This. Crowdsource funding is a fun one-off for already established artists with a large following.
In addition to the problem for non-established artists, if every single artist/author/video game producer had their hat in hand asking for crowd-sourced money, it would become an ignored barrage. Projects like these work because they're unusual enough to get people's attention and maybe even a couple Slashdot articles.
Oh yeah, indie video game makers from small cities, who are releasing games for both consoles and computers. I'm sure there's at least dozens of people upset about that.
The marketplace has already decided that game controllers are already better than mouse & keyboards. It's not like keyboard & mouse technology is anything new, game controllers could and have made them an option for consoles - I remember shooters on the Dreamcast gave that as an option. They weren't popular, so it's no longer a thing.
Anyway we live in a world where you can play Skyrim on your XBox with a controller or on your computer with a keyboard + mouse, so really who cares.
Oh yeah, of course. But you can buy "Paleo Diet Cream Puffs" online so I think it's more a weird set of dietary restrictions than an actual attempt to eat like a cave man.
Following a Paleo diet is on par with global climate change deniers?
I don't paleo diet myself, but it's a healthy way to eat. The diet excludes "grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils," and aside from the body's requirement for salt (which should be OK with a meat-heavy diet), what's wrong with that?
I know food preferences are like a religion but comparing it to anti-vaccination groups is ridiculous.
The substance of the post was obviously "the US revolted because it wanted freedoms and now the system is pushing that America is free and its enemies aren't, but really that's not true at all! The more people learn about this, the more it's going to hurt the government."
This is in the context of the announcement of a video game where you (apparently) are a modern-day bartender who is sent through a sci-fi device to re-live ancestral memories of a forebearer who was part of an international secret society, and mostly killed people with knives.
I guess you could say that the game will help people learn the truth about the American Revolution and its shocking similarities to the injustices modern Americans put up with. But you'd have to get awfully drunk first. Obviously the main point was just to get in the reflexive anti-American statement that helps make Slashdot so tiresome. It's like talking to a European in 2007.
A person has to eat 2000-3000 calories a day (depending on various factors, of course). A gallon of whole milk is a day's worth of calories for $2-$3 and the macronutrient breakdown is just about perfect. A pound of meat is half a day's calories and can easily be found for less than $5. A dozen eggs are a half or a third of a day's calories for less than $2. It goes on and on...meat and milk products are actually quite cheap. The expensive part is extravagant flavorings, and then fruits and vegetables. Grains are even cheaper but provide few micronutrients and shit macronutrients.
I hate to be an asshole, but raising a kid as a vegan is irresponsible - there are so many nutrients and macronutrients that are just not a part of a vegan diet, or are of poor quality/low quantity in a vegan diet. Once the kid is an adult let them make stupid decisions about their diet & health. Doing that to a growing child is just a terrible thing to do. At the least, have them drink some milk.
If my family busted out video games for us all to play together, I would get a new family. Not all of us are nerds in need of getting stuffed into a gym locker room, Poindexter.
It's one thing to post a rip-off game or a general concept. But Vostu did exact replicas. As in, side-by-side pictures look basically identical, game bugs were replicated, artwork is nearly identical. I think there is a line and that Vostu crossed it.
What are the comments here arguing? That exact copies of games should be allowed? That's obviously faulty. That no games with any similarity can come out? That doesn't seem right either. Obviously there has to be some compromise between these two extremes.
Really a lot of the comments here boil down to "I hate Zynga games," or "I hate lawyers."
It's been nine years and more money than budgeted and they've converted 65% of the computers. The idea of converting to Linux is still so strange and uncommon that an autonomous region of Spain considering the same move nine years later is Slashdot-worthy news. It sounds to me like a huge failure.
There already is a place for people to easily release small independent movies & tv shows, and that's youtube. It's a great place to release time wasters that last 30 seconds, it's a complete failure for releasing quality alternatives to TV shoes & movies, in particular the high-budget sci-fi/fantasy/comic-book epics that Slashdot enjoys.
Be honest. These sorts of movies require high budgets. And if the economy of movies is given over to everybody freely downloading the movies over piratebay, there is no way to finance movies. I'd love to hear somebody point out legitimate alternative. Maybe a donation based system? Or everybody deciding they'd rather watch independent home-made films instead?
And fuck you if you just want to watch independent home-made films instead. Hollywood movies can afford the best actors, the best cameramen, the best soundmen, etc., and the end result is a product that's reliably better than anything you'll find on youtube. Y Combinator doesn't even have anything new to offer and obviously absolutely nothing will come of it, Slashdot just picks up on their anti-Hollywood stance because it helps them to rationalize piracy.
