Censored by [blogspot.com] Technorati [blogspot.com] and now, Blogger too! [blogspot.com]
Now if only you'd move that text to your actual sig, so logged in slashdot users can "censor" you too. And no, I was not compelled to click through your links by your spamming.
Okay, now, unless you source yourself I have to call you out on common sense alone.
Common sense?
More and more technologies are re-usable. Less and less things are being developed from scratch. If development costs *weren't* falling (and I don't count name-brand voice talent, or franchise license costs in development costs), game studios would have failed ages ago without a price increase.
Your "common sense" comes from the constant parroting of the higher-costs claim. Common sense renders that claim bogus.
I'm not talking about going back to the NES. Those games hardly even resemble a modern game. It's not a fair comparison. I'm talking about comparing a game from 2001 to a game made today. Engine re-use and licensablity has become more popular. Development tools have advanced. Graphics hardware has become much much more uniform across platforms. More and more qualified developers are learning the craft, keeping salaries low compared to the rest of the software industry. The price of the hardware and storage required for content generation has come way down... It costs less to produce a complex piece of software today than it ever has. It doesn't take more people more hours to produce this content. Most of the stories about the costs of blockbuster titles this generation have been about how surprisingly little they cost to make. The price of console games could not have stayed at $50 for so long if development weren't getting less expensive.
When studios complain of higher costs, those high costs are almost always the increased costs of marketing, shelf space, and licensing. But really, it's usually the publishers that are complaining about the costs, and they're complaining solely to provide justification for the higher price-tag at retail.
Overlord is currently $39 for the PC and $59 for the Xbox 360.
"Development costs" is bullshit. The costs for "next-gen" (when does it become current, exactly?) content aren't significantly higher than they used to be for SD content, and aren't any different at all from what it cost to produce PC games for the last 5+ years where PCs were already running "high-def" games.
Higher licensing costs are what is pushing up the price. Development costs have actually been falling, which is the sole reason the prices were able to stay at $50/$35 for so many years.
Seriously, I think the only reason the government banned online gambling was because they couldn't effectively tax it.
Why couldn't they effectively tax it? If the company running the game simply started reporting conversions from in-game currency to US dollars to the IRS as income it would do two things:
Make it difficult for people to avoid taxes on their winnings and profit
Discourage people from converting between in-game money and real money, thus helping their profits
The same standards could be applied to all internet gambling. This isn't about taxes. It's about protecting "the children," and the existing gambling establishment.
They already do. Long haul high-tension wires are copper on the outside, and either aluminum, steel, or composite fiber on the inside.
Of course, the reasoning isn't what the GP was saying. They actually do it do balance the conductivity with the weight of the wire since the cable needs both high conductivity and the ability to support itself without breaking or sagging too far.
Yes, $300 is small. At least it is from my perspective. I say that in the context of all the additional features I listed. That is less money than the TV, less than the receiver, less than the speakers, less than two of the video game systems.... In context it is not a very expensive device.
I only pay $12.95/month for my Tivo service. That price is available to everybody if you're willing to commit to multiple years of service. If you're going to spend a few hundred dollars on the box, chances are you're going to use it for more than a year, so that's a no-brainer. It's also similar to the commitment you'd make signing up for satellite service. You can get the price down to $8.31/month if you're willing to pre-pay. You get additional discounts with multiple tivos. Neither Comcast nor Verizon offer discounts if you get multiple DVRs from them, in fact Verizon bumps the price up to $19.95/month/DVR if you get more than one and want them to work together. I do have two cable cards, and there is no monthly fee for them from Verizon. From Comcast, the first one was free and the second cost $2.95/month...
I don't know where you're getting $41.95/month... Are you dividing the cost of the box out over a single year? My first Tivo lasted me 7 years. Why should I expect my current Tivo to only last one in a price comparison. Shall I figure in the cost of my TV across a single year too? It cost *way* more than the Tivo.
Anyway, in summary: With Verizon, Tivo costs slightly more if you only have a single DVR, but you get much higher quality and more features. With Comcast, you actually save money with a Tivo over Comcast's default DVR (though it will take years to recover the initial investment), and you still get the higher quality and more features.
Versus the mythical (or perhaps not in your area) $5.95/month DVR, sure, you should probably go with the cable co's DVR. I actually agreed with you on that. So what was your motivation for pushing this argument further?
