And in the specific case of a computer or video game, there's little chance of the consumer being ripped off, since there's systems in place like reviews, Internet commentary, demos, etc. If you're still concerned, buy from some place like GameStop that has a lenient take-back policy.
Consumers didn't get hurt one bit by Daikatana taking four years too long, but Eidos took a $30M hit. Worse, the reviews, word of mouth and demo ensured that to this day the game sits in $5 dust bins.
However, convincing people to buy into a streaming video technology which really consists of a VCR in a PC case (not in this instance but in another I've heard of) is a vaporware scam.
I think people are confusing frustration at sliding ship dates with an actual crime.
Well the critical difference, I think, in what will be considered "criminal" in the Vaporware world is whether or not there's money involved. It's one thing to put on a smoke and mirrors show in order to get more investors money - and then not spend that money on what was claimed to be invested in. In this case it's either that the above had happened, or the developers really were doing what they said they were with the investment money, and they have the bad luck of being at Enron at this point in time.
Regarding DNF, it's being funded out of 3D Realms' pocket at this point in time (following comments by George on Shacknews), so no one is being bilked out of anything.
Besides, Battlecruiser 3000AD was Vaporware for like eight years, so as you can see there's worse things than never being released.
Fix bugs by advertising. Release patches through the media.
Umm, isn't that a bad idea? I mean, it's bad publicity for Microsoft that there's a new bug reported and patched each week. It's bad when something like the Slammer Worm makes the front page news. Sure, it's good that they're finding and fixing the bugs but it's bad for mainstream America to hear about it. By that logic mainstream America has no idea about this SCO Linux thing.
Winamp 3 was more of an experiment that pretty much failed
Really? I figured it was like a Netscape 4.7/6.0 situation where you continue to support the older for a while until you get the newer up to speed. Winamp 3 did just enough things wrong for me to not use it, plus at the time I was saddled with a CD-ROM drive at work that couldn't stream an MP3 for shit so I used Winamp 2's MP3 Decoder ability to cache a file to the hard drive before playing it. Winamp 3 didn't do this, as far as I could tell.
To some degree Winamp 2 is done (as far as MP3 is concerned), so I had no problem with the idea that Winamp 3 would try out some more experimental features. Hell if you're getting mad paid why not play around?
Just out of interest, how many Indians can do this job well?
I'm not sure but I think the general gist is that it's cheaper to pay Indian workers a small wage to maintain old code than it is to hire Americans to do the same thing or to rewrite it. How long this argument can hold water (i.e., how long before it really does have to be rewritten) remains to be seen.
OK, this is my last entry in this little flame war I seem to have started.
Right now the tech industry hates the old. I'm currently one of the ones that can profit from this attitude. I also fully realize it's going to bite me in the ass, so I hope this attitude changes.
And yes there are a lot of 50-year-old programmers who want to treat their gig like they were clocking out at the factory. There are also many 25-year-old programmers that feel this way as well. The difference is that the 25-year-old will have an easier time finding work for all the aforementioned reasons (lower pay, not wanting to retire soon), and will have an easier time switching jobs.
I'm not biased - if an older coder can outdo a younger one, give him the job. To hell with the cost.
Care to elaborate? I just got done working in a mainframe environment for two years, so I know of all the potential problems of mainframe programmers, though since the place I worked was less than ideal, I don't know of a lot of the pro's. My former coworker was more than thirty years older than me with no hope of retiring or moving jobs. Explain how I am a bigot for being observant.
A quick glance at your other replies on this topic indicates that you are probably an older gentleman who is a little bitter about their personal situation.
The 50-year-old programmer will want more money. Not so much a problem for us as it is for the company in question.
The 50-year-old programmer will probably want to retire soon (as has been mentioned), meaning your pool of candidates is increasingly younger - and less likely to have any mainframe skills.
