And that Mac expert is going to spend two months working for free, right? And whoever does testing and QA for the Mac version will work for free too, right? No extra funding required!
That's not how the real world works, of course, and they need more funding (which it appears they will get) to be able to produce Mac and Linux versions.
While the article you linked has some interesting points (and some ridiculous ones), it's irrelevant.
Kickstarter is all or nothing. If the campaign doesn't meat the funding goal, no money is collected. It makes sense to try to appeal to the largest crowd.
You seem to be making one of two arguments:
1) They should have set the funding goal at $1.4 million (the level required for Windows and Mac versions) and not created any game at all if they didn't reach it.
2) They should have promised the Mac version at $900k and hoped the relatively small crowd of Mac gamers with nostalgia for Wasteland would fund the majority of the development so that massively larger group of Windows gamers would only have to pledge $500k more to get a Windows version produced.
Both arguments are ridiculous. Sorry, but they are.
The developers did the right thing. They set the funding goal for the version that's likely to be the most popular and get the most funding. It's the goal they're most likely to reach so that they can get their game made. If they get enough beyond that, they have stated that they will create a Mac version as well. They clearly want to develop for multiple platforms (which is why your link is irrelevant) but need to ensure that they have enough funding to do so.
You left off... "but it would take a few thousand to represent 95% of any which text", which is kinda important, and the quote you just gave doesn't support your original suggestion that the average person will only use 1000 words in their lifetime. In fact, 5,000 is quite clearly mentioned as the number that the average French person would use regularly.
If the average person used only 1000 words in their lifetime (which is what you claimed in your original post), almost everything would be written to accomodate that and you'd see a number much closer to 100% on the first line of this chart. Fortunately, you're wrong and average people can read and understand more than 3 out of 4 words that they read.
Going by the total payments chart, they should primarily develop for Windows first since it's nearly 3/4 of the payments. After Windows, they should develop for Mac since it's slightly more than half of the non-Windows payments. Linux, even though it's more than 1% of the total payments, should still be dead last in their list of priorities since the evidence given suggests that it will give the lowest return on an investment.
And that's pretty much what they announced, isn't it? Windows first, Mac of funding reaches X amount, "other platforms" if funding allows.
Imagine having the OS scan all your videos and note details about them so that you could find any picture or video by just typing in a detail about what's in it.
Imagine your wife/girlfriend/mother/grandmother searching for "porn" and seeing everything you've got hidden thanks to the OS...
The only thing 'funny' about it is that LightSquared's CEO didn't anything for his 'donation'. No private audience with Obama and no fast-track approval for the company's idiotic plan.
The Democratic Party took the donation and treated it as a donation while the administration killed the company, which is exactly what should have happened. For once, the system worked as intended.
Nope. I just had to have my credit card company reverse the early termination fee when I did this less than six months into a contract with Sprint when they upped the monthly fees.
They will absolutely try to claim that the changes aren't material (Sprint did this to me). Your credit card company will have no problem reversing early termination fees if they try to charge them and your cell phone provider isn't about to piss off their main source of cash by arguing about a couple hundred dollars.
I used to have a Sprint phone under contract. They upped the monthly cost less than six months after I signed the contract and I told them to piss off. They said the change wasn't material and charged the early termination fee to my credit card. I explained the situation to my credit card company and they reversed the charge and told Sprint to piss off. Sprint pissed off and never bothered me again.
There's nothing naive about my post. I simply refused to take "it's immaterial" as an acceptable response and I know how to deal with companies that do shit like that.
That already exists (at least in the US). Any time your provider changes the contract, read the fine print of the contract. You'll find you have a certain time period (usually 14 or 30 days) in which you can discontinue your service without any early termination fee. The person you talk to to try to end the service will generally lie and say that the clause doesn't apply to you, but ultimately the company is bound by the terms of the original contract until such time as you agree to the new contract by paying your next payment.
