The problem is that the sonar detects an unknown object in the road. Very quickly it needs to determine characteristics of the object so it can project the movement of the object and the danger of running into it (a bowling ball and a basketball are both round but one is a lot more dangerous to run into). It needs to assess whether it is better to swerve to avoid the object or brake and the dangers of each (swerving into another car and crumpling fenders to avoid a high speed collision with a hurtling bowling ball might be acceptable if there's a danger of the bowling ball flying through the windshield while it would almost certainly be better to simply drive into the basketball with only moderate braking).
Humans instinctively make these choices very quickly. Computers right now aren't even close. Yes, sometimes humans make the wrong choices but we are much more forgiving of human error than we are of computer error.
Microsoft did not invent basic, though Bill Gates did write QBASIC for the Altair (QBASIC later found its way into DOS) and while BASIC did revolutionize computer science at its time (about 20-25 years prior to QBASIC) you really can't credit Microsoft with that.
Up above I posted a comment against someone's idea that it should be fairly easy to make such a system by insuring that only computer controlled cars drove on it. That said, I do think that some day we will probably get to the point of self driven vehicles being possible. They may not catch on commercially (we've had the technology to make amphibious cars for 50 years, for instance, but there's not enough demand to make them commercially viable) but we will have the technology to make a car that can handle real world driving conditions as well as a person.
Sure, no computer system is able to anticipate a drunk driver swerving across 6 lanes at 100 miles an hour without prior indicators such as weaving (assuming that 100 miles an hour is normal speed and not an indicator itself), but then no human would anticipate such a thing, either. Right now the human's biggest advantage is the ability to anticipate events when there are indicators. If the other car is weaving then the human would pay attention to it and adjust speed accordingly, assuming the driver is drunk or otherwise not in complete control of their vehicle. When you see a deer by the road you know it might suddenly jump in front of you. Right now computers are really bad at that sort of thing.
Of course there was a time when computers were really bad at lots of other things, too. Fifty years ago chess playing computers were fairly easy to beat but now there are programs that challenge the best players in the world. Assuming that computers will always be bad at anticipating events just because they are currently bad at it is a very shaky assumption.
Add in the fact that a computer programmed to drive a car will never start thinking about the weekend, will never panic, and will never call someone on a cell phone for reasons unrelated to driving and eventually you will wind up with a machine that is not only as safe a driver as human beings, but probably safer.
Someone once said, "In theory there is no difference between practice and theory. In practice, there is."
I've heard this idea before, the idea of a special 'robot only' road, and in theory it sounds really good. The problem is that it assumes everything works like it's suppose to, which is a bad assumption to make.
For starters it assumes that some idiot human isn't going to enter the system with a non-robot car. Preventing this is a lot harder than it seems. You would basically need some sort of gate system, similar to toll booths, where drivers had to stop at every entrance point to the system, and each station would need to be more secure than a modern toll booth. After all, if someone bypasses a tool booth without paying its an inconvenience but if they enter this system with the wrong car (possibly by crashing through the gate) they could cause multiple fatalities.
Once that problem is resolved you are still left with the possibility of other unpredicted events. An animal wanders out onto the roadway. Something falls from the bed of the vehicle up ahead. A tire has a sudden blowout. All of these are things that happen on highways every single day.
That's not to say that robot cars will never work. Eventually artificial intelligence will probably progress to the point where it is able to handle such things at least as well as a human, if not more so, and with the ability to communicate with the cars around them they will most likely be safer than modern driving. Instead it is an answer to your question 'how hard would it be to make a robot car freeway?'. Unfortunately the answer is 'harder than you think.'
Ok, Microsoft came up with ONE thing, but it still revolutionized the industry
Err...what was the one thing you're referring to? DOS? Microsoft didn't really come up with that. Bill Gates bought it from Seattle Computer Products, and it really wasn't revolutionary. It was pretty much a copy of CPM.
According to the article all the unnamed agency did was request that the site be taken down. The article could have it wrong and the agency had a court order and they ordered the site to be taken down, but assuming that the wording is correct then certainly the agency has the authority to request something like that.
"Hello, Mr. Jobs? We've got reports that Apple.com is a secret code for terrorists and we'd like to request you take the site down until our investigation is done."
"I'm not sure what medications you've been taking but I would advise you try halving the dose."
Sorry if it sounded like I was coming down on you. I truth I was really trying to illustrate that the terms 'cartel' and 'price fixing' were wrong, wherever they may have come from. The reason I mentioned that the words cared certain emotional connotations was meant to show that there was a reason for the hair splitting and I wasn't just being a grammar Nazi, but it probably sounded more like I was accusing you of bias, which wasn't my intent.
