"You're not going to get a DS/PSP beating experience with touch and motion controls."
You haven't even seen what's going to be offered tomorrow, much less a year from now after developers gain even more experience designing games for it, and you're still willing to make that pronouncement? It doesn't fit in with your preconceived notions of how a game works, so it's going to fail?
Does this sound familiar?
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
I bet you and CmdrTaco can be staring members in the same club...
Define dominate. They're already skimming the lion's share of the premimum computer market (70% or so?). And the online music and video market. And the mp3 player market. And they're making a pretty good dent in the premium smartphone market after just one year and one phone.
If you ask me the smartest thing they can do is just keep on doing what they're doing, and let the other idiots fight it out in the $495 beige-box zero-margin marketplace.
True. Any major game developer isn't going to mind spending a few grand on Macs. Heck, even smaller developers like PopCap can afford it (and are doing so).
Further, you get an added bonus. Develop a game for the iPhone and you're probably close to having a game that could be upgraded and sold to the entire Mac audience. Develop for Symbian, however, and... well... you have a game for Symbian.
Rumor has it that the price will drop, but you're missing the point. People won't buy a $399 game console. But they may well buy a $399 device that's a phone, and a text messager, and an email and internet browser, and camera, and music player, and movie player, AND a game player.
Further, if you have the iPhone, just how likely is it that someone is going to buy yet another portable device in any of those categories?
"virtual gamepad devised will take up screen space"
Even a total interface noob could spend five minutes noodling and come up with the idea of near-transparent hot-zones near the corners that indicate buttons but without hiding much screen real-estate. Define some hot corners, use a context menu, and use the accelerometers for navigation (front/back turn) and doing a Doom/Quake interface would be relatively simple.
One might also mention that plenty of phone-based games have been produced that didn't need a dedicated gamepad.
Further, gamepads exist primarily in their current incarnation for one reason only: they provide a reasonable amount of control in exchange for a few cheap plastic buttons. As the Wii has shown, we can do better.
Joysticks, keyboards, mice, controllers... both developers and gamers will adapt.
BMW will never drop the price of the 5 Series to the point where it can beat out the competition to become the standard car people use...
Nor do they need to.
Every time one of these stories surfaces some marketing "genius" proclaims that the Mac/iPod/iPhone will never be the "standard", and that Apple needs to drop prices in order to be "competitive".
"I always thought it was fairly in-efficient that we had trucks that would go all the way to Texas instead of driving it into Minneapolis (55 miles), then shipping it via train to Dallas where a local truck would take it to a warehouse for store distribution."
Maybe you should check into that. With today's fuel costs it might be a great way for them to save a bundle of money. (And make you look brilliant for suggesting it.)
From the article, it sounds like the author wants to create an international governing body that ensures all corporations are playing by the same rules no matter where they're located.
So what country, INCLUDING the US, is going to want to turn control of corporate governance over to an international organization?
The article indicates that developing nations use local laws (or lack thereof) to attract corporations. So it sounds to me that developing nations won't sign, as they'll then lose the advantages that attract foreign companies and capital. And the "first-world" countries won't want to give control over to some entity (like the UN) that won't have THEIR interests in mind.
Sounds like a non-starter to me.
Personally, I think most of these "havens" will disappear over time anyway. Look at India. Was the major outsourcing center for the support and call industry. But as competition for skilled employees increased, wages increased, and suddenly other countries were "cheaper".
"It is in a competitive market that the price gets driven to the marginal cost."
It's long been an axiom when discussing these things that a "competitive market" is doublespeak for "free" or pirated content. Hence the constant "necessity" of being forced to compete with free. Eliminate piracy, however...
The question you should be asking yourself, bright boy, is WTF the iphone have to do with PAID software/music/web services? Apple is building a direct-to-device software distribution system where, if you want the software, you buy it from the App Store and THEN it's downloaded to your phone. It's also signed, so you can't just copy it off and distribute it as "free".
