Yep, I noticed. As a software developer who has "embraced" piracy as yet another marketing opportunity, I get nothing but hate and disbelief on this empty husk of a forum. If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that everything has a way of balancing out. I see software piracy as the natural reaction to a borderline fraudulent industry where shoddy products are sold at high prices and support is virtually inexistent. Is Adobe Photoshop really worth $699 ? Would Windows be the dominant PC platform if it weren't for mass piracy ? Does EA think they're really "providing value" when they fight against used game sales and double-charge online players ? Do any of these companies give a flying fuck about the customer ?
When I was a kid, growing up in the 80's, software was cheap. I would go to the mall every week and buy a game with my $5 allowance money, and I would play the bejeezus out of those games because they were FUN! Today, games cost $50-70, and I don't know any (blue collar) families who give their preteen $50 a week. So what do they do ? They go on TPB and RapidShare to get their fix, and parents condone it because, well, who has $50 in this economy ?
Piracy is "bad" because capitalism has no effective defense against it. The greedier they get, the greater the blowback as pirate networks grow bigger, faster and more resilient to takedown attempts. Piracy is "bad" because it favours the little guy and hurts the big shot. It's "bad" because our current economic model does not hold water in the information age, and the old dinosaurs with their old money are stuck in their ways.
Me, I see it as the biggest social network there is. If I post one of my creations on a pirate site, it's not just shared with the 150 facebook friends in my monkeysphere, it spreads to tens of not hundreds of thousands of users, some of which will become paying customers. All that for the dizzying price of $0. Cheaper than a magazine spot, cheaper than AdWords, cheaper than a goddamned flyer on a corkboard! It completely bypasses the established distribution cartel with layers upon layers of middlemen and contract abusers. This is a GOOD thing.
This isn't efficient distribution, this is gouging. There are other factories in the world, the dealers are simply taking advantage of a natural disaster to arbitrarily hike prices.
I was going to buy a stack of hard drives for a new server build, but now I'm going to wait it out. My supplier is not going to see a single penny from me for hard drives until this bullshit goes back down to normal. Since the majority of my sales consist of white-box file servers, that means they're losing out on about $20k a month. Maybe not a huge amount, but I'm just one guy. The Dells and HPs of the world will also apply pressure a thousand times harder than little ol' me, which means this gouge will not last very long. I give it a month.
That's fine, they will sell exactly ZERO of them until the price goes back to normal.
So the manufacturers got flooded, tough tits. If the industry is managed in such a way that they can't buffer a few weeks of supply lag, then these people deserve to lose money. It should not be the consumer's burden. Globalization is a double edged sword and the manufacturers need to be held responsible for their record profits.
In my case, I'm in a small "casual" guild. Casual in the sense that we have about 40 regular members, but we can only reliably pull together 10 people for a raid. We're an older crowd with jobs and families, and we have no patience for trolls or troublemakers, so our roster consists of a core group of people who've known each other IRL, and friends-of-friends. The few 25-man raids I've done were PUGs, or collaborations with another friendly guild. I just play a few hours a week, and some weeks I'm too busy to play at all, so a larger more serious guild is out of the question.
That said, they should offer 40-man raids for those who do have the numbers to run them. I'll pug them when I can, for fun. But if they make it into a progression requirement that punishes smaller guilds, a majority of players are gonna be pissed.
Gear is not (always) a substitute for skill and teamwork.
I'm not a super-hardcore player, in that I only have one main character, and I raid one night a week. I have a normal life, as normal as I.T. consulting can be I suppose, and I have very little trouble keeping up with the no-lifers. When the last expansion came out, I beat the leveling content in 2 days, as I only had a few small contracts going at the time. Then I quit for about 6 months, came back after a new patch and content update, and caught up to my peers in the space of a few weeks. I don't earn as much gold as they do, but with the daily and weekly caps for endgame content, I'll raid for 2-3 hours, run a dungeon or two, and hit my weekly cap for whatever token-of-the-month. Then every other week I have enough to buy a new epic item. I am perhaps the least dedicated player in the guild, but I can keep up with them and they value my participation - sometimes I screw up boss strategies, because I don't have time to go read all the wikis and watch the videos, but I pay attention, learn from my mistakes and nail it the 2nd time. WoW is very much tuned for average players. They throw a bone to the hardcore players, but those represent a tiny portion of the user base.
