You do seem closest to getting me out of the posters so far. But just to try and explain myself further...
I don't really mind that the hardback costs more than the paperback. I spend so much money on books that it doesn't really factor into it at all for me. See, if they released the paperback and hardback at the same price and the same time, I'd own the book right now. But I won't buy any hardbacked book (except programming books which need to be a little sturdier, as they cost a shitload more and are important for work) because I do most of my reading on public transport in small, cramped seats. A hardbacked book takes up *space* dammit, and I'm already a big fat dude, I need all the room I can get!:D
The car analogy, therefore, doesn't really apply. I won't try to make it fit, it'd just get silly. But suffice to say this isn't a rationalisation, since I know I'm wrong and freely admit to it, like you noticed (and many others missed, somehow). Suffice to say I'll pay full retail price for the product I want as soon as it's there.
It's just the reasoning behind *why* I did it, and it's spawned a huge irrelevant thread. Sorry everyone:(
I have in fact thought of something the publisher *has* lost based on my actions though - they've lost the interest on the money that I would've paid for a paperbacked version of the book on the day it was released. You can decide for yourself whether you think I'm being honest or not, that's up to you, but assuming that I am (which I am!), wouldn't you say they've at least partly decided to make that loss of their own accord?
Anyway, think it's best to leave it there, nothing useful's gonna come from this discussion I think...:)
Well thanks, but it's not a murky area at all. It's completely black:)
Thing is, I know what I've done is illegal/law-breaking in a technical respect. There's no disputing tha t I've infringed copyright like a one-eyed peg-legged person. But you're either ignoring my point or haven't seen it. I'm a pirate, yes, but also a consumer. I'm not saying people should be allowed to do what I've done, or that it's right in some way. I'm just trying to explain *why* I've done it! I have consumed the publisher's product for some time, have shown my willingness and ability to pay, and wish to do so again. That I cannot do so at this time is down entirely to them. As soon as I'm able, I will buy the book, and all will be well in the world.
Maybe I'm just a really compulsive person, but it ticked me off quite a bit when they changed the cover design of the paperback. I've got 6 books with one cover design, and 5 with the new design, and that annoys me. Having 11 books of one size and one of another would annoy me equally.
I'm not making excuses. I'm giving my reasons. There's a subtle difference:)
Indeed - 20k is a decent wage in the UK for a graduate (not for a CS graduate maybe), but it was in one of the most expensive parts of the country (right next to London) where I literally couldn't afford to buy a house, and rent was 75% of my wage each month:(
I don't know about the US, but I'm a gamesprogrammer in the UK with 4 years or so games experience for a mix of companies.
My starting salary was £20k (somewhere around $35k-40k US I think), which is at the upper end of the starting range in this country. I've known people who worked in smaller companies in lower cost-of-living areas who started on much less.
Most companies that I've known staff at do *not* offer shares, or royalties, or even bonuses. Bonuses, where offered, are by no means guaranteed - I've never had one. I've worked on a finished game for which I might've received royalties, but you don't get them til at least a year after the game is released (and the company went bust before the game was released, lovely!), and there's no guarantee that the contract with the publisher will be such that the staff ever see any royalties even if the company does.
I've never worked for them, but the majority of games companies at least in the UK make GB/GBA/Mobile-phone games, not the big console titles. Even the big players (Rockstar spring to mind) don't pay out regular bonuses on time or at all.
Why do I still do it? Well, now I'm working at a decent company (Sony, if you're interested), I get to make *games* god damn it, it's fun!:)
If anyone has any more questions about working in games, feel free to reply:D
Firstly, copyright infringement isn't a criminal act.
Secondly, are you deliberately misunderstanding me or am I just coming across completely wrong?
*I WILL BE BUYING THIS BOOK AS SOON AS IT IS RELEASED IN THE SAME FORMAT AS THE OTHER 11 I LEGALLY OWN*
But, since publishers decide to go for the people who can't resist buying these things as soon as they come out, they set the paperback release way after the hardback. So to answer your question in a different manner, the paperback will look just fine on my bookshelf, next to the other paperbacks. It'll just take a while. In the meantime, I've enjoyed reading the book immensely.
