...at whoever thinks this eliminates all traces of your identity from a file. Your info could be encoded 50 different ways in the file, and if this app only scrubs 49 of them before you send the file to your friends on BitTorrent -- and seriously, what other point is there to this? -- then you're still hosed.
MacOSX and Aqua are quite new to me, so please bear with me as I learn about this (for me) exciting new platform at first. Certainly I will have many questions for my fellow Mac porters. However I can contribute ~10 years experience with vcl which I think the port can benefit from.
The problem has always been that OO.o makes assumptions about GUI development that are well-suited to X11 and Windows, and not well-suited to Aqua. The question is, can someone who's learning Mac development as he goes push changes back to OO.o to make it more suitable for Aqua and other GUI toolkits? Can he do it before Sun changes their mind and de-funds the Mac port? Sun has a habit of funding things for about six months and then getting cold feet.
Which reminds me: I should throw some money at Ed and Patrick for their continued work on NeoOffice, which uses Java as a GUI adapter (!) to get OO.o tolerable on the Mac
Exactly. And moreover, Network B is usually only allowed to use the footage from Network A for 24 hours after the end of the game. That's why when you see footage weeks or months later, it's usually from NFL Films and not from the other networks.
In the industry, this is called an "embargo", and it is absolutely typical. MSNBC owns their broadcast of the debate (under copyright law, they're the "creator" of the "creative work"), and these embargoes establish the degree to which they're willing to share their footage with other media outlets, for the sole reason that they depend on others sharing their work with MSNBC under similar terms. That it is a political news event is irrelevant -- similar terms would be used for coverage of breaking news, sports events, etc.
If anything, it's notable that MSNBC is willing to allow use by websites at all. A few years ago, there would be no such terms discussed, or there'd be a simple "no posting online".
If the terms were "take all you want and do what you want with it", the prevailing thinking is that anyone could broadcast or post the event in its entirety, without paying a dime, which would be a severe disincentive to MSNBC's production of it in the first place, which in turn would mean that all the MSNBC staffers and freelancers would be out of a job.
This is from the company that six years ago was boasting about doing everything online (viz, FF XI, the strategy guide for FF IX, etc.) and plastering the PlayOnline.com moniker everywhere it would fit. They don't seem to be talking about that grand plan much anymore.
Seriously, guys, all of your sequels have sucked (FFX-2, Dirge of Cerberus, etc.), and the you totally overlook the good work you've done on side-projects (e.g., all the Tactics and Kingdom Hearts games). We'll be happy if you just make a good new FF game in the main series every few years, and lay off the grand pronouncements.
Also, a new Chrono game wouldn't hurt. And maybe another Tobal or Ehrgeiz just for kicks.
...when it was called ThinkFree Online. Oh wait, we have to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java. Even though it works well, lets you use your own fonts and printer, opens and saves real MS Office docs, and installs into the JVM cache faster than an MS Office or OpenOffice install.
Oh well, trying to write an Office suite in Ajax has kept people busy for a few years, now they can try to get the native OO.o app working in a browser. Maybe next we can port it to Flash. That'll be fun.
...that even brick-and-mortar distribution allows for titles with modest sales numbers to find an audience. Consider this: you know those giant anime racks at Fry's and Best Buy? While there are many individual SKU's, few sell more than a handful. Teading NewType USA and AnimeOnDVD, I've seen a couple different writers note that many anime titles will sell only a few hundred copies region-wide in their entire lifetime. Production and distribution must be pretty efficient for that to be possible, right?
Having said that... don't cry for me, Argentina, I think the slow Blu-Ray sellers will survive. If you're bemoaning The Fifth Element only moving about 900 copies a week and making the top-10 for it, well, maybe your format needs more appealing films than 10-year-old sci-fi dreck that The Daily Show once called "the gay Star Wars."
...into the realm of mean-spirited lawsuits. Maybe Activision should change the series into RIAA Hero, in which you search the net for file-swappers, and throw down awesome legal whoop-ass on them. I imagine that would suit the joyless Activision drone units just fine.
