Here in China, phones that can play MP3s are already the big thing - they hook up to a computer via USB or by a removable memory card, you don't have to d/l the songs over the phone network (I don't think such a service is even offered although I could be wrong). MP3 functionality is becoming standard in even pretty low-end phones, that's sure to become true in other markets as well.
When you're already carrying a device that can play MP3s, you have a much lower motivation for carrying a separate device around to also play MP3s. I don't see this as killing iPods, but definitely it's going to eat into the low-end market.
True, but I don't think anyone on a copy protection product forum is going to be surprised to hear that bittorrent sites have pirated copies of the game. It was poor form, but I doubt it resulted in a single extra case of piracy - at least, not until Slashdot and the news article picked up the story.
Full price == baldur gate type length. 8 hour play time == $4.95... canadian. Second, don't fuck with paying consumers, there is no point copy protection, only paying customers are affected. Finally, make it worth buy the fucking game.
That idea will win applause on Slashdot but it shows a lack of understanding of the Asian market. You're assuming that most people would rather pay $4.95 Canadian for the legitimate item, rather than the $.50 - $1 Canadian these games will cost on the street or in shops. Maybe *some* US people would buy that logic, but it would certainly doesn't apply to Asia, where legitimate DVDs are dirt cheap but almost nobody buys, because the DVDs are even cheaper.
Literally if you sold a $50 game in most of Asia, *nobody* would buy it, even if they could afford it. It would be nothing more than an oddity.
And you seem to think there is a relationship between the quality of the game and the willingness of people to bootleg the game. There is no relationship. You seem to have this view of economics where people buy the legitimate item out of the goodness of their hearts, as a sort of donation to a company for doing a good job. It's terribly naive and frankly doesn't make much sense.
Certainly I'd love to hear some empirical evidence, rather than a bunch of Pollyanna sentiment.
Yeah, are there any translated French insults? I'm curious if they're really that strong or if it's just a thing Francophiles claim, which I strongly suspect - I have French friends and this is the first I've heard of any super swearing ability.
Your comparison is specious, because what's called the Tianmen Square incident in America is called the 6-4 incident in China. A more fair comparison would be:
Anyway, Tianmen Square is famous for a number of reasons in China, not just the Tianmen Square incident.
Re:The burgeoning field of arithmetic
on
Uwe Boll Smash!
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The way I read that is, there's one or two thousand people on the internet complaining about his movies. However, there's many more people who have seen the movies, and aren't complaining on the Internet. Which is definitely true although I don't know if it proves anything.
Everybody knows the sequels sucked because they had so much bullshit wannnabe philosophy. If you're genuinely interested in philosophy, you should try reading a philosophy book, not expecting it from action movies.
As a big fan of the FFVII video game, I thought the movie was the biggest piece of shit imaginable. It's not easy to make a movie worse than "Spirits Within," but they somehow did it.
And the posts saying "why buy it unless you've first downloaded it and then want to give them the money for it" are off-base - essentially Sony would be counting on donations! Maybe a very few people would abide by the system but obviously it's unworkable on any large scale.
Really, humans are not much more than hosts for self replicating information...All that being a Funny, Japanese-Speaking, Mozart-loving, Cat-loving, Slashdot-reading fellow is, is a combinatation of contaigous memes.
Bringing up "Memes" as a useful model of how the world works is so 1990s. Get with the times.
Have to agree with the other poster who actually knows what he's talking about. I'm in China and I just loaded FreeBSD and Sourceforge.net with no problem. Perhaps your ISP blocks websites on its own initiative??? That would be wacky.
That said, every person I talk to knows how to get around the Firewall (although I do talk to tech-savvy people). For most people it's easily the most visible side of government oppression, but it's mostly a matter of inconvenience - you go through a proxy, or you go through Anonymouse or something.
By every definition, PC/console gaming can be a sport like any other.
Looking on dictionary.com, every relevant definition involves the idea of "physical activity" taking place. Sorry but pressing keys on a keyboard doesn't fit the current definition.
Competitive gaming is still very very much a cult activity in Korea. 99% of Koreans talk shit about the.2% of the population involved in competitive gaming. It's bigger than the US but it's not at all mainstream.
Piracy occurs in China, even though the legitimate item costs $1.25 for a DVD. Even with the lower salaries & standard of living, $1.25 is not much money at all and I think people all agree it's reasonable. Still people almost entirely go for the bootlegs, which instead cost maybe $.75. I think a better explanation would be, "people want as much as they can for as little as they can spend, as long as they don't feel they might get in trouble for it, or if they would feel real guilty later."
I must admit the books in the Baen library look like complete shit, it's a matter of getting what you're paying for! If you're down with the classics Blackmask Online re-formats Gutenberg texts to Acrobat, Microsoft Reader, and several other popular ebook formats. No real difference for a computer, but I find it better to use with a PDA than the straight.txt or.html formatted texts.
