Not necessarily. One of the reasons the US economy has boomed and others (Mexico, say) haven't, is because of the strong middle class in the US. The North, where slavery was never a major factor in the economy, drove the economic boom of the 19th century (and the nascent middle class and urbanization were all factors in that economic boom), while the slave owning South was mired in a stagnant agrarian (sp?) economy that wasn't growing at nearly the rate of that in the North.
Cribbing liberally from "bonecrusher's" post on this topic at metafilter , According to many economists, slave-owning is an example of "rent" "a market distortion that reduces the overall productive capacity of the economy. A functioning labor market should do a better job of directing labor to where it is most productive than guys with whips and dogs." (previous text in quotes is by bonecrusher, who explained it much more concisely than I could).
Basically, when you have oligarchs or slave-owners running things, you may end up with a situation which is better for them, personally, but it hurts the economy overall. In the slave-owning scenario, it hurts the slaves most of all (duh!), but it also wrecks things for what would be the middle class, if the oligarchs weren't hogging everything for themselves. So a few people are better off, but the vast majority are either totally fscked, or partially fscked. So, slave owners totally ruined the South's economy and made it unable to grow well.
Whether or not the US profited by exploiting other people and countries is beyond the scope of this post, which is just about how retarded slavery is from an economic standpoint (to say *nothing* of how retarded it is from a moral, social, or ethical standpoint!).
I think if you're doing it for a living -- if you don't have a day job -- it's not considered "indie." If you're doing it indie, and you have a big hit, and then you quit your day job, well, then you still have your indie cred, for a few months I guess...
Gates was a programming genious. Have you ever seen any of his stuff, that he did himself? He wrote the OS and included apps (including MS BASIC) for the Tandy Model 100, one of the first laptops. Apparently that was the last project he personally did before he just moved into management full time, but it is one of the most efficient and elegant systems ever. It's fantastic.
Some more on Gate's + Allen's original BASIC is preserved here . I recommend finding the Gates interview in Programmers at Work too. Oh hey, there's copy on the same page! Gates is really pretty amazing. I'd rather have Steve Jobs market my project, though...
I think their endowment is $52B; they haven't given that away. But, they did kick down $15M for the computer history musuem , so they're pretty much cool forever in my book.
That's a good point, obviously different airports seem to have different procedures (esp. whether or not they want to xray your shoes), but I definitely flew back and forth to LA many times with an expired ID. I never tried it with NO ID, but they told me it was the same thing.
The same reasonable reading could include this right for rich dudes named Mr. Southwest: "I have a right to start an airline and not let any anyone fly on it unless they show ID."
Seriously, if you show up at an airport, without your wallet, and without trying to get a situation that enables you to file a lawsuit, you will get on the plane. Do you think people who lose their wallets on vacation have to just stay where they went and start new lives? It's only people are being pricks who they won't let on the plane.
1) Show up at airport without ID (or with expired ID -- it's all the same to them)
2) Do the normal secondary security check, that they may randomly select you for anyway
3) Get on plane
4) Fly to destination
5) STFU
I did this for months because I had an expired license. It was no big deal at all. I appreciate the guy trying to make a point, but what he was actually doing was protesting the fact that he had to go through extra security to travel without ID. This just doesn't rise to the level of something we need think worry about.
Anecdotally, from game development, I can confirm this. After about 10 hours of straight work, productivity drops off dramatically, although the performer's perception of productivity doesn't drop off until maybe 14-16 hours in. Obviously there are exceptions (such as when you're really 'in the zone' on something, or have a Eureka! moment 11 hours in or something), but generally that seems to be the case.
It's a private show, run by an industry association that can form its own rules. Given that the industry association is trying to improve the image for games, banning booth babes is entirely within its rights. If you don't like it, don't exhibit, or don't attend. So what's your problem with it?
E3 is full of buff dudes in loin clothes. It's just that no one looks at them, because they're dudes, and thus, not attractive to the bulk of the E3 audience.
For sure, but the point I was trying to make is that the organization is calling for consumers not to buy the game, and stores not to stock it, but not for the government to ban it.
What games like this may miss is that there may be reasons to work at Kinkos or Starbucks other than that is the best job you could get. You may not be into having a career track job. Maybe you're an artist or a writer and want something that can pay the bills (more or less), gives you no mental stress when you're not on the clock, and may have fringe benefits (health care and coffee at Starbucks, and free copies for your fanzine/bandfliers/whatever at Kinkos).
Maybe things were different in my neighborhood, but we would often stage elaborate, drawn-out, death sequences... ideally including falling from a tree if a pile of leaves were available. Of course, we also had the "other guy" rule (as in "right now I'm a different guy, shoot me," or "you be another guy for a second so I can shoot you."), so we weren't really killing each other...
