So the processor might be a bit pokier than the G4, but you get twice the storage, twice the memory, a burner, AND a display. And it's still $19 less than the Apple offering. So tell me again how this is competitive?
Just because something is stereotypical doesn't mean it's incorrect. That's how stereotypes evolve.
Why is it eye candy is so amazing and impressive if it's in OSX or KDE, but it's just bloat and a terrible violation of "your rights online" if Microsoft plans it for an OS that's at least two years away?
KDE it can be turned off easily. And don't even start with Apple. Their users are pre-conditioned to apply for a mortgage every time they have a product launch, so they're used to paying for a system with an over-spec video card.
But Microsoft systems are increasingly being built with low-end 2D onboard video cards to keep system costs down, in part to offset the Microsoft Tax of XP. Now with Longhorn, you'll get the pleasure of paying $400 for the computer hardware, $200 for the OS, and another $100 for the minimum-spec video card. For the LOW end system. You really think Dell's going to be able to keep the $399 specials for Longhorn boxes?
Again, considering the timing of the theft of my buddy's car with the article in the paper (basically same day), how would your feelings on the argument change if you were in his shoes?
Well, I've somewhat been in your buddy's shoes, both having had cars broken into repeatedly, and once my car was actually stolen. My basic feelings are still unchanged. So someone published a how-to. So what? Putting the knowledge out there doesn't turn people into thieves, either they're already a thief or not. Was it a little irresponsible? Perhaps, but I think in the long run it does more good. It's probable that if the newspaper published vague information on the vulnerability, Chrysler might have done nothing. Another example: The Kryptonite locks with a Bic pen issue. Existed for YEARS. Kryptonite knew about it, but didn't care until the knowledge started being passed around the net. Even once the news wires picked it up they still said nothing for almost a week, until a bunch of owners of their locks threatened a class-action suit, at which time they finally, grudgingly agreed to do something to replace the locks. Lesson here is that a corporation will never act in anyone's best interests but its own. By its very definition it is obligated to do so. The only effective way to get them to do something to fix a flaw of this nature is to provide enough information to the public to make inaction on the corporation's part more damaging to them than the cost of making it right.
He lives in Winnipeg. Car theft capital of Canada right behind Surrey and Regina. It was only a matter of time regardless.
But to address your argument at face value, is it:
a) better to have a hidden flaw that is only known to criminals (which is undoubtedly where the Sun heard about it from) that is built into cars for years to come, providing hundreds of thousands of easy targets... or b) expose the flaw to daylight and both force the manufacturer to do something about, and alert all owners of said existing cars to the problem so they can buy additional anti-theft devices.
I mean, come on. If we replace the word "theft" with "car has tendancy to spontaneously explode, killing occupants in a fiery inferno of doom", everyone and their dog would be lining up to lynch any bastard who tried to defend option a.
I don't know about you, but I would always prefer to know well in advance if my car was either easy to steal or about to explode.
They're getting better and cheaper all the time. Over Christmas, two members of my immediate family bought themselves projectors instead of a new TV. One was looking at spending $3000 on a 62" rear projection TV, but instead picked up one of those BenQ SVGA projectors for under $1000 CDN. The screen is easily twice the size, and they're just blown away by the clarity and how their Xbox looks on it with component cables. Of course this solution doesn't fit all comers, as you have to put the projector somewhere that doesn't always see direct sunlight, and you need something to provide the signal (cable box, DVD player, game system, VCR with tuner, etc) and the audio (most use a stereo or 5.1 home theatre system), but in the end a lot of people I know who have gone the projector route are far happier with it than if they just got the TV. And in the majority of cases it's cheaper too. Even factoring in replacement bulbs. As my brother-in-law summed it up: "After everything is said and done, this is costing me $0.15 an hour to have a movie theater experience in my TV room!"
By "launched" you mean he was one of the people working in some capacity with the Xbox at Microsoft, right? That press release on Yahoo tries to claim he's the creator of the Xbox. I think Seamus Blackley may have a different opinion.
The bottom line is this: we have seen JACK from Infinium Labs so far, except for stellar promises, and lawsuits against naysayers who dare to actually poke into the public record background of Kevin Bacchus and his buddies to either substantiate his claims (like where he tries to claim he built the Xbox) or disprove them. Any goofball with a bunch of seed money can walk up to a company like Nvidia and negotiate an order for a bunch of chips, and parlay that into a joint promotional junket. Whether or not they do anything useful with the chips after they get them is another matter.