All for the fabulous low price of 5.95/mo with no money down.
Maybe I can help shed some light on this for you. $5.95 isn't what every cable company charges. Where I live, Comcast charges $14.95 for the DVR and Verizon charges $12.99. Additionally, Verizon only charges a one-time $3 fee for cable cards. So for a small initial cash outlay I can get a better user interface, higher reliability, fewer restrictions, more features (can your cable box play media files off your PC?) and upgradeability. If Comcast or Verizon charged $5.95/month for an HD DVR it would be a harder decision.
You attempt to dress it up in semantics and obfuscate the real issue.
Pot, meet kettle.
Do you even know what the real issue is?
It's you're going to argue semantics about an issue, you might as well use the correct semantics. What is the real issue? The real issue is that we have allowed copyright holders (note: not content creators) to milk existing legal assets for a profit while adding no economic value. Since this isn't in the best interests of anybody except these distribution cartels (not the consumer, not society, not the government, not creators) the system has started to fall apart, and people have started to ignore the laws that were purchased to protect these profits. We could fix this by modifying the laws so that everybody benefits (though the distribution cartels would benefit less than they do right now), if it weren't for two things. First is the campaign contributions that buy bad lawmaking. Second is people like you spewing the same crappy propaganda and upping the semantic severity of the "problem".
I have tremendous respect for copyright law. I rely on it to earn a living. However it is ridiculous that it lasts nearly as long as it does. The long terms benefit publishers and distributors, enabling them to keep costs high and discourage creation outside of their sphere of influence. These are exactly the opposite of what copyright is supposed to do. If copyright terms were shorter (14-20 years), and renewable for a (large, exponentially increasing each time) fee, these cartels, cancers on our society, would die out, and we wouldn't have to deal with the spin on this issue. Instead many, many more people could earn a living through creation of copyrighted works.
As for your first statement of "if you take something that doesn't belong to you", I'll refer you back to the GP. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, the original owner no longer has it. And as for our natural resources, dispite laws preventing us from drilling to all of our oil reserves, we are still the third largest oil producing country, pumping more than twice as much out of the ground per unit time as Iran. Only Russia and Saudi Arabia produce more than the US, and even then only slightly more. Just a few days of US oil production is worth more than the annual revenues of the Music and Movie industries combined.
In the world market, America's greatest asset is intellectual property, sadly.
Well that's just plain not true. Our biggest asset is still the vast quantities of natural resources that are within out borders. Oil, ore, coal, timber, etc. Our second bigest is almost certainly our workforce. I'm not sure where intellectual property comes in on the list, but as far as a "global" asset it's probably way down, considering many countries don't have compatible IP policies, thus rendering that form of currency invalid there.
Stealing IP is against the law, and the law is very clear on the matter.
First of all, this is about copyright, not IP. Big difference. Secondly, the law is very clear in that it calls it "copying" and "reproduction", not "stealing". So don't try to pretend that calling it "stealing" is anything but spin. The parent didn't say it was right, or legal. He said it wasn't stealing. And he's right.
I have a 1080p display in my living room, and a 720p display in my bedroom. I have a 50' HDMI cable that runs through the walls from the living room to the bedroom, and the wireless controllers work from anywhere in the house (why don't other bluetooth devices seem to get good range?), so I've been switching the cable to play in the bedroom occasionally. The trouble is that if I forget to power up the system and switch away from 1080p output to 720p, the smaller display doesn't work. This fixes that.
It was really the biggest issue I had with the system. I still think it should auto-detect the maximum resolution of the connected display (which my Tivo seems to handle nicely), but this is better than nothing.
If they're in the document than it is either appropriate to describe their functionality, or it is necessary to provide a reference to another open document in which they are defined.
Sure, if they weren't in the spec, it wouldn't be the complete spec (Office '07 would produce non-compliant docs), but if they're in there and there is no available description of their functionality, then it still isn't the complete spec.
The whole thing wouldn't be an issue if Cisco hadn't patented their auto-negotiation process. If we had reliable auto-negotiation nobody would have to force anything.
To be fair to the GP, he did say "Inner" solar system.
"Landing" on Jupiter would essentially be finding the point where the drag from the fluid matter you were passing though opposed the force of gravity enough to crush you to death. Fun times.
However, as I understand it, if you tell an ATM machine you want $40 and $400 comes out, but only $40 is debited from your account, and you keep the money, you can be prosecuted.
