The thing is, the DVD manufacturer's association has got to have some sort of official line laying around to explain why having region codes is important.
Language. For example, a Region 2 DVD (Europe) will normally replace all the Region 1 extras with multiple language tracks.
Trouble is, it's complete bullshit. The UK and Ireland should be Region 1 on that basis. It wasn't too bad when regional 0 players could pay everything, but RCE is a plain statement that "for your convenience" really means "to protect the US box office".
Non-legitimate response to a problem with a business model: Buy laws and create technologies that attempt to prevent the exercise of the legally granted rights of American citizens
While I broadly agree with you, I have to pick up on a few points:
Rights aren't granted, they're asserted.
It's a wider issue than just the USA. The USA rattled its mighty sabre, and Norway wiggled its bitch ass and kicked down Jon Johansens door, remember?
Business is entitled to create anti-copying technology. It's the laws that protect that (lame) technology that are the issue. Passing a law that says that because a technology can be used illegally, the technology should be illegal, in all forms, and even discussing it or telling people where to get it should be illegal, that's the problem. CSS and SDMI are fine, it's DMCA that's the long term nightmare.
They are not taking away your freedom by trying to protect their interests. They are trying to stop software/music/movie/whatever piracy
Ha ha. No.
SDMI, CSS and their daddy, the DMCA, are aimed squarely at stopping me and thee from doing any fair use activities. Why? Because commercial duplication is already illegal, and because if you make it hard for amatuers to crack protection, then only professionals will crack it. It's that simple. If they were targetting professional pirates, they'd crank up the penalties for commercial piracy. They aren't, and they didn't. DMCA, CSS and SDMI are aimed at you and they're aimed at me.
IBM has been working on Digital Rights Management/Protection software for quite some time. I have no idea why they're joining SDMI at this late stage in the game
To kick them while they're down? All they need to do is to keep SDMI tied up in wrangling and FUD until their own standard becomes de facto. Works for M$.
Dvorak cites cost as a primary strength for dialup. And that's about it. Let's debunk this
You're quite right. In the UK, I can pay my cable company £20 a month for a second line and unlimited diallup access, or £25 a month for 512/128kbs always on. The choice is a no brainer.
And you're quite wrong. If it's a no brainer, why isn't everybody doing it? I have friends and family that happily pay their £15 a month AOL tax. They won't switch to broadband. They won't switch from monopoly telco BT to another telco or cable company. They won't even switch to another ISP. It's too new. It's too scary. They just don't see the need. I don't understand them, but they don't understand me. I'm a geek, they're not.
Dvorak is right on this one. He's an cud chewing moron, but he's right, because he understand other cud chewers. There will be no great consumer demand for fast always-on in the next few years, because until you have it, you don't know you need it. Sure, now that I've had it, I won't give it up. Ever. But me and thee (and Canada) are not who Dvorak is talking about, and we're not who the cable/DSL providers want to sell to. Because we'd use the connections, and that's bad news for them.
Their dilemma is that to make money, they need to pitch their services to people who don't need them and won't use them. That's got to be a tough sell.
I can attest that there are quite a few DSL providers out there who offer megabit connections to their subscribers, but who have an aggregate CO-to-backbone bandwidth adequate to support less than 20% of their subscribers at maximum rate
Want a laugh? BT in the UK offer residential ADSL that is contended 50:1 at the exchange. That's not a typo, I said fifty to one for the upstream bandwidth. 2% capacity. Makes cable seem like a dream.
On the bright side, the service is so overpriced (£40 = $60 a month plus £10 = $15 line rental, perhaps soon to go UP to £50 = $75 a month because "Nobody's taking it"!) that the chances of them ever getting fifty people into any given exchange is pretty low. I don't know whether that's funny or pathetic.
I was all set for a good old rant about this, but I have to admit, he has a point. For those who can't be bothered reading the article (hi guys), he's saying that there's a Catch 22 with broadband. There's no incentive (or profit) to supply broadband content until there's a lot of broadband, and no incentive to get broadband until there's a lot of content.