While they're at it, maybe they should develop their own web search engine too. Oh, and a portal! And some dancing hamsters! Everyone loves the dancing hamsters!
...the entertainment industry's lawsuits are way more interesting than their TV shows, movies, and records? Maybe they should formally change their business model and go primarily into lawsuits as a creative medium.
JList/JBox has been selling Japanese iTunes cards for some time, and frequently advertise them in their ads in magazines like NewType USA. Right next to the hentai/bishoujo games and Domo-kun plushies.
That's true -- it's not hard to see in Guitar Hero the gameplay of Frequency/Amplitude and the aesthetics of Karaoke Revolution (eg, you see the performer on stage in a reactive environment, not just Random Crap like in DDR).
One thing I forgot to note in my original message was how the loading screens for some of the unlockable songs suggested that many of the Harmonix staffers were members of the bands in the unlock songs... suggesting a passion for and understanding of musical performance that I highly doubt Neversoft shares.
All Harmonix did was create 100% fun music games with a real feel for rock, from the Boston bands playing in their basement level up to overblown stadium rock. All they did was make it fun. And before that, they did the spot-on goofy Karaoke Revolution games.
All Neversoft has ever done is crank out tired sequel after sequel after sequel, of Tony Hawk (yawn) and Spider-Man (yawn, big yawn, slip into coma).
Red Octane can spare us the spin. This doesn't do the gamers any good. It's all management and marketing, and even though I was first in my neighborhood to have GH, KR, and DDR, it's going to be very hard to get me to give GH3 a chance.
So, if having apps is incompatible with making devices that work, then I guess not developing apps for the Mac is officially a good thing now?
This attitude is gonna go over real well with the Mac developer community. "Write apps for our platform! No, not that platform, you suck and will only screw it up. Go screw up the Mac instead, with your crappy apps and all."
Producer Hironobu Sakaguchi produced most of the good Final Fantasy games. Designer Akira Toriyama did the Dragon Ball manga and the Dragon Quest games. Composer Nobuo Uematsu's music from Final Fantasy is so popular, it's played at special symphonic concerts.
Even the XBox's low esteem in the Japanese market can't screw this up.
Analogy:
Hey, kids, who wants to see a movie about an archeologist? Noooooooo!
Hey, kids, who wants to see a movie about an archeologist played by Han Solo, directed by the Jaws and Close Encounters guy, and produced by the Star Wars guy?
Yaaaaayyyy!
Kathy Sierra blogged about this a few months ago: Ease-of-use should not mean neuter-the-software, and offered a crucial insight: separate the easy/hard and simple/complex pairs into two axes: difficulty and power. She then goes on to note the trivial case that everyone knows: complex things should ideally be easy, and simple things should not be hard. But what about the other two combinations?
She argues that easy-but-simple (maybe "simplistic" is the mot juste here) is overrated. Limited functionality, even if easy-to-use, doesn't go as far as some would think (indeed, Joel argues this is the "20% strategy" that could be used for bootstrapping, but not in general cases). Kathy also says that complex-but-hard is not as bad as it's made out to be, and indeed can be a good thing. Think of awesomely powerful software, whether it's emacs or Final Cut Pro -- is there a way to make that easier to use, or is the scope of what they do (emacs), or the inherent complexity of the material (FCP) such that the only way to make it easier is to reduce features or functionality (ie, to make NotePad or iMovie instead)? It's important to stop mistaking difficulty for the inherent complexity of some problem domains.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I find absolutely zero innovation in PC games. It's the same genres (FPS, RTS, MMORPG), over and over again, with different licenses or sequel numbers. You'd think with no barriers to entry, no Sony tax, etc., that you'd see more innovation in PC games, but it just doesn't exist: the Katamari Damacys and Guitar Heros of the world show up first, and only, on consoles.
Associated Press (CNN, Yahoo), is reporting that masked, armed thugs robbed people waiting in line at a Putnam, Connecticut Wal-Mart for PS3, and shot one person who wouldn't hand over their money.
