That's not counting the tens of trillions of dollars you would have to spend on adding bridges at every railroad crossing in the nation to allow cars to go over the fences.
Well, you really don't want to count those anyway. People can (and do; they're generally called "idiots", rather than "terrorists", however) drop things off bridges onto railway tracks. You have to close most of the crossings, and then funnel everyone through enclosed bridges/tunnels at a few points that are going to cost you a fortune.
Re:Video Game Project Management for Dummies?
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When DLC Goes Wrong
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Disney's version of Toy Story 2 was at a stage where they considered it just about ready to release, before Pixar insisted on throwing the lot in the bin and doing a decent film instead. The first Toy Story's progress to release went all over the place, too, and Cars was also completely reworked because it wasn't good enough.
It really boils down to whether you see making videogames as a primarily technical or creative process, I suppose.
That all rather depends on how much of a game you're writing before scrapping it though, surely? The suggestion that Hollywood should save money by not writing scripts that don't get greenlit would be obviously ludicrous, so I suppose the issue is how far into development a game needs to go before you realise it's not going to work.
If you write just one game for every game released, in reality I suspect you're releasing all the junk that would get rightly canned under the present system, and that's not going to improve anyone's profit margins.
In defence of the studios, it's not just about setting different prices. It's also about ensuring that your US DVD of Terminator 2 is bought from Lions Gate, but my UK one came from Optimum, for example, or that your US DVD of Titanic is from Paramount, while my UK one is from Fox.
When you get into more arthouse/indie stuff, there can loads of distribution deals for different countries, each one of which has been bought by a company that has paid for a monopoly right to distribute that film in the relevant market. If they had to compete against each other on the high street, rather than just for a few geeks who have modded their players and import discs through the post, they wouldn't give the producers as much money.
Welcome to Slashdot, where Zealot 1 may well be a different person to Zealot 2. This isn't just some Groupthink thing.
Besides, there's also quite a substantial difference between "Copyright is broken; someone shouldn't get hit with a multi-million dollar court case because they copied someone else's CD" and "Copyright is broken; someone shouldn't get hit with a $130 demand for selling copied IP for a substantial profit".
Unfortunately for the individual involved, Cooks Sauce has, thanks to causing Internet Anger, alerted a whole bunch of helpful people to the fact that they haven't just violated the copyright of some random blogger, but the likes of the Disney corporation and Martha Stewart. They're going to have to ship in soil from Nevada to fill the hole in the ground where Cooks Sauce once stood by the time they're finished performing Lawyer-Fu.
Yes, Universal are still making money off Back To The Future 3 - they just re-released it to Blu-ray the other week. Die Hard 2 came out on Blu-ray a while back as well, and knowing ITV3, is probably on TV next week. Also in the next week or two comes a new re-release of the 2D Super Mario games on the Wii, so yes, they're still making money out of that, too.
Given that we've just had two rather good versions of Sherlock Holmes in the last year (Downey Jr. and Cumberbatch), they bring in money as well, for that matter.
It's all about money, yes. But not just in the way that you suggest. Every 3D projection system on the market currently is a digital projection system. The studios have been wanting to go all-digital for years, because a couple of hard drives cost a fraction of a 35mm print to courier to the cinema, let alone make in the first place (prices I've seen quoted were $35000 for the initial master print, and then $1000 per copy on a mass-distributed title). But for the cinema, they're looking at shelling out serious money for a digital setup, versus just using a film-based one they've already paid for and was cheaper in the first place.
The 3D fad could easily die off in a year or two without too much concern, because by then it will have done its job - persuading the cinema chains there is a financial incentive to invest in digital projection. That's the big prize at stake, not the $2 per ticket surcharge, most of which is funding the hardware upgrade rather than turning a profit.
There are 2D versions of 3D movies, yes. But, as we've recently seen with the likes of Piranha 3D (a film that wasn't even shot stereoscopic, but converted in post-production), that doesn't necessarily mean the studio is going to release 2D prints.
Having just got an iPod Touch, unless I'm doing something wrong there's no way to receive Skype calls unless you're actually _in_ the Skype app. So it's not hugely useful for that.
The fact that it's also an option for Snow Leopard is surely evidence against it being part of an OS lockdown, rather than for?
My comment was merely to show that Microsoft already have one "app store", and with the latest revamp of Games For Windows Live Marketplace another that more directly competes with Steam. They don't do anything to lock down a Windows box, so I can't see how bringing features to the Mac that have proved insanely profitable for iOS devices means that a lockdown will come too. Particularly when Jobs explicitly said it won't.
Just as with the consoles, people will probably get many small apps from this system, but stick to traditional disc-based delivery for the multi-Gb fully-featured offerings. I can't see the Mac ceasing to be a Proper Computer, instead of a Device.
