture, because you won't pay more right now. Then they tax the developers to make a game for the console that they just sold everybody at a huge loss, (as an investment), and the developers make money because lots of people can use the software, and the console maker gets a return on the gigantic investment.
God you're dumb. Please be more aware of your ignorance before you get belligerent.
Split-screen games are pretty hard to come by even on consoles these days. Most gaming is done over the internet. I'm trying to think of how many major titles this year included split-screen or some other type of local multi-player. The wii supports it, but the wii is all kinds of gimmicky so it has a different feel going on from mainstream gaming. How many other modern games do? I guess Modern Warfare lets you do 2 player split screen still? I don't think Battlefield does.... I guess Gears of War does... Although, hell, most console games are single-player regardless.
If nothing else, you can install Dolphin and play Wii games in beautiful high resolution on your PC:) You can hook as many game controllers or wiimotes up to the pc as the game supports.
Also, SOME PC games do support it, its just extremely rare because there's so little market for it. I know Dynasty Warriors on PC lets you play split-screen, and Left4Dead does as well.
This is really just a bunch of rambling, you've got no cohesive point. Because of modern physics APIs... games cost more... so you're stuck on one platform... because of DRM?
Yes, DRM is bad... and... some other things you said are points too... but none of it makes sense together.
Oh, it costs a great deal more than 40K to licence a mainstream xbox 360 game. That was the cost of EACH PATCH.
The thing is, yes, gaming used to be cheaper. Uh... so? It used to be you could make a video game with 2 programmers and 4 artists, Doom and Mortal Kombat both had barely more than that. But these days? 50+ developers for some projects? And you're targeting a gaming console that is sold at a loss? You have to understand the business model involved. Consoles are consoles, not PCs. (as much as I might wish otherwise).
Did you read the first paragraph and stop? It was hardly an MS PR spew, I hate MS and I spent the rest of my post explaining why they were WRONG after setting the stage. Excuuuuuuse me, (princess) for trying to shed some perspective.
It has nothing to do with bandwidth, $40,000 buys you a lot of bandwidth. And your solution doesn't work at all. Charge based on downloads? So, if lots of people download it... it ends up costing just as much. So this is only good for people who patch games that nobody plays anymore, which is... nobody. I guess the idea is that smaller games will be downloaded less than larger games? That kinda works, but its roundabout.
They just need to have more licencing options available for indie developers. Have it such that patching fees are tiered based on the size of the game and sales.
Its because Microsoft has to take time to certify every patch put out on Live, just like they certify every game software put out for the 360.
That said, Microsoft is a business, and is trying to make money from their licencing agreements. Consoles cost tons and tons of money to design, and then you actually sell them ON A LOSS. You have to make up all those millions purely through licences with developers, one way or another.
That said, they're shooting themselves in the foot making it hard for people to develop for their platform. Indie developers need access. And the whole expensive and drawn out certification process means that PC gamers get patches for games weeks or even MONTHS before console gamers see them, even if they're for the same game. Its not that they do PC first, they do both simultaneously (or console first) but PC goes out as soon as PC is ready.
If they embraced the 360 as more of a general purpose computer that can do gaming well for cheap, then they could skip the certification process and be more like PC. But right now they're shooting for a perfect, controlled console environment.
No, but the whole reason we use the term "hoist" could have to do with a phrase in french which translates to "hoisted by one's own petard". Petard, after all, is not of English but French origin. Some people said Shakespeare used the phrase, but that doesn't mean coined it.
Seriously, get off your fucking high horse. Are you trying to be a grammar nazi? What do you mean "you keep on saying this so you must believe it" ? How many times did I say it? And is this opposed to things that other people say that they don't believe in? Saying "you keep on saying this" makes it sound like other people have argued against it, but I remain stubborn. However, this is not the case at all.
Are you sure it wasn't a saying in the common vernacular before Hamlet? It could have been.
