That is right, Apple, iTunes, RIAA, sueing kids, that is what capitalism is all about. Norway isn't a capilalist country, the is socialist or by american standard, communist. Apple wants to sell in Norway then it got to play by norwegian rules.
Companies are free from not entering the european market. But Apple wants to have their cake and eat it too. Just because americans have a goverment that is so cheaply bought doesn't mean the rest of the world works the same.
Good job Norway. What do you know, a goverment official looking out for the people. It must be a cold day in hell.
The filmmaker intended you to see the movie on the bigscreen projected through film. Not on some crappy mpeg DVD.
Also upscaling if done right can have an effect. No not much but it is like the difference between a interlaced video and a properly de-interlaced one.
Proper video filters can really improve the visuall quality of a movie. No it ain't the original anymore but with DVD you ain't got the original anyway.
But hey, you are obviously to smart to fall for this. You go right ahead and watch DVD's in their native resolution on your PC. At least you will have plenty of space left over to have a browser window open to post on slashdot. The rest of us just use video filters to help improve the image and watch it at the max resolution our monitors can handle.
The intellectual property industry and law enforcement officials estimate U.S. companies lose as much as $250 billion per year to Internet pirates,
Think for a moment about this sentence. No not about the amount or how they arrived at it. Think about that sentence and and the saying, "you can't spend a penny twice".
That amount X is perhaps lost to the content owners BUT it is not somehow evaporating into thin air, that amount saved is being spend on other things.
So if the content industry gets the amount X then other industries will lose an amount X. Put simpler, that kid who has a allowance who just got a movie for free will now spend that money on his cellular phone, fast food, clothes etc etc.
It is the real problem with the content industry. They used to have to contend only with clothes for young kids pocket money. Now there is games and the phone to contend with. If you ever worked for a phone company you will know how many people get into trouble with their mobile phone bill. That is money they can't spend on music/movies/games. You can't pirate cell phone minutes but you can pirate content.
The industry world wide isn't being hurt by pirating, just the industries that are being pirated.
As to the amount, well you then have to simply ask, where the hell would the economy come up with a spare 250 billion dollars. Since that amount of money is unlikely to be stuffed behind the couch, even Bill Gates, the figure is meaningless. You may as well make it a gazillion for all the relevance.
If piracy was eleminated today the only thing that would happen is that you would see a shift in spending patterns. Perhaps the fashion industry needs to get in on the side of the pirates, cause if everyone has to pay for every bit of content they used to get for free, they will have a lot less money to spend on clothes.
The economy is not a infinite idea, there is X money and you can't just wish up an extra amount. That 250 billion just doesn't exist.
If you look at what is in the PS3 vs the 360 then the 360 seems to be a bit expensive for its hardware. At least spec wise the PS3 delivers a lot more.
A 100.000 dollar mercedes is more expensive then a 20.000 dollar lada but it is still the lada that is overpriced.
Off course this has nothing to do with gameplay but for now it seems that if you want gameplay you are in luck, the cheapest console will be the one with the better gameplay. Offcourse that is not saying the Wii is not overpriced. Nintendo has the most overpriced consoles of all, the proof? MS and Sony subsidise the early consoles, Nintendo does not and makes a profit on them, if that isn't overpricing them I don't know what is.
Perhaps you meant "That's easy. You buy the one that isnt ridiculously expensive."
In that case,might I introduce you to the humble PC. Cheapest console of them all, you already got one after all since you post here. Can't get much cheaper then 0 dollars. Oh and you it is fully backwards compatible with other consoles even. Strange enough neither the 360 or the PS3 or the Wii allow me to play old games not off their brand. Silly.
Evil men when they sense they are close to dying all of sudden want to make amends.
If anything all this charity proves that he knows he has something to make up. Oh and if he hadn't been "evil" he wouldn't have had all those billions to spend on charity but just had MS pay taxes so people wouldn't have to hold out their hand to him but just gotten what was needed from the state.
No sorry mate, I have a hard time with a lot of charities. To often they seem to be nothing more then a tool for the rich to feel good and to make sure the needy have to be properly grateful.
You just have to look at Gates charity in giving computers to schools. Windows. Oh yeah, the first one is free kids.
It was their most secure OS ever, right up to the point that WMF bug was exploited and Vista was found to be just as vulnerable as every other windows version.
Claiming Vista to be the most secure OS ever when it has already had a security flaw is just insane and tells us that MS still just don't get it. Or maybe they do get it. After all they make billions. It is sad but lying to the gullible pays better then telling the truth to the clever. There are just so many more gullible people. Last count about 6 billion.
As far as I read it this doesn't have anything to do with "bad security" just "bad users". You have to download the code and execute it.
Lots of people complain that P2P is unsafe because it carries virusses and what not. So how come I have never been infected?
Obvious it is because of my enormous intellect that makes einstein look stupid and think that a 15mb.exe files claiming to be a movie is suspicious.
Yes granted the recent WMF crap showed us that if you use MS software any file extension is under suspiscion and the design choice by MS to hide the extension by default must rank as one of their most stupid one (then again this is ms, they make so many it is hard to determine wich one was their worsed).
But GAIM does not protect you from being stupid. Nothing does. Just that if you went through the trouble of installing GAIM on a Non-MS machine, or if you are on a MS-machine deliberatly disabled MSN and installed GAIM, then you are probably not that stupid.
It ain't GAIM that is keeping you safe, it is your brain. Trust me on this, I been around long enough to know people will do anything to get infected. Just promise them a juicy picture. We have about the same chance of stopping computer infection as we have of stepping Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When Miss Jpeg flirts with you, you don't think of using a condom. (Oh and using a condom isn't enough, deep kissing can do it too. How many of you practising safe sex make sure no fluids whatever are swapped?)
except that your tag shows you to be nothing but a flaming troll with all the sense of a gnaa member.;)
Oh and there is another simple reason to clean up our act now. Tech. Mandate that cars in the west have to be clean to a high standard and you lock out the chinese cars with old tech but low prices boosting the local economy.