So for me, spending 4-5 hours a week on the game results in a safisfactory experience. I log in on a Wednesday night, run a raid with my buddies, get my fix and log off.
Well okay, I'm a server guy. I've been a server guy since the late 90's, me and Supermicro go waaaay back. I know better than to put business-critical data on low-end hardware. I'm not completely oblivious to EMC and NetApp's offerings, but I do know my money still goes a lot further with DIY.
My first "file server" was an old Linux box with a bunch of hard drives and PCI SATA controllers. Its purpose was to hold all my porn, because back then my job consisted of peddling said porn on the internet. It was built from spare parts on a zero-dollar budget, and like most of my hobby projects, it was a learning experience.
A few months later, I built my first enterprise-grade SAN on a $6500 budget. It had hardware RAID, redundant power, SAS multipath backplanes and NIC failover. That SAN still runs today, four years on, and has not skipped a beat. The only thing I changed on it was replacing the unmaintained OpenFiler distro with a hand-tuned Gentoo-based image so I could add better iSCSI support, replication, and any other features a standard Linux distro can tackle.
Now a few years later, I've just completed build # 41. It is a massive rig with multiple expanders and an SSD RAID caching module of my own design, made out of off-the-shelf components and countless hours of experimentation. I think I've learned my way around SANs pretty well for an independent consultant doing this out of an apartment. I stay on top of new developments on the hardware and software fronts, and my software stack is in constant development, since I use it myself for home and business. I'm not saying my stuff is anywhere near as performant and polished as the big brands, but there is a big-enough segment of the market that doesn't have the needs or means for EMC-level hardware, and I'm quite happy to fill in that gap. Whether it's ESXi storage, clustered content delivery or boring old D2D2T, I have plenty of room to thrive where the big boys can't be bothered to tread anymore.
That's part of my problem. I'm still on 3.6 because I really didn't like 4.0, and I haven't had the time to try the newer releases yet. I rely extensively on my browser for my day job, it's not something I can trash on a whim, so testing involves running a VM, spending a day trying everything and finding workarounds for the stuff that breaks or add-ons that haven't been updated.
It's fast if I don't install a gazillion plugins. I'm not oblivious to the fact that my browser is bogged down by all the stuff I've added to it. Firebug is probably the biggest offender, as it feels the need to parse stuff even when the editing pane isn't open. It's particularly noticeable when I have a few script-heavy tabs open, as switching between them takes a few seconds - not super long, but enough to be irritating if I'm jumping back-and-forth a lot during development. It's those 5 seconds each time that easily add up to a half-hour or more everyday.
What doesn't help my case is the plugins I do use, they're all developer-y things that mess with the content in some fashion. I've got one that turns any textarea into a CKEditor, for prototyping purposes. Another one parses the document for non-linked URLs, heavy Regex action there. HTTP sniffers, cache control, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey; these are all non-trivial extensions, most of which are pure Javascript. There's just no way that can be fast, even on a beastly workstation.
Only an idiot would use it like that on a production system
Would you call a JIT compiler idiotic then ? Because this is exactly how I foresee this stuff being used in enterprise apps, particularly ones that rely heavily on dynamic entities. We could have the app generate code on-the-fly that is then reused as needed, rather than reinterpreted every time with a hundred DB calls and long-winded generic form-generating code.
You do realize the fart sounds were the continuation of the previous episode, where Stan, having turned 10 years old, started finding that "everything is shit". Frankly, when people rave on and on about Dubstep, I feel like I'm hearing synthesizer diarrhea. The South Park writers just took it more literally for comedic impact. If you haven't seen that episode, then I can understand how you'd think it was just gratuitous fart sounds.