Let me say, sir, that you are an asshole. A thieving asshole in fact. A theiving, scumbag asshole. Someone spent time writing that book. Others spent time and money editing, printing, and marketing that book. You have stolen that book and deprived those people of thier right to make a profit.
What did I steal? Someone else paid for the book, (scanned/ocrred/retyped/whatever), and I downloaded it. Copyright infringement, hardly the same as theft. And I've already legally purchased books 1-10, and the prequel. I'll buy 11. When it comes out in paperback. There's no reason for delaying that, and the day it's available I'll be buying/ordering it from my local non-chain bookshop. I fail to see how they're not making their profit from my actions, given that I never buy hardbacked books so it isn't even a lost sale.
No. I don't want to pay *any* asking price for a copy that's far bigger than the other 10 I have, and looks out of place on my shelf. Oh, and that's also too large to read comfortably on a busy bus going to and from work.
I don't care about the price. I care about buying something I want, and I will when they see fit to release it.
We are mere months (maybe a year) away from the ability to completely scan any book and convert it accurately to text based PDF in under an hour. It will likely be F/OSS software that does it, released ostensibly to save old books in the public domain.
When this happens, books will end up on P2P just like movies, music, porn, and images. Just as P2P helps people find interesting musicians and performers, it will help people find interesting writers and authors.
We're already practically there. Books already appear on P2P just like all of everything else. I downloaded a book just this weekend in fact, completely infringing the copyright in the process. I don't feel a shred of guilt, however, because I can't buy the book I want here yet (hardback only, paperback release date seems to vary between some time next month up to a year away). It's the 11th book in a series, I have 1-10 sitting on the shelf, but I'm not gonna buy a completely oversized hardback to continue the series.
So yeah, I'm guilty as sin. But who am I really hurting, since I have the cash in my pocket and am willing to exchange it for something that just doesn't exist yet? And which I 100% guaranteed *will* buy when it does?
...this Jack Thompson fellow. And I say this as a games programmer, although not one who's ever worked on a violent game of any sort. Anyway.
When all this fuss kicked off over the last few weeks, I read a bit of what he has to say. And to be honest, reading what he says to people in private correspondance (and to an extent in his public statements) you get the impression that he's a rabid loon. Then on Penny Arcade, I spotted a link to an audio interview some guys did with him. I downloaded and had a listen. And to give the man some credit, he comes across much better in person. I'm much less surprised that he gets the attention he does, having listened to him - he comes across as a slightly opinionated but earnest and frank concerned guy, worried about the effect games have on kids and teenagers. At least, he does initially.
After a while though, when he's gone past the fairly logical point of discussing M-rated game sales to minors with someone who agrees with him, he starts getting a bit out there. EA in cahoots with the porn industry, deliberately aiming for them to make porno skins for The Sims? Please. Thing is, because he *seems* reasonable, people who don't know too much about games probably think he *is* reasonable. And in small doses, for short periods of time, he probably is. But disagree too much, scratch the surface of his arguments, and things suddenly get a lot stranger...
Big publishers have the console market pretty much sewn up, because consoles are expensive to develop for. Especially now they're moving away from relatively standard chips and architectures, it really requires a dedicated development effort to get stuff running on it. From what I see of homebrew console stuff, most of the effort is targetted at emulation. Fine, but hardly a sign of originality.
So, given the really low barrier of entry for development, PC/Mac is where it's at for indie development. It's been like that for a while now, and I don't see it changing too much in the future.
...at least here in the UK where Tivo stopped selling hardware quite some time ago, and show no signs of starting again.
Which pisses me off, because I really want one, but a new one. Yeah, I can ebay an old one. Yeah, there's alternatives. But as far as I know the original is still supposed to be the best. I want it!:(
I spend a great deal of time doing home audio stuff, and I was interested to read the article. I've used Ardour and Audacity for a little while in the past, but I find I'm still using my Windows audio apps (Ableton and Soundforge, if you're interested). Why?
