Actually, scaling the text to the screen is difficult, but scaling the container size on a well-designed site is trivial. The web was designed with this standard in mind. If you fiddle with your window size right now, you will notice that the white space after the Slashdot logo compresses, text moves out of the way, and the main box shrinks down until the site is readable at 640 * 480 (though, lower than that and you get scroll bars).
This should be the norm, as it is the functional base which the web was designed for. Even hyperactive sites like wired exhibit this behavior. But if you look at salon, the layout has far fewer dependencies yet is fixed width. Why?
Because being in an insecure industry, web designers are very trend-conscious, and less technically inclined designers create sites that are fixed width. Boo to that.
Gamespy does one thing right: It's online matchmaking service is both very convienient and (now that inline clients are common) well done. On the other hand, Fileplanet is reviled pretty much universally. IGN, on the other hand, has never been accused of objectivity, but it is generally associated with great sites such as GameFaqs and the excellent and now deceased Daily Game News (I might be remembering the name wrong).
Where does this leave the two companies? Grasping. While both have lost the edge in terms of either timely reporting of events or accurate, believable reviews, they could concievably team up in a Cnet Zdnet paradigm, whereby both sites get all of the content and neither lose out. Of course, Cnet is notorious for doing things like declaring every new cellular phone that comes out the "world's first internet phone!" Then again, Gamespy declares every year that the latest Madden is "Only for the PS2!"
Good luck you two. At least you don't have high expectations to live up to.
There are three rules to surviving at a publisher.
1. C 2. Y 3. A
Even if you create a compelling financial argument why they shouldn't include them on disk, the risk is too great for any individual to risk their future without it. How do you explain to them that the online portion of the game is compelling enough that people will need to have a legal registration code? There are just too many ways around it, and while half of the people at any given publisher are hardcore gamers, the other half are toothpaste salesmen, and sadly anyone in the know will have to answer to both.
And actually, Macrovision claims that they can delay the release of a cracked version by "as much as two weeks," but because it is the first two weeks that's a whole lot of money. To you and me that's snake oil, but to a publisher that's a condo in Florida.
I had a similar experience. The last game I worked on was a fun little multiplayer, multidisk romp, though I won't say which one. Anyway, after the project was over, we were all sent complimentary copies of the title to play / give to family / whatever. Well, the game came, and played well, but I couldn't stand swapping it in and out of the CD drive all of the time. A quick google, and a NoCD patch later, and I'm playing exactly the way I should have been playing all along... verified by my registration password.
And actually, the NoCD crack turned out to be very popular where I was working. Apparently, nobody else likes a dongle either.
Yes, there were other games that wouldn't play due to faulty copy protection, but I thought people might like to know that we don't like those damned things either. It's the publishers that insist on them.
While "fair use" is an established part of copyright law, it is by no means constitutional or a "right." Indeed, fair use provisions arose essentially because the letter of the law extended protections further than the intent of the law. Courts correctly assessed that there were many uses of copyrighted material unanticipated by the law that were beneficial to society and didn't harm the producers.
I'm not saying that protecting people's ability to protect a fragile medium is insufficient compared to the potential for piracy. I am saying choose your wording wisely and your arguments will be more effective... especially because of the less clearly delineated ground common law constructions like "fair use" occupy.
Many places charge as low as 5 dollars to have a disk resurfaced, and unless the disk is cracked it always works. The home-resurfacing kits are mostly jokes, but the professional ones work... ask at a local used CD store where they resurface theirs. Of course, you can always buy it new from EB and return the broken copy... that would be dishonest, but let's just say they lost that protection the day they sold me an unopened copy of FF7 on the release date that was scratched to hell, and didn't have a replacement available for weeks.
I agree, with your position though, that if media companies are going to take the we-own-the-media-you-have-to-return-it-to-us-on-de mand position, we should get the rights associated with it.
Lunar 2 was better on the Sega CD anyway. The animation was more charming.