That all aside, the group seems to be calling for a BOYCOTT of the game, not a BAN on the game, which are two very different things. I think the story headline should be revised.
Were there really people who were smart enough to be interested in slashdot, but too stupid to figure out the section concept? Anyway, they look like little ads to me, but they're cool I guess.
No single element of Halo stands out (I'm talking Halo 1 here, not Halo 2), but EVERY single element of Halo is impecably tuned, from control to story to graphics to physics to multiplayer to the interface to the ground textures, etc. So it becomes a sublime experience not because it innovates in any one area (it doesn't), but because it's essentially perfect in many different areas simultaniously.
Ahh. I'm an idiot. Sorry. Yeah, I've read a lot about heavy use of anti-bacterials in hospitals, etc. breeding super bugs, but since those same articles always say "just washing your hands with soap regularly is the best thing to do," I was wondering if someone had actually come up with some "omfg, don't wash your hands!" type research!
I don't know about obessive compulsives who wash their hands 60 times a day, but washing your hands regularly (after using the bathroom, before eating) seems to be the best possible way to avoid getting a standard illness (colds, flus).
Do you have a source for your contention that people who wash their hands really frequenly have resistant bacteria?
Before the inevitable crush of people pointing out the difference between too and to, let me just say that slashdot story lenths are perfect. Enough so you get the jist, but don't need to click if you aren't more interested. It's probably one of the best features of the site, and why I come back. (other than the flame wars.)
Why you can have EDGE in the UK, but not a version of EDGE in America
In the US, great issues of great magazines, with great covers, sell about 30% of the issues they put on the newstand. So, if you want to sell 30 magazines, you have to print 100. This is not profitable. So magazines give away subscriptions (you know when they offer you 12 issues for $12 or even $20? That's not profitable either). So once you sell a bunch of magazines, at a loss, and convert some of those newsstand sales to subscriptions (at a loss), you can go to advertisers and say "golly, put an ad in our magazine and 200,000 people will see it!" And if you can convince them, that's where the profit comes from. To get your magazine all across the tens of thousands of newstands in America costs a lot of money.
In the UK, in contrast, there is a lot less space and not as many newstands (and not as many people). And there isn't really a magazine subscription culture. So if someone wants a magazine, they go buy it, at one of a managebly finite number of newstands. This enables companies to see, very quickly, exactly how many issues a given magazine will sell per month, and print exactly that many. To sell 30 magazines, you only need to print 32 or 34. This is profitable! Now you don't really *need* ads, and if you don't need ads, you don't need to pump up your circulation to sell ads, so you don't need to give away magazines to subscribers (this eliminates a source of loss). Ads a still great, but they are no longer required.
Now you can have a successful magazine that sells to a small, niche audience. That's why in the UK, there is a successful, monthly, magazine for fans of Vespa motorscooters. That's why, in the UK, with a fifth the population of the US, there are like 20 horse magazines (I recommend Your Horse! and Horse Answers!). And that's why the UK can support a smart videogame magazine that appeals to a small audience. By delivering fantastic production values and design, the magazine also enhances its feel and reputation in other areas.
The problem isn't the size of the market, or that companies are stupid, or that no one wants to do an EDGE clone in the US. The problem is that at teh end of the day, there aren't enough sophisticated, magazine-buying game fans in the US to support a magazine like EDGE, or even like an Entertainment Weekly of games. Yet.
As for edit pages, a magazine has a minimum book size (say 96 pages). It also has an idea ad/edit ratio (which is usually like 45% edit, 5% house ads (free ads, ads for other magazines, etc) and 50% ads). If the magazine has only 30 ad pages one month, it may have 66 edit pages (including house ads), but if it gets 45 ads, it will only have 45 edit pages. If it gets 60 pages of ads, they may need to increase the size of the magazine, to say, 120 pages (60 pages of edit), but they'd probably try to make the magazine 108 pages (48 pages of edit) and tell the edit team they were getting an "extra" 3 pages over the minimum, enabling the company to save having to print an addition 12 pages on non-revenue generating paper. (This always comes down to various factors, including discussion between the publisher, editor, and production manager -- and its not unusual for a magazine to changes sizes many times during its production cycle.)
Disclaimer: I used to edit a videogame magazine, and I currently work at a videogame company (and I didn't RTFA; just commenting on the comments).
You are being far too hard on the 1up guy, and it could come from a lack of understanding. Sure, a game journalist could forgoe the publisher cooperation and call up a game developer directly to talk about something. But its extremely unlikely the developer is going to say ANYTHING unless the contact (if not the content) is approved by the publisher. Doing so could totally screw up the marketing plan -- really hurting your game's sales -- piss off the publisher, and no smart developer wants to do either of those things.
