I'm sure Garage Games would be more than happy to lisence its engine to peple for $250,000. The only problem is, they know full well that for that much money, a company can go out and get themselved the Q3 engine, and nobody would look at their offering, because "everyone knows Quake3 is the best".
So the chose this alternate model. The $100/developer model will probably not work too well for iD, who offer the services of John Carmack for a day to all lisencees, as well as a lot of email support, etc. Would it be worth it for JC to make a trip to teach 4 developers to use the engine, get $400 in return, and then have the game cancelled in developement?
Besides, iD doesn't really do publishing. They publish through GT Interactive as far as I recall, so this revenue stream is not viable at all.
Of course I know that. DeCSS breaks the encryption that is put by studios onto digital copies of its movies (DVDs). Their defense strategy was (partially) the fair use clause - they were saying that by breaking this encryption, they were simply letting users fairly use the content that they paid for.
If the studios can point to an analog version and say "But you don't need to break our encryption - here's the unencrypted version, lower quality, but available", this defence strategy is undermined. That is of course if the courts accept a lower-quality copy of the content as being "good enough" to satisfy fair use.
My point was that they could attack things like DeCSS, and counter any of its fair use claims by pointing out that you can still get an analog verison (which may be slightly lower in quality, but should satisfy all your needs anyway - if all you are going to do is use it for things like criticism). Since you can grab the analog, they can claim that the fair use defense is meaningless, and invalid.
So, we all knew you could do this. Just like you could point a camcorded at a movie screen, and just like you can hook up your stereo's line out to your sound card's line in to record DRM'ed music.
The question is, wether or not this satisfies fair use. If you can make a low-quality analog copy of a digital work, is the law not still guaranteeing you the right to use the work fairly in it's original - digital - format?
I think this is actually not bad at all. Nielsen has shown itself to be a good citizen when it comes to collecting viewing habits across the nation. And the fact that this is an opt-in feature rather than an opt-out one seems to go with that reputation.
Making these TiVOs useful to the corporate world is good, since they are getting a cheap and easy way to get to their data, and in return their interest is now vested with this machine that the MPAA isn't too comfy with. Hopefully, TiVO just got itself a supporter in the media camp.
Now perhaps if the money from Nielsen can be used to subsidise driving the subscription cost of TiVO down, I may finally get one:)
Microsoft today announced that due to the revealed Western Digital technology, they can disclose that Windows Longhorn will actually be a Full-Motion Video (FMV) Operating System, which will require a 200Gig drive to install on.
I loved the idea of this, since I sometimes go camping, and my battery ends up dying after a day or two... When I went to the motorola website, they only had the freecharge listed for their current crop of phones.
Mine's a StarTAC, which they have lamentably stopped producing, and I wasn't sure if the charger would work with it, given that it wasn't one of the listed supported models...
Anyone know if they're compatible?
[plug]
I recently made a site for riddles/questions of this type, if anyone is interested. http://www.flooble.com/perplexus/
[/plug]
Re:nVidia to announce new features
on
nForce2 Preview
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· Score: 1
Given previous partnerships with MS, I would assume it comes with an embedded version of Windows 3.1 instead. Of course, this will probably drive the cost up by about $100 in licencing fees, but at least you would get a true cooperative multitasking system right in the chipset.
This Windows XP (tm) installation does not match the hardware profile recorded at activation. Press "OK" to charge credit card on file with Passport $199.99 for new Windows XP (tm) lisence. Press "Cancel" to remove the unauthorised copy of Windows XP (tm) from your system.
From the text of the article, the "service" will be offered to banks, ans will "force" the "users" to authenticate online transactions with their "Passport" password.
Which means that if you are one of the people whose bank decides to "pay" Microsoft for this "service", you will be "forced" to get a Passport account.
It's a great move for Microsoft - they will be getting paid by third parties for the privilege of forcing customers into the MS system. This is similar to me paying somebody to let me force visitors go to their site.
Might wanna hold on to that cash:) Carmack himself said that by the time Doom III is out there will be a new generation of cards that are much more suited to running it.
I think it is a big gain, since you will only be spending money on the software if it offers tangible improvement in stability or performance or both.
With today's constant hardware upgrade cycles you can be forced to upgrade to a new OS because your old one does not support USB 2.0c, it only supports USB up through 2.0b. And you're screwed, since that new digital camera you got only works with 2.0c. So you end up spending money on new software and new hardware.
With the hardware part of the equation frozen, you would only be forced to spend on the software, and that spending would be motivated by tangible improvements rather than broken back-compatibility.
This is all a pipe dream of course. But I sometimes wonder... Why is my 1.4G pentium 4 not even 10 time faster than my 33MHz 386 was in '92?
Oh please... Anyone who is going to be interested in such a card will probably not want to get it to play DVDs or use Photoshop. And a serious gamer is probably a Windows user to begin with. However good Linux's desktop support is getting recently, Windows is still running circles around it when it comes to gaming. It's just a fact of life.
Ummm... ATI had nothing to do with the voodoo 5, you know that, right? Anyway, the ATI driver support is supposedly improving. Maybe if they concentrated on making solid drivers about figuring how to make things look faster in Quake3, they would have a better reputation on the market.
