Is Games for Windows Live actually required? My steam account made me create a local profile for the last Batman game, but it was local to my computer. There was no connection to Microsoft's computers. It was actually kinda annoying because it took a few moments for me to figure out why I couldn't play Street Fighter 4 online even though I was signed into GFWL, and then get signed up for an online profile.
For what it's worth, GFWL does an awesome job matching me up with players on SF4. The service does have some merits. Also steam launches & logs in automatically when I start a game. The only thing that's annoying is the Rock star log in. Yeah, that's nuts. They should just use the Microsoft GFWL API & Login for Pete's sake. There's really no reason not to at that point. Burnout Paradise did the same thing and it was annoying there too.
I was serious. Look at the reasons for the Fukushima disaster. The reactor design was known to be at risk, and there were (expensive) safety measures that could have been put in place a decade ago. The company didn't want to spend the money. So they CEO cries a little on camera, and goes back to his millions. No real consequences. No harm, no foul. To him anyway.
Now, if we could throw the ones responsible in jail for the rest of their lives, that'd be fine. But that's not how it works in the Real World. These people belong to the ruling class, and you don't shed noble blood.
as long as it's the Gov't running the plants. I don't trust private business to invest the kinds of money needed to maintain and improve safety; the profit motive is too strong and always looking for 'efficiency', e.g. corners to cut. Take a look at privately run dialysis clinics vs the gov't run ones. The Gov't run clinics have much lower rates of mortality, and the studies show it's because they don't cut corners by reusing supplies.
that the pirated copies generate support costs that are hard to distinguish from legitimate customers. If someone emails you for support it can be hard to tell their fraudulent. I've read several of the indie guys complaining that they're servers & support forums get hammered by people they know pirated the game, but that it's not technically feasible to filter them out without lots & lots of false positives (which generate really nasty support calls).
As for the 95% figure, it's probably an exaggeration, but if you're wondering where they get figures from it'd be easy for them to make a guess based on the # of pirated copies being played online. The numbers would be off some (for the aforementioned false positives), but they'd be accurate enough for sales projections after a few years of data...
just going to the console manufacturers. On the PC you keep a lot more of your profits. Console makers generally take 30% off the top. If they could get away with it they'd raise the price for the console version higher. Yes, I realize steam takes a cut, but it's in line with the mark up from a retailer. I've heard from some of the indies it's less.
I think in marketing terms there is a difference between 'shifted' and 'sold'. One means the number of unites sold to retailers, and one means the number of unites bought by consumers. I forget which though.
are the ones that made progress (as in "Progressive") a dirty word. You know, there was a time when a rocket in orbit was a pointless futurist thought experiment. The reason you can post online is because of the satellites those rockets deployed...
if that's the case, the question I have is why? 95% of computer users do not have the skills needed to pirate a video game. You have to download and install bit torrent, go to one of the sites, wade though the viruses and dead files, download & burn the game, install the game, open and read the install how to (which often has to be opened manually in a text editor), and follow the instructions.
Someone who can do all that is a very advanced computer users (don't laugh, I'm talking about the aggregate whole of all users). Assuming that Ubisoft's figures are correct, the only people left playing PC games are highly advanced users. If we assume this is true, then I want to ask why. Two possibilities are:
1. The technical barrier to entry for PC gaming is too high. If we assume that to play PC games you need to install a new graphics card (not an unreasonable assumption: most games come with an Intel Graphics adapter that can barely run WoW) then this could be true.
2. All non-Technical PC gamers have jumped ship to consoles or MMORPGs (the WoW effect).
Regarding # 1, there are still millions of PCs being sold with entry level ATI & nVidia graphics, which is more than enough to play games. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but the state of PC graphics has been stalled by console porting. Regarding # 2, well, there's something to that. But I would argue it's the job of Ubisoft's PC marketing team to make these people want to play games, and they're not doing a very good job. Note that I'm not talking about the game studios themselves, but the marketers. The key to marketing is to make people want to do something they didn't want to do before. Not necessarily something they'd never do, but something they would be disposed to doing given the proper message / incentives.
I guess what it sounds like to me is this: Ubisoft is just throwing up their hands and giving up.