But you wouldn't be. They'd just debit the extra $380 from your account when they checked in on the machine.
Companies would start offering mobile services like the offer web services now... And google would provide the ads for those services. Unlike now where the mobile offerings are largely captive networks.
From Microsoft's perspective, I'm sure you're right. Even from Microsoft's investor's perspective, since I'm sure that the stockholders trust Microsoft to know what their doing given their track record... I do have my doubts that this has payed off for them in any manner so far, but the potential is certainly there.
But there are other perspectives. It is illegal in the US, and in most industrialized countries, to try and profit not by merit, but by making the market less accessible to your competitors. You can make tons of money that way, sure. And that's great for Microsoft. But it's not good for anybody else.
I have no doubt that you are correct, and that Microsoft sees this as a wedge to brace their Windows monopoly, and even as a means to establish new monopolies in the area of digital media technologies. But that's exactly what everybody without a huge stake in Microsoft should be concerned about. As somebody who enjoys games, and affordable access to non-pay-per-use digital media, I'm certainly concerned.
There are plenty of people who aren't consumers that care; investors, etc... But consumers should care too. Look at what has happened to innovation in other markets in which Microsoft has purchased their way into market share leadership. Assuming that Microsoft actually cares about the profit from a successful gaming division, consumers of gaming hardware shouldn't be looking forward to a stagnant future in which Microsoft has a stranglehold on the market. And that's a best case scenario. Worst case is that Microsoft doesn't even care about making a profit from this or future Xboxes, and they simply wish to use it as leverage to license their entertainment software tools(DRM, codecs, Embedded Windows, DirectX, etc)... In that case Microsoft's bank account doesn't have a problem at all, but yours will if you have any desire to use digital media.
Sure, nobody sees that happening this console generation because Nintendo's system is so popular. But if Microsoft makes the gaming market sufficiently unprofitable that Sony makes their exit this generation, they can turn their attention to Nintendo next generation. And you can be sure there won't be any new entries into the gaming console market now that Microsoft is in the game. There simply aren't any companies big enough to get a foot in the door.
Of course the story says "year" but my math assumes "quarter"... So my $350 number has to be divided by at least 4 to be accurate. Feel free to mod me down as "-1, Incorrect".
Slashdot Mirror
Now if only you'd move that text to your actual sig, so logged in slashdot users can "censor" you too. And no, I was not compelled to click through your links by your spamming.
Lots of things could save lives, but are still terrible ideas.
$parent_post =~ s/obligatory/compulsory/ig;
Common sense?
More and more technologies are re-usable. Less and less things are being developed from scratch. If development costs *weren't* falling (and I don't count name-brand voice talent, or franchise license costs in development costs), game studios would have failed ages ago without a price increase.
Your "common sense" comes from the constant parroting of the higher-costs claim. Common sense renders that claim bogus.
I'm not talking about going back to the NES. Those games hardly even resemble a modern game. It's not a fair comparison. I'm talking about comparing a game from 2001 to a game made today. Engine re-use and licensablity has become more popular. Development tools have advanced. Graphics hardware has become much much more uniform across platforms. More and more qualified developers are learning the craft, keeping salaries low compared to the rest of the software industry. The price of the hardware and storage required for content generation has come way down... It costs less to produce a complex piece of software today than it ever has. It doesn't take more people more hours to produce this content. Most of the stories about the costs of blockbuster titles this generation have been about how surprisingly little they cost to make. The price of console games could not have stayed at $50 for so long if development weren't getting less expensive.
When studios complain of higher costs, those high costs are almost always the increased costs of marketing, shelf space, and licensing. But really, it's usually the publishers that are complaining about the costs, and they're complaining solely to provide justification for the higher price-tag at retail.
Overlord is currently $39 for the PC and $59 for the Xbox 360.
"Development costs" is bullshit. The costs for "next-gen" (when does it become current, exactly?) content aren't significantly higher than they used to be for SD content, and aren't any different at all from what it cost to produce PC games for the last 5+ years where PCs were already running "high-def" games.
Higher licensing costs are what is pushing up the price. Development costs have actually been falling, which is the sole reason the prices were able to stay at $50/$35 for so many years.
I think you're confusing my comments about what is really happening with my suggestion as to how they could avoid taxation problems.
