I am still having difficulty that MS will really, truly be "poking fun" at themselves over this, though. I guess I'll just have to wait for the new ad campaign to start up.
You can see some of the movies at http://www.officeclippy.com/index.html. They're a little bit markety, but they've got some good poke-fun-at-themselves lines...
User: You little, metallic, $&!#. Clippy: "You little, metallic, $&!#." Hmmm... try rephrasing your query. User: Next to Microsoft Bob, you're the most annoying thing in computer history! Clippy: You know Bob? He's a friend of mine!
Amen! I think the thing I dislike about banner ads is that they're bugging me while I'm trying to pay attention to the content. With YDKJ online, I can play the game without any outside distractions, then sit back and watch the commercials. (And I usually do watch the commercials -- They're pretty entertaining in their own right, since they can focus on being funny/clever instead of trying to grab my attention away from whatever I'm reading.)
And the point of calculating pi out to these absurd points is... what, again?
Because it's there.
Pi just seems to hold a fascination for many people -- partially because it seems to show up in just about every scientific discipline (except maybe computer science, where we ignore all numbers that aren't powers of two), and because it has resisted all attempts of mathematicians to determine its exact value or discover any sort of pattern.
I think scientists, just like anybody else, like a little challenge, even if it has no practical use. And it's a whole lot safer than climbing mountains.
As far as I know, Diablo, the word as well as the meaning of the word has been around since long before Computers... I personally don't think Blizzard has any rights to the name, as does New Line, its a name, anyone can use it.
Hmmm... I'm not sure I agree with that. By an extention of your logic, the only titles that could be copyrighted would be made up words. Would that really mean I can create a "Survivor" movie without CBS's consent? Or an "ER" movie? Heck, can I come out with a line of "Harry Potter" books? After all, it's just a name. I'm sure I could find somebody in history who was named Harry Potter.
On the other hand, there's been at least 6 movies in the last century that have all been titled "Snow". Are they guilty of copyright infringement? Probably not.
So, what's the difference? How could I create a movie called "Snow", but then go out and write a book called "Harry Potter and the Crystal Chariot" and watch my ass get sued back to the stone age? Unfortunately, and I think this is where many Slashdotters who like their world in nice logical terms get frustrated, there is no clear cut logical distinction. It's more the "Oh, c'mon" factor. If a court can essentially declare, "Oh, c'mon you big jerk! You're trying to ride somebody else's coattails without any work on your own," it counts as copyright infringement. (Yep, it's inconsistent, unpredictable, and, at times, unfair. But that's life.)
This particular case is kinda iffy. On the one hand, a modern day movie about a drug lord named Diablo is a little different than, say, a fantasy flick. But I know that the Slashdot story originally caught my interest because it included the words "Diablo" and "movie".
Plus, there's the problem of what happens when Blizzard comes out with a Diablo movie of their own. Is New Line going to come out and sue them?
Personally, I'd like to see New Line voluntarily change the name of their flick. It'll help them avoid confusion in the box office (there are probably people out there who like crime dramas but don't want to see a fantasy Diablo-themed movie), and it's early enough that they can change their name without worrying about wasted marketing dollars.
I'm all in favor of a nice, visually-pleasing restoration, but I'd be even happier if they could give it the ol' Princess Mononoke treatment. (Hire a professional writer to re-work the translation, get some better actors instead of the usual "five voices that you seem to hear in every Anime film", that sorta thing.)
I do realize, of course, that real Anime fans are supposed to listen to the Japanese track only and read the subtitles, but I always find that reading subtitles tends to take my attention away from the visual elements, which is usually the main draw of these movies in the first place.
It's probably not in their budget, though. Anybody know how much it cost Mirimax to re-dub Princess Mononoke?
Hold on, before you pack up and leave your cubicle for... well... a different colored cubicle, be sure to hear from the opposing side. Here's an article posted back in '99 on Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks.
40 acres and a mule? I'd rather have 40,000 stock options...
