This is a terrible thing. Sure those crazy French citizens would be able to download music to their heart's content for free, but, uh...... do you simply not believe in copyright?
Regardless of law, is it perfectly OK to buy a CD then proceed to redistribute it ad infinitum?
I venemously hate all opensource hippies and all file sharers. All both parties do is steal money from honest hard working folk that just want to get paid for the work they do.
This year, though, there's little Christmas cheer to go around. During the crucial Thanksgiving week, for instance, the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004
All this means is the top 10 albums sold less this year than they did last year, that is not the same as a decline in CD sales or an industry slump.
If this year only 10 albums were available to buy, from anywhere, this years top 10 whould have had huge sales compared to last years top 10, but I'd be willing to bet there would definatly be less profits than last year.
Each year more and more CDs are put out and made available to the public. Surely the way to indicate a slump would be to release the total number of CDs sold in that week, or the total profits made by the music industry that week, and compare them.
For all we know, those same top 10 albums could have had record sales for every other week in the year, and now everyone in the world has a copy, the only people buying them are those that want 2 copies:o
It seems the music industry/RIAA has just employed some statistics experts to check the numbers and find anything that could be used to indicate a down turn, whether true or not.
Google not only knows what you like, thanks to the things you search for, but it also knows who your friends are, and what they like thanks to relationships formed through GMail invites and Orkut which could come in very handy when it comes to targetted advertising in the Christmas season (and any other gift buying season).
And I'd be quite appreciative of that as I've no idea what to get my Dad this year, and a few casually placed Google Adwords undermining my own thought process wouldn't go a miss!
You should be my boss, I'd love to go home after 2 hours of work \o/
The thing that makes the MMORPG different from all other computer games is the level of online social interaction and team work that is required in order to solve tasks. Many people don't think of it as simply 'playing a game' due to this interaction, and whilst many people do lose themselves in to the game, for whatever reason or other, many others don't. When you are interacting with people from all over the world in an event, unfortunatly it becomes impossible to just inject random save points.
It doesnt even take a MMORPG to cause this, my last housemate got just as involved in Football Manager as your friend appears to have in WoW, and only left his room for 20 mins a day to order a takeaway. Anyone unfortunate enough to meet him on his path would then be hounded with how well his team was doing.
Again, you're not really alone if you're talking to 19 other people using a voice/chat system and it allows people to escape reality, that's the accomplishment. You can have fun without playing a computer game, but you can't go around slaying Orcs in the real world, or flying space ships, or trading. There is no instant gratification like that. Even real world similarities require too much, if not more dedication. Professional soldiers, athletes or fighters will probably spend more time training than someone will put in to a computer game virtually living the game's equivalent life.
The problem isn't with MMORPGs, it's with family and friends. My Football Manager playing friend lives off his parents money and plays instead of going to University, he's now retaking his 2nd year for the 3rd time. And despite informing his parents, they don't seem to care, and the University certainly doesn't care as the tuition money keeps flowing. Short of beating him to the ground, with his rent/food/bills all being paid for him, there is little left the rest of the house can do.
I've played, and completed Guildwars, typically playing about 10 hrs a week, 2-4 hours at a time, and I'm a perfectly stable, solvent IT manager who has also participated, in a small way, to the development of a currently running MMORPG. This whole 1/2 hour limit thing is, again, all rubbish. What if someone plays a MMORPG for 6 hours straight one day then doesn't touch it again for a week? Are they worse in someway than the person that plays for 1 hour a day every day?
The problem lies with this kids parents. What kind of shitty upbringing must he have had with parents so uncapable as to let him get addicted enough to kill himself in the first place, what was he using the game to escape from? Like you say, it's moderation, and you need, afaik, credit/debit cards to pay for all the games monthly so I'd assume that there is atleast someone in the chain deemed responsible somewhere...
You mean the genre of no save points and long [pointless] quests to power up an imaginary character?
Yeah, I fucking hope so.
I'm all for fantasy role playing. It's fun, it's healthy.
But if you have to play for hours straight to "enjoy it" it's clearly not good. I mean many drug addicts enjoy their drug. Doesn't mean it's good for them. All in moderation [same goes for the "legal" drugs like tobacco and caffeine].
Again, utter rubbish.