Why would anybody release a PC version when almost everybody will just end pirating it anyway, and then rationalizing that it's too expensive or they just wanted a try or that copyright is morally questionable? Honestly I don't even understand the rationale of putting out a quickie XBox port, even if it was absolutely free to do so. They're just going to cannibalize from the sales of XBox360 and PS3 versions of the same game.
Instead we watched Jordan, well into his thirties past his physical prime, lead the Bulls to multiple championships.
Well he's retired now, right? And if he attempted a comeback this year, it would be a weird joke, he couldn't even play bench. He hasn't lost the skill and the NBA hasn't overtaken the skill level Michael Jordan once had. So obviously skill is a contributing factor, but athleticism is also a good part of it.
There's millions of kids who aspire to the NBA, and tens of thousands of very skilled basketball players. 300 make it to the NBA. With such a large talent pool, there's plenty of player who are 98% as good, but just not quite there. I sincerely believe that these players who didn't make the NBA, if given unfettered access to steroids, would be better than Kobe Bryant. Even if they didn't, Kobe would no longer be such a dominating player, unless he also started juicing. Steroids are just that effective, and strength that important.
Think about Barry Bonds, who at the age of 37 had a sudden power surge and shattered batting records. A hundred years of baseball history tells you, baseball players don't dramatically increase their power in their late 30s. They do what A-Rod is doing in his mid 30s, getting dramatically less powerful and with less ability to recover sufficiently. Or look at Jose Canseco, who was always the worse player to his twin brother Ozzie. Jose got more into juicing and won unanimous AL MVP and had a near Hall of Fame career, Ozzie Canseco was never a regular starter.
Really all legalizing steroids would do is mean, every single professional athlete would have to use steroids. This would surely filter down to college athletes and just amateurs who want to get good. I think steroids deserve more study than they receive, maybe in the future all old people will take HGH, but I don't think we're at a point that the general population should be using them.
Plus if your sport requires such little skill that doping can help you win it, then it is not much of a sport anyway Please. I'd love for you to name a single sport that wouldn't be assisted by the use of steroids. Strength is a fundamental basis of every sport and if it isn't, it's an activity, rather than a sport. In which case, there's also drugs for that - beta blockers, caffeine, etc.
Also, there's a huge difference between "undetectable" and "no adverse side effects."
So for all the people talking about how movies are all sequels & super-heroes: No. Absolutely not true. Most movies aren't. Just the movies people actually care about.
The 5 most recent movies rated at AV Club (which is not an indie movie site): A biopic of Margaret Thatcher An Iranian movie examining the after-effects of a divorce A charming story of a black teen lesbian A documentary where an anonymous Mexican narco hitman describes his job A melodrama about unfit parents.
None of these are sequels. All of these can be seen if you live in or near a metropolitan area. The actual top 5 grossing movies of 2011: Harry Potter 8 Transformers 3 Pirates of the Carribean 4 Kung Fu Panda 2 Twilight Saga 2
So what's being argued? Movies are coming out that meet Slashdot's demands for something different & original, just they aren't popular. So obviously Slashdot's advice that movie theaters need to stop showing sequels is wrong!
By the way, just clicking on the Slashdot movie tags, the last 5 movies Slashdot has mentioned are: Lord of the Rings 4 XMen 4 Star Wars Manos: The Hands of Fate Toy Story
So remember slashdot, national militaries use these games as both training and propaganda, but actually there's no relation between video games and violent acts.
I am an atheist and I hate fucking atheists so much. This idea is completely ludicrous and clearly you're just some weirdo who loves blaming bad things on religion. Possibly as a child you were forced to go to Sunday School when you wanted to play video games and now this is your infantile way of striking back. Anyway keep in mind the Albigensian Crusade was less than a thousand years ago and that many scientific developments of the Roman Empire were preserved in the Indian and Arab empires. Certainly some was lost, but nowhere near a thousand years of progress. Anyway what makes you think the Cathars had loads of advanced scientific knowledge, the idea makes no sense.
The library of Alexander was mostly destroyed by Julius Caesar, and while it was partially rebuilt it slowly grew smaller and smaller over time as the Roman Empire broke down and Alexandria ceased to be the greatest city of the world. Maybe it's fun to blame it on yucky Christians but it's ahistorical.