And I guess that "hoist" or the french origin implies being lifted, but that still seems like the wrong way to say it. You aren't really lifted by an explosive as much as ripped apart.
The most important part of that comic is that you use a passphrase, not a password. Passwords are insecure, and trying to make them secure requires using lots of special characters, which as pointed out are hard to remember. Unfortunately, most of the web doesn't allow passphrases, they have pretty short limits on character length. 25 Characters? Good luck finding websites that allow that.
*sigh*, we could make everything more secure, AND easier to remember, but we're too busy trying to force grandma to use 1337 in her password. Smart.
Also, if you'd bother reading my argument fully, you'd see I said that IF BOOKS STARTED TO COST MORE then you'd see lots of piracy. At the moment, they're priced fairly, so copying them IS seen as an unnecessary pain in the ass. THAT WAS MY WHOLE POINT. GOOD JOB. It ISNT worth it. IT IS a pain in the ass.
Thats how you fight piracy. Not by making piracy the better product, but by making it the worse product. If you're lazy, its easier to buy something off steam and auto-download and auto-patch it and you can re-download it anywhere without the CD, so tons of people buy things on steam, even things they ALREADY OWN.
Meanwhile, games that only have a short single-player campaign, no multiplayer, and no mod support, try to cost $60 and compete with full AAA experiences, and we're not going to have it. People perceive the value of the product as less than the cost, so they're willing to go through the pain in the ass in order to pirate it. Because DRM and misplaced cost MAKE it worth it.
This is all a result of the west's hatred of haggling. If we let people haggle, if you could call up a game studio and say "listen, I'm a college student, I don't have $60 but I can give you $30" it would be in the studio's interest to say "sure!". It costs them next to nothing to distribute the software, so it is almost PURE profit to make ANY sale at ANY cost. Thats why Valve has gone BONKERS with sale after sale after sale, putting games up for as little as 5-10% of their original cost.
You charge $60 for a so-so game with DRM, piracy is worth it.
You charge $10 for that same game, suddenly piracy isn't worth it.
If a new book cost $60, people would pirate it all OVER the place. Things have to be priced according to market value, or your customers won't buy it.
Tons of people xerox books to.pdf and then pirate them that way. It happens. (especially in the case of Textbooks, which are massively overpriced... Hey, its our friends value and piracy again!)
A petard is a small explosive. So like many things, Age of Empires was fairly historically accurate.:) I too used to think the saboteur himself was the petard, but then "hoisted by your own petard" doesn't make as much sense, unless you're playing AoE 2, in which case somebody could convert your petard and then use it against you! Still, "hoist" seems like the wrong word. "caught in your own petard" would seem more accurate, but I guess it is all translated from French in the first place.
I learned all kinds of basic European history from the campaign.
I guess you reject my idea that the brain prioritizes memories, but that is absolutely true. Anything the brain thinks it has ready access to it won't memorize. Sometimes when I drive to work I get there and have no memory of the drive in between. I stopped at all the lights and I was paying attention, but i've driven the route so many times over and over my brain has decided that future memories of the same thing aren't vital. Similarly, things that are written down nearby and you know you can get access to at any time, your brain is much less likely to memorize.
You're nit-picking semantics to a point I didn't even try to make.
Also, just because knowing more memories increases the ability to remember does not imply that the brain never actively forgets something it finds unnecessary. You're making a leap. It can still remove a few unused ones while overall increasing in total number. I don't think you have any science to back this up, just your gut feeling. If you've got sources, I'd be interested.
Not to mention that the password could have never been recorded in long-term memory, and she just remembered it for a few days at a time as a combination of short-term and muscle memory.
Not to mention a million other things. Again, you're nit-picking something none of us were arguing.
... What? I'm really confused about what you're trying to say.
I read the summary and the article. Nothing about it was self-contradictory. Active politic detailed what happened. There was a yahoo page that described it.
