But buying your games from Gamestop is analogous to buying used DVDs from your friend instead of buying the movie new. You get your movie, but the studios get nothing. Decent AAA games now cost $20-50 million dollars to make. Guess how many copies the publisher has to sell to recoup those development costs? Thats right, a lot of them. Gamestop is leeching away 20-30% of their potential sales, that is a big deal for the publishers, and thats why they're trying to fight it with these DLC and online tying efforts.
Very few games would cost that much to make let alone market but I agree that the second hand market is leeching sales.
What I don't get is why if they're worried about sales, they don't discount their prices on digital download services. Modern Warfare 2 (for example) was cheaper to buy retail than it was on Steam. If Gamestop etc. are leeching sales, shouldn't they be encouraging people to buy their games online?
So many people think that the used game market is somehow harming the new game market. They are completely wrong. Through the magic of a priori reasoning, I know that you cannot be harmed merely because you're not getting what you are not entitled.
Of course it harms new game sales. If someone can buy a new game for $60 vs a used game for $50 then obviously some people would choose the latter. The money from that sale goes to store, not the publisher.
How much they're losing is the big question. I wouldn't be surprised if it were 10-15% of sales, more on some titles. Publishers should thank their stars that the likes of Gamestop are so greedy. If second hand prices were more reasonable I expect the % loss would be even higher.
How do publishers combat the issue or clawback money?
The obvious way, the way that the likes of EA and others are following is to start bundling redemption codes in the box. But it only works games with a substantial multiplayer / online element. Doing so means second hand owners get a crippled game (e.g. because other people have the map pack that they don't) and must purchase the missing component on line. Also, since the second hand game is crippled its resale price is less and therefore people may be discouraged from selling the game since they get less for it.
A better way IMO is to produce decent games in the first place and to support them longer. People sell crap titles, those with no replay value and those where the servers are dead. Raise the quality bar and people will naturally be inclined to hang onto their titles longer. The less games in the second hand channel, the more people are likely to buy new.
Personally I buy most of my games brand new but I restrict myself to games which are highly rated. I don't see the point of rewarding bad games or bad publishers.
Utah can pass any resolution it damn well pleases. For example they can deny the moon is in orbit around the earth. Reality of course may beg to differ on the matter.
...which is nice, but not real helpful when every single game with an auto-updater requires Admin to run.
Not my experience at all. Steam, Windows Live and other modern games appear to work just fine for me, despite me not being logged in as administrator. Besides, even if it were, it would be little different from Linux, OS X where you need to be root (e.g. via sudo) to perform installations or updates.
True but it is here now and modern windows apps have fallen into line. The most annoying thing with UAC is that if you do have older apps that it continues to nag you and there is no way to train it to ignore certain apps except by globally lowering or disabling its warnings.
Administrative users necessary to run most things (MS software or otherwise).
To be fair to Microsoft this is no longer true. UAC asks the user if they wish to elevates privileges when an app does something unsafe. Vista took a lot of flak when UAC appeared (including from myself) but it did force user land applications to stop abusing the registry (e.g opening HKLM with read/write permissions), writing random files to random locations on disk and other unnecessary operations. The consequence is apps written / patched in the last 3 years run pretty cleanly and if they don't, you get the UAC popup. In practice it's little different from what happens in Ubuntu or OS X in similar circumstances.
Well you can find ARM powered netbooks for rock bottom prices but so far they've been pretty awful. I've see one that runs Windows CE and a variety that run Linux but they're all hobbled by unacceptably low storage and memory.
I own an Asus Eee PC 701 (soon to be retired) but now for the same price I could buy a something with a 10.1" screen, 250Gb storage and Windows 7. Therefore I don't think things have gotten any more expensive, rather the amount of bang for your buck has gone up.
It did seem to have a touchscreen since the guy was tapping on things but I couldn't tell if the screen was colour or mono, or switchable between the two. I sort of like the form factor although it's a little too thick. The weird lump looks (well weird) but it would make the device easy to hold while moving around so the device would be quite practical. The biggest question mark is over the OS and what apps it ships with (for bookreading etc.).
Well you don't have to use Java (strictly speaking it's not Java but Dalvik), since Android supports native methods. Your Java app could be a stubs that invoke C/C++ for the most part. I am not sure there is any reason to do this unless you absolutely have timing critical code to execute.
Most of the time apps are bound by latency of the user, the network, the database or whatever so it really doesn't matter what they're written in so long as they are responsive enough. Java fulfills this role admirably and also relieves the programmer a lot of the pitfalls and drudgery of development and providing decent system APIs.
