So I would not be inclined to produce such rants as this, I made myself a promise a few years back. I would not be dissapointed with the lack of Video/DVD support on Linux (the only operating system in my home -- then and now) if I followed this 1 rule:
If I find myself wanting to watch movies in front of my computer screen -- then I am spending way to much time in front of a computer screen. Go for a bike ride, smell the flowers, and if I get home and still have the urge to watch movies -- I will do it the old fashioned way.
I keep reading about the old line along the lines of: Yea for every 100 signed bands -- only 1 of them makes any money. The rest gets "eaten" by the record companies. Thus the band that makes 10 "Meeelion" dollars on a million dollar process -- goes towards paying off the other 9 bands that only make pocket change on a million dollar investment. That is a sick business plan.
Imagine if a pro football team brought in and signed every college prospect to a 1 million dollar contract before they even stepped onto the field at a college or semi pro level. And then complained that the handful that could actually perform at the pro level were making them any money. And that money was all being spent on the thousands of college prospects to whom they spent 1 million each on.....
But -- It does not work that way ---- these players prove themselves at that "unpaid" college OR "minimum wage" Semi-pro level (no cost at all to the pro teams) ----- and then the select few that become great, accommodated, and polished at that level (along with becoming household names) ---- get signed to million dollar contracts.....Thus reducing the risk to the people that pay the millions. Even though a few of them (Ryan Leefe types) fall through the cracks --- the majority continue to prove that they are the "best of the best". (People buy tickets, they buy merchandise, TV contracts.....etc.)
Here is some dirty math: If an unsigned band gets a cult following and sales 10,000 copies of their self financed "demo" , garage concert tickets and home made t-shirts to said cult. And a record company sees this and decides to sign them --- well the smart thing to do, would be to not invest any more money into their initial (signed) effort than can be recouped by selling the record, tour. merchandise to the 10,000 (proven) customers.....then everyone wins. If NOT then they fall into the same category as if the pro football team were to invest a million dollars into every college or semi-pro athelete.
I stopped downloading songs when AG and Napster went away....No Linux Client for Kazzaa (sic)...So it looks like if the RIAA want everyone to stop stealing tunes than maybe they can just get everyone to convert to Linux:)
Much like W is wishing daddy would have finished the job 10 years ago...In 10 years from now we will wonder why the DOJ did not follow through with seperating Office from Windows.
The more I look at the whole M$ stranglehold -- I realize that the real evil is within the application grips. It has been proven many times -- OS/2, Mac, Linux, etc. that a competent OS will be like a car with only 3 wheels without the apps.... But if you control the apps -- you control the OS.
The sad part is that 90% of the people only really use 10% of the functionallity in office suites. And 98% of the people would be fine with the versions of Excel or Word (5.0 & 6.0) that were around during the 3.1 days....yet these suckers keep upgrading....at about 300-600 bucks a pop per license. For big companies -- that is a cash cow.
Maybe that is why my (50000 people - Fortune 500) company is still using Office 95. Being fairly high up in the IT side of the house -- I can count on one hand how many people have voiced concerns about not having newer versions.
%s/Credit Card sized 5GB HD to arrive late this year/Credit Card sized 100MB HD to arrive late this year/g
5 Gig maybe in 2005 if the company is one of the.5 percent that survives longer than their 1 year subscription to the WSJ AND the 5 GB is not just marketing bait (or/. headline bait).
The article says that storage space is between 100 meg and 5 gig. I bet that much like the buz phrase: "With upgradable fimware to support future media formats....cough OGG" -- that you will be holding a bunch of 15 dollar 100 meg cards with another soon to be famous "Will support up to 5 gig" promise that will never materialize. (And then just at the end of the products life -- they will come out with a handful of really expensive 5 gig cards -- at the same time they start to list their coffee machines and foozball tables on ebay....)
At it's worse "google vs. anything else" will become like "VHS vs. Beta" or "MP3 vs. OGG". My wife and grandma both know and love google -- and even if a better technology comes along -- I can guarentee you that google will still command there attention. It was at the right place at the right time providing the right service. For whatever reason (dumb luck, quality) many people have planted their roots in using google as THE search engine -- and most of those groups of people don't pull up their roots that easily.
