I have argued a few times that its not the features that sell a console but the games , but all things being equal otherwise the features can make or break the sale.
The Gameboy came out when Nintendo had its old seal of approval, ensuring that a lot of truly classic games were released for it.
While Nintendo still only had the GBA, Sega released the Gamegear. Atari released the Lynx - both vastly more technically able systems. Where are they now?
Even after their demise, when Nintendo released the Gameboy color, it was still less technically able than either of them.
Then, finally, Nintendo released the GBA. Consolewise it was roughly comparable to the deeply out of date Super Nintendo. Still, it sold massively.
Now Nintendo's released the DS (roughly comparable to an N64 with some cute gimmicks) while Sony has released a handheld PS2 in the form of the PSP. And still Nintendo don't seem to be too worried.
While arguments can be made about Nintendo's path through the actual console wars, they've had a lot of experience with handhelds that's no doubt taught them some very soid lessons.
It suggests that you don't have to win the immediate numbers market. You can let the others blow hundreds of millions in advertising budgets and take a massive loss *cough*microsoft*cough* on every console initially sold. If you can define your market (pure, fun, consistenly good games with an emphasis on children-friendly) and be profitable within it (because parents keep on buying their kids your nice safe system, year after year, whether it's technically the most advanced or not) then you're doing pretty well.
It's kind of like comparing the sales figures of an ambulance manufacturer against Ford's for the Explorer line. Sure, both have wheels, chassis, boxy metal bits, etc. and most of their drivers are convinced they have the power of life and death over everyone around them. At the end of the day though, that ambulance manufacturer isn't trying to get the best selling SUV in North America. It's making great profits selling smaller numbers of a very specific niche vehicle that it considers hugely important. While the bragging rights might be nice, it is pretty happy where it is.
You idiot. It's clearly Minnesotan's per second! If you can't speak the l33t speak, you shouldn't be on slashdot!
Either that, or gaminghorizon needs to either wait for the email version of the press release to cut and paste or by a better OCR program for printed ones that can tell Ns from Hs.
As for dots, they're clearly exploring new technologies like Nintendo is rumored to be doing with 3D. In this case it's evidently something based off of Dot Matrix technology. This assumption can be backed up by the need for 256+ audio channels - no one needs that much sound unless they're powering a dot matrix.
>>The combined smell of poo and hurl should cause a chain reaction around the boadroom as the entire staff voids their stomachs and bowels in a cataclysmic emetic eruption of Biblical proportions. While everyone's flailing around in a growing lake of filth, you slip out the side window.
>Remind me to never piss you off.
Nah. Just don't piss off Chunk from The Goonies. I knew it sounded familiar:
But the worst thing I ever done -- I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, t-t-then, I made a noise like this: hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa -- and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other. I never felt so bad in my entire life.
Since when did the bible become the [direct] word of God?
The Old Testament, in a few parts, maybe. Moses got the ten commandments directly from God. The [hi]story of that event, along with the words from those commandments, then got passed down by the Jews as the book of Exodus. God didn't write the book, it's not his direct words. His words may be quoted in parts but most of it is just the Jews retelling the [hi]stories of the events.
The book of Psalms isn't even that. It's basically songs made up by various religious folk in honor of their God.
So, for the Old Testament, the Jews themselves see it as true stories about people's interactions with God. As far as I'm aware, no one seriously claims God sat there and directed it to be written, word for word, according to his wishes - they're the words of individuals used to describe the [hi]stories of those who did interact with God.
It seems kind of ironic that [some - you don't get to speak for all] Christians would take a book that even those who wrote it don't claim is the direct word of God (simply a recounting of the interactions with God) and then somehow, magically, make it become God's word after the event. That, to me, sounds a lot like narrow minded people trying to make something up to self-justify. And that's not what true Christianity's supposed to be about.
OK, on to the New Testament. A series of gospels written by the people who experienced God's son. Again, they're [hi]stories written by people who were there (if you disregard the evidence that suggests they were retold orally for about three hundred years before actually getting written down) and not the direct word of God.
So, as we have people writing accounts, not God directly writing through them, quite where do they become the direct word of God anymore than a blogger recounting an audience with the Pope is writting the direct word of the Pope? We'd laugh at the blogger making such claims, yet somehow it's OK to make them about the bible?
Then there's the fairly strong evidence that suggests the gospels were fairly selectively edited around 300 A.D. to suit political will at the time. So even if they were God's word, they likely stopped being a direct version at that point anyway.
And all of this is before the translations and retranslations that have happened for the last fifteen hundred years or so. Each and every one of those translations shows the bias of the author. I've got an old bible that belonged to my great grandmother that says, "And I shall call you wo-man because you come from man and you are here to serve man" Strangely that passage isn't in most versions - it's something that got interpretted in as it was translated.
So... Even if you believe the stories the bible is about were real events and not allegories that, over time, people came to believe to be real events... You're taking a book which the original authors never claimed to be the direct word of God and then choosing to believe it is in order to justify, in many cases, petty prejudices that some tiny justification can be found for by interpretting and interpretation of an interpretation in one way.
If you can understand where someone is coming from, maybe we can get past the hate and learn to agree to disagree.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, those who do rabidly believe the bible is the direct word of God use their own belief (which most others don't share) to attempt to justify why their beliefs should become laws, be taught to children etc. Unfortunately, those people have a tendency to then believe, "Well, as [my chosen interpretation] is the direct word of God, it can't be argued. Thus I'm right, you're wrong, there can be no debate." That creates just as big a problem.
When the bible is used to justify people being healthy members of society, doing good etc., I'm all for stepping back and letting them believe it just as thoroughly as they want.
Do you actually think SCO will have any money left by the time this case is over? I bet this case only ends when SCO go bankrupt.
No. But, in the bankrupcy process, they will have assets that can be seized. Ironically, IBM may well end up owning the very system they're spending so much to defend themselves from claims of copying.
Anyone remember the start of the second Iraq war? When the U.S. government, being the only ones in control of GPS, decided to turn down the accuracy for all non-US military signals in order to stop any Iraqis from using off the shelf GPS gear against them?
I'm looking forward to Operation Someone Else Has Oil Freedom - the maps change from nice reassuring dots to three hundred plus yard wide shaded circles. With a large enough number of sex offenders (consensual BDSM, urinating against a tree when drunk, girls who lied about their age), the entire state of Florida will turn in to a great big glowing hot spot and the entire population'll freak out.
Given the choice: reassuring themselves that knowing where these people are makes a difference vs. slightly cheaper oil... which side will the average middle American fall on? Will they still accept war if it means turning down the accuracy of their knee-jerk response system for a while?
Hey, if one form of stupidity that only hurts their own citizens prevents another form of stupidity that hurts other countries' citizens, is it such a terrible thing?
*gt;> You fund these lawsuits every time you buy a CD. Then they sue you, you settle and they sue even more people. Solution: stop buying CDs.
