Someone finally realized digital magazines suck as bad as paper ones ? SURPRISE!
We have the web, which has largely obsoleted print periodicals. Why pay ten bucks for a weekly rag filled with advertising and infotising, when you can get the same bullshit on the web for free ? Oh, perhaps more to the point, who the hell still reads Wired.com in the age of RSS aggregators ?
Yours still has PS2 compatibility, but new ones don't. People are reasonably pissed that later hardware revisions dropped backward compatibility, in the name of cost-cutting. Consider also that the PS2 supported nearly all PSX titles, up to the very latest revision of the PS2 Slim that was recently launched in 2008 - after the PS3!
So, PS2 backward compatibility: 11 years and still going
PS3 backward compatibility: 1 year, yanked.
Even more insulting is that Sony now wants to sell those old games all over again, via the Playstation Network. Nevermind that your Final Fantasy X is still in great condition, you'll have to pay for it once more if you want to play it on the PS3.
All these are great reasons to be pissed off at Sony's handling of the PS3.
Funny, I see it the other way around. I was a big fan of the original Tron since I was a little kid, and even today I could appreciate the plot that entangled religion and politics in the little details. This is where Tron Legacy let me down: it was a cheesy Hollywood hack-job of a plot, about an absent father and his confused son. It was unconvincing on its own, but more importantly it completely dismissed the almost-cohesive fantasy world of the original film, where the users were seen as mythical god-like beings. In this one, it seemed as though every "program" knew what was up - a hard sell, considering the only actual user inside the system was Flynn.
The resultant hodge-podge of flashy action was then edited to hell, with terribly uneven pace and giant holes in its two-line plot. It really felt like someone looked at the Tron trailer and DVD back cover, borrowed the basic styling and made everything else up without any understanding or prior knowledge of the Tron world. The result is a delight for the senses that dulls the mind.
We need to keep in mind that online game sales are intangible products. Sure, as a publisher you're paying a few pennies for the download, but the difference is quite negligible, whether you sell 10 copies at $50, or 100 copies at $5. People are already used to "community support", i.e. forums, so if a lower price results in a greater net profit, there's no reason not to aim for such.
Indie games have such small user bases that the growth potential is tremendous. By selling the game at a very low price, you're effectively buying customers. If you do a good job of entertaining them, they will buy your next game. It's nearly-free publicity, which is good because at that level, the game house probably can't justify the expense of a real marketing campaign. Realistically, if you're bringing in less than six figures with your product, be it a game or app, you're better off lowering the price and considering that discount your "marketing cost", rather than paying up-front for promotion which may or may not recoup the investment. Why gamble the company when you can get rich slowly ?
The insane thing is that in 2010, we still use cheques. Everyone has cards, account numbers and PINs and smart chips. Even the cheapo pizza delivery joints around here take debit cards right at your door.
I can pay someone halfway around the world in four mouse clicks and a few keystrokes, why can't people pay local businesses as conveniently and securely ?
That was my reading as well. The bank explicitly told the account holder that the cheques had cleared, but then changed their mind. I thought the whole point of the clearing process and delays were to verify the validity and liquidity of a cheque.
As much as it offends me to side with the gullible fool, I think he took the proper precautions. Keep appealing until the bank loses, this is an abuse of power. The main reason 419 scams continue to thrive is because banks mislead their customers in a false sense of security. If the cheque clearing process were functioning as expected, this victim would have gotten stuck with a few bounced cheque charges, but at least he wouldn't have been duped into wiring almost a half-million dollars to a fraudster.
If you really want to get literal, the victims bank and those upon which the cheques were issues "conspired to commit fraud" since the 419 scammer got his cash, as a direct result of the banks incompetence.
I think a lot of people have grown annoyed with Jimbo Wales over the years, myself included, over his reactionary tendency toward censorship. All it takes is for one semi-famous person to criticize some aspect of Wikipedia, be it drugs, sex, or religion, and Jimbo would go in and radically truncate a bunch of pages. Nevermind that he was redacting factual information, he just wanted to "save face". Quality of information seemed to matter less than it's potential for scandal, which is a fantastic way to piss off the liberal-leaning intellectual elite (and by liberal I don't mean the imbecilic U.S. political label).
From day one, he's treated Wikipedia like his own politically-correct version of the truth, alienating countless key supporters in the process. Take him off those freakin ads and maybe, in a few years, people will forget that this megalomaniac took a big crap all over their masterfully crafted articles.
In other news, Amazon was shocked and terrified to learn that teenagers were found to regularly and eagerly engage in copulation out-of-wedlock. Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying "I had no idea hormonally-charged humans were interested in coitus. I, for one, have been virgin since I was twelve, though not necessary by my own choice."