The market is the people who want to be have the support and blessing of the parent company to poke around inside the hardware and see if they can get them to maybe pop toast or act as expensive alarm clocks without having to worry about the DMCA or RIAA or ABCD or FBI, et al breathing downn their necks or lawyers knocking on their doors. I for one don't think procurring and installing "mod's" that have to be purchased from a guy in a long trenchcoat in the back ally -- or from lick tsu tang inc. shipped on a slow boat from china with a hefty price tag and no warranty....
I for one like to be able to poke around without getting all McGuyver...I am to old for that anymore.
Why are they considering replacing the cola? Much like they killed good music, stable code, and muscle cars -- the kids of today are just going to make sure whiskey and coke's are only a memory....
Here is my vote to save the Cola. (Anyone who was thinking of joining the Mandrake CLub -- please reconsider and send to the "Save The Cola" fund instead..)
I guess the new version of "Linux Server.ORG" is going to have to change it's name soon. And "Apple OS X.COM" will have to go south. "FreeBSD Server.EDU" may not get off scott free either.
audio and video formats should be like bread....no matter what "brand" of bread I buy, my trusty old (non blue tooth enabled) toaster can make use of them. (IE -- I don't sit in the grocery store bread isle scratching my head wondering if the toast will match the toaster....)
Lot of people out of work now who could only wish to be over worked.
OTOH -- As an employee (not a contractor) I always figured that my advantage over said contracror was stability and benefits. (About 1999 I was sure in awe of the salaries they were commanding -- but rest assured with my stability.) But in this post Y2K world -- it is amazing how employers are now treating employees like dirt also. It is so fun to spend Nov - Jan of every new year wondering if you will make the cut this year......Bottom line -- the stockholders are the only ones the companies care about. Employees are dirt....It is certainlly a buyers market.
I think it would be cool if their was an "official (open) PC Console". That way companies could develop games suited for specific graphics sets, input devices, processor specs -- that would not change and that would be identical for everyone who owned a "PC Console" -- That is pretty much what the Xbox is. What would be neat is if some company with the kind of deep pockets Microsoft has (IE - can afford to lose millions for the years it takes to build up a market) would take an "open" approach at the console market. And YES since it was open (no encryprion), and built on standard hardware -- it would be trivial to install whatever OS you wanted. I guess the trick would be how to convince the game companies that their software was not going to be copied freely.....Beyond that I think the "porting" from their PC versions would be a simple thing.
I.E. -- The frustrating thing about PC gameing is the fact that a game may or may not run on your PC's hardware. It will be buggy based on the fact that they try to support as much as possible and can't code to a specific chip set, etc..... The frustrating thing about console gameing is the inability to do the same type of things your PC can do -- even if the hardware is more than capable of doing so. This would solve both problems.
For $200,000 couldn't he have done something more useful like funded the design of an opensourced Linux-based console?
Ask the Eazel people how far 200K will get you....Err, or was that more like 20 Million...I like this (bounty) method because it attracts the hackers to work towards the goal and the marketing and advertising people are not interested. I think the whole "corporating" (Linux Gold Rush) thing was funny and hurt linux because it had all the real costs, yet none of the profits.
Cool post. You hit the nail on the head. Gameplay and fun have nothing to do with how many polygons can be displayed -- and how fast. Would Pacman have sold any more copies if he had fur that looked like it was blowing in the wind?
I for one would love to be able to purchase some (new) games that had the same hardware specs as WC2 and Red Alert.....That way I could play them on whatever computer in my house that I wanted -- all the way from the Petium 133 laptop in the bathroom, the kids Cyrix 200, or my "new" Duron 700 screamer.....The perfect compromise between fun and quality...on a budget.
I am willing to bet that 85-90% of all the great software we have for Linux would still be around even if the "big boys with the deep pockets" had not come around. I think it is a detriment to the open source community that the "need to make money" people have shown up to the party -- because everyone is looking at success as the people who can make more money. Anything else is failure -- I could have saved all the companies lots of money by telling them to take there millions elseware if they were looking to add to them.....OTOH, if they wanted to "donate" there money to the cause then that is fine with me....Yet as I have said many times -- Imagine what could have happened if you split those millions up amongst the people that make quality for the "scratch the itch" of it...to spend on pizza and beer....