Has existed for ages. And so I'm sure you'll agree that the days of being able to get software onto a Windows box by any other method are numbered in the single digits.
Of course, by the same logic, Anonymous shouldn't mess around with all this DDOS nonsense when executing a random member of KISS each time Simmons shoots his mouth off would be more effective.
I'll take the argument that the mouse is still the best device we have for pointing and clicking on things, sure. But I still fail to see how spreading three of my fingers across four movement buttons on a keyboard is a better experience than moving an analogue pad with my thumb for most things. They're really only any use if you've designed your RTS to require umpty-thrumpty buttons, rather than a more streamlined experience.
Fundamentally, though, outside the rhythm-action genre developers are rightly terrified of releasing a game that DEMANDS a non-standard controller, because unless you ship it in the box it massively restricts your audience.
We need people with patriotic interests at heart, somewhat like H. Ross Perot and Ron Paul in office, but tempered with better communication and diplomatic skills.
Yep, thought so. Why is it that people only feel the need to mention Obama's middle name when they believe it implies the guy is self-evidently evil?
c) anyone you know, and indeed anyone you don't know agreeing to a terms of service, then posting unverified claims that you did something that a random person might object to. This isn't just reading what individuals have written online about themselves.
Still, well done for posting as anonymous in your case. Because if I write "Joe Bloggs takes illegal drugs" then anyone called Joe Bloggs has that on his search results from now on. Just as well I didn't know your name to use instead.
Good point. PoG is a better introduction to Banks-in-M-mode than CP on a more general level, too. Mainly because it's a better book.
I see a lot of Ringworld references above, but the Halo Orbital always seemed to be quite explicitly around the size of a Banks one, rather than a Niven.
Sadly, the article doesn't tell us at all. But looking online at screenshots it clearly involves rapid handwriting, and what _looks_ like having to press directions on the dpad at the same time. Any 1st-party title I've played like that allows you to use the four buttons as a dpad instead and similarly use either trigger, but it seems someone forgot to do this in the title under discussion.
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Well, you really don't want to count those anyway. People can (and do; they're generally called "idiots", rather than "terrorists", however) drop things off bridges onto railway tracks. You have to close most of the crossings, and then funnel everyone through enclosed bridges/tunnels at a few points that are going to cost you a fortune.
Disney's version of Toy Story 2 was at a stage where they considered it just about ready to release, before Pixar insisted on throwing the lot in the bin and doing a decent film instead. The first Toy Story's progress to release went all over the place, too, and Cars was also completely reworked because it wasn't good enough.
It really boils down to whether you see making videogames as a primarily technical or creative process, I suppose.
That all rather depends on how much of a game you're writing before scrapping it though, surely? The suggestion that Hollywood should save money by not writing scripts that don't get greenlit would be obviously ludicrous, so I suppose the issue is how far into development a game needs to go before you realise it's not going to work.
If you write just one game for every game released, in reality I suspect you're releasing all the junk that would get rightly canned under the present system, and that's not going to improve anyone's profit margins.
In defence of the studios, it's not just about setting different prices. It's also about ensuring that your US DVD of Terminator 2 is bought from Lions Gate, but my UK one came from Optimum, for example, or that your US DVD of Titanic is from Paramount, while my UK one is from Fox.
When you get into more arthouse/indie stuff, there can loads of distribution deals for different countries, each one of which has been bought by a company that has paid for a monopoly right to distribute that film in the relevant market. If they had to compete against each other on the high street, rather than just for a few geeks who have modded their players and import discs through the post, they wouldn't give the producers as much money.
Welcome to Slashdot, where Zealot 1 may well be a different person to Zealot 2. This isn't just some Groupthink thing.
Besides, there's also quite a substantial difference between "Copyright is broken; someone shouldn't get hit with a multi-million dollar court case because they copied someone else's CD" and "Copyright is broken; someone shouldn't get hit with a $130 demand for selling copied IP for a substantial profit".
Unfortunately for the individual involved, Cooks Sauce has, thanks to causing Internet Anger, alerted a whole bunch of helpful people to the fact that they haven't just violated the copyright of some random blogger, but the likes of the Disney corporation and Martha Stewart. They're going to have to ship in soil from Nevada to fill the hole in the ground where Cooks Sauce once stood by the time they're finished performing Lawyer-Fu.
Yes, Universal are still making money off Back To The Future 3 - they just re-released it to Blu-ray the other week. Die Hard 2 came out on Blu-ray a while back as well, and knowing ITV3, is probably on TV next week. Also in the next week or two comes a new re-release of the 2D Super Mario games on the Wii, so yes, they're still making money out of that, too.