Gee, I dunno. Here in Silicon Valley, those 40 acres are worth about $35 mil. Whereas 40,000 options in, say, pets.com wouldn't cover the costs of feeding the mule.
(I don't mean to make light of your argument -- I just thought that last part was kinda ironic.)
1. The "Reason we're telling the public" -- It's punitive damage. If Microsoft only gives the defendants the money they might have earned anyway, Microsoft really hasn't learned much of a lesson.
Think of it this way... if you cheat somebody out of $50, you get caught, and the only punishment you receive is that you have to give the $50 back, would this really deter you from trying it again in the future? Probably not -- the worse-case scenario is that you have a net profit of zero. But if you had to give the $50 back, plus pay a fee of $200, then you might be more inclined not to try it again. It's the same idea with Microsoft -- except that it needs to be an amount of money that actually hurts them and makes them think, "Gosh. We'd better make sure this doesn't happen again." Hence the $5 billion.
2. The "Real, secret reason" -- Microsoft's a big rich corporation. Juries like taking money from big rich corporations and giving them to normal people. And $5 billion dollars sure would be nice...
The first version of War3 was called Warcraft Adventures which was scrapped because the project wasn't viewed in good light late in it's programming.
Well, Warcraft Adventures really shouldn't be considered Warcraft III. Yes, it was a Warcraft-branded game, and it appeared after Warcraft II, but it was more of a spin-off that had little to do with the RTS games we were all familiar with. But you're right, they scrapped it when it was pretty close to completion. All I can guess is that they realized the game wasn't any good and decided that, in the long run, it would be better off to take the financial hit and preserve their reputation than release a bad game to make a few quick bucks. But I guess we'll never know for sure...
I'm a little surprised that WarCraft III is considered vaporware, too. The first time I remember hearing about it was at ECTS, which was in September 1999. I think maybe gamers are just getting a little impatient.
It's an interesting article, but I think it's incorrect in a couple of ways.
1. The main reason for the crash wasn't because of all the competing systems. It was because there was a huge amount of crapware released for the Atari (like the infamous ET game). This turned off gamers more than having to choose between competing systems. Indeed, one could argue that with Atari being in such a dominant position over the other guys, there really was no real competition, hence the downward spiral in quality.
2. Just because a console is made by Microsoft doesn't mean it's going to contain a bunch of mediocre PC ports or patches. There's no reason why Microsoft can't enter the business like any other console developer. Remember, the real reason console games don't need patches is because a) There's one and only one hardware configuration you have to deal with (and without any other concurrently-running programs to worry about), and b) Console companies run very thorough quality checks of prospective games before releasing them. All Microsoft joking aside, I see no reason why Microsoft can't equal other publishers in this area.
I think what you will discover is that the market can't support all 6 developers at once. One or two of them won't gain enough critical mass to sustain the whole "enough people playing it = publishers develop games for it = more people buy the console" cycle. It will mean failure for one or two developers. But an entire market crash? I'm skeptical.
The reason for harsh EULAs
on
EULA In Games
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· Score: 2
Will id software really sue you for producing a Quake mod? Of course not. Unless, of course, my "mod" is one that removes the words "Quake" and "id software" and replaces them with "Todd's Super Cool Shoot-a-thon!" and "Todd Software".
The problem being, there is no easy legal way to distinguish between a benevolent mod and an evil one. (Sadly, the phrase, "Total dickhead move" is too ambiguous of a term to stand up in court.) This leaves id software's legal department with little choice but to say, "No mods", but only enforce it in the case of truly evil mods.
The same holds true for most of the other cases --I'm sure the makers of Rainbow Six won't mind if I post a screenshot on my little game-review web site. But if I'm the maker of "Counter Terrorist Team Seven!" and I want to start ragging on Rainbow Six's graphics on my site, they would mind.
The major problem with all of this is that it's pretty much up to the companies themselves to determine what's a total dickhead move worth enforcing and what's not, and if you read their minds incorrectly, you can get burned.