Huh? Problems in the testing process are entirely expected, which is why they have a testing process? Are you even a nerd? Do you really think all the bugs are going to be worked out ahead of time?
Ha ha, English, right? English people all seem to thing America needs subsidized manufacturing. It's totally bizarre.
9 of the 10 best universities in the world are American. 4 of the world's 10 largest corporations are American. America has less debt per capita than Western European nations.
How many people in England use an iPhone, drive an American car, are currently typing this program on Windows or a Mac? Just about everybody. How many English products do I own? Let me look around...(30 seconds later)...I have a handle of Beefeater Gin. And that's it.
And why would intellectual property be worthless? Because it wants to be? People will pay for it so it has worth. It's just as worthwhile as paper money or gold.
What? MS is providing awesome hardware and letting game developers and home developers do what they want with it. I know basing Microsoft (sorry, M$) reflexively is part of the Slashdot experience, but Kinect technology is a really cool thing. It may have been pushed to market to compete with the Wii, but what's the problem with that? Different companies should compete and try to best each other, and anyway it's clearly not just a copy of the same technology.
"Nintendo's goal is an emotional experience." Is that what you call endless variations of Mario & Zelda?
That's a nice thought, except he didn't have a way to turn our great big ball of iron into an unlimited free power source. Just the thought is ridiculous. Tesla was obviously a genius, but he made claims for ideas of his that were never realized or were frankly impossible, or claims of amazing discoveries that he then never published. If he did have a method to develop free energy 100 years ago, not publicly divulging the information would have been strange given his financial difficulties as well as just of course he would have.
Every single person one hundred years ago could tell you that an unlimited free source of energy would have been better than oil. It isn't even really a choice, it's not a matter of Tesla having amazing foresight or being ahead of his time or what have you.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this article indicated it's less than 2%: http://gcn.com/Articles/2011/08/10/ECG-Windows-7-Top-Selling-OS-by-End-of-2011.aspx?Page=2
Nothing against Linux, I use it and have installed it on other's computers, but it's extremely niche for the desktop.
Also, listening to investor demand? There's no accountability to Kickstarter, you don't become a chairman of the board by donating $15.
This. Crowdsource funding is a fun one-off for already established artists with a large following.
In addition to the problem for non-established artists, if every single artist/author/video game producer had their hat in hand asking for crowd-sourced money, it would become an ignored barrage. Projects like these work because they're unusual enough to get people's attention and maybe even a couple Slashdot articles.
Oh yeah, indie video game makers from small cities, who are releasing games for both consoles and computers. I'm sure there's at least dozens of people upset about that.
The marketplace has already decided that game controllers are already better than mouse & keyboards. It's not like keyboard & mouse technology is anything new, game controllers could and have made them an option for consoles - I remember shooters on the Dreamcast gave that as an option. They weren't popular, so it's no longer a thing.
Anyway we live in a world where you can play Skyrim on your XBox with a controller or on your computer with a keyboard + mouse, so really who cares.
Oh yeah, of course. But you can buy "Paleo Diet Cream Puffs" online so I think it's more a weird set of dietary restrictions than an actual attempt to eat like a cave man.
Following a Paleo diet is on par with global climate change deniers?
I don't paleo diet myself, but it's a healthy way to eat. The diet excludes "grains, legumes, dairy products, salt, refined sugar, and processed oils," and aside from the body's requirement for salt (which should be OK with a meat-heavy diet), what's wrong with that?
I know food preferences are like a religion but comparing it to anti-vaccination groups is ridiculous.
And along those lines, I don't like the Chicago Cubs, so maybe we can all just pretend they don't exist. Problem solved!
The substance of the post was obviously "the US revolted because it wanted freedoms and now the system is pushing that America is free and its enemies aren't, but really that's not true at all! The more people learn about this, the more it's going to hurt the government."
This is in the context of the announcement of a video game where you (apparently) are a modern-day bartender who is sent through a sci-fi device to re-live ancestral memories of a forebearer who was part of an international secret society, and mostly killed people with knives.
I guess you could say that the game will help people learn the truth about the American Revolution and its shocking similarities to the injustices modern Americans put up with. But you'd have to get awfully drunk first. Obviously the main point was just to get in the reflexive anti-American statement that helps make Slashdot so tiresome. It's like talking to a European in 2007.