If you think that getting a big company like Nvidia to be happy in the same physical space as you is an excellent indicator of "real", try this one on: A place I once worked had convinced IBM to fly in all of their senior guys in western Canada for our product demo. We had about 20 guys from IBM on hand. Senior managers, VPs, etc. We did the product demo in a building we were planning on buying, but at the moment didn't own, and was in fact still for sale. The company talked a great game to the realtors and current owner of the building as well, so we got to use the building pretty much like it was ours for almost a half year since they were fully convinced we were buying it outright any time now.
The company talked a great game, and the IBM guys drooled so much over our pie-in-the-sky visions we almost had to use a mop. At the end of it all they extended us a bottomless line of credit for whatever we liked, LOANED us an s/390 worth $600,000 so we could "play with a few things on it", and were desperate to get in on the ground floor with us. Becuase, you see, we were going to "Change the World!". The s/390 wasn't even central to our plan, it was just a "Hey maybe we could use the VMs on the s/390 for X" that we tossed out there and IBM practically begged us to take one back to our office and try it out. There were only a dozen people in Canada at the time who even knew how to run Linux VMs on the things, and IBM flew one of them into town just for us.
8 months later, the company laid 65% of its staff off, merged with another failing company, and I believe is currently lurching along zombie-fashion with a single salaried employee today in addition to its two "directors".
But for a few months there, we could have had IBM send down guys to do anything for us because of what we "showed" them we were going to do.
Aaah. The power of vapor.
Believe NOTHING unless you see it actually work. For real. Not a company run "demo".
Just like everyone else, I have read about this system and laughed at all the jokes we have had at its expense. I have to ask, though, what benefit does this company get out of constantly hyping this seemingly nonexistant product?
Well, you get more investment money from suckers by doing this sort of thing, as well as trying to move the stock price if you've pulled in enough suckers to go public.
Look at it this way: Imagine you're broke, and living in your parents' basement. Would you rather: a) Get a job at McDonalds b) Go to college for a few years, build up student loans, get a job, pay them off over several years, or c) Get a bunch of your friends together, form a company, announce a "product" that sounds awe inspriring to people with money, and set you and your friends up with high salaries once the investment captial for "product development" comes in. Everyone socks the cash away while doing smoke and mirrors shows for a couple of years until the investors finally don't put any more money in, and the company tanks. But since you and your friends have each put away 6 figures doing this, you're set for a while. Find another "idea", and "product", rinse, repeat. However, it's a good idea when forming new companies to let some of your friends rotate between the positions, so that you don't have the same guy as president, CFO, etc all the time. That way you don't get someone coming up at an investment do and saying "weren't you just the CEO of so and so that tanked also? Why are you now CEO of this?"
You're missing the point, deliberately I hope. I was applying the evolution theory to business theory. IE, if your 150 year old business model is starting to lose you money, maybe you should do something about it instead of sitting there with your fingers in your ears hoping progress goes away. Because that really worked for all those armies of weavers we employ across North America to make textiles, for example. Oh wait...
But to answer your troll, lots of things that missed the boat died off. It's the natural order of things.
That's how it is out there in the "real world". These papers should expand their online offerings. Or make something better that competes with Craigslist. Maybe a networked classified system for a whole metro area across all newspapers. But that'll never happen, since that would require cooperation.
Also, hijackers can threaten passengers instead of just the crew. Making the cockpit inaccessible prevents 9/11 style situations but doesn't prevent old style "take us to ___ or everybody dies" hijackings.
Actually, with that system in place, those would be eliminated or severly curtailed in their effectiveness as well. Try this one on for size: A hijack is announced with 5 hijackers, who claim they have a bomb. The pilot hits stage 1, which brings all the bulkhead doors down and seals the plane into 12 sections. He then comes on the PA and tells the hijackers to surrender their bomb and sit down and shut up or he'll eject all the modules. Worst case scenario is that one of the modules is breached by the bomb, while the other 11 are fine. Considering that the modules would be built for high-speed ejection over an ocean, it's not even certain that a smuggleable bomb would be sufficient to destroy the module it is located in, let alone any of the adjoining modules. Or even better, it's decided that NTSB rules stipulate that in the event of a hijack, the pilot has no choice but to eject all modules immediately. Make it a big news story so that everyone knows that if that crap is even tried, all the modules just go away the second the pilot knows about it. There goes any and all motivation to hijack the planes since they won't get what they want. If they're just after hostages for a cause, there's lots of places to find those that don't involve planes.
Keep watching those made for TV movies, though.
What movies? Like the show I saw on Discovery last year about Flight 261? I bet those people would have loved the modular idea. Certainly much better than spiraling to their deaths in an out of control aircraft at 400 mph.
Yes, but that was due in part to sensors not triggering properly. If *your* sensors are on the blink (your eyes), what the hell are you doing flying a plane to begin with?