What do you want, lengthy and much-considered essays on a stupid game almost nobody here has played? The subject isn't worth anything more than the lame quips it's recieving.
If you were familiar with Wikipedia at all you would know that our rules on images are strict enough to cause plenty of grumbling and bitterness
And if you were familiar with Wikipedia at all you would know that plagiarism runs rampant. Give me a break, you really think having a rule against plagiarism is a full-proof system? Your post borders on nonsense.
Wikipedia isn't an organization, it's a website. The people who caught the plagiarism weren't employees of Wikipedia, or acting on behalf of the Wikipedia Foundation, why should Wikipedia be given credit? This is just another instance of Wikipedia supporters having a chip on their shoulder against the established media - I loved the righteous tone of indignation, you can almost forget just how commonly Wikipedia articles plagiarize printed sources.
Since when does headline grabbing equal interesting? Why do we need a list giving attention grabbing whores MORE attention?
Well...you posted to Slashdot about him, right? Penny Arcade and Games.slashdot.com (among others) brought his name up over and over again. So obviously he's interesting on some level.
If you do, and it's not for work (who'd pay for your phone anyhow), I'd say you have an abnormal unsatiated need for human contact, and might want to consider talking to someone professional. Face to face, that is.
Hey, thanks for the social tips. I now recognize, half an hour on the phone per day is a huge amount of time, and was definitely getting in the way of talking to people in real life. Got it.
Maybe you haven't been to Finland. We have such prices that calls cost only 6.9 cents a minute
Hmmm...so Finland goes at 6.9 eurocents min? That comes to US 8.3 cents a minute.
In the US, after taxes, I was paying $45/month for 1000 minutes, and I got to keep unused minutes. Not the best deal, but I didn't have to pay long distance to call between Hawai'i and the mainland, which I did frequently (same country but 4,000 miles distance).
That works out to 4.5 US cents per minute, I believe you could get that down to 3.5 or 4 cents per minute if you shop around. With year-long contracts on such service, cell phones are free or subsidized, depending on the model.
So anyway, you're paying more than double what a US consumer pays for their service.
I'm surprised the Finnish government imposes regulations on consumers that they're not allowed to buy cell phones with a contract - even Communist China, where I now live, allows consumers the option. I'm even more surprised you take this restriction as a positive.
China - the world's largest cell phone market - is quite a bit more expensive than the US. People end up using SMS just to avoid the charges, even though using SMS with Chinese Characters is kind of a pain.
The US has 5 major service providers in competition with each other, and many smaller regions are serviced by local cell phone companies. Of course the prices are better than most other countries.
Considering what a small share of the desktop market Macintosh and Linux has (in the US, about 4%), and that a substantial percentage of such people also have access to Windows, I don't really see this as being all that big a deal.
Yeah, obviously Americans would never play a game where the dialog is more than some guy repeating "Guards patrol the castle walls" over and over every time you talk to him.
You're mistaking the issue, perhaps you're not familiar with video-game dating simulators. They are inane and pathetic and not fun. There is really no intelligence or literary merit to them.
2. The entire Sakura Wars series. Given the sheer number of games and its popularity in Japan, its more or less considered to be a conspiracy as to why the games (or the anime, or the manga or the movies) haven't made it over here.
Having played the first of the series for the Dreamcast, it's a half-step away from a dating simulator, and I just can't imagine it being popular in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
When you're already carrying a device that can play MP3s, you have a much lower motivation for carrying a separate device around to also play MP3s. I don't see this as killing iPods, but definitely it's going to eat into the low-end market.
True, but I don't think anyone on a copy protection product forum is going to be surprised to hear that bittorrent sites have pirated copies of the game. It was poor form, but I doubt it resulted in a single extra case of piracy - at least, not until Slashdot and the news article picked up the story.
That idea will win applause on Slashdot but it shows a lack of understanding of the Asian market. You're assuming that most people would rather pay $4.95 Canadian for the legitimate item, rather than the $.50 - $1 Canadian these games will cost on the street or in shops. Maybe *some* US people would buy that logic, but it would certainly doesn't apply to Asia, where legitimate DVDs are dirt cheap but almost nobody buys, because the DVDs are even cheaper.
Literally if you sold a $50 game in most of Asia, *nobody* would buy it, even if they could afford it. It would be nothing more than an oddity.
And you seem to think there is a relationship between the quality of the game and the willingness of people to bootleg the game. There is no relationship. You seem to have this view of economics where people buy the legitimate item out of the goodness of their hearts, as a sort of donation to a company for doing a good job. It's terribly naive and frankly doesn't make much sense.
