How is it a big market? There are a ton of people there, sure, but they make very low wages; and it will be difficult for a true middle class that buys legal versions of software to emerge, ever (where are they going to get *their* cheap consumer goods?). No one wants to "lose China" but there's not a lot of business model there, as far as I can tell.
Many licenses have time limits. So even if it's the exact same game; they still time out. (See AD&D for Intellivision as an example -- same ROM as the good old days, but the IntellivisionLives guys can't release it.) A lot of time the time limits in the original contracts were super long for the time -- 10 years or more -- but uh... yeah... turned out not to be long enough! I say this working for a company that does a lot of Xbox Live Arcade work, so I have some familiarity with the issue.
Well that's really the rub isn't it? Ideally if you release a bad product -- and everyone who releases products of any sort does occaisionally -- and you get nailed, you lick your wounds, try to fix things up, and do better with the next one. If you know your product is not where you want it to be, maybe you don't submit it to reviewers. They can review it if they want, but you're under no obligation to give them a free/pre-release copy to do so.
But if you take a sour-grapes approach "no more products for you, ever!" you come off looking like a massive idiot.
In this case, however, I think the site was asking for the exact same SKU they had bagged on before, and I can see the PR person being like "uh, why? no thanks." That's actually reasonable. But he hung himself with the further correspondance of course.
It's not even research. Anyone with five minutes and a copy of WORD could do the same thing. It doesn't make something that spoofs the system, it makes something that spoofs people who can't read barcodes (that is: everyone). It wouldn't scan correctly and let you get on the plane, it just is a form that adds your name and date to a rip off of the standard "print at home" boarding passes.
This whole story is stupid. The fact that documents can be forged is not news, the fact that some guy made a website for doing it faster is not news, and the fact that security at airports is a giant joke to anyone dedicated to getting stuff past it is not news either.
I put a lot more faith in my fellow passengers' desire to rip a terrorist to pieces with their bare hands on the plane once he or she announces themselves than I do in the ability of the TSA to effectively screen people. And it's not becuase the TSA are all idiots; thay have a tough job that they try to do very quickly -- if they really wanted to screen everything effectively, it would take hours to get through security.
You know what burns me up... The whole reason we switched to CDs from records and cassettes was supposedly the higher fidelity of CD audio. Now we all listen to crappy mp3s that sound like cassette tapes. wtf?
There's a key difference. When they censor sites in China, they're criticized by people who value free speech. When the refuse to censor sites in Australia, they're criticized by people who don't value free speech. Racism is fucked, obviously, but I'd rather let those people spew their bile and have it out in the open for others to refute, than have it fester.
Yeah, I'm not saying I support that study 100%, just that I saw it. I've also seen that swimming burns the most calories, but that people, able to eat an uncontrolled diet, gain weight when swimming versus other forms of exercise (a lot of that may be trading light fat in for heavier muscle). I think the key with swimming is doing it *everyday* personally.
Don't forget Gates of Zendicon, Chips Challenge, Electrocop, Todds Adventures in Slime World, Klax, Warbirds (awesome 8 player bi-plane game)... The list goes on! The Lynx was a sweet machine. I still play mine regularly (ok, not since PSP and DS came out).
I read a study on this a while back, and the problem is the immersion in cold water (pretty much any swimming pool is colder than your body temp, too) forces your body to think "omg, winter!" and slows down your metabolism. So swimming for weight loss is actually less effective than other things (jogging, etc.). (It was a while ago, so no link research time, sorry).
No, you need to read the second part of my post. To continue to win, we need to act smart, and use our giant brains to get smarter. Someone referenced bacteria-resistant microbes. Others mentioned extinction level events, including humanity being retarded towards its own survival (see: death-cult religious fanatics, crazed dictators with nukes), volcanoes, asteroids, etc. These are all challenges we need to overcome, and there will be more.
But I'd argue that we were winning even before the dawn of recorded history (see: humanity figuring out how to survive -- and thrive -- in Europe during the ice ages, agriculture, language, figuring out how to cut parasites out of our friends, etc.), so comments about my personal ability to survive without power don't carry much weight. The industrial age is rad -- I enjoy its fruits -- but that's not why we've won, or the "win condition."
