There really isn't competition. CBS and Fox each have exclusive contracts to a different conference, ESPN/ABC have exclusive rights to Sunday night and Monday night respectively.
I don't think you're quite getting it.
Nobody but EA can produce an NFL game for the next five years. You're saying "it's the same in TV! It doesn't matter that Fox, ABC, CBS, and ESPN can all broadcast games, because they each have their own part of the league!" This may be true, but how does it compare to EA's total monopoly on the league? It's not like EA has the NFC and ESPN has the AFC, or like you get to play EA's game on Tuesday nights and ESPN's game on Thursday nights. No, because EA has everything. This is not comparable to TV broadcast rights.
Also the CBS and Fox presentations aren't in direct competition, one gets the morning timeslot, the other gets an afternoon timeslot.
This is actually completely irrelevant (for the same reason as above), but I still want to correct it because it's not true. In your area (New York, for example), there may be a deal whereby the AFC team and the NFC team play at different times of day to allow everybody in the area to see each team. (This has nothing to do with TV broadcast rights, btw.)
But if you live in a city that does not have a home team, or even that has only one team on a date when the blackout rule does not apply, then you could be watching both CBS and Fox at the same time, from 1 PM to 7 PM. There's no such thing as a morning/afternoon slot in terms of TV broadcast rights. Both networks broadcast simultaneously all day long; you just don't see every game in every market (but you do see two simultaneous games in a lot of markets - the two networks sure as hell do compete directly).
Even in New York, towards the end of the season we can watch the other network while both home teams are playing.
And this is not even counting "NFL Sunday Ticket", which is a whole other matter that gives you like 16 different channels of NFL action if you pay for it.
Again, though, say it with me:
TV = three networks on four channels (and many more than that if you pay for it) Games = one company with exclusive rights, and no choice whatsoever.
Yeah, the iPod does have the best interface. And why is this? There are probably hundreds of people here that could write firmware for an mp3 player that's as good or better than the iPod interface.
And yet they haven't. Why is this?
Lots of people think they can design a good interface, but then when it comes down to it, they don't demonstrate that to be the case. Do you think Sony set out with the idea of "hey, let's design an iPod competitor, only let's make the interface worse? Yeah, that's the way to sell units." Obviously not; they thought they could do better, just like everybody else. But they didn't.
I totally agree with the parent post. People think it's really easy to do what Apple did. Ok, so why the hell hasn't anybody done better? I mean if it's so freakin' simple, why haven't all these professionals out there in the tech industry with years of experience designing interfaces made a better product with a better interface? Because it's not that easy.
I work as a web producer; part of my job is designing interfaces (no, we don't just leave it all up to the designers). So I know the issues that come up; there are all sorts of little things that you don't think of if you're not actually designing things. Things like going back to the top of the list when you go back to browsing after playing a song. Or how long it takes to scroll through, whether it's important to be able to read the artist names as you scroll or not.
You look at these things and you say "well, all they need to do is try to actually use one to figure it out", but that doesn't really work, because the way the design process goes is you have to first try to anticipate how people are going to use something, then you design the interface, then you build it out and test it. But once you get to the testing phase, you're so used to your design and so convinced that it's the right one that it's difficult to objectively tell whether or not it's intuitive or whether it works the way people expect. You can do focus groups or other test marketing afterwards but we all know how reliable that is, and what problems it can introduce into the process. A lot of people (such as myself) think that type of product testing can actually make things worse.
But I disagree that the iPod is "feature rich" considering my iRiver has an FM Radio (which I use all the time to listen to NPR), high quality recording, optical in/out, OGG Vorbis support, etc.
I do agree that the iPod is lacking in the features department, if features are what you're looking for. Myself, I wouldn't use "feature-rich" as a selling point for any mp3 player. Here's my list of desired features:
1. It plays mp3's.
End of list.
Now, I would argue that the fact that the iPod does basically one thing and does it really well is why it's popular, but maybe that's another debate. Because I think there probably is a market for devices like the iRiver, but as the marketplace has shown, it's not really that big of a market. I mean people act as if the only reason the iPod's popular is because of marketing; well, no, I know all about the iRiver, and which player do I want? The iPod. For a bunch of reasons that manufacturers like iRiver and Sony apparently don't understand. And until they do understand them, Apple's not going to lose its 92% market share for hard drive-based players - they'll probably only increase it.
The iTunes software will automatically index it for you. Ripping "100 or so" CDs isn't that big of a deal. Do 10 here, 10 there. In a few days they are all ripped.
Seriously, I'm not even using iTunes but I've literally just ripped about 20 CD's in the time it took me to get through the article and then to this point in the thread. Whether you use iTunes (which I don't recommend for mp3 ripping) or some other app, it's hardly a difficult or even particularly time-consuming task.
Do yourself a favor and download the latest LAME codec, then get EAC as a front end. (This is assuming you're using Windows, although LAME works with other OS's too.) LAME is by far the best mp3 encoder at the moment, and EAC is a powerful front-end that's very easy to use once you set it up once - literally one-click, just like iTunes.
I ripped almost my entire collection of 300+ CD's in one afternoon; I'm just going through now and ripping the stragglers that I didn't find mp3-worthy the first time around. It's really not a big deal to do and I'm sure everybody's got enough music lying around to fill up a HDD-based mp3 player without re-purchasing anything.
It picks up one year after the game and involves a sickness that took over the worl upon Sephiroths death
Where'd you get this info? I know there's a lot of speculation going on around the net, but that's all it is. Nobody knows anything as far as I know.
Half of your statement is factually incorrect, anyway - it says right in the trailer (maybe not this one, maybe trailer 1 or 2) that it takes place two years after FF7.
The only other things you can really gather from the trailers are that a) the children of the world have lost hope after the devastation wreaked in FF7 (it specifically says this in one of the trailers), b) Cloud is drawn back into battle again, apparently against his will, and c) some dude who looks like Sephiroth's son is playing Cloud's adversary.
You can make whatever guesses you want from this info, but that's all they are - guesses. I'll throw my speculation out there, which is that one of Sephiroth's failed clones survived (the dude in the wheelchair) and is using the children of the world to incite a revolution and retake the planet in the name of Jenova. Cloud returns to stop it. I mean it sounds simple, but it's going to have to be simple to fit into a 70 minute movie. Lots of people have come up with all sorts of complicated scenarios based on the trailers but this is not an 80 hour game we're talking about, it's a 70 minute movie. It's going to be a fairly straightforward story, and based on the after-credits ending of FF7, we know how it all turns out already.
Is it just because we're talking United States here? If you read through this thread, people are acting as if watching TV on a phone is some kind of new idea. (Your post being one example.) I mean the size of the screen and the battery life are not open questions, because TV-enabled phones have been on the market for over a year (if not more) around the world.
Hmm.... that's an interesting argument you have there. I've actually never heard someone make that statement before, that a hash is a "derived work" of the original software.
Not to detract from your general point, but Final Fantasy 7 came out in Japan so much earlier because it was rushed to the market, and they didn't have the time to get everything finished. They took seven months for North American release in order to actually finish up the game, so North American gamers ended up with a superior product.
Well this is certainly news to me, and probably to all of the Japanese gamers who played FF7 as well.
The only difference I recall from the Japanese and US releases was the two extra optional bosses added towards the end of the game. This has happened now on every FF game since as well if I remember right; and it's more a way of rewarding American gamers for the long wait than it is of "finishing the game".
The Japanese do then get our version again as "Final Fantasy (n) International", which allows Square to squeeze even a few more yen out of their Japanese customers. It's a strategy from the beginning; it's not about rushing unfinished products.
Don't confuse their lack of personal space and tolerance for each other's constant intrusive presence as "outgoing-ness". The Japanese culture is more socially introverted than American culture...so say the social scientists I've read.
Ugh! All I can say is "don't believe everything you read", I guess.
It's things like this that lead us to false conclusions about each other
I think it's you who is making the false conclusions, based on something you've read in a book rather than from experiencing the culture itself.
First, don't mistake politeness with introversion, as these "social scientists" you've read apparently have. The Japanese are extremely outgoing, and you are far more likely to be approached by somebody on the street there than you would be in a place like New York (and I am speaking from experience in both places). They want to be noticed in the way they dress, they are extremely social (I'd love to see some real statistics, but I'd have to bet the ratio of bars to the local population has to be higher in Tokyo than probably anywhere else), and they are ridiculously friendly to most people.
Of course, we're both generalizing, and there are exceptions to everything.
Yes, there are rules of etiquette that must be followed in Japanese society, even among informal friends or acquaintances (this business of "omiage", or giving gifts to absolutely everybody you know whenever you come back from a trip, is one that personally drives me nuts). That does not imply introversion, simply structure.
Quit getting all your info from books and then arguing with those who have real-world experience - go out and experience some things for yourself. Japan is a wonderful place and I think you, like most westerners their first time there, would be pretty surprised by what you see the first time you go.
There are just a huge number of misconceptions about the Japanese flying around here. Some of it's understandable, but I'm gonna try to counter what I can.
The Japanese, especially the young ones, have huge disposable incomes, as a result of a culture where it's normal to share a tiny apartment in the city with other families. Because of this, they tend not to invest of their incomes in more permanent things, like houses.
Home ownership in Japan is only about 6% lower than it is in the United States. It's a fallacy that they all live in tiny little apartments - or that they all rent those apartments. Many city apartments are owned, not rented, and there are plenty of less urbanized areas just as there are here, with single-family homes. According to UN statistics, the ratio of urban to rural living is virtually the same in the US and Japan.
(I actually think people forget just how urban the United States is in discussions like this as much as they fail to realize how rural or suburban much of Japan is.)
In fact, the overall savings rate in Japan is much higher than it is in the United States (though the rate has been falling over time in both countries). So this idea that they just spend all of their disposable income on gadgets is wrong. They actually spend less money on gadgets than we do.
I too am curious what the Next Big Thing(tm) in digital audio formats will be, but how much smaller/better quality is any new/evolved format going to be -- and with storage getting so much larger and cheaper, will it even matter?
This is why I say the digital format war was settled 5 years ago. There's a reason why we still call all these devices "mp3 players" after all.
There's no great need for better compression at lower bit rates as hard drives get bigger and cheaper. I mean the fact is there are two choices (well, three): you compress music into a lossy format, or you compress it into a lossless format (the third choice being you don't compress it at all). The lossy formats we have today are already so good even at low bit rates that they're nearly indistinguishable from the originals, and obviously if you want even better quality than that you just scale up the bit rate and quality settings a bit. With today's hard drives, storage isn't much of an issue with any compressed format at any bit rate - even very large music collections won't use more than a couple GB extra by using higher quality settings throughout the collection.