What do you know, smog free and increased employment just by passing enviromental laws.
They can do what they want with it. People are getting a salary and spending it on food and rent to support their families.
Another of their long forgotten projects Prey now actually seems to be about to be released. Not DNF release date but an actuall one later this year.
Offcourse they also produced the highly acclaimed Max Payne games.
Who is to say how much of their DNF experience went into Max Payne instead? We don't even know how much money was spend so far. Maybe it was just a programmer and a designer working on it on their offhours?
The point is, their money, their business. Personally I prefer this type of development were you do not have to spend every second worrying about what the investors think. Modern blockbusters movies are made entirely with the balance sheet in mind. Do you like modern blockbusters?
Just ask yourselve who makes better games, EA or the smaller studios like 3D realms. DNF might be total dud but games that did release on time also have been duds.
This is an internal project, paid for by their own money. They can take all the time they want as long as they are willing to spend their own money doing it.
I thought everyone knew this. 3Drealms in an independent like Id (quake) and can do what it wants. They self financed it from the money earned with the earlier Duke Nukem titles.
Wich goes to show how much of a success they were and how little development has to cost (especially when you don't produce anything). Compare this to the guys who did daikatana burning through millions in a fraction of the time and you get the idea that 3d realms may not be the fastest developers ever but they can sure stretch a dollar.
Saying that investors are worried shows you are an idiot who does not know the least bit about the subject. The fact off self-financing has only been known for the last decade. It is the reason why it could go on for a decade.
DNF should not be confused with stuff like the Phantom console. 3D realms is only wasting their own money. Or not. Maybe they are just waiting until all current FPS are so fucking boring that a blast from the past will be very welcome indeed.
The DS Lite if I recall correctly requires a newer passkey because they changed something that stopped the old keys from working.
So it is not entirely true as in the article that Nintendo doesn't care about the homebrew scene. Not suprisingly, PSP commercial games often don't fit on its memory stick but most Nintendo handheld games can fit a dozen to a flash card.
This makes it a lot easier to pirate GBA/DS games then PSP games.
The DS had a revision that forced a new key but I am just not sure wether that revision happened to be the DS Lite. For sure the DS Lite is of the new version however so the answer is still yes. If you check the sites you will find some advice on checking wich firmware you got with your DS. Color background in pictochat if I remember correctly.
You and I don't disagree you just seem to want the world to work differently then it does. You are probably young. That is okay, you will grow out of it.
The simple fact is that what you describe as wrong is just the way it is. You can try to change it and you may be successfull, after all the days women were considered totally incapable of doing anything but be mothers and nurses is long gone (says a while middle aged male who thinks a glass ceiling is nice for letting in natural light) so maybe one day this will change too.
Maybe one day nude photos of a famous person will not have every tabloid drooling. Maybe one day a politician can freely admit to have smoked pot. Maybe one day not every word you say will be weighed on a silver scale.
For now the practical terms is that you either carefully examine everystep you take OR be prepared to accept that someday somebody might hold it against you.
You can rant against it for all you want but that does not change the way things are now. I got long hair, almost to my ass and I am male. Not really for fashion, I just like it. The price I pay is that I have been invited several times by high profile companies for job interviews based on previous work they have seen of me. When they then get a look off me their jaws literally drop.
I am good, they like my work but to the suits long hair like mine just doesn't work. Is it wrong? Not really. It is my choice to have long hair and it is their choice not to hire people that don't fit their idea of a well groomed employee.
As for my co-worker (well actually she is a manager of a different department and I only took notice off it because this piece of gossip included nudie pics) she will just have to accept that all men are pigs and all women are vindictive bitches. I personally couldn't care less but that is probably why I am not management at middle age. She is finding that something she did ten years ago is now biting her in the butt. Oh sure she may do wonderfull work and there is that email that circulated with her in the buff. Also up for a promotion is a guy who does not have nudie pics circulating.
You would claim the past of a person makes no difference. But does it?
My long hair is perhaps a way of me saying that I am not like everyone else. A rebel or just a social misfit? Perhaps I just can't be bothered with convention? Whatever the reason you think up it might be enough for you to consider me too big a risk to hire.
Same with the woman appearing nude in a play. As I pointed out this is something that a lot of woman do for the sake of art while all the male artists keep their clothes on. For me this suggests these women lack a certain amount of logic. Wouldn't it be more arty to keep the women clothed and the men naked? If you look at all those pics of girls caught naked circulating in your email don't you notice how rare it is to see the guy, even if he is in the pic great care has usually been taken to obscure the face.
Don't any of these girls who pose ever ask the guy to pose for them? If you want to be save as a girl posing nude just ask the guy to pose naked for you so when he releases your photographs you can release his.
That no women does this suggests to me women ain't paranoid enough and I would never hire any person as a system administrator who isn't 100% paranoid. Cause on the web they really are out to get you.
Well, we will just let that one slide. I think I know what you are trying to say. I just don't get where you get the discrimation thing from.
Discrimination is against something you are that can't be changed. Your skin color is easy (and yes I have heard of Michael Jackson but lets not go there) since it is fixed from birth and will never ever change. You therefore should not be choosen based on your skin color. Right? Right.
But is a myspace account the same thing? Yes "I won't hire you because you are black" is bad. "I won't hire you because you posted pics of yourselve online doing illegal or stupid things wich make me think you are an idiot who can't be trusted with any reponsibility" is entirely different in my eyes.
