The first inklings of hobbyists developing for the Atari 2600 were back in 1992-1993 via a mailing list. Then the first homebrew games showed up a few years later, such as Edtris, Lights Out, and Oystron. Emulators really helped the scene to take off.
Arguably, if you're wanting to experiment with tiny games, then you'd be much better off using Python and Pygame. You could write an Atari 2600-style game in a week of off hours that way, compared with the months of cycle tweaking it takes to get even a simple Atari 2600 game up and running. While it's a noble technical challenge, it isn't a good way to fool around with minimalist game design.
- From kernel to application, I can see exactly what it's doing and why - If it doesn't work the way I like it, I can change it or try to find someone who already has
OSS has advantages, but let's be realistic: the above two items are myths. Do you really understand the source to your kernel and every application you use? All ten million lines of it?
Just because the source is available doesn't mean that someone can just pop in and understand the architecture of a large program. I've worked on many large projects in the same office as the other developers. And quite frequently someone pops into my office--or I pop into theirs--with a short question that requires a lot of digging and scribbling on a white board to answer. Frequently someone says "I want to change the way X works," and after a lot of asking around it turns out that X would be a bad idea because of various low-level interactions between features (for example). With most OSS, you don't have such easy access to the developers; they can't explain their code to everyone who comes along. You end up with people who blindly make pet changes that they don't understand.
In short, access to the source is good. Being able to recompile the source is good. But understanding the source and being able to correctly modify it is not one of the reasons OSS is popular.
Sure, if you could use a console for more general purpose tasks. I know about PS2 Linux, but the PS2 makes a poor PC (with 32MB of memory and only has 8K of data cache, big tasks like compiling code drive it into the ground). Consoles are designed to do graphics first, second, and even third.
Excellent post, mod this up please. While there are people who need that performance, the rest of us are in heaven with what's currently available. For around $1000, you can get a 2.4GHz P4 that's so fast you can write Quake 3 in interpreted Smalltalk and it runs like lightning. Times are good. The fanboys who insist that they need 5% more speed for some game or whatever have become such a small minority that they're irrelevent (except that they control PC techie news sites and are extremely vocal). You'd have to be crazy to pay the $1000+ premium to move to 3.06GHz, especially when you also get more power and heat problems at the same time.
What we need now are even lower costs, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors. Active cooling, giant heat sinks, systems with five fans: good riddance. What we really want is the 2.4GHz equivalent of the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64. Something small and reliable that lets people be creative. Something that boots in two seconds. Something that isn't an IT nightmare, as are Windows and Linux. Something that one person could understand and master.
An interesting question is "Will the current crop of lowish-end handhelds, like the PocketPC, catch up enough to subsume desktop PCs entirely?" Certainly the high end processor manufacturers have lost their minds and are designing systems for Boeing and the Department of Defense, not *people*.
A SUV is useful, if you're a park ranger or someone else who actually needs the high clearance and 4WD. But the general populace has been convinced that they need one, even at the expense of high maintenance costs and poor gas mileage.
Similiarly, these kind of 64-bit processors are useful, if you're building high-end servers, designing aircraft, or doing many types numerical simulation. They certainly aren't designed for anyone else, with insane power consumption levels and heat issues. There's no way an Itanium 2 is ever going to work in a laptap or game console, for example. I hope the faux high end PC crowd realizes this, and we don't end up with the bottom end machine from Dell in a few years shipping with a 200 watt 64-bit processor. What a tremendous waste that would be.
As an aside, it's interesting how these CPU manufacturers aren't concentrating on what would be most useful: low price, low power consumption, and small form factor. It's like the early 1980s minicomputer market (VAX, etc.) compared with home computers from the same era (Apple, Atari, etc).
Gotta love the C64 (and Atari 800), for being cheap, understandable, reliable, unchanging, and far away from modern nonsense like cooling and crazy-high power consumption. I'd love to have something with the same characteristics, but not just a rehash of 1982 technology that runs a lot faster. Surely it wouldn't be difficult to put together a standard system that looks dated to the hardware junkies, but would be completely awesome and fun to play with. PCs are too complex to be fun (and Linux doesn't change that).