Sony/BMG, Sony/Arista, et al. are all owned by the same company when you get to the top of the chain while cartels have separate owners. The various sub-companies of Sony form a Conglomeration if you need a term for them but calling them a cartel is simply wrong.
Often the customer can listen to tracks for new CDs on machines in the store. Also they are (theoretically) able to talk to people in the store who might have useful insights into music that they were not aware of. Then there is the factor of instant gratification and the ability to handle cash (since lots of 16 year olds buy CDs but don't neccessarily have credit cards).
I'm sure there are plenty of other services that storefronts offer over online stores, which is all the OP was really saying.
Well, since you are talking about taking less from one person than another it does become something of a matter of perspective as to whether one person is being penalized or another rewarded, in this case. One of the posters up above provided a good business reason as to why Sony might wish to penalize online/reward high street shops other than just trying to keep prices high.
What isn't a matter of perspective are the terms 'cartel' (a group of businesses that dominate or monopolize a market that work in agreement) and 'price fixing' (when a group of companies collaborate to control the prices on something, with the implication of keeping the price artificially inflated).
Sony, being a single business (large though it may be) doesn't constitute a cartel on it's own and it's not making any agreements with anyone concerning pricing. Online retailers are free to charge as much or as little as they wish.
None of which is to say that I agree or disagree with Sony's stance. I am simply pointing out that the poster of the article has used several 'loaded' words in a situation where they do not actually apply.
This article was posted on Slashdot on October 25th talking about how the Microsoft's game console was going to be released and completely crush Sony's.
I realize it's a different author but its pretty much the same talking points. Microsoft has endless supplies of money, it will be easier to program the XBox than the PS2, people will have to choose one or the other (since we all know that at night when everyone is asleep the two systems would fight to the death), blah, blah, blah.
Do we really need to have such similar articles posted within the same 1,846 day span?
Every so often someone will come out with how $15 a month for games is too expensive and the price should be lowered without offering any alternative revenue stream. Usually these statements are accompanied with some comment about how the companies are raking in so much money from their subscriptions.
Simply running an MMO is a very expensive proposition. There are employees who have to be paid, facilities that have to be rented, equipment which must be amortized (you don't really think the Everquest servers are running on 7 year old hardware, do you?), and electricity and bandwidth bills that have to be paid. What's more, all of these expenses, with the exception of facilities, increase in a pattern that is close to linear.
Admittedly, even with those expenses there's usually a tidy sum left over, but for at least a while that money is used to pay for the development of the game. Even with the original box sales most MMOs start out in the hole because MMOs cost so much to make. I believe the typical development and marketing costs for MMOs are right now running in the $30-50 million range. Unless you're WoW you'll probably sell less than half a million copies in the first few months. If we are generous and assume that somehow the company makes $20 a box (which is probably a very high estimate) on sales then they still start out $20-40 million in the hole.
However, after you've payed the expenses involved in supporting a game and finally covered your initial investment the cash is just pouring in and you can make a big money pile in your office to roll around in, right? Well, not really. See, the odds are pretty good that as a company you've probably had other MMOs that you've been developing that never made it to market. A lot of these probably got axed early on in development and only ran a few hundred thousand dollars because you had a small team of five people on them for six months, but like they say, a few hundred thousand dollars here and a few hundred thousand dollars there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Of course this trivial amount has to be added to the not so trivial amount for games that get a few years into development with teams of 10-20 people before being cancelled.
So with the enormous cost of running an MMO how do you pay for it? Advertisements? Maybe someday, but not right now, and right now is when the bills have to be paid.
Besides, $15 a month really isn't that much. How much do you spend a month on your internet connection? How much do you spend a month on your telephone or your cable TV? Even if you figure that you spend more time watching TV than playing online there is a very good chance that your online time is cheaper per hour.
Does this mean that the market is doomed to $15 a month charges? Of course not. There's every possibility of someone far more clever than me putting together an alternative revenue source that works. Instead what I am saying is that the issue is more complicated than companies simply reducing their monthly charges to try and lure more customers.
Oh, absolutely. My point was never meant to be that Lucas' changes where any good and my comparison to Tolkien wasn't meant to show them in a favorable light. What I was really trying to show is not that Lucas' changes are bad because he has altered a scene after publication and changed a character (which is also what Tolkien did) but that Lucas' changes where bad for other reasons.
Everyone likes to jump on Lucas' head for his revisions to the original Star Wars and asking how he could do such a thing as making Greedo shoot first, altering the character of Han Solo. Let me start out by saying that I don't like his changes, either. I wish he had never made them. I still have not bought Star Wars on DVD because I cling to the hope that when the coffers start to run a little low George will realize there is money to be made with a DVD release of the 'theatrical' version.