There are two definitions for audiophile. You seem to be using the "someone who loves good audio" definition. The person you're replying to is using the "someone who spends ridiculous amounts of money on things that claim to work in ways that would break the laws of physics" definition.
You are obviously too young to remember NASA when it actually had public support
I'm quite old enough to remember when the public supported NASA without PR experiments like this. I remember being told the big bad Soviets were going to beat us to the moon, build space based weapons and destroy us all. We were all told constantly that it was our national duty to support the space program and we did.
And no, before you count the items on that page and say "that's all", it's not. That's a short list of easily explained, easily understood advances that have come about due to the ISS.
You seem to think that the astronauts "spend most of their time doing experiments that are inscrutable to the general public," but have you actually looked for the published papers? Have you seen the research they're doing?
Yes I have looked at papers that have been published as a result of experiments performed on the ISS. Unsurprisingly, the papers that aren't in the fields that I've studied are inscrutable to me. That's how things work in the real world as opposed to your fantasy world where everyone can pick up any research paper published and instantly understand it.
These "Newtonian physics demonstrations for ten-year-olds" as you call them are done for PR purposes. They are not the raison d'etre of the space program and are not intended to be.
The astronauts spend most of their time doing experiments that are inscrutable to the general public. Taking a small amount of time to do these experiments helps maintain a level of visibility for NASA that translates directly into public support for the program. Without public support, they would quickly lose their budget and we would have no space program.
I really don't get the irrational hatred for lawyers on Slashdot.
It's not just on Slashdot. It's society as a whole (at least in the United States... I can't speak for elsewhere).
It's also not that difficult to understand.
Lawyers are not paid to tell the truth in court. Their job is to distort and conceal the truth in whatever way will be most favorable to the point of view they're arguing for. Dishonesty is a fundamental part of their job.
People have difficulty believing that someone who is professionally dishonest will be honest in other situations. They express that inherent distrust through disdain and sometimes outright hatred.
The link I provided showed a rough estimate of how much energy it would require to raise the temperature of the oceans in order to show how ludicrous the 22,964.44 Joule figure given above is. I never said anything about the entire mass of the earth and the fact that the mass of earth's oceans is substantially less than that of the planet has absolutely nothing to do with my post.
It takes over 4 Joules of energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Your 22,964.4 Joule figure would be sufficient raise the temperature of 5.5 liters of water by 1 degree C.
The earth's mass is slightly larger than 5.5 liters of water and thus requires slightly more energy to raise its temperature by one degree.
Yes, I have seen their financials. I think you've confused Nintendo's corporate losses with Wii sales, but the truth is that a combination of currency exchange rates, slow 3DS sales and lower game sales than expected are to blame for that.. Without the Wii sales, their losses would have been much heavier.
The Wii somehow still sold in greater volume than the Xbox and PS3 over this past Christmas season. Nintendo has sold 95 million units to date... just a bit less than twice as many units as either Xbox or PS3 have sold. The question "How long did the Wii last compared to the Xbox or PS3?" makes no sense since the damn thing hasn't stopped selling.
It's splitting hairs, but Apple is only requiring the exclusive right to distribution of the ebook that was created with their software, not your copyrighted work. You're still free to create an ePub or other format version and distribute it in any way you wish.
It's still a bit of a douche move by Apple, but it's not quite as bad as you're making it out to be.
Wii sales in 2011 were clearly far below sales in 2010 At least for the Chistmas season. They "crashed and burned" almost as low as Xbox and PS3 during the Christmas season. Clearly Nintendo is in trouble!
Slashdot Mirror
And that Mac expert is going to spend two months working for free, right? And whoever does testing and QA for the Mac version will work for free too, right? No extra funding required!
That's not how the real world works, of course, and they need more funding (which it appears they will get) to be able to produce Mac and Linux versions.
While the article you linked has some interesting points (and some ridiculous ones), it's irrelevant.