If, on the other hand, you like to render animations using blender, povray, or what have you, or like to capture and convert video footage (cinelerra, kino, dvgrab, and transcode), or enjoy running an optimized, source based distribution such as Source Mage or Gentoo, then being able to compile your entire system, complete with open office, kde, mozilla, and so in in a few hours, rather than a few days, is kinda nice.
Let's say a "few" translates to "two," so you're talking about "two hours" vs. "two days." That's 2 hours vs. 48 hours, or a performance increase of 24x. Even if you last bought a PC in 1998 and you upgrade to an Athlon 64 you aren't going to see numbers anywhere near that.
My personal experience is that compile time roughly doubled after upgrading from an 866MHz P3 to a 2.4GHz P4. Upgrading beyond that is mostly noise, at least for the moment. If you could get a CPU that was easily 4-10x as fast as a P4 out of the box, then that would be something, but we're not seeing amazing jumps like that.
These days it's more like "most of the new games come out for consoles." Even if you despise consoles, you have no where else to go if you want to play Mario Sunshine, Splinter Cell, Vice City, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Ratchet & Clank, Halo, Ico, and so on.
To some extent all of the high-end 3D troubles on PCs (both Windows AND Linux) are to blame: constant driver and bios upgrades, difficulty in determining what card can be used to play what game, card compatibility issues, etc.
There are competitive GPL'd apps for all of those (saving you even more $$$), or you could run Wine and get the Windows versions of any of them to run.
Sigh. This kind of misguided advocacy gets so tiring.
PS: Yea, I do believe it beats the living crap out of memcpy() or BlockMove()
It's one of the fastest ways to do this in C, but if you've ever looked at the source code to an OS-level memory copying function, then you'll often see much faster, system specific methods. On the PowerPC, for example, you can get a signficant speedup by using cache manipulation instructions.
First of all, note that I'm not knocking the principles of Extreme Programming (XP).
The first XP book written by Kent Beck reads like a self-help book. If you're going to write a book whose principle is "feel good about yourself," and you're trying to fill 200 pages, then you can't just cut to the chase. You have to ramble on for a few chapters about what you're going to say, and slowly let out bits of information here and there, then there are chapters the reiterate what you've already said. Beck's books--and all of the books in the XP line that I've seen--read the same way. You could explain XP clearly and concisely in a few pages, but the XP books go around and around in cicles, and after a while you're not sure if you're getting new information or not. And, miraculously, the XP line has been extended to six or more books, each of which goes over the same small bit of information in another verbose and rambling way. There's even a book about XP critcisms, which is an officially sanctioned book in the XP series, which exists simply to reinforce the basic principles of XP.
The whole thing smacks of books like Dianetics or various lightweight volumes from self-help gurus. If there was any meaning to XP, it has been lost in endless self-justification. Imagine an entire series of books that did nothing but tell you how cool Linux was. What's the point?
Why dont you be fair and report on the next model eMachines, Dell or Compaq sells at Best Buy.
Because many people like what Apple is doing, and it's generally understood that if you could buy a Power Mac for the price of a Dell, then a whole lot of people here would get one. I mean, look, you get away from all the Intel/AMD nonsense, no crazy cooling issues, dual processors, flashy UNIX out of box with commercial applications available...this is the holy grail to a lot of people.
Whatever happened to the unwritten Linux creed, borrowed from Ghandi:
First they laugh at you, Then they fight you, Then you win.
I know the article is supposed to be funny, but at its core it comes across as bitter and whiny. If Linux is better, then let it be better on its own merits, period.
This year will be interesting as both ATI and NVIDIA know it is all about having the best VidCard on the market when DOOM]|[ hits.
The sad part is that DOOM 3 is pretty much it when it comes to needing a card like this. And with video cards costing significantly *more* than entire game consoles, and the high-end 3D game developers moving away from the PC, I'm starting to wonder just how many people are going to buy flashy video cards just to play DOOM 3. I know there will be a big rush of geeks that will, but will that "big rush" contain a million or more? Possibly it will, but it does seem that the release of DOOM 3 may just be the final shining moment of the PC video card race.
(And, yes, I *like* PCs, so this isn't an anti-PC troll.)