Since then, Activepolitic has themselves posted that it was incorrect, and they took the time to post a quotation of a District Judge saying the injuction was denied. THAT is what I was looking for. If he could have provided a website, or even just paste a quote, then I'd know his reasoning. If he noticed the page got updated, he should have said "check the page, yahoo was wrong, they updated it." Instead of just "article is bogus" and then I'd know.
I don't know what the hell you're on about for not doing research and requiring proof. The Correction wasn't yet posted when I commented about this article this morning.
Hm, unless you're talking about a zipped representation, you're going to need all the same bits regardless. A differently encoded MP3 would be different, but then that isn't the same MP3. I guess different architectures would use different voltages though, so you could have drastically more electrons per bit...
I was being silly from the get-go though, obviously this isn't serious.
Slashdot Mirror
You completely missed the point and cherry picked a few arguments that you have a problem with while completely ignoring the overall message. There's no point trying to explain anything further to you.
The size of your monitor has nothing to do with it. Gaming between friends or siblings on a couch is fun, but if you actually look at the gamers of the world, and what they spend their time doing, almost NONE of them actually get on a couch with a friend and play split-screen these days. Nobody plays sitting next to each other, you'd rather have your own chair and your own system and your own screen. Then you can't cheat and watch the other player. And your screen isn't at some ridiculous 16:4 aspect ratio because its split in half horizontally. People simply don't play much split-screen in this world today. We only did it because thats all there was, the only way to play 4 player goldeneye was to get 3 of your buddies over to your house. It was fun, yeah, but it was massively inconvenient to do on a regular basis. Split-screen co-op is usually a rarity, maybe something that happens once every 4 months at a party. And if its a party, you're going to have more than 4 people, and they're going to be trading off, and if the game is hardcore or doesn't have save points... It just doesn't work that well. It isn't really done.
I feel for you, I do. I like co-op myself. But there just isn't much of a market for it, and you have to accept that people are going to spend money making products for things that have an audience. There might be one guy out there who really wants to play a game where you rape dinosaurs, but since there's no mainstream market for that, no serious game studio would ever pick it up. Its BUSINESS. Economics 101. Capitalism. Hm?
THAT ISNT THE CONSOLE BUSINESS MODEL. That was never the plan. Its no being "too stupid", they do it entirely ON PURPOSE.
If a playstation 3 cost $900 (which for a brand new computer with a cell-broadband engine, motherboard, RAM, HDD, modem, etc. is a fair price) how many people would buy it? A few rich assholes, and the rest of us couldn't afford it.
Then, because only 10 people own the PS3, NOBODY would make games for it. You can't spend 100 million on a game that only has 10 people as a target audience. The entire console games industry simply would not work that way.
So the consoles are subsidized. You buy a console for LESS than it costs to manufacture, because you won't pay more right now. Then they tax the developers to make a game for the console that they just sold everybody at a huge loss, (as an investment), and the developers make money because lots of people can use the software, and the console maker gets a return on the gigantic investment.
God you're dumb. Please be more aware of your ignorance before you get belligerent.
Split-screen games are pretty hard to come by even on consoles these days. Most gaming is done over the internet. I'm trying to think of how many major titles this year included split-screen or some other type of local multi-player. The wii supports it, but the wii is all kinds of gimmicky so it has a different feel going on from mainstream gaming. How many other modern games do? I guess Modern Warfare lets you do 2 player split screen still? I don't think Battlefield does.... I guess Gears of War does... Although, hell, most console games are single-player regardless.
:) You can hook as many game controllers or wiimotes up to the pc as the game supports.
If nothing else, you can install Dolphin and play Wii games in beautiful high resolution on your PC
Also, SOME PC games do support it, its just extremely rare because there's so little market for it. I know Dynasty Warriors on PC lets you play split-screen, and Left4Dead does as well.
This is really just a bunch of rambling, you've got no cohesive point. Because of modern physics APIs... games cost more... so you're stuck on one platform... because of DRM?
Yes, DRM is bad... and... some other things you said are points too... but none of it makes sense together.