Plus, a lot of developers are afraid of game journalists. Despite the best journalistic intentions, errors sometimes creep in, the writer may not understand the context of a comment, the developers are (almost always) bound by multiple NDAs that cover different things, the developer may have trouble articulating himself -- all these things combine to make many, many developers feel much more comfortable when contact with journalists goes through PR people, at the publisher.
This comment doesn't go any way towards addressing the merits of the original article, just wanted to point out that it isn't like political reporting: in large part, journalists do require publisher cooperation to get good access to developers.
Having now read the article, I can further say that once a publisher cooperates in getting access to the team, there's also little a game journalist can do if the team blows it by not doing a good job answering the questions! That's irresponsible to the marketing effort for the game and disrepectful to readers and fans.
Slashdot Mirror
Cribbing liberally from "bonecrusher's" post on this topic at metafilter , According to many economists, slave-owning is an example of "rent" "a market distortion that reduces the overall productive capacity of the economy. A functioning labor market should do a better job of directing labor to where it is most productive than guys with whips and dogs." (previous text in quotes is by bonecrusher, who explained it much more concisely than I could).
Basically, when you have oligarchs or slave-owners running things, you may end up with a situation which is better for them, personally, but it hurts the economy overall. In the slave-owning scenario, it hurts the slaves most of all (duh!), but it also wrecks things for what would be the middle class, if the oligarchs weren't hogging everything for themselves. So a few people are better off, but the vast majority are either totally fscked, or partially fscked. So, slave owners totally ruined the South's economy and made it unable to grow well.
Whether or not the US profited by exploiting other people and countries is beyond the scope of this post, which is just about how retarded slavery is from an economic standpoint (to say *nothing* of how retarded it is from a moral, social, or ethical standpoint!).
If you're trying to say it is, replace the i with an apostrophe. Otherwise, no apostrophe. THIS IS AN EASY RULE. My head also asplode.
I think if you're doing it for a living -- if you don't have a day job -- it's not considered "indie." If you're doing it indie, and you have a big hit, and then you quit your day job, well, then you still have your indie cred, for a few months I guess...
Some more on Gate's + Allen's original BASIC is preserved here . I recommend finding the Gates interview in Programmers at Work too. Oh hey, there's copy on the same page! Gates is really pretty amazing. I'd rather have Steve Jobs market my project, though...
I think their endowment is $52B; they haven't given that away. But, they did kick down $15M for the computer history musuem , so they're pretty much cool forever in my book.
That's a good point, obviously different airports seem to have different procedures (esp. whether or not they want to xray your shoes), but I definitely flew back and forth to LA many times with an expired ID. I never tried it with NO ID, but they told me it was the same thing.
The same reasonable reading could include this right for rich dudes named Mr. Southwest: "I have a right to start an airline and not let any anyone fly on it unless they show ID."
Seriously, if you show up at an airport, without your wallet, and without trying to get a situation that enables you to file a lawsuit, you will get on the plane. Do you think people who lose their wallets on vacation have to just stay where they went and start new lives? It's only people are being pricks who they won't let on the plane.
1) Show up at airport without ID (or with expired ID -- it's all the same to them)
2) Do the normal secondary security check, that they may randomly select you for anyway
3) Get on plane
4) Fly to destination
5) STFU
I did this for months because I had an expired license. It was no big deal at all. I appreciate the guy trying to make a point, but what he was actually doing was protesting the fact that he had to go through extra security to travel without ID. This just doesn't rise to the level of something we need think worry about.
Anecdotally, from game development, I can confirm this. After about 10 hours of straight work, productivity drops off dramatically, although the performer's perception of productivity doesn't drop off until maybe 14-16 hours in. Obviously there are exceptions (such as when you're really 'in the zone' on something, or have a Eureka! moment 11 hours in or something), but generally that seems to be the case.
How does Texas rank in testing scores? There is not necessarily a direct relationship between how much you spend, and how well you educate.
It's a private show, run by an industry association that can form its own rules. Given that the industry association is trying to improve the image for games, banning booth babes is entirely within its rights. If you don't like it, don't exhibit, or don't attend. So what's your problem with it?
E3 is full of buff dudes in loin clothes. It's just that no one looks at them, because they're dudes, and thus, not attractive to the bulk of the E3 audience.
For sure, but the point I was trying to make is that the organization is calling for consumers not to buy the game, and stores not to stock it, but not for the government to ban it.
That all aside, the group seems to be calling for a BOYCOTT of the game, not a BAN on the game, which are two very different things. I think the story headline should be revised.
