Agreed. I can't seem to find any of the people I know listed, yet I know that some have donated... some have even campaigned for these people. Both I and my girlfriend have donated to Dean, yet neither of us show up in the database. There doesn't seem to be a spot for us on the map of our city.
Can anyone verify that they are listed and this isn't a hoax?
Just because something CAN be private, doesn't mean it should be, or that you should should get uptight about someone offering it to the public or individuals.
Well, what if you wanted to search down the Address to Barbara Bush? She happens to be at 10000 Memorial Drive Houston, TX 77024. There is an Albert and Elizabeth Gore making contributions to Dean out at 312 Lynnwood Blvd Nashville, TN 37205. Perot only leaves his P.O. Box, but he lives out in Plano, TX, and is supporting Bush.
The by-city information is very interesting, and the amounts donated to each candidate by individuals should be public information. But the actual address itself should probably be kept secret. I've known several people who have had stalkers they have moved to avoid, and would be very unhappy to discover that their address is publically available again.
Of course, oddly, I can't seem to find any of them. I'm personally not listed, despite two donations to Dean's campaign. Can anyone who has donated to a candidate verify that they are on the list? The privacy concerns would be moot if it were all a hoax...
How to create a love story has been a sticky issue in videogaming for many years now. The "contest" part is entirely trappings... You're taking some of the greatest minds in gaming, and having them attack a fundamental problem of gaming. To say that it is an invalid exercise because the structure was loose is to miss the point. A sense of heroism is easy to create in a videogame, but love? Creepy asian body pillows aside, game designers are still struggling with how to emotionally involve players in love in videogames. Love stories are established genres in all other forms of human fiction. How can this basic part of human culture manifest itself in the gaming world?
In the words of panel host Eric Zimmerman the point is to discover "how it is that game designers begin to grapple with conceptual problems."
Spector felt the task was impossible, a position that is completely understandable. I can only assume that you didn't mean that his conclusion was garbage, but that of the other two people.
Koster's solution is interesting... The Massively Multiplayer Romance Novel. Being inherently text based it wouldn't be a financial success, but it is an interesting approach to the problem. I wouldn't fund it, but then again that's why we don't see many love story videogames.
Wright's solution is both practical and might survive a publisher's funding challenge. Nothing pulls people together emotionally like adversity. A game about meeting and solving challenges together in a life-and-death situation is far more likely to cause people to fall in love than chatting on AIM. It doesn't assume that love is already there, it just picks people predisposed like a computer dating service, and gives them adversity to overcome together utilizing gaming situations likely to cause the people to fall in love.
Honestly, Wright's solution to the problem is both elegant and implementable. Personally, I would love to sign up to help develop such a project, and wouldn't be surprised to see it implemented by somebody in the coming years. There's got to be an online dating service looking for a truly unique hook.
I stopped reading your post after this line. If this is what you beleive I don't want to read any more of your ideas.
Wow. That's surprisingly open minded of you, and bodes well for the movement. Anything that doesn't agree with your philosophy is instantly turned off without bothering to read the explanation, eigh? Where I come from, that's called fundamentalism, and is a sign of a closed mind and an indefensible intellectual predisposition.
If you had bothered to read further, you would have found that my main arguments for terraforming Mars is the potential for a greater knowledge and appreciation for environmental issues, and as a protection against potential future environmental catastrophes.
Kyoto was a compromise because it will force the closing of, for example certain broken down Russian factories where income is at a sustinence level and potential investments are nonexistent. Certain people in India eek out survival by the completely hazardous and toxic recycling and burning of computer parts. Environmental controls will put these people out of jobs in areas where there aren't any other jobs. That's a reality. That's also fair, as the environmental pollution these activities create is likely to kill more people than the activities themselves support. But to say that that is not a reality of existence in other countries is extremely close-minded.
I fashion myself an environmentalist, having bicycled more miles than many people drive and protested environmentally destructive activities. To this day I'm peeved about the importation of Snails to the North American ecology, and feel that wolves should be re-introduced into the wild. Come to think of it, I'm also a member of the Green Party. If the belief that environmentally sound activities involve compromise with people's other needs is so alien to you that you stick your fingers in your ears and go "La-la-la-la-la," then get out of my movement. That form of fundamentalism is out of touch with the experiences of most people in this world, even most environmentalists, and only serves to feed the stereotype of the lunatic fringe "greenie." A stereotype which has proven an effective weapon against us many times in the court of public opinion.