It's true these will not work for larger aircraft, but some have had the idea of breaking the larger airframes into a series of seating modules, and if disaster hits, the modules get closed with bulkhead doors and then each module gets ejected from the plane with 20-30 passengers and a big honking chute. Rather like the ejection system on some military craft that ejects the whole cockpit instead of just the guy. The downside of this is obviously this won't work for existing craft. The planes would have to be built entirely differently to accomodate such a feature, and that would cost lots of coin, so of course it won't happen.
Just out of curiousity, what exactly are you attempting to accomplish? Viper's lair has the review, they're not the ones selling it. And all that extra traffic you're generating for them has probably cost them a grand total of 20 cents. But it will make their web logs look spectacular to potential advertisers, once a few things like originating IPs are stripped out and so forth. In other words, you're probably having the opposite effect to what you intend. If Viper's Lair is on the up-and-up, you're just being a jerk. If they're not, you're helping to pad their web traffic which they use as a selling point to advertisers.
Seriously though. People bitch when there are stories that aren't considered "News for nerds enough". Then whenever there is a review of something that is what a lot of people would consider "nerdy enough", people bitch because it could be seen as free advertisment for a product. Well, duh. It's rather hard to point out a product that does X without telling people about it, and who makes it. And if it's a review you've linked to, God forbid, they might actually post their thoughts on it. And if those thoughts are positive, *gasp* it might be construed as some kind of endorsement.
Is Slashdot now only supposed to be "News for nerds, stuff that matters if it's free and people can't make money off it"? Because, ya know, the last time I looked, some people were making money off of Slashdot itself.....
Apples and oranges. The NHL situation is a bloody mess 30 years in the making, where fingers can't be pointed at just one party. You have players thinking they're each God's gift to the ice rink, so they should get paid the most, and a few owners who in order to try and buy a Cup will actually do it, which puts pressure on all the other teams to offer their stars more money as well before they leave. Then the next thing you know, the payrolls are so large that some of the smaller markets (cough Quebec City, Winnipeg, Pittsburgh) can't afford them any more. So either the team moves, or something drastic has to happen like the former darling of the team comes back and buys it out and tries to prop it up. Essentially it's a huge clusterf*ck of brinkmanship that's destroying the whole league. I've actually started following WHL hockey instead, and with tickets to the games under $20, it's a hell of a lot more affordable for me to go to the games. And the level of play isn't that much lower than the NHL, so as far as I am concerned, the NHL can implode and let something else rise from the ashes a few years later.
And just to answer your pay cut question, I at one point did do exactly that. But it was more like 30%. It was either that from everyone or the company folded and 25 people lost their jobs. It all worked out in the end, so it was better than the alternative which was being out on the street with hundreds of other dot-com layoffs competing for the same few jobs.
If there is one, I will try it. Generally speaking there aren't a lot of demos released with games any more. Even a major game like Doom 3 didn't release a demo for almost 2 months after the game was out. Remember the old days of demos? You know, the ones where the demo was out shortly before the game itself to try and build excitement and anticipation? Like Quake 3, or the original Doom?
The way the demo is either forgotten entirely or released very late in the product cycle these days seems to be planned. If I was a cynic I'd say it was to minimize the possibility of potential buyers actually PLAYING the game before they forked over their cash in the midnight release-gotta-have-it-now frenzy that follows a major game's release. Because if they played it first, they might decide it's not as good as the hype said it was, and decide not to buy. Most games do the majority of their sales in the first 3 months on the shelf, and of those three months, the first month is the big one. The fact that a demo is usually no longer available during this critical time period is quite telling of what the game companies think of their product, and its ability to stand up to pre-buyer scrutiny.
If there is no demo, see if you can play it at a store.
Ha. You should do standup. Really. Show me one store on the continent of North America that I'd be able to walk into, pick any PC game up off the shelf , and be able to open the sealed package, walk up to a PC and install it.
If none of the above, check online reviews (not from gaming sites, but on forums) to see whether other people think it's worth it.
Because forums online are only filled with intelligent, well-mannered, rational discourse that is not at all biased or coloured in any way, shape, or form by fanboys or morons, right? 0MFG!!!! BMX-XXX 1s tek R0xxors!!! Joo can s33 T1tz!!!!!!!!! Buy th1z gam3 b1tchezz!!!!!
If so, and you believe you agree, buy the game. If it turns out you still think it sucks - tough luck; you get the same problem with going to the movies / eating out at a restaurant, etc.
Wrong, and wrong. If a movie sucks, in the first 10 minutes I can walk out and get a refund. If a dinner at a restaurant sucks, I can either get something else and have the original taken off the bill, or have the bad item removed from the bill. If I buy a car that sucks I have 14 days under the laws of my province to return it (and I believe the yanks have a 3 day window nationwide as well, IIRC). But if I buy a game and it blows, or is actually buggy enough to be unusable, tough. It's mine. No store in my area will take a used PC game back for a refund. Period. No other retail product is subject to such horrific return policy, with the obvious exception of personal items like swimsuits, pit stick, etc.