For the record, the last time I was without power for a week was in 1995, when my block was the last to receive pwer after a blackout in San Francisco. It was a pain in the ass (this is in the days before widespread public internet access, remember), especially for my roommate, who was a free-lancer who worked at home and needed his computer to write on, but we survived fine. Cooler + ice = milk and cereal. Candles + books = light and entertainment. We also BBQed a lot. Given that society didn't collapse around us, it was pretty straightforward. As to surviving w/o the benefits of industrial society, I hope to never find out, which is why I conserve like hell!
We're not abnormalities. We were created by the eco-system. Then we gamed the (eco)system and beat it. Think our lack of fur makes us unable to survive ice-ages or cold climates? Fuck you, eco-system, we're going to kill some animals and wear their fur! No wings? Fuck you, eco-system, we're making planes! No gills? Again, fuck you eco-system, we're busy evolving Jacques Cousteau and a crazy machine that lets us breathe underwater! Antibiotics -- win for us. Language -- win for us. Brains filled with the ability to learn -- win for us. Crazy-ass opposable thumbs -- win for us. Neil Armstrong -- win for us.
We're the winners. We rule. As a species, we're at the top of every single food chain on earth, local irregularities notwithstanding (for instance, I would not try to argue this point with a bear, shark or tiger). As long as, as a species, we act smart, we're likely to stay there. That means being responsible, not wrecking things for the next generation, conserving what we have, acting sustainably, and if needed, figuring how to removing unstable elements and memes from our global society (religious fundementalists, dictators with nukes and itchy trigger fingers, etc.). (Oh, and figuring out how to get off this rock long term, so we can beat the sun at its "burn out after a billion years" game too.)
You're free to disagree with me, but I like being on the winning team as a species. I am much happier as a videogame-enjoying human than I would be as an anonymous ferret or weasel or whatever.
People can screw off anywhere, and they can concentrate anywhere, but for some (not all), the impulse to screw off is overridden by presence of co-workers and managers. For others, the ability to concentrate is destroyed by same. A good manager knows who can work well where and when. In my experience, people in the former category will tell you working offsite is impossible, and people in the latter category will make up a bunch of reasons for doing so. So it's not like people are trying to maximize their screw-off potential when they argue this point, it's actually that they argue that what works best for them works best for everyone, which is not necessarily true.
Still, all things being equal, having people near each other so they can kibbutz and talk (not just IM each other w/ questions whne an issue comes up) seems to result in greater overall efficiency over the long term, especially in necessarily collaborative projects, such as game development. IM is great, but actually looking at someone else's monitor, overhearing info over a cube wall (in a good way), getting together in small groups occaisionally to discuss while one guys codes -- those are all valuable things that it is hard to replicate via IM or other PC-to-PC sharing tools.
I've gotten better than expected performance from my Nano 4GB. Flying to Bangkok from LA (~17 hours), I turned it on, turned the backlight off entirely, shuffled, locked (to prevent the temptation to skip songs) and didn't turn it off till we landed. It was sweet. My ears hurt like hell (from the ear-buds -- i was sleeping on them a lot of the time), but the Nano went 17 hours with ease.
Nah, they don't. I mean, they may like to, and they may offer a discount if you get both, but they're happy to sell you just cable. At least Comcast is. My dad and I buy cable and Internet for our "cabin" in nothern michigan for the summer. It's pretty straightforward; easy to turn on, and easy to turn off.
They don't always. I think it's like (I read this long ago) 70% feel they have a relationship before the baby is born, 25% feel they have a relationship once they see the baby, and 5% don';t feel they have a relationship for some time (like up to two weeks) after the baby is born. Some insignificant percentage never develop a relationship. My girlfriend was in the 25% and it totally freaked her out because she thought she was going to be a horrible mother because she didn't love her baby when it was a fetus. Once she saw him, she went totally mommy-core, but I feel compelled to post, because the myth that all women have a magic bond with their fetus can be really damaging to women's self esteem if they don't feel it. My girlfriend still referred to our son as "it" until like the day before he was born, but she's a great mother.