And don't post annonymously if you believe in something. Have a spine.
Don't forget, though, that Dragon Warrior was quite popular on the NES. I, II, III, and IV all made it to the cover of Nintendo Power, had good sales (except IV), and created fond memories. Dragon Warrior 1 is most console people's first RPG, and is still copied to this day on smaller devices. But the NES is where U.S. Dragon Warrior sat for many years. While Final Fantasy 2 never came out for the NES (I had a pre-order. Sigh), it did make two large splashes on the 16 bit generation, and three on the 32 bit systems.
Dragon Warrior, on the other hand, was conspicuously absent after the NES. With absolutely nothing on the SNES, and a title snuck in at the end of the Playstation's lifetime, there was little to really keep the series fresh in player's minds. To them, Dragon Warrior was an old outdated game that had been done a million times before, and a million times better. They waited too long to do a sequel, but not long enough that it could be considered new again.
Now I need to whip out the old emulator and find a copy of DQ IV.
I personally love Gold Golems, but Drakees were adorable.
It's not an unfair burden to expect somebody to be able to afford to buy their own phone hardware. But, just what is the minimum feature set of a computer to enjoy the Internet? Is Lynx a good enough browser, or do we have to assure that the subsidized level of service can deliver Mozilla?
Your post was intelligent and well thought-out overall, but I'd like to point out that at the time the rural telephone access was an issue, telephones were actually quite expensive. Even in the early 80's a basic telephone would run 30 dollars, and that is in the dollars of the time. My mother was leasing a telephone in the 70's, because leasing was cheaper than owning. If we assume a phone in the 50's was 50 dollars (someone who remembers/has data from that time please chime in), and the median income was 5,000 dollars, then that creates an income/cost ratio of 100 to 1. If the median US income (for 2002) was 43,000 dollars, that would imply an access burden of 430 dollars. Cheap computers can be had inside of Wallmart for that much money, including monitor, and everywhere else for not significantly more.
So yes, while the concept of rural broadbandization seems laughable, the cost to the end user doesn't seem that out of line with previous similar programs.
The evil martian regime harbors weapons of mass destruction in the form of tremendous stockpiles of poison gas, and has even gone so far as to kill off large segments of its own population. Our weapons inspection teams are hampered at every turn, and the British inspection team hasn't been heard from in months, presumed dead.
The Kyoto protocol was controversial because it was attempting to balance man's need to survive financially with man's need to survive ecologically. Nobody wants to destroy the planet, but everybody needs to eat. Plus it came to symbolize a much larger conflict between the Bush administration's self-interested unilateral actions and much of the rest of the world's eglatarian compromising.
Terraforming Mars has none of the risk of the Kyoto protocol. Whether or not we terraform Mars is basically irrelevant to the ecology of Earth. Likewise, as there isn't a strong industrial base on Mars it is pretty financially irrelevant in the short term. Essentially, the two groups debating this will be hardcore scifi geeks (like me) who want to colonize the universe and hardcore environment geeks who feel that everything is better untouched by human hands.
Personally, I feel that terraforming Mars will give Earth agencies experience in the vital area of fixing ecological nightmares. As for "screwing up" Mars, people generally point to Earth turning into Mars if we mess up this planet sufficiently. Mars is just about the worst-case scenario. Personally I'd rather have the fallback position that if global thermonuclear war were to wipe out our planet, at least life from Earth would continue somewhere. That, and the ample room such a planet would provide plus the enduring environmental investment sounds quite worthy of the loss of pristine, untouched land berift of much beyond sterilized soil and historical rocks. Much of the research into that could take place LONG before we are in a position to actually terraform the planet. After all, two out of three landers agree that the planet is a pain to get to, with one abstention.
Now, where the heavy debate is going to lie years down the road is whether or not terraforming a planet gives ownership rights to that planet, and if, for example, the people living on that planet have the right to cede from an offworld government that made life on that planet possible. That's going to be a huge, sticky debate mixing fundamental beliefs about freedom and democracy with entrenched and represented commercial interests and unspoken debts to powerful entities.