Kickstarter is all or nothing. If the campaign doesn't meat the funding goal, no money is collected. It makes sense to try to appeal to the largest crowd.
You seem to be making one of two arguments:
1) They should have set the funding goal at $1.4 million (the level required for Windows and Mac versions) and not created any game at all if they didn't reach it.
2) They should have promised the Mac version at $900k and hoped the relatively small crowd of Mac gamers with nostalgia for Wasteland would fund the majority of the development so that massively larger group of Windows gamers would only have to pledge $500k more to get a Windows version produced.
Both arguments are ridiculous. Sorry, but they are.
The developers did the right thing. They set the funding goal for the version that's likely to be the most popular and get the most funding. It's the goal they're most likely to reach so that they can get their game made. If they get enough beyond that, they have stated that they will create a Mac version as well. They clearly want to develop for multiple platforms (which is why your link is irrelevant) but need to ensure that they have enough funding to do so.
You left off... "but it would take a few thousand to represent 95% of any which text", which is kinda important, and the quote you just gave doesn't support your original suggestion that the average person will only use 1000 words in their lifetime. In fact, 5,000 is quite clearly mentioned as the number that the average French person would use regularly.
If the average person used only 1000 words in their lifetime (which is what you claimed in your original post), almost everything would be written to accomodate that and you'd see a number much closer to 100% on the first line of this chart. Fortunately, you're wrong and average people can read and understand more than 3 out of 4 words that they read.
Going by the total payments chart, they should primarily develop for Windows first since it's nearly 3/4 of the payments. After Windows, they should develop for Mac since it's slightly more than half of the non-Windows payments. Linux, even though it's more than 1% of the total payments, should still be dead last in their list of priorities since the evidence given suggests that it will give the lowest return on an investment.
And that's pretty much what they announced, isn't it? Windows first, Mac of funding reaches X amount, "other platforms" if funding allows.
Unless you're trying to find porn of celebrities' babies, that is.
Imagine having the OS scan all your videos and note details about them so that you could find any picture or video by just typing in a detail about what's in it.
Imagine your wife/girlfriend/mother/grandmother searching for "porn" and seeing everything you've got hidden thanks to the OS...
Sure it is
The only thing 'funny' about it is that LightSquared's CEO didn't anything for his 'donation'. No private audience with Obama and no fast-track approval for the company's idiotic plan.
The Democratic Party took the donation and treated it as a donation while the administration killed the company, which is exactly what should have happened. For once, the system worked as intended.
Nope. I just had to have my credit card company reverse the early termination fee when I did this less than six months into a contract with Sprint when they upped the monthly fees.
They will absolutely try to claim that the changes aren't material (Sprint did this to me). Your credit card company will have no problem reversing early termination fees if they try to charge them and your cell phone provider isn't about to piss off their main source of cash by arguing about a couple hundred dollars.
I used to have a Sprint phone under contract. They upped the monthly cost less than six months after I signed the contract and I told them to piss off. They said the change wasn't material and charged the early termination fee to my credit card. I explained the situation to my credit card company and they reversed the charge and told Sprint to piss off. Sprint pissed off and never bothered me again.
There's nothing naive about my post. I simply refused to take "it's immaterial" as an acceptable response and I know how to deal with companies that do shit like that.
Jumping out of a plane with a raft has been tested, as a matter of fact:
http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2005/08/episode_37_escape_slide_parach.html
That already exists (at least in the US). Any time your provider changes the contract, read the fine print of the contract. You'll find you have a certain time period (usually 14 or 30 days) in which you can discontinue your service without any early termination fee. The person you talk to to try to end the service will generally lie and say that the clause doesn't apply to you, but ultimately the company is bound by the terms of the original contract until such time as you agree to the new contract by paying your next payment.
I think you meant "Thank you, DARPA" (most definitely not British).
Having good equipment set up well in a good room isn't silly, but paying thousands of dollars for a speaker cable and a few hundred more for a CD/DVD demagnetizer) is.