Granted it comes close. For instance in holland smoking pot is semi-legal. The smoking itself is legal but the sale isn't wich makes it all a bit of a legal mess. Yet this leaves the fact that if a dutch person shows pictures of himself smoking a joint (on dutch soil) there is no crime being committed and it is really no different then say a picture of him drinking a beer.
So should this person then not be hired for a job just because the boss considers pot wrong in his views? Is this the same as not hiring a gay person because you consider homosexuality wrong? For that matter is it wrong to not hire a person using any drug is you consider drug use wrong?
I don't think it can be called discrimination because I just hope that we won't go that far. When you have to fire a person you will have to decide in wich person to invest a small fortune of time and real hard cash in the hope you will be getting some value out of them after training and orientation.
It is hard and I always try not to get involved but being the tech guy in a non-tech company I have to try to determine how good they will be in the tech role. Personality then comes into play. If I would find a tech with a myspace account I wouldn't not just hire them. I would fire them. Twice. Just to be sure.
It may not be scientific but suprise suprise, human resource management ain't a hard science.
I already posted this link in a other replay, but they this is slashdot and posting a dupe might just get me to be an editor. Arthur Andersen was a boring stiff off an accountant who build up a highly successfull firm. Then it all went to hell. Now how much do you want to bet that the guys who ruined the firm were the kind of people that if myspace had been available in their time would have posted pics of themselves doing stuff frowned upon at the time.
Yes a marketting job could well do with someone who stands out. For a lot of real jobs it don't matter shit. You don't care what your plumber did in school did you?
But for a lot of the more exciting/succesfull jobs who you are matters because the risk for choosing the wrong person are high.
Tell me, what kind of pilot do you want. One who leads a perfectly boring life who just spend a quiet weekend home with his wife and kids or one who just spend the weekend on a drug and booze filled rampage? Who do you want managing your stocks. Someone with all the political motivation of a jellyfish or someone who firmly believes money is the root of all evil?
Do you want an eccentric person in charge or a nuclear powerplant. A police officer with quircks, a judge with political views (especially one that doesn't agree with yours)?
Luckily most people never need to worry about this. There are plenty of jobs out there where they don't give a shit what you do in your private life. And I can't help but feel that if you want a bigger job then you should be willing to adjust what you do in your private life so you can get the big bucks.
If you want to be your own person in your personal life then the price is that you will have to accept the kind of job where your personal life don't matter. The fast majority of jobs will be open to you. Sure the fast majority of jobs also have bad pay and are boring but hey, at least you got a full and un-spyed upon private life.
Doctors spend a lot of time in school and if you ever lived in a uni town then you will know that they are not exactly known as responsible mature adults. Best that you don't know what that young intern in charge of saving your life was upto just last year. Hell better not know what he was up to last night. (Although to be honest what he did 24 hours ago was probably being on the same shift he is still on)
What seems kinda silly is however to go to far with this. The odd thing is that those kids who do extreme things are the ones who do best in real life. I should know, I didn't as a kid and I am very mediocre in my adult life.
Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places? For certain jobs yes somebody with a solid boring past is perhaps best. Chartered accountants would be nice to know they never ever broke any law of any kind ever. Read up on Arthur Andersen to see what happens when you go from the boring accountants to the exciting ones.
What is a problem is that people who do stuff like posting pictures of themselves smoking pot online then seem to want the kind of job that calls for people who think a cup of tea is a rollercoaster ride. There are just certain kind of proffesions where your entire life will come under close scrutiny. It doesn't matter so much as what you did but how easily it can be found out. Have an affair as president just don't let it get into the papers.
The problem is that we fear overlap. Is the guy who smoked pot in college still doing it? That doesn't really even matter, cocaine has a certain respectability. What matters, is he still stupid enough to post evidence of criminal behaviour for the entire world to see?
Women especially are truly stupid in this regard. Take your top off in front of a camera and those pictures WILL find their way onto the internet. Surely everyone knows this by now? Yes women still take their kit off and act all suprised when they end up on the net. How much are you willing to bet that if these women ever want to have a position with any importance later in life these pictures will come back to haunt them?
I bring this up because I recently had a rather weird discussion with a co-worker about this whose pictures off an art thing she did in university came up. She was full frontal in some play they did. It was art. When I asked her why none of her fellow male students were in any kind of naked state she was unable to find a reason. I noticed this before. A lot of times women in art go naked while the males telling them it is for art keep their clothes on. Odd that.
But she is now known on the workfloor not for her brains or years of good work but her perky tits. This doesn't matter if like me you got no ambition but if you want to move up who do you think they are going to choose. The guy who jerked off to naked girls or the girl that got naked?
Life ain't fair, that boss who drives his suv while drunk will not hire the kid who smoked a joint and the boss who fucks his secretary half his age will not give a promotion to a woman who got her kit off. If you got ambition, think about what you do. And while it ain't entirely fair, I am not certain I want the world to be run by people who can't think ahead. Is somebody who can't think ahead about his own future really fit to think ahead about say a companies future or even the entire country?
By your definition all games with a character are roleplaying games. In thief I roleplay a thief. In quake I roleplay a marine. In tetris I roleplay a block stacker.
Your comparison to theater is neither here nor there. This is not what is meant by roleplaying. That is why we don't call actors roleplayers and acting not roleplaying. Yes they play a role but they are not roleplaying. I would think that on slashdot the distinction would be clear. You are probably one of the washed hordes who never played a D&D like game.
You are right about Oblivion not giving you a lot of choice. Oblivion ain't the greatest RPG ever in my book. 99% of its quests are stricltly linear and there are very few consequences to your actions with you being able to both be an assansin and a knight in shining armour with no problem. A more true RPG would let you be one or the other but not both.