Traci Lords was unavailable for comment, but Magic Johnson is reported to have cracked a devilish grin at Bezos. And now for your local news about some retarded kid stuck in a well.
Communist-run countries usually aren't bursting at the seams with (semi-)skilled consultants looking for outsourced work.
The real issue is that when you're paying someone a tiny fraction of the North American rate for a piece of work, the data becomes the more valuable part of the equation. In some cases it can be very attractive to sell that data to a 3rd party for what we might consider peanuts, but might represent a month's salary to someone else.
Despite the many who will criticize and berate you for stating the obvious, I was thinking the exact same thing as I was reading the article. It seems like even an aspiring geek would have figured this one out in a matter of minutes. Sure, it's harder than your average "skill-testing question", but hardly something to brag about. I mean, a lot of us decode (or create) far more intricate cyphers every day. Realistically, Google wanted it to be solved quickly, as it is a very inexpensive publicity stunt. Of course, the prize being a single $199 Google netbook, the bragging rights are quite minimal. It's not like Distributed.net was going to be involved...
You're going by the assumption that delayed piracy results in increased sales. Now I have quite a bit of, ahem, experience in the world of piracy, because I use it as a promotional tool for my own creations, and I can tell you that the folks who systematically snarf 0-day games have no intention of buying unless it's a top-3 title. Everything else - and I assure you, anything on the NDS - doesn't drive that "must have" mentality that will convert a pirate.
The "try-before-you-buy" crowd will simply be turned off entirely, thinking the game is actually bugged. And contrary to propaganda, they make up a significant portion of the market. Hell, I tried SC2 before buying it - sure, I played one map and I was hooked, but I still tried it. That's the price developers pay for not releasing a proper demo - the cracked copy *becomes* the demo, so if the copy-protection breaks the demo, you lose the sale.
Ultimately there is absolutely nothing game houses can do against copying. It is all futile and a waste of resources to even try. Even big MMOs get "pirated" in the form of private servers and modded clients. If game houses want to make money, they need to deliver value. Look at Valve and Stardock, they get it right! They have fanatic supporters who happily pay for great entertainment and support. EA, Activision, Sony and Nintendo, they don't get it.
How do you define "artistic value" ? As Andres Serrano has shown, one man's bodily fluids is another man's art. Some would argue that the human form is a work of art. Others are ashamed of it. So who is wrong, and who is right ?
I have to enter a fair amount of data to prove I am who I say I am with American Express
Right... and most of that information is available to an online retailer once you've made a purchase. Home address, phone numbers, legal name, heck you could easily ask for a DOB even though it's not required, and most people will blindly enter it. That pretty much covers most identity questions, and a simple "friendly" phone call can fill in a few other blanks like spouse's name, stuff like that. If credit cards were even borderline secure, I'd still have one. I prefer cash, because if someones screws with my cash, they have to be within pummeling distance, and that's the kind of security I like.
Death is too good for this slime. Rape is too good for this slime. I say toss him in a cell with Sanford Wallace and let them duke it out. Oh, I forgot to mention, cut off their limbs first so we're left with two screaming torsos.
If any of y'all bothered to RTFA (madness, I know), you'd have found that they aren't talking about random one-off sick days. They are investigating people on long-term disability leave. Taking a sick day because your job is stressful is not the issue here, and frankly would not be worth hiring a private dick. These people are on extended periods of paid leave for what are supposed to be debilitating health issues - the whole point of being off work is because you're not in any shape to do the work. If you throw out your back, and they give you 6 months of paid leave to rest and recover, it sort-of looks bad if you start major renovations on your house the following week. It also constitutes insurance fraud, something a tad more serious than a few I.T. guys taking the day off to play Cataclysm.
Given that I know of a bunch of people who are exploiting the system right now, shafting their fellow coworkers, driving up the premiums, and of course sticking the honest ones with overtime to make up for it, well I feel no sympathy for the hypocrites and I whole-heartedly endorse these investagators. Hell, we just outed one a few months back. Not only did this person have a long history of feigning chronic pain and stress, but she was doing it twice! When she was on leave from one job, she'd work at a 2nd, and vice versa. Once the taxman is done tearing her a new one, she gets to defend herself in court against two insurance firms. Not that I like the insurance racket any, but someone needs to punish these socially defective crooks.