I will be the first in line to buy the first portable to support OGG. Until then I am not going to give up the perks of being a consumer just because the people building these devices can't get with the codec program. (The only thing that peaks my curiousity is the fact that there is not some big company behind the mp3 format that is holding a gun to their heads with a threat to pull the trigger if they move on to other codecs --- Now would not that be a nice "/. interview" -- 20 questions with the head engineer/president ceo of some of these companies like Iriver, Sonic Blue, Creative, Frontier Labs, etc....
The moment you spent all your time ripping your colletion to OGG -- you setup a lock and chain to your PC. I am all for the idea (and quality/openess ) off OGG, however -- I for one like to listen to tunes away from my PC. Don't feel bad -- somewhere out there someone who transfered all of their family films to betamax knows just how you feel.
Nobody bashed Ms. Pacman when it came out on the 2600. And Pac Man Jr. for the 2600 is still fun to today. I agree to some extend except for my above to examples go to show that it could have been better.
Hey -- don't laugh, I got a 2600 and 150 games for Christmas this year. Back in my day that would have cost around $5000 during my gaming age. (I.E. -- only something the rich could afford. You can have it all now for about $100.) Plus as an added bonus -- the games are actually fun to play. And I don't have to site through 5 minutes of FMV to get to the action.
Hell, most open source software does not even have much documentation period....So having to pay for quality docs for free software sounds like just as (or more so) solid of an OS business plan as any of the other I have heard. If all else fails -- you can always look "under the hood" (at the source) to see what makes it tick -- how can it get any better than that?
In the last 4 years I have bit my lip many times to say these 3 words.....This story pushes me over the edge:
GET A LIFE!
You know who I feel sorry for....That is the poor tweeb in customer support that has to deal with these (forgot about reality) wackos. I know this is/. "news for nerds", but I always felt proud holding the nerd flag without a D&D insignia on said flag....And I feel the same way about EQ.
Slashdot Mirror
So I would not be inclined to produce such rants as this, I made myself a promise a few years back. I would not be dissapointed with the lack of Video/DVD support on Linux (the only operating system in my home -- then and now) if I followed this 1 rule:
If I find myself wanting to watch movies in front of my computer screen -- then I am spending way to much time in front of a computer screen. Go for a bike ride, smell the flowers, and if I get home and still have the urge to watch movies -- I will do it the old fashioned way.
It has served me well.
I keep reading about the old line along the lines of: Yea for every 100 signed bands -- only 1 of them makes any money. The rest gets "eaten" by the record companies. Thus the band that makes 10 "Meeelion" dollars on a million dollar process -- goes towards paying off the other 9 bands that only make pocket change on a million dollar investment. That is a sick business plan.
Imagine if a pro football team brought in and signed every college prospect to a 1 million dollar contract before they even stepped onto the field at a college or semi pro level. And then complained that the handful that could actually perform at the pro level were making them any money. And that money was all being spent on the thousands of college prospects to whom they spent 1 million each on.....
But -- It does not work that way ---- these players prove themselves at that "unpaid" college OR "minimum wage" Semi-pro level (no cost at all to the pro teams) ----- and then the select few that become great, accommodated, and polished at that level (along with becoming household names) ---- get signed to million dollar contracts.....Thus reducing the risk to the people that pay the millions. Even though a few of them (Ryan Leefe types) fall through the cracks --- the majority continue to prove that they are the "best of the best". (People buy tickets, they buy merchandise, TV contracts.....etc.)
Here is some dirty math: If an unsigned band gets a cult following and sales 10,000 copies of their self financed "demo" , garage concert tickets and home made t-shirts to said cult. And a record company sees this and decides to sign them --- well the smart thing to do, would be to not invest any more money into their initial (signed) effort than can be recouped by selling the record, tour. merchandise to the 10,000 (proven) customers.....then everyone wins. If NOT then they fall into the same category as if the pro football team were to invest a million dollars into every college or semi-pro athelete.
(In my Best Reagan-esqe voice:
:)
"Ms.Rosen - Tear down that wall"
I stopped downloading songs when AG and Napster went away....No Linux Client for Kazzaa (sic)...So it looks like if the RIAA want everyone to stop stealing tunes than maybe they can just get everyone to convert to Linux
Much like W is wishing daddy would have finished the job 10 years ago...In 10 years from now we will wonder why the DOJ did not follow through with seperating Office from Windows.