So assuming that you can get nearly indistinguishable quality from the original with properly encoded MP3, AAC, WMA or Ogg files, and already at fairly small file sizes on hard drives that are only getting bigger and cheaper, I don't much see the point in trying to reduce file size even further. I mean let's not forget that MP3 became popular because people were still using 500MB hard drives at the time... these days, I could spend $100 on a hard drive that could hold my entire music collection with no compression at all.
So it seems to me that the talk about which compressed format sounds best at low bit rates, which has been Apple's and MS's big marketing message for the past few years, is basically moot. It doesn't matter, because every format sounds good at low bit rates (well, except for ATRAC3), every format sounds great at high bit rates, and hard drives just keep getting cheaper.
My guess is this is one reason why MS is trying to change their focus a bit to video. They're not competing with the iPod, they're trying to create a new category of players where the format war has not already been decided in somebody else's favor. They've decided there's just no money for them to make from digital music, but obviously plenty of upside for them in digital video.
I guess what I'm saying is that there probably is not going to be any "Next Big Thing" in digital music, at least not until the day when we have everything, available everywhere, all the time, via a pervasive network that connects every person to every other person and every piece of content ever created, instantly, from anywhere on Earth. But even that is simple evolution of the net; it's not a stretch of the imagination, and it's not a new concept as storing small digital music files on a hard drive would have been to those listening to LP's 50 years ago. I do think traditional music radio's days are numbered, though; subscription services and satellite radio will be its death knell - eventually.
As for DRM, it's difficult to predict what effect it will have but I honestly think it's probably a little overblown... there's never been a DRM scheme that wasn't circumvented pretty much the instant it appeared, so those who want to will always be able to get around it (and obviously, mp3 doesn't even support it... which is one reason for mp3's continued dominance). That doesn't mean DRM'd files won't continue to sell at stores like iTunes, but I think the lack of a standard is just not really a big issue for consumers. It's a bigger issue for music publishers, though; it just strikes me as stupid that the RIAA would allow Apple to impose a DRM scheme that means nobody with a player other than an iPod could play their files (without breaking the DRM)... and vice versa on other sites. You're just cutting a lot of people out of your potential consumer base with that strategy.
That's a damn expensive IBM PC unit. The clones are a lot cheaper, people.
Uh, what? They didn't buy a PC, they bought a whole PC Business. Unless you mean the clone makers are also cheaper, but that doesn't make much sense either - Gateway's brand name is nothing compared to IBM's.
I don't suppose you've ever used a Thinkpad or you'd know why it's a sought-after business. I'd be surprised if they weren't still the top selling laptops (they may not be, I'd just be surprised if that's the case), and they're still by far the best built mainstream laptops you can get (don't even bring up Apple, people - if you do, you have no idea what you're talking about). They're also among the last major makers not to pre-load their PC's with large quantities of junk. You buy most Thinkpad models and you get a PC and an OS. What you do with it is up to you.
I think this is a sad day, quite honestly. Things change in the PC industry and nothing against Levono or Lunovo or whatever Legend's calling themselves these days, but I don't have much confidence that the quality of the Thinkpad line will be maintained. At best, within five years you'll see cost-cutting to the point where there's little to distinguish them from other laptops. I mean there's a reason IBM sold this unit, after all - they can't charge enough for these things to make a meaningful profit on them given the production costs, and they can't realistically cut costs themselves because the quality is the main reason people buy them. So, they've cut and run, and left Legend to do the dirty work that they couldn't - which is more than likely to basically gut the hardware and sell off all that currently bare desktop real estate until the line is profitable. I just wonder if anybody's going to still buy a Thinkpad under such conditions, because people buy Thinkpads now specifically to stay away from cheap crap.
I guess this is why they've only got a five year window to brand them as IBM Thinkpads - IBM doesn't want their name sullied as part of the deal. Which begs the question, what's really in it for Levono? What do they do in year six? So they end up with a bit more production capacity than they have now; is that worth billions of dollars? They're not getting any major branding out of this deal that I can see, or any IP, or anything else that they can really build off of. It seems very short-sighted on their part, doesn't it?
You forgot about the fact that demand was so high for the mini that Apple could not produce enough - they've sold a shitload of these despite YOUR opinion that it's expensive.
It's not just his opinion, it's the opinion of a lot of people.
And you apparently don't know a lot about marketing if you think that Apple "could not produce enough". There are such things as manufactured shortages.
I've searched high and low for honest to goodness iPod Mini sales numbers, including through Google, Apple's investor relations site, and my E*trade account (where I can get company research that would otherwise be unavailable to the general masses). They just don't seem to break iPod sales down by model; they only release total numbers, and I doubt that's unintentional. I don't think anybody would dispute that the iPod Mini has sold fairly well to early adopters but I've just never been able to find any real data to back up your claim about Apple selling a "shitload" of them - anybody can underproduce an initial shipment and then claim demand is so high that there are shortages.
If someone's got some real and up to date sales numbers of the various iPod models, let's see em and compare. My guess is after the first wave of Apple die-hards buys in (which should have happened by now), the regular iPod will outsell the Mini by about 10 to 1 - it's just a much better value and I think most people know it.
Pricing does matter when you're taking about the mass market. Despite the iPod's overall success, I think Apple's still stuck in this idea of pricing things for their little hardcore niche. I don't think it's going to work in the medium- and long-term with the iPod Mini, and I'm not sure it's going to work at all with a flash-based iPod (I don't think there are millions of Apple faithful out there waiting for a $200 flash-based iPod, and there certainly isn't a mass market for such a thing).
Then again, I was surprised at the original iPod's success at its price point, so I've been wrong before - but that player was blazing a trail where none had gone before. Flash-based mp3 players are a dime a dozen so it's not as if Apple can come in and convince a bunch of people that their player is worth a premium of 100% or more over every other player on the market.
Damn this is no surprise. U.S have always lagged behind. Look at gran turismo all the cars are in Japanese names. So many Japanese version of the games are better than the American counterparts with more secrets etc.
Er... you mean the US lags behind because they drive different cars in Japan or what? The cars in GT have Japanese names generally because they're not available here (the Mazda Demio and Nissan Skyline GTR, for two examples). The game itself is the same as the Japanese release, though.
Many games these days are actually improved when they're brought over here - a big switch from the old days of just a few years ago. For example, every Final Fantasy game since VII has had extra monsters and side-quests in the US release (the US release then later being re-released in Japan as "FF(n) International").
Japanese game development in general isn't what it used to be, though, so the days when you'd have all these deserving little niche titles either left in Japan or brought over here in bastardized form are pretty much over. Today, games are usually produced for a worldwide audience and most deserving games are brought over either intact or with new additions and improvements.
So to me, it seems like this Mr. Driller thing is just an abberation. We'll see if it's some sort of nefarious plot by Nintendo to get Americans to buy more games, but if so they'll be kicking themselves for not region locking the system because it'll turn into an importer's dream. There hasn't been a real major must-import-for system since the Saturn (and to a lesser extent the PS1), but if Nintendo starts pressuring developers to make alterations like this in the name of profits, the DS will become the next importer system pretty quickly.
This is what happens in a country where we spend all our money on ludicrous taxes, mortgages, insurance bills.
I don't even know where to start with this one! Taxes are higher in Japan, having a mortage means you're putting money into a home (which is generally a good thing, and btw, they have mortgages in Japan too), and insurance is more expensive in Japan as well. (If you mean health insurance, they pay for it just like we do, the difference is that it's required to have by law and it only covers about 70% of hospital expenses. Imagine if that were true here! Unemployed or poor people do get cheap rates through the government, though.)
I heard some part of Japan even have fibre-channel connections at home.
Honestly, the weird thing about Japan's internet access is that while they supposedly have this huge broadband penetration, it's tough to find anybody that actually uses it. All the statistics I've seen talk about the number of "lines", not the number of subscribers... I've always wondered if they just call an ADSL-capable phone line a "broadband line" and then count that in to pad the stats. I know probably 30 people over there and not one of them uses broadband - in fact most of them access the net exclusively from their cell phones.
Anyway, this is all by way of saying that there's this perception of Japan in some parts of the west as this mythical place of Star Trek-like electronic toys that we don't get to have or that cost a lot more here (the opposite is usually true). And this DS story sort of just perpetuates that myth. It's just one game, after all. I mean they get pissed off too that they have to wait a year after our Final Fantasy releases to play the final version of the game. The grass is always greener on the other side.
people won't try to speed ahead anymore instead, they'll stick with a pack
It sounds simplistic but this is the way people drive in New York City, by design. We don't have adaptive traffic lights (that I know of), but they wouldn't really do any good here because during the day the traffic flows at a pretty constant rate in all directions, and at night the lights are programmed to the speed limits on the major thoroughfares.
Believe me, a lot of study has been done into traffic management in major cities like New York, and tweaks to the system occur on a constant basis. But the "pack" is actually the desired effect in a city like this, where one pack of cars travels at the speed limit for a set interval before hitting a red light. Another pack follows them, and the pattern repeats itself on both crosswise and parallel streets. It's really the only way to both keep traffic moving and maintain speed limits. It also cuts down on red light running because you're not going to gain anything by running a red - you'll just end up at the back of the pack at the red light ahead of you. It similarly cuts down on unnecessary lane changes (which only slows traffic flow) because jockeying for position is not important.
Of course, there are still quite a few bad drivers here, but the fact is traffic does flow and adaptive traffic lights wouldn't accomplish anything.
The bad side of this cinematic tech boom is the fact that more and more people are producing crappy content.
I agree. There was this idea a while back that access to all these great tools and cheap technology would unlock this vast untapped creativity among the general population. Unfortunately, all it's really done is decrease the signal to noise ratio.
When I went to film school (NYU graduate), you had to really have a passion for it. It was a lot of money spent on film stock (I spent around $4,000 on my final film, and that was cheap back then!), a lot of long hours spent in front of a Steenbeck cutting film, a lot of studying of the physical properties of light and what they do to the crystals on various film stocks to get the exact look you want. Nowadays it seems like all anybody's gotta do is take the school's digital camcorder and buy a couple tapes and half the work and pretty much all of the expense is taken care of.
It sounds great but it means that all of these people who probably have no real business making movies suddenly think of themselves as filmmakers. The amount of work and money involved is such that pretty much anybody can do it these days (at least on a small scale) and unfortunately, film is one of those professions that not everybody is really cut out for. (By the same token, owning a PC and a copy of MS Word does not make you a novelist.)