It's hardly rocket science, but he makes a salient point. Read this, and have a good think:
A typical DSL connection costs about $600 a year--something not everyone can afford. We heavy Internet users see things differently and assume that everyone wants to be like us. But the AOL phenomenon should give us pause. Technology mavens saw AOL as training wheels for the Internet, yet AOL now dominates the online world, with over 20 million users--many of whom still use dial-up.
I have to hold my hand up here. I was with AOL back in the day, when there was very little alternative in the UK. I got off of it at soon as it made financial sense to do so. I expected my friends and family would to. They didn't. They stuck with it. I've shown them the alternatives, I've set them up for them, they're just a click and a phone call from freedom. And still they stick with AOL. It's what they know. It's all they need. They don't want to be bothered with changing ISP, and they most particularly don't want to go through the risk and hassle of changing to DSL or cable, because really, it wouldn't benefit them that much.
It also reminds me of the hollywood studios paying web designers a lot of cash to make fan pages that look like they were done by amateurs
Sometimes they get it just right though. Check out the Galaxy Quest site. It purports to be a fan page, but a fan of the (non existent) series, who talks about meeting the series actors (e.g. Gwen Demarco, not Sigourney Weaver) at conventions.
The tongue is very firmly in the cheek, it's just a shame that the legal weasels made them put a (C) DreamWorks at the bottom.:(
Why don't they use a layer of copper, which has a much higher conductivity than aluminum.
Same reason they don't use gold or platinum... Wires used to be copper, though, before economics changed the laws of physics.
Anyone know if aluminium runs hotter (i.e. more transmission loss) than copper? That wouldn't be a problem for utilities, they'd just crank up the meter price to cover it.;)
Isn't California's problem lack of power at the power plants
Because they're turned off for political and financial reasons, not because they can't generate the power. They do need some extra capacity, but they've been adding generator capacity faster than transmission capacity, and need to get caught up on the latter before they can really crank up the former.
What I like about this idea is that it's increasingly efficiency, which is always good. Ultimately though, the solution is to decrease demand by increasing efficiency at the consumption end (i.e. turn down the damn air conditioning). Fat chance.
Maybe you should take the time to read the article. There's an optimum cable diameter above which wind and ice becomes a hazard. The can't make it thicker, but they need to get more current carrying aluminium in that diameter as possible.
I do agree with you about the data though, it's more of an "Oh gee, I guess we could do that," sort of consideration.
Anyway, they'd be better paying the up front cost and burying the whole damn lot. Then they could make it as thick as they like, and lay some nice new fibre in there while they're at it. No, wait, that would require a long term viewpoint, like thinking 2, maybe 3 years into the future...;)
It looks as though the data transmission isn't high on the agenda. The initial plan is to only replace bits of lines that are sagging, so it will be a good long time before there's enough contiguous cable in there to form a backbone.
Anyone know the operational lifetime of steel cored cables?
Oops, left out most important part: contract out writing manual to someone who can barely write in English
And don't forget to get your German translation done by the producer's new bimbo slut bitch girlfriend. She backpacked around Germany for like, six weeks, so she knows a hell of a lot more than some gay ass professional translator, right? All you have to do is explain to her what "left click" means. In English.
Of course, they never realized ideas are easy. Good execution is hard
Oh man. I was coding on Project Millstone, slaving away to try and get the damn thing nailed down and out the door. The publisher didn't want it, nobody wanted to work on it any more. It was basically dead but still staggering around.
But every week, the creative team would lock up with our macho/martyr complex lead progammer, then emerge with The Idea. This Is It. This Is The Thing. The Idea that would save the game. It was radical! It was daring! It would take just a tiny rewrite of the engine...;)
in addition to that design doc you need something that will capture the imagination and limited attention span of your target
So true. Publisher's vision is based on movement. Forget pitching Civ 2002 to them, if you're whoring a fresh game, your demo has to grab their reptilian vision centres within 5 seconds. It doesn't even necessarily have to be interactive, just something that a producer can use as eye candy muscle in his little internal power plays (hopefully on your behalf).
even more important for investors is having a team of developers with a track record of making games
Failing that though, you do need a meaty design (even if you're going to ignore it), plus you also need a flashy prototype.