For starters, all the MMORPGs I've played have same points, and your imaginary character diatribe pretty much nullifies in your eyes all computer games, board games and even things like fantasy football league, showing a distinct lack of objectivity in your reasoning.
Fantasy role playing also involves leveling up imaginery characters with pointless quests and in my experience, depending on the game, easily between 2-6 hours for a typical session, depending on the game, the level of the players and the frequency that they meet.
Many things become more meaningful, and therefore more enjoyable or personal, with time as you watch it grow, be it your pencil and paper rpg character, or a collection of some sort, or a character in a computer game. Sure you can get away sometimes with playing for 1 hour sessions which you enjoy, but with a 2 hour session you can have twice as much depth in the adventure and enjoy it more, this is forgetting the ammount of effort and time it takes to form a squad or party in a MMORPG, whether you are putting the hours in as a member of a guild, or searching for pubbies that aren't completly useless.
Whether playing a MMORPG is worth while with respect to what you can accomplish with your money and freetime isn't up for debate, and neither are your personal feelings or opinions on MMORPG systems as they are obviously skewed.
In the BBS day we had a solution which was to time limit your connection. Of course that was because most BBSes had only 1 line [sometimes a couple] and wanted to share with others.
So why not make RPGs where you can only play 1 hour per 24 hour period?
In the grand scheme of things it makes sales sense since the player progresses EVEN SLOWER through the game and it has the social benefit of not having losers play 24 hours a day.
Of course this won't stop people from making 24 accounts... I guess you can limit it to one per credit card or something...
Point is, it's trivial to solve WITHOUT modifying gameplay.
Rubbish.
A lot of MMORPGs have quests that take over several hours to complete, part of the incentive for MMORPGs is that the time spent playing them, to a degree, is worth while. Diluting a game to segments of only 1 hour or less would be really stupid, especially if the player was one of those that liked to walk about, interact and think as they played, rather than simply rushing through, or if they were not very proficient at the game, they'ed never get anywhere as they'ed get kicked off after 60 minutes.
Your idea would kill the genre.
Hey guys, duh, I can't be bothered to Google or get any insight to a very common question answered almost a millenia ago.
The very [b]vast[/b] majority of MP3 players are USB mass storage devices and will play MP3. Only consumer retards by Apple or Creative players.
I was lucky enough to have access to the Internet, and thus Google and found myself the iRiver H340 a lovely device which will play both OGG and MP3 and after a surprising firmware patch, movies too! All for around £250.
I'd be really interested in some stats for Slashdot now they've changed to HTML 4.01 and CSS. I wonder how much of a difference it has made to the server load and amount of data being chucked about as well as overall server response time?!
I thought EVERYONE IN THE WORLD new about this? People have been doing this since Brahm first released Bittorrent, hacking the Python source code to increase their rate of upload and total upload. It's litterally a * 2 stuck in the correct place.
A few of the good trackers are aware of this and if their are large anomolies with a specific torrent (ideally the up/down ratio for each torrent should be around 1) it gets flagged for the admin to look out.
The TV IV stems from a forum on Something Awful so with all that goon power behind it I'm sure it will snowball shortly in to a quite concise database.
The cookery forum offshoot, GBS Food is doing wonderfully since it's conception!
The concept they seem to fail to also grasp is that perhaps most movies today lack the substance that makes a movie actually worth watching. With the eye candy and special effects, they probably think the movie will rake in kazillion buckazoids for the CG alone and plot and story be damned, but I am the only one too sophisticated for the crap that passes for movies these days?
I was thinking this very same thing earlier, when watching the trailer for the new Dukes of Hazard film and seeing a CGI car do a mediocre jump. Back in the day as well as getting the 'wow cool he jumped the river' factor, there was also a little bit of a 'holy shit, a stunt man actually fucking did that!' factor that just made it a little better.
Case in point, the cork screw car jump in James Bond 'The Man With The Golden Gun'. Holy fuckaroo, that was real! You just won't get that nowadays:(
I'll damn well drink until the establishment closes or until I run out of money and friends I can borrow from. And no stinking robot will tell me other wise!
Really? Does it? Isn't this just an old joke with not much fact to back it up anymore?
You clearly haven't been using a system recently that's been riddled with spyware, I've just had a hell of a time trying to get rid of some stuff on a friends pc that constantly kept rebooting the pc, restarting explorer and crashing winlogon.