It's entirely possible that your 50-year-old programmer is working on being a 60-year-old programmer or even a 70-year-old programmer - i.e., badly in debt and no hope of retiring and increasingly feeble. Sure, we all know of people on the top of their game well into their 80's but these are the exceptions. Plus, odds are one of these days the programmer may die on you. I've read a statistic that in 15 years, 25% of the COBOL programmers in the world will be retired or dead.
The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home. In some cases this is fine, but in others it's a big issue.
Again, the answer to the problem today is "hire the 50-year-old programmer" but ten years from now it may be "where are all the programmers?" or "do we dare hire this 60-year-old programmer?". Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike - sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?
Re:Possible legal problems?
on
Gentoo Games
·
· Score: 2, Informative
perhaps it would help things if the square G logo wasn't purple.
Where do you find a burrito joint that routinely breaks $100s?
It's called Freebirds and they're in Texas. They started out in College Station (Texas A&M, Bjarne Stroustroup) and they've branched out to Dallas, Austin and Houston. People wait in long lines to get a "monster" - essentially a large burrito. Plus there's the "super monster" for those with no respect for their own stomachs.
True story: a friend of mine went to a popular burrito joint in town and paid for his $5 burrito with a then-new $20. The cashier somewhat blindly thinks its a then-relatively-new $100, so gives him $95 in change instead of just $15. The friend took the money and left quickly.
I told him he was all horrible and evil for doing so - but I'm not sure I wouldn't have done the same.
It's my understanding Bink has the Linux codecs now but it's probably something akin to "well you only signed up for the Windows version, so if you want the Linux version it's gonna cost you more money - and you're not allowed to go elsewhere either" - and the concept of selling a handful more copies due to Linux users is unappealing. This is Bink being jerks, but this is also Bioware not thinking it's worth it, financially.
So here's an idea - prove to them its worth it.
Bioware figures out exactly how hard it would be to put in Linux Bink support once they have it
Bioware figures out how much it would cost
If it makes financial sense, have a preorder page for the Linux page show up
If the Linux version sells enough copies, Bioware drops the cash, puts in the Bink code, covers their costs. If it doesn't, everyone gets a refund.
Of course this means that either Linux Hopefuls that bought the Windows box hoping for Linux support either buy a second copy or don't get to "vote". Also, if it fails it won't really mean much about Linux for the gamer.
And yet you've written a thousand words to reach the same conclusion! Brilliant!!
Actually the thousand words cover more than that. The conclusion I wrote there merely covers the first few paragraphs.
You mean, the mission was to confuse everyone in the world, including Microsoft?
The mission was name brand recognition, which to marketing gurus is the most important thing in the world.
Witness how Infogrames yesterday changed their name to Atari. Sit back and watch how many people will now think that Atari is the exact same company that made the 2600. Heck, when Hasbro made Atari branded games I worked in a software store and people would ask us if they needed "their old Atari" to play these new CD-ROM games.
Your average person probably thinks J2EE is an engineering agency, but if they use Hotmail they think that they use.NET every day. Microsoft learned long ago that there's no such thing as bad publicity - mission accomplished.
I'm going to use this opportunity to blatantly plug an article I wrote on this topic on what.NET is and what.NET isn't. And yes that's a Tripod link, so turn on your popup blockers.
But the short answer to your question is that yes, the overkill of.NET branding has muddied and confused the perception of what.NET is. But hey, everyone in the world knows the name, so mission accomplished?
detail the reflection of the snake in the glass during the scene in the snake pit in Raiders
For those who don't know the deal is this - in a scene in RoTLA, Indy falls into a pit and comes face to face with a snake. Obviously they don't want Harrison Ford to be bit so they put a plane of glass between him and the snake. In the theatrical prints (I'm told - was too young to remember) no one noticed the glass, but on the Laserdisc version, you could see the reflection on the glass.
What could have been an embarassing blooper was trumpeted by many as proof of the superiority of LD (remember VHS was the competition). Of course in subsequent transfers and with improvements in VHS technology, the glass was clearly visible on later printings of the video and when the movie was shown on TV.
