But really, aside from that, is the infrastructure in Alaska and Canada and eastern Russia up there really of the sort that could take advantage of a big project like this? It's all well and good to ship cargo and electricity and such through a tunnel, but without having a way to get it to / take it away from the tunnel, I'd be skeptical of the utility.
Well, the way you get it to/take it away from the tunnel is by truck, same way you get it through the tunnel. I'd imagine these trucks would end up stopping at a major cargo hub like Anchorage to distribute their cargo to the rest of the United States. Anchorage is already one of the big gateways to Asia, in terms of goods.
All you'd need is enough gas stations along the way. And Alaska's got no shortage of oil, what with that pipeline and all.
How weird would it be to see a bunch of Russian trucks driving around the United States? The producers of "Red Dawn" would be turning over in their graves!
Of course, it would be a lot more efficient to do it by train, but that would require an even larger initial investment, as I'm pretty sure there are no useable tracks up there and some pretty rugged terrain on the way to Anchorage.
The average yearly income for a Chinese family is less than a single license for Vista.
Huh? That can't possibly be true unless a Vista license costs more than about $3,000 (the average individual income in China is $1,090; families typically earn two to three times individuals).
You can't look at a country with 1.3 billion people and take average income as a pricing indicator anyway. MS could price Vista for the top 1% of earners there and still end up with 13 million copies sold. You're trying to turn this into an economic issue, but the fact of the matter is the pitiful number that they have sold has to be due to something else - be it piracy, poor product reception, or whatever.
OK, so the big studios are constantly pressuring Google to reign in their step-child video service.. When will YouTube/Google turn around and say, "Ok, when will the news (for lack of a better term) companies you own start paying us for broadcasting the clips they swipe from our site?"
The press has broad freedoms (that pesky first amendment) and are not generally bound by copyright law. As long as the context is a news story, they're under no obligation to copyright holders.
Think about it. Imagine a world where news couldn't be reported unless royalties were paid. Brand names couldn't be used in news stories, video clips couldn't be shown, song excerpts couldn't be played, etc. Except for major, breaking stories (like we saw yesterday), most news would simply go unreported.
The line between news and entertainment is blurring, though, and I suspect we'll see a test of this at some point, as some news/entertainment magazine show or some blog somewhere gets sued - and it could set a really dangerous precedent. But straight news broadcasts are not bound by copyright in news reports.
There really needs to be a distinction made in this discussion between frivolous patents, patent trolls and legitimate patents.
I don't think Verizon is a patent troll, although their patent could still be frivolous and honestly, I don't know whether this is.
But the whole point of patents is to encourage innovation, by providing protection for unique ideas. Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day? (That's especially true for startups, which don't have the money to compete head to head with larger, more established companies.)
If this is a legitimate patent, then Verizon was right to enforce it, and it will only help innovation in the long run, by continuing the legal tradition of protecting new ideas. And the court decisions suggest that it was a legitimate patent.
I think that this is a pointless move. Flash video exploded because it was fast and there weren't forcible ads and DRM.
No, Flash video exploded because it was the only true cross-platform embeddable video format, and it offered quality at least equal to and in most cases better than the competition. So, rather than dealing with encoding QuickTime for Mac, Windows Media and Real for PC, and whatever else for Linux, you just do one format and you're done. And, it'll play right in the browser without you doing anything else.
There was never any promise of no DRM and no forced ads. In fact, another reason why content owners like it is that it's very difficult to capture a stream, unless you do it wrong (YouTube actually does it wrong - they don't obfuscate their url's, allowing plugins to easily save a file. But it's easy to hide url's if you want to).
Anyway, you guys are going nuts over nothing. This has nothing to do with user-generated stuff. It's pre-roll. It's going to actually result in *more* video being available on the net, because now content owners have a financial incentive. All those TV channels hesitant to put their stuff on YouTube? Well, you're gonna see a lot more deals done now. And meanwhile, the skateboarding videos and vlogs you're so used to will continue to look exactly the same.
I have an old Apex model that I'll never get rid of for the same reason (it's the one that has the hidden menu that allows you to turn off all the protection features, including Macrovision on the analog outs.) Even plays discs full of MP3s, which was pretty impressive eight years ago. And yeah, the thing is huge by modern standards, that's for sure, but it's built like a brick outhouse. Of course, that was back before Apex went to crap like most Chinese brands seem to, eventually.
I had the same Apex model (the AD600A) - that thing was famous for being the first player that could be easily modified to be region free and macrovision free, but it was not built like a brick outhouse. It was a piece of junk. It used an early generation computer DVD-ROM drive and software-based mpeg decoding - just like all the cheap Chinese players do today. It was a pioneer in that, just as it was in other ways.
It also had awful picture quality compared to almost any other player. Again, it used a pretty terrible software-based decoder that couldn't even compete 5 years ago, much less today. This was easy to overlook at the time, because of the things this player could do that no other player could, but today there are a huge variety of players that are both region free and macrovision free.
The AD600A also never supported basic DVD features like seamless branching. So saying you've kept yours because it has fewer problems than other players is just kind of strange.
There's no reason to hold on to this player anymore. It's not built nearly as well as you seem to think it is (even my Gateway player that I paid $50 for is built better, and my old Sony DVPS3000 is a tank compared to the AD600A... nevermind the DVPS7000), its picture quality was never any good, it tops out at s-video in terms of outputs, and other players do all the same things it does while conforming better to the DVD spec.
It's time to replace your player, just as I did about 5 years ago now. Never regretted it either.
Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking???
That it's for the good of the children. So your argument is that kids should be exposed to the full weight of all that's available in the world from day one, regardless of whether or not they have the necessary cognitive skills to process it yet?
I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the equivalent of watching a snuff film, but your argument boils down to the fact that you don't believe in any controls whatsoever on what children are exposed to.
Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'. If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations.
Yes, children need to be taught how to distinguish truth from lies. That's part of what we pay teachers for. If a teacher wants to print out an article from Wikipedia that's full of inaccuracies to bring in and show to the class as an example of how dangerous inaccuracies and lies can be and how to distinguish them from the truth, more power to him/her. But the teacher should be the one doing that; it shouldn't be up to the students to fend for themselves. School is not a democracy; never has been. It's not up to students to teach themselves.
