is a rocket launcher. I'm convinced that any game can be improved with the introduction of a rocket launcher.
Re:the stupidest and most evil thing
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 2
that Mattel have done is to suffer the existence of a product whose name ("Brodcast") a) is a lousy pun and b) only makes sense if you mispronounce the name of the parent company, which has a Scandinavian o-slash rather than an o.
I don't think that's necessarily true -- after all, wouldn't that Scandinavian vowel make it pronounced broodcast?! (dramatic music...)
[Re: comparison to "non-profit" trading of MP3s on Napster] Your analogy is flawed. In no way does fanfiction reduce the market for the original work. In fact, it encourages it.
Yet some have claimed the same is true in online music trading. The sentiment behind the article Pirates Steal Negative $1,400,000,000 from Music Industry is analogous to your own opinion about the economic impact of fan fiction. Many individuals, who have bought more CDs ever since they started downloading MP3 music, also believe that music downloaded from Napster only encourages the market for the original work because it expands the consumer base.
Trading MP3s on Napster is a non-profit pastime too -- the RIAA knows more than anyone that they're not profiting from it, and they're not too happy about that! I imagine it's little comfort for these corporations that their copyrights are being violated by amateurs rather than professionals.
And, of course, profit isn't everything. As it has been mentioned, copyrights endow authors with moral rights as well as income potential. Take Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, for example. To this day, he has turned away untold millions of dollars in merchandising revenues by refusing to license any sort of Calvin and Hobbes paraphernalia (Those t-shirts and stickers? All bootleg.) In his view, turning his characters into consumer icons and corporate pitchmen would cheapen his work and creation. I'm sure he would hardly be thrilled with anyone, business or individual, publishing their own interpretation of his strip. Believe it or not, it's not always about the money.
Re:Why Gaming is important
on
Carmack Speaks
·
· Score: 2
We now have games which have a very realistic simulation of a real world, and what have game companies done with it? A series which by now must number into hundereds of games in which the totality of play involves running around and killing stuff. Maybe with a few frustrating "puzzles" involving finding coloured keys behind secret doors.
Mmmkay, but we also have The Sims, Crazy Taxi, Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid, Messiah, Homeworld, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Drakan, Asheron's Call, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Deus Ex.
Nonetheless, I allow that you probably have your own particular tastes and frustrations with current games. If you are truly committed to it, I am sure that I will some day have the opportunity to play a game of your own conception. In short, if what you want to play doesn't exist, make it yourself.
In all likelihood, I imagine Jon Katz's articles have improved greatly, but the primary reason I got a Slashdot account was to excise his frivolous articles from my headline page. The only time I hear about these kind of things (like the Voices from the Hellmuth thing) is when other people mention them. Haven't read a JonKatz post in over a year now, and don't miss them. Gentle readers, Slashdot preferences are your friend.
Now then, as far as the stock market in general, I pretty much agree it's off-topic except for the fact that stock investing is probably a serious hobby for more nerdfolk than Quake, amateur radio, or customizing their cars.
So most of you are okay with hurting the company, whether or not you think it's technically stealing?
I'm completely indifferent to whether I hurt or help their bottom line -- I'll let them mind their own business. Even if NPLI isn't smart enough to figure out how to profit from this incident, is that my fault?
I'm sure they didn't expect someone would be able to take apart the box and add Linux to it.
I'm sure the marketing geniuses that introduced the 3DO at $799 in the US didn't expect that practically nobody was willing to fork out that much. Should we have been accomodating enough to buy overpriced game systems so we didn't hurt their feelings?
I applaud the company for being so consumer-friendly, unlike many others out there. Congratulations for showing all other like-minded companies out there that they shouldn't trust the consumer.
You're exactly right. Never build a business on the kindness of strangers.
IANA Nutritionist, but I remember picking up from various sources a suspicion that all the vitamins and minerals are more effective when they are in their natural state; i.e., as part of a piece of broccoli.
Sure. In this case it looks like the (numerous) vitamins are mostly sprayed on. It doesn't seem many are in their natural state, but certainly more than in Total cereal, for example -- a veggie burrito is pretty good nutrition in the first place. But if I want sprayed-on vitamins, I'd personally rather have them sprayed on a frozen mini-pizza.
So this is the plan. After having one Dilberito, eat a pint or two of Ben & Jerry's Dilbert flavor ice cream to get your full caloric intake for the day. And both are available at your local 7-11, no less.
The ice cream is very tasty. I'm usually disgusted by the stink of green vegetables, but I guess I'll give the Dilberito a chance.