And here's the catch. If you're an unknown team, you can forget writing the next Civilisation. You have to have a whizzbang demo that makes jaws drop within the average attention span of a producer. You've got about 10 seconds, 5 if there are any shiny objects nearby. I'd even venture say that it doesn't even necessarily have to be interactive. Just knock out a swooshy flyby demo aimed at the next gen graphics card. Publishers don't give a rat's arse about playability; their vision is based on movement.
Your first step is to hook some c0cksucking little pissant producer in a publishing house who's desperate to score a winner. You need this insider to champion your cause, and the swooshier the demo, the higher up the food chain your demo will be passed. Remember, if you send a dull or ropey demo, any producer that picks it up will likely be more neurotic than Desparate Gil from the Simpsons.
After you get your producer champion, he'll then whore your design doc around inside the publishing house for you. At that point, internal politics takes over. If you got Gil, you're screwed. He'll lie to both sides, while covering his own reptilian arse and pumping up his portfolio to let him escape to a better position in another publishing house. If you get a good producer, then... no, wait... those don't exist in the real world.
This isn't overly pessimistic, it's the brutal truth. Without backing, industry experience, contacts and a good body of work (demo/game and docs), you're basically screwed. Bear that in mind if you really think you've got it in you to be a commercial game developer.
Tech writers can take care of manuals, readmes, specification copy, proposals, etc.
Excellent point. Also, remember multi language. Change your mindset. Don't think "English, but we'll internationalise it later", think "Language neutral, regionalisable from day 1."
Quick tip 1: get a German translation and design your interface sizing around it. Some German words and phrases are longer than you can possibly imagine, and don't take well to abbr.
Quick tip 2: don't let your producer's new girlfriend do the translations, or tell you that the professional ones you had done are all wrong. I don't care how much sugar he'll get for letting the vicious vacuous bimbo slut parade her sliver of "German for irritating backpackers" knowledge. Er, that might be a personal point though.;)
it was always *THE ARTISTS* who flaked on me first
Well, there are good and bad artists, just like there are good and bad coders, but I do remember nightmare conversations along the lines of "Don't you think 144 polygons is a little excessive for a bullet model? What with us having a couple of hundred of them flying around. Can we maybe cut that down a bit? Ideally to the two that we budgeted for."
On the other hand, the lead programmer wanted a COM wrapper round every bullet object (as well as every bloody object in the game) to make it easier to seamlessly integrate future modules. "So you'll be playing your Mech game, then suddenly BAM! A bunch of Aerotech fighters appear, and you're like WHOA! Where did they come from? That'll be so cool!"
I swear to Shub Internet, all this is true. The wonder is that any games get released at all.;)
Oh my. Oh my, but this is true. One thing you forgot though; in the dumb company, you hire a hideously expensive slut-in-a-trouser-suit director to handle your transition from one-game wannabe's to a multimedia multinational powerhouse. We're talking IPO's, we're talking acquisitions, we're talking CHECK YOUR SOUL AT THE DOOR, HEADCOUNT!
If the copyright holder doesn't do a run of the copyrighted material within (Say) three years of the last one, they obviously no longer value the copyright and the copyright should fall back to the public domain
Back to the public domain? In the case of written works, copyright generally reverts to the author, who can then do as she wishes with it. Any reason to do it differently with music?
just by 1/3 the number of CDs! You'll survive, believe me. If everybody feels as you do, the prices will come down.
Er, in which alternative universe? In this one, we're already seeing record companies threatening to raise prices. To be honest, I do agree that in the long term you're correct, but it looks like in the short to mid term we're in for a rough ride - screwed if we buy, screwed if we share.
As for your damaged CDs, perhaps you should have backed them up onto tape cassette or.wav files BEFORE you damaged the discs. You don't have a legal license to anything. You have physical artifacts that are now unusable. Your argument for d'ling the songs via Napster is akin to saying you have a right to completely photocopy someone else's copy of a book because you dropped a cup of coffee all over one you bought once.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying...
I can and should duplicate a CD that I own in case I coasterise it.
(By extension)I can (and should?) OCR duplicate a book that I own in case I spill coffee on it.