Oh, it costs a great deal more than 40K to licence a mainstream xbox 360 game. That was the cost of EACH PATCH.
The thing is, yes, gaming used to be cheaper. Uh... so? It used to be you could make a video game with 2 programmers and 4 artists, Doom and Mortal Kombat both had barely more than that. But these days? 50+ developers for some projects? And you're targeting a gaming console that is sold at a loss? You have to understand the business model involved. Consoles are consoles, not PCs. (as much as I might wish otherwise).
Do you have any idea how many users EQ1 had? Definitely factors of 10 or 100 larger than indie game audiences at least.
That said, fair enough.
Yeah, I was thinking about that. If you develop with Microsoft XNA the fees are all much less. But you also get special restrictions. *shrug*
Did you read the first paragraph and stop? It was hardly an MS PR spew, I hate MS and I spent the rest of my post explaining why they were WRONG after setting the stage. Excuuuuuuse me, (princess) for trying to shed some perspective.
It has nothing to do with bandwidth, $40,000 buys you a lot of bandwidth. And your solution doesn't work at all. Charge based on downloads? So, if lots of people download it... it ends up costing just as much. So this is only good for people who patch games that nobody plays anymore, which is... nobody. I guess the idea is that smaller games will be downloaded less than larger games? That kinda works, but its roundabout.
They just need to have more licencing options available for indie developers. Have it such that patching fees are tiered based on the size of the game and sales.
Its because Microsoft has to take time to certify every patch put out on Live, just like they certify every game software put out for the 360. That said, Microsoft is a business, and is trying to make money from their licencing agreements. Consoles cost tons and tons of money to design, and then you actually sell them ON A LOSS. You have to make up all those millions purely through licences with developers, one way or another.
That said, they're shooting themselves in the foot making it hard for people to develop for their platform. Indie developers need access. And the whole expensive and drawn out certification process means that PC gamers get patches for games weeks or even MONTHS before console gamers see them, even if they're for the same game. Its not that they do PC first, they do both simultaneously (or console first) but PC goes out as soon as PC is ready.
If they embraced the 360 as more of a general purpose computer that can do gaming well for cheap, then they could skip the certification process and be more like PC. But right now they're shooting for a perfect, controlled console environment.
Fine as in nice, not fine as in fee. They're double-nice. Or maybe you're being funny. Hah?
No, but the whole reason we use the term "hoist" could have to do with a phrase in french which translates to "hoisted by one's own petard". Petard, after all, is not of English but French origin. Some people said Shakespeare used the phrase, but that doesn't mean coined it.
Seriously, get off your fucking high horse. Are you trying to be a grammar nazi? What do you mean "you keep on saying this so you must believe it" ? How many times did I say it? And is this opposed to things that other people say that they don't believe in? Saying "you keep on saying this" makes it sound like other people have argued against it, but I remain stubborn. However, this is not the case at all.
You're a condescending dick.
Hahaha, reminds me of something Valve actually posted on the TF2 website:
QUOTE Abraham Lincoln, "I fucking love arena mode."
Good god, the French predicted rocket jumping! :O
"Petard" is a small explosive device.
Literally the first thing I said. So yes.
Are you sure it wasn't a saying in the common vernacular before Hamlet? It could have been.
And I guess that "hoist" or the french origin implies being lifted, but that still seems like the wrong way to say it. You aren't really lifted by an explosive as much as ripped apart.
No, no, no. Go past this. Pass this part. In fact, never play this again.
The most important part of that comic is that you use a passphrase, not a password. Passwords are insecure, and trying to make them secure requires using lots of special characters, which as pointed out are hard to remember. Unfortunately, most of the web doesn't allow passphrases, they have pretty short limits on character length. 25 Characters? Good luck finding websites that allow that.
*sigh*, we could make everything more secure, AND easier to remember, but we're too busy trying to force grandma to use 1337 in her password. Smart.