Now, you hope that film schools retain some level of standards in the students that they select. But it's not always easy for film schools to tell who has talent and who doesn't before signing them up, and it's getting harder now that these new digital tools allow pretty much anybody to produce reels (the equivalent of a portfolio, for anyone who hasn't gone to film school) that are at least semi-competent. But that student now may not ever progress past semi-competency, whereas in the old days you had to pretty much know what you were doing and show some promise to even get that far at the start. It's hard to know whether it's the tools or the person who's semi-competent anymore.
I personally think that the majority of teaching in film school should remain primarily on film, as that's still what the film industry is based on, and you can't run before you walk. You need to know the fundamentals. I understand that it's probably financially better for schools to purchase these cheap cameras and PC's as well (vs. the 16mm systems most film schools have historically based their curriculums on), but I don't think it's necessarily in either their or the students' best interests educationally (unless they're supplementing the film equipment and just adding new digital courses to the core curriculum).
It'll be a sad day when and if film finally disappears from film schools. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but I just hope that the schools manage to find some way to maintain their admissions and educational standards without allowing students to lean too heavily on technology. Even when I was in school working with film, there were always students who would try to take the cheap way out on their films, by using cheesy visual or other effects in place of real drama (or comedy, or whatever), or by relying on slick productions without any real story underneath. Cheap technology just makes it easier to slide by without needing any real talent.
I thought no-overtime non-comp work was illegal for entertainment companies.
If they're working over their salaried time then they are required by law to recieve overtime or comp.
That's what the employees believe, but labor laws are not so simple. EA has classified these employees as exempt from overtime status, which they're legally allowed to do under certain circumstances (for example, if an employee works on a contract or salary basis in a computer-related field, and is often asked to "use his or her own discretion and judgement" in the course of his/her work). Basically, exempt status in most states is intended to apply to management or learned professionals, not lower-level employees, but the wording is usually nebulous enough that most employers think they can apply it to most employees. Unfortunately for the company, though, the penalties for misapplying exempt status can be pretty severe. (The employees can be awarded both back pay and penalties, meaning a company like EA could potentially be out hundreds of millions of dollars.)
In the EA case, the employees in question have compared their jobs with identical jobs in other entertainment industries and found that in those other industries and within the same state (Callifornia) those same positions are not treated as exempt. These are in effect the "blue-collar" jobs at EA; the assembly-line type stuff. EA treats them as exempt under the computer-related occupation exemption, but according to that exemption you need to be "primarily engaged in intellectual or creative work that requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment." (Emphasis added.) So this is actually a tough exemption to apply. You could really argue that it cannot be applied to almost anybody at a company like EA, because it's pretty likely that the look and feel of a game (and its related marketing) comes from just one or two product managers per product (who themselves brainstorm ideas with other departmental managers), with the rest of the product team simply following instructions. Even if you use your own discretion at your job some of the time, though (for example, a manager tells you to draw a character a certain way but leaves the particulars up to you), you would still not be exempt, because you are not primarily engaged in using your own discretion. You are still working with instructions provided by someone else.
I think this memo probably hurts EA's legal case. A position is either exempt or it isn't; there's no "well, we didn't think it was exempt, but now we do"... the fact is it's not up to them, it's up to the law, and if they're now deciding that the law says these positions are not exempt, then they owe all of those employees back pay and they owe the state penalties. I would imagine this memo will come up in court if no settlement is reached prior to that time.
Why is EA in the news? For the same reason Vioxx is in the news. Some lawyers are trying to get the word out in order to find members of a class action. They're also trying to gin-up hatred for the company and sympathy for the "victims" in order to cash in on a big judgement against the company.
Jesus, talk about cynicism. I'm guessing you don't work in the tech industry or you'd know exactly why the EA story is a big story, and hint, it's not what you seem to believe.
The EA story is a big story because the problems at EA are endemic to the video game industry, and are at least somewhat prevalent in the IT industry as well. Employees who by law should not be treated as exempt are being treated as exempt. Being that this is a tech news site, and being that EA is such a large company, what happens at EA in this case could have a big impact on the tech industry in general. This is a chance to improve the quality of life for tech workers across the country.
That's the idealist response. The most cynical I'd ever get about this, though, would be to say that this is a large company that its employees believe are breaking the law, and it's always news when large companies break the law on a large-scale basis. Either way, it's news, and I hope this site continues to follow it.
I do agree though. Some of the best lean and mean companies I've ever seen have crappy furniture in the conference room.
Speaking as a (voluntarily) former employee of one of Acclaim's regional competitors (and I'll leave you to figure out who that might be), I admit to being a bit shocked by their extravagance in the face of such financial difficulties. The company I worked for had no such pretensions and yet strangely enough is actually quite profitable.
We did have Aeron chairs, we had 21" LCD displays at every desk (two of them if we asked, and CRT's if we preferred), it's not like my company was a bunch of misers. But antique grandfather clocks in the board room? Give me a break! What the hell does that have to do with business, or video games?
I understand the concept of impressing potential investors or partners. But did they honestly believe this sort of thing impresses anybody anymore? "Look at how much money we can throw around at completely useless objects!" Nobody runs a business like that anymore.
It's one thing to have a nice office space that workers can feel comfortable in, with the tools they need to be productive. It's another to completely splurge on largess that you cannot afford and that serves no purpose whatsoever. No wonder this company went under.
It's my property - it is my god-given right to do whatever I damn well please with it.
Well, in this context, I and a lot of other people around here would have a problem with this statement. (In other contexts, though, I might agree with you.) The whole idea of intellectual property in general is a completely new idea in the context of the totality of human history - the idea that you can "own" information. It's certainly not a "god-given" right - there's nothing in the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text that says ideas are your property. This is a concept that's really only been around for a few hundred of the 10,000 or so years human beings have walked the earth.
Now, I would postulate that such a new idea is hardly yet a perfect idea, and it's one that needs constant review given the rapid evolution of technology. I would even postulate that it's become an outdated idea, if it was ever anything else.
From your statements it sounds like you think that something that can easily be reproduced (or does not have a tangeable aspect to it like a program) should get less protection then say a television set.
I think that's probably exactly what he's saying, and I think there are a lot of people (more and more every day) who would agree with him.
Prior to the invention of the printing press, it was perfectly legal in most places to make copies of various works and distribute them however you pleased. The problem was it was impractical, so few people actually did it. In terms of music, most musicians made their money by actually wandering around and playing in front of people - they still do this today, only now they've also come to rely on this idea of "intellectual property" to protect their recorded works as a new revenue stream. But this is not historically how musicians have made a living.
The protections that grew out of the printing press (which were designed to protect book and newspaper distribution, not music, software, or other technologies) have created new revenue streams for various publishing industries - revenue streams that they have not historically enjoyed. But this doesn't make them "god-given rights" - there's no god-given right to make money for anything. A revenue stream is just a revenue stream - it can be given and it can be taken away.
In terms of the moral issue, I don't see it. Let's assume for a moment that we go back to the way things used to be and there is no such thing as intellectual property. Somebody writes a song and it becomes legally available for download all over the internet. The record labels would all be run out of business, no doubt about it. Too bad. It's not my moral responsibility to keep them in business. As far as the artists who created the song, without any record label to appease, they're now free to keep a much larger share of any touring profits - basically splitting the profits two ways between themselves and the promoter, rather than three ways between themselves, the promoter and the record label. They can get themselves out from underneath these onerous record industry contracts, and maybe they can even find new revenue streams for themselves (such as directly contracting and selling their own merchandise - t-shirts, hats, action figures, or whatever). The biggest bands can become their own little cottage industries, and most artists in general would probably end up richer rather than poorer.
Something similar would happen to the book publishing industry. True, anybody could download a book from anywhere and read it on their PC free of charge. But a lot of books can be legally downloaded right now (many famous books are in the public domain), and people still buy things like Bibles, on paper. That's the way people prefer to read books. An author, free from the confines of a publishing contract that awards most of the profits to the publisher, could contract directly (through his agent) with a printer to print his book, and with a mark
How about not having the damnned annoying spike logo in the corner, the stretch and squish games they do with the image, the commercials and parts of the show cut out because the 45 minutes of program time (15 mins for commercials) that was done back in the 80's and 90's is now too long for the now 17-20 commercial times we now have.
I don't remember if Spike does that but Sci-Fi channel cut out many parts of the original Star Trek to make room for commercials.
Spike clearly advertises that their Trek is "uncut".
Anyway, though, your point allows me to perfectly illustrate my point, which is that it seems to me there's a perfectly acceptable solution to TV "piracy" staring TV execs right in the face and they simply fail to acknowledge it.
Make all TV shows available for download, for free.
TV execs will look at this and say "bah! It's our IP! You don't just give IP away!" Well, yes you do. I don't pay anything for over-the-air broadcasts (even in high def!), and while I do pay a cable bill, that bill's going to the cable company for maintenance of the infrastructure - it's not going to the broadcast TV networks (or even to most of the cable networks, who are ad supported). Most TV stations give their content away gratis every day of the week.
I don't see why a TV station couldn't put whatever bugs they want in the corner and include commercials with their downloads (people will find a way to skip them however hard they make it to fast forward, but then what else is new? People have been doing that for years with VCR's, nevermind TiVo). The perceived value to advertisers shouldn't be any different, because I mean look. Either downloading is a small issue and therefore it shouldn't matter either to advertisers or the networks, or it's rampant and growing, in which case those advertisers would at least want the chance to reach all those eyes, rather than just sitting on the sidelines while ad-stripped copies of shows float around on bittorrent sites.
Now, there would be issues to work out with affiliates, syndicators, etc. who sell their own advertising, often locally. But so what? Issues can be worked out for the good of the industry; it's actually a rather minor change in how TV business is done in the grand scheme of things. You work out some sort of revenue-sharing deal and voila: done. And of course, TV still needs to be broadcast live before it can be downloaded, so the affiliates still get their local advertising in anyway.
One quick example - I remember when the Jon Stewart Crossfire interview aired, and afterwards there was a big story about how more people had shared and downloaded a digitized version of it than had actually watched the show in the first place. This is an extreme case right now (though it will happen more and more over time), and CNN was completely pissed about it, but I saw more than one journalist suggest that instead of whining about it, CNN could have driven people to their web site and could have promoted the show a lot better by simply making it available for free download themselves. I don't see how you can really argue with that - the downloads happened anyway, wouldn't it be better for the network to get some traffic and marketing out of it themselves rather than just ceding that market to the file sharers?