This is such an idiotic statement. There are already far more cell phones sold, smart or not, per year than PCs, and this has been true for nearly a decade. These phones are being replaced with "app-enabled devices" because it's getting nearly impossible to get a plain old phone - they just don't make them anymore. Even the $0 freebie has some sort of smartphone-like functionality. Hell, my old MotoRazr from 2004 had apps! Shiit Java apps, but still...
The day you can sit down at an "app-enabled device" and professionally write software, code a business-class web site, edit video, design a mechanical blueprint, and play WoW, well that might be the end of the PC era. For now, and the next 10 years at least, we just have a lot of fussy gadgets.
If the game can detect that it was pirated, the circumvention isn't good enough. These little pranks will fool the 0-day groups, but within hours a "proper" fix will come along, and these childish stunts will have been in vain.
The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.
Are we really slashvertising botnets now ? "up to version 7"... I mean come on, who actually gives a shit ? Botnets exist, and they tend to be based in Russia, which is why I think someone should do the world a solid and drive a backhoe across eastern Europe.
You and I understand the importance of a realistic bid, as I would hope many./'ers, but to people who don't understand programming, the assumption is that the cheap guy will deliver the same result as the expensive guy.
Myself, I have three rates, for three different types of work. They are carefully calculated and set in stone. If a job falls below my minimum, I don't even look at it. If someone wants a five-page web site, great: here's my minimum. If that's too expensive, there are a hundred jobbers that will gladly do it for $50 and a beer, but if you want The Billco, you pay The Billco's rates.
This tends to put me beyond the budgets of freelance gigs. Too bad, so sad. If I value my Starcraft time higher than some guy's pipe dream business, I think that says a lot about them.
PRECISELY! It is a cultural difference, once that I personally cannot tolerate in this field. My clients certainly do not tolerate it from me. If the contract says "eleven thingamajigs" and I give them eight, I get three voice mails from three different middle managers telling me exactly why I will be paid ZERO dollars unless I deliver the missing items, plus now some freebie because I'm past the deadline.
What irks me is that on freelancing sites, I'm the guy paying money, so I figure the consultant should be adapting to my culture, my expectations, not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone finally realized digital magazines suck as bad as paper ones ? SURPRISE!
We have the web, which has largely obsoleted print periodicals. Why pay ten bucks for a weekly rag filled with advertising and infotising, when you can get the same bullshit on the web for free ? Oh, perhaps more to the point, who the hell still reads Wired.com in the age of RSS aggregators ?
Yours still has PS2 compatibility, but new ones don't. People are reasonably pissed that later hardware revisions dropped backward compatibility, in the name of cost-cutting. Consider also that the PS2 supported nearly all PSX titles, up to the very latest revision of the PS2 Slim that was recently launched in 2008 - after the PS3!
So, PS2 backward compatibility: 11 years and still going
PS3 backward compatibility: 1 year, yanked.
Even more insulting is that Sony now wants to sell those old games all over again, via the Playstation Network. Nevermind that your Final Fantasy X is still in great condition, you'll have to pay for it once more if you want to play it on the PS3.
All these are great reasons to be pissed off at Sony's handling of the PS3.
Funny, I see it the other way around. I was a big fan of the original Tron since I was a little kid, and even today I could appreciate the plot that entangled religion and politics in the little details. This is where Tron Legacy let me down: it was a cheesy Hollywood hack-job of a plot, about an absent father and his confused son. It was unconvincing on its own, but more importantly it completely dismissed the almost-cohesive fantasy world of the original film, where the users were seen as mythical god-like beings. In this one, it seemed as though every "program" knew what was up - a hard sell, considering the only actual user inside the system was Flynn.
The resultant hodge-podge of flashy action was then edited to hell, with terribly uneven pace and giant holes in its two-line plot. It really felt like someone looked at the Tron trailer and DVD back cover, borrowed the basic styling and made everything else up without any understanding or prior knowledge of the Tron world. The result is a delight for the senses that dulls the mind.
In essence, all 10 items on the list say "Use Linux!"
Yeah, ok, thank you Captain Obvious, I mean CHIMIT :P
We need to keep in mind that online game sales are intangible products. Sure, as a publisher you're paying a few pennies for the download, but the difference is quite negligible, whether you sell 10 copies at $50, or 100 copies at $5. People are already used to "community support", i.e. forums, so if a lower price results in a greater net profit, there's no reason not to aim for such.
Indie games have such small user bases that the growth potential is tremendous. By selling the game at a very low price, you're effectively buying customers. If you do a good job of entertaining them, they will buy your next game. It's nearly-free publicity, which is good because at that level, the game house probably can't justify the expense of a real marketing campaign. Realistically, if you're bringing in less than six figures with your product, be it a game or app, you're better off lowering the price and considering that discount your "marketing cost", rather than paying up-front for promotion which may or may not recoup the investment. Why gamble the company when you can get rich slowly ?