I have no clue what the situtation is like here in Canada, but it is not as bad as the states.
Actually, it's worse in Canada. In Canada you fund them every time you buy a hard drive, a blank CD-ROM or any one of a number of objects that don't directly infringe on their rights but could conceivably be used to. Don't feel bad though, the Netherlands followed Canada's stunning lead this week - so at least you're not alone.
Now there's the ridiculous situation that, should everyone decide to protest the music industry and stop buying CDs, the music industry would, ironically, be even better off (they'd continue to collect royalties on every drive sold and have absolutely zero production cost). Sure, the staff would get laid off, no bands would get signed, but the share holders would continue to collect their royalties from drive sales in exchange for no expenditure whatsoever.
Worse, it gets better and better for them as time goes by. That the Netherlands where they charge X euros per gig of storage. A 60gb iPod will be taxed by about $250. That's painful right now. Now consider good old Moore's law (arguments about disc storage vs processors etc. aside). In another dozen years, we'll have ~2^8 times the capacity for the same price. Unless the ridiculous laws get reassessed, 256 * $250 implies a $64,000 tax on that 15 terrabyte drive that the nicer models come with. Now I know inflation's bad but I don't think it's quite bad enough to have $60,000+ iPods within a decade or so. Sounds like some politicians have no concept of how computing advances and they've signed in to being a law that'll be farcical within ten years.
Assume for a moment that CD prices have remained largely constant ($10-15 new) ever since they came out. If that remains the case, simply buying an iPod within a decade (or similar drive for your PC) will give the music industry the equivalent of your buying 4,000 albums. By that point, do you really think they'll care about a CD boycot?
Disclaimer: Yes, I know those numbers are unsustainable. That's kind of the point - illustrating how staggeringly short sighted most of the music industry protecting laws are. The one redeeming thing is that those taxes will get so stupid that the idiots who signed them in will be forced to reconsider them well within the decade.
Has anyone read the article and seen the name of this thing?
the Family Entertainment Copyright Act Legislation
With luck, we'll end up with an enforcement branch being created and the Supreme Court refusing to get involved under the ground, "We feel that, ultimately, copyright control in this country is a F.E.C.A.L. matter."
Maybe to prevent walking by a car and seeing some pervert jacking off? I know I don't want to walk by a car and notice some girl being screwed by a horse while some weird looking guy smiles politely and acts like he's not doing anything...
There are already laws in place that regulate that. Spanking your plank in public, whether via wifi or a magazine is equally punishable.
Quite whose business it is, however, what a guy does in the back compartment of a big rig, with no windows below 8-feet off the ground and curtains drawn, is beyond me.
The bigger issue is what happens when a trucker checks the highway patrol warnings page and can't view it because "Woman flashing her breasts on overpass." causes the entire page to be censored. Or, to use your analogy, "Animals escaped from farmyard. One horse, one cock and a couple of bitches in right lane."
What other keywords would get blocked? Would every driver with a consignment of porn that he was carrying be unable to access his email because key words in his shipment caused every email about it to be filtered?
Even if they just filter specific websites, all it takes is for Larry Flynt to sue for access to be re-enabled to his website as he runs an extranet for his delivery drivers from it and the filtering now penalises legitimate business.
In short, it's a dumb idea that can't be implemented without causing all kinds of problems to perfectly legal business and the only justification for it - stopping weirdos from jacking off - already has perfectly good laws addressing it.
The question is not, as you claim, whether it's reasonable to hold someone given reasonable suspicion. The question is how much doubt must be present -- this man attempted to use legal tender to satisfy a debt, and given my cash-handling experience I don't see any reason to have doubted him.
Exactly. You were a bank teller. Your job was to handle money, handle money and, uh, handle money.
If your training and experience did not involve significantly more understanding of money than a police officer is required to have, in order to have reasonable doubt, then you really shouldn't have worked as a bank teller.
I'm a programmer. There will be cases that are completely obvious to me that are not hacking. That in no way invalidates an officer saying, "OK, there's enough here for me to be suspicious enough to hold someone until I can get an expert to tell me one way or the other."
The officer didn't know. Nor, frankly, was it his job to know. If we required every police officer to have the training and experience of a bank teller in order for them to be able to deal with counterfeiting, what other training should we also require? We should definitely have them gain qualification as mechanics in order to be able to tell the difference between a scuffed VIN number and one that was actually tampered with. As with the hacking issue, a four year bachelor's in Computer Science should probably be sufficient. And, given things like identical twins and other false positives in those areas that an expert could also dismiss, a medical degree is an absolute must too. So, these fifty year old guys with their six or eight degrees... How much do tax payers pay them again?
You were a bank teller. It was your job to know these details about cash. He was a police officer. It was his job to know enough to have a pretty good idea when and when not to be suspicious enough to hold someone until he can get an expert to give him more information.
Ask the officer to quote miranda rights or penal codes, he'll likely be an expert. Ask him to quote, with the same degree of knowledge as a bank teller, the signs for counterfeit money and of course he'll fall down. His job is to have a fair idea of when to be suspicious and then to get an expert. If we wanted every cop in America to have the amount of education necessary to know as much as professionals in every field tey investigate, we'd be paying 100% tax and then some in order to keep these fine professionals.
Given your experience, it was unreasonable. Given his experience, it was something he considered reasonable.
The cashier noticed smearing of the ink - which apparently was actually there. The $2 bills may have been the first thing that got her notice but the smeared ink on them is what she claims made her suspicious enough to call her manager.
When the officer came, he noticed that the bills all had sequential serial numbers - apparently a common sign in counterfeit currency.
At that point, given the smeared ink and the sequential serial numbers, the officer felt he had grounds to detain the man until the secret service could be called.
Now it turns out that, according to the secret service officer, the ink on legitimate bills does smear from time to time. I'd not heard of that, I'm guessing most people hadn't.
The fact that he gets them as a custom withdrawl from his bank - which probably has absolutely no other use for $2 bills - explains the sequential serial numbers. They likely get them relatively directly from the treasury in large batches and only issue from those large batches to him.
None of this proves he was a criminal - it was all completely explainable.
But it wasn't a simple case of not recognising $2 bills. The smeared ink and sequential serial numbers were enough for the officer to detain him until an explanation could be verified.
It may suck but the officer had reasonable grounds to detain him until he could confirm the story. I would imagine, in the majority of cases where suspect money comes up, the person caught tries feeding a story. At the end of the day, the question is whether you believe it's right to occasionally wrongfully detain one person or regularly let go many. Rightly or wrongly, the concept of reasonable grounds enshrines the former.
Can you imagine it being used to grade a paper on something like cyberspeak?
"You got an F. You were going to get a near perfect grade for your frequent use of direct quotes but it turns out our sentence structure and grammar were terrible and your logical flow was next-to-non-existant."