I find South Park has gotten incredibly good in recent years. They still have the occasional crap episode (pardon the pun), but overall their writing is more incisive and focused than ever. The premise has always been to express serious social topics through the words and minds of the kids, with Cartman being the ignorant prick that says all the heinous stuff, to contrast against the mostly normal kids who expose his ridicule. They hardly ever throw in one-off jokes, and even cross-season references usually are done with meaning, not just as fan service.
If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.
And for the record, I'm a Firefox user. As a developer, I would not want to live without Firebug and 3 dozen more add-ons. Chrome is a "consumer" browser, much like Safari and Opera, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I fielded one such call years ago. I calmly replied that their mid-range products cost more than my employer's annual gross, and never heard from them again.
Sure, those fancy multi-tiered EMC boxes do a lot more than my ghetto Linux file servers, but if they cost about 5 years of salary just to acquire, well I can afford to lose up to 5 years of work on my ghetto box before the EMC becomes cost-effective. Especially now that high-end boards come with one or two 40GBE ports built-in, I can deploy some scary fast SAN space on the cheap - relatively speaking of course. Now if only the switches could drop a zero from the price...
Since you won't RTFA, here's my summary and digest for y'all:
Tim Rogers is a self-proclaimed game designer who has never worked on any actual game in his whole life. He is butthurt because F2P games make money and he does not.
And that's all you'll ever need to know about Tim Rogers.
F2P is a bit of a catch-22, as the revenue model is based on players paying for premium features, boosts or exclusive content, but by being free in the first place, they attract a mob of kids (or foreigners) that have no money, who promptly ruin the game for everyone else.
Exhibit A. : Runescape Exhibit B. : League of Legends Exhibit C. : Spiral Knights
These games, at the core, aren't bad. Heck, I think League of Legends is a very well designed successor to DOTA (with godawful programming). In both cases, they are riddled with grief-play, trolling, and any other abuse those prepubescent bastards can conjure up.
A guy like me, who really hates the griefers, would gladly pay a token amount to "buy" the game, as that would be an effective way of shutting out the trolls, who will simply take their racist monologues elsewhere. You don't see anywhere near that level of abuse in paid MMOs, because people tend to be a bit more respectful when a ban means having to pay $20-40 to get a new account.
Agreed. The games I had in the 90s cost between $10 and $30. The concept of "DLC" was also simply called shareware, and almost every computer shop had a carrousel full of inexpensive games, usually just a floppy and title card in a baggie or jewel case. I fondly remember buying Dungeon Master for $10 one summer, playing the crap out of it for months. Games were cheap enough that I could entertain myself at least 5-6 hours a day as a pre-teen, while saving up my $10 weekly allowance to afford a Sound Blaster by the end of the summer. I'd walk to the computer shop every Tuesday to check out their new arrivals. I still have a floppy case full of those old games somewhere... Makes me wanna fire up Commander Keen for old times' sake.
Then the CD-Rom happened, and games took a nosedive. Everything became a prerendered shit show and prices shot upward, to cover the cost of all those render farms. I have another box with all those stinkers, mostly because I'm a nostalgic packrat. I doubt I'll ever want to play "The Daedalus Encounter" again.
The examples you cite are all documented in the tax code. What most people - and by people I mean accountants and auditors - consider "creative accounting" is when extra steps are taken to reclassify income and expenses under lower-taxed umbrellas.
As a simple example, well I'm a consultant dealing in app dev, network admin and the occasional preconfigured server. In my case, I just report as a sole proprietorship and everything is quite straight-forward as far as taxes are concerned, but if I wanted to be sneaky, I could create a handful of LLCs, transfer all my assets to a one company, handle all the actual money in another company, and declare myself an employee of a third company. Finally, all my LLCs become consumers and providers to each other. This type of arrangement is actually quite common with small-to-medium businesses, and what it does is limit the liability of any one division. For example, suppose I were to bungle a job and the consulting arm got sued by a client, I could bankrupt that particular LLC without harming the asset holding company, nor the money holding company. It's a bit more complicated in practice, but that's the gist of it.
