My friend Kevin's dad owns Zumiez (which is the chain the article mentioned) and some of my friends are responsible for installing the Linux boxes they mentioned. In addition to the Linux cash registers, they also installed Evolution for the store managers to use. This was a conscious choice over Outlook.
So put your money where your mouth is and support Zumiez- they're a great company.
i've been a designer for the better part of ten years, and have therefore been exposed to a lot of type and talk about type. it's my understanding that you can't copyright or otherwise protect the actual curves (the letterforms themselves) in a font, but only the name. i believe this is accurate, because if you look at those lame corel "100000 fonts for $4" clip art packages, you'll see lots of blantantly deriviative fonts with slight changes, like "universal," which is quite obviously univers with a name change. if you ask me, this is a sad state of legal affairs, but it is the status quo whether i like it or not.
so, why doesn't someone just fire up fontographer and make a copy of andale mono with a different name and distribute that? if corel can rip off adobe fonts for profit, surely linux can get away with ripping off a M$ font...
granted, to do anything worth doing you need to learn Lingo (it's scripting language), but it's quite a powerfuil development environment with a large and helpful user base. director is certainly capable of doing anything seen on the Playstation or Saturn, and beginners can get a space invaders-type game up and running in an hour or two.
couple that with cross-platform and browser-based publishing and you have a killer set of tools for the aspiring gamer maker to use.
director really doesn't get the props it deserves...
i know this sounds to simple to be true, but it works well for me (YMMV of course). whenever i get a telemarketing call, i quickly cut them off and say "i'm not interested and i'd like to be removed from your calling list." this always shuts them up immediately, and as far as i can remember i haven't received anymore calls from those solicitors. from what i understand there's prety strict laws that require them to remove you from their list when asked...
of course, that doesn't stop you from being called in the first place ^_^
while i generally subscribe to the "if you build it, they will crax0r it" school of thought, as far as i know bleemcast (bleem for dreamcast) was never successfully cracked. i don't know all the details of it's protection scheme (i haven't kept track of "the scene" in a while), but as i remember it involved tons and tons of bad sectors that rendered it practically impossible to copy.
i'm sure someone else knows/will correct me if i'm wrong...
it sounds like you're saying advance wars is good in spite of having poor graphics.
i would submit that advance wars actually has EXTREMELY good graphics. both the mechanical/character design and execution are top-notch, and if anyone who thinks otherwise should try firing up photoshop and making a graphic of, say, a tank that rivals advance wars. then you'll see first hand how incredibly talented and skilled the pixel artists behind SNES/GBA/Saturn 2D games are. really, it's a whole lot harder than it looks ^_^
the last famitsu figures i read (popular japanese gaming mag) indicated that xbox sold 3000 units of hardware that week, which was about 500 units less than *playstation one* ^_^ meanwhile the ps2 had sold 65,000 units, and gamecube 30,000. the xbox outsold only the wonderswan and dreamcast. the outlook is indeed pretty grim! with the exception of sega, i'm not aware of any good japanese developers onboard the xbox program- that's bad news indeed for MS.
in an interview published yesterday on ign.com with dean takahashi, who is the author of a new book on the xbox, he more or less says that they lose $125 per box at current prices:
"So leaving out the modem saves them maybe five bucks per machine, and over 43 million units sold saves them $215 million. When you're losing $125 a box at the outset, that's a nice amount of savings."
so for MS to lower the price $100 would actually mean losing some very sizeable amounts of money.
i should start by saying that i'm from the punk/hardcore scene, so i'm by no means an advocate of major labels or anything. but it seems like any discussion of file sharing, DRM or the like always devolves into "CDs are too expensive, so it's ok for me to download MP3s." i'm not here to pass judgement on the ethics of that decision, but i thought i'd add my $.02, since i've not seen this information mentioned frequently on slashdot.