Sure, then Sony will be slapped with lawsuits after hundreds walk into oncoming traffic while watching a movie.
That's OK. All the drivers will be watching movies on their PSPs too. So they'll all be compatible. Problem solved.:)
It's only dangerous if one group and not the other are distracted or if the distraction mediums are incompatible. In fact, Sony can spin this to their advantage by pointing out how dangerous introducing Nintendo DS's can be.
There is however displayed respect. That special kind that gets displayed whether you're actually deserving of it or not.
This is the kind that gets displayed to an utterly incompetent CEO (to his face at least) because, well, he signs the checks and, whether you respect him or not, if you piss him off, you're screwed.
During the dotcom boom, most IT people got the displayed kind automatically. I remember being outright told, "You don't need to worry about HR and viewing unsafe sites. In the current economy, we can't replace you. You piss them off, they recommend you're fired, we refuse to do so because we can't lose you. End of story."
If a client pissed you off and you quit - or refused to work for them - it was [perceived as] way too hard to get someone else in. Thus they sucked up and displayed respect whether they felt like it or not.
It's a logical OR statement: Genuine and Displayed: Respect is shown. Genuine only: Respect is shown. Displayed only: Respect is shown. Neither: You're screwed.
What sucks for many in the IT field is that they were never really deserving of genuine respect, they just got the displayed kind because IT salaries were so nuts. Now the boom has burst and starving developers are [perceived as] a dime a dozen, they no longer qualify for the displayed kind. Thus, if you were genuinely deserving of respect, you continue to gain be shown it. If you were only ever getting the displayed kind - well, you don't merit it anymore.
Of course there's one other aspect to it. Scott Adams calls it the way of the weasel. Genuine respect still requires genuine people. In the typical workplace, many people will show respect if you genuinely deserve it - but there are still plenty of cretins who will screw anyone over, deserving or not, if it suits them. For them, whether you warrant genuine respect or not, they'll only ever show it to you if you warrant the displayed kind as, otherwise, you're not helping them directly and they can, therefore will, screw you.
I'm imagining, in all the hand wringing, MSNbc isn't going to be asking, "Why don't we automatically have flags go up when an under 18 lists their only three interests as the combination of Military, High Schools and Death & Dying?"
I'm not suggesting such invasion of people's privacy should be encouraged or practice, nor should MSN be held accountable for not doing anything to stop this. But the point is there that it's deeply hypocritical for one part of MSN to point at an exceptionally vague connection to video games while another part hosted what was pretty much his premeditated confession.
They exploit a technicality of a legal decision made against them to make their customers suffer.
On a simple level...
The OS development division and the Office/Word development devision are likely two fairly separate parts of the company. The same company perhaps, but nonetheless separate parts.
The OS division got ordered to strip Media Player and so they did it.
The Office/Word division did... nothing. No additional functionality was added. They just didn't spend money/time/resources on this new case.
If they'd added new code specifically to break it - as they apparently did in the old Dr.Dos days and as they did with Hotmail and the old Opera stylesheet deliberate bug, that would be one thing. But they didn't. All they did was not spend additional money fixing something they didn't have a legal obligation to fix.
A lot of web developers write their web pages to use the tag and call Windows Media Player directly. Their code won't work on this stripped down version. Are they secretly in league with Microsoft to undermine the EU? Of course not. They simply don't see it as worth the allocation of resources to provide a workaround to something that go changed after they developed their code. And, ultimately, that's all Microsoft's Word division is doing too.
Actually, to be fair, we don't even know if that's the case. For all we know, they may well be working on a fix, now this is identified, but didn't know about it until recently. There may well be a future patch that fixes this dependency issue. Word was written before the stripped down version of Windows was released and so, reasonably, it was coded with certain assumptions.
"video clips embedded into Microsoft Word documents don't run properly"
"The commission is still in the process of assessing... whether Microsoft is complying properly with the requirement to offer a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player."
Well. They complied. They provided a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player. It's very unfortunate that the entirely separate application, MS Word, which is not a part of Windows doesn't do everything it used to, given that it relies on Media Player being part of the O.S. Then again, the ruling covers the O.S. not the separate application.
I mean, seriously... When I write an tag to use Media Player in a web page, it doesn't work as well now either. If an external app looks for a specific set of calls and can't find them, of course it's not going to work. That's hardly the fault of an OS that was ordered to stop supporting those calls.
Now, on the other hand, had Microsoft been ordered to fully and transparently transmit those calls to any application the user cose to install in Media Player's place - and if Real could prove they seamlessly supported that complete set of calls - then there'd be a legitimate case. But the article makes no mention of that.
What it does say is that Microsoft has to make a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player. It has done so. It infers that Microsoft should also make Word support Media Player's absence better - but never actually shows where that was part of any ruling.
Weasley? Perhaps. Actually breaching the letter of the ruling? Not from anything that's actually in the article.
Which version of Word are you running? I'm on 2000 and it comes back each time. Then again, as others report it stays away from them, it may well be that it's sorted in some versions and not others.
If that is the case, the whole fuss is about, shock horror, there maybe being a bug in a Microsoft product?
If it bothers you that much, right click on the menu, choose customize|toolbars select PDF Maker 6.0 or whatever. Click Delete.
Telephone companies are not responsible for obscene phone calls or telemarketers - and I don't think ISP's should be responisble for porn, spam etc.
Which raises a good point... Why shouldn't they be?
Remember what the Utah solution actually is: The state government provides a list to ISPs. The government has stated that IF users want it, ISPs have to support filtering that list. There's no obligation on the ISP to find sites, identify them or anything else - simply allow blocking of a list that is supplied to them and only if the customer requests it.
Personally, I'd be all for my telco having a feature where I can say, "Nope. No more telemarketing and obscene calls please" and all of a sudden my phone wouldn't connect for calls from known telemarketing numbers and known obscene callers. It wouldn't be perfect but I'd be more than happy to accept a simple significant drop.
The cost to provide filtering for such a list is minimal - a couple of hours of a decent coder - that's all. After that, there's absolutely no cost to the ISPs nor is there any responsibility other than making it accessible. Even then, it's only ISPs over 7,500 users who have to give it away for free. So, call it $1,000 to develop a really basic blacklist filter that sits in your TCP/IP stack divided by 7,500 customers... Hmm, a one time cost of about 13-14c per customer. I think the ISPs can suck that up.
If you are a parent you should take responsibility.
You're not a parent, are you. Or, if you are, only of younger children. That view is regularly cited and, almost exclusively, only ever held by people without experience of actually being a parent.
The point is, no matter how much responsibility you try and take, the reality of parenthood is that you can't always be there to monitor every moment of their lives. Even if you're a stay at home parent - the moment you have more than one child, there will come times when you have one child burst in to tears in another room and have to go to them, etc.
What's wrong with having the PC in the same room as the TV set until you've taught the kid your values?