All that said I would like to relate a story about one of the great icons of Geekdom, Tolkien. In Fellowship of the Ring Gandalf is speaking to Frodo about Bilbo and the Ring and he makes some mention of Bilbo first telling him an untrue story about how he had received it. Later, when pressed, he broke down and told Gandalf the true story about what happened between him and Gollum.
The reason for this short exchange is because, apparently, Tolkien himself re-wrote the scene in between his initial publishing of the Hobbit and writing Lord of the Rings. Originally, when writing the Hobbit, the ring that Bilbo acquires was simply a rare and magical ring that allows him to turn invisible. It was not the great Ring with the power to consume the soul of its possessor over time and the heart of Sauron's power. As a result Gollum was not the wicked creature we all know. When he loses the riddle game to Bilbo he is quite willing to give up the ring and lead Bilbo out.
It was only later when Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings that he decided to turn the ring into the Ring. He felt it would make the story more interesting to have the innocuous trinket turn out to be such a deadly item. Unfortunately this made the scene with Gollum no longer work. He couldn't give up the Ring of power so willingly, so Tolkien re-wrote the scene in the Hobbit (which had already been published for a number of years, mind you) and changed the character of Gollum, rather dramatically. He passed off the changes between editions as Bilbo recording a false version of his encounter with Gollum at first, changing it to the true version once the Ring was destroyed and its power over him broken.
I think most of use will agree that the changed version of the Hobbit fits the entire storyline much better and I doubt anyone feels it should be changed back to the original publishing, though I'm certain many of use would be interested to read it simply out of curiosity, so I guess sometimes revisions to the original can be a good thing. The problem with Lucas' changes aren't really that he made any changes. Rather it is that they are ham-handed, self serving, and unnecessary.
From reading the article it looks like what Sun is talking about is making a server solution to handle all the transactions that occur in your typical MMO. Transactions, in this case, doesn't simply mean the player economy, however. When a player moves the client tells the server the player has moved from point A to point B which is validated by the server. When the player kills a mob the game gives them XP. When a player chats the client sends a message to the server and then the server sends messages out to all clients close enough in VR space to 'hear' the player. These are all examples of transactions with the servers.
The reason Sun talks about the stock market is because like an MMO the stock market has massive amounts of transactions that occur in real time. Unlike games, however, it's a lot more critical to get the transactions right. If you think duping can screw up a game imagine what it would do to the world economy, and I would imagine that it is simply unacceptable for the stock market servers to crash and have all the transactions for the past 15 minutes 'rolled back' when they reboot (for that matter it's probably unacceptable for the entire system to go down in the first place, so when a transaction server crashes other systems have to pick up without the end users ever knowing anything happened).
As a result the transaction servers developed by Sun are leaps and bounds beyond what MMOs are using. Sun is saying it can bring that expertise to developers, saving them from the expense of coding their own, usually inferior, transaction servers.
Of course a lot of this is me reading between the lines. It seems like the author of the article himself doesn't really grasp what it is that Sun is saying, but maybe the truth is that I am reading way too much into things.
Sony's station pass is 150% of the cost of a regular subscription, but it allows you to play -all- premium titles that you've purchased, not just a second.
While players can still only play one game at a time, which means no extra bandwidth, their characters will be on completely different systems, unlike CoV where your villian character will using the same group of machines as your hero character.
Really, as several others have said this is more of an upgrade than a whole new game. The difference is that unlike traditional upgrades with CoV you don't need to purchase the original game, though you will be unable to access much (possibly all) of the original game content.
First off, please realize I am no fan of DRM. I would love for us to be able to live in a world where DRM didn't exist, so please don't flame me as sucking at the corporate teat or mod me as flamebait for trying to start an argument. What I am trying to do is expose some of the fallacies of your arguement in the hopes that more refined arguements can be generated.
Secondly, please realize I am not a lawyer and it is possible that I will muck up some small details, but I have followed copyright laws and DRM for long enough that I am fairly certain that my overarching points are accurate. Still, if I am wrong on a point please feel free to correct me and provide some sort of evidence to back up your statement.
Your arguement that since DRM protects the author that they do not have the right to copyright makes as much sense as claiming that since the lock on your car protects your car from being stolen, once it is stolen it is now the property of the thief and you have no right to reclaim the vehicle. By legal definition and symbolic logic these statements are practically identical since the law recognizes the work of the author as property that is every bit as real, legally, as your car.
As for claiming "a EULA is not valid, no matter how much the software and copyright cartels proclaim" this is superficially true, but only because it is the decisions of the courts that make EULAs valid, not the claims of software and copyright cartels. Unfortunately the courts have upheld that EULAs are valid, which means at present it is so. No proclaiming or decrying from you can make them invalid, no matter how heartfelt it may be.