Well, the article itself touches on a few of my reasons. Ardour, specifially, is very "Linuxy" in its interface layout and design, reminding me in many ways of the old Dos version of 3D Studio. It definitely looks like a programmer-designed UI, it's very stark and bare-bones, and things are never quite where you expect them to be. It's clearly a Cubase/Logic inspired design and layout, but without the years of fine-tuning those have had to get to their current states. I prefer Ableton's more unorthodox approach anyway, but that's just me:)
The other is, as always, hardware support. Getting less important now in some ways, for some uses (I use quite a lot of virtual instruments, so not a huge deal for me) the lack of hardware DSP support is a killer. Proprietary developers are to blame here, in fairness, but it's still a problem.
Probably most importantly for me is the real killer, and I suspect the reason most audio folks won't move to Linux for some time to come (and coincidentally the reason so many of them use Apple machines): we don't want the software to get in the way of the creation of music any more than it has to. At the moment, many parts of Linux are unhelpfully complicated, especially to non-technical people.
A final thought, based on the quote from the article repeated in the summary:
If Ardour doesn't have a feature I need, I can code it myself. With this possibility, the software no longer defines what I can do - it's just a point of departure.
Quite apart from ignoring the fact that almost every major audio app can use various forms of plugin, which have relatively easy to obtain SDKs, and that various generic programmable plugins (like MaxDSP) exist for which one can do the same, it ignores maybe the most obvious point of all: not all musicians are programmers.
He's finally explained in clear terms why the MS-touted XML stuff in Office 2003 isn't useful to anyone else. I'd been idly wondering for a while, and other articles/interviews seem to take it for granted. Anyone else who's curious, the answer is on page 2:
...the problem is the well-known binary key in the Microsoft's XML header of every Microsoft XML document. That binary key holds a great deal of the information that we need about the layout definitions of the Microsoft XML file format. We can do a content-based transformation very well. Microsoft's content is in perfect XML file format. Their styles, though, are locked up in that binary key.
So yeah, MS have taken a completely transparent and useful XML format and munged evil hidden data into it. It can probably be reverse engineered, but still it manages to miss the entire point of having an XML data format in the first place:(
Indeed, our uni was still on 1.1.4 at the time. HotSpot compiler was still fairly new, and all the course materials were written with older stuff in mind. We still learned the AWT for pete's sake!:D
My point wasn't that Wolfie 3d graphics are acceptable. It's that I'd guess that acceptable graphics are possible given what I had running *without* hardware acceleration a few years ago. And thanks for the interest, but my old code is somewhere on a uni machine if it exists anywhere. If anyone at Strathclyde Uni finds it, they can post it if they want:)
...even though back in 2000 I wrote a 3D software engine in Java that was more than acceptably fast enough to run Wolfenstein-quality gfx on a P75. And I knew fairly little about optimisation in Java, so that could probably have been faster. Throw in hardware acceleration, and you can bet these'll be fast enough for at least ok game-level graphics. Beyond games, I don't know what use this would have...
Perhaps their complaint is that no single country should be in sole charge of a major part of the Internet infrastructure? Seems like a reasonable complaint to me, regardless of how benevolent the rule of that one nation may be at this time. What if, say, the next US administration decided to completely censor all anti-American anti-Christian content passing through equipment within its borders? I know this is likely unconstitutional, and would probably never actually happen (shit, it might even be impossible, I don't know), but as a what-if it shows the kind of power the US wields over the Internet as a whole.
Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is on any side of this manufactured argument: the UN are making a big fuss about wanting to take control away from the US (even although it's not a major or intractable problem), the US are making a big fuss about not seeing what the problem is (although it's an entirely obvious and easily solved problem), and the EU for some reason are trying to pose themselves as a peacemaker while openly agreeing with the UN (god knows what's going on there).