They're running in a mish mash hardware and emulation layer, so that you can debug running code. Even if you aren't remote debugging, it's great in that you can run live code over a network at a reasonable speed, and get additional debugging information (such as kernel outs, etc). The down side is that the graphics output is not necessarily identical (dropped particles, etc), and the whole thing is still about 20% slower than a regular debug machine (a modded playstation used to play CD builds). Of course it is much faster and more accurate than running an emulation layer on your PC, so it does have an essential place in the development chain.
A major daily paper has HUGE expenses that keep going up, yet they don't raise the price of a paper very frequently.
They do to the advertisers, who currently comprise 3/4ths of the budget of the average daily newspaper. If most of the people in a newspaper are in jobs that can be removed by online viewing, and advertisers currently comprise 3/4ths of the incoming budget of the average major daily, one would expect that online newspapers would be doing even better than they are. I suspect that as the middle ground between annoying and ineffective is found, that online publications will generate more revenue without subscriber pay-in, if it hasn't started already. If you haven't noticed, the online advertising market is recovering...
And yes, I'm willing to pay money for objects. I'm just not as willing to pay security for them.
That's business DSL you are thinking of. Most consumer ISPs (including all of the big ones) forbid running servers from your house. They can't afford to provide the bandwidth at those prices. Some provide static IP's with a wink and a nudge, but it is still against your contract. With business DSL, you wind up paying enough for a T1, so your bandwidth is covered.
And in response to the grandparent poster, It's not generally oversubscription that causes DSL lines to be slow. Usually it is the fact that DSL companies push the limits of "acceptable distance" and "acceptable wiring" too far, so the people on the edge of your service get 5 or 6k down total, and maybe half will quit and half will stay on with the crappy bandwidth.
I hereby declare my intent to trademark and patent MPBS, MPbs, and mpbs, and possibly mpBS. Just think how much better it will be when your local ISP can provide a full 1,000 MPbs of bandwidth to your home, car, or cellular device. That's a full thousand Mega Pits ber second, almost a Giga Pit! True, being on a standard that counts the number of electrons required to store one bit of data seems a little odd, but look! Shiny Thing! 1,000 MPbs!
Except that those sites are ad-supported. There is already a tradeoff going on there... You're trading eyeballs for info. That's not very risky. The thing about online registration is that you're trading a lot of safety for not much info. True, they could be nice and not spam your inbox, spam your house, clog up your phone with marketing calls... Maybe their tracking info doesn't monitor your entrances to aljazeer.net, or your propensity towards reading Palestenian sympathetic diatribes (Remember, everyone in the US government just bowed down and kissed the dead feet of a notoriously bad McCarthyist). They'd never hand that info over to someone who would misuse it. And OK, so they're running a system well and would never be hacked. But why take that risk?
What the free papers are offering are a large risk in exchange for not much reward, a risk that you wouldn't be asked to take if you were reading the dead tree edition. Would you read a newspaper if the newsstand man required a valid drivers license, and watched over your shoulder taking notes?
As what many people consider the only remaining viable source of information in this country, newspapers have a unique responsibility to the democracy. Just as voting is annonymous, so too must be information-gathering. Give that up, and who knows when the next witch hunt will find you...
Actually, they are already working on this in a way with planes. In order to prevent visual detection, the bottom of of the plane radiates light, so as to replace the light that it would normally block from the sky. (the tops of the planes are painted to resemble the ground). The same could be true of a soldier wearing this material... No matter what color you're wearing, in the desert during the day you pretty much block out the light. Add some additional luminescence of the proper color and viola! Slightly less visible.
I love how "properly configured firewall" is the solution to everything. Hackers root your box? You didn't have a properly configured firewall. System eaten by a worm? You should have had a properly configured firewall. Your windows box zombified and sending out spam? Seriously consider investing in a properly configured firewall.
Forget the firewall, get a properly implemented system.
One particularly telling comment, however, was on the topic of development costs - where Bonnell ranted that "From one cent to $50 million, I have no idea."
Ah, yes, you're right. He's not Japanese... I had been wondering how he managed to spell Dreamcast without a "mu" somewhere in there. Still, it holds true that as a non-native speaker, his shortcomings in English are not reflective of his shortcomings as a businessman.
Thank you for clearing that up. Without that insight, I would never have realized that 100,000 dollars on consoles is only for insanely obsessed freaks.