Penny Arcade has pretty much nailed the idiocy of this launch, as usual.
There's an underappreciated trend for nichey or B-list games from one generation to suddenly dominate the next generation. The Metal Gear and Final Fantasy series weren't terribly well known in the West until they went 3D and became sensations on the PlayStation 1. Grand Theft Auto was a little-played top-down niche title until its PS2 incarnation became a sensation with its [non-linear sandbox gameplay | violent, explicit, exploitative content]. Notice also how one generation's top titles tend to fade: MegaMan and Street Fighter were da bomb on 8-bit and 16-bit, but didn't evolve or age well and have faded back into niche-dom, Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider were PS1 fixtures but PS2 busts (har har).
Anyways, the PS3's biggest games may not be the current fads (GTA) or old warhorses (FF), but instead, titles that come out of nowhere, maybe because their ideas were waiting for the right hardware. By this theory, PS3's biggest hit might be Metal Gear Solid 4... but it might just as easily be Bumpy Trot 3 or Rez 2.
Do people really still believe things like this? I mean, obviously it's a slight exaggeration. But do that many people think that the PS3 won't do well?
Of course, they'll sell what they have. I'm saying that they've screwed up so badly, they have far too few to sell. They've gone from 2 million units promised for launch day to 500,000... actually, that's not even right, because Japan's gone from 100,000 to 80,000. And it costs too much. And both of these can be blamed on a certain white elephant of a feature. Or, more accurately, a "Blu" one.
Remember how the original PlayStation was praised for its laser-focus on games and not education or movies (um, hello, CD-i)? Well, they seem to have forgotten that in the last 10 years. The PlayStation brand still has hardcore fans who will clear out the initial shipment in minutes, but I think Sony has pushed a lot of fence-sitters into the 360 and Wii camps.
Slashdot Mirror
...at whoever thinks this eliminates all traces of your identity from a file. Your info could be encoded 50 different ways in the file, and if this app only scrubs 49 of them before you send the file to your friends on BitTorrent -- and seriously, what other point is there to this? -- then you're still hosed.
Maybe the fact that a PS3 with one game costs as much as a 360 and a Wii combined?
From the blog:
The problem has always been that OO.o makes assumptions about GUI development that are well-suited to X11 and Windows, and not well-suited to Aqua. The question is, can someone who's learning Mac development as he goes push changes back to OO.o to make it more suitable for Aqua and other GUI toolkits? Can he do it before Sun changes their mind and de-funds the Mac port? Sun has a habit of funding things for about six months and then getting cold feet.
Which reminds me: I should throw some money at Ed and Patrick for their continued work on NeoOffice, which uses Java as a GUI adapter (!) to get OO.o tolerable on the Mac
Or, as Tycho & Gabe once put it, sometimes things cost money.
Exactly. And moreover, Network B is usually only allowed to use the footage from Network A for 24 hours after the end of the game. That's why when you see footage weeks or months later, it's usually from NFL Films and not from the other networks.
In the industry, this is called an "embargo", and it is absolutely typical. MSNBC owns their broadcast of the debate (under copyright law, they're the "creator" of the "creative work"), and these embargoes establish the degree to which they're willing to share their footage with other media outlets, for the sole reason that they depend on others sharing their work with MSNBC under similar terms. That it is a political news event is irrelevant -- similar terms would be used for coverage of breaking news, sports events, etc.
If anything, it's notable that MSNBC is willing to allow use by websites at all. A few years ago, there would be no such terms discussed, or there'd be a simple "no posting online".
If the terms were "take all you want and do what you want with it", the prevailing thinking is that anyone could broadcast or post the event in its entirety, without paying a dime, which would be a severe disincentive to MSNBC's production of it in the first place, which in turn would mean that all the MSNBC staffers and freelancers would be out of a job.
Full disclosure: I worked for CNN for 3.5 years.
This is from the company that six years ago was boasting about doing everything online (viz, FF XI, the strategy guide for FF IX, etc.) and plastering the PlayOnline.com moniker everywhere it would fit. They don't seem to be talking about that grand plan much anymore.