Why couldn't they effectively tax it? If the company running the game simply started reporting conversions from in-game currency to US dollars to the IRS as income it would do two things:
The same standards could be applied to all internet gambling. This isn't about taxes. It's about protecting "the children," and the existing gambling establishment.
Those sound like the normal symptoms of not liking your job.
ARP provides the MAC for local routing. It doesn't arrive at the destination through a multi-hop IP connection (Like every internet connection).
What's an installation key, and since when is your MAC transmitted in an IP packet?
They already do. Long haul high-tension wires are copper on the outside, and either aluminum, steel, or composite fiber on the inside.
Of course, the reasoning isn't what the GP was saying. They actually do it do balance the conductivity with the weight of the wire since the cable needs both high conductivity and the ability to support itself without breaking or sagging too far.
Yes, $300 is small. At least it is from my perspective. I say that in the context of all the additional features I listed. That is less money than the TV, less than the receiver, less than the speakers, less than two of the video game systems.... In context it is not a very expensive device.
I only pay $12.95/month for my Tivo service. That price is available to everybody if you're willing to commit to multiple years of service. If you're going to spend a few hundred dollars on the box, chances are you're going to use it for more than a year, so that's a no-brainer. It's also similar to the commitment you'd make signing up for satellite service. You can get the price down to $8.31/month if you're willing to pre-pay. You get additional discounts with multiple tivos. Neither Comcast nor Verizon offer discounts if you get multiple DVRs from them, in fact Verizon bumps the price up to $19.95/month/DVR if you get more than one and want them to work together. I do have two cable cards, and there is no monthly fee for them from Verizon. From Comcast, the first one was free and the second cost $2.95/month...
I don't know where you're getting $41.95/month... Are you dividing the cost of the box out over a single year? My first Tivo lasted me 7 years. Why should I expect my current Tivo to only last one in a price comparison. Shall I figure in the cost of my TV across a single year too? It cost *way* more than the Tivo.
Anyway, in summary: With Verizon, Tivo costs slightly more if you only have a single DVR, but you get much higher quality and more features. With Comcast, you actually save money with a Tivo over Comcast's default DVR (though it will take years to recover the initial investment), and you still get the higher quality and more features.
Versus the mythical (or perhaps not in your area) $5.95/month DVR, sure, you should probably go with the cable co's DVR. I actually agreed with you on that. So what was your motivation for pushing this argument further?
Maybe I can help shed some light on this for you. $5.95 isn't what every cable company charges. Where I live, Comcast charges $14.95 for the DVR and Verizon charges $12.99. Additionally, Verizon only charges a one-time $3 fee for cable cards. So for a small initial cash outlay I can get a better user interface, higher reliability, fewer restrictions, more features (can your cable box play media files off your PC?) and upgradeability. If Comcast or Verizon charged $5.95/month for an HD DVR it would be a harder decision.
Pot, meet kettle.
Do you even know what the real issue is?
It's you're going to argue semantics about an issue, you might as well use the correct semantics. What is the real issue? The real issue is that we have allowed copyright holders (note: not content creators) to milk existing legal assets for a profit while adding no economic value. Since this isn't in the best interests of anybody except these distribution cartels (not the consumer, not society, not the government, not creators) the system has started to fall apart, and people have started to ignore the laws that were purchased to protect these profits. We could fix this by modifying the laws so that everybody benefits (though the distribution cartels would benefit less than they do right now), if it weren't for two things. First is the campaign contributions that buy bad lawmaking. Second is people like you spewing the same crappy propaganda and upping the semantic severity of the "problem".
I have tremendous respect for copyright law. I rely on it to earn a living. However it is ridiculous that it lasts nearly as long as it does. The long terms benefit publishers and distributors, enabling them to keep costs high and discourage creation outside of their sphere of influence. These are exactly the opposite of what copyright is supposed to do. If copyright terms were shorter (14-20 years), and renewable for a (large, exponentially increasing each time) fee, these cartels, cancers on our society, would die out, and we wouldn't have to deal with the spin on this issue. Instead many, many more people could earn a living through creation of copyrighted works.
As for your first statement of "if you take something that doesn't belong to you", I'll refer you back to the GP. If you take something that doesn't belong to you, the original owner no longer has it. And as for our natural resources, dispite laws preventing us from drilling to all of our oil reserves, we are still the third largest oil producing country, pumping more than twice as much out of the ground per unit time as Iran. Only Russia and Saudi Arabia produce more than the US, and even then only slightly more. Just a few days of US oil production is worth more than the annual revenues of the Music and Movie industries combined.