My friend can OCR duplicate his book in case he spills coffee on it.
If either of us spill coffee on our books before taking the OCR duplicate, the other can't share his OCR duplicate, even though we could share the book (but we couldn't duplicate it while it's shared?)
Is anybody else confused by this?
Re:My take on the death of the Trek series...
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
in a show full of Janeways, Tuvoks, and Harry Kims, that "neutral", "bland" character really was one of the most interesting ones
Blurgh, how true. Even the acting was monotonous, with flat. Stilted. Delivery. It was like watching statues in many of the scenes. Plus, they were always so earnest. The least utterance was delivered as though it was profoundly important. Even in the token "ha ha" scenes, everyone was so dreadfully serious and self aware.
For me, the worst thing was that most of the characters were "Federation v4.0" die cast drones. Take away their superficial quirks, and Paris, Kim, B'Elanna, Chakotay, Tuvok and Janeway were largely interchangeable in any given situation. Only Neelix, Kes, and (bizarelly) Seven and the Doctor were actually distinctive in terms of their behaviour.
Re:My take on the death of the Trek series...
on
Voyager Eulogy
·
· Score: 2
it had essentially lost the hardcore trekie audience [...] T&A got the core fanbase back
They dumbed it down until it lost the actual SF geeks, then they dumbed it down even further until the geeks came back? Ouch. That's scary because it sounds so plausible.
the non-trekie females I know that watch the show didn't dislike the 7of9 character
Good point. They never made 7 of 9 act like a bimbo - but mostly (says I) by making her neutral bordering on bland. As I say above, in a different setting (e.g. Farscape or Babylon 5), Seven could have been a fascinating character.
Slashdot Mirror
Language. For example, a Region 2 DVD (Europe) will normally replace all the Region 1 extras with multiple language tracks.
Trouble is, it's complete bullshit. The UK and Ireland should be Region 1 on that basis. It wasn't too bad when regional 0 players could pay everything, but RCE is a plain statement that "for your convenience" really means "to protect the US box office".
While I broadly agree with you, I have to pick up on a few points:
Ha ha. No.
SDMI, CSS and their daddy, the DMCA, are aimed squarely at stopping me and thee from doing any fair use activities. Why? Because commercial duplication is already illegal, and because if you make it hard for amatuers to crack protection, then only professionals will crack it. It's that simple. If they were targetting professional pirates, they'd crank up the penalties for commercial piracy. They aren't, and they didn't. DMCA, CSS and SDMI are aimed at you and they're aimed at me.
To kick them while they're down? All they need to do is to keep SDMI tied up in wrangling and FUD until their own standard becomes de facto. Works for M$.
Correction to myself - I didn't mean increased efficiency in California, I meant globally. Fat chance. ;)
You're quite right. In the UK, I can pay my cable company £20 a month for a second line and unlimited diallup access, or £25 a month for 512/128kbs always on. The choice is a no brainer.
And you're quite wrong. If it's a no brainer, why isn't everybody doing it? I have friends and family that happily pay their £15 a month AOL tax. They won't switch to broadband. They won't switch from monopoly telco BT to another telco or cable company. They won't even switch to another ISP. It's too new. It's too scary. They just don't see the need. I don't understand them, but they don't understand me. I'm a geek, they're not.
Dvorak is right on this one. He's an cud chewing moron, but he's right, because he understand other cud chewers. There will be no great consumer demand for fast always-on in the next few years, because until you have it, you don't know you need it. Sure, now that I've had it, I won't give it up. Ever. But me and thee (and Canada) are not who Dvorak is talking about, and we're not who the cable/DSL providers want to sell to. Because we'd use the connections, and that's bad news for them.
Their dilemma is that to make money, they need to pitch their services to people who don't need them and won't use them. That's got to be a tough sell.
Want a laugh? BT in the UK offer residential ADSL that is contended 50:1 at the exchange. That's not a typo, I said fifty to one for the upstream bandwidth. 2% capacity. Makes cable seem like a dream.
On the bright side, the service is so overpriced (£40 = $60 a month plus £10 = $15 line rental, perhaps soon to go UP to £50 = $75 a month because "Nobody's taking it"!) that the chances of them ever getting fifty people into any given exchange is pretty low. I don't know whether that's funny or pathetic.