... Do we need to have a Beowulf cluster of chips and memory on a video card? This is yet another example of the trend in cumputing that has strived to make things better by making them bigger and giving us more of them.
"Optimization, shmoptimization! Just cram a second GPU in there and we'll be fine."
I really wish people would just stop coming out with new hardware for a couple of years, so that we can all save a few upgrade bucks, and the software industry can get their act together, and start writing clean, well optimized, stable programs, instead of trying to always catch up to the bleeding edge that nobody really asked the hardware companies to push.
This looks like a very smart move on NVIDIA's part. Remember GLIDE? Everyone loved it, and it arguably contributed a lot to 3Dfx's success in late 90s. The only problem with GLIDE was that it completely didn't work on any other cards.
Which was fine while the market was 90% Voodoo, but once other players got more or less established, the benefit of easily developing stuff with GLIDE was overshadowed by the loss of a chunk of your target audience, and the developers moved away from it.
Now imagine, if GLIDE worked on all the competitors' cards, but worked just *slightly* worse than on a Voodoo card. Not enough to be unplayable or anything, but worse nontheless. Then, there's a good chance developers would still use GLIDE, and 3Dfx could claim supperiority on all those products.
However "open" Cg will be, NVIDIA will definitely get the edge on any software written with it, if only because they will have had a head start.
I wonder though if this language is at all similar to GLIDE, which they acquired together with 3Dfx. I also wonder what someone who is very good at low-level graphics programming (like John Carmack) thinks of the idea of this language.
I think that it's a job of any reviewer to spend an hour playing with a program's settings. I would be fine with it if he said: "The gestures were confusing and annoying at first, but if you give it a little practice they become an indispencible part of navigation." (Which really is the case). The fact that he found himself not using them, and disabled them, hardly makes them annoying.
Besides, he completely fails to mention that Opera informs you the first time you use gestures, and, as I recall gives you an option to disable it right then and there.
The comment on the reviewer's part about the mouse gestures being annoying pretty much invalidated the whole review for me. I am using Opera full time, and find genstures indispensible to the extent that when forced to use IE/K-Meleon due to Opera's rendering issues, I constantly find myself trying to "go back" by right-dragging the mouse to the left.
That somebody who took it upon themself to review the product did not wish to take the time to familiarize themself with one of its biggest features speaks to a certain lack of proffessinalism... That aside though, I don't see how the gestures can be considered a "con". Even with them turned on, I find it difficult to perform one accidentally (I myself only use the back and forth navigation and never run into a problem of triggering another gesture accidentally). Finally, since there's an option to turn them off, I really fail to see how, iven if they are "annoying", their inclusion can be held against the browser.
I think that it's by providing these features that Opera can succeed in the marketplace alongside of IE. One great feature would be trying to predict the next link you will click and pre-loading that page. (Like for multi-page articles).
I'm sure that's what'll happen, but the appeal is just too great... Think about it, instead of getting your game on the shelves for a couple of months, you ensure a cash stream for a couple of years at least. That's every single subscriber you've got not only shelling out $40 - $60 for the game in the store (of which you only get a percentage), but also paying $10 - $15 to you *directly* every month.
That's like getting somebody to buy a new game from you every four months, but with only a fraction of the money spent on development, distribution and marketing of what you would with a traditional game model.
I'm sure that all these companies are fully prepared for the risk of a failure due to market saturation, but if you weigh the benefits against the dangers, I think you end up coming out with a pretty profitable proposition, as long as your product is decent.
Besides, if all these games in the market drive up the overall quality of the genre, everybody wins. With so many companies fighting over the players, I'm hoping to see the end of the "we can always fix in in a patch" mentality that dominated the early days of MMORPGs.
Slashdot Mirror
... step away to go to the bathroom, when you come back, you will have to sit and wait for all your 20 gigs of pr0n to finish encrypting :)
So the chose this alternate model. The $100/developer model will probably not work too well for iD, who offer the services of John Carmack for a day to all lisencees, as well as a lot of email support, etc. Would it be worth it for JC to make a trip to teach 4 developers to use the engine, get $400 in return, and then have the game cancelled in developement?
Besides, iD doesn't really do publishing. They publish through GT Interactive as far as I recall, so this revenue stream is not viable at all.
Well, I think it's probably because iD isn't really into publishing. (If memory serves GT is the publisher of most of their games).
If the studios can point to an analog version and say "But you don't need to break our encryption - here's the unencrypted version, lower quality, but available", this defence strategy is undermined. That is of course if the courts accept a lower-quality copy of the content as being "good enough" to satisfy fair use.
Just playing devil's advocate here.
The question is, wether or not this satisfies fair use. If you can make a low-quality analog copy of a digital work, is the law not still guaranteeing you the right to use the work fairly in it's original - digital - format?
Making these TiVOs useful to the corporate world is good, since they are getting a cheap and easy way to get to their data, and in return their interest is now vested with this machine that the MPAA isn't too comfy with. Hopefully, TiVO just got itself a supporter in the media camp.
