Comparing hollywood and video game production as a person who does neither, I'm still aware that hollywood has extensive prop libraries. What I find lame about the video game industry is that code and objects are so easy to store. Prop houses don't keep entire sets because they take up too much space. Entire levels though fit on a hard drive.
I'm not suggesting developers give away their material to competitors for free. Charge some money, but make it still cheaper for the licensors than re-modeling the wheel for the thousandth time. This should make development less costly and faster.
For coding the games, I know code is complicated, but can't some of it, particularly for games sharing the same engine, be modularized and techniques shared? Or does optimizing each game for maximum frame rate make this impossible? It just seems like there must be some things that can speed up coding.
Who is "we all"? Us 10 or 20 percent of the market? Why do you think "we all", even united, have enough influence to change mainstream America and RIAA's plans? This isn't techie LinuxWorld and us getting rid of bad writers, this is a thousand times bigger.
Plenty of people will keep buying music for themselves for decades. If it only costs them five bucks a month for all-they-can-eat, that's a great deal. If you stop paying, do you really think Yahoo will delete your list of songs? No. If you start paying again you'll be able to download them over again.
DRM is the future, you can't stop it. Your children in 20 years won't be able to buy plain old music CDs anymore because the RIAA won't release it unsecured like that. If they still sell physical media, they'll have changed the format over to something DRM'd.
What makes you think Apple would license AAC to any store or portable-player company for any less than exorbitant fees? What good does it do Apple if people can play AAC music bought from Napster on a Dell player, unless they get huge license fees that no company is gonna pay? Apple has a huge share of the player market, and locking people into the iTunes store is the most profittable thing they can do. It also get many of those buyers thinking about buying a mac.
Meanwhile you're dreaming if you think RIAA will let anyone sell unprotected mp3s, and just about nobody wants giant-sized.wavs.
Not that much if they want to sell lots of em. Try $350 or $300. The Saturn had to quickly drop to $300 after its $400 debut. The 3DO died after opening at $700.
What makes you think MBraynard will ever tire of finding at least one new album a month? Granted the collection dies with the user, but a user of the service may be perfectly prepared to pay the equivalent of one album a month the rest of their life. Just like people pay for cable.
How much do you know about Winamp? If you're a mac person I understand, but it runs at least twice as fast as iTunes, has skins, and is much more customizable. It's my fault for not specifying, but I really meant skins for the mini-player. It ought to be easy for people to make the mini player be the size they want and show the options they want. I've found a widget for Konfabulator that does most of what I want in a much smaller, less flashier package. BTW, Konfabulator is what Apple copied to make Dashboard.
Even if Apple doesn't think I need to interact with mp3 files, why not let me adjust how it sorts them anyway? It wouldn't be hard.
Truth be told, I need to look into foobar2000, a free competitor to Winamp and iTunes. If it lets me rate my songs and create playlists accordingly, I'll switch. Meanwhile it's in Apple's interest to get as many windows users as possible to switch from winamp and musicmatch, so they should offer an advanced options menu. Make the defaults the same as they already are, and you won't have to spend 40 minutes setting it up either.
There's lots of basics missing, and plenty of advanced stuff.
Is it designed to run so slow on my 1.2GHz Athlon with 512MB RAM? Why is it designed so it can't put the artist and song name on the same line when it would fit? Why can't I turn off showing the album, because I really don't care. Why can't I tell it to organize my music by genre\artist? Why doesn't the miniplayer have a bar that I can click on to jump around a song? Why doesn't it have easy to create skins and plug-ins?
Why can't it play highly rated songs more often, but I get to set how much more often?
Why doesn't it have a random-but-no-repeat function guaranteeing I won't hear the same song twice in two days just because I turned my computer off in-between?
I reported the last two to Apple, figuring they're too stubborn to fix the others. Party shuffle is too feature limited. Smart Playlists are too feature limited. Neither can play my favorite songs as often as I want, but never duplicating a song too often. Why is that? Why can't Apple offer advanced options for former Winamp users who are comfortable using a three-button mouse?
It's not just FPS's, it's also strategy and RTS's, and Diablo-like games, and sim city type games, all of which are easier to play with a mouse, though they exist to a lesser extent already on consoles. You don't think market forces can create a simplified keyboard/mouse all-in-one solution to sit on our laps?
Do you know that a hit console game sells several millions of copies, while only the biggest hit PC games sell more than one million? It's currently hard to make a profit with a PC game. What if the market of potential buyers fell by half? I know there would still be some games released for the PC, but a lot of production would shift to consoles.