If TV shows were available for free download from network web sites, very few people are going to take the illegal route in stripping out the non-program material and then sharing them on file sharing sites. Sure, some people will, but those are the same people who'd rip or download the DVD's and share them too; they're pretty hardcore pirates, and they're not going to pay for your stuff regardless. It seems to me the idea is to keep the 99% of viewers who aren't pirates from becoming pirates, not to convert the 1% who are pirates into paying customers (a futile goal).
Of course, DVD's would still be made available at some future date, sans commercials and
Now There's Another Place To Get Your Jessica Simpson Fix, Legally
I sure hope they have better artist than this or you can count me out.
They list some other artists there and none of them are any better. Yet they later say they want PI to be have the most "diverse" content. Yeah, right - everything from Britney Spears to Jessica Simpson!
Yet another indication of how clueless the music industry is these days.
I also checked out the PI web site and there's almost no information there about the service. How does it work? Is this that stupid thing I read about a while ago where you're actually just sharing links to music rather than the music itself? In other words, it's just like publishing your playlist somewhere and then linking to some music publisher's store? If so, I don't even really consider it P2P. And I'm sure the quality's going to suck (128k files, no doubt) and there's got to be some pretty onerous DRM tacked on too.
No thanks. I'll stick to buying and ripping my own CD's. You'd think the industry would love guys like me who actually go out and pay for their music (when I actually find a new artist I like, that is, which isn't often these days), but given the DRM they're trying to force onto CD's, they obviously don't. It remains the only viable option as far as I'm concerned, though, if you want legal music for the best price with the greatest selection, and you want the highest-quality compressed files along with it.
Jeez, and I thought my job had a tradition of mediocrity.......
Uh, you don't build a city of 8 million people without planning. There's a reason all those people live here, and it's not because they have to. They haven't converted Manhattan to a gigantic prison island yet!
I recommend renting the PBS series "New York" for a bit of history of the planning of this city (it's a bit Manhattan-centric, and barely touches at all on the planning of the more populous outer boroughs, but it'll still give you an idea), or just buy the book based on the show, which has pretty much the same content.
As for SimCity, I'm sure it's had a net positive effect on urban planning, simply because it's gotten at least some of the people that play the game interested in it. Games are like anything else; some people get interested in things from reading books, or seeing movies, or whatever... some people get interested in things playing games, and that can turn into a life goal. I think it's pretty silly to think that anyone's going to put "Reached a population of 1 million in SimCity" on their resume when applying for a government job, but these people may end up majoring in urban planning based on the interest they gained playing the game, and those people could very well go on to be excellent urban planners. I'm sure the game has increased the total number of urban planners out there, and I seriously doubt it's done anything to the average quality of the profession - these people are all getting the same training as they used to, there's just more of them for employers to choose from.
I don't know about you but I do have a license to drive my car. A license that can be revoked if I don't follow the terms of aggrement. Just like a HL2 CD just because the license has been revoked they don't come knocking on your door to take away your CD as well.
Your comparison is not valid because a) your driver's license is with the state, not with the car manufacturer, and b) your license can only be revoked if you break the law, not if you simply break the terms of the license (in this case, the terms of the license is the law, but you wouldn't need a license if those laws didn't exist).
If the state wants to license me to play video games on the condition that they revoke my license if I break the law, then I actually probably wouldn't have much of a problem with it, provided I didn't have to pay anything to obtain that license. But Valve is engaged in vigilante-ism right now, and just as in other forms of law enforcement, their version of vigilante-ism is probably violating various laws themselves (the biggest issue I see is that they're nuking legally purchased, unrelated products of those who are simply using a NoCD crack - there's no way they can legally do this that I can see, whatever their EULA says).
Issues of law are not left up to the private sector, as your own example inadvertantly demonstrates. If somebody commits a crime against you, for example, it is illegal for you to personally go and take your own revenge on that person. What you must do under the law is contact the police and let them deal with it. That is how civilized society works. And even if that isn't common sense, it's the law of the land in this country.
The software industry seems to think this is the Wild West, but it isn't. The same rules apply to them. Only the state and federal governments have the power to enforce laws regarding copyright and commerce, and a company cannot take those rights away from the government through a EULA, especially when that EULA is between you and the publisher, not between the state and the publisher (in other words, no contract can invalidate the rights of a third party that's not even involved in that contract).
I said it in another reply - what Valve is doing is similar to what the RIAA wanted to be able to do if they found a single illegal MP3 on your hard drive. They want to be able to search your hard drive and nuke the contents if they so choose. The RIAA was attempting to get a bill passed that allowed them to do this, but the point is they knew that they couldn't do it without being authorized by congress. Valve apparently thinks they can get away with it without such authorization, but I hope one of these customers takes them to task over it, and to court.
Note that I don't even own HL2, not a legal and certainly not an illegal copy of it. So hopefully I am looking at this through unbiased eyes. I do hope to buy it at some point but I will not until issues like these are worked out - to me, the whole Steam authentication thing sounds pretty onerous, and if Valve is just going to nuke my games for using a simple NoCD patch, then I'm not really sure I need the aggravation.
As offered here, IF the box mentions any sort of "By using this software..." kind of message on the outside of the box then the buyer is at fault.
Not necessarily. Federal law says any information that's "material" to a consumer's buying decision must be "clear and conspicuous".
Here is an article that talks about this - the relevant part is about 2/3 the way down.
'"The FTC would not comment on our readers' fine print. However, "Consumers shouldn't have to use a magnifying glass to read important terms and conditions of any offer, " says Timothy J. Muris, FTC chairman. "Burying important terms in mouseprint is illegal, unethical, and ultimately bad business." He pledged to take action against offenders.'
I would say that most consumers, buying a box containing pretty much anything, would think when they pony up their money that they are buying not just the box but also the contents of the box. It would seem to me, then, that the license terms, or at least the fact that there is a license, is "material" information that's necessary for consumers to make an informed purchase decision. Therefore, if that information is not clearly and conspicuously displayed on the box, the consumer would have legal recourse if they decided they did not agree to the license upon installing the game and could not get their money back immediately.
From what I understand from other posts, this information is not clear and conspicuous on the box, and therefore Valve is in violation of federal law.
Anyone who's downloaded the game via Steam remember if the EULA is displayed before or after providing your CC#? Or if, at least, there's some sort of checkbox saying you agree to the linked terms and conditions before clicking the submit button? If not, seems to me that would be a violation of law as well.
I don't know how or if this would affect these 20,000 people who had their accounts shut off (it probably wouldn't), but it would affect somebody who bought the game and then decided they didn't like the license afterwards. Valve needs to put this info on the box. They also need to say the product requires activation on the box. I know other software publishers don't do this, but as this is a fairly new concept I just don't think any companies have been sued for it yet. But they will be eventually, as it's definitely material information.
(I know EULA's themselves have been challenged and have been upheld in courts - that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about providing customers with information prior to purchase informing them of both the existence of a EULA and the requirement of product activation. They can still be required to agree to the EULA upon installing the product.)
There may be other laws Valve is violating with the 20,000 accounts they've disabled, though. They can't, for example, take away products you've legally purchased because you stole a different product. That would be equivalent to the RIAA wiping your hard drive remotely because they found one illegal MP3 on it. Or the police confiscating your legally purchased Corvette and Mustang because the 350Z on your lot was listed in their database as stolen.
I don't know exactly what their EULA says, if there's some clause in there that says violation of the license for one product is equivalent to violation of the license for all products you own. I honestly doubt there is, but even if there is I'm not sure it'd hold up in court. No EULA can overturn federal, state, or local law. All a EULA can do is say "this is the law and this is how we're applying it to this product". They can't make up their own laws in a EULA. So if consumer laws protect customers from having products confiscated that have nothing to do with a crime that's been committed, as many states do, then the EULA is not going to be able to override that.
I used to go straight to gamespot, cause they have a history of being tough. Now, I can legitimately compare all scores at the same time with gamerankings.com.
What you're doing is what I use GR for too - seeing a list of all scores in one convenient place - but it gives me a chance to bring up a practice that a lot of people use GR for that I think is really bad, and that's simply looking at the average score for a game and taking that as a definitive rating. GR themselves encourage this by heavily featuring that number everywhere on their site (as the "Average Ratio" - the main qualitative ranking that they use).
A big problem with doing this is that GR's weighting for its scoring is completely arbitrary, which skews the averages. They used to have the opposite problem, which is that they'd count all reviews equally in the average, regardless of the size, reach, influence, or respectability of a site. Another issue is that many games appeal to specific sensibilities and genres and so may generate widely divergent views based on who's reviewing them, so simply taking an average of scores is just not informative.
They seem to pick and choose now which sites get included in the average (there's a disclaimer saying only "sites in bold" are used to calculate the average), but I can't see any real pattern to the sites they select, and in any case, they're still including about 90% of all the sites out there, and every site they do include gets an "equal vote". Which means a huge site like Gamespot, with a history of reliable reviews and editors with many years of experience in the business, gets only as much weighting as a site like My Gamer or eToyChest (which I've honestly never even heard of).
I just don't think this is really giving people any more accurate of an idea of how good a game is than just picking one single site you like and sticking with it. Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Rez received scores ranging from the 50% to 100% - that's a huge spread, which tells you that people either loved this game or they just didn't get it. Yet the final average is an 82%. What does that average tell you? It tells you nothing, because depending on what you're looking for in a game, your tastes vs. the reviewers' tastes, and your personality vs. the game designers' personalities, you might love or you might hate this game. It's unlikely (from reactions I've seen, and from my own experience) that you're going to think this is just a "good" but unremarkable game, as the average score would suggest. Just because an average "smooths out" the highs and lows you might see in various reviews doesn't mean that average ends up being an accurate measure of how good the game really is. And there are a lot of questionable sites included in that average to begin with, so it's doubly faulty.
The same is true to one extent or another with pretty much every game, except maybe those that are almost universally praised and those that are almost universally panned. In those cases, maybe you can trust the averages a little more. But most games don't fit that description, where every review site pretty much falls in line with the general consensus. Most games have a fairly wide range of opinions for and against them and the average score isn't going to tell you anything.
Anyway, so I use GR to give me quick links to all the available reviews for games I'm interested in, but I basically ignore the average ratio. I can tell at a quick glance of the review list if most sites are in agreement or not; if they are, then I don't even need to see the average, and if they're not, then the average is pretty pointless anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
There really isn't competition.
CBS and Fox each have exclusive contracts to a different conference, ESPN/ABC have exclusive rights to Sunday night and Monday night respectively.
I don't think you're quite getting it.