One of the major problems with game reviewing, and this is why they all sound like adverts, is that the people who want to review a particular type of game are given that game to review. If someone is an Everquest junkie, they're going to be given the new Everquest to review. Wonder of wonders, he likes it! On a fundamental level, you don't get to the point of being a game reviewer without loving games in general, so even if you removed this point you would have an unnecessarily glowing review. Having 2 or 3 reviewers on a game would be an improvement, but few publications have that kind of manpower.
Furthermore, and I've seen this firsthand, reveiwers aren't exactly the strongest willed of people. They tend not to rock the boat. I don't know if this groupthink is from self-selection, from the fact that there is no objective way to judge the value of a reviewer so you must hire by whether or not s/he reviewed games in exactly the same way that you would have, but they all blow with the wind. Companies know this, and they do their best to blow at the reviewers. Companies create the perception of a popular uprising, and reviewers feed it until it actually is a popular uprising. Most reviewers don't realize they are doing this, nor do they realize where the uprising came from.
And yes, Demos are the best indicator of a 95% finished game. Unfortunately, you do have to cut the company the littlest bit of slack, as the demo will be done a month before the game finishes, so it is almost guarenteed to have crashes that won't appear in the final version.
Companies should care, but we don't. We're too busy trying to figure out how to manipulate the reviewers into giving our games a perfect score. Most of us are terrible at it, but what we want is hype for our products rather than objectivity for everyone else's. After all, after pouring your heart and soul into a game for years you're going to think it's the bees knees, even if a more objective viewer doesn't like it. And five points on a review might be the difference between doing the game you want next time or doing a licensed movie port for the GBA.
Don't look to us to fix the objectivity problem, that will only come with subscribers choosing magazines that actually use the full range of their scoring charts, rather than just 70-100%.
What an intelligently well-written argument. I'll have to remember it.
I appologize for bringing race into the argument in any form, but having lived in LA and been on the outskirts of the music, movie, and legal scenes there the power does come primarily from rich white men. It's surprising that nobody has brought up gender in that comment, as it is equally theoretically invalid. Not that the studios are run by women, but that they "can" be every bit as much as they "can" be run by someone from India. They just aren't, through a series of self-selections.
The problem with declaring class warfare is that it will never end. The labels and studios will always be run by rich people. By being in that seat of power they become rich. Period. We can say that we want more women and "minorities" in the major positions of power in Hollywood, but it wouldn't make any sense to say that we want poor people.
What we want is a diversity of ideas and ideals, so that it will be possible to have an actual discussion with the powerbase without all of them reasurring themselves about the validness of their incorrect ideas. Being entirely from one race and one gender hinders the interaction greatly to the point of talking to a philosophical brick wall. I'm not saying that salvation lies in having a broader range of life experiences behind the leaders of our govern... companies. I'm just saying it would help.
It's amazing that Microsoft is still saying with a straight face that you can call their support line and get help. Admittedly half of that statement is true, but not the half that matters to most businesses. Microsoft's ineptitude on the phone is legendary. Their developer's site is nice and quite useful, but that's not going to help the average clueless Joe who wants to know why Office is reformatting all of his documents with the tagline "0wn3d by PH3rN4nd0!," or keeps crashing with the words "missing vsdl95.dll." They charge ludicrous hourly rates to provide the kind of tech support a jr. high school student would consider incompetent. Come to think of it, I sense an opportunity to revitialize our schools...
Furthermore, their document reads like a argument against closed protocols. "If you leave us, you leave your data. You leave your database. You leave your correspondences. You can't leave us. You're ours." If your file cabinet supplier came to you and told you that your business histories and documents would be shredded if you ever thought about leaving, you would consider it blackmail and would find a new supplier right away, threats be damned. Why do we take this as a viable argument in the computer world?
Most of the people I know consider P2P a form of nonviolent protest. It's a way of voicing our discontent with the way our consumerist society corners us with the belief that there are no alternatives. Well there are alternatives, many of them, and no matter what the rich white men in suits may believe we can actualize these alternatives into something they can't touch! P2P is our protest! P2P is our power, our voice, our constitutionally protected free speech! Outlawing P2P is outlawing free speech!