Were there really people who were smart enough to be interested in slashdot, but too stupid to figure out the section concept? Anyway, they look like little ads to me, but they're cool I guess.
Halo 2 was more uneven, but still pretty great.
Ahh. I'm an idiot. Sorry. Yeah, I've read a lot about heavy use of anti-bacterials in hospitals, etc. breeding super bugs, but since those same articles always say "just washing your hands with soap regularly is the best thing to do," I was wondering if someone had actually come up with some "omfg, don't wash your hands!" type research!
Do you have a source for your contention that people who wash their hands really frequenly have resistant bacteria?
Before the inevitable crush of people pointing out the difference between too and to, let me just say that slashdot story lenths are perfect. Enough so you get the jist, but don't need to click if you aren't more interested. It's probably one of the best features of the site, and why I come back. (other than the flame wars.)
In the US, great issues of great magazines, with great covers, sell about 30% of the issues they put on the newstand. So, if you want to sell 30 magazines, you have to print 100. This is not profitable. So magazines give away subscriptions (you know when they offer you 12 issues for $12 or even $20? That's not profitable either). So once you sell a bunch of magazines, at a loss, and convert some of those newsstand sales to subscriptions (at a loss), you can go to advertisers and say "golly, put an ad in our magazine and 200,000 people will see it!" And if you can convince them, that's where the profit comes from. To get your magazine all across the tens of thousands of newstands in America costs a lot of money.
In the UK, in contrast, there is a lot less space and not as many newstands (and not as many people). And there isn't really a magazine subscription culture. So if someone wants a magazine, they go buy it, at one of a managebly finite number of newstands. This enables companies to see, very quickly, exactly how many issues a given magazine will sell per month, and print exactly that many. To sell 30 magazines, you only need to print 32 or 34. This is profitable! Now you don't really *need* ads, and if you don't need ads, you don't need to pump up your circulation to sell ads, so you don't need to give away magazines to subscribers (this eliminates a source of loss). Ads a still great, but they are no longer required.
Now you can have a successful magazine that sells to a small, niche audience. That's why in the UK, there is a successful, monthly, magazine for fans of Vespa motorscooters. That's why, in the UK, with a fifth the population of the US, there are like 20 horse magazines (I recommend Your Horse! and Horse Answers!). And that's why the UK can support a smart videogame magazine that appeals to a small audience. By delivering fantastic production values and design, the magazine also enhances its feel and reputation in other areas.
The problem isn't the size of the market, or that companies are stupid, or that no one wants to do an EDGE clone in the US. The problem is that at teh end of the day, there aren't enough sophisticated, magazine-buying game fans in the US to support a magazine like EDGE, or even like an Entertainment Weekly of games. Yet.
As for edit pages, a magazine has a minimum book size (say 96 pages). It also has an idea ad/edit ratio (which is usually like 45% edit, 5% house ads (free ads, ads for other magazines, etc) and 50% ads). If the magazine has only 30 ad pages one month, it may have 66 edit pages (including house ads), but if it gets 45 ads, it will only have 45 edit pages. If it gets 60 pages of ads, they may need to increase the size of the magazine, to say, 120 pages (60 pages of edit), but they'd probably try to make the magazine 108 pages (48 pages of edit) and tell the edit team they were getting an "extra" 3 pages over the minimum, enabling the company to save having to print an addition 12 pages on non-revenue generating paper. (This always comes down to various factors, including discussion between the publisher, editor, and production manager -- and its not unusual for a magazine to changes sizes many times during its production cycle.)
You are being far too hard on the 1up guy, and it could come from a lack of understanding. Sure, a game journalist could forgoe the publisher cooperation and call up a game developer directly to talk about something. But its extremely unlikely the developer is going to say ANYTHING unless the contact (if not the content) is approved by the publisher. Doing so could totally screw up the marketing plan -- really hurting your game's sales -- piss off the publisher, and no smart developer wants to do either of those things.
Plus, a lot of developers are afraid of game journalists. Despite the best journalistic intentions, errors sometimes creep in, the writer may not understand the context of a comment, the developers are (almost always) bound by multiple NDAs that cover different things, the developer may have trouble articulating himself -- all these things combine to make many, many developers feel much more comfortable when contact with journalists goes through PR people, at the publisher.
This comment doesn't go any way towards addressing the merits of the original article, just wanted to point out that it isn't like political reporting: in large part, journalists do require publisher cooperation to get good access to developers.
Having now read the article, I can further say that once a publisher cooperates in getting access to the team, there's also little a game journalist can do if the team blows it by not doing a good job answering the questions! That's irresponsible to the marketing effort for the game and disrepectful to readers and fans.
1) Confuse people about Gb vs GB
2) Invent second step
3) ???
4) Profit.