So if I write a huge flame about the state of something in Linux, can I get it posted to Slashdot too?
JWZ is a long-time UNIX/Linux guru. He's not some AOL goofball. He's been around long enough, and has proven himself enough, that he's worth listening to, even if he does say "fucktard." Criticism from the inside is very valuable. It keeps you from becoming delusional.
Sure, you *can* record something in your basement recording studio, and these days it can be pretty good, but it's easy to see where higher costs can come from:
1. Bringing in a well-known producer to help you get the sound you want. Ditto for engineers. 2. Studio time in the high-end studios--with millions of dollars in equipment--can be very expensive. 3. Spending lots and lots of time in the studio--weeks or months instead of the "4 hours" people are citing. Heck, you'd be lucky to get one good take of a song in four hours, even in your basement studio. 4. Session musicians brought in for various tracks. 5. Celebrity backup singers (e.g. Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch singing backup for Steve Earle). 6. Weeks of production work done by someone else, often someone well known and highly compensated, after the initial recording sessions.
Yeah, local bands don't do all of this, but we're talking about big "cash cow" acts here, not a bar band from Austin.
RAM is a meaningless thing on a PC. If someone has a 32MB video card and a game is slow, then people cry "You need a 64MB or 128MB card!" not even thinking that the problem could lie elsewhere. Ditto for main system memory. Dell tells people that a 256MB 1.8GHz machine is good for email and web surfing, but not for games or multimedia.
I'm not going to launch into a "programmers need to make better use of their resources" tirade. The trouble is that there's really no way for programmers to do so, because everything in a modern computer is so completely abstracted away from what's really going on. You can request that you get a certain video mode, but if you request 8 bits per pixel you might end up with 32. This is why console games can run happily in 24MB--what's on the Game Cube--but equivalent PC games need 256MB.
At the same time, there's a constant push for "bigger, better, more" even if it doesn't make sense. I'm not saying that 640K is enough for everybody, but does everyone working in an insurance agency need a 32MB video card--the miniumum standard in most machines--that runs in 32-bit color? The hardcore 3D geeks insist that 32-bit color is better than 16, but they forget that it depends on what you're doing. When you double a size like that, you need more memory, more bandwidth, and more processing power. That's a big tradeoff, one that shouldn't be as casual as it is, and it certainly doesn't mean "go for it at all costs."
This is an interesting discussion, but I think much of it is being driven by personal agendas and people seeing what they want to see. I find many of them hard to agree with. First, I never think of the recording industry "labels" much at all. I don't even know who makes any of the CDs I own. I buy music from bands I like. I don't walk into a store and see "evil"; I see music.
I also don't see all music in stores as crap. Yeah, there's Mariah and so on, but there's alot a whole lot of it that I really like, both new and old. Saying that music publishers deserve to die because they're foisting unlistenable garbage on the world is a narrow view. If you hate all the music you find in the average, say, Borders, then I'm sorry, but You Just Don't Like Music.
All of the things that can be said about the Big Music Corporations can just as easily be said about smaller labels and music from local bands. They're trying to get you to pay for plastic CDs just like the big guys, and they're charging more than the fifty cents for materials. If you're arguing for the death of big music, you're arguing for the death of small music too.
I also find it hypocritcal that many people won't touch music in stores--calling it crap--but then will download it and enjoy it. Either you don't like it or you don't. These arguments come across as those from poor students trying to justify their lack of funds.
It's also not clear that CDs are really being killed by online music. I live near a CD store by a college campus, and it's always busy. The industry being down 11% is meaningless. No business grows forever and ever. So they're down 11% after growing 200% in the last decade. Does that matter? Look at how much the entire stock market has dropped in the last few years! And now they're only making _billions_ of dollars instead of billions + 11%. Hmmm. I'd take that.
The only real issue is that MP3s are more convenient sometimes, especially if you only want one song, and sure, that makes people buy fewer CDs (but it's arguable that people wouldn't buy those "for just one song" CDs anyway). But this has nothing to do with record companies being evil and so on. If you think music publishers are evil, then you should think video game and movie publishers are too. It's more that they're being branded as evil because people like the dodges that downloading music give them.
If a new artist makes a CD, and begins promoting it, and selling online, eventually the word will get out.