Well, not really. But that argument is no dumber than what has been coming out the the copyright companies. Like saying that in an economy that is down %10 due to a massive worldwide recession record sales are down %10 because of... computers. Or that the value of a copy of a song which the sell for 4 dollars suddenly becomes 10,000 dollars because it was put on a P2P network. Or that computer hacking is terrorism and terrorism is treason and treason is punishable by death but hacking to protect copyrights is a noble form of copyprotection and stopping someone from hacking to protect their copyright is a violation of the DMCA.
Sigh. All I want is a little sanity in our legal system.
Advertising 45,691 Marketing 65,789 Travel and entertainment 106,523 Website development 41,558 Internet costs 26,518 Printing and reproduction 12,655
By my accounting principles, that should all be under "marketing," and that puts marketing at
299031, or just about equal to development costs.
And I know that running a business isn't free, but how can a company of about 4 people rack up thirty-one thousand dollars in telephone fees in the span of a year? This company is notorious for not returning phone calls.
You might be interested in the XGameStation. It's a console that you build (ahem, assemble) yourself based upon an open specification. The design is entirely open, though open as in visible not open as in FSF. Hardware hacking is encouraged. You could probably build one yourself with the parts without calling down the wrath of the developers, though avoiding fumbling about for individual fuse suppliers and making your own breadboard would be worth the 100 or so dollars they will probably charge.
Good stuff. I'm looking forward to picking one up when they feel it is ready.
...that isn't run by a bunch of jacka$$#$? Try the X Game Station. It's sufficiently obscure that it makes people think you're elite, and it's sufficiently vaporware that it will be a while before that's proven wrong.
JK. Actually, the developers post on their forums all of the time, and seem like normal nice guys not prone to knee-jerk reactions and faked photographs. It's also not really vaporware, as they have released an SDK and other things... it's just a bit late. (Money... Burning... Hole...) It's also a little underpowered as far as primary gaming machines go, but that's not what you buy an alternative console for anyway.
There are good alternative console developers out there. Even if the Phantom people are evil and the DIScovER people are ruthless jerks, some people are doing good things in the world of consoles.
Hard OCP actually comes out on top of all of this, in my accounting. They get A: Slashdot traffic several times, B: Penny Arcade traffic several times, and perhaps most importantly C: an iron clad precedent if anybody else tries to muscle them into submission. HardOCP is going to come out of this as a force to be respected.
And for this, they have to hire an intelligent intelligible attorney who can argue that water is wet.
Right. And remember Nokia's response? They sold what they had, and got right to work on building a superior version that addressed the issues that everyone was complaining about.
Now I gave Nokia a lot of flak for their horrific original design, but to take such overwhelming criticism and respond by addressing everyone's complaints is admirable bordering upon heroic. And they'll get a superior product out of the other side to boot, which still will integrate well into their other product lines.
Indrema, on the other hand, has responded to criticisms by suing everybody in sight. This is not the way to get customers, this is the way to shut up people who are blowing your cover. Nokia handled the (well deserved) response to the N-Gage elegantly and should be given a second chance in the market. Indrema has taken their (well deserved) criticisms terribly, and on the slight possibility that they aren't a scam their failure in the market should evoke no sympathy.
They are playing silly buggers with the law in order to extract wealth from the economy without actually providing a service or product of value in return.
On behalf of the 99.9% under the boot, I welcome you to America.
Sorry, I had meant that the focus of these cartoons were the bankers specifically. But, when it comes right down to it you do have the seat of power of the Separatists coming entirely from the financial services industry. And the robot guys, whom we hardly ever see.
Either way they're significantly less compelling villains than, say, Fred from Three's Company.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. I can't seem to find any of the people I know listed, yet I know that some have donated... some have even campaigned for these people. Both I and my girlfriend have donated to Dean, yet neither of us show up in the database. There doesn't seem to be a spot for us on the map of our city.
Can anyone verify that they are listed and this isn't a hoax?
Just because something CAN be private, doesn't mean it should be, or that you should should get uptight about someone offering it to the public or individuals.