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
Forgetting about the huge costs of education, be that University fees, exam fees or even just books or Internet access, is not the time spent learning worth anything? If I spent 5 years of my life learning how to fix your problem, is that nearly zero effort? I think you are getting confused with the copyright infridgement isn't stealing diatribe!
The Internet is now a global network, whether you Americans like it or not, which is why, and how, so many of your American companies get dossed by kiddies in Romania.
The comedy 'the Internet is ours' replies are killing me!
We all know that means Red Hat 8.0+. Quit complaining, not everyone knows that much about linux.
Exactly, you really can't start harassing new people due to the spaghetti versioning system that Linux and it's associated distros all have. Redhat 9, Redhat Fedora Core 4, Debian 3, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, Gnome 2, KDE 3. And to guaruntee any sort of compatibility or help, you need to know exactly what you're running.
I would have expected more from a Google employee to be honest, but maybe he worded it that way for all the laymen.
Maybe also we should refuse governments who don't give black people in California the vote:o
Oh that's right, cause I tried to use my dollars to force other people to believe my particular idiology over their own instead of just supporting the market system by evaluating the product not the producer.
Being a bit hypocriticle here aren't you? Your belief clearly being that products and their price are more important than the people living and breathing around you. That is a belief you know, that you are 'forcing' upon me, just as I am 'forcing' my belief (similar to Google's, i.e. Don't be evil) on you.
Does the sum of your compassion for society really come down to hoping that everyone can buy the best products at the cheapest financial cost, regardless of the social cost? Especially when it comes down to unnecessary luxuries choice of brand of cola?
Slashdot Mirror
Hug them?
Why would you hug them?
This is a terrible thing. Sure those crazy French citizens would be able to download music to their heart's content for free, but, uh...... do you simply not believe in copyright?
Regardless of law, is it perfectly OK to buy a CD then proceed to redistribute it ad infinitum?
I venemously hate all opensource hippies and all file sharers. All both parties do is steal money from honest hard working folk that just want to get paid for the work they do.
That's why.
That was supposed to be:
:( )
French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software and
France about to get worst copyright law in Europe? but then this! I just don't know whether to hug or punch them!
(Slipped and hit submit instead of preview
French Government Lobbied to Ban Free Software and
France about to get worst copyright law in Europe? but then this! I just don't know whether to hug or punch them!
From the article:
This year, though, there's little Christmas cheer to go around. During the crucial Thanksgiving week, for instance, the top 10 albums sold 40% fewer copies than the top 10 albums the same week in 2004
All this means is the top 10 albums sold less this year than they did last year, that is not the same as a decline in CD sales or an industry slump.
If this year only 10 albums were available to buy, from anywhere, this years top 10 whould have had huge sales compared to last years top 10, but I'd be willing to bet there would definatly be less profits than last year.
Each year more and more CDs are put out and made available to the public. Surely the way to indicate a slump would be to release the total number of CDs sold in that week, or the total profits made by the music industry that week, and compare them.
For all we know, those same top 10 albums could have had record sales for every other week in the year, and now everyone in the world has a copy, the only people buying them are those that want 2 copies :o
It seems the music industry/RIAA has just employed some statistics experts to check the numbers and find anything that could be used to indicate a down turn, whether true or not.
What with the syndication of Neighbours, Home and Away and Dame Edna back to the UK, I think the Aussies are getting their own back :(
Google not only knows what you like, thanks to the things you search for, but it also knows who your friends are, and what they like thanks to relationships formed through GMail invites and Orkut which could come in very handy when it comes to targetted advertising in the Christmas season (and any other gift buying season).
And I'd be quite appreciative of that as I've no idea what to get my Dad this year, and a few casually placed Google Adwords undermining my own thought process wouldn't go a miss!
er doesnt the xbox 360 come with an HD-DVD player?
by the time the PS3 is out, there will hardly be a 'meagre' ammount of HDDVD players in peoples homes..
You should be my boss, I'd love to go home after 2 hours of work \o/
The thing that makes the MMORPG different from all other computer games is the level of online social interaction and team work that is required in order to solve tasks. Many people don't think of it as simply 'playing a game' due to this interaction, and whilst many people do lose themselves in to the game, for whatever reason or other, many others don't. When you are interacting with people from all over the world in an event, unfortunatly it becomes impossible to just inject random save points.