Well that's just plain not true. Our biggest asset is still the vast quantities of natural resources that are within out borders. Oil, ore, coal, timber, etc. Our second bigest is almost certainly our workforce. I'm not sure where intellectual property comes in on the list, but as far as a "global" asset it's probably way down, considering many countries don't have compatible IP policies, thus rendering that form of currency invalid there.
First of all, this is about copyright, not IP. Big difference. Secondly, the law is very clear in that it calls it "copying" and "reproduction", not "stealing". So don't try to pretend that calling it "stealing" is anything but spin. The parent didn't say it was right, or legal. He said it wasn't stealing. And he's right.
Wow, that's useful...
I have a 1080p display in my living room, and a 720p display in my bedroom. I have a 50' HDMI cable that runs through the walls from the living room to the bedroom, and the wireless controllers work from anywhere in the house (why don't other bluetooth devices seem to get good range?), so I've been switching the cable to play in the bedroom occasionally. The trouble is that if I forget to power up the system and switch away from 1080p output to 720p, the smaller display doesn't work. This fixes that.
It was really the biggest issue I had with the system. I still think it should auto-detect the maximum resolution of the connected display (which my Tivo seems to handle nicely), but this is better than nothing.
If they're in the document than it is either appropriate to describe their functionality, or it is necessary to provide a reference to another open document in which they are defined.
Sure, if they weren't in the spec, it wouldn't be the complete spec (Office '07 would produce non-compliant docs), but if they're in there and there is no available description of their functionality, then it still isn't the complete spec.
The whole thing wouldn't be an issue if Cisco hadn't patented their auto-negotiation process. If we had reliable auto-negotiation nobody would have to force anything.
To be fair to the GP, he did say "Inner" solar system.
"Landing" on Jupiter would essentially be finding the point where the drag from the fluid matter you were passing though opposed the force of gravity enough to crush you to death. Fun times.
But you wouldn't be. They'd just debit the extra $380 from your account when they checked in on the machine.
Companies would start offering mobile services like the offer web services now... And google would provide the ads for those services. Unlike now where the mobile offerings are largely captive networks.
From Microsoft's perspective, I'm sure you're right. Even from Microsoft's investor's perspective, since I'm sure that the stockholders trust Microsoft to know what their doing given their track record... I do have my doubts that this has payed off for them in any manner so far, but the potential is certainly there.
But there are other perspectives. It is illegal in the US, and in most industrialized countries, to try and profit not by merit, but by making the market less accessible to your competitors. You can make tons of money that way, sure. And that's great for Microsoft. But it's not good for anybody else.
I have no doubt that you are correct, and that Microsoft sees this as a wedge to brace their Windows monopoly, and even as a means to establish new monopolies in the area of digital media technologies. But that's exactly what everybody without a huge stake in Microsoft should be concerned about. As somebody who enjoys games, and affordable access to non-pay-per-use digital media, I'm certainly concerned.
It doesn't need to be either/or. They can both be cause for concern.
There are plenty of people who aren't consumers that care; investors, etc... But consumers should care too. Look at what has happened to innovation in other markets in which Microsoft has purchased their way into market share leadership. Assuming that Microsoft actually cares about the profit from a successful gaming division, consumers of gaming hardware shouldn't be looking forward to a stagnant future in which Microsoft has a stranglehold on the market. And that's a best case scenario. Worst case is that Microsoft doesn't even care about making a profit from this or future Xboxes, and they simply wish to use it as leverage to license their entertainment software tools(DRM, codecs, Embedded Windows, DirectX, etc)... In that case Microsoft's bank account doesn't have a problem at all, but yours will if you have any desire to use digital media.
Sure, nobody sees that happening this console generation because Nintendo's system is so popular. But if Microsoft makes the gaming market sufficiently unprofitable that Sony makes their exit this generation, they can turn their attention to Nintendo next generation. And you can be sure there won't be any new entries into the gaming console market now that Microsoft is in the game. There simply aren't any companies big enough to get a foot in the door.
Of course the story says "year" but my math assumes "quarter"... So my $350 number has to be divided by at least 4 to be accurate. Feel free to mod me down as "-1, Incorrect".