If 95% of their customers are pirating the game, something is very, very wrong with their marketing. Pirating games isn't as easy as that for a regular user. The question I have then is: is there anyone playing games on PC that isn't an advanced user? It's true that most PCs come with Intel Graphics, which won't play these games. Someone that can install a graphics card can probably pirate a game. But that said there are plenty of gaming rigs for under $400 (which isn't much more than a game console these days). Plus there's tonnes of WOW players that paid for graphics upgrades, and have dropped the WOW habit. These guys aren't going to be pirating anything. I guess you could say it's a tough market because they don't want to play games right now, but really it's the job of sales and marketing to make them want to:).
HP seems to be doing a lot worse since the MBAs took over. Google, OTOH, is doing great and being run by engineers. Also, the point of the article is not that MBAs don't maximize profits, it's that MBAs are gutting America's business infrastructure; and will leave a wasteland in their wake.
A good example of the worst excesses is the pulp fiction industry. Ever wonder what happened to it? Basically, there was just one company that was distributing all the the books, and that company had accumulated a ton of undervalued real-estate over the years. Somebody noticed that, bought the company, and liquidated it. The publishers lost their distributed, and couldn't survive long enough to find another one (this was the 1970s, and setting up a distributor wasn't as easy as today). So we lose out on generations of good sci-fi and it becomes harder for kids to start reading.
And I mean the whole thing.. Seriously, this pisses me off. I had to read through 20 paragraphs decrying the insanity bureaucrats before I found the reason why:
He said: “The EU is saying that this does not reduce the risk of dehydration and that is correct.
“This claim is trying to imply that there is something special about bottled water which is not a reasonable claim.”
Basically, they did say: Water doesn't prevent dehydration. They said: You can't claim bottled water is better at preventing dehydration than tap water, and you're claim implies that.
You're right, I did leave out one distinction: you have to be able to TRANSFER ownership. Then it's property. You can't transfer ownership of a service, because it's a skill.
It's harder to boycott than you think. If it gets bad enough Coke just changes their name. Yeah, Coke isn't going to do that, but their marketing makes sure it never gets that bad. Look at Union Carbide & the Bhupal disaster. All they had to do was dissolve the corporation in a buyout and there were no real consequences.
You can't keep you enemies smaller & weaker. That's not how it works. Power naturally tends to gather into the hands of a few lucky individuals. And you're wrong about corporate power. Look at the bank buyouts. 90% of the electorate was against them, but they went through anyway. Corporations are already more powerful than the gov't. Look at AT&T. We broke them up, and 20 years of mergers later they're bigger and more powerful than before. That's how it works. What state gov't can possible stand against AT&T, or Goldman Sachs? You're being divided and conquered. You're losing, whether you like it or not...
By someone that's never written anything more complex than an Excel Macro. Programming is hard. I mean that. I've written some applications myself, and making it reliable (which is kinda the point for something like this) and useful is not that simple. $200k for a professionally built application that runs on reliable on 3 platforms isn't that much. In programming, everything is always harder than you thought it was going to be.
The tanks won. In the end, the people were oppressed, and nothing changed. Also, you're making the mistake that our master and rulers didn't learn from Vietnam. It wasn't photos of protestors being gunned down that changed public sentiment; it was the pictures of body bags and caskets coming home. And being black in southern America still sucks.
The OWS protestors were sent a message: Go ahead and play around as much as you want, but don't forget; as soon as there's any chance of you changing the narrative our goons'll clear you away, and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.
I guess it just goes back to the old phrase, 'if it quacks like a duck'. I've become very practical minded these last few years. Ideals piss me off. People ignore the way things really happen when they don't mesh with their ideals. However else we want the world to be, copyrights are just as much a salable asset as land. Hell, if Apple computer was sold today, wouldn't their copyrights be a big part of their value.
Basically I'm a socialist. I got this way because I saw how much power large corporations wield, and I realized the only thing that had any hope of standing up to an international corporation was a strong centralized government. This is where my hatred of ideals comes into play. People are terrified of strong central governments. Their ideals tell them that strong central gov'ts are bad. But from a practical stand point, what the hell difference does it make if I'm being oppressed by my gov't or if I'm being oppressed by a corporation. Do you think the union reps murdered by Coke somehow care that they were killed out of profit motive instead of broad political ideals? And honestly, if you strip away the rhetoric ever single dictatorship that's ever been has always been about money. Ghaddafi wasn't ousted because he was brutal (he was, but that's a coincidence). He was ousted because he kept too much of the oil profits for himself. Slavery in Southern America? It had nothing to do with that State's rights clap trap, and everything to do with wealthy slave owners with a lot of money invested in slaves and a desire to use the slaves as a social buffer to keep poor white people in their place. I guess the point is, at least with the gov't I've got a fighting chance.