Your and other comments here so far strike me as basically just a lot of whining. Schools have always had approved and unapproved sources for research. When I was young, Encyclopedia Britannica was accepted as a source in my school, but Encyclopedia Americana was not. This is nothing new. Even when I was at NYU, only primary sources were accepted in my course of study - encyclopedias weren't accepted for research at all.
Have any of you ever actually been to school? Or maybe you're in school now and pissed off that you're losing access to an easy source. Hey, you can always go to the library like we did 20 years ago and do some proper research, which is what you should be doing anyway.
Almost all anti-delisting reverse splits I have seen back then ended up as suicides... and even today, they still translate into extended near-death experiences often followed by bankruptcy.
I think you're confusing the issue a little bit.
The reason reverse splits rarely work is that they don't solve the underlying problem that's causing the dropping stock price to begin with. They treat the symptoms, not the disease. Which means there's nothing "suicidal" about the reverse split, it's just that they don't really accomplish anything other than keeping the company on the market for a bit longer.
It's kind of like taking an aspirin for the pain being caused by a brain tumor. You'll eventually die anyway, but it's not because of the aspirin, it's because of the brain tumor. Taking aspirin isn't "suicidal" and in fact has no bearing whatsoever on your health, it just doesn't solve the real problem.
Lots of people think about stock prices as if they're somehow disconnected from company performance. That's a real dot-com era way of thinking, but we should all be back to reality by now. A reverse split *can* work, but only if it's combined with measures to make the company profitable again. But certainly, if I were a company shareholder, I would want any company that I thought had a good plan for a real turnaround to do a reverse split to keep themselves on the market until their plan started to bear fruit.
Of course, this *is* SCO we're talking about, so I can't imagine a reverse split would do anything but delay the inevitable.
The movies aren't HD quality because even with average cable/DSL speeds the bandwidth required would be prohibitive. Don't expect to see super high quality downloadable movies until we have fiber to the home.
Two things:
1) We already have fiber to the home. But it doesn't take fiber download speeds (which aren't much higher than cable, which is fiber most of the way) to download HD.
Apple is simply behind Microsoft, for once. No other way to put it. No use making apologies for Apple, either.
Personally, I don't think any of these download services are going to matter in the slightest until the rights issues get worked out - and that means more than signing a deal with a major studio. That doesn't automatically bring all that studio's movies onto a download service, because most of these movies never had download rights negotiated in the first place. Remember the early days of VHS? That's what we're in right now with digital downloads. It's going to take decades for all of these rights to be renegotiated on a film by film basis.
Until that happens, most people are just going to keep using services like Netflix with its 70,000 titles (Netflix is an example of the success of the "long tail" - almost all of those 70,000 films are checked out at any given time), including HD-DVD and Blu-Ray if you want high-def. They also offer digital streaming, though their selection is limited, just as iTunes and Xbox Live is.
My employer uses LaCie drives and I frequently see problems where Windows can't detect the device.
We use LaCie drives at my office and I can verify this. It's also not really a problem with only one specific model of theirs; we have problems with one of our original-release Porsche drives from them (this drive is now 100% dead, incidentally) and we have the same problem on the new 500GB drives we purchased in March.
I also personally don't think LaCie drives are all that reliable. In addition to the Porsche drive that went dead, one of the four new 500GB drives we bought is also already dead and about to go back for a warranty replacement. It's not as if we're particularly hard on these either; I mean they're external drives and they're meant to be shuttled around a bit, but it's not as if we're subjecting them to 150 degree temperatures or anything. We're just using them in an office environment.
If I was buying something for myself, I'd buy something else.
Yes, but if you took the resources wasted by the distribution/marketing companies to DRM their content, the writers/directors/actors would have more resources to create better (arguably) movies.
It's more like, if hacks like Joel Schumacher stop getting $200 million budgets to make the next crap Hollywood "blockbuster" that ends up bombing at the box office anyway, then other directors will have more resources to create better movies, or at least more of them.
The bottom line is expensive special effects don't make good movies. Never have. Ever heard of Citizen Kane? Casablanca? The Graduate? On the Waterfront? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Not a single explosion in any of those movies.
Movie budgets have basically no correlation to movie quality. It takes approximately zero dollars to write a good script. Maybe a couple bucks for some paper and a pen. Not even a computer's necessary - most of the best scripts ever produced were written in the days of the typewriter. It is true that there's a base budget that's necessary to actually produce an existing script - film/tape stock, equipment rentals, talent payroll, catering, etc. - but that is so far below what the average budget is these days that it's completely ridiculous.
In other words, the money spent on DRM has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of our movies. Writers, directors and producers have no constraints whatsoever put on them by DRM on the home video side. And if you want to complain about bad movies, it's probably because there's too much money flying around rather than not enough.
(That said, there are plenty of great movies being made today, including in Hollywood but also outside of it. If you're not finding them, then that's mostly a personal problem.)
is the scale - so many people don't realize how huge NYC really is when you include all 5 boroughs.
NYC is physically smaller than Los Angeles, which Los Santos in San Andreas was based on. So you can't take the size of the real city as indicative of anything whatsoever. It will no doubt be much smaller than the real NYC, and I believe they even say it's smaller than the world in San Andreas.
btw, since when is an outright magazine article "leaked" information? This information was put there intentionally by Game Informer and Rockstar.
Okay, I'm tired of this. 260,000 MB of mp3s at approximately 1MB/min of music means you have 180 days worth of music if you ran it constantly without ever repeating. Seriously folks, it would probably take at least 5-10 years for you to realistically listen to 260GB of music. I have a hard time believing that you have a) ever listened to all of the music you own and b) have any reasonable use for carrying it all with you on a portable device. 5 days worth of music on constant play with no repeats is a little over 7GB. If that's not enough space for you, then you need a life.
Ladies and gentlemen, the voting for the coveted "Asshole of the Year" award is now closed!
Seriously, every single point in your argument is easily refuted. 1MB/min? Some of us want better quality than that - you're talking about 128kbps files there. All of my earliest mp3's are VBR at around 180kbps average; my newer ones are closer to 250kbps average.
That throws most of your other arguments out the window without even saying anything else.
But let's say you work at a mindless desk job, where you can listen to music 8 hours per day. You also have a 2 hour total commute. That's potentially 10 hours worth of listening, 5 days per week. Yes, some of us do like music that much. So assuming 250kbps, how much storage would we need now for, let's say 2 weeks worth of non-repeating music? What about a month? 2 months?
If we "need a life", then you need a job, because you clearly don't understand how or why people use portable music.