A person has to eat 2000-3000 calories a day (depending on various factors, of course). A gallon of whole milk is a day's worth of calories for $2-$3 and the macronutrient breakdown is just about perfect. A pound of meat is half a day's calories and can easily be found for less than $5. A dozen eggs are a half or a third of a day's calories for less than $2. It goes on and on...meat and milk products are actually quite cheap. The expensive part is extravagant flavorings, and then fruits and vegetables. Grains are even cheaper but provide few micronutrients and shit macronutrients.
I hate to be an asshole, but raising a kid as a vegan is irresponsible - there are so many nutrients and macronutrients that are just not a part of a vegan diet, or are of poor quality/low quantity in a vegan diet. Once the kid is an adult let them make stupid decisions about their diet & health. Doing that to a growing child is just a terrible thing to do. At the least, have them drink some milk.
If my family busted out video games for us all to play together, I would get a new family. Not all of us are nerds in need of getting stuffed into a gym locker room, Poindexter.
It's one thing to post a rip-off game or a general concept. But Vostu did exact replicas. As in, side-by-side pictures look basically identical, game bugs were replicated, artwork is nearly identical. I think there is a line and that Vostu crossed it.
What are the comments here arguing? That exact copies of games should be allowed? That's obviously faulty. That no games with any similarity can come out? That doesn't seem right either. Obviously there has to be some compromise between these two extremes.
Really a lot of the comments here boil down to "I hate Zynga games," or "I hate lawyers."
It's been nine years and more money than budgeted and they've converted 65% of the computers. The idea of converting to Linux is still so strange and uncommon that an autonomous region of Spain considering the same move nine years later is Slashdot-worthy news. It sounds to me like a huge failure.
There already is a place for people to easily release small independent movies & tv shows, and that's youtube. It's a great place to release time wasters that last 30 seconds, it's a complete failure for releasing quality alternatives to TV shoes & movies, in particular the high-budget sci-fi/fantasy/comic-book epics that Slashdot enjoys.
Be honest. These sorts of movies require high budgets. And if the economy of movies is given over to everybody freely downloading the movies over piratebay, there is no way to finance movies. I'd love to hear somebody point out legitimate alternative. Maybe a donation based system? Or everybody deciding they'd rather watch independent home-made films instead?
And fuck you if you just want to watch independent home-made films instead. Hollywood movies can afford the best actors, the best cameramen, the best soundmen, etc., and the end result is a product that's reliably better than anything you'll find on youtube. Y Combinator doesn't even have anything new to offer and obviously absolutely nothing will come of it, Slashdot just picks up on their anti-Hollywood stance because it helps them to rationalize piracy.
Why would anybody release a PC version when almost everybody will just end pirating it anyway, and then rationalizing that it's too expensive or they just wanted a try or that copyright is morally questionable? Honestly I don't even understand the rationale of putting out a quickie XBox port, even if it was absolutely free to do so. They're just going to cannibalize from the sales of XBox360 and PS3 versions of the same game.
Instead we watched Jordan, well into his thirties past his physical prime, lead the Bulls to multiple championships.
Well he's retired now, right? And if he attempted a comeback this year, it would be a weird joke, he couldn't even play bench. He hasn't lost the skill and the NBA hasn't overtaken the skill level Michael Jordan once had. So obviously skill is a contributing factor, but athleticism is also a good part of it.
There's millions of kids who aspire to the NBA, and tens of thousands of very skilled basketball players. 300 make it to the NBA. With such a large talent pool, there's plenty of player who are 98% as good, but just not quite there. I sincerely believe that these players who didn't make the NBA, if given unfettered access to steroids, would be better than Kobe Bryant. Even if they didn't, Kobe would no longer be such a dominating player, unless he also started juicing. Steroids are just that effective, and strength that important.
Think about Barry Bonds, who at the age of 37 had a sudden power surge and shattered batting records. A hundred years of baseball history tells you, baseball players don't dramatically increase their power in their late 30s. They do what A-Rod is doing in his mid 30s, getting dramatically less powerful and with less ability to recover sufficiently. Or look at Jose Canseco, who was always the worse player to his twin brother Ozzie. Jose got more into juicing and won unanimous AL MVP and had a near Hall of Fame career, Ozzie Canseco was never a regular starter.
Really all legalizing steroids would do is mean, every single professional athlete would have to use steroids. This would surely filter down to college athletes and just amateurs who want to get good. I think steroids deserve more study than they receive, maybe in the future all old people will take HGH, but I don't think we're at a point that the general population should be using them.