let's take the newest britney spears record. it wouldn't surprise me if they paid over $1 million to record it. tack on another $50K for artwork and photography, $50K for a new website, another $500K for national print advertising campaign, and probably at least $100K for legal. there's probably a lot more expenses i'm not thinking of, but you get the idea. before the CD even goes to the pressing plant, the tab is already close to $2 million. sure, manufacturing is comparitively cheap when pressing that much, but i'm sure they're paying at least $1 each when all's said and done. so let's say that if they pressed an initial run of 4M copies, their cost is almost $6 million. and when you see a CD for sale at $16 or whatever they cost these days (i stopped buying CDs when i discovered napster years ago), it's not like that $16 goes into the label's pocket. they're probably selling to the distributor (probably a subsidiary of the label in Jive/RCA's case) for maybe $8 each, who then marks the price up to $12 or $13 and sells it to the retailer, who marks it up again. so when they sell 4 million copies, their gross profit is perhaps $6.50 per CD (still a lot of money). but the money's not in the bank yet- out of the money they make off of releases like britney they pay their extremely well-compensated executives and other staff members, and the profits from successful releases subsidize the money they lose off of their releases that bomb (which far outnumber the successful ones).
to be sure, the labels are still making a very healthy profit, but what's wrong with that? and if an artist is getting shitty royalty payments, well, they are as much to blame as anyone else-- after all, they signed the contract! back when pop punk was the thing in 95 or so, many bands (like rancid) decided not to sign to major labels because they did their homework and it turned out that they would make more money selling less records on a smaller label (like epitaph) that paid them higher royalties per unit. so i don't really feel too bad for artists who don't read the fine print, or choose to ignore it, then compain later.
also, let's not forget that without the substantial investments in promotion and what not that only a bigger label can provide, you may not have heard of your favorite artist in the first place. and if you never hear about the artist, it really makes the issue of their royalties moot, since you'd never purchase their record.
finally, let's not forget the powerful legal muscle that labels can provide. if a business or individual were to use some unknown garage band's material in an unathorized fashion, it's entirely likely that the band would never hear about it, and even if they did, they would have a tough time getting any royalty monies out of it. but, since it's in a major label's best interest to do so (let's not kid ourselves and pretend the labels are in it for the music or the artists' best interests), they could have a team of scary lawyers on it in a heartbeat (see disney).
so i guess what i'm trying to say is that the music business, like any other issue, is not black and white. of course major labels (and most indies) and totally shady, shiftless fuckers, but they also provide capital and invaluable services to artists, who are frequently too stupid to know what's good for them anyway. so, demonizing labels and industry organizations is really a short-sighted point of view.
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holy fuck, i went to high school with rory hudson too. small world! i sat next to him in geometry in 10th grade, i believe.
My friend Kevin's dad owns Zumiez (which is the chain the article mentioned) and some of my friends are responsible for installing the Linux boxes they mentioned. In addition to the Linux cash registers, they also installed Evolution for the store managers to use. This was a conscious choice over Outlook.
So put your money where your mouth is and support Zumiez- they're a great company.
so, why doesn't someone just fire up fontographer and make a copy of andale mono with a different name and distribute that? if corel can rip off adobe fonts for profit, surely linux can get away with ripping off a M$ font...
couple that with cross-platform and browser-based publishing and you have a killer set of tools for the aspiring gamer maker to use.
director really doesn't get the props it deserves...
of course, that doesn't stop you from being called in the first place ^_^
while i generally subscribe to the "if you build it, they will crax0r it" school of thought, as far as i know bleemcast (bleem for dreamcast) was never successfully cracked. i don't know all the details of it's protection scheme (i haven't kept track of "the scene" in a while), but as i remember it involved tons and tons of bad sectors that rendered it practically impossible to copy.
i'm sure someone else knows/will correct me if i'm wrong...
it sounds like you're saying advance wars is good in spite of having poor graphics.