Nobody but EA can produce an NFL game for the next five years. You're saying "it's the same in TV! It doesn't matter that Fox, ABC, CBS, and ESPN can all broadcast games, because they each have their own part of the league!" This may be true, but how does it compare to EA's total monopoly on the league? It's not like EA has the NFC and ESPN has the AFC, or like you get to play EA's game on Tuesday nights and ESPN's game on Thursday nights. No, because EA has everything. This is not comparable to TV broadcast rights.
Also the CBS and Fox presentations aren't in direct competition, one gets the morning timeslot, the other gets an afternoon timeslot.
This is actually completely irrelevant (for the same reason as above), but I still want to correct it because it's not true. In your area (New York, for example), there may be a deal whereby the AFC team and the NFC team play at different times of day to allow everybody in the area to see each team. (This has nothing to do with TV broadcast rights, btw.)
But if you live in a city that does not have a home team, or even that has only one team on a date when the blackout rule does not apply, then you could be watching both CBS and Fox at the same time, from 1 PM to 7 PM. There's no such thing as a morning/afternoon slot in terms of TV broadcast rights. Both networks broadcast simultaneously all day long; you just don't see every game in every market (but you do see two simultaneous games in a lot of markets - the two networks sure as hell do compete directly).
Even in New York, towards the end of the season we can watch the other network while both home teams are playing.
And this is not even counting "NFL Sunday Ticket", which is a whole other matter that gives you like 16 different channels of NFL action if you pay for it.
Again, though, say it with me:
TV = three networks on four channels (and many more than that if you pay for it)
Games = one company with exclusive rights, and no choice whatsoever.
Not comparable.
Yeah, the iPod does have the best interface. And why is this? There are probably hundreds of people here that could write firmware for an mp3 player that's as good or better than the iPod interface.
And yet they haven't. Why is this?
Lots of people think they can design a good interface, but then when it comes down to it, they don't demonstrate that to be the case. Do you think Sony set out with the idea of "hey, let's design an iPod competitor, only let's make the interface worse? Yeah, that's the way to sell units." Obviously not; they thought they could do better, just like everybody else. But they didn't.
I totally agree with the parent post. People think it's really easy to do what Apple did. Ok, so why the hell hasn't anybody done better? I mean if it's so freakin' simple, why haven't all these professionals out there in the tech industry with years of experience designing interfaces made a better product with a better interface? Because it's not that easy.
I work as a web producer; part of my job is designing interfaces (no, we don't just leave it all up to the designers). So I know the issues that come up; there are all sorts of little things that you don't think of if you're not actually designing things. Things like going back to the top of the list when you go back to browsing after playing a song. Or how long it takes to scroll through, whether it's important to be able to read the artist names as you scroll or not.
You look at these things and you say "well, all they need to do is try to actually use one to figure it out", but that doesn't really work, because the way the design process goes is you have to first try to anticipate how people are going to use something, then you design the interface, then you build it out and test it. But once you get to the testing phase, you're so used to your design and so convinced that it's the right one that it's difficult to objectively tell whether or not it's intuitive or whether it works the way people expect. You can do focus groups or other test marketing afterwards but we all know how reliable that is, and what problems it can introduce into the process. A lot of people (such as myself) think that type of product testing can actually make things worse.
But I disagree that the iPod is "feature rich" considering my iRiver has an FM Radio (which I use all the time to listen to NPR), high quality recording, optical in/out, OGG Vorbis support, etc.
I do agree that the iPod is lacking in the features department, if features are what you're looking for. Myself, I wouldn't use "feature-rich" as a selling point for any mp3 player. Here's my list of desired features:
1. It plays mp3's.
End of list.
Now, I would argue that the fact that the iPod does basically one thing and does it really well is why it's popular, but maybe that's another debate. Because I think there probably is a market for devices like the iRiver, but as the marketplace has shown, it's not really that big of a market. I mean people act as if the only reason the iPod's popular is because of marketing; well, no, I know all about the iRiver, and which player do I want? The iPod. For a bunch of reasons that manufacturers like iRiver and Sony apparently don't understand. And until they do understand them, Apple's not going to lose its 92% market share for hard drive-based players - they'll probably only increase it.
The iTunes software will automatically index it for you. Ripping "100 or so" CDs isn't that big of a deal. Do 10 here, 10 there. In a few days they are all ripped.
Seriously, I'm not even using iTunes but I've literally just ripped about 20 CD's in the time it took me to get through the article and then to this point in the thread. Whether you use iTunes (which I don't recommend for mp3 ripping) or some other app, it's hardly a difficult or even particularly time-consuming task.
Do yourself a favor and download the latest LAME codec, then get EAC as a front end. (This is assuming you're using Windows, although LAME works with other OS's too.) LAME is by far the best mp3 encoder at the moment, and EAC is a powerful front-end that's very easy to use once you set it up once - literally one-click, just like iTunes.
I ripped almost my entire collection of 300+ CD's in one afternoon; I'm just going through now and ripping the stragglers that I didn't find mp3-worthy the first time around. It's really not a big deal to do and I'm sure everybody's got enough music lying around to fill up a HDD-based mp3 player without re-purchasing anything.
It picks up one year after the game and involves a sickness that took over the worl upon Sephiroths death
Where'd you get this info? I know there's a lot of speculation going on around the net, but that's all it is. Nobody knows anything as far as I know.
Half of your statement is factually incorrect, anyway - it says right in the trailer (maybe not this one, maybe trailer 1 or 2) that it takes place two years after FF7.
The only other things you can really gather from the trailers are that a) the children of the world have lost hope after the devastation wreaked in FF7 (it specifically says this in one of the trailers), b) Cloud is drawn back into battle again, apparently against his will, and c) some dude who looks like Sephiroth's son is playing Cloud's adversary.
You can make whatever guesses you want from this info, but that's all they are - guesses. I'll throw my speculation out there, which is that one of Sephiroth's failed clones survived (the dude in the wheelchair) and is using the children of the world to incite a revolution and retake the planet in the name of Jenova. Cloud returns to stop it. I mean it sounds simple, but it's going to have to be simple to fit into a 70 minute movie. Lots of people have come up with all sorts of complicated scenarios based on the trailers but this is not an 80 hour game we're talking about, it's a 70 minute movie. It's going to be a fairly straightforward story, and based on the after-credits ending of FF7, we know how it all turns out already.
...battery life and practical viewable area on a phone.
Well, the obvious question to me is what is new about this?
Is it just because we're talking United States here? If you read through this thread, people are acting as if watching TV on a phone is some kind of new idea. (Your post being one example.) I mean the size of the screen and the battery life are not open questions, because TV-enabled phones have been on the market for over a year (if not more) around the world.
Am I missing something?
Hmm.... that's an interesting argument you have there. I've actually never heard someone make that statement before, that a hash is a "derived work" of the original software.
He probably works for SCO!
Not to detract from your general point, but Final Fantasy 7 came out in Japan so much earlier because it was rushed to the market, and they didn't have the time to get everything finished. They took seven months for North American release in order to actually finish up the game, so North American gamers ended up with a superior product.
Well this is certainly news to me, and probably to all of the Japanese gamers who played FF7 as well.
The only difference I recall from the Japanese and US releases was the two extra optional bosses added towards the end of the game. This has happened now on every FF game since as well if I remember right; and it's more a way of rewarding American gamers for the long wait than it is of "finishing the game".
The Japanese do then get our version again as "Final Fantasy (n) International", which allows Square to squeeze even a few more yen out of their Japanese customers. It's a strategy from the beginning; it's not about rushing unfinished products.
Don't confuse their lack of personal space and tolerance for each other's constant intrusive presence as "outgoing-ness". The Japanese culture is more socially introverted than American culture...so say the social scientists I've read.
Ugh! All I can say is "don't believe everything you read", I guess.
It's things like this that lead us to false conclusions about each other
I think it's you who is making the false conclusions, based on something you've read in a book rather than from experiencing the culture itself.
First, don't mistake politeness with introversion, as these "social scientists" you've read apparently have. The Japanese are extremely outgoing, and you are far more likely to be approached by somebody on the street there than you would be in a place like New York (and I am speaking from experience in both places). They want to be noticed in the way they dress, they are extremely social (I'd love to see some real statistics, but I'd have to bet the ratio of bars to the local population has to be higher in Tokyo than probably anywhere else), and they are ridiculously friendly to most people.
Of course, we're both generalizing, and there are exceptions to everything.
Yes, there are rules of etiquette that must be followed in Japanese society, even among informal friends or acquaintances (this business of "omiage", or giving gifts to absolutely everybody you know whenever you come back from a trip, is one that personally drives me nuts). That does not imply introversion, simply structure.
Quit getting all your info from books and then arguing with those who have real-world experience - go out and experience some things for yourself. Japan is a wonderful place and I think you, like most westerners their first time there, would be pretty surprised by what you see the first time you go.
There are just a huge number of misconceptions about the Japanese flying around here. Some of it's understandable, but I'm gonna try to counter what I can.
The Japanese, especially the young ones, have huge disposable incomes, as a result of a culture where it's normal to share a tiny apartment in the city with other families. Because of this, they tend not to invest of their incomes in more permanent things, like houses.
Home ownership in Japan is only about 6% lower than it is in the United States. It's a fallacy that they all live in tiny little apartments - or that they all rent those apartments. Many city apartments are owned, not rented, and there are plenty of less urbanized areas just as there are here, with single-family homes. According to UN statistics, the ratio of urban to rural living is virtually the same in the US and Japan.
(I actually think people forget just how urban the United States is in discussions like this as much as they fail to realize how rural or suburban much of Japan is.)
In fact, the overall savings rate in Japan is much higher than it is in the United States (though the rate has been falling over time in both countries). So this idea that they just spend all of their disposable income on gadgets is wrong. They actually spend less money on gadgets than we do.
I too am curious what the Next Big Thing(tm) in digital audio formats will be, but how much smaller/better quality is any new/evolved format going to be -- and with storage getting so much larger and cheaper, will it even matter?
This is why I say the digital format war was settled 5 years ago. There's a reason why we still call all these devices "mp3 players" after all.
There's no great need for better compression at lower bit rates as hard drives get bigger and cheaper. I mean the fact is there are two choices (well, three): you compress music into a lossy format, or you compress it into a lossless format (the third choice being you don't compress it at all). The lossy formats we have today are already so good even at low bit rates that they're nearly indistinguishable from the originals, and obviously if you want even better quality than that you just scale up the bit rate and quality settings a bit. With today's hard drives, storage isn't much of an issue with any compressed format at any bit rate - even very large music collections won't use more than a couple GB extra by using higher quality settings throughout the collection.