Well, what if you wanted to search down the Address to Barbara Bush? She happens to be at 10000 Memorial Drive Houston, TX 77024. There is an Albert and Elizabeth Gore making contributions to Dean out at 312 Lynnwood Blvd Nashville, TN 37205. Perot only leaves his P.O. Box, but he lives out in Plano, TX, and is supporting Bush.
The by-city information is very interesting, and the amounts donated to each candidate by individuals should be public information. But the actual address itself should probably be kept secret. I've known several people who have had stalkers they have moved to avoid, and would be very unhappy to discover that their address is publically available again.
Of course, oddly, I can't seem to find any of them. I'm personally not listed, despite two donations to Dean's campaign. Can anyone who has donated to a candidate verify that they are on the list? The privacy concerns would be moot if it were all a hoax...
What a load of bullshit. Kyoto was dead before Bush was even nominated as a presidential candidate.
I'm not saying it was caused by Bush, I'm saying it came to symbolize the administration rightly or wrongly to the rest of the world.
An explanation of "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" can be found here.
And yes, perfect reference. Leave it to Will Wright to create an interpretation of Love based upon Star Trek.
Plan 9 was an utter failure. Just three zombies? What were the aliens thinking?
How to create a love story has been a sticky issue in videogaming for many years now. The "contest" part is entirely trappings... You're taking some of the greatest minds in gaming, and having them attack a fundamental problem of gaming. To say that it is an invalid exercise because the structure was loose is to miss the point. A sense of heroism is easy to create in a videogame, but love? Creepy asian body pillows aside, game designers are still struggling with how to emotionally involve players in love in videogames. Love stories are established genres in all other forms of human fiction. How can this basic part of human culture manifest itself in the gaming world?
In the words of panel host Eric Zimmerman the point is to discover "how it is that game designers begin to grapple with conceptual problems."
Spector felt the task was impossible, a position that is completely understandable. I can only assume that you didn't mean that his conclusion was garbage, but that of the other two people.
Koster's solution is interesting... The Massively Multiplayer Romance Novel. Being inherently text based it wouldn't be a financial success, but it is an interesting approach to the problem. I wouldn't fund it, but then again that's why we don't see many love story videogames.
Wright's solution is both practical and might survive a publisher's funding challenge. Nothing pulls people together emotionally like adversity. A game about meeting and solving challenges together in a life-and-death situation is far more likely to cause people to fall in love than chatting on AIM. It doesn't assume that love is already there, it just picks people predisposed like a computer dating service, and gives them adversity to overcome together utilizing gaming situations likely to cause the people to fall in love.
Honestly, Wright's solution to the problem is both elegant and implementable. Personally, I would love to sign up to help develop such a project, and wouldn't be surprised to see it implemented by somebody in the coming years. There's got to be an online dating service looking for a truly unique hook.
Yeah but then democracy happened and since then no democratic state can plan more than about 4 years ahead.*
*Unless it involves guns. - DARPA
I stopped reading your post after this line. If this is what you beleive I don't want to read any more of your ideas.
Wow. That's surprisingly open minded of you, and bodes well for the movement. Anything that doesn't agree with your philosophy is instantly turned off without bothering to read the explanation, eigh? Where I come from, that's called fundamentalism, and is a sign of a closed mind and an indefensible intellectual predisposition.
If you had bothered to read further, you would have found that my main arguments for terraforming Mars is the potential for a greater knowledge and appreciation for environmental issues, and as a protection against potential future environmental catastrophes.
Kyoto was a compromise because it will force the closing of, for example certain broken down Russian factories where income is at a sustinence level and potential investments are nonexistent. Certain people in India eek out survival by the completely hazardous and toxic recycling and burning of computer parts. Environmental controls will put these people out of jobs in areas where there aren't any other jobs. That's a reality. That's also fair, as the environmental pollution these activities create is likely to kill more people than the activities themselves support. But to say that that is not a reality of existence in other countries is extremely close-minded.