Right, and then one person rips it, posts it, and it's all over. The reason you don't see much of this right now it because locally produced CDs sell a handful of copies.
I am trying to point out there is ALWAYS A REASON behind terrorism.
And that reason is often as simple as "I don't like the policies of the US government." Heck, maybe I don't like some of the policies of the Chinese government, but that's not a justification for me to go kill a bunch of innocent Chinese citizens.
This is actually quite good as this will force Sony to put a lot of money into seeding/ development support for smaller players and start-ups.
Sorry, no. It takes 4-10 million dollars to develop a triple-A title, and 4 million is more like a figure from several years ago. If a "smaller player" has 4-10 million dollars, then by definition they're not a smaller player.
This means that new idea can make money with a low penetration PS2, something that is not possible for Xbox. Say, 1% equates to half a million titles sold for the Sony camp or 80K for MS. Where would you put your bet?
Ah, now this is a classic myth that has been the death of many a game development studio. The truth is that (roughly) 5% of the available games make up 90% of all games sold. If you're not in that 5%, then you're not going to see sales anywhere near 500,000. Even when there were 75 million PS1s out there, it was still common to see a decently reveiwed game sell 15 *thousand* copies or less. There are many PS2 games that are nowhere near the 50,000 mark.
The big mistake is seeing that GTA3 sold 4 million copies, and thinking that your well-designed game can easily sell 10% of that. It isn't true.
Maybe my country has been poking its nose where it doesn't belong.
I agree with all of your points except this one. Sure the statement may be true, but it isn't a clear cut justifcation for random terrorism. If it were, the the US would be targetted by terrorists from Mexico, Nicaragua, Canada, Korea, China, you name it.
Slashdot Mirror
The first inklings of hobbyists developing for the Atari 2600 were back in 1992-1993 via a mailing list. Then the first homebrew games showed up a few years later, such as Edtris, Lights Out, and Oystron. Emulators really helped the scene to take off.
Arguably, if you're wanting to experiment with tiny games, then you'd be much better off using Python and Pygame. You could write an Atari 2600-style game in a week of off hours that way, compared with the months of cycle tweaking it takes to get even a simple Atari 2600 game up and running. While it's a noble technical challenge, it isn't a good way to fool around with minimalist game design.
- From kernel to application, I can see exactly what it's doing and why
- If it doesn't work the way I like it, I can change it or try to find someone who already has
OSS has advantages, but let's be realistic: the above two items are myths. Do you really understand the source to your kernel and every application you use? All ten million lines of it?
Just because the source is available doesn't mean that someone can just pop in and understand the architecture of a large program. I've worked on many large projects in the same office as the other developers. And quite frequently someone pops into my office--or I pop into theirs--with a short question that requires a lot of digging and scribbling on a white board to answer. Frequently someone says "I want to change the way X works," and after a lot of asking around it turns out that X would be a bad idea because of various low-level interactions between features (for example). With most OSS, you don't have such easy access to the developers; they can't explain their code to everyone who comes along. You end up with people who blindly make pet changes that they don't understand.
In short, access to the source is good. Being able to recompile the source is good. But understanding the source and being able to correctly modify it is not one of the reasons OSS is popular.
You're talking about game consoles, no?
Sure, if you could use a console for more general purpose tasks. I know about PS2 Linux, but the PS2 makes a poor PC (with 32MB of memory and only has 8K of data cache, big tasks like compiling code drive it into the ground). Consoles are designed to do graphics first, second, and even third.
Excellent post, mod this up please. While there are people who need that performance, the rest of us are in heaven with what's currently available. For around $1000, you can get a 2.4GHz P4 that's so fast you can write Quake 3 in interpreted Smalltalk and it runs like lightning. Times are good. The fanboys who insist that they need 5% more speed for some game or whatever have become such a small minority that they're irrelevent (except that they control PC techie news sites and are extremely vocal). You'd have to be crazy to pay the $1000+ premium to move to 3.06GHz, especially when you also get more power and heat problems at the same time.
