How is a demo free content?
That sounds like demos work for you. The entire idea is to not waste the consumers money.
No, the idea is for the company making the console to not have to fund any game development. By requiring every game be "free to play" they dodge the expensive of having to make first party titles. If nothing else you can play their console for free.
I got my Ouya a few weeks ago. I feel sorry for the people that were part of the Kickstarter but haven't gotten theirs. I had a tracking number for weeks but the US Post office delivered it before the tracking number ever was recognized. DHL from Hong Kong is not exactly a good shipping partner. They took the cheap route on shipping and it looks like it really hurt them. Doing order fulfillment from HK was a mistake. They should have bulk shipped them to the US and shipped them out from here.
As for it's value as a game console. It's kind of disappointing. I've yet to actually pay money for any games, since not one of the demo versions were interesting enough. While the Tegra 3 is a decent chip, somehow they have managed to make it have about the same power as an old SNES. Oddly enough Final Fantasy 3 is one of the few name brand titles. A best seller on the SNES.
As as platform for Android development (one of the reasons I got it) it is fairly disappointing. Their "every game has a demo" model pretty much means anyone developing for it is giving them free content. It' is rare that a game will convince me with a great demo. More often than not a demo just gives me enough to know it is not worth buying.
It also has strange issues with it's sleep mode/power on (I almost always have to walk up and press the button on the top). The gamepad feels awful. The box itself is not exactly easy to place in the living room.
It does seems like a good addition to my collection of failed consoles though, joining my Atari Jaguar and 3DO (among others).
Valve has made no promises about any future games. Or even announcements about future games. Just a handful of announcements about the beta Steam and beta TF2. That's it.
And no one at Valve can promise ANYTHING about future development (even Gabe). Every Valve employee is their own boss. Unless people sign up to do the work, the ports won't get done.
Pretty much the whole article is a fluff piece, pushing the concept that hiring a consultant with no specific skills would be a good idea. Zero-gravity thinkers is just another way of promoting the consultant business. They aren't any more likely to contribute creativity and innovation than your employees. The only reason they might be successful is they aren't bogged down with all the extra headaches your employees have to deal with. It's very unlikely your employees have been tasked with being creative and innovating. Most likely they have been asked to perform jobs that have little to do with that. If you want your people to innovate, then you have to make that their job.
The engineers that made the remote with 52 buttons on it were tasked with making a remote. The DVD player had 52 functions, so it's no surprise the remote ends up with that many buttons. If on the other hand the engineers were told to design a remote that was easier to use and was innovative, it's very likely they could. It's not necessary to bring in some random outsider to say the emperor has no clothes. You just have to give your existing employees the freedom to do that.
One day these cheap HDTV tuners might show up. But right now if you want one your going to have a really hard time finding anything. The only thing I could come up with a year ago was a Samsung DTB-H260F which I think I paid $250 for(Amazon now has them for $166). But it did fix the problem of how to get digital channels onto my TV. Course there is no way to control the box from my 1st gen ReplayTV which really makes it more of a novelty piece than anything else. I'm thinking these dirt cheap tuners are just myths, at least for now.
Indexing would be fine and fair use. But that isn't what Google does. It copies wholesale and republishes what it copied (via it's cache feature). While the world+dog may think Google is a great and super useful tool, it doesn't change the fact that it is also is based on the assumption that they can do any damn thing they want with other people's content. But as always, free content is more important than protecting the content's owners rights to commercially exploit it, at least on Slashdot.
While I think some small, niche, indie films would do fine with a big screen, net, and DVD release at the same time, it is not going to be the next big thing. The main reason has to do with the role nationwide movie theater showings have. If you look at it for a minute, by doing a national release you get a level of publicity above and beyond anything you could ever pay for. Every newspaper in the country runs film reviews for new movies that open. Coming Attraction shows promote films. And there are the theater ran ads and plain show listings that customers look at several times a month. This high level of promotion is also over a period of time, which is very effective at driving the interest in something. Even if the consumer doesn't go to the theater when it is released, when that DVD shows up in stores he has already been exposed to it. Add in the paid promotional events and you end up with (ideally) a profitable big screen run, followed by a profitable DVD run -- not to mention pay-per-view, paid cable, cable, and finally broadcast TV. All of these events launch off that wide scale roll out, it provides a vast amount of unpurchasable publicity.