I fashion myself an environmentalist, having bicycled more miles than many people drive and protested environmentally destructive activities. To this day I'm peeved about the importation of Snails to the North American ecology, and feel that wolves should be re-introduced into the wild. Come to think of it, I'm also a member of the Green Party. If the belief that environmentally sound activities involve compromise with people's other needs is so alien to you that you stick your fingers in your ears and go "La-la-la-la-la," then get out of my movement. That form of fundamentalism is out of touch with the experiences of most people in this world, even most environmentalists, and only serves to feed the stereotype of the lunatic fringe "greenie." A stereotype which has proven an effective weapon against us many times in the court of public opinion.
And don't post annonymously if you believe in something. Have a spine.
- Chris Canfield
Ahh... Memories.
Don't forget, though, that Dragon Warrior was quite popular on the NES. I, II, III, and IV all made it to the cover of Nintendo Power, had good sales (except IV), and created fond memories. Dragon Warrior 1 is most console people's first RPG, and is still copied to this day on smaller devices. But the NES is where U.S. Dragon Warrior sat for many years. While Final Fantasy 2 never came out for the NES (I had a pre-order. Sigh), it did make two large splashes on the 16 bit generation, and three on the 32 bit systems.
Dragon Warrior, on the other hand, was conspicuously absent after the NES. With absolutely nothing on the SNES, and a title snuck in at the end of the Playstation's lifetime, there was little to really keep the series fresh in player's minds. To them, Dragon Warrior was an old outdated game that had been done a million times before, and a million times better. They waited too long to do a sequel, but not long enough that it could be considered new again.
Now I need to whip out the old emulator and find a copy of DQ IV.
I personally love Gold Golems, but Drakees were adorable.
It's not an unfair burden to expect somebody to be able to afford to buy their own phone hardware. But, just what is the minimum feature set of a computer to enjoy the Internet? Is Lynx a good enough browser, or do we have to assure that the subsidized level of service can deliver Mozilla?
Your post was intelligent and well thought-out overall, but I'd like to point out that at the time the rural telephone access was an issue, telephones were actually quite expensive. Even in the early 80's a basic telephone would run 30 dollars, and that is in the dollars of the time. My mother was leasing a telephone in the 70's, because leasing was cheaper than owning. If we assume a phone in the 50's was 50 dollars (someone who remembers/has data from that time please chime in), and the median income was 5,000 dollars, then that creates an income/cost ratio of 100 to 1. If the median US income (for 2002) was 43,000 dollars, that would imply an access burden of 430 dollars. Cheap computers can be had inside of Wallmart for that much money, including monitor, and everywhere else for not significantly more.
So yes, while the concept of rural broadbandization seems laughable, the cost to the end user doesn't seem that out of line with previous similar programs.
The evil martian regime harbors weapons of mass destruction in the form of tremendous stockpiles of poison gas, and has even gone so far as to kill off large segments of its own population. Our weapons inspection teams are hampered at every turn, and the British inspection team hasn't been heard from in months, presumed dead.
We cannot ignore the martian threat any longer.
The Kyoto protocol was controversial because it was attempting to balance man's need to survive financially with man's need to survive ecologically. Nobody wants to destroy the planet, but everybody needs to eat. Plus it came to symbolize a much larger conflict between the Bush administration's self-interested unilateral actions and much of the rest of the world's eglatarian compromising.
Terraforming Mars has none of the risk of the Kyoto protocol. Whether or not we terraform Mars is basically irrelevant to the ecology of Earth. Likewise, as there isn't a strong industrial base on Mars it is pretty financially irrelevant in the short term. Essentially, the two groups debating this will be hardcore scifi geeks (like me) who want to colonize the universe and hardcore environment geeks who feel that everything is better untouched by human hands.
Personally, I feel that terraforming Mars will give Earth agencies experience in the vital area of fixing ecological nightmares. As for "screwing up" Mars, people generally point to Earth turning into Mars if we mess up this planet sufficiently. Mars is just about the worst-case scenario. Personally I'd rather have the fallback position that if global thermonuclear war were to wipe out our planet, at least life from Earth would continue somewhere. That, and the ample room such a planet would provide plus the enduring environmental investment sounds quite worthy of the loss of pristine, untouched land berift of much beyond sterilized soil and historical rocks. Much of the research into that could take place LONG before we are in a position to actually terraform the planet. After all, two out of three landers agree that the planet is a pain to get to, with one abstention.