That's not even considering the fact that all proper HDD-based music players are also just portable hard drives. They're mass storage devices (this includes the iPod). Your assumption that we all want to fill up a 260GB drive with nothing but music is faulty to begin with.
You really don't think anyone could ever fill up a 260GB music player with high quality lightly compressed or even losslessly compressed music, *plus* whatever other files we need to carry around with us?
Yes, because we all know that DVD sales are plummeting.
You meant that sarcastically, but actually, you're right.
Charging more for HD content isn't going to cut it because a lot of people *with* HDTVs like the quality of DVDs in a progressive scan player (which they are are over the last couple years).
First of all, both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies cost the same as DVD's - about $15-$20. Some are as low as $9. So that argument doesn't hold water.
Second, nobody who has an HDTV likes the quality of DVD vs. true HDTV. DVD's are watchable, but the quality difference is pretty obvious. I have never seen any HDTV owner that says otherwise. (Maybe going back to the early days of HDTV, when the resolution of those sets was hardly better than DVD. But that's not the case anymore.)
The industry needs a replacement for DVD, and HDTV owners do want one. It will likely turn out to be some combination of digital downloads and high-def optical discs, most likely Blu-Ray in the long run.
I'm constantly arguing with people about whether or not you can see the difference between 1080p and 720p or not. As in most other things, many people want an absolute answer: yes you can, or no you can't. They read things containing ambiguity and conclude the answer must be "no you can't." But that's not what the word "ambiguity" means.
As you point out, not everybody has the same visual acuity. My vision is corrected to better than 20/20, and even beyond that, to some extent I've been trained in visual acuity first by going to film school and then by working in the TV industry for some years. My job is to look for picture detail.
I have a 42" 1080p LCD monitor, from which I sit about 6 feet away. I can easily distinguish the difference between 720p and 1080i programming (which gets properly deinterlaced by my TV set, so I'm seeing a full 1920x1080 image). Now, some of that is probably the scaling being done by my cable box, but almost surely not all - and anyway, scaling is never taken into account in the opposite argument (ie. nobody stops to consider that "720p" TV sets are almost all 1366x768 or 1024x768 resolution, meaning they have to scale everything).
I think the bottom line is some people see the difference, some don't, and yes, it depends on how close you sit and how big your TV is. It depends on a lot of things. There's no "yes, you can see the difference" or "no, you can't".
One thing I would say is that with prices being what they are these days, I don't see any reason whatsoever not to buy a 1080p set. The price difference between 720p and 1080p in the same line of sets is usually only about 10-20%.
Heavily compressed doesn't mean poor quality though. Look at the H264 codec. Very clean and sharp looking, but takes up less space.
iTunes videos are h.264. You've drunk the kool-aid Apple's been pouring for you - h.264 by itself is not some picture quality panacea. At a certain point, data loss is data loss. And h.264 is lossy compression just like divx or wmv or any other codec. (All of these are based around mpeg4, btw - h.264 is just a somewhat more advanced version, but it is still mpeg4.)
h.264 compression is always a series of compromises, just like any other compression. The end result may be a slightly smaller file with the same quality or a slightly better file at the same file size vs. other codecs, but just because you encode something with h.264 doesn't mean it's going to be crystal clear and artifact-free. h.264 videos can easily look just as bad as any other videos. Apple obviously had not originally planned on their iTunes videos being watched on large screens, so they never took the care to encode for this type of viewing.
I think it would be easy to apply a U.S. perspective to this and cry foul. But if Japan has publicly funded elections and strict, but fair rules about how candidates communicate then maybe they are justified in their action.
I agree. The initial reaction among Americans to this news would likely be to cite "free speech" as justification for letting YouTube keep the clips up.
But that's a very Amero-centric way of looking at the world, and is rooted in the same kind of thinking that now has us in trouble in Iraq and is responsible for the dim view taken of us by the rest of the world.
If Japan's laws say speeches can't be broadcast except through government-controlled TV, then I'm sorry, but that's the law. And if Google wants to do business in Japan (as they do), then they need to respect local laws. A US company should not be trying to impose US law or US cultural norms on Japan.
It's perfectly within YouTube's power to geo-restrict these videos to parts of the world where they're allowed. Yes, you can get around those restrictions if you really want to, but there's no reason they shouldn't take reasonable measures to comply with Japanese laws with regard to Japanese videos.
It probably goes without saying, but this isn't some initiative on MS' part. It's riding Jobs' coattails, crying "me too!, me too!", as if MS is some kind of crusader for consumers' rights around music and DRM.
I think you need to go back and read EMI's announcement. Some relevant quotes (emphasis added):
"From today, EMI's retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality."
"EMI's new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms."
"Apple's iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) is the first online music store to receive EMI's new premium downloads."
EMI had always planned to make its catalog available to anyone that wants it, not just through iTunes and not just AAC files. The only exclusivity Apple ever had was in making the co-announcement.
Until they all do, this isn't the "eureka" moment that people think it is.
Well, it is, because EMI announced that their catalog is available to all retailers in whatever format they want it. iTunes just gets it first.
Anyone who doesn't think MS won't be offering non-DRM.wma files through the Zune store is mistaken. Ditto for Napster and Yahoo and whoever else is selling music these days (I still buy CD's, so I confess I don't even really know the full list). No doubt you'll find EMI's catalog in a variety of different formats online, and if.mp3 is really what people want, then whoever is selling.mp3 is the store that's going to do the most business. The market will ultimately decide, though - what this has done is now detach the store from the player.
That's what this BW article is missing. He's thinking that where iTunes goes, so go consumers. But people only shop at iTunes because they have iPods and they think they have to. Maybe that'll continue. But there are definitely people (like myself) who own iPods but never shop at iTunes and don't own anything but CD's ripped to mp3. So no doubt there will be a lot of iPod owners shopping elsewhere, and maybe even some switchers from iTunes to other stores. The end result is just as likely to be lower sales for iTunes and higher sales for everybody else as the reverse.
But yes, it is a "eureka!" moment, the removal of DRM. It's also almost overnight seemed to make the other three labels' catalogs basically irrelevant to internet sales. EMI has plenty of good music; why would I waste my money on a DRM'd track from another label? (I'm saying this as if I was a consumer that actually bought digital download tracks, but you get my point.)