So in response to the comment "Techdirt's article was all about how real business models need to reflect both the near-zero marginal cost of additional copies of media...", I pointed out that Apple apparently has a "real" business model that doesn't "need" to reflect near-zero marginal costs. You want a $5 game from the App Store, you pay $5 to the App Store. Apple controls both ends of the equation.
And as Apple's third-party software developers ALSO have access to the same model, they too can write software with some expectation of being paid for their work and don't need to sell t-shirts or beg for donations.
In short, there are plenty of "real" business models for digital content, and "free" isn't the only one...
Or come up with new distribution methods. Look at how Apple will be doing applications for the iPhone. Users will browse the "app" store directly from the phone, purchase from the phone, and they will be digitally signed and downloaded directly to the phone.
Which is is a distinction made only by those rationalizing why content should be "free". Production costs are real, and are amortized and combined with the distribution costs of each individual sale. Reduce one cost, and the other still remains.
Now, figure out how to make a $100,000,000 movie for nothing, and you may have something. In the meantime...
True, but again, you have to remember the timeline. The first version of SC didn't hit until two years after HC was released, which was, again, only two years after we had the first color-capable Mac (Mac II) and Color Quickdraw. So 90% of the hardware base was still B&W.
And SC itself didn't do card/background bitmap-everywhere color, but only supported colored buttons and smaller bitmap objects. And with HC there were questions as to how color stacks would play on B&W machines, backward compatibility issues, and so on.
IIRC, SC didn't get full 24-bit support until the late '90s, by which time Apple had already handed HC off to Claris. Apple DID work on a color capable HyperCard 3.0, but then decided that QuickTime interactive would do everything HC would do, and more. 'Course, QTi was dropped too, and eventually everything but QuickTime video was shelved by Jobs.
Just shows that Stevie doesn't get EVERYTHING right. (grin)
So there aren't any other versions of Cinderella? Huh.
Sorry, but Disney holds copyright on the work and specific likenesses they created when a hundred or so animators they paid made their version of the story and brought it to the screen.
You're completely free to buy someone else's version, or even make your own, for that matter.
Should have tried Reports for HyperCard. Super fast searching, sorting, report layouts, labels, mail merge, row/column views, you name it, it did it. It understood the HC file format, and effectively bulk-loaded entire sections of the stack into ram for searching.
Claris was once interested in acquiring it, but didn't when they decided it would have too much of an impact on FileMaker. Ran rings around the silly thing.
Color WAS considered, but to do animations and the other things HyperCard did in B&W requires several offscreen bitmaps. They're not too intensive at 1 bit per pixel (640x480x1, or 38K), but downright prohibitive on the hardware of the time when done in color (640x480x24, or 0.9MB). Keep in mind that a color-capable Mac II (vintage 1987, same as HC) only had 1 megabyte of RAM standard, so one full-color bitmap for one stack would have needed ALL of the memory in the computer.
People forget just how far computers have come, when today's computers have 512MB just on the graphics card...
Michael Long, Nine To Five Software, Reports for HyperCard.
All this will ultimately do is criminalize such systems, destroying any real benefit they may have had, and all simply so you can avoid paying a buck or two for the song or movie you wanted anyway.
"Because becoming the target of a downloading lawsuit is currently less likely than being struck by lightning."
Now. Change the law, and suddenly every ISP sends tracking data to the local government, which immediately sends out a summons, much like the process with traffic cams. Come to court if you want, or just pay the fine.
Now, under that scenario, is "free" music worth a $500 ticket? $1,000?
It's even simpler, actually. If I were doing it I'd require ISPs to place significant caps on UPSTREAM traffic. Get your first $500 monthly bill, and I pretty much gurantee that you're going to shut down your torrent system. You can leach, of course, but if no one is seeding and everyone is leaching, how worthwhile is it going to be?
You realize, of course, that the motion picture industry is one of the few that actually generate an international trade surplus? With other industries failing, do you think the US is NOT going to do anything and everything it can to protect the remaining cash cows?
When an industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in trade, safeguarding that income becomes its own "very real and very serious problem".
Your time is worth nothing? You don't pay for an internet connection? Your computer and hard drive are free?