Thanks for the clue about that, both of you. Makes a lot more sense now. I work on products that have (barely) paid dogfood eaters, so maybe that's why I hadn't heard of that before.
I've also run across it (only) on the Mozilla project, and it didn't really explain why they call usability bugs dogfood (0xd06f00d?) bugs. I don't get it -- "dogfood" is not a really catchy term, especially in print, and it doesn't seem like much of a substitute for "usability" without an explanation.
I was casting around for a scripting language to use in a game I was working on about a year ago. I took a look at Python, but it didn't seem embeddable enough at the time (I suppose the situation has improved). The number one candidate was actually JavaScript... seriously! The only real problem was that it was a little too slow, but not horribly so. Otherwise it had some great features:
First and most important of all, it has a good mechanism for exposing C functions to scripts. This is crucial.
You can strip out just about EVERYTHING, even text functions if you want. Great if you have to target a PSX or N64.
Similarly, you can save memory since you're able to compile script text, then throw the text away and keep the bytecodes.
A flexible syntax that could be used like C or as a line-based language, in scripts, on a command line, or in a config file.
Garbage collection and a fixed heap size.
Debugging support, which is often forgotten but important.
However, the script <--> C++ interface, though simple and mostly effective, was still fairly primitive and certainly not on the level of UnrealScript (which BTW just totally rocks the party, I hope we can see more of it soon). I would really like to see more scripting languages which bind as tightly with a C++ framework like UnrealScript does, for instance parsing C++ header files instead of depending on an interface to be defined elsewhere. I think just about every program should take advantage of a glue language, and the better the interface, the better the gluing. =^)
I also checked out ICI (cool), saw whether Perl could be cut down to size (not easily, but it would be worthwhile), TinyScheme (sure is!), and Small (very cool!). Now that there's more attention to large-scale, reusable game scripting (take a look at a new project, GODL) I think we should expect that good games will have a good scripting language behind them.
Yeah, arcades don't have the wild variety of games as they did in the early eighties. This is not surprising, however, given that arcade games were insanely profitable and ubiquitous then. These days, the US market just can't support that much variety... forget lack of originality, it's more like lack of players, lack of games, and lack of arcades. Even the royalty of US arcade development, the Williams pinball crew, has drained their last extra ball and is now developing casino games.
Even so, there's a lot of originality on display at the arcade, and it's essentially all imported. The last two times I went to the arcade, I played Crazy Taxi (love that game), Mr. Driller (a Namco puzzler), Jambo! Safari (another Sega gem), Guitar Freaks ("Play the guitar rhythmically!"), some Megatouch games (come on, they're cool), Virtua Tennis (yes, arcade tennis, and it's great!) and the incomparable Dance Dance Revolution. All quite original and almost all Japanese, because their arcade market is still doing well and they just tend to be more goofy, original, risk-taking developers. Unfortunately, only the big entertainment centers will ever have these wonderful games because they tend to be heinously expensive (another reason why so many arcades have died).
The FMV (video clip) fad and the rush to copy hits like The 7th Guest (yay) and Myst (bah) set console gaming back at least a year. Part of why they tended to fail horribly is the cost of filming or rendering half an hour to an hour of good stuff. What usually happened was either compromising on technology and design or poorly repurposing existing video. This may not interest those who can't be bothered to finish long articles, but Geoff Keighley wrote a a fascinating Gamespot feature about Trilobyte, developers of The 7th Guest, which touches on the huge budget it takes to produce original video for a game.
The basic aspect to remember about being a sole proprietor is that legally, for the most part, you are the business and the business is you. So if your business is sued, you're fully liable, and if your business has tax deductions, you take them on your own taxes. Unlike an incorporated business, all the income and deductions go on the sole proprietor's tax return.
However, let me point out to our readers (as you probably know yourself) the advantage to having a sole proprietorship, which is that it's relatively simple and cheap to set up. The only thing you really need is a business license from the city you're in (if none, the county). A separate bank account and ledger would help your tax case, though. One downside is that if you want to use a business name instead of just using your own, you have to register it with the county and do that "fictitious business name" thing in the local paper. All in all, not a bad deal, and hey, it's how eBay started out.