Let's break this down, shall we?
PS2 development kit: 20,000 dollars M2 development kit: I don't think any of these have been sold, but let's estimate at 20,000 dollars for the extreme rarity. the 10 other development kits: about 2,000 each, or 20k for the lot. games: PC Engine games are a steal at 4 or 5 dollars each, and he's got over 500 of them. Neo Geo games still demand over 100 dollars each for most titles, so let's put a blanket value at 10,000 dollars. Special edition systems: Most of the 100 or so special edition systems he has would fetch 200 dollars each, so let's put another blanket value at 20,000 Normal systems: The Bandai, Supergraphics, LaserInteractive, Neo Geo, Turbo Express and many of the other normal systems that he lists routinely sell for over 200 each. Let's put their blanket value at 10k.
We're at roughly 100,000k already, without counting the value of the oddities in the collection such as the PSX / PS2 launch wines and the integrated televion set. 100,000 actually about right for a collection of this size, if not a little low. Of course, anyone thinking of bidding should do a more rigorous item-by-item breakdown of the value of the goods... after all, what would a collector do with a development tool? How many games for the various systems is he selling?
Dev kits are illegal to sell, as Sony retains the property rights on all of them. However, the PS2 is far along enough in its lifespan that they don't worry so much anymore. They frequently wind up on Ebay, though they sell for a pretty penny. The Playstation 2 is well enough understood these days that there isn't any real reason to stop people from selling them. Ironically, a lot of those dev kits go to developers, as sometimes you NEED another tool to make a deadline, and sitting through Sony's lengthy approval process isn't an option. Plus the tools still cost several thousand dollars on e-bay, and don't even play games that well, limiting the audience to developers.
Now, if he was selling PSP dev kits, he could be expecting a nice little nastygram.
I'm sure the seller has quite a bit of experience in this area. He is selling, amongst other things, a development version of the M2. They didn't just hand those out free with your cereal, you know. The M2 development systems were so rare that people doubted they were shipped at all. Add to that the DD development system (did those go outside of Nintendo?), and the Deramcast, Saturn, Playstation, SNK development systems, and you have a surprisingly rare bundle. Now add in the Supergraphix, the Pippin, several unopened bottles of launch wine, multiple PS2 tools (which normally e-bay for about 20k each, I might add), thousands of games, lots of rare variations of every system released in the past 15 years, and this really does deserve to cost a lot more than 100,000 dollars.
Note that the auctioneer makes classic Japanese to English blunders, like switching S for T. In Japanese pretty much all consonants are followed by a vowel, and hence "Dreamcast" is usually pronounced "Du Ri Mu Ca Su T." When dealing with a native English speaker, an inability so spell correctly is usually a sign of below-average intelligence and a general disregard for details. However, when dealing with a Japanese speaker nothing can be read into classic Japanese translation errors.
PSI is as easy a client to setup as AIM, and significantly easier than ICQ. All you need is a login server, name, and password, and PSI can create all of those for you on jabber.org if you like. Jabber's XML specification makes it much easier to debug than when something goes wrong with MSN. Setting up a Jabber server is not trivial, but it's also not required... You can always use the main centralized server. On the other hand, if you want security, you want your own server, and Jabber is the only one which can deliver that (and which is why most enterprise IM solutions are thinly masked layers upon a basic jabber implementation.)
Anyways, Trillian doesn't support Jabber (at least, the free version doesn't). Well, yes. But the 15 dollar version does, and is actually quite good at it. I've been using the paid version happily for months. There's not much additional to the paid version except for Jabber, but Trillian is a significant enough piece of software that it deserves support.
I don't think many non AOL'ers know this, but when you leave the AOL service you lose your AIM screen name, which can be even worse than losing your e-mail address.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, scaling the text to the screen is difficult, but scaling the container size on a well-designed site is trivial. The web was designed with this standard in mind. If you fiddle with your window size right now, you will notice that the white space after the Slashdot logo compresses, text moves out of the way, and the main box shrinks down until the site is readable at 640 * 480 (though, lower than that and you get scroll bars).