What we need now are even lower costs, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors. Active cooling, giant heat sinks, systems with five fans: good riddance. What we really want is the 2.4GHz equivalent of the Apple II, Atari 800, and Commodore 64. Something small and reliable that lets people be creative. Something that boots in two seconds. Something that isn't an IT nightmare, as are Windows and Linux. Something that one person could understand and master.
An interesting question is "Will the current crop of lowish-end handhelds, like the PocketPC, catch up enough to subsume desktop PCs entirely?" Certainly the high end processor manufacturers have lost their minds and are designing systems for Boeing and the Department of Defense, not *people*.
A SUV is useful, if you're a park ranger or someone else who actually needs the high clearance and 4WD. But the general populace has been convinced that they need one, even at the expense of high maintenance costs and poor gas mileage.
Similiarly, these kind of 64-bit processors are useful, if you're building high-end servers, designing aircraft, or doing many types numerical simulation. They certainly aren't designed for anyone else, with insane power consumption levels and heat issues. There's no way an Itanium 2 is ever going to work in a laptap or game console, for example. I hope the faux high end PC crowd realizes this, and we don't end up with the bottom end machine from Dell in a few years shipping with a 200 watt 64-bit processor. What a tremendous waste that would be.
As an aside, it's interesting how these CPU manufacturers aren't concentrating on what would be most useful: low price, low power consumption, and small form factor. It's like the early 1980s minicomputer market (VAX, etc.) compared with home computers from the same era (Apple, Atari, etc).
Gotta love the C64 (and Atari 800), for being cheap, understandable, reliable, unchanging, and far away from modern nonsense like cooling and crazy-high power consumption. I'd love to have something with the same characteristics, but not just a rehash of 1982 technology that runs a lot faster. Surely it wouldn't be difficult to put together a standard system that looks dated to the hardware junkies, but would be completely awesome and fun to play with. PCs are too complex to be fun (and Linux doesn't change that).
If, on the other hand, you like to render animations using blender, povray, or what have you, or like to capture and convert video footage (cinelerra, kino, dvgrab, and transcode), or enjoy running an optimized, source based distribution such as Source Mage or Gentoo, then being able to compile your entire system, complete with open office, kde, mozilla, and so in in a few hours, rather than a few days, is kinda nice.
Let's say a "few" translates to "two," so you're talking about "two hours" vs. "two days." That's 2 hours vs. 48 hours, or a performance increase of 24x. Even if you last bought a PC in 1998 and you upgrade to an Athlon 64 you aren't going to see numbers anywhere near that.
My personal experience is that compile time roughly doubled after upgrading from an 866MHz P3 to a 2.4GHz P4. Upgrading beyond that is mostly noise, at least for the moment. If you could get a CPU that was easily 4-10x as fast as a P4 out of the box, then that would be something, but we're not seeing amazing jumps like that.
The fact is, new games only come out for Windows.
These days it's more like "most of the new games come out for consoles." Even if you despise consoles, you have no where else to go if you want to play Mario Sunshine, Splinter Cell, Vice City, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, Ratchet & Clank, Halo, Ico, and so on.
To some extent all of the high-end 3D troubles on PCs (both Windows AND Linux) are to blame: constant driver and bios upgrades, difficulty in determining what card can be used to play what game, card compatibility issues, etc.
There are competitive GPL'd apps for all of those (saving you even more $$$), or you could run Wine and get the Windows versions of any of them to run.
Sigh. This kind of misguided advocacy gets so tiring.
PS: Yea, I do believe it beats the living crap out of memcpy() or BlockMove()
It's one of the fastest ways to do this in C, but if you've ever looked at the source code to an OS-level memory copying function, then you'll often see much faster, system specific methods. On the PowerPC, for example, you can get a signficant speedup by using cache manipulation instructions.
First of all, note that I'm not knocking the principles of Extreme Programming (XP).
The first XP book written by Kent Beck reads like a self-help book. If you're going to write a book whose principle is "feel good about yourself," and you're trying to fill 200 pages, then you can't just cut to the chase. You have to ramble on for a few chapters about what you're going to say, and slowly let out bits of information here and there, then there are chapters the reiterate what you've already said. Beck's books--and all of the books in the XP line that I've seen--read the same way. You could explain XP clearly and concisely in a few pages, but the XP books go around and around in cicles, and after a while you're not sure if you're getting new information or not. And, miraculously, the XP line has been extended to six or more books, each of which goes over the same small bit of information in another verbose and rambling way. There's even a book about XP critcisms, which is an officially sanctioned book in the XP series, which exists simply to reinforce the basic principles of XP.