And how much good does watching them do? Just after the ad for a site where women make horses very happy comes on to the screen, because they accidentally clicked a link, you dive across the room and turn off the screen. So, does that make them "un" see it? Of course not. No amount of vigilence and sensible teaching in the world can make the web a place most parents would consider "safe" to surf - even if they monitor every moment of their child's usage.
Filtering, while not perfect (but that debate is for the parent post), is an attempt to address that. Even if you do monitor - you can only be reactive. A filter is a means of being proactive.
I agree that only seeing the sites you want to see is a good thing, but why in the world involve the ISPs? This is like requiring taxi companies to refuse to take you to a list of restaurants you don't like. If you don't want to go there, don't go there!
But the point is there's no way, short of monitoring every moment of a child's internet usage (which isn't truly practical) to ensure they don't end up going there.
It's not about whether an adult wants to go there or not - it's about whether an adult has the means to ensure their children don't go there.
The law's treatment of ISPs is nothing like a taxi firm, it's like a news seller:
Hardcore porn, right now, can be sitting anywhere on a newseller's shelves - right amongst the comics. Worse, it's virtually impossible to identify which links will and won't take a kid to porn or what endless cycles of pop-ups will. That's the equivalent of hardcore porn makers wrapping their content in Yu-Gi-Oh covers to ensure it gets more impressions.
What the law is saying is: Utah magazine publishers aren't allowed to wrap an innocent looking cover around their porn mags anymore and, as Utah can't legislate against out of state magazines, they're requiring news sellers to put magazines from a given list on the top shelf.
It's not even as if it prohibits free speach. You still have the right to speak. It's just that parents are being given the right to decide they and their families don't want to listen (and still have the right to decide to listen if they want to).
I agree it's not an ideal system. I agree it's not perfect. I agree some non-porn sites will mistakenly end up on the list. I agree there are better alternatives out there (though, as many parents evidently don't know of them, "better" is obviously a relative term).
But, just because something's not ideal, it doesn't mean it should automatically be ignored if, as non-ideal, it's still better than not doing it.
What are the costs? The real, genuine costs? Minimal if anything - a piece of cheap software that blocks a supplied list really doesn't cost much at all. Give a decent programmer a few hours, they can knock it up for you. Other than that and the Utah state government's money - the other costs are arguably negligible.
What are the benefits? Maybe not as great as promised but they do exist. Block a few thousand typo domains like hotmale.com, the obvious ones kids try like playboy.com and the most prolific ad/spyware based ones and you can make a reasonable sized dent - even if you can't catch everything.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Yes. Does it trample any civil liberties or anything else with a hard to immediately prove but ultimately huge cost? No.
So stop whining. You see flaws in it? Write to the Utah congresscritters and senators. Suggest better solutions. They evidently see it as a problem worth addressing, they obviously see the benefits as outweighing the costs - so suggest your better solution and see if they'll act on it. Just don't bitch for the sake of bitching that people chose a non-perfect solution that they still regard as better than the costs of implementing it.
I doubt that, say, GTA:San Andreas, could have been created without the huge investment that was made in it.
GTA 1 was the kind of game you could knock out in a couple of months. It also captured the moment and was hugely successful at the time.
GTA 2 came along, brought even more money in.
GTA 3: Liberty City moved to 3D and all the rest of it, but probably could have been developed off the profits of the first two.
GTA 3: Vice City could well have been developed off the profits of Liberty City.
GTA 3: San Andreas, true enough, couldn't be developed without a large bankroll - but by that point, they frankly had one. Then again, without the experience of the earlier titles, it would probably not have merited that money either.
To paraphrase the movie industry quote about scripts: Game ideas are like asses - Everyone has one.
Sure, GTA3:VC was an incredible game. The thing is, most indie developers probably shouldn't try to make it - they'd screw it up.
Making a successful game isn't about a good idea. It's about having good managers who know how to keep their programmers on track, developing good code without cutting corners. It's about actually, you know, planning milestones and such in advance so you don't have your coders crunching 20 hour days and coding while hallucinating. It's about knowing that good post-launch CS is the key to convincing players to go with your next title. It's about putting in the features that are fun, rather than the ones an obsessive developer has tunnel vision for.
Those are all skills which take time to gain. An indie developer probably shouldn't be developing a triple-A title. They should be developing the next Counter Strike or the next Turn Based Strategy title, getting the experience while they build their bankroll. Once they have a few hundred thousand in the bank then, sure, they should move on to the next really imaginative idea - like Will Wright's Spore concept and get to the point where they have milions to their name and experience with that scale of title.
There really isn't any reason why that should be impossible. So why don't we see it happening?
Because taking risks sucks. Few people mind betting everything when it's just your evenings and weekends outside a real job. The problem is, once you get successful, most developers don't want to feel the risk anymore (and that's excluding those who don't even wait to be successful and simply take a job at EA or wherever in the first place). A big publisher comes along, offers them a big sack of money and they never have to risk their nice big house again. Most of them take it.
Will Wright started with SimCity, Maxis evolved, got reasonably successful - then sold out to EA.
Peter Molyneau created Bullfrog, released Populous, Syndicate, etc. - then sold out.
The Roberts brothers created Origin, built up the Ultima Series, Wing Commander, Wing Commander 2 - then sold out.
RockStar started small with GTA1 and the like, grew, and ultimately sold out.
Westwood started small. Built some 2D RTS games, got hugely popular, sold out to EA.
About the only big names that haven't done so are Id, Valve and 3DRealms. Id has continued, sticking to its core beliefs, much to its credit. Valve had success with Halflife which its publisher (Sierra, now a part of Vivendi) barely advertised initially, built off a bought-in game engine (Quake 1) then went pretty much silent for years. 3DRealms is a good example of a smaller firm that got too successful too fast and now has enough money it can survive having a bunch of people who really don't know how to execute ideas as big as it seems to have for Duke - hence the constant restarting of the project.
The point is - a developer can start small and work their way big - but most decide they don't want to take the risk and sell out. The big publishers don't want to take the risks either - which is why their games are kind of boring. Still, just because m
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I have argued a few times that its not the features that sell a console but the games , but all things being equal otherwise the features can make or break the sale.
The Gameboy came out when Nintendo had its old seal of approval, ensuring that a lot of truly classic games were released for it.
While Nintendo still only had the GBA, Sega released the Gamegear. Atari released the Lynx - both vastly more technically able systems. Where are they now?
Even after their demise, when Nintendo released the Gameboy color, it was still less technically able than either of them.
Then, finally, Nintendo released the GBA. Consolewise it was roughly comparable to the deeply out of date Super Nintendo. Still, it sold massively.
Now Nintendo's released the DS (roughly comparable to an N64 with some cute gimmicks) while Sony has released a handheld PS2 in the form of the PSP. And still Nintendo don't seem to be too worried.