"But most people know they'll never get caught."
Precisely. But if the odds of getting caught were much, much higher? Many people speed, but most of them don't go significantly faster than the limit because when you do so the chances of getting caught go up, as do the penalties.
You think it won't be worthwhile for the government to enforce infringement cases... but I think they will, and they'll do it for the money, just like enforcing speed limits is a major revenue source for local municipalities.
Why is it that every time this comes up someone cherry picks quotes from Dowling? If you're going to quote a two-decades old case, then let's get some that actually apply. "The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of 2314." Reread the last part, "for purposes of 2314". Which means that they determined that, for this case, the act didn't apply.
Why? "The purpose of 2314 to fill with federal action an enforcement gap created by limited state jurisdiction...." So this is why 2314 exists.
"No such need for supplemental federal action has ever existed with respect to copyright..." And why it doesn't apply.
To back up, "Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud." So, to quote your own case, there are property interests and it's not just "run-of-the-mill theft".
Now, from dictionary.com: Theft: "a criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent."
Property OR services. Check. Without consent. Check.
Finally, from a moral standpoint, if you take my property, my work, the results of my work, or even just my ideas, you're stealing from me.
So, from a legal, dictionary, and moral standpoint...
Actually, that's why I'd like to try a "MInority Report" arm waving system for a while. Add a couple of wrist weights and you could get a nice workout while you work... (grin)
Seriously though, I think for a good touch-screen system to work it would almost need to be something on the order of an inclned draftsman's desk.
And I just read somewhere about some new coatings for materials that wouldn't allow oils to stick to them. Maybe they could add them to the iPhone and help you keep your t-shirt clean... (grin)
Slashdot Mirror
"You're not going to get a DS/PSP beating experience with touch and motion controls."
You haven't even seen what's going to be offered tomorrow, much less a year from now after developers gain even more experience designing games for it, and you're still willing to make that pronouncement? It doesn't fit in with your preconceived notions of how a game works, so it's going to fail?
Does this sound familiar?
"No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
I bet you and CmdrTaco can be staring members in the same club...
Define dominate. They're already skimming the lion's share of the premimum computer market (70% or so?). And the online music and video market. And the mp3 player market. And they're making a pretty good dent in the premium smartphone market after just one year and one phone.
If you ask me the smartest thing they can do is just keep on doing what they're doing, and let the other idiots fight it out in the $495 beige-box zero-margin marketplace.
True. Any major game developer isn't going to mind spending a few grand on Macs. Heck, even smaller developers like PopCap can afford it (and are doing so).
Further, you get an added bonus. Develop a game for the iPhone and you're probably close to having a game that could be upgraded and sold to the entire Mac audience. Develop for Symbian, however, and... well... you have a game for Symbian.
Sorry about that.
"PSP = $170. NDS = $130. iPhone = $399."
Rumor has it that the price will drop, but you're missing the point. People won't buy a $399 game console. But they may well buy a $399 device that's a phone, and a text messager, and an email and internet browser, and camera, and music player, and movie player, AND a game player.
Further, if you have the iPhone, just how likely is it that someone is going to buy yet another portable device in any of those categories?
"virtual gamepad devised will take up screen space"
Even a total interface noob could spend five minutes noodling and come up with the idea of near-transparent hot-zones near the corners that indicate buttons but without hiding much screen real-estate. Define some hot corners, use a context menu, and use the accelerometers for navigation (front/back turn) and doing a Doom/Quake interface would be relatively simple.
One might also mention that plenty of phone-based games have been produced that didn't need a dedicated gamepad.
Further, gamepads exist primarily in their current incarnation for one reason only: they provide a reasonable amount of control in exchange for a few cheap plastic buttons. As the Wii has shown, we can do better.
Joysticks, keyboards, mice, controllers... both developers and gamers will adapt.
BMW will never drop the price of the 5 Series to the point where it can beat out the competition to become the standard car people use...
Nor do they need to.