On another note, the main concern I'd have is that your premise of never having any revenue is not really workable. The problem is that the IRS defines a business as an enterprise with the intent of making a profit. No profit motive, no business. If you're not even going to have revenue, it's going to be very difficult to convince the taxman that you're in business at all. I guess you could incorporate as a charitable corporation, but it would be a hassle.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution: get revenue. Be enterprising! Sell ads on your website: hey, it works for Slashdot, right? Refer people visiting your page to one of those money for clickthrough sca^H^H^Hprograms. Selling T-shirts or something may come to mind, but watch out: selling anything tangible usually requires a state seller's permit.
So your business could write open source software that attracts people to come to your website, which you make money on. That may not sound like such a hot business plan, but these days, believe me, that and a snappy domain name will get you $15 million in venture capital. =^)
As always, check your local laws and seek expert advice, because this ain't it: I'm not a lawyer or a tax expert. I'm not even a business owner, in fact, I just found out this stuff when I was looking into the subject a few months ago. In any case, good luck!
Of course he's wrong about the banking metaphor. Money is unitary and only can increase through interest accruing loans (AFAIK). Software is like fire - it can be freely distributed without lessening the original flame.
Although it doesn't account for that important fact, it's a fair comparison and not "wrong." After all, metaphors are good or bad, not right or wrong. Metaphors by nature tend to be oversimplifications anyway.
He is right about the second comment, in a way, but in the context of freely distributed software, he doesn't understand what "expensive" really means.
"Expensive", in terms of open source/bazaar software, is measured in units of *glamour* rather than units of *money*.[...]
Yes, Gates was talking strictly in a money-driven context. The PD programmers of the day got little notice (the "glamour") unless they could publish their work in a magazine, newsletter or the like. Yet, many of them still made programs mostly out of their own independent satisfaction of accomplishment. The GNU project knows this well and stays true to that ideal. RMS doesn't need units of glamour in place of money or seek praise for his efforts, and that's the real spirit of free software that Bill Gates ran up against even then.
Can you imagine the performance increase you'd see if you compiled directly into the native Crusoe instruction set, so it could bypass all that code-morphing (emulation) software?
Compiling to native instructions before execution is for wimps. I want to see this processor running C bytecode. =^)
OK, so I saw this article, which at that time had some comments dismissing the article's premise. So I say, oh well, another would-be Slashdot story discredited by the comments. Then I come back and Robin has done a sengan!!! What in the world? So I have to read this overblown, insincere apology which is obviously meant as a counterflame to some flames I hadn't yet read. Way to drag down the level of discussion.
Robin, I could care less that you posted this article, I could care less that you've been flamed, but you shouldn't be subjecting me to the sophistry of your "Public Apology." As difficult as it is, even if you don't have a thick enough skin to ignore the flamage, I really don't think it's right for you to use your position as a Slashdot author to post argumentative content like that.
Bought one last night (Saturday) here in the LA area for $149, at the Circuit City in Lakewood (#0408). I just had them look it up and sell me one on the spot. The clerk didn't even bat an eye at me buying one sight unseen.
I hate to break it to you, but no idea is 100% original.
Firstly, I do not understand this mention of a "100% original" criterion.
Oh, sure. They just "thunk" it up. The idea for, say, Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" or Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" or U2's "The Streets Have No Name" just came out of nowhere.
I hate to break it to you, but no idea is 100% original. Everyone uses ideas "thunk up" by others -- they change them, improve them, alter them to fit a particular need and (every once in a while) replace them with something new.
There is no creativity (they couldn't have thunk it) without inspiration. It is unfair to discount expressions because of their relationship to the context they are created in.
Sure, intellectual property is property. Someone had to create it, and at one time owned each part of it by virtue of sole unique possession (i.e. they thunk it).
And I like the fundamentals of our intellectual property laws (gasp!). They exist to prevent secrecy by treating disclosed ideas and works equitably. We all benefit by encouraging people to express what they create. It moves us forward culturally, economically, and technologically. Sure, the implementation has the inevitable bugs, but the design is solid.
Slashdot Mirror
is a rocket launcher. I'm convinced that any game can be improved with the introduction of a rocket launcher.
I don't think that's necessarily true -- after all, wouldn't that Scandinavian vowel make it pronounced broodcast?! (dramatic music...)
Who's Mark?
Your analogy is flawed. In no way does fanfiction reduce the market for the original work. In fact, it encourages it.
Yet some have claimed the same is true in online music trading. The sentiment behind the article Pirates Steal Negative $1,400,000,000 from Music Industry is analogous to your own opinion about the economic impact of fan fiction. Many individuals, who have bought more CDs ever since they started downloading MP3 music, also believe that music downloaded from Napster only encourages the market for the original work because it expands the consumer base.