Yo dawg, we heard you like micro-chips, so we put micro-chips in yo micro-chips so you can root while you root
The insane thing is that in 2010, we still use cheques. Everyone has cards, account numbers and PINs and smart chips. Even the cheapo pizza delivery joints around here take debit cards right at your door.
I can pay someone halfway around the world in four mouse clicks and a few keystrokes, why can't people pay local businesses as conveniently and securely ?
Numbers on a piece of paper are OBSOLETE!
That was my reading as well. The bank explicitly told the account holder that the cheques had cleared, but then changed their mind. I thought the whole point of the clearing process and delays were to verify the validity and liquidity of a cheque.
As much as it offends me to side with the gullible fool, I think he took the proper precautions. Keep appealing until the bank loses, this is an abuse of power. The main reason 419 scams continue to thrive is because banks mislead their customers in a false sense of security. If the cheque clearing process were functioning as expected, this victim would have gotten stuck with a few bounced cheque charges, but at least he wouldn't have been duped into wiring almost a half-million dollars to a fraudster.
If you really want to get literal, the victims bank and those upon which the cheques were issues "conspired to commit fraud" since the 419 scammer got his cash, as a direct result of the banks incompetence.
I think a lot of people have grown annoyed with Jimbo Wales over the years, myself included, over his reactionary tendency toward censorship. All it takes is for one semi-famous person to criticize some aspect of Wikipedia, be it drugs, sex, or religion, and Jimbo would go in and radically truncate a bunch of pages. Nevermind that he was redacting factual information, he just wanted to "save face". Quality of information seemed to matter less than it's potential for scandal, which is a fantastic way to piss off the liberal-leaning intellectual elite (and by liberal I don't mean the imbecilic U.S. political label).
From day one, he's treated Wikipedia like his own politically-correct version of the truth, alienating countless key supporters in the process. Take him off those freakin ads and maybe, in a few years, people will forget that this megalomaniac took a big crap all over their masterfully crafted articles.
In other news, Amazon was shocked and terrified to learn that teenagers were found to regularly and eagerly engage in copulation out-of-wedlock. Jeff Bezos was quoted as saying "I had no idea hormonally-charged humans were interested in coitus. I, for one, have been virgin since I was twelve, though not necessary by my own choice."
Traci Lords was unavailable for comment, but Magic Johnson is reported to have cracked a devilish grin at Bezos. And now for your local news about some retarded kid stuck in a well.
Communist-run countries usually aren't bursting at the seams with (semi-)skilled consultants looking for outsourced work.
The real issue is that when you're paying someone a tiny fraction of the North American rate for a piece of work, the data becomes the more valuable part of the equation. In some cases it can be very attractive to sell that data to a 3rd party for what we might consider peanuts, but might represent a month's salary to someone else.
Despite the many who will criticize and berate you for stating the obvious, I was thinking the exact same thing as I was reading the article. It seems like even an aspiring geek would have figured this one out in a matter of minutes. Sure, it's harder than your average "skill-testing question", but hardly something to brag about. I mean, a lot of us decode (or create) far more intricate cyphers every day. Realistically, Google wanted it to be solved quickly, as it is a very inexpensive publicity stunt. Of course, the prize being a single $199 Google netbook, the bragging rights are quite minimal. It's not like Distributed.net was going to be involved...
You're going by the assumption that delayed piracy results in increased sales. Now I have quite a bit of, ahem, experience in the world of piracy, because I use it as a promotional tool for my own creations, and I can tell you that the folks who systematically snarf 0-day games have no intention of buying unless it's a top-3 title. Everything else - and I assure you, anything on the NDS - doesn't drive that "must have" mentality that will convert a pirate.
The "try-before-you-buy" crowd will simply be turned off entirely, thinking the game is actually bugged. And contrary to propaganda, they make up a significant portion of the market. Hell, I tried SC2 before buying it - sure, I played one map and I was hooked, but I still tried it. That's the price developers pay for not releasing a proper demo - the cracked copy *becomes* the demo, so if the copy-protection breaks the demo, you lose the sale.
Ultimately there is absolutely nothing game houses can do against copying. It is all futile and a waste of resources to even try. Even big MMOs get "pirated" in the form of private servers and modded clients. If game houses want to make money, they need to deliver value. Look at Valve and Stardock, they get it right! They have fanatic supporters who happily pay for great entertainment and support. EA, Activision, Sony and Nintendo, they don't get it.