It's kind of interesting, when I first switched to 10.4 I used the dashboard aLL the time, and I used spotlight ALL the time.
now, however many months later, I don't use dashboard ever, and I use spotlight for 1) typing in application names to start them 2) in File Open dialogs occasionally.
I use a Mac at work. The first time I tried the dashboard I could not believe anyone thought this was either useful *or* cool; I haven't touched it since. (I use Karamba on my home Linux box, so it's not that I hate widgets; I just don't think the way they're implemented on Mac make them worth using. I'd rather have them persistent, but able to be turned off.)
Spotlight I use occasionally, but it gives me weird results. I'm sure I'm not using it right, but whenever I do I end up with a million results that have no relation to what I'm looking for. From what I remember, I also couldn't figure out how to search for, say, a set of files with a word in part of the name and a specific file extension.
If Google Desktop for mac is a little more intuitive and powerful, I'll probably end up using it over Spotlight.
Personally, I think "most efficient" and "most creative" are mutually exclusive.
Only if you think all great art is produced by committee.
Anyone who works in any creative field will tell you that the more cooks in the kitchen, the more watered-down any creative idea is going to be. A singular creative vision (provided it's coming from someone who actually has one) will always be both more creative and more efficient than ideas formed and executed by large groups.
Having said that, I wouldn't say Take 2 is bloated from a development standpoint. I don't know who they plan to cut in order to foster this creativity, but they don't have a lot of visionaries to spare over there.
What I think he *might* have been saying is that they will cut back on their production of shovelware in order to concentrate more on what they see as their high end franchises. That means most likely ditching one of their 2 non-RS labels - either Global Star or 2K Games (not 2K Sports). That doesn't mean every single game on the cut label will also go; the worthy titles will just move over to the unaffected label. But it would streamline ops a bit.
In the wake of the chaos of the board overthrow, Strauss Zelnick is taking pains to reassure investors that stability and security are now the company's goals. He also pointed out that his position as CEO is a short-term situation
Am I the only one that sees the contradiction in this?
The 30 cents not only buys you a DRM free version, but also a higher quality version. So you pay 30 cents for twice the bit rate and no DRM. I, personally, think it's a decent deal.
It's a decent deal if you thought 99 cents was a decent deal before. Many of us didn't, which is one reason why CD's continue to account for more than 90% of all music purchases.
The whole value proposition of the iTunes store needs to change if they really want to go mass market (and don't kid yourselves; for all the hype, iTunes sells a tiny fraction of all music bought. It's not mainstream). I remember reading a while back that if you strip out all the production and shipping costs associated with CD packaging, an individual song *should* cost 18 cents. (Sorry, I don't have a link, but it was a story posted here.) And that's assuming uncompressed CD quality.
Apple should be at the very least lowering prices on the 128kbps tracks and just upping the quality of the 99 cent tracks. I don't really blame them, though; I know it's the industry themselves trying to keep prices artificially high.
You can thank former mayor juliani (however it is spelled)for that.
Crime was dropping before Giuliani took office. And it's dropped faster under Bloomberg than it did under Giuliani.
Crime dropped *nationwide* while Giuliani was in office, largely as a result of Bill Clinton's initiatives in both crime prevention (through educational programs, etc.) and in enforcement (100,000 new officers nationwide for community policing, of which about 5,000 ended up in NYC - that's 5,000 cops walking the beat that the city never had before, and Giuliani had nothing to do with them).
I guess he created a floating precinct idea were an entire police station was mobile and could be located where ever the need for extra enforcement popped up in less then 24 hours.
There's no such thing as a "floating precinct". William Bratton and his lieutenants came up with most of the ideas that lowered crime, but the two biggest things that you can credit from an enforcement standpoint are just those 5,000 extra cops and the computerized COMPSTAT crime tracking system that was both devised and implemented by deputy commissioner Jack Maple.
Since 9/11, Giuliani gets credit for way too many things that he had little or nothing to do with. Most New Yorkers did not like him in the waning days of his mayoralty, and most credited Bratton and Clinton more with the reduction in crime than Giuliani. (I'm not sure if you can still find old gallup polls anywhere, but the polls did reflect that.)
And how did Giuliani repay Bratton for his hard work? By asking for his resignation and hiring Bernard Kerik, a personal friend with ties to the mafia, to replace him.
You're going to be hearing about this a lot more if Giuliani presses ahead with his presidential campaign.
Since the Hot Coffee controversy they haven't released any really high-end games.
Both Bully and The Warriors were supposed to be "high-end" games. (In fact, everything Rockstar releases is supposed to be "high-end" - they're the label Take 2 slaps on its high-end franchises. What isn't released under the Rockstar label gets the Global Star or 2K labels.) The fact that they didn't make much of a splash is a big part of the problem.
Rockstar basically pays for its existence with GTA, which is what it was founded on to begin with. That's fine when every iteration sells 10 million copies, but as the article points out, sales have been dropping ever since San Andreas (and there have been at least three separate GTA releases since then). True, some of that is down to the user base of the PSP and the fact that the PS2 versions were developed for lesser hardware, but then back in the days of GTA3, it was the game driving sales of the console. That's no longer really the case.
GTA4 is a lot more anticipated than Vice City Stories for the PS2, but then it's also going to be appearing on systems with a lot smaller user bases. The question is whether it can drive system sales like GTA3 did - I doubt it. Too much competition these days; I mean I don't agree with this, but some people think games like Scarface have actually improved upon the GTA formula by now. So I think GTA4 is guaranteed to be the slowest selling full-fledged GTA game since GTA2.
The danger is obviously that a company that's basically a one-hit wonder is eventually going to run out of luck with that one hit. Rockstar has been trying for almost a decade now to build new franchises, but none have ever really caught on. Oni, Smuggler's Run, Midnight Club, Red Dead Revolver, Bully, The Warriors - all these games and more were supposed to be new "tentpoles" for the company and they all ended up at best as minor franchises and at worst as outright bombs.
Rockstar's not on its way out of business, but they definitely have a lot of problems right now.
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But really, aside from that, is the infrastructure in Alaska and Canada and eastern Russia up there really of the sort that could take advantage of a big project like this? It's all well and good to ship cargo and electricity and such through a tunnel, but without having a way to get it to / take it away from the tunnel, I'd be skeptical of the utility.