Re:Done in by the people who would buy this stuff
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Buy a Piece of Acclaim
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Either buy it and then say how crappy it is, or just stay away and let the company go down in flames the right way
You DO know there is a third option, right? "Try" out the game, and if it's good, buy it to show support for a good game.
Funnily enough, a lot of people DO tend to care if others take credit for their work. To extend your logic to the workplace, "who cares if Roberts over there takes credit for all of your work and gets promoted? You're still getting a paycheck, so shut up and like it..."
You don't need to do jack to hack the Dreamcast. It doesn't have any anti-copy protection that prevents it from booting off CDs. Instead it used a special disc format for the games called GD Rom that stores about 1.2 GB. So in theory, it was not possible to copy them. In reality, it turned out that there were a few groups able to extract the contents of the discs anyway and make them fit on 700 MB CDs, sometimes with ripping out movies and so on, sometimes not. Sadly, that's one of the reasons the Dreamcast tanked as hard as it did. Rampant piracy. Only a few of the release groups could make the discs because of the hardware hacking involved, but once they got made, they got passed around all over. It got so bad, there was even the rumor that Sega Japan approached the most egregious group with a bribe to stop doing it, which they allegedly took. But, nature and release groups abhor a vacuum, so when one group took a bow, others came in to fill the gap.
But the upside is if you want to run, say, MAME on it, just burn a CD with a bit of help and off you go. No hardware modding required.
You don't want activation? Find some other way to deter warez a**holes
Well, how about a small modification to id's strategy vis a vis Quake III?
id didn't give a crap if you made a hundred copies of Q3A and played it with your buddies at the office on the LAN. The only thing they cared about was if you had a legit CD key for online play. Which made Q3A very popular with a whole bunch of people who might not have tried it otherwise. This approach might not work for a single-player game, but for the multiplayer/counterstrike aspect it'd be fine.
The single weakest aspect of the new HL launch has been people having their keys invalidated by people with keygens. How bloody hard can this be to fix? If I was actually going to take a stab at such an important facet of my company's anti-piracy effort, here's what I'd do:
Hire a mathematician whose sole job is to work on developing a system of creating keys that you cannot easily keygen. Once he has his incredibly complex routine for generating keys running, it spits out 500 million keys. He then devises another routine that randomly winnows out 99% of those keys. Then, out of those remaining keys, he devises a third routine that randomly swaps characters in the keys at random positions. Voila! 5 million keys that can't be keygen'd because they're almost completely random. The Master Server that controls online play is then loaded up with the 5 million valid keys, and all of your jewel cases get keys printed from the same list.
Now, you can't embed a routine for checking the validity of the key in the software itself where it can be watched by the bad people. Instead, it only finds out if it's key is good or bad by checking against the master server.
Implement this, and you'll shut all the warez kiddies out of online play permanently. And if you make an appealing online play aspect for your game, you have free advertising (people playing it with their friends who haven't yet bought it on LANs) that will turn into additional sales. Like they say other places, first one's free...
the only thing you have no control over with a DVD is the intro sequence, where you are often forced to sit through the FBI/Interpol warning and maybe the distributors log
Ever watch one of the older Disney DVDs? They used to make that "intro" into a 10 minute commercial for their other DVDs. It was just like going to the damn movie theatre.
I'm sure there may be 100 people who get illegitimately screwed out of this action (probably far fewer and possibly none) but they will be inconvenienced only long enough to provide proof of purchase to Valve.
Thinking like this reminds me of a quote from that old movie Blue Thunder when they tested the new anti-terrorism fun of the chopper:
"6 terrorists to 1 civilian lost is an acceptable ratio" "Yeah, unless *you're* one of those civilians"
The bottom line is activation tends to screw legitimate customers. If I was one of that "very small" group who just paid $60 for a bloody game I want to play, why the hell should I have to "prove" anything in order to enjoy it? And how quick is this "proving"? Immediate? Do they have a "Prove it" hotline? Do I have to wait overnight? A week? Do I have to Fedex them my UPC code from the box? Or should I just throw up my hands, hit the newsgroups and download the WareZ version and forget all the hassles?
Slashdot Mirror
Oh yes. A $499 computer with no monitor. And the following spec:
40GB HDD (4200 RPM no less!)
256 MB RAM
1.25 GHz processor
Optical drive isn't a burner
Spending $480 over at Dell (even though I don't like them much either) gets you:
80 GB HDD
512 MB RAM
Celeron 2.6
CDRW drive
17" monitor!