If you can sell it, it's property. You can sell copyright, so it's property. You own what you can sell. You can disagree over whether it's a valid property right, whether it's good for society. But if you can sell it, it's a property right.
or does anyone else find it frustrating that/.ers are in favor of unlimited property rights except when they go digital? Seriously. If you just suggest that maybe, just maybe, that we as a society shouldn't allow Apple Computer to sit on 85 billion dollars then you're drowned out in a chorus of "It's THEIR money, let them spend it however they want!". But make it digital, and you've got the same people decrying the evil of buying the White Album for the 15th time.
I guess what I'm ticked off about is, I'm watching our civilization regress to pre-Renaissance levels of wealth inequality and all anybody cares about is the Beatles...
It never was. That's just a convenient lie to get the poor to take it. Note that I said the POOR, not the rich. The rich already mostly support it, because if they let things get too bad you end up with social upheaval that isn't good for anybody. Mind you, they want just enough to prevent that, but the point is, it's a welfare program (and a good one). Ayn Rand died penniless on Medicare & Social security you know? A friend of hers had to convince her to accept it so she wouldn't die like a dog in the streets. This is the kind of thing we're up against. People who actively campaign against their own self interests for the interests of a wealthy 1%:(....
How Gods good name is a CS Major suppose to compete with India & China? If you're that smart, why not just get a nice Math Major (they're practically the same thing anyway) and go off and do your own thing w/o the added stress?
The 'We' is society. Society decides how it's resources are spent. We make those decisions when we allowed Apple to accumulate that war chest. Once again you're unable to see past the notion of 'property rights' and look at the big picture of how the mechanics of our civilization function, and whether we want them to work that way or not.
The correct response is to tax the company to diminish the war chest, weakening them while strengthening society at large. Nice baiting though with the iZombie, but you'll have to work on subtlety if you want to get into pseudo-trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but you add a bunch of overhead to get back to text.
that had to google "inflection point"? From a marketing standpoint it might be good to have a CEO who isn't an engineer :P.
I built it on a generic *nix, and the only thing I had to change when I wanted it to work on OSX was the binaries that make the mp3s.
it's easy, except for the OS software licenses...
Is Games for Windows Live actually required? My steam account made me create a local profile for the last Batman game, but it was local to my computer. There was no connection to Microsoft's computers. It was actually kinda annoying because it took a few moments for me to figure out why I couldn't play Street Fighter 4 online even though I was signed into GFWL, and then get signed up for an online profile.
For what it's worth, GFWL does an awesome job matching me up with players on SF4. The service does have some merits. Also steam launches & logs in automatically when I start a game. The only thing that's annoying is the Rock star log in. Yeah, that's nuts. They should just use the Microsoft GFWL API & Login for Pete's sake. There's really no reason not to at that point. Burnout Paradise did the same thing and it was annoying there too.
I was serious. Look at the reasons for the Fukushima disaster. The reactor design was known to be at risk, and there were (expensive) safety measures that could have been put in place a decade ago. The company didn't want to spend the money. So they CEO cries a little on camera, and goes back to his millions. No real consequences. No harm, no foul. To him anyway.
Now, if we could throw the ones responsible in jail for the rest of their lives, that'd be fine. But that's not how it works in the Real World. These people belong to the ruling class, and you don't shed noble blood.
as long as it's the Gov't running the plants. I don't trust private business to invest the kinds of money needed to maintain and improve safety; the profit motive is too strong and always looking for 'efficiency', e.g. corners to cut. Take a look at privately run dialysis clinics vs the gov't run ones. The Gov't run clinics have much lower rates of mortality, and the studies show it's because they don't cut corners by reusing supplies.
that the pirated copies generate support costs that are hard to distinguish from legitimate customers. If someone emails you for support it can be hard to tell their fraudulent. I've read several of the indie guys complaining that they're servers & support forums get hammered by people they know pirated the game, but that it's not technically feasible to filter them out without lots & lots of false positives (which generate really nasty support calls).