The idea of belligerent, sarcastic, astronauts shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody if you think about it. Consider...
1. Astronauts are nerds.
2. The people who post on Slashdot are probably a good representative sample of nerds.
3. The people who post on Slashdot are sarcastic and belligerent.
Therefore, we can safely assume that astronauts are going to be sarcastic and belligerent.
Maybe mission control should threaten to moderate them down next time. ("One more outburst like that and you're moderated down as a Troll." "First post!" "Oh, shut up...")
You might want to take a look at Black and White: Peter Molyneaueuexe's new game by Lionhead Studios, if or when it ships. According to previews I've heard, you can control the entire game using just the mouse -- much of it through mouse gestures. For instance, drawing a heart-symbol with the mouse casts a Healing spell.
Of course, while all that is nice, I think they'll find that 90% of their players will realize it's a hell of a lot faster to hit the "H" key to cast their healing spell and all that mouse-gesture-recognition technology will be for naught. But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Somehow Sony has convinced several major developers not to release their flagship titles on the Dreamcast.
That's a deal console companies often make with developers for "first party publishing" rights -- that is, games where Sony takes care of most of the distribution, advertising, etc. (For example, all the Crash Bandicoot games were first party titles on the Playstation. I wouldn't expect to see those anytime soon on the N64.) Usually, for a game to become a first party title, it has to be exclusive to that platform. That's why you see lots of Sony-sponsored ads for Tekken Tag Tournament and not for Dead or Alive 2 -- I'm pretty sure TTT is a Sony first party title.
All that being said, I'm not sure the PSX2 is a clear winner in the fighting games category. The reviews I've read of TTT are basically, "It's fun, but if you've played Tekken 3, you've played this game." And Street Fighter EX game has gotten mostly average reviews. The Dreamcast has some great fighting games in Soul Caliber, the Powerstone series (which I find a blast, if not particularly deep) and the 2D Marvel vs. Capcom vs. SNK vs. Your Mom types of games.
Granted, I'm sure there will eventually be more and better fighting games for the Playstation, but in the meantime, I might recommend picking up a Dreamcast and letting that tide you over until the Playstation 2 drops in price and you don't have to wait in line for 8 hours just to get one. That's my plan, anyway...
Everyone knows Ellison shoots his mouth off -- a lot. On the other hand, personally, I have more respect for the guy with cojones than whiny Bill threatening to sue.
Unless, of course some other company shows their database performs faster than Oracle's. Then watch Oracle whine...
My thoughts exactly! There are "Enhances the browsing experience" Flash sites and "So unbearably fills up your site with pointless animation that most users run away in frustration" Flash sites. The one fell into the latter category. It's too bad, 'cuz with just a few changes (like a "Skip intro" link) this could have been a decent site.
Hope their clothes are a little more practical than their site.
You're right in that OMM did go out of their way to find a ridiculously bad example of a puzzle. But even the best adventure games have puzzles that make absolutely no sense to anybody who has not been indoctrinated to the Contrived and Arbitrary Rules of Adventure Games.
Imagine trying to play an excellent game like Sam n' Max with somebody who's never played an adventure game before...
You: Ooh! Be sure to take that jar with the severed hand in it?
Friend: Why? What do I need a jar with a severed hand for?
You: I don't know. But you'll definitely need it later.
Friend: What? Why?
You: I just know! Now take the damned jar!
Friend: But I can't open it.
You: Yeah, you'll probably have to do it later.
Friend: It's made of glass. Why can't I just smash it on the ground?
You: You can't do that!!
Friend: Why not? It's made of glass...
You: No, you'll probably have to find somebody who's really good at opening jars later.
Friend: Okay... and this is fun why?
And so on. While most adventure games aren't quite as bad as the Gabriel Knight example, they do rely on a bunch of arbitrary rules that, while somewhat logical to anybody who's played an adventure game before, would make absolutely no sense to anybody who hasn't been trained to the way of adventure games.