Of course PC's are multi-purpose, but PC's are plenty fast enough to run windows and office. Didn't used to be like that. You're ignoring my economic argument that many people would stop paying extra for a high-end PC and save money by getting a mid-range PC + console. So what if someone has a high-end PC today, it won't be high end in three years. Should they spend $250 for a new video card, plus $300 for CPU, mobo, and RAM? Or just pay $250 for a console?
Consoles didn't kill PC gaming before now because they had lousy resolution. This coming generation is different.
Only thing I was wrong about was using the word "kill" instead of bludgeon and decimate.
Yeah we agree. And the top third of the comments are from people utterly failing to think. Next time you need to spell things out better. Obviously computers will continue to sell, but people can save $500 by getting a mid-range PC and a console. Or if the xbox360 has a version of Office, these nay-sayers are really gonna freak. It's also pathetic how many of them believe PC gaming will continue when half of the market defects. I'm being generous too suggesting half of PC Gamers buy $500 video cards instead of the $200 version. If half the players defect, there won't be a large enough base to make publishing worth it, except maybe xbox360 to PC ports.
This is so simple. The console knows what it's rendering and can report that to Live. People outputting HD play against HD. SD plays against SD. Problem solved!
What I want to know is will xbox 360 support keyboards, mice and monitors? That will kill PC gaming. I know MS is saying 720p, but what if it can output 1920x1080 progressive on a monitor or very high-end TV? The PC gaming market will crash and burn because plenty of people tired of paying for a new video card every two years, a new CPU/mobo/RAM/HD every three, and a new power supply every four. That's $700-1400 every 5 year console cycle. Yes PC games have better graphics in the last couple years, but to too many people it won't be worth it.
Microsoft wants to own the computing world, but PC gaming is a large part of what sells CPU's. They may not want to harm the market like that. However, Sony and Nintendo have lots of reasons to step in and do this.
He laid down in front of a bulldozer. He was having witty conversation with an attractive woman. Then he was whisked away to other planets. That's an eye opener and perfectly reasonable he might become a bit more expressive. He didn't earn her, she just had the time and second chance to get to know him better.
I'll be seeing the sequel and in the meanwhile acquiring the song from the opening. Of course I must be in the minority since that song was obviously done to annoy most everybody. I haven't read the books though I've seen the mini-series.
So India and Mexico are out because they want to provide a minimum quality of life for their poorest people?
My suggestion is bring back tariffs. Yes free trade is good for corporations, and enriched the USA for a while, but it's biting us in the ass now. Free trade has created Corporations that lack national borders or allegiance. Money flows from the rich and poor to the Corporations, where it accumulates. The rich accumulate money too, since it flows up from the poor and middle class, but now it's leaving the country.
The USA is almost self-sufficient. If tariffs were put back, there would be jobs for everyone at high wages. Yes many goods would cost more, but the middle class would still have food, clothes, a car, a TV and a telephone. By going for self-sufficiency, we could also freely steal inventions and IP from other countries. The benefits would go to Americans.
In fact, I dare say that thanks to computing power, we could do a far better job today of allocating resources if we wanted to go SEMI-communist. Consider if Maytag made washing machines and was the only one to do so. Sears and several other brands could devote their personnel and resources to making stoves, refrigerators and dishwashers. To keep innovation going, double the R&D for Maytag's washing machine division, but that would still save resources because several former-competitors would focus on other things.
Simple explanations and ideas such as "your own suburban oasis from the craziness of life" are convincing to people who swallow sound bites instead of learning the complexities of issues, including livable cities.
Not only does sex sell, it's often more memorable. If they'd chosen something like gohost.com it probably wouldn't be as memorable since people seem to unconsiously put more effort into remembering sex-related things.
Amusing thought, but probably the regenerative processes of sleeping would decrease too. Meaning that the stars might be able to slow down aging, but only by sleeping in hibernation for say, a whole week just to feel like they slept for one night. Yet I'm sure some stars would be fine with this, especially if their careers were slumping and they just needed to kill time for a script to come along and revive it.
If it makes Southwest's fares even cheaper, do it. Besides, if the aging process slows down as well, many people may want this instead of suffering for 18 hours from New York to Sydney.
I can't play music, but I can hum and vocalize it. There must be software by now that will create a midi based on my voice into a microphone, right? Does anyone know what's available and how well they work?
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Comparing hollywood and video game production as a person who does neither, I'm still aware that hollywood has extensive prop libraries. What I find lame about the video game industry is that code and objects are so easy to store. Prop houses don't keep entire sets because they take up too much space. Entire levels though fit on a hard drive.