Sadly there are few enough game genre labels. Perhaps Oblivion would be better called a stat based, non-class-restricted quest exploration game. Or something.
you and me disagree 100% on this. What you want is a choice-making game, not an RPG. No, in my eyes an RPG is a choice making game. Do I join the thiefs guild or the band of paladins, do I save the child or hand it over to the slavers. Am I evil incarnate, look out for number one or so good halos shoot out of my ass?
The simplest test of an RPG is this, can you choose to be evil or good? You can't in any Final Fantasy game I played. Therefore it is not an RPG by western standards.
But hey, this is a well known holy war. To you playing a role is being the pre-defined character, to me roleplaying is making my own choices in a game. Western RPG vs Japanese RPG.
Just ask yourselve how many people in your audience are in your audience because they tried to escape from ad burdened entertainment like tv, radio, movies.
Let the ads in and loose your audience. Ask tv execs what happened to their young male audience.
Now I do realize that this is temporary state. Just as the net is slowly being taken over by the sheep who love brands (myspace) this too will happen in games. For games aimed squarly at the average consumer ads are okay, they will swallow them as they do elsewhere.
But if your audience is that young male that stopped watching tv because of the constant commercials then beware, you wouldn't be the first person to ruin a product with to much commercialism.
Oh who am I kidding. I for one welcome our old advertising masters may they ruin games as they ruin everything else.
Napster was amazing in its day. You could get any music no matter how fucking obscure with very little hazzle. Well it would take a while but who cared when you could get music no longer available or just never released on your continent.
When I was a kid my mother took me to a very small performance by a dutch artist called Peter Blanker. I don't know how she did it but she got from him a tape with his songs, the a-side his adult songs and the b-side his kid songs. That tape lasted me a long time BUT it eventually just gave away. Well I tried to replace it by buying CD's but no luck, the music just wasn't available.
I couldn't replace it until napster came along. Now I got most of them back again. Napster also introduced me to some unknown stuff as you could select to view all the other songs the person you were downloading from. Hey if they like that song you like perhaps they got other stuff you might like.
Movies are different. I used to spend a lot of time at the movies BUT when I moved to a different city I learned just how bad most movie theathers were. The one I grew up in used to just skip the commercials if their were only regulars and they didn't sell any food stuffs that made a noise. It was in wageningen in case any dutch people want to know. One in Ede used to do the same if you were the only group. I guess both places figured they made more money keeping a few kids happy then sticking to the rules.
Anyway, things changed and now when you go to movies you get lenghty boring commerercials (thanks for banning smoking and drinking commercials at least they were fun to watch) super expensive food and actuall checks that you don't bring your own, people talking on cellphones or even just talking. I just stopped going. It ain't my idea of a funtime anymore.
DVD's are a pain, being out long after the hype has reached you via the internet. Having those stupid piracy warnings wich you only see if you bought the product legally so this is like stopping people who don't speed to warn them about speeding. WTF?
Oh and I can download weird movies that never make it to dutch shops.
You ruin the product you are trying to sell me and the free alternative is better in all aspects. It would be like you had to buy a 100.000 Lada but could get a McClaren for free.
Change your business. Make 1 theather sound free and anyone that makes a sound in it gets a laser in their eyes and make DVD's easily playable the way I want them. Oh and let the DVD's actually be cheaper then the VHS version. Talk about a ripoff. A pressed piece of plastic being more expensive then a mechincal device.
The problem is that the reviewer ain't comparing FF7 with Oblivion at all. He just critizes Oblivion to make FF7 look good.
If we assume for a moment this guy ain't a shill then all he is showing that he prefers adventures over RPG's.
The simple fact is that the western RPG ala Baldur's Gate is a totally different genre then the japanese "RPG" ala the Final Fantasy series. The biggest single difference is that you do NOT have a choice in the japanese "RPG". Why do I use quotes? Because I am a westerner and as such think that RPG's originate with the D&D Pen & Paper style games. These games were not just about fighting and levelling up or being told a story. They were about making choices. The dungeon master would tell you the situation and then the game starts with, what do you do.
The western computer RPG usually tries to give you choice, choice as to what you play, choice as to how you play and choice as to well what choices you make. There are costs involved. The non-choice character Planescape Torment gives you a far stronger story then say Icewind Dale where you create your own party. Yet PT is as free as a bird compared to the on-rails gameplay of Final Fantasy.
If anything the Japanese "RPG" in western eyes is closer to an adventure with stat based fighting. Adventures are great games but usually not known for their free form story telling. Linear is the word most often used. I amazed to see games like Fire Emblem labelled as an RPG. Exactly where is the RP element?
You therefore in my eyes can't compare the Final Fantasy with Oblivion (although Oblivion does suffer from a lot of linear quests) because fundementally they belong in different genre's.
To me, a western CRPG lover Final Fantasy doesn't count as a great RPG, a mediocre RPG or even a bad RPG. I don't count it as an RPG. Doesn't mean it is a bad game. It just ain't a RPG.
I am not totally alone although I realize it is hard to come up with enough labels to eh label all the various game genre's. Lets just settle for Japanese RPG and Western RPG. Most people here would know what is meant by that including that comparing games between the two is futile.
This reviewer probably hasn't learned that distinction and was either burned by Oblivion thinking that ALL RPG's are like Japanese RPG's. Either that or he is an idiot.
As for this being posted by Zonk, well big supirse there.
For a mere 600 euros that ain't much. I wonder what sony's strategy is going to be. Is it going to really push linux? Will it have full access to the hardware and will the hardware specs be fully published? If that is done that fact that the sony's libraries won't be available will be meaningless. The OSS movement is certainly capable enough to write its own libraries considering they do similar stuff with hardware were they are working completly in the dark.
That for me is the most intresting part of the PS3. Console games meh but the PS3 as a alternative PC, that is mighty intresting to those who think MS dominance of the desktop is not a good thing.
