Square makes an announcement like this at least once for every Final Fantasy title they release. Just recently, we heard that we'll be playing FF7 games for the next fifteen years and FF12 games for the next five.
The FF series has been fantastic for a long time, but Square is notorious for having eyes much bigger than its stomach, so to speak. Just look at the colossal failure that was The Spirits Within, or the canceled PS2 ports of FF7, FF8 and FF9. Or the floundering PlayOnline service, which is only a fraction of the massive online gaming platform they proclaimed it to be. Or Chrono Break, the Chrono Trigger sequel we were promised more than half a decade ago. Come to think of it, it's no wonder they get along so well with Sony.
Not to mention that this kind of thing would be better viewed as a threat than a promise. Remember Final Fantasy X-2? Come to think of it, has any of their spinoff games been worthwhile? The last one I played was Dirge of Cerberus, which was only playable because of its setting. The game itself was bland and uninspired.
I don't know if this kind of thing is endemic to Japanese companies, but as it is, Square has a reputation up there with 3D Realms and the early days of Ion Storm. I kind of figured that the overly ambitious promises would stay buried with Square (the company they basically destroyed), but they've apparently found their way to Squeenix, too.
And seriously, shouldn't they at least release the first game? For all we know, it could be three years late or just completely unplayable. You have to build momentum before you can ride it.
But who are they catering to? The content producers certainly don't buy a sufficient number of CPU's to justify this change.
The most plausible explanation that I've heard is that Vista pretty much requires this level of compliance, or it'll just act like your hardware is broken. Which, of course, will end up getting blamed on the manufacturer, whether or not it's their fault.
And our fair use rights are clearly slipping away. I agree that it won't be the end of the world if I can no longer make backup copies, but it will still suck. It's only going to get harder to fight to protect our rights as they start to disappear. If people are going to stand up for this, the best time to do it is now.
I agree, but I wonder how much of it has to do with liability. If they're selling them to governments, they probably have to guarantee that they're unbreakable.
Re:Why do this?
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
That's misleading.
Where did you buy your last car? Let's assume it's a Honda. Did you buy your Honda car from Honda? I'll bet you didn't. Honda doesn't sell to end-users, only to volume customers. You probably bought your car from a local dealership. These companies are Honda's customer, not you. That means for Honda, resellers are the vast majority of their sales.
That doesn't mean Honda doesn't want your business, nor that they don't stand to benefit from it. If people stop buying cars from resellers, Honda stops being able to sell cars to resellers. If you buy an AMD CPU standalone, you're an AMD customer, and it would make sense for them to listen to you.
Or money. I wouldn't be surprised if they took a big payoff from some content producer to do this. Or maybe got some kind of licensing deal with one of the media standards boards. That would be incredibly slimy, of course. But they're in this for the money, not to benefit their reputation.
Believe me, I've been modded down for far less. I got flagged as a troll for implying that Ted Stevens was an idiot. Seriously. Don't you have to say something controversial to be a troll?
First off, no one has been able to predict baseball results with great accuracy, and it's not for lack of trying. There's a whole cottage industry built around baseball statistics, populated by fans and professional scouts alike, and there's been some major innovation. But there's so much chance involved, and so many factors that we just can't measure (injuries, weather, slumps, etc.), that I don't think it's even possible to generate reliable predictions. Being more right than wrong five years out of six isn't all that impressive; common sense can usually net you at least three division winners a year.
As other posters have mentioned, 110 wins would not be a safe prediction for any team in history. Even for a very good, well funded team expected to be in the running, such as the Yankees or Red Sox, a reasonable expectation is 95-100 wins per season. 110 happens, but it's rare. Especially in the somewhat competitive AL East, where the Sox and Yankees reside. Most of the big win totals come from teams that utterly dominate their divisions. (About half of MLB games are intra-division.)
Furthermore, Burkiet's "surprising findings" aren't breaking news at all. I only dabble in Sabermetrics, but even I know that batting order has been proven to not really matter all that much, and that the third slot is where your best power hitter goes. (That last bit is actually conventional baseball wisdom, and has been around forever.)