As for the 95% figure, it's probably an exaggeration, but if you're wondering where they get figures from it'd be easy for them to make a guess based on the # of pirated copies being played online. The numbers would be off some (for the aforementioned false positives), but they'd be accurate enough for sales projections after a few years of data...
just going to the console manufacturers. On the PC you keep a lot more of your profits. Console makers generally take 30% off the top. If they could get away with it they'd raise the price for the console version higher. Yes, I realize steam takes a cut, but it's in line with the mark up from a retailer. I've heard from some of the indies it's less.
I think in marketing terms there is a difference between 'shifted' and 'sold'. One means the number of unites sold to retailers, and one means the number of unites bought by consumers. I forget which though.
are the ones that made progress (as in "Progressive") a dirty word. You know, there was a time when a rocket in orbit was a pointless futurist thought experiment. The reason you can post online is because of the satellites those rockets deployed...
if that's the case, the question I have is why? 95% of computer users do not have the skills needed to pirate a video game. You have to download and install bit torrent, go to one of the sites, wade though the viruses and dead files, download & burn the game, install the game, open and read the install how to (which often has to be opened manually in a text editor), and follow the instructions.
Someone who can do all that is a very advanced computer users (don't laugh, I'm talking about the aggregate whole of all users). Assuming that Ubisoft's figures are correct, the only people left playing PC games are highly advanced users. If we assume this is true, then I want to ask why. Two possibilities are:
1. The technical barrier to entry for PC gaming is too high. If we assume that to play PC games you need to install a new graphics card (not an unreasonable assumption: most games come with an Intel Graphics adapter that can barely run WoW) then this could be true.
2. All non-Technical PC gamers have jumped ship to consoles or MMORPGs (the WoW effect).
Regarding # 1, there are still millions of PCs being sold with entry level ATI & nVidia graphics, which is more than enough to play games. That wasn't true 10 years ago, but the state of PC graphics has been stalled by console porting. Regarding # 2, well, there's something to that. But I would argue it's the job of Ubisoft's PC marketing team to make these people want to play games, and they're not doing a very good job. Note that I'm not talking about the game studios themselves, but the marketers. The key to marketing is to make people want to do something they didn't want to do before. Not necessarily something they'd never do, but something they would be disposed to doing given the proper message / incentives.
I guess what it sounds like to me is this: Ubisoft is just throwing up their hands and giving up.
If 95% of their customers are pirating the game, something is very, very wrong with their marketing. Pirating games isn't as easy as that for a regular user. The question I have then is: is there anyone playing games on PC that isn't an advanced user? It's true that most PCs come with Intel Graphics, which won't play these games. Someone that can install a graphics card can probably pirate a game. But that said there are plenty of gaming rigs for under $400 (which isn't much more than a game console these days). Plus there's tonnes of WOW players that paid for graphics upgrades, and have dropped the WOW habit. These guys aren't going to be pirating anything. I guess you could say it's a tough market because they don't want to play games right now, but really it's the job of sales and marketing to make them want to :).
HP seems to be doing a lot worse since the MBAs took over. Google, OTOH, is doing great and being run by engineers. Also, the point of the article is not that MBAs don't maximize profits, it's that MBAs are gutting America's business infrastructure; and will leave a wasteland in their wake.
A good example of the worst excesses is the pulp fiction industry. Ever wonder what happened to it? Basically, there was just one company that was distributing all the the books, and that company had accumulated a ton of undervalued real-estate over the years. Somebody noticed that, bought the company, and liquidated it. The publishers lost their distributed, and couldn't survive long enough to find another one (this was the 1970s, and setting up a distributor wasn't as easy as today). So we lose out on generations of good sci-fi and it becomes harder for kids to start reading.
Basically, they did say: Water doesn't prevent dehydration. They said: You can't claim bottled water is better at preventing dehydration than tap water, and you're claim implies that.
You're right, I did leave out one distinction: you have to be able to TRANSFER ownership. Then it's property. You can't transfer ownership of a service, because it's a skill.
It's harder to boycott than you think. If it gets bad enough Coke just changes their name. Yeah, Coke isn't going to do that, but their marketing makes sure it never gets that bad. Look at Union Carbide & the Bhupal disaster. All they had to do was dissolve the corporation in a buyout and there were no real consequences.