Seriously, guys, all of your sequels have sucked (FFX-2, Dirge of Cerberus, etc.), and the you totally overlook the good work you've done on side-projects (e.g., all the Tactics and Kingdom Hearts games). We'll be happy if you just make a good new FF game in the main series every few years, and lay off the grand pronouncements.
Also, a new Chrono game wouldn't hurt. And maybe another Tobal or Ehrgeiz just for kicks.
...when it was called ThinkFree Online. Oh wait, we have to hate ThinkFree because it's written in Java. Even though it works well, lets you use your own fonts and printer, opens and saves real MS Office docs, and installs into the JVM cache faster than an MS Office or OpenOffice install.
Oh well, trying to write an Office suite in Ajax has kept people busy for a few years, now they can try to get the native OO.o app working in a browser. Maybe next we can port it to Flash. That'll be fun.
...that even brick-and-mortar distribution allows for titles with modest sales numbers to find an audience. Consider this: you know those giant anime racks at Fry's and Best Buy? While there are many individual SKU's, few sell more than a handful. Teading NewType USA and AnimeOnDVD, I've seen a couple different writers note that many anime titles will sell only a few hundred copies region-wide in their entire lifetime. Production and distribution must be pretty efficient for that to be possible, right?
Having said that... don't cry for me, Argentina, I think the slow Blu-Ray sellers will survive. If you're bemoaning The Fifth Element only moving about 900 copies a week and making the top-10 for it, well, maybe your format needs more appealing films than 10-year-old sci-fi dreck that The Daily Show once called "the gay Star Wars."
...into the realm of mean-spirited lawsuits. Maybe Activision should change the series into RIAA Hero, in which you search the net for file-swappers, and throw down awesome legal whoop-ass on them. I imagine that would suit the joyless Activision drone units just fine.
Have they squatted the name wedontgetit.tv yet?
While they're at it, maybe they should develop their own web search engine too. Oh, and a portal! And some dancing hamsters! Everyone loves the dancing hamsters!
...the entertainment industry's lawsuits are way more interesting than their TV shows, movies, and records? Maybe they should formally change their business model and go primarily into lawsuits as a creative medium.
Or they could just go ahead, as rumored, and buy ThinkFree, whose Java-based online office suite has long supported PPT.
JList/JBox has been selling Japanese iTunes cards for some time, and frequently advertise them in their ads in magazines like NewType USA. Right next to the hentai/bishoujo games and Domo-kun plushies.
That's true -- it's not hard to see in Guitar Hero the gameplay of Frequency/Amplitude and the aesthetics of Karaoke Revolution (eg, you see the performer on stage in a reactive environment, not just Random Crap like in DDR).
One thing I forgot to note in my original message was how the loading screens for some of the unlockable songs suggested that many of the Harmonix staffers were members of the bands in the unlock songs... suggesting a passion for and understanding of musical performance that I highly doubt Neversoft shares.
All Harmonix did was create 100% fun music games with a real feel for rock, from the Boston bands playing in their basement level up to overblown stadium rock. All they did was make it fun. And before that, they did the spot-on goofy Karaoke Revolution games.
All Neversoft has ever done is crank out tired sequel after sequel after sequel, of Tony Hawk (yawn) and Spider-Man (yawn, big yawn, slip into coma).
Red Octane can spare us the spin. This doesn't do the gamers any good. It's all management and marketing, and even though I was first in my neighborhood to have GH, KR, and DDR, it's going to be very hard to get me to give GH3 a chance.
So, if having apps is incompatible with making devices that work, then I guess not developing apps for the Mac is officially a good thing now?
This attitude is gonna go over real well with the Mac developer community. "Write apps for our platform! No, not that platform, you suck and will only screw it up. Go screw up the Mac instead, with your crappy apps and all."
First Mitt Romney, now this? Massachusetts, you used to be cool, but now y'all have a lot to answer for.
So who would win in a fight: Hal Jordan or Char Aznable?