This does not mean that we are doomed to a world of EULAs. Once slavery was legal and now it is not. What it means is that there need to be new laws passed to regulate or eliminate EULAs. It may prove very difficult to get such laws passed but until that happens the EULA is in general an enforceable contract and claims to the contrary bolster your position no more than claiming that your position must be right because the sky is green.
Arguing that copyright is not property because it has temporal restrictions is also not a valid arguement. There are various conditions under which property may be stripped away and given to the general populace. Emminent Domain is one of these. The fact that the government may strip you of property in certain situations does not mean that such property is not property. It simply means there are situations where property rights can be lost. The temporal expiration of copyright laws is simply one of these situations, albeit a more readily defined one.
Finally you claim 'when you sell a copy, the customer has the right to use that copy any way they wish, short of distributing it'. This is, in fact, not true. If it were than a movie theatre could go and purchase a commercially available DVD and charge admission to show it. Charging admission, even though they retain the DVD and make no copies, violates the 'fair use' section of copyright. It would be possible to split hairs are argue that somehow showing it like that counts as distributing the movie but at that point you become so picayune that it could be argued that making a copy to your home server is distributing it to your server.
You are correct in your assertation that "YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT to do with your property whatever you desire" but since copyrighted material is not, according to law, your property but is in fact someone else's property which you have been given certain rights of use then you do not have the right to do whatever you desire with copyrighted material.
Not lions, but we did have sabretoothed tigers. They are talking about replacing lost species with analogous species, such as elephants replacing mastadons and tigers replacing the sabretooths.
Now I am a very conservationally minded person. I do believe in trying to preserve all endangered species and that most, if not all, are endangered through the actions of man (which is why we are responsible for fixing the problem). I'm all for things like the efforts to clone the thylacine and reintroduce it, since it was wiped out by modern man, but these creatures went extinct a long time ago and if man was responsible for it in some way it was only because we were a natural part of the ecosystem (as opposed to today where we wipe out species because we have a disproportionately large effect upon the ecosystem).
It's a 2d image projected into the air, and since you don't have the flat surface as a screen to aid in your eyes depth perception, it appears 3D
Except that it's not the flat surface of the screen that makes an image appear 2D, otherwise when you looked out the window of your house everything would appear flat.
We perceive depth because we have two eyes and when you look at something in 3D you get slightly different images in each eye. This is how 3D movies work.
Since both eyes will see the exact same image, although at different positions relative to the background, your brain will process it as a flat object hanging out in space, much like the things you would see in an old Viewmaster.
Re:And this benefits us how?
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19 million Amps
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...Yes, that is a HUGE amount of current, but unless you are designing HUGE lasers...
We will be mounting the lasers on the heads of sharks.
I don't think that the author is trying to say that games should be like movies. I think instead when he makes the comparison he is showing that games need to come into their own, much as movies had to do when they first came out.
The author's point was that games, like movies, are a form of storytelling. What people need to do is to figure out what elements of cinematic storytelling work, what elements do not work, and what new elements exist that have not existed before. He uses movies simply because they are analogous to games at a certain base level and by examining the history of movies we can get some idea as to the current state of games in relation to where it can lead.
In the earliest days of movies they were basically filmed as plays. Over time people learned to use the special characteristics of the medium such as dramatic lighting, special effects, and camera angles, to make the medium what it is today.
Computer games are really just in their infancy. While our production and engineering capabilities have increased to the point where new technology such as DVD players can achieve in a few short years a level of market penetration that took VCRs a decade to accomplish innovations of style continues to creep along at the same slow pace. Zork was written around 1979. Edison patented the 'kinetoscope' in 1893 and opened the worlds first movie studio. This means that games are at the same level as movies in around 1919. Just for reference The Shiek with Valentino was released two years later, in 1921. Now ignore the technological differences such as lack of color or sound and compare the cinematography and acting of The Shiek with a more modern film, such as Lawrence of Arabia.
And it should be noted that movie styles continue to change, though at a slower rate these days. Part of this is the fact that we, as a population, continue to change, and part of it is the continuing process of refinement. Compare The Great Escape with the much more recent Hart's War. While the Great Escape shows all the techniques used in more modern films it is still not as stylistically developed as more modern films.
Now will you automatically like the new techniques that develop? Not neccessarily. As you point out you much prefer theatre over cinema. New storytelling techniques are not automatically better, they are just different. Books and movies are both storytelling methods and while you can't really get the same visceral impact of a high speed car chase in a book as a movie you also cannot really get the same depths of detail, insight, and empathy in a movie as can be achieved in a book. Every method has its strengths and weaknesses.
The author's point isn't that games will become like movies. In fact if anything they will probably become less and less like movies over time, just as movies have become less and less like theatre. The author's real point is that there is a common base between the two and that by understanding the link games can be made better.