The more I look at the whole M$ stranglehold -- I realize that the real evil is within the application grips. It has been proven many times -- OS/2, Mac, Linux, etc. that a competent OS will be like a car with only 3 wheels without the apps.... But if you control the apps -- you control the OS.
The sad part is that 90% of the people only really use 10% of the functionallity in office suites. And 98% of the people would be fine with the versions of Excel or Word (5.0 & 6.0) that were around during the 3.1 days....yet these suckers keep upgrading....at about 300-600 bucks a pop per license. For big companies -- that is a cash cow. Maybe that is why my (50000 people - Fortune 500) company is still using Office 95. Being fairly high up in the IT side of the house -- I can count on one hand how many people have voiced concerns about not having newer versions.
I know Redundent, But:
%s/Credit Card sized 5GB HD to arrive late this year/Credit Card sized 100MB HD to arrive late this year/g
5 Gig maybe in 2005 if the company is one of the
The article says that storage space is between 100 meg and 5 gig. I bet that much like the buz phrase: "With upgradable fimware to support future media formats....cough OGG" -- that you will be holding a bunch of 15 dollar 100 meg cards with another soon to be famous "Will support up to 5 gig" promise that will never materialize. (And then just at the end of the products life -- they will come out with a handful of really expensive 5 gig cards -- at the same time they start to list their coffee machines and foozball tables on ebay....)
What is itunes? Is it a music player like XMMS? I see a lot of stories about itunes as if the people on that platform have no other way to play music.
At it's worse "google vs. anything else" will become like "VHS vs. Beta" or "MP3 vs. OGG". My wife and grandma both know and love google -- and even if a better technology comes along -- I can guarentee you that google will still command there attention. It was at the right place at the right time providing the right service. For whatever reason (dumb luck, quality) many people have planted their roots in using google as THE search engine -- and most of those groups of people don't pull up their roots that easily.
The market is the people who want to be have the support and blessing of the parent company to poke around inside the hardware and see if they can get them to maybe pop toast or act as expensive alarm clocks without having to worry about the DMCA or RIAA or ABCD or FBI, et al breathing downn their necks or lawyers knocking on their doors. I for one don't think procurring and installing "mod's" that have to be purchased from a guy in a long trenchcoat in the back ally -- or from lick tsu tang inc. shipped on a slow boat from china with a hefty price tag and no warranty....
I for one like to be able to poke around without getting all McGuyver...I am to old for that anymore.
Why are they considering replacing the cola? Much like they killed good music, stable code, and muscle cars -- the kids of today are just going to make sure whiskey and coke's are only a memory....
Here is my vote to save the Cola. (Anyone who was thinking of joining the Mandrake CLub -- please reconsider and send to the "Save The Cola" fund instead..)
I guess the new version of "Linux Server .ORG" is going to have to change it's name soon. And "Apple OS X .COM" will have to go south. "FreeBSD Server .EDU" may not get off scott free either.
audio and video formats should be like bread....no matter what "brand" of bread I buy, my trusty old (non blue tooth enabled) toaster can make use of them. (IE -- I don't sit in the grocery store bread isle scratching my head wondering if the toast will match the toaster....)
Lot of people out of work now who could only wish to be over worked.
OTOH -- As an employee (not a contractor) I always figured that my advantage over said contracror was stability and benefits. (About 1999 I was sure in awe of the salaries they were commanding -- but rest assured with my stability.) But in this post Y2K world -- it is amazing how employers are now treating employees like dirt also. It is so fun to spend Nov - Jan of every new year wondering if you will make the cut this year......Bottom line -- the stockholders are the only ones the companies care about. Employees are dirt....It is certainlly a buyers market.
I think it would be cool if their was an "official (open) PC Console". That way companies could develop games suited for specific graphics sets, input devices, processor specs -- that would not change and that would be identical for everyone who owned a "PC Console" -- That is pretty much what the Xbox is. What would be neat is if some company with the kind of deep pockets Microsoft has (IE - can afford to lose millions for the years it takes to build up a market) would take an "open" approach at the console market. And YES since it was open (no encryprion), and built on standard hardware -- it would be trivial to install whatever OS you wanted. I guess the trick would be how to convince the game companies that their software was not going to be copied freely.....Beyond that I think the "porting" from their PC versions would be a simple thing.