Now, where the heavy debate is going to lie years down the road is whether or not terraforming a planet gives ownership rights to that planet, and if, for example, the people living on that planet have the right to cede from an offworld government that made life on that planet possible. That's going to be a huge, sticky debate mixing fundamental beliefs about freedom and democracy with entrenched and represented commercial interests and unspoken debts to powerful entities.
One of the major problems with game reviewing, and this is why they all sound like adverts, is that the people who want to review a particular type of game are given that game to review. If someone is an Everquest junkie, they're going to be given the new Everquest to review. Wonder of wonders, he likes it! On a fundamental level, you don't get to the point of being a game reviewer without loving games in general, so even if you removed this point you would have an unnecessarily glowing review. Having 2 or 3 reviewers on a game would be an improvement, but few publications have that kind of manpower.
Furthermore, and I've seen this firsthand, reveiwers aren't exactly the strongest willed of people. They tend not to rock the boat. I don't know if this groupthink is from self-selection, from the fact that there is no objective way to judge the value of a reviewer so you must hire by whether or not s/he reviewed games in exactly the same way that you would have, but they all blow with the wind. Companies know this, and they do their best to blow at the reviewers. Companies create the perception of a popular uprising, and reviewers feed it until it actually is a popular uprising. Most reviewers don't realize they are doing this, nor do they realize where the uprising came from.
And yes, Demos are the best indicator of a 95% finished game. Unfortunately, you do have to cut the company the littlest bit of slack, as the demo will be done a month before the game finishes, so it is almost guarenteed to have crashes that won't appear in the final version.
Companies should care, but we don't. We're too busy trying to figure out how to manipulate the reviewers into giving our games a perfect score. Most of us are terrible at it, but what we want is hype for our products rather than objectivity for everyone else's. After all, after pouring your heart and soul into a game for years you're going to think it's the bees knees, even if a more objective viewer doesn't like it. And five points on a review might be the difference between doing the game you want next time or doing a licensed movie port for the GBA.
Don't look to us to fix the objectivity problem, that will only come with subscribers choosing magazines that actually use the full range of their scoring charts, rather than just 70-100%.
What an intelligently well-written argument. I'll have to remember it.
I appologize for bringing race into the argument in any form, but having lived in LA and been on the outskirts of the music, movie, and legal scenes there the power does come primarily from rich white men. It's surprising that nobody has brought up gender in that comment, as it is equally theoretically invalid. Not that the studios are run by women, but that they "can" be every bit as much as they "can" be run by someone from India. They just aren't, through a series of self-selections.
The problem with declaring class warfare is that it will never end. The labels and studios will always be run by rich people. By being in that seat of power they become rich. Period. We can say that we want more women and "minorities" in the major positions of power in Hollywood, but it wouldn't make any sense to say that we want poor people.
What we want is a diversity of ideas and ideals, so that it will be possible to have an actual discussion with the powerbase without all of them reasurring themselves about the validness of their incorrect ideas. Being entirely from one race and one gender hinders the interaction greatly to the point of talking to a philosophical brick wall. I'm not saying that salvation lies in having a broader range of life experiences behind the leaders of our govern... companies. I'm just saying it would help.
It's amazing that Microsoft is still saying with a straight face that you can call their support line and get help. Admittedly half of that statement is true, but not the half that matters to most businesses. Microsoft's ineptitude on the phone is legendary. Their developer's site is nice and quite useful, but that's not going to help the average clueless Joe who wants to know why Office is reformatting all of his documents with the tagline "0wn3d by PH3rN4nd0!," or keeps crashing with the words "missing vsdl95.dll." They charge ludicrous hourly rates to provide the kind of tech support a jr. high school student would consider incompetent. Come to think of it, I sense an opportunity to revitialize our schools...
Furthermore, their document reads like a argument against closed protocols. "If you leave us, you leave your data. You leave your database. You leave your correspondences. You can't leave us. You're ours." If your file cabinet supplier came to you and told you that your business histories and documents would be shredded if you ever thought about leaving, you would consider it blackmail and would find a new supplier right away, threats be damned. Why do we take this as a viable argument in the computer world?
consumer backlash no longer means anything.