And that, I believe, is why adventure games (at least the old-style ones) are dying. At least with an FPS, you can figure out the rules within the first 30 seconds (Shoot something and it dies!)
I think the trick is you can't have advertising that's so annoying it motivates people to go out of their way to write and/or download a program to strip them out.
Look at banner advertising. I know that people have written plug-ins to strip out banner ads, but I've never really been motivated to go out there and actually download one. Why? I don't mind banner ads. They don't distract from my web-browsing experience, it's a small download, and I can very easily skip over them if I don't feel like reading them.
But to listen to 20-30 seconds of an advertisement every time I wanted to hear a song? You must be kidding! (Plus, while.mp3 compression may be good, it's still gonna be a heckuva lot bigger than a banner ad.)
I think the advertising model has potential. But you're dealing with a group of people who are savvy enough to strip out advertisements if they're inclined to do so. Companies are going to have to find a way to create ads without hurting the user experience.
If drugs are smuggled onto an airplane, is it the airplane's fault or the person carrying the drugs?
Well, that depends.
If it's a major airline, that regularly inspects luggage for illegal contents and fully cooperates with the U.S. government in using drug-sniffing dogs to inspect luggage and arrest passengers that are trying to smuggle drugs, it's pretty much not their fault.
If it's "Bob's Nudge-Nudge Wink-Wink Airlines" making daily runs from Columbia, no questions asked, they probably can be found at fault by the law. Not quite sure what the legal precedent is, but I'm guessing they could be found guilty as an accomplice of some sort.
Law isn't really as cut-and-dry as, say, computer science, and there is room for people (like judges and juries) to use their own judgement to determine things like intent and acting in good faith. That, I believe, is where Napster is running into trouble. The idea of "Don't blame us! How were we supposed to know there was illegal stuff going on?" doesn't really fly.
Obviously, Napster is not actively doing anything to Metallica. No Napster employee is going out and "hijacking" Metallica songs. But there is the idea of making a reasonable effort to prevent illegal activity on their service, and that's going to be tough for Napster to prove.
It's pretty much a fact that if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive. (Unless you wait several years for technology to catch up.)
Am I really going to wait until 2004 to buy a Pentium-7/3000 so that I can download an emulator that simulates the PSX2 at a reasonable speed? Probably not. By the same token, the Gameboy has essentially reached market saturation by now. If you were going to buy a Gameboy, you probably would have already.
The way I see it, a PlayStation emulator isn't all that harmful to Sony -- after all, as lots of people are quick to point out, Sony doesn't make any money selling their hardware. Often, they'll sell it for a loss and make their money on royalties for their games. (They get a pretty hefty chunk of change on every PSX game sold.) If they can make money selling games without having to take a loss on the hardware, they'll probably be pretty happy.
The biggest drawback for Sony that I can see is that a game running on the Sony emulator (in my experience anyway) isn't as good as when it runs on normal PSX hardware. I suppose that someone who had never seen a PlayStation before and tried playing Soul Blade on their Bleem emulator might think, "Boy, Playstation games aren't all that good."
Another more dangerous (but perhaps less likely) potential problem is the fact that maybe these console companies could steal each other's publishing deals. Suppose to make Tunnel Raider V for the PSX, it'll cost me $5/game in royalties for Sony. Suppose Sega offers me a better deal -- say, $3/game -- to make the "Dreamcast Bleem Emulator" version of the game (which, totally by coincidence, happens to run on the Playstation as well). That could really screw over Sony. I don't think it's a particularly likely scenario, but it's possible...
Of course, most of this is a moot point now that most people are looking forward to the PSX2, which is probably the real reason why Sony isn't continuing their legal battle.
Ehhh.. I'd probably be a little wary of the linuxplanet article. For one thing, it may be a tad biased. (I think I read a Mac Addict article that assured me the show was all about Aqua.)