This should be the norm, as it is the functional base which the web was designed for. Even hyperactive sites like wired exhibit this behavior. But if you look at salon, the layout has far fewer dependencies yet is fixed width. Why?
Because being in an insecure industry, web designers are very trend-conscious, and less technically inclined designers create sites that are fixed width. Boo to that.
On a related note, is there an RFID tag / system that would be useful for finding my keys? Those Sharper Image things are so bulky.
Gamespy does one thing right: It's online matchmaking service is both very convienient and (now that inline clients are common) well done. On the other hand, Fileplanet is reviled pretty much universally. IGN, on the other hand, has never been accused of objectivity, but it is generally associated with great sites such as GameFaqs and the excellent and now deceased Daily Game News (I might be remembering the name wrong).
Where does this leave the two companies? Grasping. While both have lost the edge in terms of either timely reporting of events or accurate, believable reviews, they could concievably team up in a Cnet Zdnet paradigm, whereby both sites get all of the content and neither lose out. Of course, Cnet is notorious for doing things like declaring every new cellular phone that comes out the "world's first internet phone!" Then again, Gamespy declares every year that the latest Madden is "Only for the PS2!"
Good luck you two. At least you don't have high expectations to live up to.
Well, the Herf tag doesn't seem to be working, so let's try this again. You missed a WWW in the Ecco Pro address.
You missed a WWW in the Ecco Pro address. There is also the open-source Progect, a nice little outliner with has a (sadly paid) windows client.
There are three rules to surviving at a publisher.
1. C
2. Y
3. A
Even if you create a compelling financial argument why they shouldn't include them on disk, the risk is too great for any individual to risk their future without it. How do you explain to them that the online portion of the game is compelling enough that people will need to have a legal registration code? There are just too many ways around it, and while half of the people at any given publisher are hardcore gamers, the other half are toothpaste salesmen, and sadly anyone in the know will have to answer to both.
And actually, Macrovision claims that they can delay the release of a cracked version by "as much as two weeks," but because it is the first two weeks that's a whole lot of money. To you and me that's snake oil, but to a publisher that's a condo in Florida.
I had a similar experience. The last game I worked on was a fun little multiplayer, multidisk romp, though I won't say which one. Anyway, after the project was over, we were all sent complimentary copies of the title to play / give to family / whatever. Well, the game came, and played well, but I couldn't stand swapping it in and out of the CD drive all of the time. A quick google, and a NoCD patch later, and I'm playing exactly the way I should have been playing all along... verified by my registration password.
And actually, the NoCD crack turned out to be very popular where I was working. Apparently, nobody else likes a dongle either.
Yes, there were other games that wouldn't play due to faulty copy protection, but I thought people might like to know that we don't like those damned things either. It's the publishers that insist on them.
While "fair use" is an established part of copyright law, it is by no means constitutional or a "right." Indeed, fair use provisions arose essentially because the letter of the law extended protections further than the intent of the law. Courts correctly assessed that there were many uses of copyrighted material unanticipated by the law that were beneficial to society and didn't harm the producers.
I'm not saying that protecting people's ability to protect a fragile medium is insufficient compared to the potential for piracy. I am saying choose your wording wisely and your arguments will be more effective... especially because of the less clearly delineated ground common law constructions like "fair use" occupy.
Many places charge as low as 5 dollars to have a disk resurfaced, and unless the disk is cracked it always works. The home-resurfacing kits are mostly jokes, but the professional ones work... ask at a local used CD store where they resurface theirs. Of course, you can always buy it new from EB and return the broken copy... that would be dishonest, but let's just say they lost that protection the day they sold me an unopened copy of FF7 on the release date that was scratched to hell, and didn't have a replacement available for weeks.
e mand position, we should get the rights associated with it.
I agree, with your position though, that if media companies are going to take the we-own-the-media-you-have-to-return-it-to-us-on-d
Lunar 2 was better on the Sega CD anyway. The animation was more charming.