So the question is - do you go in and fix it? Or I guess the question really is - did they go in and fix it? On the one hand it's not supposed to be in there (or at least not noticable) and it could be removed digitally with no one minding or caring (not like it's Han shooting first or anything). But on the other hand, it is messing with the film. It's no fun to not be able to point it out at parties and the like.
I'm sure if they did fix it then the unfixed scene is a bonus on disc #4.
No, George Lucas maximum money-extraction fashion was originally to release the three films separate, a year apart, leading up to the fourth movie. Do you really want that? Most people are thrilled to have them all now.
So... if you don't want jobs sourced overseas, then equally expect no change in job, no productivity increases, no economic growth.
Except that in some cases it really is an example of "hey we could just make someone else do this cheap and then lay off all the people we've got right now!" - that's what people mean when they hate outsourcing to other countries.
In an industry where you find it neccessary to have a room full of people scanning medical documents into computers - yeah, outsource that to some other country. It's difficult or impossible to find that many Americans willing to work even minimum wage to do that day in and day out.
But what about the recent examples wherein a bank has an older system and a team of people who have been programming it for thirty years? They realize that soon these people are going to start to retire and want things like retirement and so forth, plus they want increasing pay scales as time goes on. Instead, fire them all (lay them off) and outsource to India. You pay the Indian workers less and you don't have to worry about retirement benefits for the tons of people you just fired. This is what people are afraid of.
Plus the modded-down poster said "jobs that should be available to citizens of the U.S." - probably what he really wants to mean is that there are a number of jobs right out of college that can either go to U.S. Citizens or foreigners needing things like sponsorship. It seems like a bad idea to some to sponsor foreigners when so many U.S. citizens are without jobs at the moment.
Care to share the secret with us? My wife and I both changed our cell phone numbers recently and within days we were recieving telemarketing calls. I had mine for less than a day or so and I got an automated computer voice trying to sell me a way to avoid calls like this in the future!
Of course in my case it may have been different - I got a call from someone trying to track down someone else, so I probably had someone's old phone number, but I can't explain my wife's as anything but "let's dial all the phone numbers and see who picks up!"
start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times, as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system
This sounds a lot like the TeleZapper, the $30 brick that plays the little "doo-dah-dee" sound that means the line is disconnected. Of course, from what I've heard, the telemarketing computer systems are getting wise to this sort of thing and before long (if not already) the TeleZapper will be useless. As a result, I can't help but think this technique Rooney mentioned is obselete already.
More specifically, my information says that when you don't hear anyone on the other line what has happened is that the system they use which automatically calls people based on the average call time of their employees, has misestimated when to call (or all the employees are unavailable), so there's a silent pause. If the pause is long enough, the computer simply hangs up. Consequently, anyone who calls me from an unlisted number and gives me silence for three seconds or so I hang up on. If it's someone important, they'll call right back.
why change? maybe because excel xp has hundreds of more options than lotus 123 and is easier to share work.
For a brief period of time my mother-in-law entertained the notion of becoming a medical transcriptionist. The doctors rattle something off into a handheld recorder, you get the tape, you type it out. One of those on-the-side businesses.
So we do some investigation and one of the things she'd need is WordPerfect. I don't remember if this was a requirement (like she'd be sending these files digitally) or if it was just the "accepted thing", but we started to research how much it would cost to get her WordPerfect, which we though was sorta asinine since her PC already had Word (came with the machine of course).
Then we found out that you really had to have WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. You know, the one with the blue screen and a slow, VGA-based preview mode.
Of course I didn't know then how in the world you would even acquire a legitimate copy of that. Or even if it was possible.
We found someone else in the business and asked her why in the world this ancient program was still being used. She told us that the legal and medical professions still use WP5.1 religiously both because everyone's so used to it and because everything in the program since that version just slows them down. Remember, these people are the ones typing the volumes and volumes of legal and medical documents out there. They want productivity and they want it now. They don't want to wait the half second for Word to figure out whatver it's doing in the background to render bullet points.