If you're interested in learning more about statistical analysis of baseball, ignore the publicity-seeking academics and look to the Society for American Baseball Research, or pick up anything written by Bill James. Michael Lewis's Moneyball is also a good place to start.
I've played on both RP and normal PvE servers. They're pretty much exactly the same. It seems like there are fewer assholes on RP servers (though it's not a significantly large difference), but the overall playskill seems to be a bit lower, too.
If we fail, it is because we positioned PS3 as the Mercedes of the videogame field. PS3 is after a different audience and it can be whatever it wants -- a home server, game device, even a computer.
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds like a really, really dumb strategy. I think I read somewhere that on average, a publisher needs to sell 500,000 copies of a next-gen game just to break even. How are they planning to do that with a console that they claim that 90% of the market is too poor to afford?
Alternatively, you could go out and buy something like this. I've seen one of these things in action, and while it might be overkill for all but the biggest operations, it's still really, really damn cool.
So, by this token, its alright to shoplift something out of a store for personal consumption, but dammit! don't lump me in with the guy that hijacks a truck full of cigarettes to sell back in Joisey.
I think you'll find that if you took these two cases before a judge and jury, the outcomes would be very different, and they might even be prosecuted under different statutes. The OP never said personal-use piracy was OK, just that it was different from running a massive pirate empire for profit. And he's absolutely right.
Piracy and theft are different in two major ways. First, as many others have stated, when you steal something, you're depriving its rightful owner of physical goods. If you steal something, you have it and he no longer does. That's not the case with piracy.
Second, it's relatively straightforward to measure the (monetary) amount of damage a thief does, but it's extremely difficult to do so in software piracy cases. If someone steals a CD from Best Buy, that's $14 in damages. If that person instead downloads a rip of that album from a BitTorrent tracker, how do you measure that? Not everyone who pirates something would have purchased it at full price. If, say, 10% of pirates would have bought the album if they couldn't get it otherwise, does that mean the company is out $1.40? And who, exactly, was deprived of that money? Are all of the retail stores in which a person might have bought it entitled to a cut? It's not at all a clear-cut issue.
As I'm sure is obvious by now, IANAL. YMMV. LOLOMGWTFBBQ.
They wouldn't be offering "discounts" if they were legally entitled to the information; they'd try to get it at (metaphorical) gunpoint. You know, the way they do everything else.
On the other hand, since they're not legally entitled to divulge the information, I would hope that most ISP's would decline this "kind offer," and I'd be quite willing to terminate my service agreement if mine chose to comply.
And given that I can't even get someone decent from Comcast on the phone to address the constant disconnects, bad hops and lag spikes, I don't think you'd have much success getting their logs, either.
Of course there was damage. The site was temporarily shut down, resulting in lost ad revenue. Furthermore, someone had to remove the worm from over a million profiles, purge anything malicious from the database, and then assess and patch the hole. It probably caused quite a lot of work in emergency audits, too. Rest assured that whoever had to do all of this wasn't an unpaid volunteer.
I agree that he didn't belong in jail for this, but there are costs to this kind of thing.
I also live in Boston, and while I wasn't too thrilled about the whole thing, whoever called in the complaint is an idiot. The bomb squad, even more so. The media aren't exactly blameless, either; this wasn't exactly a difficult story to crack.
You can't make society bomb-proof, and you'll sacrifice too much in the process of trying. Hopefully we'll learn that someday.
I'm still curious why we are still years away from practical products like this.
Because people don't want them. It doesn't matter what people need; it's what people want. And whether or not customers are practical about their needs, it's their desires that guide the market.
Most people don't need an SUV that can climb 45 degree mountain slopes in the snow. But it remains a major selling point. Same deal.
Let the record show that I tried to take the (relatively) high road here.
A company wanting exposure in a new market? Wow, did you think that up all by yourself?