For another, if you're a manning a booth and a guy walks up to you with a badge that says, "Press: LinuxPlanet" you might be skewing your sales pitch a bit to play up the Linux side of your business.
Still, it's nice to see an article focusing on the real purpose of these trade shows: Getting random crap with other companies' logos on them.
Yeah, you've got a really good point there. I'm guessing that either... a) Blue Sky Studios managed to exploit some technicality by releasing the movie in a small theater they rented for an afternoon, or b) The Academy was willing to look the other way in this case.
Actually, I'm sure this happens quite a bit for some of these other film categories (How many Short Subject Documentaries do you see in the theatres?) and I'm sure this will happen for films that are released on the Internet. Maybe Atom films already "releases" their movies in a little theatre in their basement before putting them on their web site. Maybe if the movie is good enough, the Academy won't care.
Personally, I just see this as a way for the Academy to clarify what they generally consider to be a film that falls under their domain. For the same reasons they leave the made-for-HBO movies to the Cable Ace awards, they'll leave the made-for-Internet movies to the Webbys. Whether that's just a "We want to compare apples-to-apples" logic or something more malicious is an exercise left to the reader.
There was an ad i saw for something on the scifi channel that looked kind of nifty, any idea what that might have been?
You might be thinking of Exposure -- every episode, they show a short film (usually with a sci-fi theme.) created by some young up-and-coming director. I don't think it's always animated, but it's often heavy on the animation or CG. Obviously, quality can differ from show to show, but it's usually pretty good. Afterwards, there's an interview with the guy (or gal) who did it.
I've only watched a few episodes (I'm never quite sure when it's on), but so far I haven't been disappointed.
On a side note, I think some of the coolest and most creative stuff I've seen has been the little 30-second promos the Sci-Fi channel occasionally inserts between commercials. Kinda like all those ones MTV used to do back when they played music videos without the pre-teens screaming "I love you Carson!"
Slashdot Mirror
- "At least I'm not a sock puppet."
- "It looks like you're writing a letter. Is it a love letter? Can I see?"
At least they've got a sense of humor about it.Amen! I think the thing I dislike about banner ads is that they're bugging me while I'm trying to pay attention to the content. With YDKJ online, I can play the game without any outside distractions, then sit back and watch the commercials. (And I usually do watch the commercials -- They're pretty entertaining in their own right, since they can focus on being funny/clever instead of trying to grab my attention away from whatever I'm reading.)
Because it's there.
Pi just seems to hold a fascination for many people -- partially because it seems to show up in just about every scientific discipline (except maybe computer science, where we ignore all numbers that aren't powers of two), and because it has resisted all attempts of mathematicians to determine its exact value or discover any sort of pattern.
I think scientists, just like anybody else, like a little challenge, even if it has no practical use. And it's a whole lot safer than climbing mountains.
---
On the other hand, there's been at least 6 movies in the last century that have all been titled "Snow". Are they guilty of copyright infringement? Probably not.
So, what's the difference? How could I create a movie called "Snow", but then go out and write a book called "Harry Potter and the Crystal Chariot" and watch my ass get sued back to the stone age? Unfortunately, and I think this is where many Slashdotters who like their world in nice logical terms get frustrated, there is no clear cut logical distinction. It's more the "Oh, c'mon" factor. If a court can essentially declare, "Oh, c'mon you big jerk! You're trying to ride somebody else's coattails without any work on your own," it counts as copyright infringement. (Yep, it's inconsistent, unpredictable, and, at times, unfair. But that's life.)
This particular case is kinda iffy. On the one hand, a modern day movie about a drug lord named Diablo is a little different than, say, a fantasy flick. But I know that the Slashdot story originally caught my interest because it included the words "Diablo" and "movie".
Plus, there's the problem of what happens when Blizzard comes out with a Diablo movie of their own. Is New Line going to come out and sue them?