WordPerfect released WP6 for DOS at one point, probably the most advanced graphical application DOS ever saw. But of course few if anyone wanted that - they either fell into the camp which wanted the lean and mean DOS WP5.1 or the people who were already seeing how nice Windows made everything look already. To this end WordPerfect even released a WP5.1+ to give WP5.1 compatibility with WP5.1 documents. WordPerfect was also pretty good about at least trying to be on every desktop platform, like OS/2 and Linux. WordPerfect was then bought and sold about five times, and for the last three or four major versions has been on board the sinking ship that is Corel. Hell, Corel even tried to pit it on Java at one point.
So the short version of the story is - the reason people don't want to change is that sometimes the options slow them down. Plus there is such a thing as version lock-in syndrome. Ask any psychotic Counter-Strike player which version is better and they'll tell you "man, every release since version (whatever) sucks!"
but why aren't the benefits of lower production costs being passed on to the consumer
I'm going to get modded down for this but oh well.
Man, it's never enough for some people is it? Let's say just for the sake of argument that Pro Tools cuts down production costs significantly. That means there's more profit margin, right?
So people start complaining that that cost in savings should be passed on to the consumer.
These are the same people who complain about the RIAA's not giving the artists enough money or compensation for their efforts. Now we might have a way to make the profit margins higher so there's more money that can be passed on to the artist, right?
Yeah I know we all assume that this profit will in fact not be passed on to the artist, but that's not what people decried first. These same people who complain that the artist doesn't get paid enough look at this savings in cost and instead want that for themselves.
The single player portion of W:ET was being done by Mad Doc Studios (Star Trek: Armada 2, Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest), but it didn't progress as well as they (Activision) had hoped, so they cancelled it. However, the multiplayer portion, done by mod team Splash Damage (Q3F for Quake 3: Arena) wasn't having the same problem, so they decided to allow Splash Damage to finish it and release it. I think the idea was basically a "map pack" for RtCW, but it's a full fledged standalone game now.
What's curious to me is this - Activision is releasing Day of Defeat as a retail product soon. DoD's main weakness is the ancient Half-Life engine, but W:ET is looking not-too-damn-bad with the Quake 3 engine and all, and it's free. *shrugs*
Slashdot Mirror
Consumers didn't get hurt one bit by Daikatana taking four years too long, but Eidos took a $30M hit. Worse, the reviews, word of mouth and demo ensured that to this day the game sits in $5 dust bins.
However, convincing people to buy into a streaming video technology which really consists of a VCR in a PC case (not in this instance but in another I've heard of) is a vaporware scam.
I think people are confusing frustration at sliding ship dates with an actual crime.
Regarding DNF, it's being funded out of 3D Realms' pocket at this point in time (following comments by George on Shacknews), so no one is being bilked out of anything.
Besides, Battlecruiser 3000AD was Vaporware for like eight years, so as you can see there's worse things than never being released.
Yeah. Damn them for changing something. Anything. Don't they know that all gamers are stauch conservatives who never want to change anything, ever?
To some degree Winamp 2 is done (as far as MP3 is concerned), so I had no problem with the idea that Winamp 3 would try out some more experimental features. Hell if you're getting mad paid why not play around?
Right now the tech industry hates the old. I'm currently one of the ones that can profit from this attitude. I also fully realize it's going to bite me in the ass, so I hope this attitude changes.
And yes there are a lot of 50-year-old programmers who want to treat their gig like they were clocking out at the factory. There are also many 25-year-old programmers that feel this way as well. The difference is that the 25-year-old will have an easier time finding work for all the aforementioned reasons (lower pay, not wanting to retire soon), and will have an easier time switching jobs.
I'm not biased - if an older coder can outdo a younger one, give him the job. To hell with the cost.
A quick glance at your other replies on this topic indicates that you are probably an older gentleman who is a little bitter about their personal situation.