Certainly I'd love to hear some empirical evidence, rather than a bunch of Pollyanna sentiment.
Even more prescient, can Jimmy Wales edit his own interview, to make himself seem more important to the interview process?
Yeah, are there any translated French insults? I'm curious if they're really that strong or if it's just a thing Francophiles claim, which I strongly suspect - I have French friends and this is the first I've heard of any super swearing ability.
http://images.google.cn/images?svnum=10&hl=zh-CN&l r=&cr=countryCN&newwindow=1&q=%E5%85%AD%E5%9B%9B&b tnG=%E6%90%9C%E7%B4%A2
Anyway, Tianmen Square is famous for a number of reasons in China, not just the Tianmen Square incident.
The way I read that is, there's one or two thousand people on the internet complaining about his movies. However, there's many more people who have seen the movies, and aren't complaining on the Internet. Which is definitely true although I don't know if it proves anything.
Everybody knows the sequels sucked because they had so much bullshit wannnabe philosophy. If you're genuinely interested in philosophy, you should try reading a philosophy book, not expecting it from action movies.
And the posts saying "why buy it unless you've first downloaded it and then want to give them the money for it" are off-base - essentially Sony would be counting on donations! Maybe a very few people would abide by the system but obviously it's unworkable on any large scale.
Bringing up "Memes" as a useful model of how the world works is so 1990s. Get with the times.
That said, every person I talk to knows how to get around the Firewall (although I do talk to tech-savvy people). For most people it's easily the most visible side of government oppression, but it's mostly a matter of inconvenience - you go through a proxy, or you go through Anonymouse or something.
Looking on dictionary.com, every relevant definition involves the idea of "physical activity" taking place. Sorry but pressing keys on a keyboard doesn't fit the current definition.
Competitive gaming is still very very much a cult activity in Korea. 99% of Koreans talk shit about the .2% of the population involved in competitive gaming. It's bigger than the US but it's not at all mainstream.
I must admit the books in the Baen library look like complete shit, it's a matter of getting what you're paying for! If you're down with the classics Blackmask Online re-formats Gutenberg texts to Acrobat, Microsoft Reader, and several other popular ebook formats. No real difference for a computer, but I find it better to use with a PDA than the straight .txt or .html formatted texts.
What do you want, lengthy and much-considered essays on a stupid game almost nobody here has played? The subject isn't worth anything more than the lame quips it's recieving.
It's a Conspiracy!!! C, O, N, Spiracy!
And if you were familiar with Wikipedia at all you would know that plagiarism runs rampant. Give me a break, you really think having a rule against plagiarism is a full-proof system? Your post borders on nonsense.
Wikipedia isn't an organization, it's a website. The people who caught the plagiarism weren't employees of Wikipedia, or acting on behalf of the Wikipedia Foundation, why should Wikipedia be given credit? This is just another instance of Wikipedia supporters having a chip on their shoulder against the established media - I loved the righteous tone of indignation, you can almost forget just how commonly Wikipedia articles plagiarize printed sources.
Well...you posted to Slashdot about him, right? Penny Arcade and Games.slashdot.com (among others) brought his name up over and over again. So obviously he's interesting on some level.
Hey, thanks for the social tips. I now recognize, half an hour on the phone per day is a huge amount of time, and was definitely getting in the way of talking to people in real life. Got it.
Hmmm...so Finland goes at 6.9 eurocents min? That comes to US 8.3 cents a minute.
In the US, after taxes, I was paying $45/month for 1000 minutes, and I got to keep unused minutes. Not the best deal, but I didn't have to pay long distance to call between Hawai'i and the mainland, which I did frequently (same country but 4,000 miles distance).
That works out to 4.5 US cents per minute, I believe you could get that down to 3.5 or 4 cents per minute if you shop around. With year-long contracts on such service, cell phones are free or subsidized, depending on the model.
So anyway, you're paying more than double what a US consumer pays for their service.
I'm surprised the Finnish government imposes regulations on consumers that they're not allowed to buy cell phones with a contract - even Communist China, where I now live, allows consumers the option. I'm even more surprised you take this restriction as a positive.
The US has 5 major service providers in competition with each other, and many smaller regions are serviced by local cell phone companies. Of course the prices are better than most other countries.
Considering what a small share of the desktop market Macintosh and Linux has (in the US, about 4%), and that a substantial percentage of such people also have access to Windows, I don't really see this as being all that big a deal.
This is hardly innovative. It's one of the first things you can research in X-Com, and that game came out in like 1992!
You're mistaking the issue, perhaps you're not familiar with video-game dating simulators. They are inane and pathetic and not fun. There is really no intelligence or literary merit to them.
Having played the first of the series for the Dreamcast, it's a half-step away from a dating simulator, and I just can't imagine it being popular in the US.