Given that we've just had two rather good versions of Sherlock Holmes in the last year (Downey Jr. and Cumberbatch), they bring in money as well, for that matter.
It's all about money, yes. But not just in the way that you suggest. Every 3D projection system on the market currently is a digital projection system. The studios have been wanting to go all-digital for years, because a couple of hard drives cost a fraction of a 35mm print to courier to the cinema, let alone make in the first place (prices I've seen quoted were $35000 for the initial master print, and then $1000 per copy on a mass-distributed title). But for the cinema, they're looking at shelling out serious money for a digital setup, versus just using a film-based one they've already paid for and was cheaper in the first place.
The 3D fad could easily die off in a year or two without too much concern, because by then it will have done its job - persuading the cinema chains there is a financial incentive to invest in digital projection. That's the big prize at stake, not the $2 per ticket surcharge, most of which is funding the hardware upgrade rather than turning a profit.
There are 2D versions of 3D movies, yes. But, as we've recently seen with the likes of Piranha 3D (a film that wasn't even shot stereoscopic, but converted in post-production), that doesn't necessarily mean the studio is going to release 2D prints.
Having just got an iPod Touch, unless I'm doing something wrong there's no way to receive Skype calls unless you're actually _in_ the Skype app. So it's not hugely useful for that.
The fact that it's also an option for Snow Leopard is surely evidence against it being part of an OS lockdown, rather than for?
My comment was merely to show that Microsoft already have one "app store", and with the latest revamp of Games For Windows Live Marketplace another that more directly competes with Steam. They don't do anything to lock down a Windows box, so I can't see how bringing features to the Mac that have proved insanely profitable for iOS devices means that a lockdown will come too. Particularly when Jobs explicitly said it won't.
Just as with the consoles, people will probably get many small apps from this system, but stick to traditional disc-based delivery for the multi-Gb fully-featured offerings. I can't see the Mac ceasing to be a Proper Computer, instead of a Device.
www.windowsmarketplace.com - Tinfoil hat for Mr. Gilbert, please.
www.windowsmarketplace.com
Has existed for ages. And so I'm sure you'll agree that the days of being able to get software onto a Windows box by any other method are numbered in the single digits.
Or not, because Jobs Is Evil, or something.
Windows Live Marketplace means that Windows 8 is dead, and the sucessor to Win7 is an XBox.
Of course, by the same logic, Anonymous shouldn't mess around with all this DDOS nonsense when executing a random member of KISS each time Simmons shoots his mouth off would be more effective.
Let's not give 'em ideas though, eh?
I'll take the argument that the mouse is still the best device we have for pointing and clicking on things, sure. But I still fail to see how spreading three of my fingers across four movement buttons on a keyboard is a better experience than moving an analogue pad with my thumb for most things. They're really only any use if you've designed your RTS to require umpty-thrumpty buttons, rather than a more streamlined experience.
Fundamentally, though, outside the rhythm-action genre developers are rightly terrified of releasing a game that DEMANDS a non-standard controller, because unless you ship it in the box it massively restricts your audience.
You could always take an external keyboard, rather than an external monitor. Wouldn't need a power supply, and is less likely to get broken.
DINGDINGDING! It's the Hussein Alarm!
Yep, thought so. Why is it that people only feel the need to mention Obama's middle name when they believe it implies the guy is self-evidently evil?
c) anyone you know, and indeed anyone you don't know agreeing to a terms of service, then posting unverified claims that you did something that a random person might object to. This isn't just reading what individuals have written online about themselves.
Still, well done for posting as anonymous in your case. Because if I write "Joe Bloggs takes illegal drugs" then anyone called Joe Bloggs has that on his search results from now on. Just as well I didn't know your name to use instead.
Good point. PoG is a better introduction to Banks-in-M-mode than CP on a more general level, too. Mainly because it's a better book.
I see a lot of Ringworld references above, but the Halo Orbital always seemed to be quite explicitly around the size of a Banks one, rather than a Niven.
Indeed. When the UK uses a "conscience vote", we mean that there is no whip at all - there isn't a party line to rebel against.
Doesn't exactly seem likely to happen, given there's no sign of a PC release for Halo 3 or ODST yet.
If you want to read an SF novel with an Orbital in it, you _really_ should be heading straight for Consider Phlebas...
If we get wipEoutHD on the 360 in exchange, then I'm quite absurdly happy.
Sadly, the article doesn't tell us at all. But looking online at screenshots it clearly involves rapid handwriting, and what _looks_ like having to press directions on the dpad at the same time. Any 1st-party title I've played like that allows you to use the four buttons as a dpad instead and similarly use either trigger, but it seems someone forgot to do this in the title under discussion.