The whole thing smacks of books like Dianetics or various lightweight volumes from self-help gurus. If there was any meaning to XP, it has been lost in endless self-justification. Imagine an entire series of books that did nothing but tell you how cool Linux was. What's the point?
Why dont you be fair and report on the next model eMachines, Dell or Compaq sells at Best Buy.
Because many people like what Apple is doing, and it's generally understood that if you could buy a Power Mac for the price of a Dell, then a whole lot of people here would get one. I mean, look, you get away from all the Intel/AMD nonsense, no crazy cooling issues, dual processors, flashy UNIX out of box with commercial applications available...this is the holy grail to a lot of people.
But no one wants to pay Apple's high-end prices.
Whatever happened to the unwritten Linux creed, borrowed from Ghandi:
First they laugh at you,
Then they fight you,
Then you win.
I know the article is supposed to be funny, but at its core it comes across as bitter and whiny. If Linux is better, then let it be better on its own merits, period.
This year will be interesting as both ATI and NVIDIA know it is all about having the best VidCard on the market when DOOM]|[ hits.
The sad part is that DOOM 3 is pretty much it when it comes to needing a card like this. And with video cards costing significantly *more* than entire game consoles, and the high-end 3D game developers moving away from the PC, I'm starting to wonder just how many people are going to buy flashy video cards just to play DOOM 3. I know there will be a big rush of geeks that will, but will that "big rush" contain a million or more? Possibly it will, but it does seem that the release of DOOM 3 may just be the final shining moment of the PC video card race.
(And, yes, I *like* PCs, so this isn't an anti-PC troll.)
So now we get marginally better performance at the expensive an loud, extremely hot, very power hungry video card?
Certainly the law of diminishing returns has kicked in by now.
Ummm, did he miss the point of Linux?? If you don't like it, fix it.
That better not be the point of Linux. Provide crap and let the user fix it? If it is, good riddance.
P.S. If this joker wrote XEmacs, he has no room to criticize anyone. Talk about crappy UI's....
True.
So if I write a huge flame about the state of something in Linux, can I get it posted to Slashdot too?
JWZ is a long-time UNIX/Linux guru. He's not some AOL goofball. He's been around long enough, and has proven himself enough, that he's worth listening to, even if he does say "fucktard." Criticism from the inside is very valuable. It keeps you from becoming delusional.
What ever happened to PERFORMANCE artists?
The same bands perform live, but when lots of people are listening to the same take on CD, over and over for decades, you want it to be perfect, okay?
Sure, you *can* record something in your basement recording studio, and these days it can be pretty good, but it's easy to see where higher costs can come from:
1. Bringing in a well-known producer to help you get the sound you want. Ditto for engineers.
2. Studio time in the high-end studios--with millions of dollars in equipment--can be very expensive.
3. Spending lots and lots of time in the studio--weeks or months instead of the "4 hours" people are citing. Heck, you'd be lucky to get one good take of a song in four hours, even in your basement studio.
4. Session musicians brought in for various tracks.
5. Celebrity backup singers (e.g. Emmylou Harris and Gillian Welch singing backup for Steve Earle).
6. Weeks of production work done by someone else, often someone well known and highly compensated, after the initial recording sessions.
Yeah, local bands don't do all of this, but we're talking about big "cash cow" acts here, not a bar band from Austin.
RAM is a meaningless thing on a PC. If someone has a 32MB video card and a game is slow, then people cry "You need a 64MB or 128MB card!" not even thinking that the problem could lie elsewhere. Ditto for main system memory. Dell tells people that a 256MB 1.8GHz machine is good for email and web surfing, but not for games or multimedia.
I'm not going to launch into a "programmers need to make better use of their resources" tirade. The trouble is that there's really no way for programmers to do so, because everything in a modern computer is so completely abstracted away from what's really going on. You can request that you get a certain video mode, but if you request 8 bits per pixel you might end up with 32. This is why console games can run happily in 24MB--what's on the Game Cube--but equivalent PC games need 256MB.