I was all set for a good old rant about this, but I have to admit, he has a point. For those who can't be bothered reading the article (hi guys), he's saying that there's a Catch 22 with broadband. There's no incentive (or profit) to supply broadband content until there's a lot of broadband, and no incentive to get broadband until there's a lot of content.
It's hardly rocket science, but he makes a salient point. Read this, and have a good think:
I have to hold my hand up here. I was with AOL back in the day, when there was very little alternative in the UK. I got off of it at soon as it made financial sense to do so. I expected my friends and family would to. They didn't. They stuck with it. I've shown them the alternatives, I've set them up for them, they're just a click and a phone call from freedom. And still they stick with AOL. It's what they know. It's all they need. They don't want to be bothered with changing ISP, and they most particularly don't want to go through the risk and hassle of changing to DSL or cable, because really, it wouldn't benefit them that much.
Sometimes they get it just right though. Check out the Galaxy Quest site. It purports to be a fan page, but a fan of the (non existent) series, who talks about meeting the series actors (e.g. Gwen Demarco, not Sigourney Weaver) at conventions.
The tongue is very firmly in the cheek, it's just a shame that the legal weasels made them put a (C) DreamWorks at the bottom. :(
Same reason they don't use gold or platinum... Wires used to be copper, though, before economics changed the laws of physics.
Anyone know if aluminium runs hotter (i.e. more transmission loss) than copper? That wouldn't be a problem for utilities, they'd just crank up the meter price to cover it. ;)
Because they're turned off for political and financial reasons, not because they can't generate the power. They do need some extra capacity, but they've been adding generator capacity faster than transmission capacity, and need to get caught up on the latter before they can really crank up the former.
What I like about this idea is that it's increasingly efficiency, which is always good. Ultimately though, the solution is to decrease demand by increasing efficiency at the consumption end (i.e. turn down the damn air conditioning). Fat chance.
Maybe you should take the time to read the article. There's an optimum cable diameter above which wind and ice becomes a hazard. The can't make it thicker, but they need to get more current carrying aluminium in that diameter as possible.
I do agree with you about the data though, it's more of an "Oh gee, I guess we could do that," sort of consideration.
Anyway, they'd be better paying the up front cost and burying the whole damn lot. Then they could make it as thick as they like, and lay some nice new fibre in there while they're at it. No, wait, that would require a long term viewpoint, like thinking 2, maybe 3 years into the future... ;)
It looks as though the data transmission isn't high on the agenda. The initial plan is to only replace bits of lines that are sagging, so it will be a good long time before there's enough contiguous cable in there to form a backbone.
Anyone know the operational lifetime of steel cored cables?
And don't forget to get your German translation done by the producer's new bimbo slut bitch girlfriend. She backpacked around Germany for like, six weeks, so she knows a hell of a lot more than some gay ass professional translator, right? All you have to do is explain to her what "left click" means. In English.
Oh, how I wish I was joking.
Oh man. I was coding on Project Millstone, slaving away to try and get the damn thing nailed down and out the door. The publisher didn't want it, nobody wanted to work on it any more. It was basically dead but still staggering around.
But every week, the creative team would lock up with our macho/martyr complex lead progammer, then emerge with The Idea. This Is It. This Is The Thing. The Idea that would save the game. It was radical! It was daring! It would take just a tiny rewrite of the engine... ;)
So true. Publisher's vision is based on movement. Forget pitching Civ 2002 to them, if you're whoring a fresh game, your demo has to grab their reptilian vision centres within 5 seconds. It doesn't even necessarily have to be interactive, just something that a producer can use as eye candy muscle in his little internal power plays (hopefully on your behalf).
Failing that though, you do need a meaty design (even if you're going to ignore it), plus you also need a flashy prototype.
And here's the catch. If you're an unknown team, you can forget writing the next Civilisation. You have to have a whizzbang demo that makes jaws drop within the average attention span of a producer. You've got about 10 seconds, 5 if there are any shiny objects nearby. I'd even venture say that it doesn't even necessarily have to be interactive. Just knock out a swooshy flyby demo aimed at the next gen graphics card. Publishers don't give a rat's arse about playability; their vision is based on movement.