While arguments can be made about Nintendo's path through the actual console wars, they've had a lot of experience with handhelds that's no doubt taught them some very soid lessons.
It suggests that you don't have to win the immediate numbers market. You can let the others blow hundreds of millions in advertising budgets and take a massive loss *cough*microsoft*cough* on every console initially sold. If you can define your market (pure, fun, consistenly good games with an emphasis on children-friendly) and be profitable within it (because parents keep on buying their kids your nice safe system, year after year, whether it's technically the most advanced or not) then you're doing pretty well.
It's kind of like comparing the sales figures of an ambulance manufacturer against Ford's for the Explorer line. Sure, both have wheels, chassis, boxy metal bits, etc. and most of their drivers are convinced they have the power of life and death over everyone around them. At the end of the day though, that ambulance manufacturer isn't trying to get the best selling SUV in North America. It's making great profits selling smaller numbers of a very specific niche vehicle that it considers hugely important. While the bragging rights might be nice, it is pretty happy where it is.
You idiot. It's clearly Minnesotan's per second! If you can't speak the l33t speak, you shouldn't be on slashdot!
Either that, or gaminghorizon needs to either wait for the email version of the press release to cut and paste or by a better OCR program for printed ones that can tell Ns from Hs.
As for dots, they're clearly exploring new technologies like Nintendo is rumored to be doing with 3D. In this case it's evidently something based off of Dot Matrix technology. This assumption can be backed up by the need for 256+ audio channels - no one needs that much sound unless they're powering a dot matrix.
>>The combined smell of poo and hurl should cause a chain reaction around the boadroom as the entire staff voids their stomachs and bowels in a cataclysmic emetic eruption of Biblical proportions. While everyone's flailing around in a growing lake of filth, you slip out the side window.
>Remind me to never piss you off.
Nah. Just don't piss off Chunk from The Goonies. I knew it sounded familiar:
But the worst thing I ever done -- I mixed a pot of fake puke at home and then I went to this movie theater, hid the puke in my jacket, climbed up to the balcony and then, t-t-then, I made a noise like this: hua-hua-hua-huaaaaaaa -- and then I dumped it over the side, all over the people in the audience. And then, this was horrible, all the people started getting sick and throwing up all over each other. I never felt so bad in my entire life.
MP3 Version
Since when did the bible become the [direct] word of God?
The Old Testament, in a few parts, maybe. Moses got the ten commandments directly from God. The [hi]story of that event, along with the words from those commandments, then got passed down by the Jews as the book of Exodus. God didn't write the book, it's not his direct words. His words may be quoted in parts but most of it is just the Jews retelling the [hi]stories of the events.
The book of Psalms isn't even that. It's basically songs made up by various religious folk in honor of their God.
So, for the Old Testament, the Jews themselves see it as true stories about people's interactions with God. As far as I'm aware, no one seriously claims God sat there and directed it to be written, word for word, according to his wishes - they're the words of individuals used to describe the [hi]stories of those who did interact with God.
It seems kind of ironic that [some - you don't get to speak for all] Christians would take a book that even those who wrote it don't claim is the direct word of God (simply a recounting of the interactions with God) and then somehow, magically, make it become God's word after the event. That, to me, sounds a lot like narrow minded people trying to make something up to self-justify. And that's not what true Christianity's supposed to be about.
OK, on to the New Testament. A series of gospels written by the people who experienced God's son. Again, they're [hi]stories written by people who were there (if you disregard the evidence that suggests they were retold orally for about three hundred years before actually getting written down) and not the direct word of God.
So, as we have people writing accounts, not God directly writing through them, quite where do they become the direct word of God anymore than a blogger recounting an audience with the Pope is writting the direct word of the Pope? We'd laugh at the blogger making such claims, yet somehow it's OK to make them about the bible?
Then there's the fairly strong evidence that suggests the gospels were fairly selectively edited around 300 A.D. to suit political will at the time. So even if they were God's word, they likely stopped being a direct version at that point anyway.
And all of this is before the translations and retranslations that have happened for the last fifteen hundred years or so. Each and every one of those translations shows the bias of the author. I've got an old bible that belonged to my great grandmother that says, "And I shall call you wo-man because you come from man and you are here to serve man" Strangely that passage isn't in most versions - it's something that got interpretted in as it was translated.
So... Even if you believe the stories the bible is about were real events and not allegories that, over time, people came to believe to be real events... You're taking a book which the original authors never claimed to be the direct word of God and then choosing to believe it is in order to justify, in many cases, petty prejudices that some tiny justification can be found for by interpretting and interpretation of an interpretation in one way.
If you can understand where someone is coming from, maybe we can get past the hate and learn to agree to disagree.
I completely agree. Unfortunately, those who do rabidly believe the bible is the direct word of God use their own belief (which most others don't share) to attempt to justify why their beliefs should become laws, be taught to children etc. Unfortunately, those people have a tendency to then believe, "Well, as [my chosen interpretation] is the direct word of God, it can't be argued. Thus I'm right, you're wrong, there can be no debate." That creates just as big a problem.
When the bible is used to justify people being healthy members of society, doing good etc., I'm all for stepping back and letting them believe it just as thoroughly as they want.
When the bib
Do you actually think SCO will have any money left by the time this case is over? I bet this case only ends when SCO go bankrupt.
No. But, in the bankrupcy process, they will have assets that can be seized. Ironically, IBM may well end up owning the very system they're spending so much to defend themselves from claims of copying.
I preferred the classic educational film shown in highschools: Death on the blue screen.
A little gory but it made me think twice.
Anyone remember the start of the second Iraq war? When the U.S. government, being the only ones in control of GPS, decided to turn down the accuracy for all non-US military signals in order to stop any Iraqis from using off the shelf GPS gear against them?
I'm looking forward to Operation Someone Else Has Oil Freedom - the maps change from nice reassuring dots to three hundred plus yard wide shaded circles. With a large enough number of sex offenders (consensual BDSM, urinating against a tree when drunk, girls who lied about their age), the entire state of Florida will turn in to a great big glowing hot spot and the entire population'll freak out.
Given the choice: reassuring themselves that knowing where these people are makes a difference vs. slightly cheaper oil... which side will the average middle American fall on? Will they still accept war if it means turning down the accuracy of their knee-jerk response system for a while?
Hey, if one form of stupidity that only hurts their own citizens prevents another form of stupidity that hurts other countries' citizens, is it such a terrible thing?
*gt;> You fund these lawsuits every time you buy a CD. Then they sue you, you settle and they sue even more people. Solution: stop buying CDs.
I have no clue what the situtation is like here in Canada, but it is not as bad as the states.
Actually, it's worse in Canada. In Canada you fund them every time you buy a hard drive, a blank CD-ROM or any one of a number of objects that don't directly infringe on their rights but could conceivably be used to. Don't feel bad though, the Netherlands followed Canada's stunning lead this week - so at least you're not alone.
