Also worth mentioning that Douglas Adams was an atheist. Not that it makes too much difference but it does put the joke in a slightly different context.
I don't think most people think a car is like software - they think computers are like cars. They're both big expensive machines which everyone uses whether they want to or not, most people rely on them, and very few people know how to fix.
After that though the analogy breaks down a bit. Yes Mr. Gates it would be ludicrous for the government to tell you you have to buy your tires separately from your car (analogy he was hoisting when the whole IE Bundling thing went down) but at least tires can be removed from the car.
But what's significant for Slashdot (other than just being porn) is that the porn industry has adapted to technologies so quickly. Whereas the RIAA wanted to squash any technology that deviated from the one thing it had become good at selling (CD's), porn adapts as soon as the new technologies come out. VHS, DVD, Internet, etc. Instead of clinging to old technologies or whining when people try to pirate them, they just keep pressing onward.
Of course there are some differences. The porn industry can't cry to congress when someone pirates their stuff - congress would rather just shut porn down altogether (or rather their constituents would). The music industry is one whose product ages well (I'm listening to a ten-year-old album right now since a lot of new music is crap IMHO), porn always needs fresh stuff (thus the 11K titles per year). Plus while music is fun to listen to, porn has been likened to crack cocaine.
Plus on some level porn is easier to make than music or movies. I'm not going to say that the actual performances are easy (especially after watching that HBO series) but we're not talking about having to come up with ten clever songs or $100M in special effects. Plot is frowned upon. Acting ability is optional. 11K titles isn't all that significant when it takes maybe a week to make an average movie.
Of course there's technologies that have nothing to do with porn that work out fine - the porn industry didn't fuel the cell phone (phone sex only makes sense when normal calls are free) or the PVR or the iPod.
As late as 1999 whomever owned the rights to Atari owned the rights to Pong, as witnessed by the Hasbro Interactive title Pong: The Next Level. It's likely Infogrames/Atari still has it.
Note that this refers to calling a specific game "Pong", as opposed to all the Pong-clones popular in the 80's, like "Video Tennis", etc.
Thing is, when people pine for the Commodore 64 they're either nostalgic over the ancient implementations of things like word processors or databases, or nostalgic over games.
No one is still insisting that Paperclip was better than Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Write (though I'm sure a few will as soon as I hit "submit"), so apps are out.
As for games, people still love old C64 games. That Joystick on QVC with the games on it is selling enough to have its own hacking community and people are still psycho about games like M.U.L.E. (my Wife wants me to get one of those joysticks and hack Caveman Ughlympics on it - I'd prefer Fort Apocalypse myself).
Thing is, Commodore themselves didn't write many games. M.U.L.E. was Electronic Arts of all things, Fort Apocalypse was Synapse Software (long dead of course).
Just buying out the "Commodore" name won't allow them to sue abandonware sites. There *might* be something they can do to emulator authors, but that's doubtful.
They bought the "Commodore" name since it's still a powerful brand in people's minds. They'll see Commodore MP3 players and Commodore 64 joysticks in stores and think "wow, Commodore is still around..." Look at the sheer number of people who think Atari is the same company with the same people. Heck, when I was working at Babbage's in 1999 when Hasbro had the new games under the Atari name (Windows CD-ROM's) I had people come up to me and ask if they "needed their old Atari" to play these games.
The next slide simply showed a class of 4-to-5 year olds sitting on the floor of a classroom learning how to use some new Macs, they all looked like they were having a great time.
The implication was very clear - either your employees are less capable than the average four-year old, or it's going to be a breeze to train them.
I get the joke and I know what Apple was trying to accomplish, but it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. 4- and 5-year olds aren't worried about losing their jobs to decreased productivity. They don't have ten years experience in anything, much less Excel and Access and the particular way Windows works. Also, 4- and 5-year olds are in preschool or Kindergarden at best - of course they're having fun, every day is a blast. Your average office employee likely already loathes coming into work and they HATE change.
A very neat spin on the myth, but not one that works.
There's only one thing you truly need to make this a success:
Cheerleaders.
I know you're kidding, but
Problem #1) Cheerleaders won't want anything to do with it.
Problem #2) Most high school kids who would go to LAN parties are terrified of women (note I said most, not all)
Actually more to the point - how many high schoolers even own significant enough PC's to game with? I mean, that they own, not their parents. Most kids with jobs tend to pay for cars and such.
Throw a HALO party - TV's and Xboxen are easier to find and string together.
Because the presence of those actors almost always has a direct correlation to the amount of money the film brings in.