Your first step is to hook some c0cksucking little pissant producer in a publishing house who's desperate to score a winner. You need this insider to champion your cause, and the swooshier the demo, the higher up the food chain your demo will be passed. Remember, if you send a dull or ropey demo, any producer that picks it up will likely be more neurotic than Desparate Gil from the Simpsons.
After you get your producer champion, he'll then whore your design doc around inside the publishing house for you. At that point, internal politics takes over. If you got Gil, you're screwed. He'll lie to both sides, while covering his own reptilian arse and pumping up his portfolio to let him escape to a better position in another publishing house. If you get a good producer, then... no, wait... those don't exist in the real world.
This isn't overly pessimistic, it's the brutal truth. Without backing, industry experience, contacts and a good body of work (demo/game and docs), you're basically screwed. Bear that in mind if you really think you've got it in you to be a commercial game developer.
Excellent point. Also, remember multi language. Change your mindset. Don't think "English, but we'll internationalise it later", think "Language neutral, regionalisable from day 1."
Quick tip 1: get a German translation and design your interface sizing around it. Some German words and phrases are longer than you can possibly imagine, and don't take well to abbr.
Quick tip 2: don't let your producer's new girlfriend do the translations, or tell you that the professional ones you had done are all wrong. I don't care how much sugar he'll get for letting the vicious vacuous bimbo slut parade her sliver of "German for irritating backpackers" knowledge. Er, that might be a personal point though. ;)
Well, there are good and bad artists, just like there are good and bad coders, but I do remember nightmare conversations along the lines of "Don't you think 144 polygons is a little excessive for a bullet model? What with us having a couple of hundred of them flying around. Can we maybe cut that down a bit? Ideally to the two that we budgeted for."
On the other hand, the lead programmer wanted a COM wrapper round every bullet object (as well as every bloody object in the game) to make it easier to seamlessly integrate future modules. "So you'll be playing your Mech game, then suddenly BAM! A bunch of Aerotech fighters appear, and you're like WHOA! Where did they come from? That'll be so cool!"
I swear to Shub Internet, all this is true. The wonder is that any games get released at all. ;)
Oh my. Oh my, but this is true. One thing you forgot though; in the dumb company, you hire a hideously expensive slut-in-a-trouser-suit director to handle your transition from one-game wannabe's to a multimedia multinational powerhouse. We're talking IPO's, we're talking acquisitions, we're talking CHECK YOUR SOUL AT THE DOOR, HEADCOUNT!
Never Say Never Again? Does this mean that we have to play Quake wearing a dinner jacket and saying "Sho, Mishter Blofeld, we meetsh again." ?
Back to the public domain? In the case of written works, copyright generally reverts to the author, who can then do as she wishes with it. Any reason to do it differently with music?
Er, in which alternative universe? In this one, we're already seeing record companies threatening to raise prices. To be honest, I do agree that in the long term you're correct, but it looks like in the short to mid term we're in for a rough ride - screwed if we buy, screwed if we share.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying...
Is anybody else confused by this?
Blurgh, how true. Even the acting was monotonous, with flat. Stilted. Delivery. It was like watching statues in many of the scenes. Plus, they were always so earnest. The least utterance was delivered as though it was profoundly important. Even in the token "ha ha" scenes, everyone was so dreadfully serious and self aware.
For me, the worst thing was that most of the characters were "Federation v4.0" die cast drones. Take away their superficial quirks, and Paris, Kim, B'Elanna, Chakotay, Tuvok and Janeway were largely interchangeable in any given situation. Only Neelix, Kes, and (bizarelly) Seven and the Doctor were actually distinctive in terms of their behaviour.
They dumbed it down until it lost the actual SF geeks, then they dumbed it down even further until the geeks came back? Ouch. That's scary because it sounds so plausible.
Good point. They never made 7 of 9 act like a bimbo - but mostly (says I) by making her neutral bordering on bland. As I say above, in a different setting (e.g. Farscape or Babylon 5), Seven could have been a fascinating character.