I.E. -- The frustrating thing about PC gameing is the fact that a game may or may not run on your PC's hardware. It will be buggy based on the fact that they try to support as much as possible and can't code to a specific chip set, etc..... The frustrating thing about console gameing is the inability to do the same type of things your PC can do -- even if the hardware is more than capable of doing so. This would solve both problems.
For $200,000 couldn't he have done something more useful like funded the design of an opensourced Linux-based console?
Ask the Eazel people how far 200K will get you....Err, or was that more like 20 Million...I like this (bounty) method because it attracts the hackers to work towards the goal and the marketing and advertising people are not interested. I think the whole "corporating" (Linux Gold Rush) thing was funny and hurt linux because it had all the real costs, yet none of the profits.
First they took my Custers Revenge -- I did nothing
Then they took my GTA III -- I did nothing
Now all I have left to play is Super Mario's bible challenge and Tetris....Damn them
Cool post. You hit the nail on the head. Gameplay and fun have nothing to do with how many polygons can be displayed -- and how fast. Would Pacman have sold any more copies if he had fur that looked like it was blowing in the wind?
I for one would love to be able to purchase some (new) games that had the same hardware specs as WC2 and Red Alert.....That way I could play them on whatever computer in my house that I wanted -- all the way from the Petium 133 laptop in the bathroom, the kids Cyrix 200, or my "new" Duron 700 screamer.....The perfect compromise between fun and quality...on a budget.
I am willing to bet that 85-90% of all the great software we have for Linux would still be around even if the "big boys with the deep pockets" had not come around. I think it is a detriment to the open source community that the "need to make money" people have shown up to the party -- because everyone is looking at success as the people who can make more money. Anything else is failure -- I could have saved all the companies lots of money by telling them to take there millions elseware if they were looking to add to them.....OTOH, if they wanted to "donate" there money to the cause then that is fine with me....Yet as I have said many times -- Imagine what could have happened if you split those millions up amongst the people that make quality for the "scratch the itch" of it...to spend on pizza and beer....
I will be the first in line to buy the first portable to support OGG. Until then I am not going to give up the perks of being a consumer just because the people building these devices can't get with the codec program. (The only thing that peaks my curiousity is the fact that there is not some big company behind the mp3 format that is holding a gun to their heads with a threat to pull the trigger if they move on to other codecs --- Now would not that be a nice "/. interview" -- 20 questions with the head engineer/president ceo of some of these companies like Iriver, Sonic Blue, Creative, Frontier Labs, etc....
The moment you spent all your time ripping your colletion to OGG -- you setup a lock and chain to your PC. I am all for the idea (and quality/openess
) off OGG, however -- I for one like to listen to tunes away from my PC. Don't feel bad -- somewhere out there someone who transfered all of their family films to betamax knows just how you feel.
Nobody bashed Ms. Pacman when it came out on the 2600. And Pac Man Jr. for the 2600 is still fun to today. I agree to some extend except for my above to examples go to show that it could have been better.
Hey -- don't laugh, I got a 2600 and 150 games for Christmas this year. Back in my day that would have cost around $5000 during my gaming age. (I.E. -- only something the rich could afford. You can have it all now for about $100.) Plus as an added bonus -- the games are actually fun to play. And I don't have to site through 5 minutes of FMV to get to the action.
Hell, most open source software does not even have much documentation period....So having to pay for quality docs for free software sounds like just as (or more so) solid of an OS business plan as any of the other I have heard. If all else fails -- you can always look "under the hood" (at the source) to see what makes it tick -- how can it get any better than that?
In the last 4 years I have bit my lip many times to say these 3 words.....This story pushes me over the edge:
/. "news for nerds", but I always felt proud holding the nerd flag without a D&D insignia on said flag....And I feel the same way about EQ.
GET A LIFE!
You know who I feel sorry for....That is the poor tweeb in customer support that has to deal with these (forgot about reality) wackos. I know this is
great, now his bandwidth bill will equal his electric bill.