In Laci Peterson's case, she had already NAMED the baby, so clearly she was feeling a relationship! It's also common to name children who are stillborn, and refer to them as children, not fetuses.
Finally, anyone who has had a kid, or more exactly, a pregnant wife/girlfriend knows that Scott Peterson was guilty. No one with a consscience or an ounce of care for his wife goes fishing 3 hours from home, on Christmas Eve, when their wife is 9 months pregnant. No one. Only a total sociopath -- the exact type who would kill his wife -- would even think that was a workable excuse.
What do you think we'd have? Magic underground test detectors? The whole thing about nuclear tests is you can't hide them; they just get picked up on standard siesmographs. Most likely the dude working Sunday at the CIA who the AP called was like "uh, no clue," because the analysts who tell the difference between nukes and earthquakes were at BBQs or something.
I still can't belive this sort of thing happends and they got away with it. it boggles my mind in so many ways.
Um... they didn't get away with it.
I don't know how often this sort of thing happens, but when the cabal announcd what they'd done -- the results of their 'investigation' -- one of the board members (Perkins) blew the whistle and before long, all the major players were indicted for felonies, with their careers in ruins.
I don't actually know the metric/farenheit conversion, but it was packed with people (190,000 over 3 days) and it certainly felt like >80F in the conventional hall.
Seriously, I -- maybe -- have a couple hours every month for adventure games. I'd RATHER get episodic content.
Another advantage for game players (and makers)is this. If someone does a 40 hour game, they gotta pack a lot into that last hour for those players who make it. But a lot of people don't make it that far. They lose out, and the developer did a lot of work for nothing.
Doing several two or three hour episodes, as a game maker, I'd know most of the people who play them will get to see everything, so the player gets more reward, we can pack more exctement up front, and the artists and designers get to know that more people are seeing their hard work.
Finally, it gives the team the option to do a game with (potentially) a more complicated story-line, with multiple arcs and climaxes, than you'd see in just in one game. Each episode can have a story, as part of a larger story arc, like, you know, an EPISODE OF TV, versus having to do every game as one giant story, like a movie or book.
Shamless plug: there's some good discussion of this topic in the current next-gen.biz podcast, on which I am a guest.
I was at TGS and a) it was about 1000 degress inside; b) the PS3s were in tiny plexiglass containers with no visible ventilation; c) it was pre-release software; d) it's probably running on test kits, which aren't notoriously reliable; and e) I was in the sony booth, looking directly at games, for >90 minutes and saw one crash only.
This a) compares favorably with E3, and b) is in line with what you'd expect from beta software, especially since the last bugs you find are the kind of crazy tiny 'soak-test' memory leaks that tend to come out when you play the game constantly for 8 hours w/o rebooting, as you see at TGS.
IMHO, this whole thing is FUD; some analyst who saw a game crash and is trying to justify his trip to Tokyo.
I think the term you're looking at to satisfy #1, #2, and #3 is "interactive fiction." Players of pedantic text adventures may not look down on others, but I assure you, connoisseurs of interactive fiction, of the literary type produced by Adam Cadre , Emily Short , and Zarf , among others, most likely look down on all other "gamers," and are probably scorned in kind by WoW players! And not nobody is selling IF at Wal-Mart...
Slashdot Mirror
How is it a big market? There are a ton of people there, sure, but they make very low wages; and it will be difficult for a true middle class that buys legal versions of software to emerge, ever (where are they going to get *their* cheap consumer goods?). No one wants to "lose China" but there's not a lot of business model there, as far as I can tell.
Many licenses have time limits. So even if it's the exact same game; they still time out. (See AD&D for Intellivision as an example -- same ROM as the good old days, but the IntellivisionLives guys can't release it.) A lot of time the time limits in the original contracts were super long for the time -- 10 years or more -- but uh... yeah... turned out not to be long enough! I say this working for a company that does a lot of Xbox Live Arcade work, so I have some familiarity with the issue.
But if you take a sour-grapes approach "no more products for you, ever!" you come off looking like a massive idiot.