You can't keep you enemies smaller & weaker. That's not how it works. Power naturally tends to gather into the hands of a few lucky individuals. And you're wrong about corporate power. Look at the bank buyouts. 90% of the electorate was against them, but they went through anyway. Corporations are already more powerful than the gov't. Look at AT&T. We broke them up, and 20 years of mergers later they're bigger and more powerful than before. That's how it works. What state gov't can possible stand against AT&T, or Goldman Sachs? You're being divided and conquered. You're losing, whether you like it or not...
By someone that's never written anything more complex than an Excel Macro. Programming is hard. I mean that. I've written some applications myself, and making it reliable (which is kinda the point for something like this) and useful is not that simple. $200k for a professionally built application that runs on reliable on 3 platforms isn't that much. In programming, everything is always harder than you thought it was going to be.
The tanks won. In the end, the people were oppressed, and nothing changed. Also, you're making the mistake that our master and rulers didn't learn from Vietnam. It wasn't photos of protestors being gunned down that changed public sentiment; it was the pictures of body bags and caskets coming home. And being black in southern America still sucks.
The OWS protestors were sent a message: Go ahead and play around as much as you want, but don't forget; as soon as there's any chance of you changing the narrative our goons'll clear you away, and there's nothing you or anyone can do about it.
I guess it just goes back to the old phrase, 'if it quacks like a duck'. I've become very practical minded these last few years. Ideals piss me off. People ignore the way things really happen when they don't mesh with their ideals. However else we want the world to be, copyrights are just as much a salable asset as land. Hell, if Apple computer was sold today, wouldn't their copyrights be a big part of their value.
Basically I'm a socialist. I got this way because I saw how much power large corporations wield, and I realized the only thing that had any hope of standing up to an international corporation was a strong centralized government. This is where my hatred of ideals comes into play. People are terrified of strong central governments. Their ideals tell them that strong central gov'ts are bad. But from a practical stand point, what the hell difference does it make if I'm being oppressed by my gov't or if I'm being oppressed by a corporation. Do you think the union reps murdered by Coke somehow care that they were killed out of profit motive instead of broad political ideals? And honestly, if you strip away the rhetoric ever single dictatorship that's ever been has always been about money. Ghaddafi wasn't ousted because he was brutal (he was, but that's a coincidence). He was ousted because he kept too much of the oil profits for himself. Slavery in Southern America? It had nothing to do with that State's rights clap trap, and everything to do with wealthy slave owners with a lot of money invested in slaves and a desire to use the slaves as a social buffer to keep poor white people in their place. I guess the point is, at least with the gov't I've got a fighting chance.
If you can sell it, it's property. You can sell copyright, so it's property. You own what you can sell. You can disagree over whether it's a valid property right, whether it's good for society. But if you can sell it, it's a property right.
or does anyone else find it frustrating that /.ers are in favor of unlimited property rights except when they go digital? Seriously. If you just suggest that maybe, just maybe, that we as a society shouldn't allow Apple Computer to sit on 85 billion dollars then you're drowned out in a chorus of "It's THEIR money, let them spend it however they want!". But make it digital, and you've got the same people decrying the evil of buying the White Album for the 15th time.
I guess what I'm ticked off about is, I'm watching our civilization regress to pre-Renaissance levels of wealth inequality and all anybody cares about is the Beatles...
It never was. That's just a convenient lie to get the poor to take it. Note that I said the POOR, not the rich. The rich already mostly support it, because if they let things get too bad you end up with social upheaval that isn't good for anybody. Mind you, they want just enough to prevent that, but the point is, it's a welfare program (and a good one). Ayn Rand died penniless on Medicare & Social security you know? A friend of hers had to convince her to accept it so she wouldn't die like a dog in the streets. This is the kind of thing we're up against. People who actively campaign against their own self interests for the interests of a wealthy 1% :(. ...
How Gods good name is a CS Major suppose to compete with India & China? If you're that smart, why not just get a nice Math Major (they're practically the same thing anyway) and go off and do your own thing w/o the added stress?
The 'We' is society. Society decides how it's resources are spent. We make those decisions when we allowed Apple to accumulate that war chest. Once again you're unable to see past the notion of 'property rights' and look at the big picture of how the mechanics of our civilization function, and whether we want them to work that way or not.
The correct response is to tax the company to diminish the war chest, weakening them while strengthening society at large. Nice baiting though with the iZombie, but you'll have to work on subtlety if you want to get into pseudo-trolling.