So the processor might be a bit pokier than the G4, but you get twice the storage, twice the memory, a burner, AND a display. And it's still $19 less than the Apple offering. So tell me again how this is competitive?
Just because something is stereotypical doesn't mean it's incorrect. That's how stereotypes evolve.
Why is it eye candy is so amazing and impressive if it's in OSX or KDE, but it's just bloat and a terrible violation of "your rights online" if Microsoft plans it for an OS that's at least two years away?
KDE it can be turned off easily. And don't even start with Apple. Their users are pre-conditioned to apply for a mortgage every time they have a product launch, so they're used to paying for a system with an over-spec video card.
But Microsoft systems are increasingly being built with low-end 2D onboard video cards to keep system costs down, in part to offset the Microsoft Tax of XP. Now with Longhorn, you'll get the pleasure of paying $400 for the computer hardware, $200 for the OS, and another $100 for the minimum-spec video card. For the LOW end system. You really think Dell's going to be able to keep the $399 specials for Longhorn boxes?
Again, considering the timing of the theft of my buddy's car with the article in the paper (basically same day), how would your feelings on the argument change if you were in his shoes?
Well, I've somewhat been in your buddy's shoes, both having had cars broken into repeatedly, and once my car was actually stolen. My basic feelings are still unchanged. So someone published a how-to. So what? Putting the knowledge out there doesn't turn people into thieves, either they're already a thief or not. Was it a little irresponsible? Perhaps, but I think in the long run it does more good. It's probable that if the newspaper published vague information on the vulnerability, Chrysler might have done nothing.
Another example: The Kryptonite locks with a Bic pen issue. Existed for YEARS. Kryptonite knew about it, but didn't care until the knowledge started being passed around the net. Even once the news wires picked it up they still said nothing for almost a week, until a bunch of owners of their locks threatened a class-action suit, at which time they finally, grudgingly agreed to do something to replace the locks.
Lesson here is that a corporation will never act in anyone's best interests but its own. By its very definition it is obligated to do so. The only effective way to get them to do something to fix a flaw of this nature is to provide enough information to the public to make inaction on the corporation's part more damaging to them than the cost of making it right.
He lives in Winnipeg. Car theft capital of Canada right behind Surrey and Regina. It was only a matter of time regardless.
:
But to address your argument at face value, is it
a) better to have a hidden flaw that is only known to criminals (which is undoubtedly where the Sun heard about it from) that is built into cars for years to come, providing hundreds of thousands of easy targets...
or
b) expose the flaw to daylight and both force the manufacturer to do something about, and alert all owners of said existing cars to the problem so they can buy additional anti-theft devices.
I mean, come on. If we replace the word "theft" with "car has tendancy to spontaneously explode, killing occupants in a fiery inferno of doom", everyone and their dog would be lining up to lynch any bastard who tried to defend option a.
I don't know about you, but I would always prefer to know well in advance if my car was either easy to steal or about to explode.
They're getting better and cheaper all the time. Over Christmas, two members of my immediate family bought themselves projectors instead of a new TV. One was looking at spending $3000 on a 62" rear projection TV, but instead picked up one of those BenQ SVGA projectors for under $1000 CDN. The screen is easily twice the size, and they're just blown away by the clarity and how their Xbox looks on it with component cables.
Of course this solution doesn't fit all comers, as you have to put the projector somewhere that doesn't always see direct sunlight, and you need something to provide the signal (cable box, DVD player, game system, VCR with tuner, etc) and the audio (most use a stereo or 5.1 home theatre system), but in the end a lot of people I know who have gone the projector route are far happier with it than if they just got the TV. And in the majority of cases it's cheaper too. Even factoring in replacement bulbs. As my brother-in-law summed it up: "After everything is said and done, this is costing me $0.15 an hour to have a movie theater experience in my TV room!"
From your linked article:
The Phantom you see above is plugged in and "running", although we could never get it to POST.
A machine that doesn't even boot when given out for a review still sounds pretty vaporous to me...
By "launched" you mean he was one of the people working in some capacity with the Xbox at Microsoft, right?
That press release on Yahoo tries to claim he's the creator of the Xbox. I think Seamus Blackley may have a different opinion.
The bottom line is this: we have seen JACK from Infinium Labs so far, except for stellar promises, and lawsuits against naysayers who dare to actually poke into the public record background of Kevin Bacchus and his buddies to either substantiate his claims (like where he tries to claim he built the Xbox) or disprove them.
Any goofball with a bunch of seed money can walk up to a company like Nvidia and negotiate an order for a bunch of chips, and parlay that into a joint promotional junket. Whether or not they do anything useful with the chips after they get them is another matter.