It doesnt even take a MMORPG to cause this, my last housemate got just as involved in Football Manager as your friend appears to have in WoW, and only left his room for 20 mins a day to order a takeaway. Anyone unfortunate enough to meet him on his path would then be hounded with how well his team was doing.
Again, you're not really alone if you're talking to 19 other people using a voice/chat system and it allows people to escape reality, that's the accomplishment. You can have fun without playing a computer game, but you can't go around slaying Orcs in the real world, or flying space ships, or trading. There is no instant gratification like that. Even real world similarities require too much, if not more dedication. Professional soldiers, athletes or fighters will probably spend more time training than someone will put in to a computer game virtually living the game's equivalent life.
The problem isn't with MMORPGs, it's with family and friends. My Football Manager playing friend lives off his parents money and plays instead of going to University, he's now retaking his 2nd year for the 3rd time. And despite informing his parents, they don't seem to care, and the University certainly doesn't care as the tuition money keeps flowing. Short of beating him to the ground, with his rent/food/bills all being paid for him, there is little left the rest of the house can do.
I've played, and completed Guildwars, typically playing about 10 hrs a week, 2-4 hours at a time, and I'm a perfectly stable, solvent IT manager who has also participated, in a small way, to the development of a currently running MMORPG. This whole 1/2 hour limit thing is, again, all rubbish. What if someone plays a MMORPG for 6 hours straight one day then doesn't touch it again for a week? Are they worse in someway than the person that plays for 1 hour a day every day?
The problem lies with this kids parents. What kind of shitty upbringing must he have had with parents so uncapable as to let him get addicted enough to kill himself in the first place, what was he using the game to escape from? Like you say, it's moderation, and you need, afaik, credit/debit cards to pay for all the games monthly so I'd assume that there is atleast someone in the chain deemed responsible somewhere...
You mean the genre of no save points and long [pointless] quests to power up an imaginary character?
Yeah, I fucking hope so.
I'm all for fantasy role playing. It's fun, it's healthy.
But if you have to play for hours straight to "enjoy it" it's clearly not good. I mean many drug addicts enjoy their drug. Doesn't mean it's good for them. All in moderation [same goes for the "legal" drugs like tobacco and caffeine].
Again, utter rubbish.
For starters, all the MMORPGs I've played have same points, and your imaginary character diatribe pretty much nullifies in your eyes all computer games, board games and even things like fantasy football league, showing a distinct lack of objectivity in your reasoning.
Fantasy role playing also involves leveling up imaginery characters with pointless quests and in my experience, depending on the game, easily between 2-6 hours for a typical session, depending on the game, the level of the players and the frequency that they meet.
Many things become more meaningful, and therefore more enjoyable or personal, with time as you watch it grow, be it your pencil and paper rpg character, or a collection of some sort, or a character in a computer game. Sure you can get away sometimes with playing for 1 hour sessions which you enjoy, but with a 2 hour session you can have twice as much depth in the adventure and enjoy it more, this is forgetting the ammount of effort and time it takes to form a squad or party in a MMORPG, whether you are putting the hours in as a member of a guild, or searching for pubbies that aren't completly useless.
Whether playing a MMORPG is worth while with respect to what you can accomplish with your money and freetime isn't up for debate, and neither are your personal feelings or opinions on MMORPG systems as they are obviously skewed.
In the BBS day we had a solution which was to time limit your connection. Of course that was because most BBSes had only 1 line [sometimes a couple] and wanted to share with others. ... I guess you can limit it to one per credit card or something...
So why not make RPGs where you can only play 1 hour per 24 hour period?
In the grand scheme of things it makes sales sense since the player progresses EVEN SLOWER through the game and it has the social benefit of not having losers play 24 hours a day.
Of course this won't stop people from making 24 accounts
Point is, it's trivial to solve WITHOUT modifying gameplay.
Rubbish.
A lot of MMORPGs have quests that take over several hours to complete, part of the incentive for MMORPGs is that the time spent playing them, to a degree, is worth while. Diluting a game to segments of only 1 hour or less would be really stupid, especially if the player was one of those that liked to walk about, interact and think as they played, rather than simply rushing through, or if they were not very proficient at the game, they'ed never get anywhere as they'ed get kicked off after 60 minutes.
Your idea would kill the genre.