I'm not suggesting developers give away their material to competitors for free. Charge some money, but make it still cheaper for the licensors than re-modeling the wheel for the thousandth time. This should make development less costly and faster.
For coding the games, I know code is complicated, but can't some of it, particularly for games sharing the same engine, be modularized and techniques shared? Or does optimizing each game for maximum frame rate make this impossible? It just seems like there must be some things that can speed up coding.
20 years perhaps before they're gone? Then the kiddies won't be able to share music with their children.
Who is "we all"? Us 10 or 20 percent of the market? Why do you think "we all", even united, have enough influence to change mainstream America and RIAA's plans? This isn't techie LinuxWorld and us getting rid of bad writers, this is a thousand times bigger.
right, i meant fairplay+aac
Plenty of people will keep buying music for themselves for decades. If it only costs them five bucks a month for all-they-can-eat, that's a great deal. If you stop paying, do you really think Yahoo will delete your list of songs? No. If you start paying again you'll be able to download them over again.
DRM is the future, you can't stop it. Your children in 20 years won't be able to buy plain old music CDs anymore because the RIAA won't release it unsecured like that. If they still sell physical media, they'll have changed the format over to something DRM'd.
What makes you think Apple would license AAC to any store or portable-player company for any less than exorbitant fees? What good does it do Apple if people can play AAC music bought from Napster on a Dell player, unless they get huge license fees that no company is gonna pay? Apple has a huge share of the player market, and locking people into the iTunes store is the most profittable thing they can do. It also get many of those buyers thinking about buying a mac.
.wavs.
Meanwhile you're dreaming if you think RIAA will let anyone sell unprotected mp3s, and just about nobody wants giant-sized
Not that much if they want to sell lots of em. Try $350 or $300. The Saturn had to quickly drop to $300 after its $400 debut. The 3DO died after opening at $700.
What makes you think MBraynard will ever tire of finding at least one new album a month? Granted the collection dies with the user, but a user of the service may be perfectly prepared to pay the equivalent of one album a month the rest of their life. Just like people pay for cable.
How much do you know about Winamp? If you're a mac person I understand, but it runs at least twice as fast as iTunes, has skins, and is much more customizable. It's my fault for not specifying, but I really meant skins for the mini-player. It ought to be easy for people to make the mini player be the size they want and show the options they want. I've found a widget for Konfabulator that does most of what I want in a much smaller, less flashier package. BTW, Konfabulator is what Apple copied to make Dashboard.
Even if Apple doesn't think I need to interact with mp3 files, why not let me adjust how it sorts them anyway? It wouldn't be hard.
Truth be told, I need to look into foobar2000, a free competitor to Winamp and iTunes. If it lets me rate my songs and create playlists accordingly, I'll switch. Meanwhile it's in Apple's interest to get as many windows users as possible to switch from winamp and musicmatch, so they should offer an advanced options menu. Make the defaults the same as they already are, and you won't have to spend 40 minutes setting it up either.
There's lots of basics missing, and plenty of advanced stuff.
Is it designed to run so slow on my 1.2GHz Athlon with 512MB RAM? Why is it designed so it can't put the artist and song name on the same line when it would fit? Why can't I turn off showing the album, because I really don't care. Why can't I tell it to organize my music by genre\artist? Why doesn't the miniplayer have a bar that I can click on to jump around a song? Why doesn't it have easy to create skins and plug-ins?
Why can't it play highly rated songs more often, but I get to set how much more often?
Why doesn't it have a random-but-no-repeat function guaranteeing I won't hear the same song twice in two days just because I turned my computer off in-between?
I reported the last two to Apple, figuring they're too stubborn to fix the others. Party shuffle is too feature limited. Smart Playlists are too feature limited. Neither can play my favorite songs as often as I want, but never duplicating a song too often. Why is that? Why can't Apple offer advanced options for former Winamp users who are comfortable using a three-button mouse?
It's not just FPS's, it's also strategy and RTS's, and Diablo-like games, and sim city type games, all of which are easier to play with a mouse, though they exist to a lesser extent already on consoles. You don't think market forces can create a simplified keyboard/mouse all-in-one solution to sit on our laps?
Do you know that a hit console game sells several millions of copies, while only the biggest hit PC games sell more than one million? It's currently hard to make a profit with a PC game. What if the market of potential buyers fell by half? I know there would still be some games released for the PC, but a lot of production would shift to consoles.