They're running in a mish mash hardware and emulation layer, so that you can debug running code. Even if you aren't remote debugging, it's great in that you can run live code over a network at a reasonable speed, and get additional debugging information (such as kernel outs, etc). The down side is that the graphics output is not necessarily identical (dropped particles, etc), and the whole thing is still about 20% slower than a regular debug machine (a modded playstation used to play CD builds). Of course it is much faster and more accurate than running an emulation layer on your PC, so it does have an essential place in the development chain.
A major daily paper has HUGE expenses that keep going up, yet they don't raise the price of a paper very frequently.
They do to the advertisers, who currently comprise 3/4ths of the budget of the average daily newspaper. If most of the people in a newspaper are in jobs that can be removed by online viewing, and advertisers currently comprise 3/4ths of the incoming budget of the average major daily, one would expect that online newspapers would be doing even better than they are. I suspect that as the middle ground between annoying and ineffective is found, that online publications will generate more revenue without subscriber pay-in, if it hasn't started already. If you haven't noticed, the online advertising market is recovering...
And yes, I'm willing to pay money for objects. I'm just not as willing to pay security for them.
- C
That's business DSL you are thinking of. Most consumer ISPs (including all of the big ones) forbid running servers from your house. They can't afford to provide the bandwidth at those prices. Some provide static IP's with a wink and a nudge, but it is still against your contract. With business DSL, you wind up paying enough for a T1, so your bandwidth is covered.
And in response to the grandparent poster, It's not generally oversubscription that causes DSL lines to be slow. Usually it is the fact that DSL companies push the limits of "acceptable distance" and "acceptable wiring" too far, so the people on the edge of your service get 5 or 6k down total, and maybe half will quit and half will stay on with the crappy bandwidth.
I hereby declare my intent to trademark and patent MPBS, MPbs, and mpbs, and possibly mpBS. Just think how much better it will be when your local ISP can provide a full 1,000 MPbs of bandwidth to your home, car, or cellular device. That's a full thousand Mega Pits ber second, almost a Giga Pit! True, being on a standard that counts the number of electrons required to store one bit of data seems a little odd, but look! Shiny Thing! 1,000 MPbs!
Except that those sites are ad-supported. There is already a tradeoff going on there... You're trading eyeballs for info. That's not very risky. The thing about online registration is that you're trading a lot of safety for not much info. True, they could be nice and not spam your inbox, spam your house, clog up your phone with marketing calls... Maybe their tracking info doesn't monitor your entrances to aljazeer.net, or your propensity towards reading Palestenian sympathetic diatribes (Remember, everyone in the US government just bowed down and kissed the dead feet of a notoriously bad McCarthyist). They'd never hand that info over to someone who would misuse it. And OK, so they're running a system well and would never be hacked. But why take that risk?
What the free papers are offering are a large risk in exchange for not much reward, a risk that you wouldn't be asked to take if you were reading the dead tree edition. Would you read a newspaper if the newsstand man required a valid drivers license, and watched over your shoulder taking notes?
As what many people consider the only remaining viable source of information in this country, newspapers have a unique responsibility to the democracy. Just as voting is annonymous, so too must be information-gathering. Give that up, and who knows when the next witch hunt will find you...
Actually, they are already working on this in a way with planes. In order to prevent visual detection, the bottom of of the plane radiates light, so as to replace the light that it would normally block from the sky. (the tops of the planes are painted to resemble the ground). The same could be true of a soldier wearing this material... No matter what color you're wearing, in the desert during the day you pretty much block out the light. Add some additional luminescence of the proper color and viola! Slightly less visible.
I love how "properly configured firewall" is the solution to everything. Hackers root your box? You didn't have a properly configured firewall. System eaten by a worm? You should have had a properly configured firewall. Your windows box zombified and sending out spam? Seriously consider investing in a properly configured firewall.
Forget the firewall, get a properly implemented system.
One particularly telling comment, however, was on the topic of development costs - where Bonnell ranted that "From one cent to $50 million, I have no idea."
Well, that explains what happened to Infogrames.
Ah, yes, you're right. He's not Japanese... I had been wondering how he managed to spell Dreamcast without a "mu" somewhere in there. Still, it holds true that as a non-native speaker, his shortcomings in English are not reflective of his shortcomings as a businessman.