It's funny that you're taking this intellectually arrogant attitude, because you've really offered nothing to prove that you have even the slightest idea what you're talking about. Yes, companies look for new markets. Growth drives share price, and that's what they're about. It's not a difficult concept. But when it's done at the expense of existing product lines, it's a risk. The bottom line is that Apple chose to release a phone at the expense of releasing a new "dedicated" iPod.
Okay, seriously, just how stupid are you? The problem with the PS3 is not that it has a Blu-Ray drive, which has been known about for a very long time. The problem is that the "cheap" version is 500 frikkin dollars, and you can buy a Wii and a 360 for the price of the 60 gig PS3.
Sweet math, man. There might be a career for you in that.
The reason that the PS3 starts at $500 is that the blue laser diodes for the Blu-Ray drive are very difficult to manufacture in quantity, and that adds about $200 to the cost. Sony won't eat a $500 loss on each console. So let's apply some of those amazing arithmetic skills you demonstrated. A PS3 without Blu-Ray parts would conceivably cost $300-400, or the same price as an XBox 360. The Blu-Ray drive is there mainly to push the format into the market, with the expectation that Sony will make the money back in royalties when it becomes widespread.
Feel free to dazzle me with more of your astounding brilliance, and maybe call me a fag or something while you're at it.
No, but it is the future. Keep the OS, keep the interface, keep the wireless, lose the cell phone and maybe the camera, and add a hard drive.
It's painfully obvious that most of this technology will be in future iPods. No one is debating that. My complaint is that it's being bundled only with something extraneous that increases the cost by about 500% (that Cingular contract won't be cheap), and it's being done solely so Apple can gain exposure in a new market. Most Slashdotters saw it as manipulative and disrespectful to consumers when Sony pulled the same thing with PS3 and Blu-Ray, but Apple is somehow immune to that.
And maybe you should work on being less of a whiney, self-centered jackass.
Sweet flame, d00d. Clever and insightful. Where can I learn to be as smart and witty as you?
I've been hearing that argument for years. In the meantime, company after company is paying out settlements in the hundreds of millions. I think it's time to try something a little more direct.
Who am I petitioning? Where in my previous post did I suggest that anyone take any kind of action at all? And what makes you think I want the iPhone "overturned?" What does that even mean?
I'm not really a big fan of the analogy as a rhetorical device, but I'll run with the one you've given me.
We're not talking about free gravy on a plate of mashed potatoes. We're talking about a plate of mashed potatoes that they won't sell you unless you also buy $20 worth of gravy.
The technology is already there, and it would be almost trivial, given the work they've already done, to integrate these new features into a dedicated iPod. The option isn't available, most likely, because they're worried that offering an alternative would detract from their attempt to break into the phone market. In other words, they're ignoring what consumers want (I guarantee you that a new iPod incorporating this stuff would far, far outsell the iPhone) in an effort to increase their bottom line. Yes, corporations exist to make money. But when you alienate consumers, you're playing with fire.
Are you planning on buying an iPhone? At $600 (and with the storage capacity of a $250 Nano) plus a Cingular contract that's likely worth more than $2,000?
Apple's previous iPod offerings have been very diverse, and it's worked out very well for them.
The iPhone is not the next-gen iPod. It may have iPodlike functionality, but it's obviously not intended to replace the current models, as each previous generation of iPod has done to the one preceding it. The storage capacity is inferior, and the price is orders of magnitude higher.
A lot of the new features in the iPhone look fantastic, and I'd be willing to pay a premium for an iPod incorporating some of them. The problem is, it's all or nothing. Apple has decided, for better or worse, to ignore a majority of their customers in favor of a new product in a new market with fatter margins.
It's not really about what I want. I guarantee you that at the current price point, and with the mandatory two-year Cingular contract, the iPhone will not have mass market appeal. Their goal is to squeeze as much as possible out of the few people willing to throw around money like that, and make the rest of us wait until they're done doing that.
On an unrelated note, you might want to consider some anger management classes. Or maybe a regimen of antidepressants. You don't sound like a very happy person.