Well, the way you get it to/take it away from the tunnel is by truck, same way you get it through the tunnel. I'd imagine these trucks would end up stopping at a major cargo hub like Anchorage to distribute their cargo to the rest of the United States. Anchorage is already one of the big gateways to Asia, in terms of goods.
All you'd need is enough gas stations along the way. And Alaska's got no shortage of oil, what with that pipeline and all.
How weird would it be to see a bunch of Russian trucks driving around the United States? The producers of "Red Dawn" would be turning over in their graves!
Of course, it would be a lot more efficient to do it by train, but that would require an even larger initial investment, as I'm pretty sure there are no useable tracks up there and some pretty rugged terrain on the way to Anchorage.
The average yearly income for a Chinese family is less than a single license for Vista.
Huh? That can't possibly be true unless a Vista license costs more than about $3,000 (the average individual income in China is $1,090; families typically earn two to three times individuals).
You can't look at a country with 1.3 billion people and take average income as a pricing indicator anyway. MS could price Vista for the top 1% of earners there and still end up with 13 million copies sold. You're trying to turn this into an economic issue, but the fact of the matter is the pitiful number that they have sold has to be due to something else - be it piracy, poor product reception, or whatever.
OK, so the big studios are constantly pressuring Google to reign in their step-child video service.. When will YouTube/Google turn around and say, "Ok, when will the news (for lack of a better term) companies you own start paying us for broadcasting the clips they swipe from our site?"
The press has broad freedoms (that pesky first amendment) and are not generally bound by copyright law. As long as the context is a news story, they're under no obligation to copyright holders.
Think about it. Imagine a world where news couldn't be reported unless royalties were paid. Brand names couldn't be used in news stories, video clips couldn't be shown, song excerpts couldn't be played, etc. Except for major, breaking stories (like we saw yesterday), most news would simply go unreported.
The line between news and entertainment is blurring, though, and I suspect we'll see a test of this at some point, as some news/entertainment magazine show or some blog somewhere gets sued - and it could set a really dangerous precedent. But straight news broadcasts are not bound by copyright in news reports.
End the patent nonesense now!
There really needs to be a distinction made in this discussion between frivolous patents, patent trolls and legitimate patents.
I don't think Verizon is a patent troll, although their patent could still be frivolous and honestly, I don't know whether this is.
But the whole point of patents is to encourage innovation, by providing protection for unique ideas. Why would anybody bother coming up with new ideas if anybody else could just copy them the next day? (That's especially true for startups, which don't have the money to compete head to head with larger, more established companies.)
If this is a legitimate patent, then Verizon was right to enforce it, and it will only help innovation in the long run, by continuing the legal tradition of protecting new ideas. And the court decisions suggest that it was a legitimate patent.
I think that this is a pointless move. Flash video exploded because it was fast and there weren't forcible ads and DRM.
No, Flash video exploded because it was the only true cross-platform embeddable video format, and it offered quality at least equal to and in most cases better than the competition. So, rather than dealing with encoding QuickTime for Mac, Windows Media and Real for PC, and whatever else for Linux, you just do one format and you're done. And, it'll play right in the browser without you doing anything else.
There was never any promise of no DRM and no forced ads. In fact, another reason why content owners like it is that it's very difficult to capture a stream, unless you do it wrong (YouTube actually does it wrong - they don't obfuscate their url's, allowing plugins to easily save a file. But it's easy to hide url's if you want to).
Anyway, you guys are going nuts over nothing. This has nothing to do with user-generated stuff. It's pre-roll. It's going to actually result in *more* video being available on the net, because now content owners have a financial incentive. All those TV channels hesitant to put their stuff on YouTube? Well, you're gonna see a lot more deals done now. And meanwhile, the skateboarding videos and vlogs you're so used to will continue to look exactly the same.
I have an old Apex model that I'll never get rid of for the same reason (it's the one that has the hidden menu that allows you to turn off all the protection features, including Macrovision on the analog outs.) Even plays discs full of MP3s, which was pretty impressive eight years ago. And yeah, the thing is huge by modern standards, that's for sure, but it's built like a brick outhouse. Of course, that was back before Apex went to crap like most Chinese brands seem to, eventually.
I had the same Apex model (the AD600A) - that thing was famous for being the first player that could be easily modified to be region free and macrovision free, but it was not built like a brick outhouse. It was a piece of junk. It used an early generation computer DVD-ROM drive and software-based mpeg decoding - just like all the cheap Chinese players do today. It was a pioneer in that, just as it was in other ways.
It also had awful picture quality compared to almost any other player. Again, it used a pretty terrible software-based decoder that couldn't even compete 5 years ago, much less today. This was easy to overlook at the time, because of the things this player could do that no other player could, but today there are a huge variety of players that are both region free and macrovision free.
The AD600A also never supported basic DVD features like seamless branching. So saying you've kept yours because it has fewer problems than other players is just kind of strange.
There's no reason to hold on to this player anymore. It's not built nearly as well as you seem to think it is (even my Gateway player that I paid $50 for is built better, and my old Sony DVPS3000 is a tank compared to the AD600A... nevermind the DVPS7000), its picture quality was never any good, it tops out at s-video in terms of outputs, and other players do all the same things it does while conforming better to the DVD spec.
It's time to replace your player, just as I did about 5 years ago now. Never regretted it either.
Great! After having just returned from Communist China (where they deliberately block WikiPedia) the USA now has school districts blocking WikiPedia. Woa to all you dimwits who say "This is for the good of the children." What are you thinking???
That it's for the good of the children. So your argument is that kids should be exposed to the full weight of all that's available in the world from day one, regardless of whether or not they have the necessary cognitive skills to process it yet?
I'm not saying that Wikipedia is the equivalent of watching a snuff film, but your argument boils down to the fact that you don't believe in any controls whatsoever on what children are exposed to.
Part of the 'learning' process is to be able to acquire data and distinguish that which is accurate from that which is misleading. That is what makes us 'human'. If we do not teach our children how to distinguish the truth from made up lies and how to check a theory using multiple alternate sources then we end up cripling our future generations.
Yes, children need to be taught how to distinguish truth from lies. That's part of what we pay teachers for. If a teacher wants to print out an article from Wikipedia that's full of inaccuracies to bring in and show to the class as an example of how dangerous inaccuracies and lies can be and how to distinguish them from the truth, more power to him/her. But the teacher should be the one doing that; it shouldn't be up to the students to fend for themselves. School is not a democracy; never has been. It's not up to students to teach themselves.