So assuming that you can get nearly indistinguishable quality from the original with properly encoded MP3, AAC, WMA or Ogg files, and already at fairly small file sizes on hard drives that are only getting bigger and cheaper, I don't much see the point in trying to reduce file size even further. I mean let's not forget that MP3 became popular because people were still using 500MB hard drives at the time... these days, I could spend $100 on a hard drive that could hold my entire music collection with no compression at all.
So it seems to me that the talk about which compressed format sounds best at low bit rates, which has been Apple's and MS's big marketing message for the past few years, is basically moot. It doesn't matter, because every format sounds good at low bit rates (well, except for ATRAC3), every format sounds great at high bit rates, and hard drives just keep getting cheaper.
My guess is this is one reason why MS is trying to change their focus a bit to video. They're not competing with the iPod, they're trying to create a new category of players where the format war has not already been decided in somebody else's favor. They've decided there's just no money for them to make from digital music, but obviously plenty of upside for them in digital video.
I guess what I'm saying is that there probably is not going to be any "Next Big Thing" in digital music, at least not until the day when we have everything, available everywhere, all the time, via a pervasive network that connects every person to every other person and every piece of content ever created, instantly, from anywhere on Earth. But even that is simple evolution of the net; it's not a stretch of the imagination, and it's not a new concept as storing small digital music files on a hard drive would have been to those listening to LP's 50 years ago. I do think traditional music radio's days are numbered, though; subscription services and satellite radio will be its death knell - eventually.
As for DRM, it's difficult to predict what effect it will have but I honestly think it's probably a little overblown... there's never been a DRM scheme that wasn't circumvented pretty much the instant it appeared, so those who want to will always be able to get around it (and obviously, mp3 doesn't even support it... which is one reason for mp3's continued dominance). That doesn't mean DRM'd files won't continue to sell at stores like iTunes, but I think the lack of a standard is just not really a big issue for consumers. It's a bigger issue for music publishers, though; it just strikes me as stupid that the RIAA would allow Apple to impose a DRM scheme that means nobody with a player other than an iPod could play their files (without breaking the DRM)... and vice versa on other sites. You're just cutting a lot of people out of your potential consumer base with that strategy.
That's a damn expensive IBM PC unit. The clones are a lot cheaper, people.
Uh, what? They didn't buy a PC, they bought a whole PC Business. Unless you mean the clone makers are also cheaper, but that doesn't make much sense either - Gateway's brand name is nothing compared to IBM's.
I don't suppose you've ever used a Thinkpad or you'd know why it's a sought-after business. I'd be surprised if they weren't still the top selling laptops (they may not be, I'd just be surprised if that's the case), and they're still by far the best built mainstream laptops you can get (don't even bring up Apple, people - if you do, you have no idea what you're talking about). They're also among the last major makers not to pre-load their PC's with large quantities of junk. You buy most Thinkpad models and you get a PC and an OS. What you do with it is up to you.
I think this is a sad day, quite honestly. Things change in the PC industry and nothing against Levono or Lunovo or whatever Legend's calling themselves these days, but I don't have much confidence that the quality of the Thinkpad line will be maintained. At best, within five years you'll see cost-cutting to the point where there's little to distinguish them from other laptops. I mean there's a reason IBM sold this unit, after all - they can't charge enough for these things to make a meaningful profit on them given the production costs, and they can't realistically cut costs themselves because the quality is the main reason people buy them. So, they've cut and run, and left Legend to do the dirty work that they couldn't - which is more than likely to basically gut the hardware and sell off all that currently bare desktop real estate until the line is profitable. I just wonder if anybody's going to still buy a Thinkpad under such conditions, because people buy Thinkpads now specifically to stay away from cheap crap.
I guess this is why they've only got a five year window to brand them as IBM Thinkpads - IBM doesn't want their name sullied as part of the deal. Which begs the question, what's really in it for Levono? What do they do in year six? So they end up with a bit more production capacity than they have now; is that worth billions of dollars? They're not getting any major branding out of this deal that I can see, or any IP, or anything else that they can really build off of. It seems very short-sighted on their part, doesn't it?
You forgot about the fact that demand was so high for the mini that Apple could not produce enough - they've sold a shitload of these despite YOUR opinion that it's expensive.
It's not just his opinion, it's the opinion of a lot of people.
And you apparently don't know a lot about marketing if you think that Apple "could not produce enough". There are such things as manufactured shortages.
I've searched high and low for honest to goodness iPod Mini sales numbers, including through Google, Apple's investor relations site, and my E*trade account (where I can get company research that would otherwise be unavailable to the general masses). They just don't seem to break iPod sales down by model; they only release total numbers, and I doubt that's unintentional. I don't think anybody would dispute that the iPod Mini has sold fairly well to early adopters but I've just never been able to find any real data to back up your claim about Apple selling a "shitload" of them - anybody can underproduce an initial shipment and then claim demand is so high that there are shortages.
If someone's got some real and up to date sales numbers of the various iPod models, let's see em and compare. My guess is after the first wave of Apple die-hards buys in (which should have happened by now), the regular iPod will outsell the Mini by about 10 to 1 - it's just a much better value and I think most people know it.
Pricing does matter when you're taking about the mass market. Despite the iPod's overall success, I think Apple's still stuck in this idea of pricing things for their little hardcore niche. I don't think it's going to work in the medium- and long-term with the iPod Mini, and I'm not sure it's going to work at all with a flash-based iPod (I don't think there are millions of Apple faithful out there waiting for a $200 flash-based iPod, and there certainly isn't a mass market for such a thing).
Then again, I was surprised at the original iPod's success at its price point, so I've been wrong before - but that player was blazing a trail where none had gone before. Flash-based mp3 players are a dime a dozen so it's not as if Apple can come in and convince a bunch of people that their player is worth a premium of 100% or more over every other player on the market.
Damn this is no surprise. U.S have always lagged behind. Look at gran turismo all the cars are in Japanese names. So many Japanese version of the games are better than the American counterparts with more secrets etc.
Er... you mean the US lags behind because they drive different cars in Japan or what? The cars in GT have Japanese names generally because they're not available here (the Mazda Demio and Nissan Skyline GTR, for two examples). The game itself is the same as the Japanese release, though.
Many games these days are actually improved when they're brought over here - a big switch from the old days of just a few years ago. For example, every Final Fantasy game since VII has had extra monsters and side-quests in the US release (the US release then later being re-released in Japan as "FF(n) International").
Japanese game development in general isn't what it used to be, though, so the days when you'd have all these deserving little niche titles either left in Japan or brought over here in bastardized form are pretty much over. Today, games are usually produced for a worldwide audience and most deserving games are brought over either intact or with new additions and improvements.
So to me, it seems like this Mr. Driller thing is just an abberation. We'll see if it's some sort of nefarious plot by Nintendo to get Americans to buy more games, but if so they'll be kicking themselves for not region locking the system because it'll turn into an importer's dream. There hasn't been a real major must-import-for system since the Saturn (and to a lesser extent the PS1), but if Nintendo starts pressuring developers to make alterations like this in the name of profits, the DS will become the next importer system pretty quickly.
This is what happens in a country where we spend all our money on ludicrous taxes, mortgages, insurance bills.
I don't even know where to start with this one! Taxes are higher in Japan, having a mortage means you're putting money into a home (which is generally a good thing, and btw, they have mortgages in Japan too), and insurance is more expensive in Japan as well. (If you mean health insurance, they pay for it just like we do, the difference is that it's required to have by law and it only covers about 70% of hospital expenses. Imagine if that were true here! Unemployed or poor people do get cheap rates through the government, though.)
I heard some part of Japan even have fibre-channel connections at home.
Got it here too.
Honestly, the weird thing about Japan's internet access is that while they supposedly have this huge broadband penetration, it's tough to find anybody that actually uses it. All the statistics I've seen talk about the number of "lines", not the number of subscribers... I've always wondered if they just call an ADSL-capable phone line a "broadband line" and then count that in to pad the stats. I know probably 30 people over there and not one of them uses broadband - in fact most of them access the net exclusively from their cell phones.
Anyway, this is all by way of saying that there's this perception of Japan in some parts of the west as this mythical place of Star Trek-like electronic toys that we don't get to have or that cost a lot more here (the opposite is usually true). And this DS story sort of just perpetuates that myth. It's just one game, after all. I mean they get pissed off too that they have to wait a year after our Final Fantasy releases to play the final version of the game. The grass is always greener on the other side.
(Notwithstanding my sig homage to Puffy...)
people won't try to speed ahead anymore instead, they'll stick with a pack
It sounds simplistic but this is the way people drive in New York City, by design. We don't have adaptive traffic lights (that I know of), but they wouldn't really do any good here because during the day the traffic flows at a pretty constant rate in all directions, and at night the lights are programmed to the speed limits on the major thoroughfares.
Believe me, a lot of study has been done into traffic management in major cities like New York, and tweaks to the system occur on a constant basis. But the "pack" is actually the desired effect in a city like this, where one pack of cars travels at the speed limit for a set interval before hitting a red light. Another pack follows them, and the pattern repeats itself on both crosswise and parallel streets. It's really the only way to both keep traffic moving and maintain speed limits. It also cuts down on red light running because you're not going to gain anything by running a red - you'll just end up at the back of the pack at the red light ahead of you. It similarly cuts down on unnecessary lane changes (which only slows traffic flow) because jockeying for position is not important.
Of course, there are still quite a few bad drivers here, but the fact is traffic does flow and adaptive traffic lights wouldn't accomplish anything.
The bad side of this cinematic tech boom is the fact that more and more people are producing crappy content.
I agree. There was this idea a while back that access to all these great tools and cheap technology would unlock this vast untapped creativity among the general population. Unfortunately, all it's really done is decrease the signal to noise ratio.
When I went to film school (NYU graduate), you had to really have a passion for it. It was a lot of money spent on film stock (I spent around $4,000 on my final film, and that was cheap back then!), a lot of long hours spent in front of a Steenbeck cutting film, a lot of studying of the physical properties of light and what they do to the crystals on various film stocks to get the exact look you want. Nowadays it seems like all anybody's gotta do is take the school's digital camcorder and buy a couple tapes and half the work and pretty much all of the expense is taken care of.
It sounds great but it means that all of these people who probably have no real business making movies suddenly think of themselves as filmmakers. The amount of work and money involved is such that pretty much anybody can do it these days (at least on a small scale) and unfortunately, film is one of those professions that not everybody is really cut out for. (By the same token, owning a PC and a copy of MS Word does not make you a novelist.)