Now perhaps if the money from Nielsen can be used to subsidise driving the subscription cost of TiVO down, I may finally get one :)
Microsoft today announced that due to the revealed Western Digital technology, they can disclose that Windows Longhorn will actually be a Full-Motion Video (FMV) Operating System, which will require a 200Gig drive to install on.
Mine's a StarTAC, which they have lamentably stopped producing, and I wasn't sure if the charger would work with it, given that it wasn't one of the listed supported models... Anyone know if they're compatible?
[plug] I recently made a site for riddles/questions of this type, if anyone is interested. http://www.flooble.com/perplexus/ [/plug]
Given previous partnerships with MS, I would assume it comes with an embedded version of Windows 3.1 instead. Of course, this will probably drive the cost up by about $100 in licencing fees, but at least you would get a true cooperative multitasking system right in the chipset.
Plans for nForce 4 (still some time in the future) include an embedded version of Java and/or Internet Explorer
This Windows XP (tm) installation does not match the hardware profile recorded at activation. Press "OK" to charge credit card on file with Passport $199.99 for new Windows XP (tm) lisence. Press "Cancel" to remove the unauthorised copy of Windows XP (tm) from your system.
Which means that if you are one of the people whose bank decides to "pay" Microsoft for this "service", you will be "forced" to get a Passport account.
It's a great move for Microsoft - they will be getting paid by third parties for the privilege of forcing customers into the MS system. This is similar to me paying somebody to let me force visitors go to their site.
Might wanna hold on to that cash :) Carmack himself said that by the time Doom III is out there will be a new generation of cards that are much more suited to running it.
With today's constant hardware upgrade cycles you can be forced to upgrade to a new OS because your old one does not support USB 2.0c, it only supports USB up through 2.0b. And you're screwed, since that new digital camera you got only works with 2.0c. So you end up spending money on new software and new hardware.
With the hardware part of the equation frozen, you would only be forced to spend on the software, and that spending would be motivated by tangible improvements rather than broken back-compatibility.
This is all a pipe dream of course. But I sometimes wonder... Why is my 1.4G pentium 4 not even 10 time faster than my 33MHz 386 was in '92?
Oh please... Anyone who is going to be interested in such a card will probably not want to get it to play DVDs or use Photoshop. And a serious gamer is probably a Windows user to begin with. However good Linux's desktop support is getting recently, Windows is still running circles around it when it comes to gaming. It's just a fact of life.
Ummm... ATI had nothing to do with the voodoo 5, you know that, right? Anyway, the ATI driver support is supposedly improving. Maybe if they concentrated on making solid drivers about figuring how to make things look faster in Quake3, they would have a better reputation on the market.
"Optimization, shmoptimization! Just cram a second GPU in there and we'll be fine."
I really wish people would just stop coming out with new hardware for a couple of years, so that we can all save a few upgrade bucks, and the software industry can get their act together, and start writing clean, well optimized, stable programs, instead of trying to always catch up to the bleeding edge that nobody really asked the hardware companies to push.
Which was fine while the market was 90% Voodoo, but once other players got more or less established, the benefit of easily developing stuff with GLIDE was overshadowed by the loss of a chunk of your target audience, and the developers moved away from it.
Now imagine, if GLIDE worked on all the competitors' cards, but worked just *slightly* worse than on a Voodoo card. Not enough to be unplayable or anything, but worse nontheless. Then, there's a good chance developers would still use GLIDE, and 3Dfx could claim supperiority on all those products.
However "open" Cg will be, NVIDIA will definitely get the edge on any software written with it, if only because they will have had a head start.
I wonder though if this language is at all similar to GLIDE, which they acquired together with 3Dfx. I also wonder what someone who is very good at low-level graphics programming (like John Carmack) thinks of the idea of this language.
Besides, he completely fails to mention that Opera informs you the first time you use gestures, and, as I recall gives you an option to disable it right then and there.
That somebody who took it upon themself to review the product did not wish to take the time to familiarize themself with one of its biggest features speaks to a certain lack of proffessinalism... That aside though, I don't see how the gestures can be considered a "con". Even with them turned on, I find it difficult to perform one accidentally (I myself only use the back and forth navigation and never run into a problem of triggering another gesture accidentally). Finally, since there's an option to turn them off, I really fail to see how, iven if they are "annoying", their inclusion can be held against the browser.
I think that it's by providing these features that Opera can succeed in the marketplace alongside of IE. One great feature would be trying to predict the next link you will click and pre-loading that page. (Like for multi-page articles).
That's like getting somebody to buy a new game from you every four months, but with only a fraction of the money spent on development, distribution and marketing of what you would with a traditional game model.
I'm sure that all these companies are fully prepared for the risk of a failure due to market saturation, but if you weigh the benefits against the dangers, I think you end up coming out with a pretty profitable proposition, as long as your product is decent.
Besides, if all these games in the market drive up the overall quality of the genre, everybody wins. With so many companies fighting over the players, I'm hoping to see the end of the "we can always fix in in a patch" mentality that dominated the early days of MMORPGs.