When those LLC sandboxes grow overly complex and contrived, that's when people start speaking of creative accounting. Keep in mind, one company's expense is another one's income, so the more layers of bullshit there are, the easier it is to sneak in expenses that don't match up with another LLC's income. If one of those sandboxes is a publicly traded company, the complexity of this financial Rube Goldberg machine grows by an order of magnitude.
That's real cute, but IOS is a touch-based platform. How are you going to replicate that on a TV ? If Apple launches a console based on iPhone/iPad hardware, it won't be able to tap into their huge catalog of craptastic touch games, which means this hypothesized platform would be starting over from scratch.
Well this is Canada - Ottawa, specifically. We have lots of Mac people, I see tons of them in coffee shops, but they almost all have the tiny little 13" models, probably the Air or the basic Macbook. When they see my maxed-out 17" iPeen, they can't resist... even though it's being pawed by a leather-clad metal guy twice their size, whose shirt clearly states in 9001-pt Arial "Fuck off, I'm drinking".
We've also only had an Apple store here for about two years, it opened in July 2009 so up until that point, the only Macs in Ottawa were mail-ordered and they just weren't that popular outside of design circles. Now they're all trendy and shit...
It does have Linux on it, thanks to that ReFit boot loader, but as I mentioned way up there in my original post, part of my job is mobile app dev. That means I have to run OSX, in order to run XCode, and while I'm in there, I also run Eclipse so I can work on the IOS, Android and BB versions side-by-side.
I had Linux on my older laptop, and it was great, because back then I was primarily a network admin, filling the gaps with web dev. It got slightly sucky when I foolishly upgraded to KDE 4 (what a mess), but still a very powerful setup that did not get in my way.
OSX gets in my way. The UI is sorely lacking in keyboard shortcuts, which means I'm always reaching for that damn touchpad or a cordless mouse. Alt-Tab works funny, because it actually switches between applications, not windows within the same app, so that's a tough habit to change. The Finder is absolute murder, also lacking in basic things such as Cut/Paste! No, they expect you to drag everything with the mouse... I often feel the UI is expressly designed to slow me down and force me to stare at the pretty graphics, when all I want to do is finish my damn task, bill my time and get back to my beer.
I don't know how modified it is, but it's rooted in BSD, and that's enough to set me off. My curse is that I cut my teeth on RedHat 4.2 (I think). I later went through the Linux-From-Scratch rite of passage, and eventually settled on Gentoo. With the exception of LFS which is pretty spartan by nature, those other two distros have a ton of custom patches and creature comforts to soften some of the hard edges in the OS.
BSD/Darwin have none of that. The nerfed stuff is all in the GUI, while the Unix stuff is in its raw, unpolished form. It's workable, but I miss my Linuxisms and I really miss my Portage repo.
We don't wear weights, masks or noise machines, no, but mentally the effect is quite similar. You can't be exceptional at what you do, next to people who are borderline zombies, because the zombies will gang up and pull you down to their level, whether through legislation or sabotage. Crabs in the bucket...
All the best intentions in the world are so quickly spoiled by an angry uninformed mob of cretins. The larger the society, the stronger the cretins.
So, how do you suggest one should plan against supposed terrorists razing the whole building ?
More to the point: how is the $15 lackey going to make a difference in that scenario ? If nothing else, NOT having the lackey there saves the company from paying out death benefits:D
The rsync system, while suboptimal for code projects, works on everything. It abstracts the check-in process down to just saving a file in a monitored folder. If I screw up some random spreadsheet from last week, even though it's not part of any formal project, it is caught in the daily sweep anyway so I can roll it back.
More importantly, it is transparent enough that my wife can benefit from it, so that when SHE screws up a spreadsheet, or absent-mindedly deletes her entire music folder, she can browse to the other (read-only) mapped drive with all the dailies and fish her files out. Do that with SVN!
But yeah, at the base of it all, what I have works well enough for me, and I'm too lazy to implement anything more at this time. I'm very old-school in my ways and coding is only about a third of my time, most of my contracts these days are hardware and network admin so the pressure to change things just isn't there.