Now, you hope that film schools retain some level of standards in the students that they select. But it's not always easy for film schools to tell who has talent and who doesn't before signing them up, and it's getting harder now that these new digital tools allow pretty much anybody to produce reels (the equivalent of a portfolio, for anyone who hasn't gone to film school) that are at least semi-competent. But that student now may not ever progress past semi-competency, whereas in the old days you had to pretty much know what you were doing and show some promise to even get that far at the start. It's hard to know whether it's the tools or the person who's semi-competent anymore.
I personally think that the majority of teaching in film school should remain primarily on film, as that's still what the film industry is based on, and you can't run before you walk. You need to know the fundamentals. I understand that it's probably financially better for schools to purchase these cheap cameras and PC's as well (vs. the 16mm systems most film schools have historically based their curriculums on), but I don't think it's necessarily in either their or the students' best interests educationally (unless they're supplementing the film equipment and just adding new digital courses to the core curriculum).
It'll be a sad day when and if film finally disappears from film schools. I'm sure it will happen eventually, but I just hope that the schools manage to find some way to maintain their admissions and educational standards without allowing students to lean too heavily on technology. Even when I was in school working with film, there were always students who would try to take the cheap way out on their films, by using cheesy visual or other effects in place of real drama (or comedy, or whatever), or by relying on slick productions without any real story underneath. Cheap technology just makes it easier to slide by without needing any real talent.
I thought no-overtime non-comp work was illegal for entertainment companies.
If they're working over their salaried time then they are required by law to recieve overtime or comp.
That's what the employees believe, but labor laws are not so simple. EA has classified these employees as exempt from overtime status, which they're legally allowed to do under certain circumstances (for example, if an employee works on a contract or salary basis in a computer-related field, and is often asked to "use his or her own discretion and judgement" in the course of his/her work). Basically, exempt status in most states is intended to apply to management or learned professionals, not lower-level employees, but the wording is usually nebulous enough that most employers think they can apply it to most employees. Unfortunately for the company, though, the penalties for misapplying exempt status can be pretty severe. (The employees can be awarded both back pay and penalties, meaning a company like EA could potentially be out hundreds of millions of dollars.)
In the EA case, the employees in question have compared their jobs with identical jobs in other entertainment industries and found that in those other industries and within the same state (Callifornia) those same positions are not treated as exempt. These are in effect the "blue-collar" jobs at EA; the assembly-line type stuff. EA treats them as exempt under the computer-related occupation exemption, but according to that exemption you need to be "primarily engaged in intellectual or creative work that requires the exercise of discretion and independent judgment." (Emphasis added.) So this is actually a tough exemption to apply. You could really argue that it cannot be applied to almost anybody at a company like EA, because it's pretty likely that the look and feel of a game (and its related marketing) comes from just one or two product managers per product (who themselves brainstorm ideas with other departmental managers), with the rest of the product team simply following instructions. Even if you use your own discretion at your job some of the time, though (for example, a manager tells you to draw a character a certain way but leaves the particulars up to you), you would still not be exempt, because you are not primarily engaged in using your own discretion. You are still working with instructions provided by someone else.
I think this memo probably hurts EA's legal case. A position is either exempt or it isn't; there's no "well, we didn't think it was exempt, but now we do"... the fact is it's not up to them, it's up to the law, and if they're now deciding that the law says these positions are not exempt, then they owe all of those employees back pay and they owe the state penalties. I would imagine this memo will come up in court if no settlement is reached prior to that time.
Why is EA in the news? For the same reason Vioxx is in the news. Some lawyers are trying to get the word out in order to find members of a class action. They're also trying to gin-up hatred for the company and sympathy for the "victims" in order to cash in on a big judgement against the company.
Jesus, talk about cynicism. I'm guessing you don't work in the tech industry or you'd know exactly why the EA story is a big story, and hint, it's not what you seem to believe.
The EA story is a big story because the problems at EA are endemic to the video game industry, and are at least somewhat prevalent in the IT industry as well. Employees who by law should not be treated as exempt are being treated as exempt. Being that this is a tech news site, and being that EA is such a large company, what happens at EA in this case could have a big impact on the tech industry in general. This is a chance to improve the quality of life for tech workers across the country.
That's the idealist response. The most cynical I'd ever get about this, though, would be to say that this is a large company that its employees believe are breaking the law, and it's always news when large companies break the law on a large-scale basis. Either way, it's news, and I hope this site continues to follow it.
I do agree though. Some of the best lean and mean companies I've ever seen have crappy furniture in the conference room.
Speaking as a (voluntarily) former employee of one of Acclaim's regional competitors (and I'll leave you to figure out who that might be), I admit to being a bit shocked by their extravagance in the face of such financial difficulties. The company I worked for had no such pretensions and yet strangely enough is actually quite profitable.
We did have Aeron chairs, we had 21" LCD displays at every desk (two of them if we asked, and CRT's if we preferred), it's not like my company was a bunch of misers. But antique grandfather clocks in the board room? Give me a break! What the hell does that have to do with business, or video games?
I understand the concept of impressing potential investors or partners. But did they honestly believe this sort of thing impresses anybody anymore? "Look at how much money we can throw around at completely useless objects!" Nobody runs a business like that anymore.
It's one thing to have a nice office space that workers can feel comfortable in, with the tools they need to be productive. It's another to completely splurge on largess that you cannot afford and that serves no purpose whatsoever. No wonder this company went under.
It's my property - it is my god-given right to do whatever I damn well please with it.
Well, in this context, I and a lot of other people around here would have a problem with this statement. (In other contexts, though, I might agree with you.) The whole idea of intellectual property in general is a completely new idea in the context of the totality of human history - the idea that you can "own" information. It's certainly not a "god-given" right - there's nothing in the Bible or the Koran or any other religious text that says ideas are your property. This is a concept that's really only been around for a few hundred of the 10,000 or so years human beings have walked the earth.
Now, I would postulate that such a new idea is hardly yet a perfect idea, and it's one that needs constant review given the rapid evolution of technology. I would even postulate that it's become an outdated idea, if it was ever anything else.
From your statements it sounds like you think that something that can easily be reproduced (or does not have a tangeable aspect to it like a program) should get less protection then say a television set.
I think that's probably exactly what he's saying, and I think there are a lot of people (more and more every day) who would agree with him.
Prior to the invention of the printing press, it was perfectly legal in most places to make copies of various works and distribute them however you pleased. The problem was it was impractical, so few people actually did it. In terms of music, most musicians made their money by actually wandering around and playing in front of people - they still do this today, only now they've also come to rely on this idea of "intellectual property" to protect their recorded works as a new revenue stream. But this is not historically how musicians have made a living.
The protections that grew out of the printing press (which were designed to protect book and newspaper distribution, not music, software, or other technologies) have created new revenue streams for various publishing industries - revenue streams that they have not historically enjoyed. But this doesn't make them "god-given rights" - there's no god-given right to make money for anything. A revenue stream is just a revenue stream - it can be given and it can be taken away.
In terms of the moral issue, I don't see it. Let's assume for a moment that we go back to the way things used to be and there is no such thing as intellectual property. Somebody writes a song and it becomes legally available for download all over the internet. The record labels would all be run out of business, no doubt about it. Too bad. It's not my moral responsibility to keep them in business. As far as the artists who created the song, without any record label to appease, they're now free to keep a much larger share of any touring profits - basically splitting the profits two ways between themselves and the promoter, rather than three ways between themselves, the promoter and the record label. They can get themselves out from underneath these onerous record industry contracts, and maybe they can even find new revenue streams for themselves (such as directly contracting and selling their own merchandise - t-shirts, hats, action figures, or whatever). The biggest bands can become their own little cottage industries, and most artists in general would probably end up richer rather than poorer.
Something similar would happen to the book publishing industry. True, anybody could download a book from anywhere and read it on their PC free of charge. But a lot of books can be legally downloaded right now (many famous books are in the public domain), and people still buy things like Bibles, on paper. That's the way people prefer to read books. An author, free from the confines of a publishing contract that awards most of the profits to the publisher, could contract directly (through his agent) with a printer to print his book, and with a mark
How about not having the damnned annoying spike logo in the corner, the stretch and squish games they do with the image, the commercials and parts of the show cut out because the 45 minutes of program time (15 mins for commercials) that was done back in the 80's and 90's is now too long for the now 17-20 commercial times we now have.
I don't remember if Spike does that but Sci-Fi channel cut out many parts of the original Star Trek to make room for commercials.
Spike clearly advertises that their Trek is "uncut".
Anyway, though, your point allows me to perfectly illustrate my point, which is that it seems to me there's a perfectly acceptable solution to TV "piracy" staring TV execs right in the face and they simply fail to acknowledge it.
Make all TV shows available for download, for free.
TV execs will look at this and say "bah! It's our IP! You don't just give IP away!" Well, yes you do. I don't pay anything for over-the-air broadcasts (even in high def!), and while I do pay a cable bill, that bill's going to the cable company for maintenance of the infrastructure - it's not going to the broadcast TV networks (or even to most of the cable networks, who are ad supported). Most TV stations give their content away gratis every day of the week.
I don't see why a TV station couldn't put whatever bugs they want in the corner and include commercials with their downloads (people will find a way to skip them however hard they make it to fast forward, but then what else is new? People have been doing that for years with VCR's, nevermind TiVo). The perceived value to advertisers shouldn't be any different, because I mean look. Either downloading is a small issue and therefore it shouldn't matter either to advertisers or the networks, or it's rampant and growing, in which case those advertisers would at least want the chance to reach all those eyes, rather than just sitting on the sidelines while ad-stripped copies of shows float around on bittorrent sites.
Now, there would be issues to work out with affiliates, syndicators, etc. who sell their own advertising, often locally. But so what? Issues can be worked out for the good of the industry; it's actually a rather minor change in how TV business is done in the grand scheme of things. You work out some sort of revenue-sharing deal and voila: done. And of course, TV still needs to be broadcast live before it can be downloaded, so the affiliates still get their local advertising in anyway.
One quick example - I remember when the Jon Stewart Crossfire interview aired, and afterwards there was a big story about how more people had shared and downloaded a digitized version of it than had actually watched the show in the first place. This is an extreme case right now (though it will happen more and more over time), and CNN was completely pissed about it, but I saw more than one journalist suggest that instead of whining about it, CNN could have driven people to their web site and could have promoted the show a lot better by simply making it available for free download themselves. I don't see how you can really argue with that - the downloads happened anyway, wouldn't it be better for the network to get some traffic and marketing out of it themselves rather than just ceding that market to the file sharers?