Personally, I'd like to see New Line voluntarily change the name of their flick. It'll help them avoid confusion in the box office (there are probably people out there who like crime dramas but don't want to see a fantasy Diablo-themed movie), and it's early enough that they can change their name without worrying about wasted marketing dollars.
I'm all in favor of a nice, visually-pleasing restoration, but I'd be even happier if they could give it the ol' Princess Mononoke treatment. (Hire a professional writer to re-work the translation, get some better actors instead of the usual "five voices that you seem to hear in every Anime film", that sorta thing.)
I do realize, of course, that real Anime fans are supposed to listen to the Japanese track only and read the subtitles, but I always find that reading subtitles tends to take my attention away from the visual elements, which is usually the main draw of these movies in the first place.
It's probably not in their budget, though. Anybody know how much it cost Mirimax to re-dub Princess Mononoke?
Hold on, before you pack up and leave your cubicle for... well... a different colored cubicle, be sure to hear from the opposing side. Here's an article posted back in '99 on Why Being a Computer Game Developer Sucks.
Gee, I dunno. Here in Silicon Valley, those 40 acres are worth about $35 mil. Whereas 40,000 options in, say, pets.com wouldn't cover the costs of feeding the mule.
(I don't mean to make light of your argument -- I just thought that last part was kinda ironic.)
Two reasons...
1. The "Reason we're telling the public" -- It's punitive damage. If Microsoft only gives the defendants the money they might have earned anyway, Microsoft really hasn't learned much of a lesson.
Think of it this way... if you cheat somebody out of $50, you get caught, and the only punishment you receive is that you have to give the $50 back, would this really deter you from trying it again in the future? Probably not -- the worse-case scenario is that you have a net profit of zero. But if you had to give the $50 back, plus pay a fee of $200, then you might be more inclined not to try it again. It's the same idea with Microsoft -- except that it needs to be an amount of money that actually hurts them and makes them think, "Gosh. We'd better make sure this doesn't happen again." Hence the $5 billion.
2. The "Real, secret reason" -- Microsoft's a big rich corporation. Juries like taking money from big rich corporations and giving them to normal people. And $5 billion dollars sure would be nice...
I'm a little surprised that WarCraft III is considered vaporware, too. The first time I remember hearing about it was at ECTS, which was in September 1999. I think maybe gamers are just getting a little impatient.
It's an interesting article, but I think it's incorrect in a couple of ways.
1. The main reason for the crash wasn't because of all the competing systems. It was because there was a huge amount of crapware released for the Atari (like the infamous ET game). This turned off gamers more than having to choose between competing systems. Indeed, one could argue that with Atari being in such a dominant position over the other guys, there really was no real competition, hence the downward spiral in quality.
2. Just because a console is made by Microsoft doesn't mean it's going to contain a bunch of mediocre PC ports or patches. There's no reason why Microsoft can't enter the business like any other console developer. Remember, the real reason console games don't need patches is because a) There's one and only one hardware configuration you have to deal with (and without any other concurrently-running programs to worry about), and b) Console companies run very thorough quality checks of prospective games before releasing them. All Microsoft joking aside, I see no reason why Microsoft can't equal other publishers in this area.
I think what you will discover is that the market can't support all 6 developers at once. One or two of them won't gain enough critical mass to sustain the whole "enough people playing it = publishers develop games for it = more people buy the console" cycle. It will mean failure for one or two developers. But an entire market crash? I'm skeptical.
The problem being, there is no easy legal way to distinguish between a benevolent mod and an evil one. (Sadly, the phrase, "Total dickhead move" is too ambiguous of a term to stand up in court.) This leaves id software's legal department with little choice but to say, "No mods", but only enforce it in the case of truly evil mods.
The same holds true for most of the other cases --I'm sure the makers of Rainbow Six won't mind if I post a screenshot on my little game-review web site. But if I'm the maker of "Counter Terrorist Team Seven!" and I want to start ragging on Rainbow Six's graphics on my site, they would mind.