And, of course, profit isn't everything. As it has been mentioned, copyrights endow authors with moral rights as well as income potential. Take Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, for example. To this day, he has turned away untold millions of dollars in merchandising revenues by refusing to license any sort of Calvin and Hobbes paraphernalia (Those t-shirts and stickers? All bootleg.) In his view, turning his characters into consumer icons and corporate pitchmen would cheapen his work and creation. I'm sure he would hardly be thrilled with anyone, business or individual, publishing their own interpretation of his strip. Believe it or not, it's not always about the money.
Mmmkay, but we also have The Sims, Crazy Taxi, Half-Life, Grim Fandango, Rainbow Six, Metal Gear Solid, Messiah, Homeworld, Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Drakan, Asheron's Call, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, and Deus Ex.
Nonetheless, I allow that you probably have your own particular tastes and frustrations with current games. If you are truly committed to it, I am sure that I will some day have the opportunity to play a game of your own conception. In short, if what you want to play doesn't exist, make it yourself.
Now then, as far as the stock market in general, I pretty much agree it's off-topic except for the fact that stock investing is probably a serious hobby for more nerdfolk than Quake, amateur radio, or customizing their cars.
I'm completely indifferent to whether I hurt or help their bottom line -- I'll let them mind their own business. Even if NPLI isn't smart enough to figure out how to profit from this incident, is that my fault?
I'm sure they didn't expect someone would be able to take apart the box and add Linux to it.
I'm sure the marketing geniuses that introduced the 3DO at $799 in the US didn't expect that practically nobody was willing to fork out that much. Should we have been accomodating enough to buy overpriced game systems so we didn't hurt their feelings?
I applaud the company for being so consumer-friendly, unlike many others out there. Congratulations for showing all other like-minded companies out there that they shouldn't trust the consumer.
You're exactly right. Never build a business on the kindness of strangers.
Sure. In this case it looks like the (numerous) vitamins are mostly sprayed on. It doesn't seem many are in their natural state, but certainly more than in Total cereal, for example -- a veggie burrito is pretty good nutrition in the first place. But if I want sprayed-on vitamins, I'd personally rather have them sprayed on a frozen mini-pizza.
The ice cream is very tasty. I'm usually disgusted by the stink of green vegetables, but I guess I'll give the Dilberito a chance.
Thanks for the clue about that, both of you. Makes a lot more sense now. I work on products that have (barely) paid dogfood eaters, so maybe that's why I hadn't heard of that before.
I've also run across it (only) on the Mozilla project, and it didn't really explain why they call usability bugs dogfood (0xd06f00d?) bugs. I don't get it -- "dogfood" is not a really catchy term, especially in print, and it doesn't seem like much of a substitute for "usability" without an explanation.
Everyone should read BAMF daily. Everyone. Don't forget the gaming section.
Never used it. However good it is, can I model a telecomms network with it?
Not necessarily, thank God. We've been programming games using languages for programming communications networks for long enough, thank you very much.
- First and most important of all, it has a good mechanism for exposing C functions to scripts. This is crucial.
- You can strip out just about EVERYTHING, even text functions if you want. Great if you have to target a PSX or N64.
- Similarly, you can save memory since you're able to compile script text, then throw the text away and keep the bytecodes.
- A flexible syntax that could be used like C or as a line-based language, in scripts, on a command line, or in a config file.
- Garbage collection and a fixed heap size.
- Debugging support, which is often forgotten but important.
However, the script <--> C++ interface, though simple and mostly effective, was still fairly primitive and certainly not on the level of UnrealScript (which BTW just totally rocks the party, I hope we can see more of it soon). I would really like to see more scripting languages which bind as tightly with a C++ framework like UnrealScript does, for instance parsing C++ header files instead of depending on an interface to be defined elsewhere. I think just about every program should take advantage of a glue language, and the better the interface, the better the gluing. =^)I also checked out ICI (cool), saw whether Perl could be cut down to size (not easily, but it would be worthwhile), TinyScheme (sure is!), and Small (very cool!). Now that there's more attention to large-scale, reusable game scripting (take a look at a new project, GODL) I think we should expect that good games will have a good scripting language behind them.