It has nothing to do with it being an "outlet" as being a matter of right and wrong. Cartoons depicting children being raped or in other sexual situations is obscene and repugnant to the vast majority of people and the law reflects that. If pedos want an "outlet" they can see a psychiatrist or counselor.
Dalvik isn't a JVM. It's similar to a JVM but Java byte code is translated during the build phase into a different intermediate byte code. Dalvik byte code is a register oriented code compared to the stack oriented code in the JVM. The runtime sits on top
It's also fairly nascent and I wouldn't be surprised if there is plenty of room for improvement.
The fact that they'd drop support for an OS version thats only 5 years old, when Firefox quite obviously still works on 10 year old Windows 2000, is sort of surprising.
Windows tends to go through very large but very backwards compatible updates every 5 years or so (less from Vista to W7), whereas OS X has a shorter update cycle and doesn't appear to care half as much about BC.
In terms of programming W2K is little different from Windows 7 especially for a C++ app which is hitting Win32 APIs. Stuff around the periphery might change and there may be performance implications if DirectX is used for some operations. Probably the biggest effort is keeping the chrome up to date because W2K doesn't have uxtheme.dll (the Windows theme engine) so the something somewhere has to work around this. I can see that being reason enough to dump W2K in as well.
Yeah, because Flash is more of a gateway to a mass of free content from across the world than the Web.
There are countless games and apps that exist in Flash but not in HTML. HTML simply isn't adequate for a great many applications - hence the reason Flash is so popular.
And Apple would be sure to not include the best mobile web browser available in their mobile products.
It's the best and its also the worst mobile web browser on their mobile products. Why? Because Apple does not allow other browsers or other kinds of apps that compete with their technology. Perish the thought that people might even have the option of using non Apple code since it might "confuse" them right?
Or supply an SDK for web content tailored to their mobile devices. Forget about providing a means to install such a web app so that it appears as a first-class citizen to the apps available from their officially-blessed store.
Web apps being yet more things you must obtain from the App store. Why must web apps be approved by Apple if they're just web applications?
Ha! Imagine if they actually followed web standards and pushed the start of the art forward!
Web apps feature proprietary extensions and packaging. They might utilise some underlying web standards but they most certainly are not portable.
All of your arguments are beside the point. Apple have chosen to shut out Flash (and Java and Silverlight and every other plugin / runtime) and the apologists have leapt out of the woodwork to rationalize this decision. None of the excuses hold any water at all. Indeed Flash Lite is available in various incarnations for lots of phones already.
It is clear that this is done solely to herd as many people through the app store and wring as much money out of them as possible. It has absolutely nothing to do with performance, or memory, or security or anything else.
Is one where everyone buys their content through Apple's store. That's it.
It's no wonder that Flash which acts as a gateway to a mass of free content from across the world might be considered "non optimal". After all, Apple has to think of the poor consumers who would be "confused" by all the choice that countless non-Apple alternatives would cause.
The complaining continues because Linux users still cannot play video using FOSS solutions, due to licensing fees associated with implementation of H.264. Given the overall Linux philosophy, it's a perfectly valid complaint.
Not true. Most of the world can play H264 just fine without any legal implications. Even in the US, there is nothing to stop someone setting up a legal process for users to register and pay the paltry fee to use the codec legally.
Theora can be decoded on the cpus of all the devices you listed, at the applicable screen resolutions, in real time. Heck, the arm optimized version of theora can decode HD at a significant multiple of real time on a CPU slower than the one in the 3gs.
Could but never will be the way things are going. H264 is the industry standard and that's that.
I think there is a strong case to be made to say Ogg Theora should have been the minimum HTML 5 video standard but saying it should be the only one is just insane. I think Opera & Mozilla shot themselves in the foot by going down that path.
Home is festooned with adverts, sponsored zones and as you say trinkets for $$$. It's already commercialized enough and charging for it would be stupid.
Personally I think Sony have plenty of means of keeping online free and making money. They're already doing lots of them - pushing PSN, selling / renting videos, premium avatars & themes, advertising, qore etc. They could add to that model with IPTV, game rentals (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc.), streaming music & video, network storage & game load/saves etc. There is no reason that they should have to charge for any functionality that the PS3 already offers.
It's not an issue if they're using the web browser's user agent and response of fonts to determine suite usage. It's very easy to weed out Linux users because it says they're Linux right there in the user agent string. The number of people anonymizing or pretending to be Windows for one reason or another is probably small enough to be covered by a reasonable margin of error.