i would submit that advance wars actually has EXTREMELY good graphics. both the mechanical/character design and execution are top-notch, and if anyone who thinks otherwise should try firing up photoshop and making a graphic of, say, a tank that rivals advance wars. then you'll see first hand how incredibly talented and skilled the pixel artists behind SNES/GBA/Saturn 2D games are. really, it's a whole lot harder than it looks ^_^
the last famitsu figures i read (popular japanese gaming mag) indicated that xbox sold 3000 units of hardware that week, which was about 500 units less than *playstation one* ^_^ meanwhile the ps2 had sold 65,000 units, and gamecube 30,000. the xbox outsold only the wonderswan and dreamcast. the outlook is indeed pretty grim! with the exception of sega, i'm not aware of any good japanese developers onboard the xbox program- that's bad news indeed for MS.
in an interview published yesterday on ign.com with dean takahashi, who is the author of a new book on the xbox, he more or less says that they lose $125 per box at current prices:
"So leaving out the modem saves them maybe five bucks per machine, and over 43 million units sold saves them $215 million. When you're losing $125 a box at the outset, that's a nice amount of savings."
so for MS to lower the price $100 would actually mean losing some very sizeable amounts of money.
i should start by saying that i'm from the punk/hardcore scene, so i'm by no means an advocate of major labels or anything. but it seems like any discussion of file sharing, DRM or the like always devolves into "CDs are too expensive, so it's ok for me to download MP3s." i'm not here to pass judgement on the ethics of that decision, but i thought i'd add my $.02, since i've not seen this information mentioned frequently on slashdot.
let's take the newest britney spears record. it wouldn't surprise me if they paid over $1 million to record it. tack on another $50K for artwork and photography, $50K for a new website, another $500K for national print advertising campaign, and probably at least $100K for legal. there's probably a lot more expenses i'm not thinking of, but you get the idea. before the CD even goes to the pressing plant, the tab is already close to $2 million. sure, manufacturing is comparitively cheap when pressing that much, but i'm sure they're paying at least $1 each when all's said and done. so let's say that if they pressed an initial run of 4M copies, their cost is almost $6 million. and when you see a CD for sale at $16 or whatever they cost these days (i stopped buying CDs when i discovered napster years ago), it's not like that $16 goes into the label's pocket. they're probably selling to the distributor (probably a subsidiary of the label in Jive/RCA's case) for maybe $8 each, who then marks the price up to $12 or $13 and sells it to the retailer, who marks it up again. so when they sell 4 million copies, their gross profit is perhaps $6.50 per CD (still a lot of money). but the money's not in the bank yet- out of the money they make off of releases like britney they pay their extremely well-compensated executives and other staff members, and the profits from successful releases subsidize the money they lose off of their releases that bomb (which far outnumber the successful ones).
to be sure, the labels are still making a very healthy profit, but what's wrong with that? and if an artist is getting shitty royalty payments, well, they are as much to blame as anyone else-- after all, they signed the contract! back when pop punk was the thing in 95 or so, many bands (like rancid) decided not to sign to major labels because they did their homework and it turned out that they would make more money selling less records on a smaller label (like epitaph) that paid them higher royalties per unit. so i don't really feel too bad for artists who don't read the fine print, or choose to ignore it, then compain later.
also, let's not forget that without the substantial investments in promotion and what not that only a bigger label can provide, you may not have heard of your favorite artist in the first place. and if you never hear about the artist, it really makes the issue of their royalties moot, since you'd never purchase their record. finally, let's not forget the powerful legal muscle that labels can provide. if a business or individual were to use some unknown garage band's material in an unathorized fashion, it's entirely likely that the band would never hear about it, and even if they did, they would have a tough time getting any royalty monies out of it. but, since it's in a major label's best interest to do so (let's not kid ourselves and pretend the labels are in it for the music or the artists' best interests), they could have a team of scary lawyers on it in a heartbeat (see disney). so i guess what i'm trying to say is that the music business, like any other issue, is not black and white. of course major labels (and most indies) and totally shady, shiftless fuckers, but they also provide capital and invaluable services to artists, who are frequently too stupid to know what's good for them anyway. so, demonizing labels and industry organizations is really a short-sighted point of view.