Plus if your sport requires such little skill that doping can help you win it, then it is not much of a sport anyway
Please. I'd love for you to name a single sport that wouldn't be assisted by the use of steroids. Strength is a fundamental basis of every sport and if it isn't, it's an activity, rather than a sport. In which case, there's also drugs for that - beta blockers, caffeine, etc.
Also, there's a huge difference between "undetectable" and "no adverse side effects."
So for all the people talking about how movies are all sequels & super-heroes: No. Absolutely not true. Most movies aren't. Just the movies people actually care about.
The 5 most recent movies rated at AV Club (which is not an indie movie site):
A biopic of Margaret Thatcher
An Iranian movie examining the after-effects of a divorce
A charming story of a black teen lesbian
A documentary where an anonymous Mexican narco hitman describes his job
A melodrama about unfit parents.
None of these are sequels. All of these can be seen if you live in or near a metropolitan area. The actual top 5 grossing movies of 2011:
Harry Potter 8
Transformers 3
Pirates of the Carribean 4
Kung Fu Panda 2
Twilight Saga 2
So what's being argued? Movies are coming out that meet Slashdot's demands for something different & original, just they aren't popular. So obviously Slashdot's advice that movie theaters need to stop showing sequels is wrong!
By the way, just clicking on the Slashdot movie tags, the last 5 movies Slashdot has mentioned are:
Lord of the Rings 4
XMen 4
Star Wars
Manos: The Hands of Fate
Toy Story
So remember slashdot, national militaries use these games as both training and propaganda, but actually there's no relation between video games and violent acts.
I am an atheist and I hate fucking atheists so much. This idea is completely ludicrous and clearly you're just some weirdo who loves blaming bad things on religion. Possibly as a child you were forced to go to Sunday School when you wanted to play video games and now this is your infantile way of striking back. Anyway keep in mind the Albigensian Crusade was less than a thousand years ago and that many scientific developments of the Roman Empire were preserved in the Indian and Arab empires. Certainly some was lost, but nowhere near a thousand years of progress. Anyway what makes you think the Cathars had loads of advanced scientific knowledge, the idea makes no sense.
The library of Alexander was mostly destroyed by Julius Caesar, and while it was partially rebuilt it slowly grew smaller and smaller over time as the Roman Empire broke down and Alexandria ceased to be the greatest city of the world. Maybe it's fun to blame it on yucky Christians but it's ahistorical.
Huh? Problems in the testing process are entirely expected, which is why they have a testing process? Are you even a nerd? Do you really think all the bugs are going to be worked out ahead of time?
Ha ha, English, right? English people all seem to thing America needs subsidized manufacturing. It's totally bizarre.
9 of the 10 best universities in the world are American. 4 of the world's 10 largest corporations are American. America has less debt per capita than Western European nations.
How many people in England use an iPhone, drive an American car, are currently typing this program on Windows or a Mac? Just about everybody. How many English products do I own? Let me look around...(30 seconds later)...I have a handle of Beefeater Gin. And that's it.
And why would intellectual property be worthless? Because it wants to be? People will pay for it so it has worth. It's just as worthwhile as paper money or gold.
Well only if you assume that US citizens are incapable of talking bad about the US.
Considering Slashdot is slight more anti-American than the Taliban that's obviously not true.
What? MS is providing awesome hardware and letting game developers and home developers do what they want with it. I know basing Microsoft (sorry, M$) reflexively is part of the Slashdot experience, but Kinect technology is a really cool thing. It may have been pushed to market to compete with the Wii, but what's the problem with that? Different companies should compete and try to best each other, and anyway it's clearly not just a copy of the same technology.
"Nintendo's goal is an emotional experience." Is that what you call endless variations of Mario & Zelda?
That's a nice thought, except he didn't have a way to turn our great big ball of iron into an unlimited free power source. Just the thought is ridiculous. Tesla was obviously a genius, but he made claims for ideas of his that were never realized or were frankly impossible, or claims of amazing discoveries that he then never published. If he did have a method to develop free energy 100 years ago, not publicly divulging the information would have been strange given his financial difficulties as well as just of course he would have.
Every single person one hundred years ago could tell you that an unlimited free source of energy would have been better than oil. It isn't even really a choice, it's not a matter of Tesla having amazing foresight or being ahead of his time or what have you.
Because people think they are entitled to the latest Hollywood entertainments, and if they don't have the money then stealing is totally OK?
This is a great rationalization. I think I'm entitled to a Mercedes M class, however I can't afford one. Guess I'll just break into the lot tonight.