If you change the model and ship the film just once in several formats, your faced with having to sell the DVD and net versions without all that exposure over the nationwide release. And if the movie theater owners don't keep your movie around (because everyone is just buying the DVD) or they don't buy local newspaper/net ads, you may get less publicity than you might have if you had stuck to the normal schedule. Even if the publicity is identical and no one scales back because it is on DVD too, you still will lose the timed exposure. Like cooking by turning up the heat really high, it may not be as good a meal even if it is cooked the same amount.
The comic book industry has this same problem. Everyone wants to buy the trade paperbacks and skip the monthly issues. Which is fine, but it means giving up six months of exposure and advertising. Since it is going to take six months to make the six issues of the trade paperback anyway, if the monthly floppies can sell well enough to warrant shipping them, them being on shelves is more than worth having. Skipping right to the trade means giving up a whole lot of promotion.
For smaller indie films however it may make a lot of sense. They don't get as much out of the big screen roll out (usually because they only hit limited cities and play on screens that don't do much advertising). A combination DVD and big screen release might actually make the film more money, since mail order DVD's can cover the whole country. But once you cross over to the major studio film, I think the total revenue isn't going to be as much.
You have now invented a problem you didn't have (designing the ultimate developer environment) and are wasting your time. Solve the problem of writing code by writing code. As you write code, new problems will come up, solve those. Your chair, your desk, your keyboard, your mouse, your computer, your OS, your editor, your IDE -- none of these matter. Don't make problems you don't need to solve.
Of course none of this matters because you have already failed. Those who can, do. Those who can't, read lots reviews and obsess about the gear.
It wasn't clear to me on a first reading but the article is all about cookies being used by ad companies. It doesn't say that, but only these spyware identified cookies are seeing deletion rates as high as they quote.
This article is really aimed at helping advertising networks that have been labeled as spyware and are being regularly deleted by the various anti-spyware apps. What they talk about doesn't really apply on a site level, where the deletion of cookies isn't so common.
Of course the banner ads can't easily do more reliable user authentication. So they are totally out of luck basically. In which case combining a few different ways to try and count users might make sense. But in the long run if people don't like and don't want their advertising, they are going to lose. It doesn't matter how they count, if enough users block them and their sites they will go out of business.
They make some silly assumptions that I don't think work with users using proxy agents, but in the end it still boils down to the existence of cookies. Which would be ok, if the problem they are trying to solve wasn't that users are deleting and not storing cookies at all. They do mention using Flash to store cookies, which I suspect will have to be the next area users will have to start cleaning up. But just because cookies don't overlap in time and the IP address is the same doesn't mean it's the same person. A bunch of users that use the same browser and share an IP address that always delete their cookies with this system will look like one user. Vastly under counting. Which I don't think web sites are interested in. Vast over counting is profitable. Under counting, not so much.
In the end there is no way they can even mostly recognize repeat web site visitors if the VISITOR DOESN'T WANT THEM TO.
The big problem is stated at the top of the article:
"We need to identify unique users on the web. It's fundamental. We need to know how many people visit, what they read, for how long, how often they return, and at what frequency. These are the 'atoms' of our metrics. Without this knowledge we really can't do much."
If knowing who unique users are is that important they need to create a reason for the user to correctly identify themselves. Some form of incentive that makes it worth giving up an identification for.
1. Had no clue about what weapons and forces Iraq really had. 2. Still can't find Waldo. 3. No clue where Bin Laden is. 4. No idea in advance about 9/11.
They might have acres of Vic-20's maybe. Sometimes I think they pay people to flood forums and what not talking about their amazing powers. Because the record clearly shows if they actually are good at doing anything it has nothing to do with what everyone claims they are amazing at.
Looks like up until Jan 2002 he was actually linking copies of all the shows as ASF and AVI files. It's hard to tell if he hosted any of them, but the site does claim some of them came from the site itself.
In Jan 2002 the site "changed" into a fan site/info site.
The key reason Hollywood does release movies the way they do is that it maximizes their advertising potential. If you shipped the DVD the same day as the theater release, then you miss out on the 3 months it was in theaters getting reviews and word of mouth. You also don't get to do the press junket twice. So the entertainment magazines and TV shows don't get to cover you over and over again.