At the same time, there's a constant push for "bigger, better, more" even if it doesn't make sense. I'm not saying that 640K is enough for everybody, but does everyone working in an insurance agency need a 32MB video card--the miniumum standard in most machines--that runs in 32-bit color? The hardcore 3D geeks insist that 32-bit color is better than 16, but they forget that it depends on what you're doing. When you double a size like that, you need more memory, more bandwidth, and more processing power. That's a big tradeoff, one that shouldn't be as casual as it is, and it certainly doesn't mean "go for it at all costs."
This is an interesting discussion, but I think much of it is being driven by personal agendas and people seeing what they want to see. I find many of them hard to agree with. First, I never think of the recording industry "labels" much at all. I don't even know who makes any of the CDs I own. I buy music from bands I like. I don't walk into a store and see "evil"; I see music.
I also don't see all music in stores as crap. Yeah, there's Mariah and so on, but there's alot a whole lot of it that I really like, both new and old. Saying that music publishers deserve to die because they're foisting unlistenable garbage on the world is a narrow view. If you hate all the music you find in the average, say, Borders, then I'm sorry, but You Just Don't Like Music.
All of the things that can be said about the Big Music Corporations can just as easily be said about smaller labels and music from local bands. They're trying to get you to pay for plastic CDs just like the big guys, and they're charging more than the fifty cents for materials. If you're arguing for the death of big music, you're arguing for the death of small music too.
I also find it hypocritcal that many people won't touch music in stores--calling it crap--but then will download it and enjoy it. Either you don't like it or you don't. These arguments come across as those from poor students trying to justify their lack of funds.
It's also not clear that CDs are really being killed by online music. I live near a CD store by a college campus, and it's always busy. The industry being down 11% is meaningless. No business grows forever and ever. So they're down 11% after growing 200% in the last decade. Does that matter? Look at how much the entire stock market has dropped in the last few years! And now they're only making _billions_ of dollars instead of billions + 11%. Hmmm. I'd take that.
The only real issue is that MP3s are more convenient sometimes, especially if you only want one song, and sure, that makes people buy fewer CDs (but it's arguable that people wouldn't buy those "for just one song" CDs anyway). But this has nothing to do with record companies being evil and so on. If you think music publishers are evil, then you should think video game and movie publishers are too. It's more that they're being branded as evil because people like the dodges that downloading music give them.
If a new artist makes a CD, and begins promoting it, and selling online, eventually the word will get out.
Right, and then one person rips it, posts it, and it's all over. The reason you don't see much of this right now it because locally produced CDs sell a handful of copies.
I am trying to point out there is ALWAYS A REASON behind terrorism.
And that reason is often as simple as "I don't like the policies of the US government." Heck, maybe I don't like some of the policies of the Chinese government, but that's not a justification for me to go kill a bunch of innocent Chinese citizens.
This is actually quite good as this will force Sony to put a lot of money into seeding/ development support for smaller players and start-ups.
Sorry, no. It takes 4-10 million dollars to develop a triple-A title, and 4 million is more like a figure from several years ago. If a "smaller player" has 4-10 million dollars, then by definition they're not a smaller player.
This means that new idea can make money with a low penetration PS2, something that is not possible for Xbox. Say, 1% equates to half a million titles sold for the Sony camp or 80K for MS. Where would you put your bet?
Ah, now this is a classic myth that has been the death of many a game development studio. The truth is that (roughly) 5% of the available games make up 90% of all games sold. If you're not in that 5%, then you're not going to see sales anywhere near 500,000. Even when there were 75 million PS1s out there, it was still common to see a decently reveiwed game sell 15 *thousand* copies or less. There are many PS2 games that are nowhere near the 50,000 mark.
The big mistake is seeing that GTA3 sold 4 million copies, and thinking that your well-designed game can easily sell 10% of that. It isn't true.
Maybe my country has been poking its nose where it doesn't belong.
I agree with all of your points except this one. Sure the statement may be true, but it isn't a clear cut justifcation for random terrorism. If it were, the the US would be targetted by terrorists from Mexico, Nicaragua, Canada, Korea, China, you name it.