Now there's the ridiculous situation that, should everyone decide to protest the music industry and stop buying CDs, the music industry would, ironically, be even better off (they'd continue to collect royalties on every drive sold and have absolutely zero production cost). Sure, the staff would get laid off, no bands would get signed, but the share holders would continue to collect their royalties from drive sales in exchange for no expenditure whatsoever.
Worse, it gets better and better for them as time goes by. That the Netherlands where they charge X euros per gig of storage. A 60gb iPod will be taxed by about $250. That's painful right now. Now consider good old Moore's law (arguments about disc storage vs processors etc. aside). In another dozen years, we'll have ~2^8 times the capacity for the same price. Unless the ridiculous laws get reassessed, 256 * $250 implies a $64,000 tax on that 15 terrabyte drive that the nicer models come with. Now I know inflation's bad but I don't think it's quite bad enough to have $60,000+ iPods within a decade or so. Sounds like some politicians have no concept of how computing advances and they've signed in to being a law that'll be farcical within ten years.
Assume for a moment that CD prices have remained largely constant ($10-15 new) ever since they came out. If that remains the case, simply buying an iPod within a decade (or similar drive for your PC) will give the music industry the equivalent of your buying 4,000 albums. By that point, do you really think they'll care about a CD boycot?
Disclaimer: Yes, I know those numbers are unsustainable. That's kind of the point - illustrating how staggeringly short sighted most of the music industry protecting laws are. The one redeeming thing is that those taxes will get so stupid that the idiots who signed them in will be forced to reconsider them well within the decade.
Has anyone read the article and seen the name of this thing?
the Family Entertainment Copyright Act Legislation
With luck, we'll end up with an enforcement branch being created and the Supreme Court refusing to get involved under the ground, "We feel that, ultimately, copyright control in this country is a F.E.C.A.L. matter."
They do know it's the 20th, no the 1st, right?
Maybe to prevent walking by a car and seeing some pervert jacking off? I know I don't want to walk by a car and notice some girl being screwed by a horse while some weird looking guy smiles politely and acts like he's not doing anything...
There are already laws in place that regulate that. Spanking your plank in public, whether via wifi or a magazine is equally punishable.
Quite whose business it is, however, what a guy does in the back compartment of a big rig, with no windows below 8-feet off the ground and curtains drawn, is beyond me.
The bigger issue is what happens when a trucker checks the highway patrol warnings page and can't view it because "Woman flashing her breasts on overpass." causes the entire page to be censored. Or, to use your analogy, "Animals escaped from farmyard. One horse, one cock and a couple of bitches in right lane."
What other keywords would get blocked? Would every driver with a consignment of porn that he was carrying be unable to access his email because key words in his shipment caused every email about it to be filtered?
Even if they just filter specific websites, all it takes is for Larry Flynt to sue for access to be re-enabled to his website as he runs an extranet for his delivery drivers from it and the filtering now penalises legitimate business.
In short, it's a dumb idea that can't be implemented without causing all kinds of problems to perfectly legal business and the only justification for it - stopping weirdos from jacking off - already has perfectly good laws addressing it.
I worked for a couple of years as a bank teller.
The question is not, as you claim, whether it's reasonable to hold someone given reasonable suspicion. The question is how much doubt must be present -- this man attempted to use legal tender to satisfy a debt, and given my cash-handling experience I don't see any reason to have doubted him.
Exactly. You were a bank teller. Your job was to handle money, handle money and, uh, handle money.
If your training and experience did not involve significantly more understanding of money than a police officer is required to have, in order to have reasonable doubt, then you really shouldn't have worked as a bank teller.
I'm a programmer. There will be cases that are completely obvious to me that are not hacking. That in no way invalidates an officer saying, "OK, there's enough here for me to be suspicious enough to hold someone until I can get an expert to tell me one way or the other."
The officer didn't know. Nor, frankly, was it his job to know. If we required every police officer to have the training and experience of a bank teller in order for them to be able to deal with counterfeiting, what other training should we also require? We should definitely have them gain qualification as mechanics in order to be able to tell the difference between a scuffed VIN number and one that was actually tampered with. As with the hacking issue, a four year bachelor's in Computer Science should probably be sufficient. And, given things like identical twins and other false positives in those areas that an expert could also dismiss, a medical degree is an absolute must too. So, these fifty year old guys with their six or eight degrees... How much do tax payers pay them again?
You were a bank teller. It was your job to know these details about cash. He was a police officer. It was his job to know enough to have a pretty good idea when and when not to be suspicious enough to hold someone until he can get an expert to give him more information.
Ask the officer to quote miranda rights or penal codes, he'll likely be an expert. Ask him to quote, with the same degree of knowledge as a bank teller, the signs for counterfeit money and of course he'll fall down. His job is to have a fair idea of when to be suspicious and then to get an expert. If we wanted every cop in America to have the amount of education necessary to know as much as professionals in every field tey investigate, we'd be paying 100% tax and then some in order to keep these fine professionals.
Given your experience, it was unreasonable. Given his experience, it was something he considered reasonable.
Original Article
It was not as simple as not recognising $2 bills.
The cashier noticed smearing of the ink - which apparently was actually there. The $2 bills may have been the first thing that got her notice but the smeared ink on them is what she claims made her suspicious enough to call her manager.
When the officer came, he noticed that the bills all had sequential serial numbers - apparently a common sign in counterfeit currency.
At that point, given the smeared ink and the sequential serial numbers, the officer felt he had grounds to detain the man until the secret service could be called.
Now it turns out that, according to the secret service officer, the ink on legitimate bills does smear from time to time. I'd not heard of that, I'm guessing most people hadn't.
The fact that he gets them as a custom withdrawl from his bank - which probably has absolutely no other use for $2 bills - explains the sequential serial numbers. They likely get them relatively directly from the treasury in large batches and only issue from those large batches to him.
None of this proves he was a criminal - it was all completely explainable.
But it wasn't a simple case of not recognising $2 bills. The smeared ink and sequential serial numbers were enough for the officer to detain him until an explanation could be verified.
It may suck but the officer had reasonable grounds to detain him until he could confirm the story. I would imagine, in the majority of cases where suspect money comes up, the person caught tries feeding a story. At the end of the day, the question is whether you believe it's right to occasionally wrongfully detain one person or regularly let go many. Rightly or wrongly, the concept of reasonable grounds enshrines the former.
Can you imagine it being used to grade a paper on something like cyberspeak?
"You got an F. You were going to get a near perfect grade for your frequent use of direct quotes but it turns out our sentence structure and grammar were terrible and your logical flow was next-to-non-existant."
...to the next article discussing how Moore's law can't possibly hold up much longer begins now.
Sure, then Sony will be slapped with lawsuits after hundreds walk into oncoming traffic while watching a movie.