In this case, however, I think the site was asking for the exact same SKU they had bagged on before, and I can see the PR person being like "uh, why? no thanks." That's actually reasonable. But he hung himself with the further correspondance of course.
This whole story is stupid. The fact that documents can be forged is not news, the fact that some guy made a website for doing it faster is not news, and the fact that security at airports is a giant joke to anyone dedicated to getting stuff past it is not news either.
I put a lot more faith in my fellow passengers' desire to rip a terrorist to pieces with their bare hands on the plane once he or she announces themselves than I do in the ability of the TSA to effectively screen people. And it's not becuase the TSA are all idiots; thay have a tough job that they try to do very quickly -- if they really wanted to screen everything effectively, it would take hours to get through security.
You know what burns me up... The whole reason we switched to CDs from records and cassettes was supposedly the higher fidelity of CD audio. Now we all listen to crappy mp3s that sound like cassette tapes. wtf?
There's a key difference. When they censor sites in China, they're criticized by people who value free speech. When the refuse to censor sites in Australia, they're criticized by people who don't value free speech. Racism is fucked, obviously, but I'd rather let those people spew their bile and have it out in the open for others to refute, than have it fester.
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Yeah, I'm not saying I support that study 100%, just that I saw it. I've also seen that swimming burns the most calories, but that people, able to eat an uncontrolled diet, gain weight when swimming versus other forms of exercise (a lot of that may be trading light fat in for heavier muscle). I think the key with swimming is doing it *everyday* personally.
Don't forget Gates of Zendicon, Chips Challenge, Electrocop, Todds Adventures in Slime World, Klax, Warbirds (awesome 8 player bi-plane game)... The list goes on! The Lynx was a sweet machine. I still play mine regularly (ok, not since PSP and DS came out).
I read a study on this a while back, and the problem is the immersion in cold water (pretty much any swimming pool is colder than your body temp, too) forces your body to think "omg, winter!" and slows down your metabolism. So swimming for weight loss is actually less effective than other things (jogging, etc.). (It was a while ago, so no link research time, sorry).
But I'd argue that we were winning even before the dawn of recorded history (see: humanity figuring out how to survive -- and thrive -- in Europe during the ice ages, agriculture, language, figuring out how to cut parasites out of our friends, etc.), so comments about my personal ability to survive without power don't carry much weight. The industrial age is rad -- I enjoy its fruits -- but that's not why we've won, or the "win condition."
For the record, the last time I was without power for a week was in 1995, when my block was the last to receive pwer after a blackout in San Francisco. It was a pain in the ass (this is in the days before widespread public internet access, remember), especially for my roommate, who was a free-lancer who worked at home and needed his computer to write on, but we survived fine. Cooler + ice = milk and cereal. Candles + books = light and entertainment. We also BBQed a lot. Given that society didn't collapse around us, it was pretty straightforward. As to surviving w/o the benefits of industrial society, I hope to never find out, which is why I conserve like hell!
We're the winners. We rule. As a species, we're at the top of every single food chain on earth, local irregularities notwithstanding (for instance, I would not try to argue this point with a bear, shark or tiger). As long as, as a species, we act smart, we're likely to stay there. That means being responsible, not wrecking things for the next generation, conserving what we have, acting sustainably, and if needed, figuring how to removing unstable elements and memes from our global society (religious fundementalists, dictators with nukes and itchy trigger fingers, etc.). (Oh, and figuring out how to get off this rock long term, so we can beat the sun at its "burn out after a billion years" game too.)
You're free to disagree with me, but I like being on the winning team as a species. I am much happier as a videogame-enjoying human than I would be as an anonymous ferret or weasel or whatever.
People can screw off anywhere, and they can concentrate anywhere, but for some (not all), the impulse to screw off is overridden by presence of co-workers and managers. For others, the ability to concentrate is destroyed by same. A good manager knows who can work well where and when. In my experience, people in the former category will tell you working offsite is impossible, and people in the latter category will make up a bunch of reasons for doing so. So it's not like people are trying to maximize their screw-off potential when they argue this point, it's actually that they argue that what works best for them works best for everyone, which is not necessarily true. Still, all things being equal, having people near each other so they can kibbutz and talk (not just IM each other w/ questions whne an issue comes up) seems to result in greater overall efficiency over the long term, especially in necessarily collaborative projects, such as game development. IM is great, but actually looking at someone else's monitor, overhearing info over a cube wall (in a good way), getting together in small groups occaisionally to discuss while one guys codes -- those are all valuable things that it is hard to replicate via IM or other PC-to-PC sharing tools.