Which brings up a point - why does the MPAA care? I mean, it's not like movies are flopping left and right. If the MPAA had a case then Star Wars Episode 2 wouldn't have pulled in $300M, right? Of course movies do flop but there have always been flop movies and movies that do well. If the movie industry was hurting then why do we still have record weekends? Inflation doesn't always answer that. Heck, today a million or so people are going to buy the new ROTK DVD. They can sell movies after they've already been shown in the theater.
Thanks to piracy the RIAA is fucked, and we all know that. But even if 100,000 people download the new Oceans Twelve, it's still nothing next to the amount of money the movie is going to make...
This would be a perfect time for the XFL to come back! Yaaay!!
You jest, but I do recall some company (THQ, I think) got the rights to do an XFL game. Must have been a kick in the pants when the freaking league didn't make it long enough to even finish the game.
Well the point is that if a retailer can sell a game for $39.99, undercutting the RRP, then why can't Valve?
If Valve undercuts the MSRP, then the retailers don't carry the game. Popular speculation is that 90% of this game's sales will be in a store.
If Stardock can do it, then so can Valve.
Stardock's publisher let them do it. VUG is not letting Valve do it. The fact that HL2 will sell more copies than GalCiv is precisely the reason VUG won't budge.
Further, Stardock's publisher, Strategy First, is under the threat of bankruptcy - the last thing they're in a position to do is sue someone or threaten them.
Is this accurate? Do they not plan on releasing a retail boxed version that does not need activation (via steam)? That would be a pitiful thing to see. I always liked id's product key idea where you cannot play multiplayer if you have an invalid or duplicated key so prior to any decent keygens nobody would ever give out their key. We were more than willing to share the media but we kept our keys locked up tight. Now if HL2 is committed to online activation that would be a slap across the face of the legit customers.
You do have to activate it online - not sure if the installation stops you cold (I doubt it since as early as Saturday I saw screenshots of installations in progress) but you do have to "activate" it to play. However, remember that id Software took out the need to authenticate Quake 3 in a patch once the retail effectiveness of that game was done. I'm sure that Valve will do the same - especially if VUG pulls something. Valve will probably do a "FU VUG" patch at some point. Plus, with the mint they make off of this game, they can keep activation servers around forever...
From what I hear though the game's DRM is pretty lenient. You can install on as many PC's as you like, they just can't use the same key simultaneously. This isn't activation in the "Windows XP" sense of the word.
I do recall that at one point the plan was to release a less expensive single player only version of the game "to the Costcos of the world" that couldn't run mods, etc. Perhaps that's the version which won't need activation (assuming it ever comes out)
Quake I... well, you might have an argument there. Some truly excellent levels, some appalling levels, and a surprising hodge podge of inconsistent design - that speaks of a certain amount of "slapped together".
I don't recall who said it (if it was someone formerly of id or if it was a reporter) but essentially, Quake was an example of what happens when you change directions very late into a project. They had a more ambitious design in mind but they got scared at the last minute and scrapped it for the "DOOM with better graphics" feel. DOOM's entire development took a year, it was eighteen months into Quake's engine development before they changed directions. This why there's a level in a space dungeon, a level in a medieval castle, etc. There's no plot or consistency, etc. Still, fun game and killer deathmatch.
Required reading: Masters of Doom
Also, it's fun to post about id on Slashdot, knowing Carmack himself might show up and beat you over the head with a mackrel.
From the outside looking in, it seems like your site and your livelihood is derived much from web advertisements and such. I know there's more to it than that and I know you do other things (art for GameSpy, etc.) but I recall at one point, right about the time you did Club PA, that you were resigning yourself to having to go get regular jobs. It looks like that didn't happen (or need to) and for the most part your livelihood has survived the dot-com web advertisement bubble.
Do you see what you're doing now as something which can be sustained for a long time? Do you have any contingency plans?
Not exactly - what really happened is of course still in dispute forever, but the version I repeatedly hear is that Nintendo hires Sony to make a SNES-CD addon, and Sony gets the idea to make a 32-bit CD console with a SNES cart slot. They figure they can bully Nintendo into doing it their way. Nintendo doesn't cave and as a result Sony continues with their idea, sans SNES slot. The project was codenamed "PlayStation" originally but without Nintendo it was re-codenamed "PlayStation X" or PSX - thus the acronym.
An interesting thought experiment is to imagine what would have happened had we invaded Germany and removed Hitler instead of ceding the Sudetenland to him. People probably would have said we were overstating the threat, etc. Was Saddam as big a threat as Hitler? (Remember, Hitler had no WMD's either,) Maybe not. But if we had removed Hitler when he invaded the Sudetenland, Hitler wouldn't have been as big a threat.