Many movies forget their roots in theatre. They become so interested in the new things they can do, like car chases and big explosions, that they forget that they need certain essentials like character development and motivation. Likewise games of today are forgetting their storytelling roots.
To some degree this is to be expected. Just like the earliest movie technology didn't allow actors to be heard by their audience, making it hard to convey the more subtle elements of the story the earliest game technologies were too limiting to allow all the subtle elements involved in creating compelling stories, but over time that is becoming less and less the case.
Movies aren't the end point of game evolution. They are not the goal, but as the modern form of storytelling they are our start. They are the point we launched from, incomplete, just as movies were first incomplete when they launched from theatre. As time goes by we are regaining those tools of storytelling that we were forced to leave behind, but tools won't do us any good if we forget how to use them.
If you went to the "uploading clinic", and they put you under a general anaestheic, uploaded you, and terminated the leftover hunk of meat, how would that be different than simply going to sleep and waking up (albeit in a new "body")?
Well, I suppose for starters one difference would be the fact that I was dead.
Just because a computer has a copy of my memories that doesn't mean I am now inside that computer. It just means there is a copy of me in that computer. Any clever games that are played so that the copy is unaware of the fact that it's a copy don't alter the fact that it's a copy.
The proof of this can be seen in the fact that if I make a photocopy of a page in a book the photocopy is, obviously, unaware that it is a copy. Does that mean that what came out of the photocopier is now the original simply because it doesn't know any better? Of course not.
The idea that somehow a copy of your mind is actually you can be easily disproven with the following example: Your engrams are uploaded into a clone. Because of the process the clone is completely unaware of the fact that it is a clone and it has been told that you, in fact, are the clone. As the two of you leave the clone is killed by a speeding bus. According to your logic, you, rather than some copy of you, has just died, which is of course complete nonsense.
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Humans instinctively make these choices very quickly. Computers right now aren't even close. Yes, sometimes humans make the wrong choices but we are much more forgiving of human error than we are of computer error.
Microsoft did not invent basic, though Bill Gates did write QBASIC for the Altair (QBASIC later found its way into DOS) and while BASIC did revolutionize computer science at its time (about 20-25 years prior to QBASIC) you really can't credit Microsoft with that.
Sure, no computer system is able to anticipate a drunk driver swerving across 6 lanes at 100 miles an hour without prior indicators such as weaving (assuming that 100 miles an hour is normal speed and not an indicator itself), but then no human would anticipate such a thing, either. Right now the human's biggest advantage is the ability to anticipate events when there are indicators. If the other car is weaving then the human would pay attention to it and adjust speed accordingly, assuming the driver is drunk or otherwise not in complete control of their vehicle. When you see a deer by the road you know it might suddenly jump in front of you. Right now computers are really bad at that sort of thing.
Of course there was a time when computers were really bad at lots of other things, too. Fifty years ago chess playing computers were fairly easy to beat but now there are programs that challenge the best players in the world. Assuming that computers will always be bad at anticipating events just because they are currently bad at it is a very shaky assumption.
Add in the fact that a computer programmed to drive a car will never start thinking about the weekend, will never panic, and will never call someone on a cell phone for reasons unrelated to driving and eventually you will wind up with a machine that is not only as safe a driver as human beings, but probably safer.
I've heard this idea before, the idea of a special 'robot only' road, and in theory it sounds really good. The problem is that it assumes everything works like it's suppose to, which is a bad assumption to make.
For starters it assumes that some idiot human isn't going to enter the system with a non-robot car. Preventing this is a lot harder than it seems. You would basically need some sort of gate system, similar to toll booths, where drivers had to stop at every entrance point to the system, and each station would need to be more secure than a modern toll booth. After all, if someone bypasses a tool booth without paying its an inconvenience but if they enter this system with the wrong car (possibly by crashing through the gate) they could cause multiple fatalities.
Once that problem is resolved you are still left with the possibility of other unpredicted events. An animal wanders out onto the roadway. Something falls from the bed of the vehicle up ahead. A tire has a sudden blowout. All of these are things that happen on highways every single day.
That's not to say that robot cars will never work. Eventually artificial intelligence will probably progress to the point where it is able to handle such things at least as well as a human, if not more so, and with the ability to communicate with the cars around them they will most likely be safer than modern driving. Instead it is an answer to your question 'how hard would it be to make a robot car freeway?'. Unfortunately the answer is 'harder than you think.'
Err...what was the one thing you're referring to? DOS? Microsoft didn't really come up with that. Bill Gates bought it from Seattle Computer Products, and it really wasn't revolutionary. It was pretty much a copy of CPM.
"Hello, Mr. Jobs? We've got reports that Apple.com is a secret code for terrorists and we'd like to request you take the site down until our investigation is done."