The difference between a small budget indy film and a blockbuster is more the way it is sold and promoted. You need those long intervals to maximize your advertising exposure. It's the same reason direct to video doesn't do as well as a small theater release followed by a large video roll out. Having it play in a local theater and having people see it on "what's playing" lists all lend promotion to the film. That level of promotion over a period of time does make for more product awareness and higher sales. The staged roll out allows you to better promote at each stage (you can't have the stars in every country promoting the movie on local shows if it opens the same day everywhere).
This is also why the monthly comic book floppy is important to the trade paperback. It's all about prolonged exposure and promotion. As long as each step in the chain is capable of paying for itself, it's suicide to skip them.
Right now all compulsory licensing deals actually involve money. Radio stations pay money to play songs. Sure the compulsory license means they don't have to make a deal with each artist and record company, but there is still a non-zero fee involved. Any P2P compulsory licensing will involve some sort of fee (per download, per month, per something) and a system to collect that fee along with reporting what that fee was for so the money could make it back to the record company. In a P2P world like that no one is going to want to share files and bandwidth. It's one thing to give away files and bandwidth for free as part of a community, but if all your bandwidth and files are making a bunch of other people money I doubt your going to be so happy about it.
The only thing compulsory licensing could do is create better versions of PressPlay type services. It is not likely to even apply to P2P as we know it. It would effect things like Apple's iTunes though, in ways they might not be so keen on. Unless that compulsory license involved a $1/track fee.
In any case I don't see Google getting into this. It's not a search business, it's a content provider business. Which of course is why all the current P2P software companies are running on borrowed time, they have no content and no money to host it even if it was licensable.
While they might think they can work out a model where uploaders are paid from the fees the downloaders pay(thereby giving people a reason to offer files) I doubt there is a company on earth that could handle all the tax issues making every uploader a small business would entail. Not to mention all the other issues involved in quality control and correct reporting of what the file was.
The future of compulsory licensing is a bunch of businesses not in the P2P field but more like PressPlay and Apple. They host content, they charge for that content. If Google wanted to get into that I'm sure they could but I don't see it happening.
No CMU Comp Eng student has ever gone to Pitt or other nearby schools to recruit chicks and also managed to graduate. Do not be deceived. CMU is a great experience but there are no "chicks". Do not buy the myth.
It's not uncommon these days for music CD's to have extra PC content. Installers, screensavers, etc. Usually it's just a few music videos, but I've bought CD's that actually had full installers with EULAs. I think it wouldn't be unexpected if they were to add text to the EULA that they can scan for copies of MP3's and delete them/report them/etc, then install the necessary "virus" software to do it. Or at least these "outside tech" companies would like us to believe that, since let's face it there aren't many legal resources they can do softwarewise. So they need to hype these "illegal" things to stay in business
I think turning off autorunning on CD's should be considered necessary for basic system security. It would be too easy for a music CD to run a fast installer and bang you have a anti-pirate virus installed. Even if they don't "delete files", they could (if you didn't have an outbound firewall) scan for music and send lists to the RIAA. Report on installed P2P software. Send any and all usage logs from that software, etc.
Sure they will hold off till they can get laws on their side, but right now I'm not sure congress really is looking after consumers all that much. This "right to hack" nonsense has come up too many times recently.
Someone has come along and created a product with equal demand for less money: DVD movies.
Oddly enough that hasn't been even considered as to why $18 albums aren't selling well.
If you accept that they have no way to enforce this with companies that don't have a physical presence in an EU country(no US court will help them with this), logically they will be forced to block non-compliant web sites from EU countries. I can see it now:
1. EU finds high traffic/high volume download for money web sites that doesn't charge VAT 2. They send an informational message explaining you have to collect the tax from EU users 3. Some time passes, web site still isn't collecting VAT 4. Harsher message is sent threatening to block IP addresses from all EU countries. 5. More time passes. They block the web site, no one in the EU can access it.
Now it will be a bit difficult to "block" the IP address, but given the few number of paths into any country and the small number of companies running them, I believe it will be possible for them to shut off most access to a non-compliant site. By doing this they create a situation that might convince someone to reconsider collecting the VAT tax.
Even if smart users can "hack" their way around it, the company will find it's EU sales reduced to near zero. Plus if done right it could cut off email and other access(the block would work both ways). It's a very big stick and it's well within their reach.