Your and other comments here so far strike me as basically just a lot of whining. Schools have always had approved and unapproved sources for research. When I was young, Encyclopedia Britannica was accepted as a source in my school, but Encyclopedia Americana was not. This is nothing new. Even when I was at NYU, only primary sources were accepted in my course of study - encyclopedias weren't accepted for research at all.
Have any of you ever actually been to school? Or maybe you're in school now and pissed off that you're losing access to an easy source. Hey, you can always go to the library like we did 20 years ago and do some proper research, which is what you should be doing anyway.
Almost all anti-delisting reverse splits I have seen back then ended up as suicides... and even today, they still translate into extended near-death experiences often followed by bankruptcy.
I think you're confusing the issue a little bit.
The reason reverse splits rarely work is that they don't solve the underlying problem that's causing the dropping stock price to begin with. They treat the symptoms, not the disease. Which means there's nothing "suicidal" about the reverse split, it's just that they don't really accomplish anything other than keeping the company on the market for a bit longer.
It's kind of like taking an aspirin for the pain being caused by a brain tumor. You'll eventually die anyway, but it's not because of the aspirin, it's because of the brain tumor. Taking aspirin isn't "suicidal" and in fact has no bearing whatsoever on your health, it just doesn't solve the real problem.
Lots of people think about stock prices as if they're somehow disconnected from company performance. That's a real dot-com era way of thinking, but we should all be back to reality by now. A reverse split *can* work, but only if it's combined with measures to make the company profitable again. But certainly, if I were a company shareholder, I would want any company that I thought had a good plan for a real turnaround to do a reverse split to keep themselves on the market until their plan started to bear fruit.
Of course, this *is* SCO we're talking about, so I can't imagine a reverse split would do anything but delay the inevitable.
The movies aren't HD quality because even with average cable/DSL speeds the bandwidth required would be prohibitive. Don't expect to see super high quality downloadable movies until we have fiber to the home.
Two things:
1) We already have fiber to the home. But it doesn't take fiber download speeds (which aren't much higher than cable, which is fiber most of the way) to download HD.
2) We also already have HD downloads.
Apple is simply behind Microsoft, for once. No other way to put it. No use making apologies for Apple, either.
Personally, I don't think any of these download services are going to matter in the slightest until the rights issues get worked out - and that means more than signing a deal with a major studio. That doesn't automatically bring all that studio's movies onto a download service, because most of these movies never had download rights negotiated in the first place. Remember the early days of VHS? That's what we're in right now with digital downloads. It's going to take decades for all of these rights to be renegotiated on a film by film basis.
Until that happens, most people are just going to keep using services like Netflix with its 70,000 titles (Netflix is an example of the success of the "long tail" - almost all of those 70,000 films are checked out at any given time), including HD-DVD and Blu-Ray if you want high-def. They also offer digital streaming, though their selection is limited, just as iTunes and Xbox Live is.
My employer uses LaCie drives and I frequently see problems where Windows can't detect the device.
We use LaCie drives at my office and I can verify this. It's also not really a problem with only one specific model of theirs; we have problems with one of our original-release Porsche drives from them (this drive is now 100% dead, incidentally) and we have the same problem on the new 500GB drives we purchased in March.
I also personally don't think LaCie drives are all that reliable. In addition to the Porsche drive that went dead, one of the four new 500GB drives we bought is also already dead and about to go back for a warranty replacement. It's not as if we're particularly hard on these either; I mean they're external drives and they're meant to be shuttled around a bit, but it's not as if we're subjecting them to 150 degree temperatures or anything. We're just using them in an office environment.
If I was buying something for myself, I'd buy something else.
Yes, but if you took the resources wasted by the distribution/marketing companies to DRM their content, the writers/directors/actors would have more resources to create better (arguably) movies.
It's more like, if hacks like Joel Schumacher stop getting $200 million budgets to make the next crap Hollywood "blockbuster" that ends up bombing at the box office anyway, then other directors will have more resources to create better movies, or at least more of them.
The bottom line is expensive special effects don't make good movies. Never have. Ever heard of Citizen Kane? Casablanca? The Graduate? On the Waterfront? One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? Not a single explosion in any of those movies.
Movie budgets have basically no correlation to movie quality. It takes approximately zero dollars to write a good script. Maybe a couple bucks for some paper and a pen. Not even a computer's necessary - most of the best scripts ever produced were written in the days of the typewriter. It is true that there's a base budget that's necessary to actually produce an existing script - film/tape stock, equipment rentals, talent payroll, catering, etc. - but that is so far below what the average budget is these days that it's completely ridiculous.
In other words, the money spent on DRM has absolutely nothing to do with the quality of our movies. Writers, directors and producers have no constraints whatsoever put on them by DRM on the home video side. And if you want to complain about bad movies, it's probably because there's too much money flying around rather than not enough.
(That said, there are plenty of great movies being made today, including in Hollywood but also outside of it. If you're not finding them, then that's mostly a personal problem.)
is the scale - so many people don't realize how huge NYC really is when you include all 5 boroughs.
NYC is physically smaller than Los Angeles, which Los Santos in San Andreas was based on. So you can't take the size of the real city as indicative of anything whatsoever. It will no doubt be much smaller than the real NYC, and I believe they even say it's smaller than the world in San Andreas.
btw, since when is an outright magazine article "leaked" information? This information was put there intentionally by Game Informer and Rockstar.
Okay, I'm tired of this. 260,000 MB of mp3s at approximately 1MB/min of music means you have 180 days worth of music if you ran it constantly without ever repeating. Seriously folks, it would probably take at least 5-10 years for you to realistically listen to 260GB of music. I have a hard time believing that you have a) ever listened to all of the music you own and b) have any reasonable use for carrying it all with you on a portable device. 5 days worth of music on constant play with no repeats is a little over 7GB. If that's not enough space for you, then you need a life.
Ladies and gentlemen, the voting for the coveted "Asshole of the Year" award is now closed!
Seriously, every single point in your argument is easily refuted. 1MB/min? Some of us want better quality than that - you're talking about 128kbps files there. All of my earliest mp3's are VBR at around 180kbps average; my newer ones are closer to 250kbps average.
That throws most of your other arguments out the window without even saying anything else.
But let's say you work at a mindless desk job, where you can listen to music 8 hours per day. You also have a 2 hour total commute. That's potentially 10 hours worth of listening, 5 days per week. Yes, some of us do like music that much. So assuming 250kbps, how much storage would we need now for, let's say 2 weeks worth of non-repeating music? What about a month? 2 months?