If you think that getting a big company like Nvidia to be happy in the same physical space as you is an excellent indicator of "real", try this one on:
A place I once worked had convinced IBM to fly in all of their senior guys in western Canada for our product demo. We had about 20 guys from IBM on hand. Senior managers, VPs, etc. We did the product demo in a building we were planning on buying, but at the moment didn't own, and was in fact still for sale. The company talked a great game to the realtors and current owner of the building as well, so we got to use the building pretty much like it was ours for almost a half year since they were fully convinced we were buying it outright any time now.
The company talked a great game, and the IBM guys drooled so much over our pie-in-the-sky visions we almost had to use a mop. At the end of it all they extended us a bottomless line of credit for whatever we liked, LOANED us an s/390 worth $600,000 so we could "play with a few things on it", and were desperate to get in on the ground floor with us. Becuase, you see, we were going to "Change the World!". The s/390 wasn't even central to our plan, it was just a "Hey maybe we could use the VMs on the s/390 for X" that we tossed out there and IBM practically begged us to take one back to our office and try it out. There were only a dozen people in Canada at the time who even knew how to run Linux VMs on the things, and IBM flew one of them into town just for us.
8 months later, the company laid 65% of its staff off, merged with another failing company, and I believe is currently lurching along zombie-fashion with a single salaried employee today in addition to its two "directors".
But for a few months there, we could have had IBM send down guys to do anything for us because of what we "showed" them we were going to do.
Aaah. The power of vapor.
Believe NOTHING unless you see it actually work. For real. Not a company run "demo".
Just like everyone else, I have read about this system and laughed at all the jokes we have had at its expense. I have to ask, though, what benefit does this company get out of constantly hyping this seemingly nonexistant product?
Well, you get more investment money from suckers by doing this sort of thing, as well as trying to move the stock price if you've pulled in enough suckers to go public.
Look at it this way: Imagine you're broke, and living in your parents' basement. Would you rather:
a) Get a job at McDonalds
b) Go to college for a few years, build up student loans, get a job, pay them off over several years, or
c) Get a bunch of your friends together, form a company, announce a "product" that sounds awe inspriring to people with money, and set you and your friends up with high salaries once the investment captial for "product development" comes in. Everyone socks the cash away while doing smoke and mirrors shows for a couple of years until the investors finally don't put any more money in, and the company tanks. But since you and your friends have each put away 6 figures doing this, you're set for a while.
Find another "idea", and "product", rinse, repeat. However, it's a good idea when forming new companies to let some of your friends rotate between the positions, so that you don't have the same guy as president, CFO, etc all the time. That way you don't get someone coming up at an investment do and saying "weren't you just the CEO of so and so that tanked also? Why are you now CEO of this?"
You're missing the point, deliberately I hope. I was applying the evolution theory to business theory. IE, if your 150 year old business model is starting to lose you money, maybe you should do something about it instead of sitting there with your fingers in your ears hoping progress goes away. Because that really worked for all those armies of weavers we employ across North America to make textiles, for example. Oh wait...
But to answer your troll, lots of things that missed the boat died off. It's the natural order of things.
That's how it is out there in the "real world". These papers should expand their online offerings. Or make something better that competes with Craigslist. Maybe a networked classified system for a whole metro area across all newspapers. But that'll never happen, since that would require cooperation.
Also, hijackers can threaten passengers instead of just the crew. Making the cockpit inaccessible prevents 9/11 style situations but doesn't prevent old style "take us to ___ or everybody dies" hijackings.
Actually, with that system in place, those would be eliminated or severly curtailed in their effectiveness as well. Try this one on for size: A hijack is announced with 5 hijackers, who claim they have a bomb. The pilot hits stage 1, which brings all the bulkhead doors down and seals the plane into 12 sections. He then comes on the PA and tells the hijackers to surrender their bomb and sit down and shut up or he'll eject all the modules. Worst case scenario is that one of the modules is breached by the bomb, while the other 11 are fine. Considering that the modules would be built for high-speed ejection over an ocean, it's not even certain that a smuggleable bomb would be sufficient to destroy the module it is located in, let alone any of the adjoining modules.
Or even better, it's decided that NTSB rules stipulate that in the event of a hijack, the pilot has no choice but to eject all modules immediately. Make it a big news story so that everyone knows that if that crap is even tried, all the modules just go away the second the pilot knows about it. There goes any and all motivation to hijack the planes since they won't get what they want.
If they're just after hostages for a cause, there's lots of places to find those that don't involve planes.
Keep watching those made for TV movies, though.
What movies? Like the show I saw on Discovery last year about Flight 261? I bet those people would have loved the modular idea. Certainly much better than spiraling to their deaths in an out of control aircraft at 400 mph.
Yes, but that was due in part to sensors not triggering properly. If *your* sensors are on the blink (your eyes), what the hell are you doing flying a plane to begin with?