Even so, there's a lot of originality on display at the arcade, and it's essentially all imported. The last two times I went to the arcade, I played Crazy Taxi (love that game), Mr. Driller (a Namco puzzler), Jambo! Safari (another Sega gem), Guitar Freaks ("Play the guitar rhythmically!"), some Megatouch games (come on, they're cool), Virtua Tennis (yes, arcade tennis, and it's great!) and the incomparable Dance Dance Revolution. All quite original and almost all Japanese, because their arcade market is still doing well and they just tend to be more goofy, original, risk-taking developers. Unfortunately, only the big entertainment centers will ever have these wonderful games because they tend to be heinously expensive (another reason why so many arcades have died).
Now, certainly, there was a fair share of fighting/gun/driving games like Tekken Tag Tournament, Dead or Alive 2, Silent Scope, Crisis Zone, Rush 2049, Ferrari F355, and Off-Road Thunder being played too. But let's not forget that there was a glut of maze games, space shooters and driving games in the classic era too -- there will always be popular genres.
Pure FMV games aren't dead yet, by the way.
However, let me point out to our readers (as you probably know yourself) the advantage to having a sole proprietorship, which is that it's relatively simple and cheap to set up. The only thing you really need is a business license from the city you're in (if none, the county). A separate bank account and ledger would help your tax case, though. One downside is that if you want to use a business name instead of just using your own, you have to register it with the county and do that "fictitious business name" thing in the local paper. All in all, not a bad deal, and hey, it's how eBay started out.
On another note, the main concern I'd have is that your premise of never having any revenue is not really workable. The problem is that the IRS defines a business as an enterprise with the intent of making a profit. No profit motive, no business. If you're not even going to have revenue, it's going to be very difficult to convince the taxman that you're in business at all. I guess you could incorporate as a charitable corporation, but it would be a hassle.
Fortunately, there's a simple solution: get revenue. Be enterprising! Sell ads on your website: hey, it works for Slashdot, right? Refer people visiting your page to one of those money for clickthrough sca^H^H^Hprograms. Selling T-shirts or something may come to mind, but watch out: selling anything tangible usually requires a state seller's permit.
So your business could write open source software that attracts people to come to your website, which you make money on. That may not sound like such a hot business plan, but these days, believe me, that and a snappy domain name will get you $15 million in venture capital. =^)
As always, check your local laws and seek expert advice, because this ain't it: I'm not a lawyer or a tax expert. I'm not even a business owner, in fact, I just found out this stuff when I was looking into the subject a few months ago. In any case, good luck!
Although it doesn't account for that important fact, it's a fair comparison and not "wrong." After all, metaphors are good or bad, not right or wrong. Metaphors by nature tend to be oversimplifications anyway.
He is right about the second comment, in a way, but in the context of freely distributed software, he doesn't understand what "expensive" really means.
"Expensive", in terms of open source/bazaar software, is measured in units of *glamour* rather than units of *money*.[...]
Yes, Gates was talking strictly in a money-driven context. The PD programmers of the day got little notice (the "glamour") unless they could publish their work in a magazine, newsletter or the like. Yet, many of them still made programs mostly out of their own independent satisfaction of accomplishment. The GNU project knows this well and stays true to that ideal. RMS doesn't need units of glamour in place of money or seek praise for his efforts, and that's the real spirit of free software that Bill Gates ran up against even then.
Compiling to native instructions before execution is for wimps.
I want to see this processor running C bytecode. =^)
Robin, I could care less that you posted this article, I could care less that you've been flamed, but you shouldn't be subjecting me to the sophistry of your "Public Apology." As difficult as it is, even if you don't have a thick enough skin to ignore the flamage, I really don't think it's right for you to use your position as a Slashdot author to post argumentative content like that.
Bought one last night (Saturday) here in the LA area for $149, at the Circuit City in Lakewood (#0408). I just had them look it up and sell me one on the spot. The clerk didn't even bat an eye at me buying one sight unseen.
Firstly, I do not understand this mention of a "100% original" criterion.
Oh, sure. They just "thunk" it up. The idea for, say, Walt Disney's "Steamboat Willie" or Salman Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" or U2's "The Streets Have No Name" just came out of nowhere.
I hate to break it to you, but no idea is 100% original. Everyone uses ideas "thunk up" by others -- they change them, improve them, alter them to fit a particular need and (every once in a while) replace them with something new.
There is no creativity (they couldn't have thunk it) without inspiration. It is unfair to discount expressions because of their relationship to the context they are created in.
And I like the fundamentals of our intellectual property laws (gasp!). They exist to prevent secrecy by treating disclosed ideas and works equitably. We all benefit by encouraging people to express what they create. It moves us forward culturally, economically, and technologically. Sure, the implementation has the inevitable bugs, but the design is solid.