After visiting Panopticlick, I wonder why websites even need to *know* what fonts I have. This seems by far the worst leakage of entropy by far, followed closely by plugins, followed by random junk tacked onto the user agent string such as.NET runtime. I realise some JS does legitimately check plugins (e.g. swfobject.js), but I see no reason that the entire list should be broadcast to any site without some manner of safeguards in the browser.
I expect that when these parties signed contracts they did so in England and are therefore subject to English law and English jurisdiction. Otherwise they would be in court in the US, Germany, France or wherever they actually signed the contracts.
In a monoculture the attack surface is large since everyone is using the same code and therefore vulnerable to the same bugs. Just moving users onto a mix of other browsers lowers the attack surface even if each individual browser has its own fair share of bugs.
I remember going to some trade show some 15 years ago where a variety of 3D devices were on display and to be honest the state of the art has barely advanced since then. The displays may have changed from CRT to LCD / plasma / DLP but they still require special glasses to watch 3D.
The first manufacturer to produce a 3D display that works over a wide viewing angle without glasses is going to make a fortune.
Slashdot Mirror
Very few games would cost that much to make let alone market but I agree that the second hand market is leeching sales.
What I don't get is why if they're worried about sales, they don't discount their prices on digital download services. Modern Warfare 2 (for example) was cheaper to buy retail than it was on Steam. If Gamestop etc. are leeching sales, shouldn't they be encouraging people to buy their games online?
Perhaps the entire context that contained sentence sailed past you. Better go back and read it again.
Of course it harms new game sales. If someone can buy a new game for $60 vs a used game for $50 then obviously some people would choose the latter. The money from that sale goes to store, not the publisher.
How much they're losing is the big question. I wouldn't be surprised if it were 10-15% of sales, more on some titles. Publishers should thank their stars that the likes of Gamestop are so greedy. If second hand prices were more reasonable I expect the % loss would be even higher.
How do publishers combat the issue or clawback money?
The obvious way, the way that the likes of EA and others are following is to start bundling redemption codes in the box. But it only works games with a substantial multiplayer / online element. Doing so means second hand owners get a crippled game (e.g. because other people have the map pack that they don't) and must purchase the missing component on line. Also, since the second hand game is crippled its resale price is less and therefore people may be discouraged from selling the game since they get less for it.
A better way IMO is to produce decent games in the first place and to support them longer. People sell crap titles, those with no replay value and those where the servers are dead. Raise the quality bar and people will naturally be inclined to hang onto their titles longer. The less games in the second hand channel, the more people are likely to buy new.
Personally I buy most of my games brand new but I restrict myself to games which are highly rated. I don't see the point of rewarding bad games or bad publishers.
Utah can pass any resolution it damn well pleases. For example they can deny the moon is in orbit around the earth. Reality of course may beg to differ on the matter.
Not my experience at all. Steam, Windows Live and other modern games appear to work just fine for me, despite me not being logged in as administrator. Besides, even if it were, it would be little different from Linux, OS X where you need to be root (e.g. via sudo) to perform installations or updates.
True but it is here now and modern windows apps have fallen into line. The most annoying thing with UAC is that if you do have older apps that it continues to nag you and there is no way to train it to ignore certain apps except by globally lowering or disabling its warnings.
To be fair to Microsoft this is no longer true. UAC asks the user if they wish to elevates privileges when an app does something unsafe. Vista took a lot of flak when UAC appeared (including from myself) but it did force user land applications to stop abusing the registry (e.g opening HKLM with read/write permissions), writing random files to random locations on disk and other unnecessary operations. The consequence is apps written / patched in the last 3 years run pretty cleanly and if they don't, you get the UAC popup. In practice it's little different from what happens in Ubuntu or OS X in similar circumstances.
I own an Asus Eee PC 701 (soon to be retired) but now for the same price I could buy a something with a 10.1" screen, 250Gb storage and Windows 7. Therefore I don't think things have gotten any more expensive, rather the amount of bang for your buck has gone up.
Don't be absurd.
It did seem to have a touchscreen since the guy was tapping on things but I couldn't tell if the screen was colour or mono, or switchable between the two. I sort of like the form factor although it's a little too thick. The weird lump looks (well weird) but it would make the device easy to hold while moving around so the device would be quite practical. The biggest question mark is over the OS and what apps it ships with (for bookreading etc.).
Most of the time apps are bound by latency of the user, the network, the database or whatever so it really doesn't matter what they're written in so long as they are responsive enough. Java fulfills this role admirably and also relieves the programmer a lot of the pitfalls and drudgery of development and providing decent system APIs.