The major problem with all of this is that it's pretty much up to the companies themselves to determine what's a total dickhead move worth enforcing and what's not, and if you read their minds incorrectly, you can get burned.
The idea of belligerent, sarcastic, astronauts shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody if you think about it. Consider...
1. Astronauts are nerds.
2. The people who post on Slashdot are probably a good representative sample of nerds.
3. The people who post on Slashdot are sarcastic and belligerent.
Therefore, we can safely assume that astronauts are going to be sarcastic and belligerent.
Maybe mission control should threaten to moderate them down next time. ("One more outburst like that and you're moderated down as a Troll." "First post!" "Oh, shut up...")
Of course, while all that is nice, I think they'll find that 90% of their players will realize it's a hell of a lot faster to hit the "H" key to cast their healing spell and all that mouse-gesture-recognition technology will be for naught. But that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
All that being said, I'm not sure the PSX2 is a clear winner in the fighting games category. The reviews I've read of TTT are basically, "It's fun, but if you've played Tekken 3, you've played this game." And Street Fighter EX game has gotten mostly average reviews. The Dreamcast has some great fighting games in Soul Caliber, the Powerstone series (which I find a blast, if not particularly deep) and the 2D Marvel vs. Capcom vs. SNK vs. Your Mom types of games.
Granted, I'm sure there will eventually be more and better fighting games for the Playstation, but in the meantime, I might recommend picking up a Dreamcast and letting that tide you over until the Playstation 2 drops in price and you don't have to wait in line for 8 hours just to get one. That's my plan, anyway...
My thoughts exactly! There are "Enhances the browsing experience" Flash sites and "So unbearably fills up your site with pointless animation that most users run away in frustration" Flash sites. The one fell into the latter category. It's too bad, 'cuz with just a few changes (like a "Skip intro" link) this could have been a decent site.
Hope their clothes are a little more practical than their site.
Imagine trying to play an excellent game like Sam n' Max with somebody who's never played an adventure game before...
And so on. While most adventure games aren't quite as bad as the Gabriel Knight example, they do rely on a bunch of arbitrary rules that, while somewhat logical to anybody who's played an adventure game before, would make absolutely no sense to anybody who hasn't been trained to the way of adventure games.
And that, I believe, is why adventure games (at least the old-style ones) are dying. At least with an FPS, you can figure out the rules within the first 30 seconds (Shoot something and it dies!)
I think the trick is you can't have advertising that's so annoying it motivates people to go out of their way to write and/or download a program to strip them out.
.mp3 compression may be good, it's still gonna be a heckuva lot bigger than a banner ad.)
Look at banner advertising. I know that people have written plug-ins to strip out banner ads, but I've never really been motivated to go out there and actually download one. Why? I don't mind banner ads. They don't distract from my web-browsing experience, it's a small download, and I can very easily skip over them if I don't feel like reading them.
But to listen to 20-30 seconds of an advertisement every time I wanted to hear a song? You must be kidding! (Plus, while
I think the advertising model has potential. But you're dealing with a group of people who are savvy enough to strip out advertisements if they're inclined to do so. Companies are going to have to find a way to create ads without hurting the user experience.
If it's a major airline, that regularly inspects luggage for illegal contents and fully cooperates with the U.S. government in using drug-sniffing dogs to inspect luggage and arrest passengers that are trying to smuggle drugs, it's pretty much not their fault.
If it's "Bob's Nudge-Nudge Wink-Wink Airlines" making daily runs from Columbia, no questions asked, they probably can be found at fault by the law. Not quite sure what the legal precedent is, but I'm guessing they could be found guilty as an accomplice of some sort.
Law isn't really as cut-and-dry as, say, computer science, and there is room for people (like judges and juries) to use their own judgement to determine things like intent and acting in good faith. That, I believe, is where Napster is running into trouble. The idea of "Don't blame us! How were we supposed to know there was illegal stuff going on?" doesn't really fly.