Imagine if Sony really does get it right with the PS3 Linux PC (unlikely), all the problems with linux not having drivers will be gone in an instant. Instead all PS3's will have exactly the same hardware. No more drivers problems no need to support decades worth of ancient equipment.
Oh sure I am dreaming, but maybe, just maybe sony will somehow slip up and actually get it right and not screw itself over.
By the Trusted Computing hardware. Wich your mac might already contain. Notice how with game consoles we already seem to accept that the company tells us what we can and cannot do with our property.
Most products you buy you are free to use them in anyway you see fit. With game consoles this is no longer the case. Wonder what will be next?
Apple sure didn't seem to like people hacking their OS to run on other hardware nor for that matter people hacking their hardware to run other OS'es.
Just because today you have a freedom don't count on it being there tomorrow unless you are willing to fight for it today.
RIAA/MPAA wants to rape your ass, Apple just wants you to give him a blowjob.
Compared to what the RIAA/MPAA want to do to you Apple stuff is great. Right?
DRM is an absolute. iTunes DRM is not complete. Steve Jobs realized that for now this is the maximum he could get away with. Question is, is Steve Jobs going to lessen the DRM as the RIAA/MPAA smartens up OR is he going to increase the DRM as the public gets used to it.
What do you think? To invoke godwin, the consumer is poland during WW2. It doesn't really matter who wins the DRM war, poland is going to get it up the ass sooner or later.
Slashdot Mirror
That is right, Apple, iTunes, RIAA, sueing kids, that is what capitalism is all about. Norway isn't a capilalist country, the is socialist or by american standard, communist. Apple wants to sell in Norway then it got to play by norwegian rules.
Companies are free from not entering the european market. But Apple wants to have their cake and eat it too. Just because americans have a goverment that is so cheaply bought doesn't mean the rest of the world works the same.
Good job Norway. What do you know, a goverment official looking out for the people. It must be a cold day in hell.
Also upscaling if done right can have an effect. No not much but it is like the difference between a interlaced video and a properly de-interlaced one.
Proper video filters can really improve the visuall quality of a movie. No it ain't the original anymore but with DVD you ain't got the original anyway.
But hey, you are obviously to smart to fall for this. You go right ahead and watch DVD's in their native resolution on your PC. At least you will have plenty of space left over to have a browser window open to post on slashdot. The rest of us just use video filters to help improve the image and watch it at the max resolution our monitors can handle.
Think for a moment about this sentence. No not about the amount or how they arrived at it. Think about that sentence and and the saying, "you can't spend a penny twice".
That amount X is perhaps lost to the content owners BUT it is not somehow evaporating into thin air, that amount saved is being spend on other things.
So if the content industry gets the amount X then other industries will lose an amount X. Put simpler, that kid who has a allowance who just got a movie for free will now spend that money on his cellular phone, fast food, clothes etc etc.
It is the real problem with the content industry. They used to have to contend only with clothes for young kids pocket money. Now there is games and the phone to contend with. If you ever worked for a phone company you will know how many people get into trouble with their mobile phone bill. That is money they can't spend on music/movies/games. You can't pirate cell phone minutes but you can pirate content.
The industry world wide isn't being hurt by pirating, just the industries that are being pirated.
As to the amount, well you then have to simply ask, where the hell would the economy come up with a spare 250 billion dollars. Since that amount of money is unlikely to be stuffed behind the couch, even Bill Gates, the figure is meaningless. You may as well make it a gazillion for all the relevance.
If piracy was eleminated today the only thing that would happen is that you would see a shift in spending patterns. Perhaps the fashion industry needs to get in on the side of the pirates, cause if everyone has to pay for every bit of content they used to get for free, they will have a lot less money to spend on clothes.
The economy is not a infinite idea, there is X money and you can't just wish up an extra amount. That 250 billion just doesn't exist.
The first one is always free.
A 100.000 dollar mercedes is more expensive then a 20.000 dollar lada but it is still the lada that is overpriced.
Off course this has nothing to do with gameplay but for now it seems that if you want gameplay you are in luck, the cheapest console will be the one with the better gameplay. Offcourse that is not saying the Wii is not overpriced. Nintendo has the most overpriced consoles of all, the proof? MS and Sony subsidise the early consoles, Nintendo does not and makes a profit on them, if that isn't overpricing them I don't know what is.
Perhaps you meant "That's easy. You buy the one that isnt ridiculously expensive."
In that case,might I introduce you to the humble PC. Cheapest console of them all, you already got one after all since you post here. Can't get much cheaper then 0 dollars. Oh and you it is fully backwards compatible with other consoles even. Strange enough neither the 360 or the PS3 or the Wii allow me to play old games not off their brand. Silly.
Evil men when they sense they are close to dying all of sudden want to make amends.
If anything all this charity proves that he knows he has something to make up. Oh and if he hadn't been "evil" he wouldn't have had all those billions to spend on charity but just had MS pay taxes so people wouldn't have to hold out their hand to him but just gotten what was needed from the state.
No sorry mate, I have a hard time with a lot of charities. To often they seem to be nothing more then a tool for the rich to feel good and to make sure the needy have to be properly grateful.
You just have to look at Gates charity in giving computers to schools. Windows. Oh yeah, the first one is free kids.
Claiming Vista to be the most secure OS ever when it has already had a security flaw is just insane and tells us that MS still just don't get it. Or maybe they do get it. After all they make billions. It is sad but lying to the gullible pays better then telling the truth to the clever. There are just so many more gullible people. Last count about 6 billion.
First you crawl back up into your mother then are sucked out of there by your dad. Wonderfull. I hope they have shrinks in the pre-life.
Lots of people complain that P2P is unsafe because it carries virusses and what not. So how come I have never been infected?
Obvious it is because of my enormous intellect that makes einstein look stupid and think that a 15mb .exe files claiming to be a movie is suspicious.