Producer Hironobu Sakaguchi produced most of the good Final Fantasy games. Designer Akira Toriyama did the Dragon Ball manga and the Dragon Quest games. Composer Nobuo Uematsu's music from Final Fantasy is so popular, it's played at special symphonic concerts.
Even the XBox's low esteem in the Japanese market can't screw this up.
Analogy:
Hey, kids, who wants to see a movie about an archeologist?
Noooooooo!
Hey, kids, who wants to see a movie about an archeologist played by Han Solo, directed by the Jaws and Close Encounters guy, and produced by the Star Wars guy?
Yaaaaayyyy!
Kathy Sierra blogged about this a few months ago: Ease-of-use should not mean neuter-the-software, and offered a crucial insight: separate the easy/hard and simple/complex pairs into two axes: difficulty and power. She then goes on to note the trivial case that everyone knows: complex things should ideally be easy, and simple things should not be hard. But what about the other two combinations?
She argues that easy-but-simple (maybe "simplistic" is the mot juste here) is overrated. Limited functionality, even if easy-to-use, doesn't go as far as some would think (indeed, Joel argues this is the "20% strategy" that could be used for bootstrapping, but not in general cases). Kathy also says that complex-but-hard is not as bad as it's made out to be, and indeed can be a good thing. Think of awesomely powerful software, whether it's emacs or Final Cut Pro -- is there a way to make that easier to use, or is the scope of what they do (emacs), or the inherent complexity of the material (FCP) such that the only way to make it easier is to reduce features or functionality (ie, to make NotePad or iMovie instead)? It's important to stop mistaking difficulty for the inherent complexity of some problem domains.
Can't speak for anyone else, but I find absolutely zero innovation in PC games. It's the same genres (FPS, RTS, MMORPG), over and over again, with different licenses or sequel numbers. You'd think with no barriers to entry, no Sony tax, etc., that you'd see more innovation in PC games, but it just doesn't exist: the Katamari Damacys and Guitar Heros of the world show up first, and only, on consoles.
Associated Press (CNN, Yahoo), is reporting that masked, armed thugs robbed people waiting in line at a Putnam, Connecticut Wal-Mart for PS3, and shot one person who wouldn't hand over their money.
Penny Arcade has pretty much nailed the idiocy of this launch, as usual.
There's an underappreciated trend for nichey or B-list games from one generation to suddenly dominate the next generation. The Metal Gear and Final Fantasy series weren't terribly well known in the West until they went 3D and became sensations on the PlayStation 1. Grand Theft Auto was a little-played top-down niche title until its PS2 incarnation became a sensation with its [non-linear sandbox gameplay | violent, explicit, exploitative content]. Notice also how one generation's top titles tend to fade: MegaMan and Street Fighter were da bomb on 8-bit and 16-bit, but didn't evolve or age well and have faded back into niche-dom, Crash Bandicoot and Tomb Raider were PS1 fixtures but PS2 busts (har har).
Anyways, the PS3's biggest games may not be the current fads (GTA) or old warhorses (FF), but instead, titles that come out of nowhere, maybe because their ideas were waiting for the right hardware. By this theory, PS3's biggest hit might be Metal Gear Solid 4... but it might just as easily be Bumpy Trot 3 or Rez 2.
Do people really still believe things like this? I mean, obviously it's a slight exaggeration. But do that many people think that the PS3 won't do well?
Of course, they'll sell what they have. I'm saying that they've screwed up so badly, they have far too few to sell. They've gone from 2 million units promised for launch day to 500,000... actually, that's not even right, because Japan's gone from 100,000 to 80,000. And it costs too much. And both of these can be blamed on a certain white elephant of a feature. Or, more accurately, a "Blu" one.
Remember how the original PlayStation was praised for its laser-focus on games and not education or movies (um, hello, CD-i)? Well, they seem to have forgotten that in the last 10 years. The PlayStation brand still has hardcore fans who will clear out the initial shipment in minutes, but I think Sony has pushed a lot of fence-sitters into the 360 and Wii camps.