There are two definitions for audiophile. You seem to be using the "someone who loves good audio" definition. The person you're replying to is using the "someone who spends ridiculous amounts of money on things that claim to work in ways that would break the laws of physics" definition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshmallow_creme
And one of the reasons it's popular:
http://www.marshmallowfluff.com/pages/fluffernutter.html
You are obviously too young to remember NASA when it actually had public support
I'm quite old enough to remember when the public supported NASA without PR experiments like this. I remember being told the big bad Soviets were going to beat us to the moon, build space based weapons and destroy us all. We were all told constantly that it was our national duty to support the space program and we did.
Those days are over and good riddance.
I mean, what else comes out of it?
It's not my fault that you're too stupid to use Google:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/coolstation.html
And no, before you count the items on that page and say "that's all", it's not. That's a short list of easily explained, easily understood advances that have come about due to the ISS.
You seem to think that the astronauts "spend most of their time doing experiments that are inscrutable to the general public," but have you actually looked for the published papers? Have you seen the research they're doing?
Yes I have looked at papers that have been published as a result of experiments performed on the ISS. Unsurprisingly, the papers that aren't in the fields that I've studied are inscrutable to me. That's how things work in the real world as opposed to your fantasy world where everyone can pick up any research paper published and instantly understand it.
These "Newtonian physics demonstrations for ten-year-olds" as you call them are done for PR purposes. They are not the raison d'etre of the space program and are not intended to be.
The astronauts spend most of their time doing experiments that are inscrutable to the general public. Taking a small amount of time to do these experiments helps maintain a level of visibility for NASA that translates directly into public support for the program. Without public support, they would quickly lose their budget and we would have no space program.
I really don't get the irrational hatred for lawyers on Slashdot.
It's not just on Slashdot. It's society as a whole (at least in the United States... I can't speak for elsewhere).
It's also not that difficult to understand.
Lawyers are not paid to tell the truth in court. Their job is to distort and conceal the truth in whatever way will be most favorable to the point of view they're arguing for. Dishonesty is a fundamental part of their job.
People have difficulty believing that someone who is professionally dishonest will be honest in other situations. They express that inherent distrust through disdain and sometimes outright hatred.
What a pathetic attempt at a strawman argument.
The link I provided showed a rough estimate of how much energy it would require to raise the temperature of the oceans in order to show how ludicrous the 22,964.44 Joule figure given above is. I never said anything about the entire mass of the earth and the fact that the mass of earth's oceans is substantially less than that of the planet has absolutely nothing to do with my post.
And just how do you suggest doing that without increasing the temperature of the ocean?
It takes over 4 Joules of energy to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius. Your 22,964.4 Joule figure would be sufficient raise the temperature of 5.5 liters of water by 1 degree C.
The earth's mass is slightly larger than 5.5 liters of water and thus requires slightly more energy to raise its temperature by one degree.
Try again
Yes, I have seen their financials. I think you've confused Nintendo's corporate losses with Wii sales, but the truth is that a combination of currency exchange rates, slow 3DS sales and lower game sales than expected are to blame for that.. Without the Wii sales, their losses would have been much heavier.
The Wii somehow still sold in greater volume than the Xbox and PS3 over this past Christmas season. Nintendo has sold 95 million units to date... just a bit less than twice as many units as either Xbox or PS3 have sold. The question "How long did the Wii last compared to the Xbox or PS3?" makes no sense since the damn thing hasn't stopped selling.
It's splitting hairs, but Apple is only requiring the exclusive right to distribution of the ebook that was created with their software, not your copyrighted work. You're still free to create an ePub or other format version and distribute it in any way you wish.
It's still a bit of a douche move by Apple, but it's not quite as bad as you're making it out to be.
But look at this
Wii sales in 2011 were clearly far below sales in 2010 At least for the Chistmas season. They "crashed and burned" almost as low as Xbox and PS3 during the Christmas season. Clearly Nintendo is in trouble!