Slashdot Mirror
How is a demo free content? That sounds like demos work for you. The entire idea is to not waste the consumers money.
No, the idea is for the company making the console to not have to fund any game development. By requiring every game be "free to play" they dodge the expensive of having to make first party titles. If nothing else you can play their console for free.
See this slashdot article on how demos lower sales http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/01/17/0339230/do-game-demos-have-an-adverse-effect-on-sales
I got my Ouya a few weeks ago. I feel sorry for the people that were part of the Kickstarter but haven't gotten theirs. I had a tracking number for weeks but the US Post office delivered it before the tracking number ever was recognized. DHL from Hong Kong is not exactly a good shipping partner. They took the cheap route on shipping and it looks like it really hurt them. Doing order fulfillment from HK was a mistake. They should have bulk shipped them to the US and shipped them out from here.
As for it's value as a game console. It's kind of disappointing. I've yet to actually pay money for any games, since not one of the demo versions were interesting enough. While the Tegra 3 is a decent chip, somehow they have managed to make it have about the same power as an old SNES. Oddly enough Final Fantasy 3 is one of the few name brand titles. A best seller on the SNES.
As as platform for Android development (one of the reasons I got it) it is fairly disappointing. Their "every game has a demo" model pretty much means anyone developing for it is giving them free content. It' is rare that a game will convince me with a great demo. More often than not a demo just gives me enough to know it is not worth buying.
It also has strange issues with it's sleep mode/power on (I almost always have to walk up and press the button on the top). The gamepad feels awful. The box itself is not exactly easy to place in the living room.
It does seems like a good addition to my collection of failed consoles though, joining my Atari Jaguar and 3DO (among others).
Valve has made no promises about any future games. Or even announcements about future games. Just a handful of announcements about the beta Steam and beta TF2. That's it. And no one at Valve can promise ANYTHING about future development (even Gabe). Every Valve employee is their own boss. Unless people sign up to do the work, the ports won't get done.
Pretty much the whole article is a fluff piece, pushing the concept that hiring a consultant with no specific skills would be a good idea. Zero-gravity thinkers is just another way of promoting the consultant business. They aren't any more likely to contribute creativity and innovation than your employees. The only reason they might be successful is they aren't bogged down with all the extra headaches your employees have to deal with. It's very unlikely your employees have been tasked with being creative and innovating. Most likely they have been asked to perform jobs that have little to do with that. If you want your people to innovate, then you have to make that their job.
The engineers that made the remote with 52 buttons on it were tasked with making a remote. The DVD player had 52 functions, so it's no surprise the remote ends up with that many buttons. If on the other hand the engineers were told to design a remote that was easier to use and was innovative, it's very likely they could. It's not necessary to bring in some random outsider to say the emperor has no clothes. You just have to give your existing employees the freedom to do that.
One day these cheap HDTV tuners might show up. But right now if you want one your going to have a really hard time finding anything. The only thing I could come up with a year ago was a Samsung DTB-H260F which I think I paid $250 for(Amazon now has them for $166). But it did fix the problem of how to get digital channels onto my TV. Course there is no way to control the box from my 1st gen ReplayTV which really makes it more of a novelty piece than anything else. I'm thinking these dirt cheap tuners are just myths, at least for now.
Indexing would be fine and fair use. But that isn't what Google does. It copies wholesale and republishes what it copied (via it's cache feature). While the world+dog may think Google is a great and super useful tool, it doesn't change the fact that it is also is based on the assumption that they can do any damn thing they want with other people's content. But as always, free content is more important than protecting the content's owners rights to commercially exploit it, at least on Slashdot.
Go Google. King of evil.
While I think some small, niche, indie films would do fine with a big screen, net, and DVD release at the same time, it is not going to be the next big thing. The main reason has to do with the role nationwide movie theater showings have. If you look at it for a minute, by doing a national release you get a level of publicity above and beyond anything you could ever pay for. Every newspaper in the country runs film reviews for new movies that open. Coming Attraction shows promote films. And there are the theater ran ads and plain show listings that customers look at several times a month. This high level of promotion is also over a period of time, which is very effective at driving the interest in something. Even if the consumer doesn't go to the theater when it is released, when that DVD shows up in stores he has already been exposed to it. Add in the paid promotional events and you end up with (ideally) a profitable big screen run, followed by a profitable DVD run -- not to mention pay-per-view, paid cable, cable, and finally broadcast TV. All of these events launch off that wide scale roll out, it provides a vast amount of unpurchasable publicity.