Yes granted the recent WMF crap showed us that if you use MS software any file extension is under suspiscion and the design choice by MS to hide the extension by default must rank as one of their most stupid one (then again this is ms, they make so many it is hard to determine wich one was their worsed).
But GAIM does not protect you from being stupid. Nothing does. Just that if you went through the trouble of installing GAIM on a Non-MS machine, or if you are on a MS-machine deliberatly disabled MSN and installed GAIM, then you are probably not that stupid.
It ain't GAIM that is keeping you safe, it is your brain. Trust me on this, I been around long enough to know people will do anything to get infected. Just promise them a juicy picture. We have about the same chance of stopping computer infection as we have of stepping Sexually Transmitted Diseases. When Miss Jpeg flirts with you, you don't think of using a condom. (Oh and using a condom isn't enough, deep kissing can do it too. How many of you practising safe sex make sure no fluids whatever are swapped?)
Oh and there is another simple reason to clean up our act now. Tech. Mandate that cars in the west have to be clean to a high standard and you lock out the chinese cars with old tech but low prices boosting the local economy.
What do you know, smog free and increased employment just by passing enviromental laws.
Nudity is now in the same class as spam and trojans etc? What is it going to do, give my computer a hard drive ;)
Another of their long forgotten projects Prey now actually seems to be about to be released. Not DNF release date but an actuall one later this year.
Offcourse they also produced the highly acclaimed Max Payne games.
Who is to say how much of their DNF experience went into Max Payne instead? We don't even know how much money was spend so far. Maybe it was just a programmer and a designer working on it on their offhours?
The point is, their money, their business. Personally I prefer this type of development were you do not have to spend every second worrying about what the investors think. Modern blockbusters movies are made entirely with the balance sheet in mind. Do you like modern blockbusters?
Just ask yourselve who makes better games, EA or the smaller studios like 3D realms. DNF might be total dud but games that did release on time also have been duds.
I thought everyone knew this. 3Drealms in an independent like Id (quake) and can do what it wants. They self financed it from the money earned with the earlier Duke Nukem titles.
Wich goes to show how much of a success they were and how little development has to cost (especially when you don't produce anything). Compare this to the guys who did daikatana burning through millions in a fraction of the time and you get the idea that 3d realms may not be the fastest developers ever but they can sure stretch a dollar.
Saying that investors are worried shows you are an idiot who does not know the least bit about the subject. The fact off self-financing has only been known for the last decade. It is the reason why it could go on for a decade.
DNF should not be confused with stuff like the Phantom console. 3D realms is only wasting their own money. Or not. Maybe they are just waiting until all current FPS are so fucking boring that a blast from the past will be very welcome indeed.
So it is not entirely true as in the article that Nintendo doesn't care about the homebrew scene. Not suprisingly, PSP commercial games often don't fit on its memory stick but most Nintendo handheld games can fit a dozen to a flash card.
This makes it a lot easier to pirate GBA/DS games then PSP games.
The DS had a revision that forced a new key but I am just not sure wether that revision happened to be the DS Lite. For sure the DS Lite is of the new version however so the answer is still yes. If you check the sites you will find some advice on checking wich firmware you got with your DS. Color background in pictochat if I remember correctly.
The simple fact is that what you describe as wrong is just the way it is. You can try to change it and you may be successfull, after all the days women were considered totally incapable of doing anything but be mothers and nurses is long gone (says a while middle aged male who thinks a glass ceiling is nice for letting in natural light) so maybe one day this will change too.
Maybe one day nude photos of a famous person will not have every tabloid drooling. Maybe one day a politician can freely admit to have smoked pot. Maybe one day not every word you say will be weighed on a silver scale.
For now the practical terms is that you either carefully examine everystep you take OR be prepared to accept that someday somebody might hold it against you.
You can rant against it for all you want but that does not change the way things are now. I got long hair, almost to my ass and I am male. Not really for fashion, I just like it. The price I pay is that I have been invited several times by high profile companies for job interviews based on previous work they have seen of me. When they then get a look off me their jaws literally drop.
I am good, they like my work but to the suits long hair like mine just doesn't work. Is it wrong? Not really. It is my choice to have long hair and it is their choice not to hire people that don't fit their idea of a well groomed employee.
As for my co-worker (well actually she is a manager of a different department and I only took notice off it because this piece of gossip included nudie pics) she will just have to accept that all men are pigs and all women are vindictive bitches. I personally couldn't care less but that is probably why I am not management at middle age. She is finding that something she did ten years ago is now biting her in the butt. Oh sure she may do wonderfull work and there is that email that circulated with her in the buff. Also up for a promotion is a guy who does not have nudie pics circulating.
You would claim the past of a person makes no difference. But does it?
My long hair is perhaps a way of me saying that I am not like everyone else. A rebel or just a social misfit? Perhaps I just can't be bothered with convention? Whatever the reason you think up it might be enough for you to consider me too big a risk to hire.
Same with the woman appearing nude in a play. As I pointed out this is something that a lot of woman do for the sake of art while all the male artists keep their clothes on. For me this suggests these women lack a certain amount of logic. Wouldn't it be more arty to keep the women clothed and the men naked? If you look at all those pics of girls caught naked circulating in your email don't you notice how rare it is to see the guy, even if he is in the pic great care has usually been taken to obscure the face.
Don't any of these girls who pose ever ask the guy to pose for them? If you want to be save as a girl posing nude just ask the guy to pose naked for you so when he releases your photographs you can release his.
That no women does this suggests to me women ain't paranoid enough and I would never hire any person as a system administrator who isn't 100% paranoid. Cause on the web they really are out to get you.
Discrimination is against something you are that can't be changed. Your skin color is easy (and yes I have heard of Michael Jackson but lets not go there) since it is fixed from birth and will never ever change. You therefore should not be choosen based on your skin color. Right? Right.