Most of the people I know consider P2P a form of nonviolent protest. It's a way of voicing our discontent with the way our consumerist society corners us with the belief that there are no alternatives. Well there are alternatives, many of them, and no matter what the rich white men in suits may believe we can actualize these alternatives into something they can't touch! P2P is our protest! P2P is our power, our voice, our constitutionally protected free speech! Outlawing P2P is outlawing free speech!
Well, not really. But that argument is no dumber than what has been coming out the the copyright companies. Like saying that in an economy that is down %10 due to a massive worldwide recession record sales are down %10 because of... computers. Or that the value of a copy of a song which the sell for 4 dollars suddenly becomes 10,000 dollars because it was put on a P2P network. Or that computer hacking is terrorism and terrorism is treason and treason is punishable by death but hacking to protect copyrights is a noble form of copyprotection and stopping someone from hacking to protect their copyright is a violation of the DMCA.
Sigh. All I want is a little sanity in our legal system.
Four, Infinium, NOT Indrema-- the two are totally different.
Not until they launch.
Advertising 45,691
Marketing 65,789
Travel and entertainment 106,523
Website development 41,558
Internet costs 26,518
Printing and reproduction 12,655
By my accounting principles, that should all be under "marketing," and that puts marketing at
299031, or just about equal to development costs.
And I know that running a business isn't free, but how can a company of about 4 people rack up thirty-one thousand dollars in telephone fees in the span of a year? This company is notorious for not returning phone calls.
You might be interested in the XGameStation. It's a console that you build (ahem, assemble) yourself based upon an open specification. The design is entirely open, though open as in visible not open as in FSF. Hardware hacking is encouraged. You could probably build one yourself with the parts without calling down the wrath of the developers, though avoiding fumbling about for individual fuse suppliers and making your own breadboard would be worth the 100 or so dollars they will probably charge.
Good stuff. I'm looking forward to picking one up when they feel it is ready.
...that isn't run by a bunch of jacka$$#$? Try the X Game Station. It's sufficiently obscure that it makes people think you're elite, and it's sufficiently vaporware that it will be a while before that's proven wrong.
JK. Actually, the developers post on their forums all of the time, and seem like normal nice guys not prone to knee-jerk reactions and faked photographs. It's also not really vaporware, as they have released an SDK and other things... it's just a bit late. (Money... Burning... Hole...) It's also a little underpowered as far as primary gaming machines go, but that's not what you buy an alternative console for anyway.
There are good alternative console developers out there. Even if the Phantom people are evil and the DIScovER people are ruthless jerks, some people are doing good things in the world of consoles.
Hard OCP actually comes out on top of all of this, in my accounting. They get A: Slashdot traffic several times, B: Penny Arcade traffic several times, and perhaps most importantly C: an iron clad precedent if anybody else tries to muscle them into submission. HardOCP is going to come out of this as a force to be respected.
And for this, they have to hire an intelligent intelligible attorney who can argue that water is wet.
Right. And remember Nokia's response? They sold what they had, and got right to work on building a superior version that addressed the issues that everyone was complaining about.
Now I gave Nokia a lot of flak for their horrific original design, but to take such overwhelming criticism and respond by addressing everyone's complaints is admirable bordering upon heroic. And they'll get a superior product out of the other side to boot, which still will integrate well into their other product lines.
Indrema, on the other hand, has responded to criticisms by suing everybody in sight. This is not the way to get customers, this is the way to shut up people who are blowing your cover. Nokia handled the (well deserved) response to the N-Gage elegantly and should be given a second chance in the market. Indrema has taken their (well deserved) criticisms terribly, and on the slight possibility that they aren't a scam their failure in the market should evoke no sympathy.
They are playing silly buggers with the law in order to extract wealth from the economy without actually providing a service or product of value in return.
On behalf of the 99.9% under the boot, I welcome you to America.
Sorry, I had meant that the focus of these cartoons were the bankers specifically. But, when it comes right down to it you do have the seat of power of the Separatists coming entirely from the financial services industry. And the robot guys, whom we hardly ever see.
Either way they're significantly less compelling villains than, say, Fred from Three's Company.
These.