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Yep, I noticed. As a software developer who has "embraced" piracy as yet another marketing opportunity, I get nothing but hate and disbelief on this empty husk of a forum. If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that everything has a way of balancing out. I see software piracy as the natural reaction to a borderline fraudulent industry where shoddy products are sold at high prices and support is virtually inexistent. Is Adobe Photoshop really worth $699 ? Would Windows be the dominant PC platform if it weren't for mass piracy ? Does EA think they're really "providing value" when they fight against used game sales and double-charge online players ? Do any of these companies give a flying fuck about the customer ?
When I was a kid, growing up in the 80's, software was cheap. I would go to the mall every week and buy a game with my $5 allowance money, and I would play the bejeezus out of those games because they were FUN! Today, games cost $50-70, and I don't know any (blue collar) families who give their preteen $50 a week. So what do they do ? They go on TPB and RapidShare to get their fix, and parents condone it because, well, who has $50 in this economy ?
Piracy is "bad" because capitalism has no effective defense against it. The greedier they get, the greater the blowback as pirate networks grow bigger, faster and more resilient to takedown attempts. Piracy is "bad" because it favours the little guy and hurts the big shot. It's "bad" because our current economic model does not hold water in the information age, and the old dinosaurs with their old money are stuck in their ways.
Me, I see it as the biggest social network there is. If I post one of my creations on a pirate site, it's not just shared with the 150 facebook friends in my monkeysphere, it spreads to tens of not hundreds of thousands of users, some of which will become paying customers. All that for the dizzying price of $0. Cheaper than a magazine spot, cheaper than AdWords, cheaper than a goddamned flyer on a corkboard! It completely bypasses the established distribution cartel with layers upon layers of middlemen and contract abusers. This is a GOOD thing.
This isn't efficient distribution, this is gouging. There are other factories in the world, the dealers are simply taking advantage of a natural disaster to arbitrarily hike prices.
I was going to buy a stack of hard drives for a new server build, but now I'm going to wait it out. My supplier is not going to see a single penny from me for hard drives until this bullshit goes back down to normal. Since the majority of my sales consist of white-box file servers, that means they're losing out on about $20k a month. Maybe not a huge amount, but I'm just one guy. The Dells and HPs of the world will also apply pressure a thousand times harder than little ol' me, which means this gouge will not last very long. I give it a month.
That's fine, they will sell exactly ZERO of them until the price goes back to normal.
So the manufacturers got flooded, tough tits. If the industry is managed in such a way that they can't buffer a few weeks of supply lag, then these people deserve to lose money. It should not be the consumer's burden. Globalization is a double edged sword and the manufacturers need to be held responsible for their record profits.
In my case, I'm in a small "casual" guild. Casual in the sense that we have about 40 regular members, but we can only reliably pull together 10 people for a raid. We're an older crowd with jobs and families, and we have no patience for trolls or troublemakers, so our roster consists of a core group of people who've known each other IRL, and friends-of-friends. The few 25-man raids I've done were PUGs, or collaborations with another friendly guild. I just play a few hours a week, and some weeks I'm too busy to play at all, so a larger more serious guild is out of the question.
That said, they should offer 40-man raids for those who do have the numbers to run them. I'll pug them when I can, for fun. But if they make it into a progression requirement that punishes smaller guilds, a majority of players are gonna be pissed.
Gear is not (always) a substitute for skill and teamwork.
I'm not a super-hardcore player, in that I only have one main character, and I raid one night a week. I have a normal life, as normal as I.T. consulting can be I suppose, and I have very little trouble keeping up with the no-lifers. When the last expansion came out, I beat the leveling content in 2 days, as I only had a few small contracts going at the time. Then I quit for about 6 months, came back after a new patch and content update, and caught up to my peers in the space of a few weeks. I don't earn as much gold as they do, but with the daily and weekly caps for endgame content, I'll raid for 2-3 hours, run a dungeon or two, and hit my weekly cap for whatever token-of-the-month. Then every other week I have enough to buy a new epic item. I am perhaps the least dedicated player in the guild, but I can keep up with them and they value my participation - sometimes I screw up boss strategies, because I don't have time to go read all the wikis and watch the videos, but I pay attention, learn from my mistakes and nail it the 2nd time. WoW is very much tuned for average players. They throw a bone to the hardcore players, but those represent a tiny portion of the user base.