- The 50-year-old programmer will want more money. Not so much a problem for us as it is for the company in question.
- The 50-year-old programmer will probably want to retire soon (as has been mentioned), meaning your pool of candidates is increasingly younger - and less likely to have any mainframe skills.
- It's entirely possible that your 50-year-old programmer is working on being a 60-year-old programmer or even a 70-year-old programmer - i.e., badly in debt and no hope of retiring and increasingly feeble. Sure, we all know of people on the top of their game well into their 80's but these are the exceptions. Plus, odds are one of these days the programmer may die on you. I've read a statistic that in 15 years, 25% of the COBOL programmers in the world will be retired or dead.
- The 50-year-old programmer isn't usually interested in innovation and tends to shun such things as this "web crap" - they just want to clock in their time and go home. In some cases this is fine, but in others it's a big issue.
Again, the answer to the problem today is "hire the 50-year-old programmer" but ten years from now it may be "where are all the programmers?" or "do we dare hire this 60-year-old programmer?". Outsourcing these guys to India may be seen in the same light as sweatshops for Nike - sure it sucks but can you find Americans willing to do the work for the money?perhaps it would help things if the square G logo wasn't purple.
Should have called that 1-800 number and reported her. You know, since she called you retarded.
I told him he was all horrible and evil for doing so - but I'm not sure I wouldn't have done the same.
So here's an idea - prove to them its worth it.
- Bioware figures out exactly how hard it would be to put in Linux Bink support once they have it
- Bioware figures out how much it would cost
- If it makes financial sense, have a preorder page for the Linux page show up
- If the Linux version sells enough copies, Bioware drops the cash, puts in the Bink code, covers their costs. If it doesn't, everyone gets a refund.
Of course this means that either Linux Hopefuls that bought the Windows box hoping for Linux support either buy a second copy or don't get to "vote". Also, if it fails it won't really mean much about Linux for the gamer.Witness how Infogrames yesterday changed their name to Atari. Sit back and watch how many people will now think that Atari is the exact same company that made the 2600. Heck, when Hasbro made Atari branded games I worked in a software store and people would ask us if they needed "their old Atari" to play these new CD-ROM games.
Your average person probably thinks J2EE is an engineering agency, but if they use Hotmail they think that they use .NET every day. Microsoft learned long ago that there's no such thing as bad publicity - mission accomplished.
But the short answer to your question is that yes, the overkill of .NET branding has muddied and confused the perception of what .NET is. But hey, everyone in the world knows the name, so mission accomplished?
What could have been an embarassing blooper was trumpeted by many as proof of the superiority of LD (remember VHS was the competition). Of course in subsequent transfers and with improvements in VHS technology, the glass was clearly visible on later printings of the video and when the movie was shown on TV.
So the question is - do you go in and fix it? Or I guess the question really is - did they go in and fix it? On the one hand it's not supposed to be in there (or at least not noticable) and it could be removed digitally with no one minding or caring (not like it's Han shooting first or anything). But on the other hand, it is messing with the film. It's no fun to not be able to point it out at parties and the like.
I'm sure if they did fix it then the unfixed scene is a bonus on disc #4.
No, George Lucas maximum money-extraction fashion was originally to release the three films separate, a year apart, leading up to the fourth movie. Do you really want that? Most people are thrilled to have them all now.
In an industry where you find it neccessary to have a room full of people scanning medical documents into computers - yeah, outsource that to some other country. It's difficult or impossible to find that many Americans willing to work even minimum wage to do that day in and day out.
But what about the recent examples wherein a bank has an older system and a team of people who have been programming it for thirty years? They realize that soon these people are going to start to retire and want things like retirement and so forth, plus they want increasing pay scales as time goes on. Instead, fire them all (lay them off) and outsource to India. You pay the Indian workers less and you don't have to worry about retirement benefits for the tons of people you just fired. This is what people are afraid of.