Hey guys, duh, I can't be bothered to Google or get any insight to a very common question answered almost a millenia ago.
The very [b]vast[/b] majority of MP3 players are USB mass storage devices and will play MP3. Only consumer retards by Apple or Creative players.
I was lucky enough to have access to the Internet, and thus Google and found myself the iRiver H340 a lovely device which will play both OGG and MP3 and after a surprising firmware patch, movies too! All for around £250.
Only all the teachers passwords were blank, and they had superuser privaledges. I got in so much trouble for pointing that out :/
I'd be really interested in some stats for Slashdot now they've changed to HTML 4.01 and CSS. I wonder how much of a difference it has made to the server load and amount of data being chucked about as well as overall server response time?!
I thought EVERYONE IN THE WORLD new about this? People have been doing this since Brahm first released Bittorrent, hacking the Python source code to increase their rate of upload and total upload. It's litterally a * 2 stuck in the correct place.
A few of the good trackers are aware of this and if their are large anomolies with a specific torrent (ideally the up/down ratio for each torrent should be around 1) it gets flagged for the admin to look out.
The TV IV stems from a forum on Something Awful so with all that goon power behind it I'm sure it will snowball shortly in to a quite concise database.
The cookery forum offshoot, GBS Food is doing wonderfully since it's conception!
They had quite a few days notice, they could have simply walked away.
The concept they seem to fail to also grasp is that perhaps most movies today lack the substance that makes a movie actually worth watching. With the eye candy and special effects, they probably think the movie will rake in kazillion buckazoids for the CG alone and plot and story be damned, but I am the only one too sophisticated for the crap that passes for movies these days?
I was thinking this very same thing earlier, when watching the trailer for the new Dukes of Hazard film and seeing a CGI car do a mediocre jump. Back in the day as well as getting the 'wow cool he jumped the river' factor, there was also a little bit of a 'holy shit, a stunt man actually fucking did that!' factor that just made it a little better.
Case in point, the cork screw car jump in James Bond 'The Man With The Golden Gun'. Holy fuckaroo, that was real! You just won't get that nowadays :(
I'll damn well drink until the establishment closes or until I run out of money and friends I can borrow from. And no stinking robot will tell me other wise!
Really? Does it? Isn't this just an old joke with not much fact to back it up anymore?
You clearly haven't been using a system recently that's been riddled with spyware, I've just had a hell of a time trying to get rid of some stuff on a friends pc that constantly kept rebooting the pc, restarting explorer and crashing winlogon.
It is simply my position that knowlege has, or rather, ought to have, no monetary value since it takes nearly zero effort to reproduce.
Forgetting about the huge costs of education, be that University fees, exam fees or even just books or Internet access, is not the time spent learning worth anything? If I spent 5 years of my life learning how to fix your problem, is that nearly zero effort? I think you are getting confused with the copyright infridgement isn't stealing diatribe!
Recieving stolen goods is also a crime.
Is it stolen goods though, or just an invalid license? Is that the same or different?
The Internet is now a global network, whether you Americans like it or not, which is why, and how, so many of your American companies get dossed by kiddies in Romania.
The comedy 'the Internet is ours' replies are killing me!
We all know that means Red Hat 8.0+. Quit complaining, not everyone knows that much about linux.
Exactly, you really can't start harassing new people due to the spaghetti versioning system that Linux and it's associated distros all have. Redhat 9, Redhat Fedora Core 4, Debian 3, Linux 2.4, Linux 2.6, Gnome 2, KDE 3. And to guaruntee any sort of compatibility or help, you need to know exactly what you're running.
I would have expected more from a Google employee to be honest, but maybe he worded it that way for all the laymen.
Debian/GNOME as of 2000.
Maybe also we should refuse governments who don't give black people in California the vote :o
Oh that's right, cause I tried to use my dollars to force other people to believe my particular idiology over their own instead of just supporting the market system by evaluating the product not the producer.
Being a bit hypocriticle here aren't you? Your belief clearly being that products and their price are more important than the people living and breathing around you. That is a belief you know, that you are 'forcing' upon me, just as I am 'forcing' my belief (similar to Google's, i.e. Don't be evil) on you.
Does the sum of your compassion for society really come down to hoping that everyone can buy the best products at the cheapest financial cost, regardless of the social cost? Especially when it comes down to unnecessary luxuries choice of brand of cola?