If you change the model and ship the film just once in several formats, your faced with having to sell the DVD and net versions without all that exposure over the nationwide release. And if the movie theater owners don't keep your movie around (because everyone is just buying the DVD) or they don't buy local newspaper/net ads, you may get less publicity than you might have if you had stuck to the normal schedule. Even if the publicity is identical and no one scales back because it is on DVD too, you still will lose the timed exposure. Like cooking by turning up the heat really high, it may not be as good a meal even if it is cooked the same amount.
The comic book industry has this same problem. Everyone wants to buy the trade paperbacks and skip the monthly issues. Which is fine, but it means giving up six months of exposure and advertising. Since it is going to take six months to make the six issues of the trade paperback anyway, if the monthly floppies can sell well enough to warrant shipping them, them being on shelves is more than worth having. Skipping right to the trade means giving up a whole lot of promotion.
For smaller indie films however it may make a lot of sense. They don't get as much out of the big screen roll out (usually because they only hit limited cities and play on screens that don't do much advertising). A combination DVD and big screen release might actually make the film more money, since mail order DVD's can cover the whole country. But once you cross over to the major studio film, I think the total revenue isn't going to be as much.
You have now invented a problem you didn't have (designing the ultimate developer environment) and are wasting your time. Solve the problem of writing code by writing code. As you write code, new problems will come up, solve those. Your chair, your desk, your keyboard, your mouse, your computer, your OS, your editor, your IDE -- none of these matter. Don't make problems you don't need to solve.
Of course none of this matters because you have already failed. Those who can, do. Those who can't, read lots reviews and obsess about the gear.
It wasn't clear to me on a first reading but the article is all about cookies being used by ad companies. It doesn't say that, but only these spyware identified cookies are seeing deletion rates as high as they quote. This article is really aimed at helping advertising networks that have been labeled as spyware and are being regularly deleted by the various anti-spyware apps. What they talk about doesn't really apply on a site level, where the deletion of cookies isn't so common. Of course the banner ads can't easily do more reliable user authentication. So they are totally out of luck basically. In which case combining a few different ways to try and count users might make sense. But in the long run if people don't like and don't want their advertising, they are going to lose. It doesn't matter how they count, if enough users block them and their sites they will go out of business.
They make some silly assumptions that I don't think work with users using proxy agents, but in the end it still boils down to the existence of cookies. Which would be ok, if the problem they are trying to solve wasn't that users are deleting and not storing cookies at all. They do mention using Flash to store cookies, which I suspect will have to be the next area users will have to start cleaning up. But just because cookies don't overlap in time and the IP address is the same doesn't mean it's the same person. A bunch of users that use the same browser and share an IP address that always delete their cookies with this system will look like one user. Vastly under counting. Which I don't think web sites are interested in. Vast over counting is profitable. Under counting, not so much.
In the end there is no way they can even mostly recognize repeat web site visitors if the VISITOR DOESN'T WANT THEM TO.
The big problem is stated at the top of the article:
"We need to identify unique users on the web. It's fundamental. We need to know how many people visit, what they read, for how long, how often they return, and at what frequency. These are the 'atoms' of our metrics. Without this knowledge we really can't do much."
If knowing who unique users are is that important they need to create a reason for the user to correctly identify themselves. Some form of incentive that makes it worth giving up an identification for.
Yeah, the NSA those guys are good.
1. Had no clue about what weapons and forces Iraq really had.
2. Still can't find Waldo.
3. No clue where Bin Laden is.
4. No idea in advance about 9/11.
They might have acres of Vic-20's maybe. Sometimes I think they pay people to flood forums and what not talking about their amazing powers. Because the record clearly shows if they actually are good at doing anything it has nothing to do with what everyone claims they are amazing at.
You might think of as 10420 machines if you were a sales guy licensing software by the CPU.