So for me, spending 4-5 hours a week on the game results in a safisfactory experience. I log in on a Wednesday night, run a raid with my buddies, get my fix and log off.
Well okay, I'm a server guy. I've been a server guy since the late 90's, me and Supermicro go waaaay back. I know better than to put business-critical data on low-end hardware. I'm not completely oblivious to EMC and NetApp's offerings, but I do know my money still goes a lot further with DIY.
My first "file server" was an old Linux box with a bunch of hard drives and PCI SATA controllers. Its purpose was to hold all my porn, because back then my job consisted of peddling said porn on the internet. It was built from spare parts on a zero-dollar budget, and like most of my hobby projects, it was a learning experience.
A few months later, I built my first enterprise-grade SAN on a $6500 budget. It had hardware RAID, redundant power, SAS multipath backplanes and NIC failover. That SAN still runs today, four years on, and has not skipped a beat. The only thing I changed on it was replacing the unmaintained OpenFiler distro with a hand-tuned Gentoo-based image so I could add better iSCSI support, replication, and any other features a standard Linux distro can tackle.
Now a few years later, I've just completed build # 41. It is a massive rig with multiple expanders and an SSD RAID caching module of my own design, made out of off-the-shelf components and countless hours of experimentation. I think I've learned my way around SANs pretty well for an independent consultant doing this out of an apartment. I stay on top of new developments on the hardware and software fronts, and my software stack is in constant development, since I use it myself for home and business. I'm not saying my stuff is anywhere near as performant and polished as the big brands, but there is a big-enough segment of the market that doesn't have the needs or means for EMC-level hardware, and I'm quite happy to fill in that gap. Whether it's ESXi storage, clustered content delivery or boring old D2D2T, I have plenty of room to thrive where the big boys can't be bothered to tread anymore.
That's part of my problem. I'm still on 3.6 because I really didn't like 4.0, and I haven't had the time to try the newer releases yet. I rely extensively on my browser for my day job, it's not something I can trash on a whim, so testing involves running a VM, spending a day trying everything and finding workarounds for the stuff that breaks or add-ons that haven't been updated.
It's fast if I don't install a gazillion plugins. I'm not oblivious to the fact that my browser is bogged down by all the stuff I've added to it. Firebug is probably the biggest offender, as it feels the need to parse stuff even when the editing pane isn't open. It's particularly noticeable when I have a few script-heavy tabs open, as switching between them takes a few seconds - not super long, but enough to be irritating if I'm jumping back-and-forth a lot during development. It's those 5 seconds each time that easily add up to a half-hour or more everyday.
What doesn't help my case is the plugins I do use, they're all developer-y things that mess with the content in some fashion. I've got one that turns any textarea into a CKEditor, for prototyping purposes. Another one parses the document for non-linked URLs, heavy Regex action there. HTTP sniffers, cache control, FoxyProxy, Greasemonkey; these are all non-trivial extensions, most of which are pure Javascript. There's just no way that can be fast, even on a beastly workstation.
Only an idiot would use it like that on a production system
Would you call a JIT compiler idiotic then ? Because this is exactly how I foresee this stuff being used in enterprise apps, particularly ones that rely heavily on dynamic entities. We could have the app generate code on-the-fly that is then reused as needed, rather than reinterpreted every time with a hundred DB calls and long-winded generic form-generating code.
You do realize the fart sounds were the continuation of the previous episode, where Stan, having turned 10 years old, started finding that "everything is shit". Frankly, when people rave on and on about Dubstep, I feel like I'm hearing synthesizer diarrhea. The South Park writers just took it more literally for comedic impact. If you haven't seen that episode, then I can understand how you'd think it was just gratuitous fart sounds.
I find South Park has gotten incredibly good in recent years. They still have the occasional crap episode (pardon the pun), but overall their writing is more incisive and focused than ever. The premise has always been to express serious social topics through the words and minds of the kids, with Cartman being the ignorant prick that says all the heinous stuff, to contrast against the mostly normal kids who expose his ridicule. They hardly ever throw in one-off jokes, and even cross-season references usually are done with meaning, not just as fan service.