:)
That's OK. All the drivers will be watching movies on their PSPs too. So they'll all be compatible. Problem solved.
It's only dangerous if one group and not the other are distracted or if the distraction mediums are incompatible. In fact, Sony can spin this to their advantage by pointing out how dangerous introducing Nintendo DS's can be.
You're accurate about genuine respect.
There is however displayed respect. That special kind that gets displayed whether you're actually deserving of it or not.
This is the kind that gets displayed to an utterly incompetent CEO (to his face at least) because, well, he signs the checks and, whether you respect him or not, if you piss him off, you're screwed.
During the dotcom boom, most IT people got the displayed kind automatically. I remember being outright told, "You don't need to worry about HR and viewing unsafe sites. In the current economy, we can't replace you. You piss them off, they recommend you're fired, we refuse to do so because we can't lose you. End of story."
If a client pissed you off and you quit - or refused to work for them - it was [perceived as] way too hard to get someone else in. Thus they sucked up and displayed respect whether they felt like it or not.
It's a logical OR statement:
Genuine and Displayed: Respect is shown.
Genuine only: Respect is shown.
Displayed only: Respect is shown.
Neither: You're screwed.
What sucks for many in the IT field is that they were never really deserving of genuine respect, they just got the displayed kind because IT salaries were so nuts. Now the boom has burst and starving developers are [perceived as] a dime a dozen, they no longer qualify for the displayed kind. Thus, if you were genuinely deserving of respect, you continue to gain be shown it. If you were only ever getting the displayed kind - well, you don't merit it anymore.
Of course there's one other aspect to it. Scott Adams calls it the way of the weasel. Genuine respect still requires genuine people. In the typical workplace, many people will show respect if you genuinely deserve it - but there are still plenty of cretins who will screw anyone over, deserving or not, if it suits them. For them, whether you warrant genuine respect or not, they'll only ever show it to you if you warrant the displayed kind as, otherwise, you're not helping them directly and they can, therefore will, screw you.
"We must protest and make a fuss before somebody thinks of blaming us"
You have no idea how right you really are.
MSNBC have to point the finger at someone. Otherwise people might look closer to home. Like MSN.
The kid had a profile on MSN as Solitude where he listed:
Interest categories:
Military, High Schools, Death & Dying
Picture:
From the Gus Van Sant movie about a highschool shooting.
Favorite Things:
moments where control becomes completely unattainable...
times when maddened psycho paths briefly open the gates to hell, and let chaos flood through...
those few individuals who care enough to reclaim their place...
Hobies and Interests:
Plannning
Waiting
Hating
And then he linked to his homepage where he had a flash animation called Target Practice, which was about a guy going on a rampage with guns, killing police officers, then blowing his own brains out - which is pretty much exactly what he subsequently did.
I'm imagining, in all the hand wringing, MSNbc isn't going to be asking, "Why don't we automatically have flags go up when an under 18 lists their only three interests as the combination of Military, High Schools and Death & Dying?"
I'm not suggesting such invasion of people's privacy should be encouraged or practice, nor should MSN be held accountable for not doing anything to stop this. But the point is there that it's deeply hypocritical for one part of MSN to point at an exceptionally vague connection to video games while another part hosted what was pretty much his premeditated confession.
They exploit a technicality of a legal decision made against them to make their customers suffer.
On a simple level...
The OS development division and the Office/Word development devision are likely two fairly separate parts of the company. The same company perhaps, but nonetheless separate parts.
The OS division got ordered to strip Media Player and so they did it.
The Office/Word division did... nothing. No additional functionality was added. They just didn't spend money/time/resources on this new case.
If they'd added new code specifically to break it - as they apparently did in the old Dr.Dos days and as they did with Hotmail and the old Opera stylesheet deliberate bug, that would be one thing. But they didn't. All they did was not spend additional money fixing something they didn't have a legal obligation to fix.
A lot of web developers write their web pages to use the tag and call Windows Media Player directly. Their code won't work on this stripped down version. Are they secretly in league with Microsoft to undermine the EU? Of course not. They simply don't see it as worth the allocation of resources to provide a workaround to something that go changed after they developed their code. And, ultimately, that's all Microsoft's Word division is doing too.
Actually, to be fair, we don't even know if that's the case. For all we know, they may well be working on a fix, now this is identified, but didn't know about it until recently. There may well be a future patch that fixes this dependency issue. Word was written before the stripped down version of Windows was released and so, reasonably, it was coded with certain assumptions.
"video clips embedded into Microsoft Word documents don't run properly"
... whether Microsoft is complying properly with the requirement to offer a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player."
"The commission is still in the process of assessing
Well. They complied. They provided a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player. It's very unfortunate that the entirely separate application, MS Word, which is not a part of Windows doesn't do everything it used to, given that it relies on Media Player being part of the O.S. Then again, the ruling covers the O.S. not the separate application.
I mean, seriously... When I write an tag to use Media Player in a web page, it doesn't work as well now either. If an external app looks for a specific set of calls and can't find them, of course it's not going to work. That's hardly the fault of an OS that was ordered to stop supporting those calls.
Now, on the other hand, had Microsoft been ordered to fully and transparently transmit those calls to any application the user cose to install in Media Player's place - and if Real could prove they seamlessly supported that complete set of calls - then there'd be a legitimate case. But the article makes no mention of that.
What it does say is that Microsoft has to make a fully functioning version of Windows without Media Player. It has done so. It infers that Microsoft should also make Word support Media Player's absence better - but never actually shows where that was part of any ruling.
Weasley? Perhaps. Actually breaching the letter of the ruling? Not from anything that's actually in the article.
Which version of Word are you running? I'm on 2000 and it comes back each time. Then again, as others report it stays away from them, it may well be that it's sorted in some versions and not others.
If that is the case, the whole fuss is about, shock horror, there maybe being a bug in a Microsoft product?
If it bothers you that much, right click on the menu, choose customize|toolbars select PDF Maker 6.0 or whatever. Click Delete.
Telephone companies are not responsible for obscene phone calls or telemarketers - and I don't think ISP's should be responisble for porn, spam etc.
Which raises a good point... Why shouldn't they be?
Remember what the Utah solution actually is: The state government provides a list to ISPs. The government has stated that IF users want it, ISPs have to support filtering that list. There's no obligation on the ISP to find sites, identify them or anything else - simply allow blocking of a list that is supplied to them and only if the customer requests it.
Personally, I'd be all for my telco having a feature where I can say, "Nope. No more telemarketing and obscene calls please" and all of a sudden my phone wouldn't connect for calls from known telemarketing numbers and known obscene callers. It wouldn't be perfect but I'd be more than happy to accept a simple significant drop.