But is a myspace account the same thing? Yes "I won't hire you because you are black" is bad. "I won't hire you because you posted pics of yourselve online doing illegal or stupid things wich make me think you are an idiot who can't be trusted with any reponsibility" is entirely different in my eyes.
Granted it comes close. For instance in holland smoking pot is semi-legal. The smoking itself is legal but the sale isn't wich makes it all a bit of a legal mess. Yet this leaves the fact that if a dutch person shows pictures of himself smoking a joint (on dutch soil) there is no crime being committed and it is really no different then say a picture of him drinking a beer.
So should this person then not be hired for a job just because the boss considers pot wrong in his views? Is this the same as not hiring a gay person because you consider homosexuality wrong? For that matter is it wrong to not hire a person using any drug is you consider drug use wrong?
I don't think it can be called discrimination because I just hope that we won't go that far. When you have to fire a person you will have to decide in wich person to invest a small fortune of time and real hard cash in the hope you will be getting some value out of them after training and orientation.
It is hard and I always try not to get involved but being the tech guy in a non-tech company I have to try to determine how good they will be in the tech role. Personality then comes into play. If I would find a tech with a myspace account I wouldn't not just hire them. I would fire them. Twice. Just to be sure.
It may not be scientific but suprise suprise, human resource management ain't a hard science.
Yes a marketting job could well do with someone who stands out. For a lot of real jobs it don't matter shit. You don't care what your plumber did in school did you?
But for a lot of the more exciting/succesfull jobs who you are matters because the risk for choosing the wrong person are high.
Tell me, what kind of pilot do you want. One who leads a perfectly boring life who just spend a quiet weekend home with his wife and kids or one who just spend the weekend on a drug and booze filled rampage? Who do you want managing your stocks. Someone with all the political motivation of a jellyfish or someone who firmly believes money is the root of all evil?
Do you want an eccentric person in charge or a nuclear powerplant. A police officer with quircks, a judge with political views (especially one that doesn't agree with yours)?
Luckily most people never need to worry about this. There are plenty of jobs out there where they don't give a shit what you do in your private life. And I can't help but feel that if you want a bigger job then you should be willing to adjust what you do in your private life so you can get the big bucks.
If you want to be your own person in your personal life then the price is that you will have to accept the kind of job where your personal life don't matter. The fast majority of jobs will be open to you. Sure the fast majority of jobs also have bad pay and are boring but hey, at least you got a full and un-spyed upon private life.
What seems kinda silly is however to go to far with this. The odd thing is that those kids who do extreme things are the ones who do best in real life. I should know, I didn't as a kid and I am very mediocre in my adult life.
Who do you want in your company? Joe Average or somebody going places? For certain jobs yes somebody with a solid boring past is perhaps best. Chartered accountants would be nice to know they never ever broke any law of any kind ever. Read up on Arthur Andersen to see what happens when you go from the boring accountants to the exciting ones.
What is a problem is that people who do stuff like posting pictures of themselves smoking pot online then seem to want the kind of job that calls for people who think a cup of tea is a rollercoaster ride. There are just certain kind of proffesions where your entire life will come under close scrutiny. It doesn't matter so much as what you did but how easily it can be found out. Have an affair as president just don't let it get into the papers.
The problem is that we fear overlap. Is the guy who smoked pot in college still doing it? That doesn't really even matter, cocaine has a certain respectability. What matters, is he still stupid enough to post evidence of criminal behaviour for the entire world to see?
Women especially are truly stupid in this regard. Take your top off in front of a camera and those pictures WILL find their way onto the internet. Surely everyone knows this by now? Yes women still take their kit off and act all suprised when they end up on the net. How much are you willing to bet that if these women ever want to have a position with any importance later in life these pictures will come back to haunt them?
I bring this up because I recently had a rather weird discussion with a co-worker about this whose pictures off an art thing she did in university came up. She was full frontal in some play they did. It was art. When I asked her why none of her fellow male students were in any kind of naked state she was unable to find a reason. I noticed this before. A lot of times women in art go naked while the males telling them it is for art keep their clothes on. Odd that.
But she is now known on the workfloor not for her brains or years of good work but her perky tits. This doesn't matter if like me you got no ambition but if you want to move up who do you think they are going to choose. The guy who jerked off to naked girls or the girl that got naked?
Life ain't fair, that boss who drives his suv while drunk will not hire the kid who smoked a joint and the boss who fucks his secretary half his age will not give a promotion to a woman who got her kit off. If you got ambition, think about what you do. And while it ain't entirely fair, I am not certain I want the world to be run by people who can't think ahead. Is somebody who can't think ahead about his own future really fit to think ahead about say a companies future or even the entire country?
Your comparison to theater is neither here nor there. This is not what is meant by roleplaying. That is why we don't call actors roleplayers and acting not roleplaying. Yes they play a role but they are not roleplaying. I would think that on slashdot the distinction would be clear. You are probably one of the washed hordes who never played a D&D like game.
You are right about Oblivion not giving you a lot of choice. Oblivion ain't the greatest RPG ever in my book. 99% of its quests are stricltly linear and there are very few consequences to your actions with you being able to both be an assansin and a knight in shining armour with no problem. A more true RPG would let you be one or the other but not both.
Sadly there are few enough game genre labels. Perhaps Oblivion would be better called a stat based, non-class-restricted quest exploration game. Or something.
you and me disagree 100% on this. What you want is a choice-making game, not an RPG. No, in my eyes an RPG is a choice making game. Do I join the thiefs guild or the band of paladins, do I save the child or hand it over to the slavers. Am I evil incarnate, look out for number one or so good halos shoot out of my ass?
The simplest test of an RPG is this, can you choose to be evil or good? You can't in any Final Fantasy game I played. Therefore it is not an RPG by western standards.