Of course PC's are multi-purpose, but PC's are plenty fast enough to run windows and office. Didn't used to be like that. You're ignoring my economic argument that many people would stop paying extra for a high-end PC and save money by getting a mid-range PC + console. So what if someone has a high-end PC today, it won't be high end in three years. Should they spend $250 for a new video card, plus $300 for CPU, mobo, and RAM? Or just pay $250 for a console?
Consoles didn't kill PC gaming before now because they had lousy resolution. This coming generation is different.
Only thing I was wrong about was using the word "kill" instead of bludgeon and decimate.
Yeah we agree. And the top third of the comments are from people utterly failing to think. Next time you need to spell things out better. Obviously computers will continue to sell, but people can save $500 by getting a mid-range PC and a console. Or if the xbox360 has a version of Office, these nay-sayers are really gonna freak. It's also pathetic how many of them believe PC gaming will continue when half of the market defects. I'm being generous too suggesting half of PC Gamers buy $500 video cards instead of the $200 version. If half the players defect, there won't be a large enough base to make publishing worth it, except maybe xbox360 to PC ports.
You joke, but the end will actually be the day after the Supreme Court rules corporations don't have the rights of people.
This is so simple. The console knows what it's rendering and can report that to Live. People outputting HD play against HD. SD plays against SD. Problem solved!
What I want to know is will xbox 360 support keyboards, mice and monitors? That will kill PC gaming. I know MS is saying 720p, but what if it can output 1920x1080 progressive on a monitor or very high-end TV? The PC gaming market will crash and burn because plenty of people tired of paying for a new video card every two years, a new CPU/mobo/RAM/HD every three, and a new power supply every four. That's $700-1400 every 5 year console cycle. Yes PC games have better graphics in the last couple years, but to too many people it won't be worth it.
Microsoft wants to own the computing world, but PC gaming is a large part of what sells CPU's. They may not want to harm the market like that. However, Sony and Nintendo have lots of reasons to step in and do this.
Did you properly tag all the hundred of megabytes of music you downloaded from Napster? Or did you dump them in folders like mpe3\Rock\Metallica ?
Unless your man-boobs are about as big as hers in the picture, you're not likely to win.
He laid down in front of a bulldozer. He was having witty conversation with an attractive woman. Then he was whisked away to other planets. That's an eye opener and perfectly reasonable he might become a bit more expressive. He didn't earn her, she just had the time and second chance to get to know him better.
I'll be seeing the sequel and in the meanwhile acquiring the song from the opening. Of course I must be in the minority since that song was obviously done to annoy most everybody. I haven't read the books though I've seen the mini-series.
So India and Mexico are out because they want to provide a minimum quality of life for their poorest people?
My suggestion is bring back tariffs. Yes free trade is good for corporations, and enriched the USA for a while, but it's biting us in the ass now. Free trade has created Corporations that lack national borders or allegiance. Money flows from the rich and poor to the Corporations, where it accumulates. The rich accumulate money too, since it flows up from the poor and middle class, but now it's leaving the country.
The USA is almost self-sufficient. If tariffs were put back, there would be jobs for everyone at high wages. Yes many goods would cost more, but the middle class would still have food, clothes, a car, a TV and a telephone. By going for self-sufficiency, we could also freely steal inventions and IP from other countries. The benefits would go to Americans.
In fact, I dare say that thanks to computing power, we could do a far better job today of allocating resources if we wanted to go SEMI-communist. Consider if Maytag made washing machines and was the only one to do so. Sears and several other brands could devote their personnel and resources to making stoves, refrigerators and dishwashers. To keep innovation going, double the R&D for Maytag's washing machine division, but that would still save resources because several former-competitors would focus on other things.
Simple explanations and ideas such as "your own suburban oasis from the craziness of life" are convincing to people who swallow sound bites instead of learning the complexities of issues, including livable cities.
The Super Bowl commercials were. The name is for quite a few people. Some women, even adult ones, call the guy they're having sex with "Daddy."
Not only does sex sell, it's often more memorable. If they'd chosen something like gohost.com it probably wouldn't be as memorable since people seem to unconsiously put more effort into remembering sex-related things.
Amusing thought, but probably the regenerative processes of sleeping would decrease too. Meaning that the stars might be able to slow down aging, but only by sleeping in hibernation for say, a whole week just to feel like they slept for one night. Yet I'm sure some stars would be fine with this, especially if their careers were slumping and they just needed to kill time for a script to come along and revive it.
If it makes Southwest's fares even cheaper, do it. Besides, if the aging process slows down as well, many people may want this instead of suffering for 18 hours from New York to Sydney.
I can't play music, but I can hum and vocalize it. There must be software by now that will create a midi based on my voice into a microphone, right? Does anyone know what's available and how well they work?