Every time one of these stories surfaces some marketing "genius" proclaims that the Mac/iPod/iPhone will never be the "standard", and that Apple needs to drop prices in order to be "competitive".
Guess what?
They don't need to either.
"I always thought it was fairly in-efficient that we had trucks that would go all the way to Texas instead of driving it into Minneapolis (55 miles), then shipping it via train to Dallas where a local truck would take it to a warehouse for store distribution."
Maybe you should check into that. With today's fuel costs it might be a great way for them to save a bundle of money. (And make you look brilliant for suggesting it.)
"Steve gets what he wants and has billions to "contribute"...."
So let him "contribute" and just build the darn thing. Heck, he'd probably end up making as much or more on tickets as his casinos...
From the article, it sounds like the author wants to create an international governing body that ensures all corporations are playing by the same rules no matter where they're located.
So what country, INCLUDING the US, is going to want to turn control of corporate governance over to an international organization?
The article indicates that developing nations use local laws (or lack thereof) to attract corporations. So it sounds to me that developing nations won't sign, as they'll then lose the advantages that attract foreign companies and capital. And the "first-world" countries won't want to give control over to some entity (like the UN) that won't have THEIR interests in mind.
Sounds like a non-starter to me.
Personally, I think most of these "havens" will disappear over time anyway. Look at India. Was the major outsourcing center for the support and call industry. But as competition for skilled employees increased, wages increased, and suddenly other countries were "cheaper".
Ditto. Sounds to me like the issue is using cheap-ass hardware...
"It is in a competitive market that the price gets driven to the marginal cost."
It's long been an axiom when discussing these things that a "competitive market" is doublespeak for "free" or pirated content. Hence the constant "necessity" of being forced to compete with free. Eliminate piracy, however...
The question you should be asking yourself, bright boy, is WTF the iphone have to do with PAID software/music/web services? Apple is building a direct-to-device software distribution system where, if you want the software, you buy it from the App Store and THEN it's downloaded to your phone. It's also signed, so you can't just copy it off and distribute it as "free".
So in response to the comment "Techdirt's article was all about how real business models need to reflect both the near-zero marginal cost of additional copies of media...", I pointed out that Apple apparently has a "real" business model that doesn't "need" to reflect near-zero marginal costs. You want a $5 game from the App Store, you pay $5 to the App Store. Apple controls both ends of the equation.
And as Apple's third-party software developers ALSO have access to the same model, they too can write software with some expectation of being paid for their work and don't need to sell t-shirts or beg for donations.
In short, there are plenty of "real" business models for digital content, and "free" isn't the only one...
Or come up with new distribution methods. Look at how Apple will be doing applications for the iPhone. Users will browse the "app" store directly from the phone, purchase from the phone, and they will be digitally signed and downloaded directly to the phone.
Which is is a distinction made only by those rationalizing why content should be "free". Production costs are real, and are amortized and combined with the distribution costs of each individual sale. Reduce one cost, and the other still remains.
Now, figure out how to make a $100,000,000 movie for nothing, and you may have something. In the meantime...
True, but again, you have to remember the timeline. The first version of SC didn't hit until two years after HC was released, which was, again, only two years after we had the first color-capable Mac (Mac II) and Color Quickdraw. So 90% of the hardware base was still B&W.
And SC itself didn't do card/background bitmap-everywhere color, but only supported colored buttons and smaller bitmap objects. And with HC there were questions as to how color stacks would play on B&W machines, backward compatibility issues, and so on.
IIRC, SC didn't get full 24-bit support until the late '90s, by which time Apple had already handed HC off to Claris. Apple DID work on a color capable HyperCard 3.0, but then decided that QuickTime interactive would do everything HC would do, and more. 'Course, QTi was dropped too, and eventually everything but QuickTime video was shelved by Jobs.
Just shows that Stevie doesn't get EVERYTHING right. (grin)
"... to people that do not generate any added value into the music/movie."
You mean, other than taking the often enormous risk of financing that multi-million dollar movie in the first place?
So there aren't any other versions of Cinderella? Huh.