Obviously, Napster is not actively doing anything to Metallica. No Napster employee is going out and "hijacking" Metallica songs. But there is the idea of making a reasonable effort to prevent illegal activity on their service, and that's going to be tough for Napster to prove.
Ehh... I think the loss is negligable, actually.
It's pretty much a fact that if you take a general-purpose piece of hardware and write a program for it that simulates what another piece of hardware was specifically designed to do, it's going to end up a) Slower, and b) More expensive. (Unless you wait several years for technology to catch up.)
Am I really going to wait until 2004 to buy a Pentium-7/3000 so that I can download an emulator that simulates the PSX2 at a reasonable speed? Probably not. By the same token, the Gameboy has essentially reached market saturation by now. If you were going to buy a Gameboy, you probably would have already.
The way I see it, a PlayStation emulator isn't all that harmful to Sony -- after all, as lots of people are quick to point out, Sony doesn't make any money selling their hardware. Often, they'll sell it for a loss and make their money on royalties for their games. (They get a pretty hefty chunk of change on every PSX game sold.) If they can make money selling games without having to take a loss on the hardware, they'll probably be pretty happy.
The biggest drawback for Sony that I can see is that a game running on the Sony emulator (in my experience anyway) isn't as good as when it runs on normal PSX hardware. I suppose that someone who had never seen a PlayStation before and tried playing Soul Blade on their Bleem emulator might think, "Boy, Playstation games aren't all that good."
Another more dangerous (but perhaps less likely) potential problem is the fact that maybe these console companies could steal each other's publishing deals. Suppose to make Tunnel Raider V for the PSX, it'll cost me $5/game in royalties for Sony. Suppose Sega offers me a better deal -- say, $3/game -- to make the "Dreamcast Bleem Emulator" version of the game (which, totally by coincidence, happens to run on the Playstation as well). That could really screw over Sony. I don't think it's a particularly likely scenario, but it's possible...
Of course, most of this is a moot point now that most people are looking forward to the PSX2, which is probably the real reason why Sony isn't continuing their legal battle.
Ehhh.. I'd probably be a little wary of the linuxplanet article. For one thing, it may be a tad biased. (I think I read a Mac Addict article that assured me the show was all about Aqua.)
For another, if you're a manning a booth and a guy walks up to you with a badge that says, "Press: LinuxPlanet" you might be skewing your sales pitch a bit to play up the Linux side of your business.
Still, it's nice to see an article focusing on the real purpose of these trade shows: Getting random crap with other companies' logos on them.
Yeah, you've got a really good point there. I'm guessing that either...
a) Blue Sky Studios managed to exploit some technicality by releasing the movie in a small theater they rented for an afternoon, or
b) The Academy was willing to look the other way in this case.
Actually, I'm sure this happens quite a bit for some of these other film categories (How many Short Subject Documentaries do you see in the theatres?) and I'm sure this will happen for films that are released on the Internet. Maybe Atom films already "releases" their movies in a little theatre in their basement before putting them on their web site. Maybe if the movie is good enough, the Academy won't care.
Personally, I just see this as a way for the Academy to clarify what they generally consider to be a film that falls under their domain. For the same reasons they leave the made-for-HBO movies to the Cable Ace awards, they'll leave the made-for-Internet movies to the Webbys. Whether that's just a "We want to compare apples-to-apples" logic or something more malicious is an exercise left to the reader.
You might be thinking of Exposure -- every episode, they show a short film (usually with a sci-fi theme.) created by some young up-and-coming director. I don't think it's always animated, but it's often heavy on the animation or CG. Obviously, quality can differ from show to show, but it's usually pretty good. Afterwards, there's an interview with the guy (or gal) who did it.
I've only watched a few episodes (I'm never quite sure when it's on), but so far I haven't been disappointed.
On a side note, I think some of the coolest and most creative stuff I've seen has been the little 30-second promos the Sci-Fi channel occasionally inserts between commercials. Kinda like all those ones MTV used to do back when they played music videos without the pre-teens screaming "I love you Carson!"