No, I'm aware that the existing product line isn't going anywhere. It just kind of sucks that they're not improving it with any of these new bells and whistles, and it sucks even more that they're doing so to push a new product with (I'd imagine) fatter margins.
Slashdot Mirror
Square makes an announcement like this at least once for every Final Fantasy title they release. Just recently, we heard that we'll be playing FF7 games for the next fifteen years and FF12 games for the next five.
The FF series has been fantastic for a long time, but Square is notorious for having eyes much bigger than its stomach, so to speak. Just look at the colossal failure that was The Spirits Within, or the canceled PS2 ports of FF7, FF8 and FF9. Or the floundering PlayOnline service, which is only a fraction of the massive online gaming platform they proclaimed it to be. Or Chrono Break, the Chrono Trigger sequel we were promised more than half a decade ago. Come to think of it, it's no wonder they get along so well with Sony.
Not to mention that this kind of thing would be better viewed as a threat than a promise. Remember Final Fantasy X-2? Come to think of it, has any of their spinoff games been worthwhile? The last one I played was Dirge of Cerberus, which was only playable because of its setting. The game itself was bland and uninspired.
I don't know if this kind of thing is endemic to Japanese companies, but as it is, Square has a reputation up there with 3D Realms and the early days of Ion Storm. I kind of figured that the overly ambitious promises would stay buried with Square (the company they basically destroyed), but they've apparently found their way to Squeenix, too.
And seriously, shouldn't they at least release the first game? For all we know, it could be three years late or just completely unplayable. You have to build momentum before you can ride it.
But who are they catering to? The content producers certainly don't buy a sufficient number of CPU's to justify this change.
The most plausible explanation that I've heard is that Vista pretty much requires this level of compliance, or it'll just act like your hardware is broken. Which, of course, will end up getting blamed on the manufacturer, whether or not it's their fault.
And our fair use rights are clearly slipping away. I agree that it won't be the end of the world if I can no longer make backup copies, but it will still suck. It's only going to get harder to fight to protect our rights as they start to disappear. If people are going to stand up for this, the best time to do it is now.
I agree, but I wonder how much of it has to do with liability. If they're selling them to governments, they probably have to guarantee that they're unbreakable.
That's misleading.
Where did you buy your last car? Let's assume it's a Honda. Did you buy your Honda car from Honda? I'll bet you didn't. Honda doesn't sell to end-users, only to volume customers. You probably bought your car from a local dealership. These companies are Honda's customer, not you. That means for Honda, resellers are the vast majority of their sales.
That doesn't mean Honda doesn't want your business, nor that they don't stand to benefit from it. If people stop buying cars from resellers, Honda stops being able to sell cars to resellers. If you buy an AMD CPU standalone, you're an AMD customer, and it would make sense for them to listen to you.
Or money. I wouldn't be surprised if they took a big payoff from some content producer to do this. Or maybe got some kind of licensing deal with one of the media standards boards. That would be incredibly slimy, of course. But they're in this for the money, not to benefit their reputation.
Count me in. I'm officially off the AMD bandwagon. I'll be buying Intel from now on, at least until they announce their equivalent product next week.
After that, I have no idea what I'll do. Maybe build a shack in the woods in Montana.
Believe me, I've been modded down for far less. I got flagged as a troll for implying that Ted Stevens was an idiot. Seriously. Don't you have to say something controversial to be a troll?
This is total bullshit.
First off, no one has been able to predict baseball results with great accuracy, and it's not for lack of trying. There's a whole cottage industry built around baseball statistics, populated by fans and professional scouts alike, and there's been some major innovation. But there's so much chance involved, and so many factors that we just can't measure (injuries, weather, slumps, etc.), that I don't think it's even possible to generate reliable predictions. Being more right than wrong five years out of six isn't all that impressive; common sense can usually net you at least three division winners a year.