"I'm not sure what medications you've been taking but I would advise you try halving the dose."
I stopped at a Shell Station. They told me I had blown a seal. I said 'Fix the damn thing and leave my personal life out of it'.
Sorry if it sounded like I was coming down on you. I truth I was really trying to illustrate that the terms 'cartel' and 'price fixing' were wrong, wherever they may have come from. The reason I mentioned that the words cared certain emotional connotations was meant to show that there was a reason for the hair splitting and I wasn't just being a grammar Nazi, but it probably sounded more like I was accusing you of bias, which wasn't my intent.
Sony/BMG, Sony/Arista, et al. are all owned by the same company when you get to the top of the chain while cartels have separate owners. The various sub-companies of Sony form a Conglomeration if you need a term for them but calling them a cartel is simply wrong.
I'm sure there are plenty of other services that storefronts offer over online stores, which is all the OP was really saying.
What isn't a matter of perspective are the terms 'cartel' (a group of businesses that dominate or monopolize a market that work in agreement) and 'price fixing' (when a group of companies collaborate to control the prices on something, with the implication of keeping the price artificially inflated).
Sony, being a single business (large though it may be) doesn't constitute a cartel on it's own and it's not making any agreements with anyone concerning pricing. Online retailers are free to charge as much or as little as they wish.
None of which is to say that I agree or disagree with Sony's stance. I am simply pointing out that the poster of the article has used several 'loaded' words in a situation where they do not actually apply.
This article was posted on Slashdot on October 25th talking about how the Microsoft's game console was going to be released and completely crush Sony's.
I realize it's a different author but its pretty much the same talking points. Microsoft has endless supplies of money, it will be easier to program the XBox than the PS2, people will have to choose one or the other (since we all know that at night when everyone is asleep the two systems would fight to the death), blah, blah, blah.
Do we really need to have such similar articles posted within the same 1,846 day span?
I mean seriously, look at how many years it took before television completely killed off radio.
Simply running an MMO is a very expensive proposition. There are employees who have to be paid, facilities that have to be rented, equipment which must be amortized (you don't really think the Everquest servers are running on 7 year old hardware, do you?), and electricity and bandwidth bills that have to be paid. What's more, all of these expenses, with the exception of facilities, increase in a pattern that is close to linear.
Admittedly, even with those expenses there's usually a tidy sum left over, but for at least a while that money is used to pay for the development of the game. Even with the original box sales most MMOs start out in the hole because MMOs cost so much to make. I believe the typical development and marketing costs for MMOs are right now running in the $30-50 million range. Unless you're WoW you'll probably sell less than half a million copies in the first few months. If we are generous and assume that somehow the company makes $20 a box (which is probably a very high estimate) on sales then they still start out $20-40 million in the hole.
However, after you've payed the expenses involved in supporting a game and finally covered your initial investment the cash is just pouring in and you can make a big money pile in your office to roll around in, right? Well, not really. See, the odds are pretty good that as a company you've probably had other MMOs that you've been developing that never made it to market. A lot of these probably got axed early on in development and only ran a few hundred thousand dollars because you had a small team of five people on them for six months, but like they say, a few hundred thousand dollars here and a few hundred thousand dollars there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. Of course this trivial amount has to be added to the not so trivial amount for games that get a few years into development with teams of 10-20 people before being cancelled.
So with the enormous cost of running an MMO how do you pay for it? Advertisements? Maybe someday, but not right now, and right now is when the bills have to be paid.
Besides, $15 a month really isn't that much. How much do you spend a month on your internet connection? How much do you spend a month on your telephone or your cable TV? Even if you figure that you spend more time watching TV than playing online there is a very good chance that your online time is cheaper per hour.
Does this mean that the market is doomed to $15 a month charges? Of course not. There's every possibility of someone far more clever than me putting together an alternative revenue source that works. Instead what I am saying is that the issue is more complicated than companies simply reducing their monthly charges to try and lure more customers.
Oh, absolutely. My point was never meant to be that Lucas' changes where any good and my comparison to Tolkien wasn't meant to show them in a favorable light. What I was really trying to show is not that Lucas' changes are bad because he has altered a scene after publication and changed a character (which is also what Tolkien did) but that Lucas' changes where bad for other reasons.
All that said I would like to relate a story about one of the great icons of Geekdom, Tolkien. In Fellowship of the Ring Gandalf is speaking to Frodo about Bilbo and the Ring and he makes some mention of Bilbo first telling him an untrue story about how he had received it. Later, when pressed, he broke down and told Gandalf the true story about what happened between him and Gollum.