If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.
And for the record, I'm a Firefox user. As a developer, I would not want to live without Firebug and 3 dozen more add-ons. Chrome is a "consumer" browser, much like Safari and Opera, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I fielded one such call years ago. I calmly replied that their mid-range products cost more than my employer's annual gross, and never heard from them again.
Sure, those fancy multi-tiered EMC boxes do a lot more than my ghetto Linux file servers, but if they cost about 5 years of salary just to acquire, well I can afford to lose up to 5 years of work on my ghetto box before the EMC becomes cost-effective. Especially now that high-end boards come with one or two 40GBE ports built-in, I can deploy some scary fast SAN space on the cheap - relatively speaking of course. Now if only the switches could drop a zero from the price...
Since you won't RTFA, here's my summary and digest for y'all:
Tim Rogers is a self-proclaimed game designer who has never worked on any actual game in his whole life. He is butthurt because F2P games make money and he does not.
And that's all you'll ever need to know about Tim Rogers.
You're welcome.
F2P is a bit of a catch-22, as the revenue model is based on players paying for premium features, boosts or exclusive content, but by being free in the first place, they attract a mob of kids (or foreigners) that have no money, who promptly ruin the game for everyone else.
Exhibit A. : Runescape
Exhibit B. : League of Legends
Exhibit C. : Spiral Knights
These games, at the core, aren't bad. Heck, I think League of Legends is a very well designed successor to DOTA (with godawful programming). In both cases, they are riddled with grief-play, trolling, and any other abuse those prepubescent bastards can conjure up.
A guy like me, who really hates the griefers, would gladly pay a token amount to "buy" the game, as that would be an effective way of shutting out the trolls, who will simply take their racist monologues elsewhere. You don't see anywhere near that level of abuse in paid MMOs, because people tend to be a bit more respectful when a ban means having to pay $20-40 to get a new account.
Agreed. The games I had in the 90s cost between $10 and $30. The concept of "DLC" was also simply called shareware, and almost every computer shop had a carrousel full of inexpensive games, usually just a floppy and title card in a baggie or jewel case. I fondly remember buying Dungeon Master for $10 one summer, playing the crap out of it for months. Games were cheap enough that I could entertain myself at least 5-6 hours a day as a pre-teen, while saving up my $10 weekly allowance to afford a Sound Blaster by the end of the summer. I'd walk to the computer shop every Tuesday to check out their new arrivals. I still have a floppy case full of those old games somewhere... Makes me wanna fire up Commander Keen for old times' sake.
Then the CD-Rom happened, and games took a nosedive. Everything became a prerendered shit show and prices shot upward, to cover the cost of all those render farms. I have another box with all those stinkers, mostly because I'm a nostalgic packrat. I doubt I'll ever want to play "The Daedalus Encounter" again.
Video editing apps so they can post to Youtube... That's my first guess.
Frankly, they could probably do JUST FINE uploading cell-phone videos and having a friend offsite to edit/caption/comment and whatnot.
The examples you cite are all documented in the tax code. What most people - and by people I mean accountants and auditors - consider "creative accounting" is when extra steps are taken to reclassify income and expenses under lower-taxed umbrellas.
As a simple example, well I'm a consultant dealing in app dev, network admin and the occasional preconfigured server. In my case, I just report as a sole proprietorship and everything is quite straight-forward as far as taxes are concerned, but if I wanted to be sneaky, I could create a handful of LLCs, transfer all my assets to a one company, handle all the actual money in another company, and declare myself an employee of a third company. Finally, all my LLCs become consumers and providers to each other. This type of arrangement is actually quite common with small-to-medium businesses, and what it does is limit the liability of any one division. For example, suppose I were to bungle a job and the consulting arm got sued by a client, I could bankrupt that particular LLC without harming the asset holding company, nor the money holding company. It's a bit more complicated in practice, but that's the gist of it.