As other posters have mentioned, 110 wins would not be a safe prediction for any team in history. Even for a very good, well funded team expected to be in the running, such as the Yankees or Red Sox, a reasonable expectation is 95-100 wins per season. 110 happens, but it's rare. Especially in the somewhat competitive AL East, where the Sox and Yankees reside. Most of the big win totals come from teams that utterly dominate their divisions. (About half of MLB games are intra-division.)
Furthermore, Burkiet's "surprising findings" aren't breaking news at all. I only dabble in Sabermetrics, but even I know that batting order has been proven to not really matter all that much, and that the third slot is where your best power hitter goes. (That last bit is actually conventional baseball wisdom, and has been around forever.)
If you're interested in learning more about statistical analysis of baseball, ignore the publicity-seeking academics and look to the Society for American Baseball Research, or pick up anything written by Bill James. Michael Lewis's Moneyball is also a good place to start.
I've played on both RP and normal PvE servers. They're pretty much exactly the same. It seems like there are fewer assholes on RP servers (though it's not a significantly large difference), but the overall playskill seems to be a bit lower, too.
Yeah, I said it. Go ahead, mod me down.
Maybe it's just me, but that sounds like a really, really dumb strategy. I think I read somewhere that on average, a publisher needs to sell 500,000 copies of a next-gen game just to break even. How are they planning to do that with a console that they claim that 90% of the market is too poor to afford?
I thought marijuana was illegal in Japan.
Alternatively, you could go out and buy something like this. I've seen one of these things in action, and while it might be overkill for all but the biggest operations, it's still really, really damn cool.
I think you'll find that if you took these two cases before a judge and jury, the outcomes would be very different, and they might even be prosecuted under different statutes. The OP never said personal-use piracy was OK, just that it was different from running a massive pirate empire for profit. And he's absolutely right.
Piracy and theft are different in two major ways. First, as many others have stated, when you steal something, you're depriving its rightful owner of physical goods. If you steal something, you have it and he no longer does. That's not the case with piracy.
Second, it's relatively straightforward to measure the (monetary) amount of damage a thief does, but it's extremely difficult to do so in software piracy cases. If someone steals a CD from Best Buy, that's $14 in damages. If that person instead downloads a rip of that album from a BitTorrent tracker, how do you measure that? Not everyone who pirates something would have purchased it at full price. If, say, 10% of pirates would have bought the album if they couldn't get it otherwise, does that mean the company is out $1.40? And who, exactly, was deprived of that money? Are all of the retail stores in which a person might have bought it entitled to a cut? It's not at all a clear-cut issue.
As I'm sure is obvious by now, IANAL. YMMV. LOLOMGWTFBBQ.
What brain?
They wouldn't be offering "discounts" if they were legally entitled to the information; they'd try to get it at (metaphorical) gunpoint. You know, the way they do everything else.
On the other hand, since they're not legally entitled to divulge the information, I would hope that most ISP's would decline this "kind offer," and I'd be quite willing to terminate my service agreement if mine chose to comply.
And given that I can't even get someone decent from Comcast on the phone to address the constant disconnects, bad hops and lag spikes, I don't think you'd have much success getting their logs, either.
Of course there was damage. The site was temporarily shut down, resulting in lost ad revenue. Furthermore, someone had to remove the worm from over a million profiles, purge anything malicious from the database, and then assess and patch the hole. It probably caused quite a lot of work in emergency audits, too. Rest assured that whoever had to do all of this wasn't an unpaid volunteer.
I agree that he didn't belong in jail for this, but there are costs to this kind of thing.
I also live in Boston, and while I wasn't too thrilled about the whole thing, whoever called in the complaint is an idiot. The bomb squad, even more so. The media aren't exactly blameless, either; this wasn't exactly a difficult story to crack.
You can't make society bomb-proof, and you'll sacrifice too much in the process of trying. Hopefully we'll learn that someday.
Because people don't want them. It doesn't matter what people need; it's what people want. And whether or not customers are practical about their needs, it's their desires that guide the market.
Most people don't need an SUV that can climb 45 degree mountain slopes in the snow. But it remains a major selling point. Same deal.
Is there a "light side" of HDCP?