The reason for this short exchange is because, apparently, Tolkien himself re-wrote the scene in between his initial publishing of the Hobbit and writing Lord of the Rings. Originally, when writing the Hobbit, the ring that Bilbo acquires was simply a rare and magical ring that allows him to turn invisible. It was not the great Ring with the power to consume the soul of its possessor over time and the heart of Sauron's power. As a result Gollum was not the wicked creature we all know. When he loses the riddle game to Bilbo he is quite willing to give up the ring and lead Bilbo out.
It was only later when Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings that he decided to turn the ring into the Ring. He felt it would make the story more interesting to have the innocuous trinket turn out to be such a deadly item. Unfortunately this made the scene with Gollum no longer work. He couldn't give up the Ring of power so willingly, so Tolkien re-wrote the scene in the Hobbit (which had already been published for a number of years, mind you) and changed the character of Gollum, rather dramatically. He passed off the changes between editions as Bilbo recording a false version of his encounter with Gollum at first, changing it to the true version once the Ring was destroyed and its power over him broken.
I think most of use will agree that the changed version of the Hobbit fits the entire storyline much better and I doubt anyone feels it should be changed back to the original publishing, though I'm certain many of use would be interested to read it simply out of curiosity, so I guess sometimes revisions to the original can be a good thing. The problem with Lucas' changes aren't really that he made any changes. Rather it is that they are ham-handed, self serving, and unnecessary.
The reason Sun talks about the stock market is because like an MMO the stock market has massive amounts of transactions that occur in real time. Unlike games, however, it's a lot more critical to get the transactions right. If you think duping can screw up a game imagine what it would do to the world economy, and I would imagine that it is simply unacceptable for the stock market servers to crash and have all the transactions for the past 15 minutes 'rolled back' when they reboot (for that matter it's probably unacceptable for the entire system to go down in the first place, so when a transaction server crashes other systems have to pick up without the end users ever knowing anything happened).
As a result the transaction servers developed by Sun are leaps and bounds beyond what MMOs are using. Sun is saying it can bring that expertise to developers, saving them from the expense of coding their own, usually inferior, transaction servers.
Of course a lot of this is me reading between the lines. It seems like the author of the article himself doesn't really grasp what it is that Sun is saying, but maybe the truth is that I am reading way too much into things.
Actually, I'm pretty sure Ruins of Kunark contained the entire game, because this is what I purchased when I started playing.
While players can still only play one game at a time, which means no extra bandwidth, their characters will be on completely different systems, unlike CoV where your villian character will using the same group of machines as your hero character.
Really, as several others have said this is more of an upgrade than a whole new game. The difference is that unlike traditional upgrades with CoV you don't need to purchase the original game, though you will be unable to access much (possibly all) of the original game content.
Secondly, please realize I am not a lawyer and it is possible that I will muck up some small details, but I have followed copyright laws and DRM for long enough that I am fairly certain that my overarching points are accurate. Still, if I am wrong on a point please feel free to correct me and provide some sort of evidence to back up your statement.
Your arguement that since DRM protects the author that they do not have the right to copyright makes as much sense as claiming that since the lock on your car protects your car from being stolen, once it is stolen it is now the property of the thief and you have no right to reclaim the vehicle. By legal definition and symbolic logic these statements are practically identical since the law recognizes the work of the author as property that is every bit as real, legally, as your car.
As for claiming "a EULA is not valid, no matter how much the software and copyright cartels proclaim" this is superficially true, but only because it is the decisions of the courts that make EULAs valid, not the claims of software and copyright cartels. Unfortunately the courts have upheld that EULAs are valid, which means at present it is so. No proclaiming or decrying from you can make them invalid, no matter how heartfelt it may be.
This does not mean that we are doomed to a world of EULAs. Once slavery was legal and now it is not. What it means is that there need to be new laws passed to regulate or eliminate EULAs. It may prove very difficult to get such laws passed but until that happens the EULA is in general an enforceable contract and claims to the contrary bolster your position no more than claiming that your position must be right because the sky is green.
Arguing that copyright is not property because it has temporal restrictions is also not a valid arguement. There are various conditions under which property may be stripped away and given to the general populace. Emminent Domain is one of these. The fact that the government may strip you of property in certain situations does not mean that such property is not property. It simply means there are situations where property rights can be lost. The temporal expiration of copyright laws is simply one of these situations, albeit a more readily defined one.
Finally you claim 'when you sell a copy, the customer has the right to use that copy any way they wish, short of distributing it'. This is, in fact, not true. If it were than a movie theatre could go and purchase a commercially available DVD and charge admission to show it. Charging admission, even though they retain the DVD and make no copies, violates the 'fair use' section of copyright. It would be possible to split hairs are argue that somehow showing it like that counts as distributing the movie but at that point you become so picayune that it could be argued that making a copy to your home server is distributing it to your server.