Perhaps Apple banned it because the photos are so horribly shooped, it would make the Retina display look like shit.
</justsayin'>
How do you define "artistic value" ? As Andres Serrano has shown, one man's bodily fluids is another man's art. Some would argue that the human form is a work of art. Others are ashamed of it. So who is wrong, and who is right ?
I have to enter a fair amount of data to prove I am who I say I am with American Express
Right... and most of that information is available to an online retailer once you've made a purchase. Home address, phone numbers, legal name, heck you could easily ask for a DOB even though it's not required, and most people will blindly enter it. That pretty much covers most identity questions, and a simple "friendly" phone call can fill in a few other blanks like spouse's name, stuff like that. If credit cards were even borderline secure, I'd still have one. I prefer cash, because if someones screws with my cash, they have to be within pummeling distance, and that's the kind of security I like.
Death is too good for this slime. Rape is too good for this slime. I say toss him in a cell with Sanford Wallace and let them duke it out. Oh, I forgot to mention, cut off their limbs first so we're left with two screaming torsos.
Yeah.
If any of y'all bothered to RTFA (madness, I know), you'd have found that they aren't talking about random one-off sick days. They are investigating people on long-term disability leave. Taking a sick day because your job is stressful is not the issue here, and frankly would not be worth hiring a private dick. These people are on extended periods of paid leave for what are supposed to be debilitating health issues - the whole point of being off work is because you're not in any shape to do the work. If you throw out your back, and they give you 6 months of paid leave to rest and recover, it sort-of looks bad if you start major renovations on your house the following week. It also constitutes insurance fraud, something a tad more serious than a few I.T. guys taking the day off to play Cataclysm.
Given that I know of a bunch of people who are exploiting the system right now, shafting their fellow coworkers, driving up the premiums, and of course sticking the honest ones with overtime to make up for it, well I feel no sympathy for the hypocrites and I whole-heartedly endorse these investagators. Hell, we just outed one a few months back. Not only did this person have a long history of feigning chronic pain and stress, but she was doing it twice! When she was on leave from one job, she'd work at a 2nd, and vice versa. Once the taxman is done tearing her a new one, she gets to defend herself in court against two insurance firms. Not that I like the insurance racket any, but someone needs to punish these socially defective crooks.
This is such an idiotic statement. There are already far more cell phones sold, smart or not, per year than PCs, and this has been true for nearly a decade. These phones are being replaced with "app-enabled devices" because it's getting nearly impossible to get a plain old phone - they just don't make them anymore. Even the $0 freebie has some sort of smartphone-like functionality. Hell, my old MotoRazr from 2004 had apps! Shiit Java apps, but still...
The day you can sit down at an "app-enabled device" and professionally write software, code a business-class web site, edit video, design a mechanical blueprint, and play WoW, well that might be the end of the PC era. For now, and the next 10 years at least, we just have a lot of fussy gadgets.
ICBMs ? Yeah sure, if only the Russians remembered where they hid them.
If the game can detect that it was pirated, the circumvention isn't good enough. These little pranks will fool the 0-day groups, but within hours a "proper" fix will come along, and these childish stunts will have been in vain.
The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.
That's the joke
In reality, the game is broken for everyone, they just now have a new scapegoat to blame the bugs on: piracy!
Are we really slashvertising botnets now ? "up to version 7"... I mean come on, who actually gives a shit ? Botnets exist, and they tend to be based in Russia, which is why I think someone should do the world a solid and drive a backhoe across eastern Europe.
You and I understand the importance of a realistic bid, as I would hope many ./'ers, but to people who don't understand programming, the assumption is that the cheap guy will deliver the same result as the expensive guy.
Myself, I have three rates, for three different types of work. They are carefully calculated and set in stone. If a job falls below my minimum, I don't even look at it. If someone wants a five-page web site, great: here's my minimum. If that's too expensive, there are a hundred jobbers that will gladly do it for $50 and a beer, but if you want The Billco, you pay The Billco's rates.
This tends to put me beyond the budgets of freelance gigs. Too bad, so sad. If I value my Starcraft time higher than some guy's pipe dream business, I think that says a lot about them.
PRECISELY! It is a cultural difference, once that I personally cannot tolerate in this field. My clients certainly do not tolerate it from me. If the contract says "eleven thingamajigs" and I give them eight, I get three voice mails from three different middle managers telling me exactly why I will be paid ZERO dollars unless I deliver the missing items, plus now some freebie because I'm past the deadline.
What irks me is that on freelancing sites, I'm the guy paying money, so I figure the consultant should be adapting to my culture, my expectations, not the other way around.