Plus the modded-down poster said "jobs that should be available to citizens of the U.S." - probably what he really wants to mean is that there are a number of jobs right out of college that can either go to U.S. Citizens or foreigners needing things like sponsorship. It seems like a bad idea to some to sponsor foreigners when so many U.S. citizens are without jobs at the moment.
Of course in my case it may have been different - I got a call from someone trying to track down someone else, so I probably had someone's old phone number, but I can't explain my wife's as anything but "let's dial all the phone numbers and see who picks up!"
More specifically, my information says that when you don't hear anyone on the other line what has happened is that the system they use which automatically calls people based on the average call time of their employees, has misestimated when to call (or all the employees are unavailable), so there's a silent pause. If the pause is long enough, the computer simply hangs up. Consequently, anyone who calls me from an unlisted number and gives me silence for three seconds or so I hang up on. If it's someone important, they'll call right back.
Yup, even counting Quake, I mean I never could even get Quake to print my term papers, let alone write them on it.
So we do some investigation and one of the things she'd need is WordPerfect. I don't remember if this was a requirement (like she'd be sending these files digitally) or if it was just the "accepted thing", but we started to research how much it would cost to get her WordPerfect, which we though was sorta asinine since her PC already had Word (came with the machine of course).
Then we found out that you really had to have WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS. You know, the one with the blue screen and a slow, VGA-based preview mode.
Of course I didn't know then how in the world you would even acquire a legitimate copy of that. Or even if it was possible.
We found someone else in the business and asked her why in the world this ancient program was still being used. She told us that the legal and medical professions still use WP5.1 religiously both because everyone's so used to it and because everything in the program since that version just slows them down. Remember, these people are the ones typing the volumes and volumes of legal and medical documents out there. They want productivity and they want it now. They don't want to wait the half second for Word to figure out whatver it's doing in the background to render bullet points.
WordPerfect released WP6 for DOS at one point, probably the most advanced graphical application DOS ever saw. But of course few if anyone wanted that - they either fell into the camp which wanted the lean and mean DOS WP5.1 or the people who were already seeing how nice Windows made everything look already. To this end WordPerfect even released a WP5.1+ to give WP5.1 compatibility with WP5.1 documents. WordPerfect was also pretty good about at least trying to be on every desktop platform, like OS/2 and Linux. WordPerfect was then bought and sold about five times, and for the last three or four major versions has been on board the sinking ship that is Corel. Hell, Corel even tried to pit it on Java at one point.
So the short version of the story is - the reason people don't want to change is that sometimes the options slow them down. Plus there is such a thing as version lock-in syndrome. Ask any psychotic Counter-Strike player which version is better and they'll tell you "man, every release since version (whatever) sucks!"
Man, it's never enough for some people is it? Let's say just for the sake of argument that Pro Tools cuts down production costs significantly. That means there's more profit margin, right?
So people start complaining that that cost in savings should be passed on to the consumer.
These are the same people who complain about the RIAA's not giving the artists enough money or compensation for their efforts. Now we might have a way to make the profit margins higher so there's more money that can be passed on to the artist, right?
Yeah I know we all assume that this profit will in fact not be passed on to the artist, but that's not what people decried first. These same people who complain that the artist doesn't get paid enough look at this savings in cost and instead want that for themselves.
It's just never enough, is it?
The single player portion of W:ET was being done by Mad Doc Studios (Star Trek: Armada 2, Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest), but it didn't progress as well as they (Activision) had hoped, so they cancelled it. However, the multiplayer portion, done by mod team Splash Damage (Q3F for Quake 3: Arena) wasn't having the same problem, so they decided to allow Splash Damage to finish it and release it. I think the idea was basically a "map pack" for RtCW, but it's a full fledged standalone game now.
What's curious to me is this - Activision is releasing Day of Defeat as a retail product soon. DoD's main weakness is the ancient Half-Life engine, but W:ET is looking not-too-damn-bad with the Quake 3 engine and all, and it's free. *shrugs*