Which is probably why we didn't remove Hitler - not enough support for it. We didn't enter WWII since, without a Pearl Harbor-caliber incident, we wouldn't have had any support for it. Clinton tried to take out Osama Bin Laden but failed and didn't persue it further since he knew he would have no support (the initial strike on OBL came as he was being impeached - many, including myself, saw it as a diversion tactic)
And perhaps Bush did The Right Thing. Perhaps he knows the things which we as Americans can never know, and perhaps 9/11 part II will be avoided simply because he took Saddam out of power. But had Clinton taken out OBL and 9/11 had never occured, we would still not have supported him or his efforts. And taking out Hitler would have never had popular support since we would have never knew he was one of history's greatest monsters.
Look at how things work - reactionary is more popular than precautionary. In hindsight it would have been better to search those terrorists and taken away box cutters. But when we search an old lady and take away her fingernail file, it's cruel and unusal. We want our lives to be safe but not inconvenienced. We want terrorists taken out, but only when we know which ones.
But if Bush knows something we don't and can never tell us, then he did what he did (invade Iraq) full well knowing it may cost him the re-election. Lincoln did what he knew to be right even though he knew it would cost him half the country. Today's politicians won't do the right thing if it costs them a district. Perhaps Bush did the right thing and is perfectly ready to accept defeat.
Interesting that you post this on Slashdot, a community not terribly behind Mono (.NET on Linux). The two problems behind coming up with something like this are
You will always be playing catch-up to Microsoft - you will never be caught up or ahead
Microsoft might take legal action
Plus there's other things - like how installers for DirectX video card drivers are Windows specific, or the fact that the consensus is to come up with or enhance native cross platform alternatives instead of helping Microsoft.
RTFA. It's the last home game the Redskins play before election day, not their home game against the Packers that season.
My bad - I guess I glanced over the particular football anecdotes a little too quickly. Still - this helps my point, it's not even a particular rivalry, it's the "last home game" before the election. If they had picked a particular rivalry then the point would be even harder to fit.
Has anyone else noticed how non-rigid this legend is? For starters, it's not every time these two teams meet, it's every time they meet in an election year, so only 25% of their games count toward this election. Plus, it's the "incumbent party", not one party affiliated with a particular team. If the Redskins always represented Republicans and Green Bay always represented the Democrats, then it of course wouldn't work. And - I'm no football junkie - but is this even a significant rivalry? I always figured the Redskins were rivals mainly with the Dallas Cowboys.
I hope Kerry wins and so I obviously like this "omen", but to me this is more akin to those guys that find the Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon connection - yeah it fits but how long did it take you to find the correlation?
...just set up a manual recording time of 2 hours on some channel, then when Tivo starts recording just change the channel on the actual cable box to the PPV one?
I know it won't work wih DirecTivos but it's a workaround.
Slashdot Mirror
Also worth mentioning that Douglas Adams was an atheist. Not that it makes too much difference but it does put the joke in a slightly different context.
After that though the analogy breaks down a bit. Yes Mr. Gates it would be ludicrous for the government to tell you you have to buy your tires separately from your car (analogy he was hoisting when the whole IE Bundling thing went down) but at least tires can be removed from the car.
Of course there are some differences. The porn industry can't cry to congress when someone pirates their stuff - congress would rather just shut porn down altogether (or rather their constituents would). The music industry is one whose product ages well (I'm listening to a ten-year-old album right now since a lot of new music is crap IMHO), porn always needs fresh stuff (thus the 11K titles per year). Plus while music is fun to listen to, porn has been likened to crack cocaine.
Plus on some level porn is easier to make than music or movies. I'm not going to say that the actual performances are easy (especially after watching that HBO series) but we're not talking about having to come up with ten clever songs or $100M in special effects. Plot is frowned upon. Acting ability is optional. 11K titles isn't all that significant when it takes maybe a week to make an average movie.
Of course there's technologies that have nothing to do with porn that work out fine - the porn industry didn't fuel the cell phone (phone sex only makes sense when normal calls are free) or the PVR or the iPod.
Note that this refers to calling a specific game "Pong", as opposed to all the Pong-clones popular in the 80's, like "Video Tennis", etc.
A recent cloning attempt is Space HoRSE.
No one is still insisting that Paperclip was better than Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Write (though I'm sure a few will as soon as I hit "submit"), so apps are out.