I've gotten better than expected performance from my Nano 4GB. Flying to Bangkok from LA (~17 hours), I turned it on, turned the backlight off entirely, shuffled, locked (to prevent the temptation to skip songs) and didn't turn it off till we landed. It was sweet. My ears hurt like hell (from the ear-buds -- i was sleeping on them a lot of the time), but the Nano went 17 hours with ease.
Nah, they don't. I mean, they may like to, and they may offer a discount if you get both, but they're happy to sell you just cable. At least Comcast is. My dad and I buy cable and Internet for our "cabin" in nothern michigan for the summer. It's pretty straightforward; easy to turn on, and easy to turn off.
scrimp now, live comfortably later, or spend now and eat dog food later... the difference is, LATER I can't work if I change my mind.
In Laci Peterson's case, she had already NAMED the baby, so clearly she was feeling a relationship! It's also common to name children who are stillborn, and refer to them as children, not fetuses.
Finally, anyone who has had a kid, or more exactly, a pregnant wife/girlfriend knows that Scott Peterson was guilty. No one with a consscience or an ounce of care for his wife goes fishing 3 hours from home, on Christmas Eve, when their wife is 9 months pregnant. No one. Only a total sociopath -- the exact type who would kill his wife -- would even think that was a workable excuse.
What do you think we'd have? Magic underground test detectors? The whole thing about nuclear tests is you can't hide them; they just get picked up on standard siesmographs. Most likely the dude working Sunday at the CIA who the AP called was like "uh, no clue," because the analysts who tell the difference between nukes and earthquakes were at BBQs or something.
Um... they didn't get away with it.
I don't know how often this sort of thing happens, but when the cabal announcd what they'd done -- the results of their 'investigation' -- one of the board members (Perkins) blew the whistle and before long, all the major players were indicted for felonies, with their careers in ruins.
I don't actually know the metric/farenheit conversion, but it was packed with people (190,000 over 3 days) and it certainly felt like >80F in the conventional hall.
Seriously, I -- maybe -- have a couple hours every month for adventure games. I'd RATHER get episodic content.
Another advantage for game players (and makers)is this. If someone does a 40 hour game, they gotta pack a lot into that last hour for those players who make it. But a lot of people don't make it that far. They lose out, and the developer did a lot of work for nothing.
Doing several two or three hour episodes, as a game maker, I'd know most of the people who play them will get to see everything, so the player gets more reward, we can pack more exctement up front, and the artists and designers get to know that more people are seeing their hard work.
Finally, it gives the team the option to do a game with (potentially) a more complicated story-line, with multiple arcs and climaxes, than you'd see in just in one game. Each episode can have a story, as part of a larger story arc, like, you know, an EPISODE OF TV, versus having to do every game as one giant story, like a movie or book.
Shamless plug: there's some good discussion of this topic in the current next-gen.biz podcast, on which I am a guest.
This a) compares favorably with E3, and b) is in line with what you'd expect from beta software, especially since the last bugs you find are the kind of crazy tiny 'soak-test' memory leaks that tend to come out when you play the game constantly for 8 hours w/o rebooting, as you see at TGS.
IMHO, this whole thing is FUD; some analyst who saw a game crash and is trying to justify his trip to Tokyo.
NORAD does. Check it out.
I think the term you're looking at to satisfy #1, #2, and #3 is "interactive fiction." Players of pedantic text adventures may not look down on others, but I assure you, connoisseurs of interactive fiction, of the literary type produced by Adam Cadre , Emily Short , and Zarf , among others, most likely look down on all other "gamers," and are probably scorned in kind by WoW players! And not nobody is selling IF at Wal-Mart...