But hey, this is a well known holy war. To you playing a role is being the pre-defined character, to me roleplaying is making my own choices in a game. Western RPG vs Japanese RPG.
Let the ads in and loose your audience. Ask tv execs what happened to their young male audience.
Now I do realize that this is temporary state. Just as the net is slowly being taken over by the sheep who love brands (myspace) this too will happen in games. For games aimed squarly at the average consumer ads are okay, they will swallow them as they do elsewhere.
But if your audience is that young male that stopped watching tv because of the constant commercials then beware, you wouldn't be the first person to ruin a product with to much commercialism.
Oh who am I kidding. I for one welcome our old advertising masters may they ruin games as they ruin everything else.
When I was a kid my mother took me to a very small performance by a dutch artist called Peter Blanker. I don't know how she did it but she got from him a tape with his songs, the a-side his adult songs and the b-side his kid songs. That tape lasted me a long time BUT it eventually just gave away. Well I tried to replace it by buying CD's but no luck, the music just wasn't available.
I couldn't replace it until napster came along. Now I got most of them back again. Napster also introduced me to some unknown stuff as you could select to view all the other songs the person you were downloading from. Hey if they like that song you like perhaps they got other stuff you might like.
Movies are different. I used to spend a lot of time at the movies BUT when I moved to a different city I learned just how bad most movie theathers were. The one I grew up in used to just skip the commercials if their were only regulars and they didn't sell any food stuffs that made a noise. It was in wageningen in case any dutch people want to know. One in Ede used to do the same if you were the only group. I guess both places figured they made more money keeping a few kids happy then sticking to the rules.
Anyway, things changed and now when you go to movies you get lenghty boring commerercials (thanks for banning smoking and drinking commercials at least they were fun to watch) super expensive food and actuall checks that you don't bring your own, people talking on cellphones or even just talking. I just stopped going. It ain't my idea of a funtime anymore.
DVD's are a pain, being out long after the hype has reached you via the internet. Having those stupid piracy warnings wich you only see if you bought the product legally so this is like stopping people who don't speed to warn them about speeding. WTF?
Oh and I can download weird movies that never make it to dutch shops.
You ruin the product you are trying to sell me and the free alternative is better in all aspects. It would be like you had to buy a 100.000 Lada but could get a McClaren for free.
Change your business. Make 1 theather sound free and anyone that makes a sound in it gets a laser in their eyes and make DVD's easily playable the way I want them. Oh and let the DVD's actually be cheaper then the VHS version. Talk about a ripoff. A pressed piece of plastic being more expensive then a mechincal device.
If we assume for a moment this guy ain't a shill then all he is showing that he prefers adventures over RPG's.
The simple fact is that the western RPG ala Baldur's Gate is a totally different genre then the japanese "RPG" ala the Final Fantasy series. The biggest single difference is that you do NOT have a choice in the japanese "RPG". Why do I use quotes? Because I am a westerner and as such think that RPG's originate with the D&D Pen & Paper style games. These games were not just about fighting and levelling up or being told a story. They were about making choices. The dungeon master would tell you the situation and then the game starts with, what do you do.
The western computer RPG usually tries to give you choice, choice as to what you play, choice as to how you play and choice as to well what choices you make. There are costs involved. The non-choice character Planescape Torment gives you a far stronger story then say Icewind Dale where you create your own party. Yet PT is as free as a bird compared to the on-rails gameplay of Final Fantasy.
If anything the Japanese "RPG" in western eyes is closer to an adventure with stat based fighting. Adventures are great games but usually not known for their free form story telling. Linear is the word most often used. I amazed to see games like Fire Emblem labelled as an RPG. Exactly where is the RP element?
You therefore in my eyes can't compare the Final Fantasy with Oblivion (although Oblivion does suffer from a lot of linear quests) because fundementally they belong in different genre's.
To me, a western CRPG lover Final Fantasy doesn't count as a great RPG, a mediocre RPG or even a bad RPG. I don't count it as an RPG. Doesn't mean it is a bad game. It just ain't a RPG.
I am not totally alone although I realize it is hard to come up with enough labels to eh label all the various game genre's. Lets just settle for Japanese RPG and Western RPG. Most people here would know what is meant by that including that comparing games between the two is futile.
This reviewer probably hasn't learned that distinction and was either burned by Oblivion thinking that ALL RPG's are like Japanese RPG's. Either that or he is an idiot.
As for this being posted by Zonk, well big supirse there.
That for me is the most intresting part of the PS3. Console games meh but the PS3 as a alternative PC, that is mighty intresting to those who think MS dominance of the desktop is not a good thing.
Imagine if Sony really does get it right with the PS3 Linux PC (unlikely), all the problems with linux not having drivers will be gone in an instant. Instead all PS3's will have exactly the same hardware. No more drivers problems no need to support decades worth of ancient equipment.
Oh sure I am dreaming, but maybe, just maybe sony will somehow slip up and actually get it right and not screw itself over.
Most products you buy you are free to use them in anyway you see fit. With game consoles this is no longer the case. Wonder what will be next?
Apple sure didn't seem to like people hacking their OS to run on other hardware nor for that matter people hacking their hardware to run other OS'es.
Just because today you have a freedom don't count on it being there tomorrow unless you are willing to fight for it today.
Compared to what the RIAA/MPAA want to do to you Apple stuff is great. Right?
DRM is an absolute. iTunes DRM is not complete. Steve Jobs realized that for now this is the maximum he could get away with. Question is, is Steve Jobs going to lessen the DRM as the RIAA/MPAA smartens up OR is he going to increase the DRM as the public gets used to it.
What do you think? To invoke godwin, the consumer is poland during WW2. It doesn't really matter who wins the DRM war, poland is going to get it up the ass sooner or later.