As for games, people still love old C64 games. That Joystick on QVC with the games on it is selling enough to have its own hacking community and people are still psycho about games like M.U.L.E. (my Wife wants me to get one of those joysticks and hack Caveman Ughlympics on it - I'd prefer Fort Apocalypse myself).
Thing is, Commodore themselves didn't write many games. M.U.L.E. was Electronic Arts of all things, Fort Apocalypse was Synapse Software (long dead of course).
Just buying out the "Commodore" name won't allow them to sue abandonware sites. There *might* be something they can do to emulator authors, but that's doubtful.
They bought the "Commodore" name since it's still a powerful brand in people's minds. They'll see Commodore MP3 players and Commodore 64 joysticks in stores and think "wow, Commodore is still around..." Look at the sheer number of people who think Atari is the same company with the same people. Heck, when I was working at Babbage's in 1999 when Hasbro had the new games under the Atari name (Windows CD-ROM's) I had people come up to me and ask if they "needed their old Atari" to play these games.
A very neat spin on the myth, but not one that works.
IIRC, ZSNES did release the source years ago - but all being x86 ASM (some portions in C) didn't do tons of people a ton of good.
Problem #1) Cheerleaders won't want anything to do with it.
Problem #2) Most high school kids who would go to LAN parties are terrified of women (note I said most, not all)
Actually more to the point - how many high schoolers even own significant enough PC's to game with? I mean, that they own, not their parents. Most kids with jobs tend to pay for cars and such.
Throw a HALO party - TV's and Xboxen are easier to find and string together.
Thanks to piracy the RIAA is fucked, and we all know that. But even if 100,000 people download the new Oceans Twelve, it's still nothing next to the amount of money the movie is going to make...
Would you prefer to have Windows Server 2004 or 2005 come out and be charged for this?
I'm not sure what HL2 does but IIRC, HL1 allowed 5 LAN'd people to use the same key.
Further, Stardock's publisher, Strategy First, is under the threat of bankruptcy - the last thing they're in a position to do is sue someone or threaten them.
From what I hear though the game's DRM is pretty lenient. You can install on as many PC's as you like, they just can't use the same key simultaneously. This isn't activation in the "Windows XP" sense of the word.
I do recall that at one point the plan was to release a less expensive single player only version of the game "to the Costcos of the world" that couldn't run mods, etc. Perhaps that's the version which won't need activation (assuming it ever comes out)
Required reading: Masters of Doom
Also, it's fun to post about id on Slashdot, knowing Carmack himself might show up and beat you over the head with a mackrel.
Do you see what you're doing now as something which can be sustained for a long time? Do you have any contingency plans?
Not exactly - what really happened is of course still in dispute forever, but the version I repeatedly hear is that Nintendo hires Sony to make a SNES-CD addon, and Sony gets the idea to make a 32-bit CD console with a SNES cart slot. They figure they can bully Nintendo into doing it their way. Nintendo doesn't cave and as a result Sony continues with their idea, sans SNES slot. The project was codenamed "PlayStation" originally but without Nintendo it was re-codenamed "PlayStation X" or PSX - thus the acronym.
And perhaps Bush did The Right Thing. Perhaps he knows the things which we as Americans can never know, and perhaps 9/11 part II will be avoided simply because he took Saddam out of power. But had Clinton taken out OBL and 9/11 had never occured, we would still not have supported him or his efforts. And taking out Hitler would have never had popular support since we would have never knew he was one of history's greatest monsters.
Look at how things work - reactionary is more popular than precautionary. In hindsight it would have been better to search those terrorists and taken away box cutters. But when we search an old lady and take away her fingernail file, it's cruel and unusal. We want our lives to be safe but not inconvenienced. We want terrorists taken out, but only when we know which ones.
But if Bush knows something we don't and can never tell us, then he did what he did (invade Iraq) full well knowing it may cost him the re-election. Lincoln did what he knew to be right even though he knew it would cost him half the country. Today's politicians won't do the right thing if it costs them a district. Perhaps Bush did the right thing and is perfectly ready to accept defeat.
- You will always be playing catch-up to Microsoft - you will never be caught up or ahead
- Microsoft might take legal action
Plus there's other things - like how installers for DirectX video card drivers are Windows specific, or the fact that the consensus is to come up with or enhance native cross platform alternatives instead of helping Microsoft.I hope Kerry wins and so I obviously like this "omen", but to me this is more akin to those guys that find the Wizard of Oz/Dark Side of the Moon connection - yeah it fits but how long did it take you to find the correlation?
I know it won't work wih DirecTivos but it's a workaround.