If we "need a life", then you need a job, because you clearly don't understand how or why people use portable music.
That's not even considering the fact that all proper HDD-based music players are also just portable hard drives. They're mass storage devices (this includes the iPod). Your assumption that we all want to fill up a 260GB drive with nothing but music is faulty to begin with.
You really don't think anyone could ever fill up a 260GB music player with high quality lightly compressed or even losslessly compressed music, *plus* whatever other files we need to carry around with us?
Yes, because we all know that DVD sales are plummeting.
You meant that sarcastically, but actually, you're right.
Charging more for HD content isn't going to cut it because a lot of people *with* HDTVs like the quality of DVDs in a progressive scan player (which they are are over the last couple years).
First of all, both HD-DVD and Blu-Ray movies cost the same as DVD's - about $15-$20. Some are as low as $9. So that argument doesn't hold water.
Second, nobody who has an HDTV likes the quality of DVD vs. true HDTV. DVD's are watchable, but the quality difference is pretty obvious. I have never seen any HDTV owner that says otherwise. (Maybe going back to the early days of HDTV, when the resolution of those sets was hardly better than DVD. But that's not the case anymore.)
The industry needs a replacement for DVD, and HDTV owners do want one. It will likely turn out to be some combination of digital downloads and high-def optical discs, most likely Blu-Ray in the long run.
I'm constantly arguing with people about whether or not you can see the difference between 1080p and 720p or not. As in most other things, many people want an absolute answer: yes you can, or no you can't. They read things containing ambiguity and conclude the answer must be "no you can't." But that's not what the word "ambiguity" means.
As you point out, not everybody has the same visual acuity. My vision is corrected to better than 20/20, and even beyond that, to some extent I've been trained in visual acuity first by going to film school and then by working in the TV industry for some years. My job is to look for picture detail.
I have a 42" 1080p LCD monitor, from which I sit about 6 feet away. I can easily distinguish the difference between 720p and 1080i programming (which gets properly deinterlaced by my TV set, so I'm seeing a full 1920x1080 image). Now, some of that is probably the scaling being done by my cable box, but almost surely not all - and anyway, scaling is never taken into account in the opposite argument (ie. nobody stops to consider that "720p" TV sets are almost all 1366x768 or 1024x768 resolution, meaning they have to scale everything).
I think the bottom line is some people see the difference, some don't, and yes, it depends on how close you sit and how big your TV is. It depends on a lot of things. There's no "yes, you can see the difference" or "no, you can't".
One thing I would say is that with prices being what they are these days, I don't see any reason whatsoever not to buy a 1080p set. The price difference between 720p and 1080p in the same line of sets is usually only about 10-20%.
Heavily compressed doesn't mean poor quality though. Look at the H264 codec. Very clean and sharp looking, but takes up less space.
iTunes videos are h.264. You've drunk the kool-aid Apple's been pouring for you - h.264 by itself is not some picture quality panacea. At a certain point, data loss is data loss. And h.264 is lossy compression just like divx or wmv or any other codec. (All of these are based around mpeg4, btw - h.264 is just a somewhat more advanced version, but it is still mpeg4.)
h.264 compression is always a series of compromises, just like any other compression. The end result may be a slightly smaller file with the same quality or a slightly better file at the same file size vs. other codecs, but just because you encode something with h.264 doesn't mean it's going to be crystal clear and artifact-free. h.264 videos can easily look just as bad as any other videos. Apple obviously had not originally planned on their iTunes videos being watched on large screens, so they never took the care to encode for this type of viewing.
I think it would be easy to apply a U.S. perspective to this and cry foul. But if Japan has publicly funded elections and strict, but fair rules about how candidates communicate then maybe they are justified in their action.
I agree. The initial reaction among Americans to this news would likely be to cite "free speech" as justification for letting YouTube keep the clips up.
But that's a very Amero-centric way of looking at the world, and is rooted in the same kind of thinking that now has us in trouble in Iraq and is responsible for the dim view taken of us by the rest of the world.
If Japan's laws say speeches can't be broadcast except through government-controlled TV, then I'm sorry, but that's the law. And if Google wants to do business in Japan (as they do), then they need to respect local laws. A US company should not be trying to impose US law or US cultural norms on Japan.
It's perfectly within YouTube's power to geo-restrict these videos to parts of the world where they're allowed. Yes, you can get around those restrictions if you really want to, but there's no reason they shouldn't take reasonable measures to comply with Japanese laws with regard to Japanese videos.
It probably goes without saying, but this isn't some initiative on MS' part. It's riding Jobs' coattails, crying "me too!, me too!", as if MS is some kind of crusader for consumers' rights around music and DRM.
I think you need to go back and read EMI's announcement. Some relevant quotes (emphasis added):
"From today, EMI's retailers will be offered downloads of tracks and albums in the DRM-free audio format of their choice in a variety of bit rates up to CD quality."
"EMI's new DRM-free products will enable full interoperability of digital music across all devices and platforms."
"Apple's iTunes Store (www.itunes.com) is the first online music store to receive EMI's new premium downloads."
EMI had always planned to make its catalog available to anyone that wants it, not just through iTunes and not just AAC files. The only exclusivity Apple ever had was in making the co-announcement.
Until they all do, this isn't the "eureka" moment that people think it is.
.wma files through the Zune store is mistaken. Ditto for Napster and Yahoo and whoever else is selling music these days (I still buy CD's, so I confess I don't even really know the full list). No doubt you'll find EMI's catalog in a variety of different formats online, and if .mp3 is really what people want, then whoever is selling .mp3 is the store that's going to do the most business. The market will ultimately decide, though - what this has done is now detach the store from the player.
Well, it is, because EMI announced that their catalog is available to all retailers in whatever format they want it. iTunes just gets it first.
Anyone who doesn't think MS won't be offering non-DRM
That's what this BW article is missing. He's thinking that where iTunes goes, so go consumers. But people only shop at iTunes because they have iPods and they think they have to. Maybe that'll continue. But there are definitely people (like myself) who own iPods but never shop at iTunes and don't own anything but CD's ripped to mp3. So no doubt there will be a lot of iPod owners shopping elsewhere, and maybe even some switchers from iTunes to other stores. The end result is just as likely to be lower sales for iTunes and higher sales for everybody else as the reverse.