When those LLC sandboxes grow overly complex and contrived, that's when people start speaking of creative accounting. Keep in mind, one company's expense is another one's income, so the more layers of bullshit there are, the easier it is to sneak in expenses that don't match up with another LLC's income. If one of those sandboxes is a publicly traded company, the complexity of this financial Rube Goldberg machine grows by an order of magnitude.
That's real cute, but IOS is a touch-based platform. How are you going to replicate that on a TV ? If Apple launches a console based on iPhone/iPad hardware, it won't be able to tap into their huge catalog of craptastic touch games, which means this hypothesized platform would be starting over from scratch.
Well this is Canada - Ottawa, specifically. We have lots of Mac people, I see tons of them in coffee shops, but they almost all have the tiny little 13" models, probably the Air or the basic Macbook. When they see my maxed-out 17" iPeen, they can't resist... even though it's being pawed by a leather-clad metal guy twice their size, whose shirt clearly states in 9001-pt Arial "Fuck off, I'm drinking".
We've also only had an Apple store here for about two years, it opened in July 2009 so up until that point, the only Macs in Ottawa were mail-ordered and they just weren't that popular outside of design circles. Now they're all trendy and shit...
It does have Linux on it, thanks to that ReFit boot loader, but as I mentioned way up there in my original post, part of my job is mobile app dev. That means I have to run OSX, in order to run XCode, and while I'm in there, I also run Eclipse so I can work on the IOS, Android and BB versions side-by-side.
I had Linux on my older laptop, and it was great, because back then I was primarily a network admin, filling the gaps with web dev. It got slightly sucky when I foolishly upgraded to KDE 4 (what a mess), but still a very powerful setup that did not get in my way.
OSX gets in my way. The UI is sorely lacking in keyboard shortcuts, which means I'm always reaching for that damn touchpad or a cordless mouse. Alt-Tab works funny, because it actually switches between applications, not windows within the same app, so that's a tough habit to change. The Finder is absolute murder, also lacking in basic things such as Cut/Paste! No, they expect you to drag everything with the mouse... I often feel the UI is expressly designed to slow me down and force me to stare at the pretty graphics, when all I want to do is finish my damn task, bill my time and get back to my beer.
I don't know how modified it is, but it's rooted in BSD, and that's enough to set me off. My curse is that I cut my teeth on RedHat 4.2 (I think). I later went through the Linux-From-Scratch rite of passage, and eventually settled on Gentoo. With the exception of LFS which is pretty spartan by nature, those other two distros have a ton of custom patches and creature comforts to soften some of the hard edges in the OS.
BSD/Darwin have none of that. The nerfed stuff is all in the GUI, while the Unix stuff is in its raw, unpolished form. It's workable, but I miss my Linuxisms and I really miss my Portage repo.
We don't wear weights, masks or noise machines, no, but mentally the effect is quite similar. You can't be exceptional at what you do, next to people who are borderline zombies, because the zombies will gang up and pull you down to their level, whether through legislation or sabotage. Crabs in the bucket...
All the best intentions in the world are so quickly spoiled by an angry uninformed mob of cretins. The larger the society, the stronger the cretins.
Bad car analogy, because an ECU can actually do that.
So, how do you suggest one should plan against supposed terrorists razing the whole building ?
More to the point: how is the $15 lackey going to make a difference in that scenario ? If nothing else, NOT having the lackey there saves the company from paying out death benefits :D
Laziness. :)
The rsync system, while suboptimal for code projects, works on everything. It abstracts the check-in process down to just saving a file in a monitored folder. If I screw up some random spreadsheet from last week, even though it's not part of any formal project, it is caught in the daily sweep anyway so I can roll it back.
More importantly, it is transparent enough that my wife can benefit from it, so that when SHE screws up a spreadsheet, or absent-mindedly deletes her entire music folder, she can browse to the other (read-only) mapped drive with all the dailies and fish her files out. Do that with SVN!
But yeah, at the base of it all, what I have works well enough for me, and I'm too lazy to implement anything more at this time. I'm very old-school in my ways and coding is only about a third of my time, most of my contracts these days are hardware and network admin so the pressure to change things just isn't there.