Let the record show that I tried to take the (relatively) high road here.
It's funny that you're taking this intellectually arrogant attitude, because you've really offered nothing to prove that you have even the slightest idea what you're talking about. Yes, companies look for new markets. Growth drives share price, and that's what they're about. It's not a difficult concept. But when it's done at the expense of existing product lines, it's a risk. The bottom line is that Apple chose to release a phone at the expense of releasing a new "dedicated" iPod.
Sweet math, man. There might be a career for you in that.
The reason that the PS3 starts at $500 is that the blue laser diodes for the Blu-Ray drive are very difficult to manufacture in quantity, and that adds about $200 to the cost. Sony won't eat a $500 loss on each console. So let's apply some of those amazing arithmetic skills you demonstrated. A PS3 without Blu-Ray parts would conceivably cost $300-400, or the same price as an XBox 360. The Blu-Ray drive is there mainly to push the format into the market, with the expectation that Sony will make the money back in royalties when it becomes widespread.
Feel free to dazzle me with more of your astounding brilliance, and maybe call me a fag or something while you're at it.
It's painfully obvious that most of this technology will be in future iPods. No one is debating that. My complaint is that it's being bundled only with something extraneous that increases the cost by about 500% (that Cingular contract won't be cheap), and it's being done solely so Apple can gain exposure in a new market. Most Slashdotters saw it as manipulative and disrespectful to consumers when Sony pulled the same thing with PS3 and Blu-Ray, but Apple is somehow immune to that.
Sweet flame, d00d. Clever and insightful. Where can I learn to be as smart and witty as you?
It may be cheaper in the short term to pay someone to go away, but when sharks smell blood, they all come running.
Yes, I'm aware that sharks don't run. But you get my point.
I've been hearing that argument for years. In the meantime, company after company is paying out settlements in the hundreds of millions. I think it's time to try something a little more direct.
Who am I petitioning? Where in my previous post did I suggest that anyone take any kind of action at all? And what makes you think I want the iPhone "overturned?" What does that even mean?
I'm not really a big fan of the analogy as a rhetorical device, but I'll run with the one you've given me.
We're not talking about free gravy on a plate of mashed potatoes. We're talking about a plate of mashed potatoes that they won't sell you unless you also buy $20 worth of gravy.
The technology is already there, and it would be almost trivial, given the work they've already done, to integrate these new features into a dedicated iPod. The option isn't available, most likely, because they're worried that offering an alternative would detract from their attempt to break into the phone market. In other words, they're ignoring what consumers want (I guarantee you that a new iPod incorporating this stuff would far, far outsell the iPhone) in an effort to increase their bottom line. Yes, corporations exist to make money. But when you alienate consumers, you're playing with fire.
Are you planning on buying an iPhone? At $600 (and with the storage capacity of a $250 Nano) plus a Cingular contract that's likely worth more than $2,000?
Apple's previous iPod offerings have been very diverse, and it's worked out very well for them.
The iPhone is not the next-gen iPod. It may have iPodlike functionality, but it's obviously not intended to replace the current models, as each previous generation of iPod has done to the one preceding it. The storage capacity is inferior, and the price is orders of magnitude higher.
A lot of the new features in the iPhone look fantastic, and I'd be willing to pay a premium for an iPod incorporating some of them. The problem is, it's all or nothing. Apple has decided, for better or worse, to ignore a majority of their customers in favor of a new product in a new market with fatter margins.
It's not really about what I want. I guarantee you that at the current price point, and with the mandatory two-year Cingular contract, the iPhone will not have mass market appeal. Their goal is to squeeze as much as possible out of the few people willing to throw around money like that, and make the rest of us wait until they're done doing that.
On an unrelated note, you might want to consider some anger management classes. Or maybe a regimen of antidepressants. You don't sound like a very happy person.
No, I'm aware that the existing product line isn't going anywhere. It just kind of sucks that they're not improving it with any of these new bells and whistles, and it sucks even more that they're doing so to push a new product with (I'd imagine) fatter margins.