It's true these will not work for larger aircraft, but some have had the idea of breaking the larger airframes into a series of seating modules, and if disaster hits, the modules get closed with bulkhead doors and then each module gets ejected from the plane with 20-30 passengers and a big honking chute. Rather like the ejection system on some military craft that ejects the whole cockpit instead of just the guy.
The downside of this is obviously this won't work for existing craft. The planes would have to be built entirely differently to accomodate such a feature, and that would cost lots of coin, so of course it won't happen.
And people wonder why some actors are afraid to join up on a sci-fi show for fear of typecasting?
Just out of curiousity, what exactly are you attempting to accomplish? Viper's lair has the review, they're not the ones selling it. And all that extra traffic you're generating for them has probably cost them a grand total of 20 cents. But it will make their web logs look spectacular to potential advertisers, once a few things like originating IPs are stripped out and so forth.
In other words, you're probably having the opposite effect to what you intend. If Viper's Lair is on the up-and-up, you're just being a jerk. If they're not, you're helping to pad their web traffic which they use as a selling point to advertisers.
It's a joke. Laugh.
Seriously though. People bitch when there are stories that aren't considered "News for nerds enough". Then whenever there is a review of something that is what a lot of people would consider "nerdy enough", people bitch because it could be seen as free advertisment for a product. Well, duh. It's rather hard to point out a product that does X without telling people about it, and who makes it. And if it's a review you've linked to, God forbid, they might actually post their thoughts on it. And if those thoughts are positive, *gasp* it might be construed as some kind of endorsement.
Is Slashdot now only supposed to be "News for nerds, stuff that matters if it's free and people can't make money off it"? Because, ya know, the last time I looked, some people were making money off of Slashdot itself.....
I know! That damn Firefox is on here at least once a week! Those guys must be rolling in it!
Hm. Until the first time the limiting mechanism fails, and then everything gets wrecked all at once. Not so good of a design...
Apples and oranges. The NHL situation is a bloody mess 30 years in the making, where fingers can't be pointed at just one party. You have players thinking they're each God's gift to the ice rink, so they should get paid the most, and a few owners who in order to try and buy a Cup will actually do it, which puts pressure on all the other teams to offer their stars more money as well before they leave. Then the next thing you know, the payrolls are so large that some of the smaller markets (cough Quebec City, Winnipeg, Pittsburgh) can't afford them any more. So either the team moves, or something drastic has to happen like the former darling of the team comes back and buys it out and tries to prop it up. Essentially it's a huge clusterf*ck of brinkmanship that's destroying the whole league. I've actually started following WHL hockey instead, and with tickets to the games under $20, it's a hell of a lot more affordable for me to go to the games. And the level of play isn't that much lower than the NHL, so as far as I am concerned, the NHL can implode and let something else rise from the ashes a few years later.
And just to answer your pay cut question, I at one point did do exactly that. But it was more like 30%. It was either that from everyone or the company folded and 25 people lost their jobs. It all worked out in the end, so it was better than the alternative which was being out on the street with hundreds of other dot-com layoffs competing for the same few jobs.
If you want to try out a game, get the demo.
If there is one, I will try it. Generally speaking there aren't a lot of demos released with games any more. Even a major game like Doom 3 didn't release a demo for almost 2 months after the game was out. Remember the old days of demos? You know, the ones where the demo was out shortly before the game itself to try and build excitement and anticipation? Like Quake 3, or the original Doom?
The way the demo is either forgotten entirely or released very late in the product cycle these days seems to be planned. If I was a cynic I'd say it was to minimize the possibility of potential buyers actually PLAYING the game before they forked over their cash in the midnight release-gotta-have-it-now frenzy that follows a major game's release. Because if they played it first, they might decide it's not as good as the hype said it was, and decide not to buy. Most games do the majority of their sales in the first 3 months on the shelf, and of those three months, the first month is the big one. The fact that a demo is usually no longer available during this critical time period is quite telling of what the game companies think of their product, and its ability to stand up to pre-buyer scrutiny.
If there is no demo, see if you can play it at a store.
Ha. You should do standup. Really. Show me one store on the continent of North America that I'd be able to walk into, pick any PC game up off the shelf , and be able to open the sealed package, walk up to a PC and install it.
If none of the above, check online reviews (not from gaming sites, but on forums) to see whether other people think it's worth it.
Because forums online are only filled with intelligent, well-mannered, rational discourse that is not at all biased or coloured in any way, shape, or form by fanboys or morons, right? 0MFG!!!! BMX-XXX 1s tek R0xxors!!! Joo can s33 T1tz!!!!!!!!! Buy th1z gam3 b1tchezz!!!!!