You are correct in your assertation that "YOU HAVE EVERY RIGHT to do with your property whatever you desire" but since copyrighted material is not, according to law, your property but is in fact someone else's property which you have been given certain rights of use then you do not have the right to do whatever you desire with copyrighted material.
Now I am a very conservationally minded person. I do believe in trying to preserve all endangered species and that most, if not all, are endangered through the actions of man (which is why we are responsible for fixing the problem). I'm all for things like the efforts to clone the thylacine and reintroduce it, since it was wiped out by modern man, but these creatures went extinct a long time ago and if man was responsible for it in some way it was only because we were a natural part of the ecosystem (as opposed to today where we wipe out species because we have a disproportionately large effect upon the ecosystem).
And the coolest animal we ever had wasn't the giant sloth. It was the terror birds (http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/4 75.shtml) in my opinion. :)
Except that it's not the flat surface of the screen that makes an image appear 2D, otherwise when you looked out the window of your house everything would appear flat.
We perceive depth because we have two eyes and when you look at something in 3D you get slightly different images in each eye. This is how 3D movies work.
Since both eyes will see the exact same image, although at different positions relative to the background, your brain will process it as a flat object hanging out in space, much like the things you would see in an old Viewmaster.
We will be mounting the lasers on the heads of sharks.
The author's point was that games, like movies, are a form of storytelling. What people need to do is to figure out what elements of cinematic storytelling work, what elements do not work, and what new elements exist that have not existed before. He uses movies simply because they are analogous to games at a certain base level and by examining the history of movies we can get some idea as to the current state of games in relation to where it can lead.
In the earliest days of movies they were basically filmed as plays. Over time people learned to use the special characteristics of the medium such as dramatic lighting, special effects, and camera angles, to make the medium what it is today.
Computer games are really just in their infancy. While our production and engineering capabilities have increased to the point where new technology such as DVD players can achieve in a few short years a level of market penetration that took VCRs a decade to accomplish innovations of style continues to creep along at the same slow pace. Zork was written around 1979. Edison patented the 'kinetoscope' in 1893 and opened the worlds first movie studio. This means that games are at the same level as movies in around 1919. Just for reference The Shiek with Valentino was released two years later, in 1921. Now ignore the technological differences such as lack of color or sound and compare the cinematography and acting of The Shiek with a more modern film, such as Lawrence of Arabia.
And it should be noted that movie styles continue to change, though at a slower rate these days. Part of this is the fact that we, as a population, continue to change, and part of it is the continuing process of refinement. Compare The Great Escape with the much more recent Hart's War. While the Great Escape shows all the techniques used in more modern films it is still not as stylistically developed as more modern films.
Now will you automatically like the new techniques that develop? Not neccessarily. As you point out you much prefer theatre over cinema. New storytelling techniques are not automatically better, they are just different. Books and movies are both storytelling methods and while you can't really get the same visceral impact of a high speed car chase in a book as a movie you also cannot really get the same depths of detail, insight, and empathy in a movie as can be achieved in a book. Every method has its strengths and weaknesses.
The author's point isn't that games will become like movies. In fact if anything they will probably become less and less like movies over time, just as movies have become less and less like theatre. The author's real point is that there is a common base between the two and that by understanding the link games can be made better.
Many movies forget their roots in theatre. They become so interested in the new things they can do, like car chases and big explosions, that they forget that they need certain essentials like character development and motivation. Likewise games of today are forgetting their storytelling roots.
To some degree this is to be expected. Just like the earliest movie technology didn't allow actors to be heard by their audience, making it hard to convey the more subtle elements of the story the earliest game technologies were too limiting to allow all the subtle elements involved in creating compelling stories, but over time that is becoming less and less the case.
Movies aren't the end point of game evolution. They are not the goal, but as the modern form of storytelling they are our start. They are the point we launched from, incomplete, just as movies were first incomplete when they launched from theatre. As time goes by we are regaining those tools of storytelling that we were forced to leave behind, but tools won't do us any good if we forget how to use them.
Well, I suppose for starters one difference would be the fact that I was dead.
Just because a computer has a copy of my memories that doesn't mean I am now inside that computer. It just means there is a copy of me in that computer. Any clever games that are played so that the copy is unaware of the fact that it's a copy don't alter the fact that it's a copy.
The proof of this can be seen in the fact that if I make a photocopy of a page in a book the photocopy is, obviously, unaware that it is a copy. Does that mean that what came out of the photocopier is now the original simply because it doesn't know any better? Of course not.
The idea that somehow a copy of your mind is actually you can be easily disproven with the following example: Your engrams are uploaded into a clone. Because of the process the clone is completely unaware of the fact that it is a clone and it has been told that you, in fact, are the clone. As the two of you leave the clone is killed by a speeding bus. According to your logic, you, rather than some copy of you, has just died, which is of course complete nonsense.