Also, if you'd bother reading my argument fully, you'd see I said that IF BOOKS STARTED TO COST MORE then you'd see lots of piracy. At the moment, they're priced fairly, so copying them IS seen as an unnecessary pain in the ass. THAT WAS MY WHOLE POINT. GOOD JOB. It ISNT worth it. IT IS a pain in the ass.
Thats how you fight piracy. Not by making piracy the better product, but by making it the worse product. If you're lazy, its easier to buy something off steam and auto-download and auto-patch it and you can re-download it anywhere without the CD, so tons of people buy things on steam, even things they ALREADY OWN.
Meanwhile, games that only have a short single-player campaign, no multiplayer, and no mod support, try to cost $60 and compete with full AAA experiences, and we're not going to have it. People perceive the value of the product as less than the cost, so they're willing to go through the pain in the ass in order to pirate it. Because DRM and misplaced cost MAKE it worth it.
This is all a result of the west's hatred of haggling. If we let people haggle, if you could call up a game studio and say "listen, I'm a college student, I don't have $60 but I can give you $30" it would be in the studio's interest to say "sure!". It costs them next to nothing to distribute the software, so it is almost PURE profit to make ANY sale at ANY cost. Thats why Valve has gone BONKERS with sale after sale after sale, putting games up for as little as 5-10% of their original cost.
You charge $60 for a so-so game with DRM, piracy is worth it.
You charge $10 for that same game, suddenly piracy isn't worth it.
If a new book cost $60, people would pirate it all OVER the place. Things have to be priced according to market value, or your customers won't buy it.
Tons of people xerox books to .pdf and then pirate them that way. It happens. (especially in the case of Textbooks, which are massively overpriced... Hey, its our friends value and piracy again!)
A petard is a small explosive. So like many things, Age of Empires was fairly historically accurate. :) I too used to think the saboteur himself was the petard, but then "hoisted by your own petard" doesn't make as much sense, unless you're playing AoE 2, in which case somebody could convert your petard and then use it against you! Still, "hoist" seems like the wrong word. "caught in your own petard" would seem more accurate, but I guess it is all translated from French in the first place.
I learned all kinds of basic European history from the campaign.
I guess you reject my idea that the brain prioritizes memories, but that is absolutely true. Anything the brain thinks it has ready access to it won't memorize. Sometimes when I drive to work I get there and have no memory of the drive in between. I stopped at all the lights and I was paying attention, but i've driven the route so many times over and over my brain has decided that future memories of the same thing aren't vital. Similarly, things that are written down nearby and you know you can get access to at any time, your brain is much less likely to memorize.
You're nit-picking semantics to a point I didn't even try to make.
Also, just because knowing more memories increases the ability to remember does not imply that the brain never actively forgets something it finds unnecessary. You're making a leap. It can still remove a few unused ones while overall increasing in total number. I don't think you have any science to back this up, just your gut feeling. If you've got sources, I'd be interested.
Not to mention that the password could have never been recorded in long-term memory, and she just remembered it for a few days at a time as a combination of short-term and muscle memory.
Not to mention a million other things. Again, you're nit-picking something none of us were arguing.
... What? I'm really confused about what you're trying to say.
I read the summary and the article. Nothing about it was self-contradictory. Active politic detailed what happened. There was a yahoo page that described it.
Since then, Activepolitic has themselves posted that it was incorrect, and they took the time to post a quotation of a District Judge saying the injuction was denied. THAT is what I was looking for. If he could have provided a website, or even just paste a quote, then I'd know his reasoning. If he noticed the page got updated, he should have said "check the page, yahoo was wrong, they updated it." Instead of just "article is bogus" and then I'd know.
I don't know what the hell you're on about for not doing research and requiring proof. The Correction wasn't yet posted when I commented about this article this morning.
Hm, unless you're talking about a zipped representation, you're going to need all the same bits regardless. A differently encoded MP3 would be different, but then that isn't the same MP3. I guess different architectures would use different voltages though, so you could have drastically more electrons per bit...
I was being silly from the get-go though, obviously this isn't serious.