There is no technical reason why other countries can't just do what they like. And maybe we should do exactly that, why depend on any other country more than you have to? Think of it like the fuss a while back about GPS, and how the Galileo system came about as a result. This is like that, but more politically noisy.
Slashdot Mirror
You do seem closest to getting me out of the posters so far. But just to try and explain myself further...
:D
:(
:)
I don't really mind that the hardback costs more than the paperback. I spend so much money on books that it doesn't really factor into it at all for me. See, if they released the paperback and hardback at the same price and the same time, I'd own the book right now. But I won't buy any hardbacked book (except programming books which need to be a little sturdier, as they cost a shitload more and are important for work) because I do most of my reading on public transport in small, cramped seats. A hardbacked book takes up *space* dammit, and I'm already a big fat dude, I need all the room I can get!
The car analogy, therefore, doesn't really apply. I won't try to make it fit, it'd just get silly. But suffice to say this isn't a rationalisation, since I know I'm wrong and freely admit to it, like you noticed (and many others missed, somehow). Suffice to say I'll pay full retail price for the product I want as soon as it's there.
It's just the reasoning behind *why* I did it, and it's spawned a huge irrelevant thread. Sorry everyone
I have in fact thought of something the publisher *has* lost based on my actions though - they've lost the interest on the money that I would've paid for a paperbacked version of the book on the day it was released. You can decide for yourself whether you think I'm being honest or not, that's up to you, but assuming that I am (which I am!), wouldn't you say they've at least partly decided to make that loss of their own accord?
Anyway, think it's best to leave it there, nothing useful's gonna come from this discussion I think...
Well thanks, but it's not a murky area at all. It's completely black :)
:)
Thing is, I know what I've done is illegal/law-breaking in a technical respect. There's no disputing tha t I've infringed copyright like a one-eyed peg-legged person. But you're either ignoring my point or haven't seen it. I'm a pirate, yes, but also a consumer. I'm not saying people should be allowed to do what I've done, or that it's right in some way. I'm just trying to explain *why* I've done it! I have consumed the publisher's product for some time, have shown my willingness and ability to pay, and wish to do so again. That I cannot do so at this time is down entirely to them. As soon as I'm able, I will buy the book, and all will be well in the world.
Maybe I'm just a really compulsive person, but it ticked me off quite a bit when they changed the cover design of the paperback. I've got 6 books with one cover design, and 5 with the new design, and that annoys me. Having 11 books of one size and one of another would annoy me equally.
I'm not making excuses. I'm giving my reasons. There's a subtle difference
Indeed - 20k is a decent wage in the UK for a graduate (not for a CS graduate maybe), but it was in one of the most expensive parts of the country (right next to London) where I literally couldn't afford to buy a house, and rent was 75% of my wage each month :(
I don't know about the US, but I'm a gamesprogrammer in the UK with 4 years or so games experience for a mix of companies.
:)
:D
My starting salary was £20k (somewhere around $35k-40k US I think), which is at the upper end of the starting range in this country. I've known people who worked in smaller companies in lower cost-of-living areas who started on much less.
Most companies that I've known staff at do *not* offer shares, or royalties, or even bonuses. Bonuses, where offered, are by no means guaranteed - I've never had one. I've worked on a finished game for which I might've received royalties, but you don't get them til at least a year after the game is released (and the company went bust before the game was released, lovely!), and there's no guarantee that the contract with the publisher will be such that the staff ever see any royalties even if the company does.
I've never worked for them, but the majority of games companies at least in the UK make GB/GBA/Mobile-phone games, not the big console titles. Even the big players (Rockstar spring to mind) don't pay out regular bonuses on time or at all.
Why do I still do it? Well, now I'm working at a decent company (Sony, if you're interested), I get to make *games* god damn it, it's fun!
If anyone has any more questions about working in games, feel free to reply
Firstly, copyright infringement isn't a criminal act.
Secondly, are you deliberately misunderstanding me or am I just coming across completely wrong?