If TV shows were available for free download from network web sites, very few people are going to take the illegal route in stripping out the non-program material and then sharing them on file sharing sites. Sure, some people will, but those are the same people who'd rip or download the DVD's and share them too; they're pretty hardcore pirates, and they're not going to pay for your stuff regardless. It seems to me the idea is to keep the 99% of viewers who aren't pirates from becoming pirates, not to convert the 1% who are pirates into paying customers (a futile goal).
Of course, DVD's would still be made available at some future date, sans commercials and
Now There's Another Place To Get Your Jessica Simpson Fix, Legally
I sure hope they have better artist than this or you can count me out.
They list some other artists there and none of them are any better. Yet they later say they want PI to be have the most "diverse" content. Yeah, right - everything from Britney Spears to Jessica Simpson!
Yet another indication of how clueless the music industry is these days.
I also checked out the PI web site and there's almost no information there about the service. How does it work? Is this that stupid thing I read about a while ago where you're actually just sharing links to music rather than the music itself? In other words, it's just like publishing your playlist somewhere and then linking to some music publisher's store? If so, I don't even really consider it P2P. And I'm sure the quality's going to suck (128k files, no doubt) and there's got to be some pretty onerous DRM tacked on too.
No thanks. I'll stick to buying and ripping my own CD's. You'd think the industry would love guys like me who actually go out and pay for their music (when I actually find a new artist I like, that is, which isn't often these days), but given the DRM they're trying to force onto CD's, they obviously don't. It remains the only viable option as far as I'm concerned, though, if you want legal music for the best price with the greatest selection, and you want the highest-quality compressed files along with it.
New York City HAS an urban planner?
Jeez, and I thought my job had a tradition of mediocrity.......
Uh, you don't build a city of 8 million people without planning. There's a reason all those people live here, and it's not because they have to. They haven't converted Manhattan to a gigantic prison island yet!
I recommend renting the PBS series "New York" for a bit of history of the planning of this city (it's a bit Manhattan-centric, and barely touches at all on the planning of the more populous outer boroughs, but it'll still give you an idea), or just buy the book based on the show, which has pretty much the same content.
As for SimCity, I'm sure it's had a net positive effect on urban planning, simply because it's gotten at least some of the people that play the game interested in it. Games are like anything else; some people get interested in things from reading books, or seeing movies, or whatever... some people get interested in things playing games, and that can turn into a life goal. I think it's pretty silly to think that anyone's going to put "Reached a population of 1 million in SimCity" on their resume when applying for a government job, but these people may end up majoring in urban planning based on the interest they gained playing the game, and those people could very well go on to be excellent urban planners. I'm sure the game has increased the total number of urban planners out there, and I seriously doubt it's done anything to the average quality of the profession - these people are all getting the same training as they used to, there's just more of them for employers to choose from.
I don't know about you but I do have a license to drive my car. A license that can be revoked if I don't follow the terms of aggrement. Just like a HL2 CD just because the license has been revoked they don't come knocking on your door to take away your CD as well.
Your comparison is not valid because a) your driver's license is with the state, not with the car manufacturer, and b) your license can only be revoked if you break the law, not if you simply break the terms of the license (in this case, the terms of the license is the law, but you wouldn't need a license if those laws didn't exist).
If the state wants to license me to play video games on the condition that they revoke my license if I break the law, then I actually probably wouldn't have much of a problem with it, provided I didn't have to pay anything to obtain that license. But Valve is engaged in vigilante-ism right now, and just as in other forms of law enforcement, their version of vigilante-ism is probably violating various laws themselves (the biggest issue I see is that they're nuking legally purchased, unrelated products of those who are simply using a NoCD crack - there's no way they can legally do this that I can see, whatever their EULA says).
Issues of law are not left up to the private sector, as your own example inadvertantly demonstrates. If somebody commits a crime against you, for example, it is illegal for you to personally go and take your own revenge on that person. What you must do under the law is contact the police and let them deal with it. That is how civilized society works. And even if that isn't common sense, it's the law of the land in this country.
The software industry seems to think this is the Wild West, but it isn't. The same rules apply to them. Only the state and federal governments have the power to enforce laws regarding copyright and commerce, and a company cannot take those rights away from the government through a EULA, especially when that EULA is between you and the publisher, not between the state and the publisher (in other words, no contract can invalidate the rights of a third party that's not even involved in that contract).
I said it in another reply - what Valve is doing is similar to what the RIAA wanted to be able to do if they found a single illegal MP3 on your hard drive. They want to be able to search your hard drive and nuke the contents if they so choose. The RIAA was attempting to get a bill passed that allowed them to do this, but the point is they knew that they couldn't do it without being authorized by congress. Valve apparently thinks they can get away with it without such authorization, but I hope one of these customers takes them to task over it, and to court.
Note that I don't even own HL2, not a legal and certainly not an illegal copy of it. So hopefully I am looking at this through unbiased eyes. I do hope to buy it at some point but I will not until issues like these are worked out - to me, the whole Steam authentication thing sounds pretty onerous, and if Valve is just going to nuke my games for using a simple NoCD patch, then I'm not really sure I need the aggravation.
As offered here, IF the box mentions any sort of "By using this software..." kind of message on the outside of the box then the buyer is at fault.
Not necessarily. Federal law says any information that's "material" to a consumer's buying decision must be "clear and conspicuous".
Here is an article that talks about this - the relevant part is about 2/3 the way down.
'"The FTC would not comment on our readers' fine print. However, "Consumers shouldn't have to use a magnifying glass to read important terms and conditions of any offer, " says Timothy J. Muris, FTC chairman. "Burying important terms in mouseprint is illegal, unethical, and ultimately bad business." He pledged to take action against offenders.'
I would say that most consumers, buying a box containing pretty much anything, would think when they pony up their money that they are buying not just the box but also the contents of the box. It would seem to me, then, that the license terms, or at least the fact that there is a license, is "material" information that's necessary for consumers to make an informed purchase decision. Therefore, if that information is not clearly and conspicuously displayed on the box, the consumer would have legal recourse if they decided they did not agree to the license upon installing the game and could not get their money back immediately.
From what I understand from other posts, this information is not clear and conspicuous on the box, and therefore Valve is in violation of federal law.
Anyone who's downloaded the game via Steam remember if the EULA is displayed before or after providing your CC#? Or if, at least, there's some sort of checkbox saying you agree to the linked terms and conditions before clicking the submit button? If not, seems to me that would be a violation of law as well.
I don't know how or if this would affect these 20,000 people who had their accounts shut off (it probably wouldn't), but it would affect somebody who bought the game and then decided they didn't like the license afterwards. Valve needs to put this info on the box. They also need to say the product requires activation on the box. I know other software publishers don't do this, but as this is a fairly new concept I just don't think any companies have been sued for it yet. But they will be eventually, as it's definitely material information.
(I know EULA's themselves have been challenged and have been upheld in courts - that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about providing customers with information prior to purchase informing them of both the existence of a EULA and the requirement of product activation. They can still be required to agree to the EULA upon installing the product.)
There may be other laws Valve is violating with the 20,000 accounts they've disabled, though. They can't, for example, take away products you've legally purchased because you stole a different product. That would be equivalent to the RIAA wiping your hard drive remotely because they found one illegal MP3 on it. Or the police confiscating your legally purchased Corvette and Mustang because the 350Z on your lot was listed in their database as stolen.
I don't know exactly what their EULA says, if there's some clause in there that says violation of the license for one product is equivalent to violation of the license for all products you own. I honestly doubt there is, but even if there is I'm not sure it'd hold up in court. No EULA can overturn federal, state, or local law. All a EULA can do is say "this is the law and this is how we're applying it to this product". They can't make up their own laws in a EULA. So if consumer laws protect customers from having products confiscated that have nothing to do with a crime that's been committed, as many states do, then the EULA is not going to be able to override that.
I used to go straight to gamespot, cause they have a history of being tough. Now, I can legitimately compare all scores at the same time with gamerankings.com.
What you're doing is what I use GR for too - seeing a list of all scores in one convenient place - but it gives me a chance to bring up a practice that a lot of people use GR for that I think is really bad, and that's simply looking at the average score for a game and taking that as a definitive rating. GR themselves encourage this by heavily featuring that number everywhere on their site (as the "Average Ratio" - the main qualitative ranking that they use).
A big problem with doing this is that GR's weighting for its scoring is completely arbitrary, which skews the averages. They used to have the opposite problem, which is that they'd count all reviews equally in the average, regardless of the size, reach, influence, or respectability of a site. Another issue is that many games appeal to specific sensibilities and genres and so may generate widely divergent views based on who's reviewing them, so simply taking an average of scores is just not informative.
They seem to pick and choose now which sites get included in the average (there's a disclaimer saying only "sites in bold" are used to calculate the average), but I can't see any real pattern to the sites they select, and in any case, they're still including about 90% of all the sites out there, and every site they do include gets an "equal vote". Which means a huge site like Gamespot, with a history of reliable reviews and editors with many years of experience in the business, gets only as much weighting as a site like My Gamer or eToyChest (which I've honestly never even heard of).
I just don't think this is really giving people any more accurate of an idea of how good a game is than just picking one single site you like and sticking with it. Here is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Rez received scores ranging from the 50% to 100% - that's a huge spread, which tells you that people either loved this game or they just didn't get it. Yet the final average is an 82%. What does that average tell you? It tells you nothing, because depending on what you're looking for in a game, your tastes vs. the reviewers' tastes, and your personality vs. the game designers' personalities, you might love or you might hate this game. It's unlikely (from reactions I've seen, and from my own experience) that you're going to think this is just a "good" but unremarkable game, as the average score would suggest. Just because an average "smooths out" the highs and lows you might see in various reviews doesn't mean that average ends up being an accurate measure of how good the game really is. And there are a lot of questionable sites included in that average to begin with, so it's doubly faulty.
The same is true to one extent or another with pretty much every game, except maybe those that are almost universally praised and those that are almost universally panned. In those cases, maybe you can trust the averages a little more. But most games don't fit that description, where every review site pretty much falls in line with the general consensus. Most games have a fairly wide range of opinions for and against them and the average score isn't going to tell you anything.
Anyway, so I use GR to give me quick links to all the available reviews for games I'm interested in, but I basically ignore the average ratio. I can tell at a quick glance of the review list if most sites are in agreement or not; if they are, then I don't even need to see the average, and if they're not, then the average is pretty pointless anyway.