Looks like up until Jan 2002 he was actually linking copies of all the shows as ASF and AVI files. It's hard to tell if he hosted any of them, but the site does claim some of them came from the site itself.
a rchive.net/
In Jan 2002 the site "changed" into a fan site/info site.
http://web.archive.org/web/20011012011922/www.sg1
The key reason Hollywood does release movies the way they do is that it maximizes their advertising potential. If you shipped the DVD the same day as the theater release, then you miss out on the 3 months it was in theaters getting reviews and word of mouth. You also don't get to do the press junket twice. So the entertainment magazines and TV shows don't get to cover you over and over again.
The difference between a small budget indy film and a blockbuster is more the way it is sold and promoted. You need those long intervals to maximize your advertising exposure. It's the same reason direct to video doesn't do as well as a small theater release followed by a large video roll out. Having it play in a local theater and having people see it on "what's playing" lists all lend promotion to the film. That level of promotion over a period of time does make for more product awareness and higher sales. The staged roll out allows you to better promote at each stage (you can't have the stars in every country promoting the movie on local shows if it opens the same day everywhere).
This is also why the monthly comic book floppy is important to the trade paperback. It's all about prolonged exposure and promotion. As long as each step in the chain is capable of paying for itself, it's suicide to skip them.
Now with Product Activation
http://www.adobe.com/activation/main.html
Right now all compulsory licensing deals actually involve money. Radio stations pay money to play songs. Sure the compulsory license means they don't have to make a deal with each artist and record company, but there is still a non-zero fee involved. Any P2P compulsory licensing will involve some sort of fee (per download, per month, per something) and a system to collect that fee along with reporting what that fee was for so the money could make it back to the record company. In a P2P world like that no one is going to want to share files and bandwidth. It's one thing to give away files and bandwidth for free as part of a community, but if all your bandwidth and files are making a bunch of other people money I doubt your going to be so happy about it. The only thing compulsory licensing could do is create better versions of PressPlay type services. It is not likely to even apply to P2P as we know it. It would effect things like Apple's iTunes though, in ways they might not be so keen on. Unless that compulsory license involved a $1/track fee. In any case I don't see Google getting into this. It's not a search business, it's a content provider business. Which of course is why all the current P2P software companies are running on borrowed time, they have no content and no money to host it even if it was licensable. While they might think they can work out a model where uploaders are paid from the fees the downloaders pay(thereby giving people a reason to offer files) I doubt there is a company on earth that could handle all the tax issues making every uploader a small business would entail. Not to mention all the other issues involved in quality control and correct reporting of what the file was. The future of compulsory licensing is a bunch of businesses not in the P2P field but more like PressPlay and Apple. They host content, they charge for that content. If Google wanted to get into that I'm sure they could but I don't see it happening.
No CMU Comp Eng student has ever gone to Pitt or other nearby schools to recruit chicks and also managed to graduate. Do not be deceived. CMU is a great experience but there are no "chicks". Do not buy the myth.
I think turning off autorunning on CD's should be considered necessary for basic system security. It would be too easy for a music CD to run a fast installer and bang you have a anti-pirate virus installed. Even if they don't "delete files", they could (if you didn't have an outbound firewall) scan for music and send lists to the RIAA. Report on installed P2P software. Send any and all usage logs from that software, etc.
Sure they will hold off till they can get laws on their side, but right now I'm not sure congress really is looking after consumers all that much. This "right to hack" nonsense has come up too many times recently.
Someone has come along and created a product with equal demand for less money: DVD movies. Oddly enough that hasn't been even considered as to why $18 albums aren't selling well.
If you accept that they have no way to enforce this with companies that don't have a physical presence in an EU country(no US court will help them with this), logically they will be forced to block non-compliant web sites from EU countries. I can see it now:
1. EU finds high traffic/high volume download for money web sites that doesn't charge VAT
2. They send an informational message explaining you have to collect the tax from EU users
3. Some time passes, web site still isn't collecting VAT
4. Harsher message is sent threatening to block IP addresses from all EU countries.
5. More time passes. They block the web site, no one in the EU can access it.
Now it will be a bit difficult to "block" the IP address, but given the few number of paths into any country and the small number of companies running them, I believe it will be possible for them to shut off most access to a non-compliant site. By doing this they create a situation that might convince someone to reconsider collecting the VAT tax.
Even if smart users can "hack" their way around it, the company will find it's EU sales reduced to near zero. Plus if done right it could cut off email and other access(the block would work both ways). It's a very big stick and it's well within their reach.