The cost to provide filtering for such a list is minimal - a couple of hours of a decent coder - that's all. After that, there's absolutely no cost to the ISPs nor is there any responsibility other than making it accessible. Even then, it's only ISPs over 7,500 users who have to give it away for free. So, call it $1,000 to develop a really basic blacklist filter that sits in your TCP/IP stack divided by 7,500 customers... Hmm, a one time cost of about 13-14c per customer. I think the ISPs can suck that up.
If you are a parent you should take responsibility.
You're not a parent, are you. Or, if you are, only of younger children. That view is regularly cited and, almost exclusively, only ever held by people without experience of actually being a parent.
The point is, no matter how much responsibility you try and take, the reality of parenthood is that you can't always be there to monitor every moment of their lives. Even if you're a stay at home parent - the moment you have more than one child, there will come times when you have one child burst in to tears in another room and have to go to them, etc.
What's wrong with having the PC in the same room as the TV set until you've taught the kid your values?
And how much good does watching them do? Just after the ad for a site where women make horses very happy comes on to the screen, because they accidentally clicked a link, you dive across the room and turn off the screen. So, does that make them "un" see it? Of course not. No amount of vigilence and sensible teaching in the world can make the web a place most parents would consider "safe" to surf - even if they monitor every moment of their child's usage.
Filtering, while not perfect (but that debate is for the parent post), is an attempt to address that. Even if you do monitor - you can only be reactive. A filter is a means of being proactive.
I agree that only seeing the sites you want to see is a good thing, but why in the world involve the ISPs? This is like requiring taxi companies to refuse to take you to a list of restaurants you don't like. If you don't want to go there, don't go there!
But the point is there's no way, short of monitoring every moment of a child's internet usage (which isn't truly practical) to ensure they don't end up going there.
It's not about whether an adult wants to go there or not - it's about whether an adult has the means to ensure their children don't go there.
The law's treatment of ISPs is nothing like a taxi firm, it's like a news seller:
Hardcore porn, right now, can be sitting anywhere on a newseller's shelves - right amongst the comics. Worse, it's virtually impossible to identify which links will and won't take a kid to porn or what endless cycles of pop-ups will. That's the equivalent of hardcore porn makers wrapping their content in Yu-Gi-Oh covers to ensure it gets more impressions.
What the law is saying is: Utah magazine publishers aren't allowed to wrap an innocent looking cover around their porn mags anymore and, as Utah can't legislate against out of state magazines, they're requiring news sellers to put magazines from a given list on the top shelf.
It's not even as if it prohibits free speach. You still have the right to speak. It's just that parents are being given the right to decide they and their families don't want to listen (and still have the right to decide to listen if they want to).
I agree it's not an ideal system. I agree it's not perfect. I agree some non-porn sites will mistakenly end up on the list. I agree there are better alternatives out there (though, as many parents evidently don't know of them, "better" is obviously a relative term).
But, just because something's not ideal, it doesn't mean it should automatically be ignored if, as non-ideal, it's still better than not doing it.
What are the costs? The real, genuine costs? Minimal if anything - a piece of cheap software that blocks a supplied list really doesn't cost much at all. Give a decent programmer a few hours, they can knock it up for you. Other than that and the Utah state government's money - the other costs are arguably negligible.
What are the benefits? Maybe not as great as promised but they do exist. Block a few thousand typo domains like hotmale.com, the obvious ones kids try like playboy.com and the most prolific ad/spyware based ones and you can make a reasonable sized dent - even if you can't catch everything.
Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Yes. Does it trample any civil liberties or anything else with a hard to immediately prove but ultimately huge cost? No.
So stop whining. You see flaws in it? Write to the Utah congresscritters and senators. Suggest better solutions. They evidently see it as a problem worth addressing, they obviously see the benefits as outweighing the costs - so suggest your better solution and see if they'll act on it. Just don't bitch for the sake of bitching that people chose a non-perfect solution that they still regard as better than the costs of implementing it.
I doubt that, say, GTA:San Andreas, could have been created without the huge investment that was made in it.
GTA 1 was the kind of game you could knock out in a couple of months. It also captured the moment and was hugely successful at the time.
GTA 2 came along, brought even more money in.
GTA 3: Liberty City moved to 3D and all the rest of it, but probably could have been developed off the profits of the first two.
GTA 3: Vice City could well have been developed off the profits of Liberty City.
GTA 3: San Andreas, true enough, couldn't be developed without a large bankroll - but by that point, they frankly had one. Then again, without the experience of the earlier titles, it would probably not have merited that money either.
To paraphrase the movie industry quote about scripts: Game ideas are like asses - Everyone has one.
Sure, GTA3:VC was an incredible game. The thing is, most indie developers probably shouldn't try to make it - they'd screw it up.
Making a successful game isn't about a good idea. It's about having good managers who know how to keep their programmers on track, developing good code without cutting corners. It's about actually, you know, planning milestones and such in advance so you don't have your coders crunching 20 hour days and coding while hallucinating. It's about knowing that good post-launch CS is the key to convincing players to go with your next title. It's about putting in the features that are fun, rather than the ones an obsessive developer has tunnel vision for.
Those are all skills which take time to gain. An indie developer probably shouldn't be developing a triple-A title. They should be developing the next Counter Strike or the next Turn Based Strategy title, getting the experience while they build their bankroll. Once they have a few hundred thousand in the bank then, sure, they should move on to the next really imaginative idea - like Will Wright's Spore concept and get to the point where they have milions to their name and experience with that scale of title.
There really isn't any reason why that should be impossible. So why don't we see it happening?
Because taking risks sucks. Few people mind betting everything when it's just your evenings and weekends outside a real job. The problem is, once you get successful, most developers don't want to feel the risk anymore (and that's excluding those who don't even wait to be successful and simply take a job at EA or wherever in the first place). A big publisher comes along, offers them a big sack of money and they never have to risk their nice big house again. Most of them take it.
Will Wright started with SimCity, Maxis evolved, got reasonably successful - then sold out to EA.
Peter Molyneau created Bullfrog, released Populous, Syndicate, etc. - then sold out.
The Roberts brothers created Origin, built up the Ultima Series, Wing Commander, Wing Commander 2 - then sold out.
RockStar started small with GTA1 and the like, grew, and ultimately sold out.
Westwood started small. Built some 2D RTS games, got hugely popular, sold out to EA.
About the only big names that haven't done so are Id, Valve and 3DRealms. Id has continued, sticking to its core beliefs, much to its credit. Valve had success with Halflife which its publisher (Sierra, now a part of Vivendi) barely advertised initially, built off a bought-in game engine (Quake 1) then went pretty much silent for years. 3DRealms is a good example of a smaller firm that got too successful too fast and now has enough money it can survive having a bunch of people who really don't know how to execute ideas as big as it seems to have for Duke - hence the constant restarting of the project.
The point is - a developer can start small and work their way big - but most decide they don't want to take the risk and sell out. The big publishers don't want to take the risks either - which is why their games are kind of boring. Still, just because m