Thank you for clearing that up. Without that insight, I would never have realized that 100,000 dollars on consoles is only for insanely obsessed freaks.
Let's break this down, shall we?
PS2 development kit: 20,000 dollars
M2 development kit: I don't think any of these have been sold, but let's estimate at 20,000 dollars for the extreme rarity.
the 10 other development kits: about 2,000 each, or 20k for the lot.
games: PC Engine games are a steal at 4 or 5 dollars each, and he's got over 500 of them. Neo Geo games still demand over 100 dollars each for most titles, so let's put a blanket value at 10,000 dollars.
Special edition systems: Most of the 100 or so special edition systems he has would fetch 200 dollars each, so let's put another blanket value at 20,000
Normal systems: The Bandai, Supergraphics, LaserInteractive, Neo Geo, Turbo Express and many of the other normal systems that he lists routinely sell for over 200 each. Let's put their blanket value at 10k.
We're at roughly 100,000k already, without counting the value of the oddities in the collection such as the PSX / PS2 launch wines and the integrated televion set. 100,000 actually about right for a collection of this size, if not a little low. Of course, anyone thinking of bidding should do a more rigorous item-by-item breakdown of the value of the goods... after all, what would a collector do with a development tool? How many games for the various systems is he selling?
100,000 is not insane. It's just a lot.
Dev kits are illegal to sell, as Sony retains the property rights on all of them. However, the PS2 is far along enough in its lifespan that they don't worry so much anymore. They frequently wind up on Ebay, though they sell for a pretty penny. The Playstation 2 is well enough understood these days that there isn't any real reason to stop people from selling them. Ironically, a lot of those dev kits go to developers, as sometimes you NEED another tool to make a deadline, and sitting through Sony's lengthy approval process isn't an option. Plus the tools still cost several thousand dollars on e-bay, and don't even play games that well, limiting the audience to developers.
Now, if he was selling PSP dev kits, he could be expecting a nice little nastygram.
For a collection that large, I'd spend $100K any day.
So would I. That's probably why we don't have it.
I'm sure the seller has quite a bit of experience in this area. He is selling, amongst other things, a development version of the M2. They didn't just hand those out free with your cereal, you know. The M2 development systems were so rare that people doubted they were shipped at all. Add to that the DD development system (did those go outside of Nintendo?), and the Deramcast, Saturn, Playstation, SNK development systems, and you have a surprisingly rare bundle. Now add in the Supergraphix, the Pippin, several unopened bottles of launch wine, multiple PS2 tools (which normally e-bay for about 20k each, I might add), thousands of games, lots of rare variations of every system released in the past 15 years, and this really does deserve to cost a lot more than 100,000 dollars.
Note that the auctioneer makes classic Japanese to English blunders, like switching S for T. In Japanese pretty much all consonants are followed by a vowel, and hence "Dreamcast" is usually pronounced "Du Ri Mu Ca Su T." When dealing with a native English speaker, an inability so spell correctly is usually a sign of below-average intelligence and a general disregard for details. However, when dealing with a Japanese speaker nothing can be read into classic Japanese translation errors.
Link. Slashdot adds spaces to long words, to keep people from creating tremendously wide pages, but this breaks a lot of links.
PSI is as easy a client to setup as AIM, and significantly easier than ICQ. All you need is a login server, name, and password, and PSI can create all of those for you on jabber.org if you like. Jabber's XML specification makes it much easier to debug than when something goes wrong with MSN. Setting up a Jabber server is not trivial, but it's also not required... You can always use the main centralized server. On the other hand, if you want security, you want your own server, and Jabber is the only one which can deliver that (and which is why most enterprise IM solutions are thinly masked layers upon a basic jabber implementation.)
Anyways, Trillian doesn't support Jabber (at least, the free version doesn't). Well, yes. But the 15 dollar version does, and is actually quite good at it. I've been using the paid version happily for months. There's not much additional to the paid version except for Jabber, but Trillian is a significant enough piece of software that it deserves support.
thus defeating the lock-in.
I don't think many non AOL'ers know this, but when you leave the AOL service you lose your AIM screen name, which can be even worse than losing your e-mail address.