But yes, it is a "eureka!" moment, the removal of DRM. It's also almost overnight seemed to make the other three labels' catalogs basically irrelevant to internet sales. EMI has plenty of good music; why would I waste my money on a DRM'd track from another label? (I'm saying this as if I was a consumer that actually bought digital download tracks, but you get my point.)
It's kind of interesting, when I first switched to 10.4 I used the dashboard aLL the time, and I used spotlight ALL the time.
now, however many months later, I don't use dashboard ever, and I use spotlight for 1) typing in application names to start them 2) in File Open dialogs occasionally.
I use a Mac at work. The first time I tried the dashboard I could not believe anyone thought this was either useful *or* cool; I haven't touched it since. (I use Karamba on my home Linux box, so it's not that I hate widgets; I just don't think the way they're implemented on Mac make them worth using. I'd rather have them persistent, but able to be turned off.)
Spotlight I use occasionally, but it gives me weird results. I'm sure I'm not using it right, but whenever I do I end up with a million results that have no relation to what I'm looking for. From what I remember, I also couldn't figure out how to search for, say, a set of files with a word in part of the name and a specific file extension.
If Google Desktop for mac is a little more intuitive and powerful, I'll probably end up using it over Spotlight.
Personally, I think "most efficient" and "most creative" are mutually exclusive.
Only if you think all great art is produced by committee.
Anyone who works in any creative field will tell you that the more cooks in the kitchen, the more watered-down any creative idea is going to be. A singular creative vision (provided it's coming from someone who actually has one) will always be both more creative and more efficient than ideas formed and executed by large groups.
Having said that, I wouldn't say Take 2 is bloated from a development standpoint. I don't know who they plan to cut in order to foster this creativity, but they don't have a lot of visionaries to spare over there.
What I think he *might* have been saying is that they will cut back on their production of shovelware in order to concentrate more on what they see as their high end franchises. That means most likely ditching one of their 2 non-RS labels - either Global Star or 2K Games (not 2K Sports). That doesn't mean every single game on the cut label will also go; the worthy titles will just move over to the unaffected label. But it would streamline ops a bit.
In the wake of the chaos of the board overthrow, Strauss Zelnick is taking pains to reassure investors that stability and security are now the company's goals. He also pointed out that his position as CEO is a short-term situation
Am I the only one that sees the contradiction in this?
The 30 cents not only buys you a DRM free version, but also a higher quality version. So you pay 30 cents for twice the bit rate and no DRM. I, personally, think it's a decent deal.
It's a decent deal if you thought 99 cents was a decent deal before. Many of us didn't, which is one reason why CD's continue to account for more than 90% of all music purchases.
The whole value proposition of the iTunes store needs to change if they really want to go mass market (and don't kid yourselves; for all the hype, iTunes sells a tiny fraction of all music bought. It's not mainstream). I remember reading a while back that if you strip out all the production and shipping costs associated with CD packaging, an individual song *should* cost 18 cents. (Sorry, I don't have a link, but it was a story posted here.) And that's assuming uncompressed CD quality.
Apple should be at the very least lowering prices on the 128kbps tracks and just upping the quality of the 99 cent tracks. I don't really blame them, though; I know it's the industry themselves trying to keep prices artificially high.
You can thank former mayor juliani (however it is spelled)for that.
Crime was dropping before Giuliani took office. And it's dropped faster under Bloomberg than it did under Giuliani.
Crime dropped *nationwide* while Giuliani was in office, largely as a result of Bill Clinton's initiatives in both crime prevention (through educational programs, etc.) and in enforcement (100,000 new officers nationwide for community policing, of which about 5,000 ended up in NYC - that's 5,000 cops walking the beat that the city never had before, and Giuliani had nothing to do with them).
I guess he created a floating precinct idea were an entire police station was mobile and could be located where ever the need for extra enforcement popped up in less then 24 hours.
There's no such thing as a "floating precinct". William Bratton and his lieutenants came up with most of the ideas that lowered crime, but the two biggest things that you can credit from an enforcement standpoint are just those 5,000 extra cops and the computerized COMPSTAT crime tracking system that was both devised and implemented by deputy commissioner Jack Maple.
Since 9/11, Giuliani gets credit for way too many things that he had little or nothing to do with. Most New Yorkers did not like him in the waning days of his mayoralty, and most credited Bratton and Clinton more with the reduction in crime than Giuliani. (I'm not sure if you can still find old gallup polls anywhere, but the polls did reflect that.)
And how did Giuliani repay Bratton for his hard work? By asking for his resignation and hiring Bernard Kerik, a personal friend with ties to the mafia, to replace him.
You're going to be hearing about this a lot more if Giuliani presses ahead with his presidential campaign.
Since the Hot Coffee controversy they haven't released any really high-end games.
Both Bully and The Warriors were supposed to be "high-end" games. (In fact, everything Rockstar releases is supposed to be "high-end" - they're the label Take 2 slaps on its high-end franchises. What isn't released under the Rockstar label gets the Global Star or 2K labels.) The fact that they didn't make much of a splash is a big part of the problem.
Rockstar basically pays for its existence with GTA, which is what it was founded on to begin with. That's fine when every iteration sells 10 million copies, but as the article points out, sales have been dropping ever since San Andreas (and there have been at least three separate GTA releases since then). True, some of that is down to the user base of the PSP and the fact that the PS2 versions were developed for lesser hardware, but then back in the days of GTA3, it was the game driving sales of the console. That's no longer really the case.
GTA4 is a lot more anticipated than Vice City Stories for the PS2, but then it's also going to be appearing on systems with a lot smaller user bases. The question is whether it can drive system sales like GTA3 did - I doubt it. Too much competition these days; I mean I don't agree with this, but some people think games like Scarface have actually improved upon the GTA formula by now. So I think GTA4 is guaranteed to be the slowest selling full-fledged GTA game since GTA2.
The danger is obviously that a company that's basically a one-hit wonder is eventually going to run out of luck with that one hit. Rockstar has been trying for almost a decade now to build new franchises, but none have ever really caught on. Oni, Smuggler's Run, Midnight Club, Red Dead Revolver, Bully, The Warriors - all these games and more were supposed to be new "tentpoles" for the company and they all ended up at best as minor franchises and at worst as outright bombs.
Rockstar's not on its way out of business, but they definitely have a lot of problems right now.