If so, and you believe you agree, buy the game. If it turns out you still think it sucks - tough luck; you get the same problem with going to the movies / eating out at a restaurant, etc.
Wrong, and wrong. If a movie sucks, in the first 10 minutes I can walk out and get a refund. If a dinner at a restaurant sucks, I can either get something else and have the original taken off the bill, or have the bad item removed from the bill. If I buy a car that sucks I have 14 days under the laws of my province to return it (and I believe the yanks have a 3 day window nationwide as well, IIRC). But if I buy a game and it blows, or is actually buggy enough to be unusable, tough. It's mine. No store in my area will take a used PC game back for a refund. Period. No other retail product is subject to such horrific return policy, with the obvious exception of personal items like swimsuits, pit stick, etc.
Either buy it and then say how crappy it is, or just stay away and let the company go down in flames the right way
You DO know there is a third option, right? "Try" out the game, and if it's good, buy it to show support for a good game.
Funnily enough, a lot of people DO tend to care if others take credit for their work. To extend your logic to the workplace, "who cares if Roberts over there takes credit for all of your work and gets promoted? You're still getting a paycheck, so shut up and like it..."
You don't need to do jack to hack the Dreamcast. It doesn't have any anti-copy protection that prevents it from booting off CDs. Instead it used a special disc format for the games called GD Rom that stores about 1.2 GB. So in theory, it was not possible to copy them. In reality, it turned out that there were a few groups able to extract the contents of the discs anyway and make them fit on 700 MB CDs, sometimes with ripping out movies and so on, sometimes not. Sadly, that's one of the reasons the Dreamcast tanked as hard as it did. Rampant piracy. Only a few of the release groups could make the discs because of the hardware hacking involved, but once they got made, they got passed around all over. It got so bad, there was even the rumor that Sega Japan approached the most egregious group with a bribe to stop doing it, which they allegedly took. But, nature and release groups abhor a vacuum, so when one group took a bow, others came in to fill the gap.
But the upside is if you want to run, say, MAME on it, just burn a CD with a bit of help and off you go. No hardware modding required.
You don't want activation? Find some other way to deter warez a**holes
Well, how about a small modification to id's strategy vis a vis Quake III?
id didn't give a crap if you made a hundred copies of Q3A and played it with your buddies at the office on the LAN. The only thing they cared about was if you had a legit CD key for online play. Which made Q3A very popular with a whole bunch of people who might not have tried it otherwise. This approach might not work for a single-player game, but for the multiplayer/counterstrike aspect it'd be fine.
The single weakest aspect of the new HL launch has been people having their keys invalidated by people with keygens. How bloody hard can this be to fix? If I was actually going to take a stab at such an important facet of my company's anti-piracy effort, here's what I'd do:
Hire a mathematician whose sole job is to work on developing a system of creating keys that you cannot easily keygen. Once he has his incredibly complex routine for generating keys running, it spits out 500 million keys. He then devises another routine that randomly winnows out 99% of those keys. Then, out of those remaining keys, he devises a third routine that randomly swaps characters in the keys at random positions. Voila! 5 million keys that can't be keygen'd because they're almost completely random. The Master Server that controls online play is then loaded up with the 5 million valid keys, and all of your jewel cases get keys printed from the same list.
Now, you can't embed a routine for checking the validity of the key in the software itself where it can be watched by the bad people. Instead, it only finds out if it's key is good or bad by checking against the master server.
Implement this, and you'll shut all the warez kiddies out of online play permanently. And if you make an appealing online play aspect for your game, you have free advertising (people playing it with their friends who haven't yet bought it on LANs) that will turn into additional sales. Like they say other places, first one's free...
the only thing you have no control over with a DVD is the intro sequence, where you are often forced to sit through the FBI/Interpol warning and maybe the distributors log
Ever watch one of the older Disney DVDs? They used to make that "intro" into a 10 minute commercial for their other DVDs. It was just like going to the damn movie theatre.
I'm sure there may be 100 people who get illegitimately screwed out of this action (probably far fewer and possibly none) but they will be inconvenienced only long enough to provide proof of purchase to Valve.
Thinking like this reminds me of a quote from that old movie Blue Thunder when they tested the new anti-terrorism fun of the chopper:
"6 terrorists to 1 civilian lost is an acceptable ratio"
"Yeah, unless *you're* one of those civilians"
The bottom line is activation tends to screw legitimate customers. If I was one of that "very small" group who just paid $60 for a bloody game I want to play, why the hell should I have to "prove" anything in order to enjoy it? And how quick is this "proving"? Immediate? Do they have a "Prove it" hotline? Do I have to wait overnight? A week? Do I have to Fedex them my UPC code from the box? Or should I just throw up my hands, hit the newsgroups and download the WareZ version and forget all the hassles?