It has nothing to do with it being an "outlet" as being a matter of right and wrong. Cartoons depicting children being raped or in other sexual situations is obscene and repugnant to the vast majority of people and the law reflects that. If pedos want an "outlet" they can see a psychiatrist or counselor.
And so it should.
It's also fairly nascent and I wouldn't be surprised if there is plenty of room for improvement.
Windows tends to go through very large but very backwards compatible updates every 5 years or so (less from Vista to W7), whereas OS X has a shorter update cycle and doesn't appear to care half as much about BC.
In terms of programming W2K is little different from Windows 7 especially for a C++ app which is hitting Win32 APIs. Stuff around the periphery might change and there may be performance implications if DirectX is used for some operations. Probably the biggest effort is keeping the chrome up to date because W2K doesn't have uxtheme.dll (the Windows theme engine) so the something somewhere has to work around this. I can see that being reason enough to dump W2K in as well.
There are countless games and apps that exist in Flash but not in HTML. HTML simply isn't adequate for a great many applications - hence the reason Flash is so popular.
And Apple would be sure to not include the best mobile web browser available in their mobile products.
It's the best and its also the worst mobile web browser on their mobile products. Why? Because Apple does not allow other browsers or other kinds of apps that compete with their technology. Perish the thought that people might even have the option of using non Apple code since it might "confuse" them right?
Or supply an SDK for web content tailored to their mobile devices. Forget about providing a means to install such a web app so that it appears as a first-class citizen to the apps available from their officially-blessed store.
Web apps being yet more things you must obtain from the App store. Why must web apps be approved by Apple if they're just web applications?
Ha! Imagine if they actually followed web standards and pushed the start of the art forward!
Web apps feature proprietary extensions and packaging. They might utilise some underlying web standards but they most certainly are not portable.
All of your arguments are beside the point. Apple have chosen to shut out Flash (and Java and Silverlight and every other plugin / runtime) and the apologists have leapt out of the woodwork to rationalize this decision. None of the excuses hold any water at all. Indeed Flash Lite is available in various incarnations for lots of phones already.
It is clear that this is done solely to herd as many people through the app store and wring as much money out of them as possible. It has absolutely nothing to do with performance, or memory, or security or anything else.
It's no wonder that Flash which acts as a gateway to a mass of free content from across the world might be considered "non optimal". After all, Apple has to think of the poor consumers who would be "confused" by all the choice that countless non-Apple alternatives would cause.
Not true. Most of the world can play H264 just fine without any legal implications. Even in the US, there is nothing to stop someone setting up a legal process for users to register and pay the paltry fee to use the codec legally.
Could but never will be the way things are going. H264 is the industry standard and that's that.
I think there is a strong case to be made to say Ogg Theora should have been the minimum HTML 5 video standard but saying it should be the only one is just insane. I think Opera & Mozilla shot themselves in the foot by going down that path.
Home is festooned with adverts, sponsored zones and as you say trinkets for $$$. It's already commercialized enough and charging for it would be stupid.
Personally I think Sony have plenty of means of keeping online free and making money. They're already doing lots of them - pushing PSN, selling / renting videos, premium avatars & themes, advertising, qore etc. They could add to that model with IPTV, game rentals (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly etc.), streaming music & video, network storage & game load/saves etc. There is no reason that they should have to charge for any functionality that the PS3 already offers.
It's not an issue if they're using the web browser's user agent and response of fonts to determine suite usage. It's very easy to weed out Linux users because it says they're Linux right there in the user agent string. The number of people anonymizing or pretending to be Windows for one reason or another is probably small enough to be covered by a reasonable margin of error.
After visiting Panopticlick, I wonder why websites even need to *know* what fonts I have. This seems by far the worst leakage of entropy by far, followed closely by plugins, followed by random junk tacked onto the user agent string such as .NET runtime. I realise some JS does legitimately check plugins (e.g. swfobject.js), but I see no reason that the entire list should be broadcast to any site without some manner of safeguards in the browser.
I expect that when these parties signed contracts they did so in England and are therefore subject to English law and English jurisdiction. Otherwise they would be in court in the US, Germany, France or wherever they actually signed the contracts.
In a monoculture the attack surface is large since everyone is using the same code and therefore vulnerable to the same bugs. Just moving users onto a mix of other browsers lowers the attack surface even if each individual browser has its own fair share of bugs.
The first manufacturer to produce a 3D display that works over a wide viewing angle without glasses is going to make a fortune.