*I WILL BE BUYING THIS BOOK AS SOON AS IT IS RELEASED IN THE SAME FORMAT AS THE OTHER 11 I LEGALLY OWN*
But, since publishers decide to go for the people who can't resist buying these things as soon as they come out, they set the paperback release way after the hardback. So to answer your question in a different manner, the paperback will look just fine on my bookshelf, next to the other paperbacks. It'll just take a while. In the meantime, I've enjoyed reading the book immensely.
What did I steal? Someone else paid for the book, (scanned/ocrred/retyped/whatever), and I downloaded it. Copyright infringement, hardly the same as theft. And I've already legally purchased books 1-10, and the prequel. I'll buy 11. When it comes out in paperback. There's no reason for delaying that, and the day it's available I'll be buying/ordering it from my local non-chain bookshop. I fail to see how they're not making their profit from my actions, given that I never buy hardbacked books so it isn't even a lost sale.
No. I don't want to pay *any* asking price for a copy that's far bigger than the other 10 I have, and looks out of place on my shelf. Oh, and that's also too large to read comfortably on a busy bus going to and from work.
I don't care about the price. I care about buying something I want, and I will when they see fit to release it.
We're already practically there. Books already appear on P2P just like all of everything else. I downloaded a book just this weekend in fact, completely infringing the copyright in the process. I don't feel a shred of guilt, however, because I can't buy the book I want here yet (hardback only, paperback release date seems to vary between some time next month up to a year away). It's the 11th book in a series, I have 1-10 sitting on the shelf, but I'm not gonna buy a completely oversized hardback to continue the series.
So yeah, I'm guilty as sin. But who am I really hurting, since I have the cash in my pocket and am willing to exchange it for something that just doesn't exist yet? And which I 100% guaranteed *will* buy when it does?
...is Ballmer hoeing fish eggs???
No wonder he gets angry!
Now straying dangerously offtopic, but if the first post just regurgitates a bit of the summary (or article) then surely it could be redundant? :)
Being sold in the UK at all would make it better than a proper Tivo! :(
:D
Ah well, I can dream!
...this Jack Thompson fellow. And I say this as a games programmer, although not one who's ever worked on a violent game of any sort. Anyway.
When all this fuss kicked off over the last few weeks, I read a bit of what he has to say. And to be honest, reading what he says to people in private correspondance (and to an extent in his public statements) you get the impression that he's a rabid loon. Then on Penny Arcade, I spotted a link to an audio interview some guys did with him. I downloaded and had a listen. And to give the man some credit, he comes across much better in person. I'm much less surprised that he gets the attention he does, having listened to him - he comes across as a slightly opinionated but earnest and frank concerned guy, worried about the effect games have on kids and teenagers. At least, he does initially.
After a while though, when he's gone past the fairly logical point of discussing M-rated game sales to minors with someone who agrees with him, he starts getting a bit out there. EA in cahoots with the porn industry, deliberately aiming for them to make porno skins for The Sims? Please. Thing is, because he *seems* reasonable, people who don't know too much about games probably think he *is* reasonable. And in small doses, for short periods of time, he probably is. But disagree too much, scratch the surface of his arguments, and things suddenly get a lot stranger...
I don't know for sure, but isn't WebCore a different thing to KHTML? I think it's based on KHTML, but is it not a separate project?
...it just doesn't involve consoles.
Big publishers have the console market pretty much sewn up, because consoles are expensive to develop for. Especially now they're moving away from relatively standard chips and architectures, it really requires a dedicated development effort to get stuff running on it. From what I see of homebrew console stuff, most of the effort is targetted at emulation. Fine, but hardly a sign of originality.
So, given the really low barrier of entry for development, PC/Mac is where it's at for indie development. It's been like that for a while now, and I don't see it changing too much in the future.
...at least here in the UK where Tivo stopped selling hardware quite some time ago, and show no signs of starting again.
:(
Which pisses me off, because I really want one, but a new one. Yeah, I can ebay an old one. Yeah, there's alternatives. But as far as I know the original is still supposed to be the best. I want it!