Sorry, but Disney holds copyright on the work and specific likenesses they created when a hundred or so animators they paid made their version of the story and brought it to the screen.
You're completely free to buy someone else's version, or even make your own, for that matter.
Should have tried Reports for HyperCard. Super fast searching, sorting, report layouts, labels, mail merge, row/column views, you name it, it did it. It understood the HC file format, and effectively bulk-loaded entire sections of the stack into ram for searching.
Claris was once interested in acquiring it, but didn't when they decided it would have too much of an impact on FileMaker. Ran rings around the silly thing.
Color WAS considered, but to do animations and the other things HyperCard did in B&W requires several offscreen bitmaps. They're not too intensive at 1 bit per pixel (640x480x1, or 38K), but downright prohibitive on the hardware of the time when done in color (640x480x24, or 0.9MB). Keep in mind that a color-capable Mac II (vintage 1987, same as HC) only had 1 megabyte of RAM standard, so one full-color bitmap for one stack would have needed ALL of the memory in the computer.
People forget just how far computers have come, when today's computers have 512MB just on the graphics card...
Michael Long, Nine To Five Software, Reports for HyperCard.
All this will ultimately do is criminalize such systems, destroying any real benefit they may have had, and all simply so you can avoid paying a buck or two for the song or movie you wanted anyway.
"Because becoming the target of a downloading lawsuit is currently less likely than being struck by lightning."
Now. Change the law, and suddenly every ISP sends tracking data to the local government, which immediately sends out a summons, much like the process with traffic cams. Come to court if you want, or just pay the fine.
Now, under that scenario, is "free" music worth a $500 ticket? $1,000?
It's even simpler, actually. If I were doing it I'd require ISPs to place significant caps on UPSTREAM traffic. Get your first $500 monthly bill, and I pretty much gurantee that you're going to shut down your torrent system. You can leach, of course, but if no one is seeding and everyone is leaching, how worthwhile is it going to be?
You realize, of course, that the motion picture industry is one of the few that actually generate an international trade surplus? With other industries failing, do you think the US is NOT going to do anything and everything it can to protect the remaining cash cows?
When an industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in trade, safeguarding that income becomes its own "very real and very serious problem".
Translation: it's NOT going away.
"See if I download stuff it costs me NOTHING."
Your time is worth nothing? You don't pay for an internet connection? Your computer and hard drive are free?
"But most people know they'll never get caught."
Precisely. But if the odds of getting caught were much, much higher? Many people speed, but most of them don't go significantly faster than the limit because when you do so the chances of getting caught go up, as do the penalties.
You think it won't be worthwhile for the government to enforce infringement cases... but I think they will, and they'll do it for the money, just like enforcing speed limits is a major revenue source for local municipalities.
Why is it that every time this comes up someone cherry picks quotes from Dowling? If you're going to quote a two-decades old case, then let's get some that actually apply. "The phonorecords in question were not "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" for purposes of 2314." Reread the last part, "for purposes of 2314". Which means that they determined that, for this case, the act didn't apply.
Why? "The purpose of 2314 to fill with federal action an enforcement gap created by limited state jurisdiction...." So this is why 2314 exists.
"No such need for supplemental federal action has ever existed with respect to copyright..." And why it doesn't apply.
To back up, "Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud." So, to quote your own case, there are property interests and it's not just "run-of-the-mill theft".
Now, from dictionary.com: Theft: "a criminal taking of the property or services of another without consent."
Property OR services. Check. Without consent. Check.
Finally, from a moral standpoint, if you take my property, my work, the results of my work, or even just my ideas, you're stealing from me.
So, from a legal, dictionary, and moral standpoint...
Actually, that's why I'd like to try a "MInority Report" arm waving system for a while. Add a couple of wrist weights and you could get a nice workout while you work... (grin)
Seriously though, I think for a good touch-screen system to work it would almost need to be something on the order of an inclned draftsman's desk.
And I just read somewhere about some new coatings for materials that wouldn't allow oils to stick to them. Maybe they could add them to the iPhone and help you keep your t-shirt clean... (grin)