Well, the article itself touches on a few of my reasons. Ardour, specifially, is very "Linuxy" in its interface layout and design, reminding me in many ways of the old Dos version of 3D Studio. It definitely looks like a programmer-designed UI, it's very stark and bare-bones, and things are never quite where you expect them to be. It's clearly a Cubase/Logic inspired design and layout, but without the years of fine-tuning those have had to get to their current states. I prefer Ableton's more unorthodox approach anyway, but that's just me
The other is, as always, hardware support. Getting less important now in some ways, for some uses (I use quite a lot of virtual instruments, so not a huge deal for me) the lack of hardware DSP support is a killer. Proprietary developers are to blame here, in fairness, but it's still a problem.
Probably most importantly for me is the real killer, and I suspect the reason most audio folks won't move to Linux for some time to come (and coincidentally the reason so many of them use Apple machines): we don't want the software to get in the way of the creation of music any more than it has to. At the moment, many parts of Linux are unhelpfully complicated, especially to non-technical people.
A final thought, based on the quote from the article repeated in the summary:
Quite apart from ignoring the fact that almost every major audio app can use various forms of plugin, which have relatively easy to obtain SDKs, and that various generic programmable plugins (like MaxDSP) exist for which one can do the same, it ignores maybe the most obvious point of all: not all musicians are programmers.
Maybe they just want to remedy their original mistake, and now get back to being GoogOL! *badum TISH!*
They can get AOLTW to be evil for them, thus separating them from the actual evil itself while having the evil done regardless? :D
So yeah, MS have taken a completely transparent and useful XML format and munged evil hidden data into it. It can probably be reverse engineered, but still it manages to miss the entire point of having an XML data format in the first place
Indeed, our uni was still on 1.1.4 at the time. HotSpot compiler was still fairly new, and all the course materials were written with older stuff in mind. We still learned the AWT for pete's sake! :D
Fast for unoptimised Java written by a relative novice? I'd say so, yeah.
My point wasn't that Wolfie 3d graphics are acceptable. It's that I'd guess that acceptable graphics are possible given what I had running *without* hardware acceleration a few years ago. And thanks for the interest, but my old code is somewhere on a uni machine if it exists anywhere. If anyone at Strathclyde Uni finds it, they can post it if they want :)
If I still had my uni course stuff, I'd be glad to. But alas, those days are long gone...
;)
Bear in mind I didn't claim it was well designed, extendable, or remotely worth using for anything other than a demonstration...
...even though back in 2000 I wrote a 3D software engine in Java that was more than acceptably fast enough to run Wolfenstein-quality gfx on a P75. And I knew fairly little about optimisation in Java, so that could probably have been faster. Throw in hardware acceleration, and you can bet these'll be fast enough for at least ok game-level graphics. Beyond games, I don't know what use this would have...
Disclaimer: I am not American...
Perhaps their complaint is that no single country should be in sole charge of a major part of the Internet infrastructure? Seems like a reasonable complaint to me, regardless of how benevolent the rule of that one nation may be at this time. What if, say, the next US administration decided to completely censor all anti-American anti-Christian content passing through equipment within its borders? I know this is likely unconstitutional, and would probably never actually happen (shit, it might even be impossible, I don't know), but as a what-if it shows the kind of power the US wields over the Internet as a whole.
Frankly, I don't see what the big deal is on any side of this manufactured argument: the UN are making a big fuss about wanting to take control away from the US (even although it's not a major or intractable problem), the US are making a big fuss about not seeing what the problem is (although it's an entirely obvious and easily solved problem), and the EU for some reason are trying to pose themselves as a peacemaker while openly agreeing with the UN (god knows what's going on there).
There is no technical reason why other countries can't just do what they like. And maybe we should do exactly that, why depend on any other country more than you have to? Think of it like the fuss a while back about GPS, and how the Galileo system came about as a result. This is like that, but more politically noisy.