I might buy into your logic if this was some sort of cancer-innoculation that would wipe the disease from existance. Might, but wouldn't. We've done that with a ton of other diseases, and they make fine money selling the innoculations.
My point is, there's money to be made selling a treatment, cure or innoculation. Equal money, it's just a matter of adjusting the price points.
The RIAA themselves will tell you that sales have never been better, and the industry has never been healthier - if you're an investor.
Warner music losing money doesn't mean that album and song sales can't be going up. They are, but the numbers are weird.
Digital music sales tripled last year, but album sales continued to slowly trickle off. This article says overall sales are up 19% - including digital music, videos, etc.
The market is different - people are less likely to buy a CD, when they can buy just a song, or with so many portable video devices like video iPods, are buying music related DVDs - live concerts, or video compilations. The market is much more diverse - music listeners don't necessarily buy "albums" as they have conventionally.
At the end of the day, it's all (potential, if they can realize it) profit for RIAA members.
However, when the discussion turns to piracy, they only talk about CD sales. These are of course dwindling - they would be even if there was absolutely no piracy at all. But a huge chunk of the money they "lose" in album sales they make up in digital downloads, or other products.
It's a justified analogy to what the RIAA is doing, but I welcome the work they spend trying to button up music "piracy." For one thing, the costs of the RIAA are pushed onto the consumer -- leading to higher prices of the music they're trying to protect, giving consumers more reason to work with alternative distribution mechanisms
They're making record amounts of money, despite what they tell you. This is about maximizing profit. They aren't dumb, they've run the numbers.
ISPs are being financially harmed, too, because they're going to have to keep these logs
Why should the RIAA care? Besides, in lots of cases, the ISP is going to be owned by the same set of companies that own the members of the RIAA.
'm noticing that medium-level artists are finding more ways to produce an income without the sale of recorded music
It's always been that way. The $$$ for the artist is in touring and merchandise sales, why do you think they'd work 11 months a year, if they can get fat and rich floating in their gold-lined swimming pool? Love of art? Maybe for 1 in a million, for the rest - performing live is their job. Recording an album is marketing.
Are these "early settlements" financially profitable for the RIAA? Lawyers aren't cheap, and settlement lawyers even less so. Even if you agree to a settlement, they still need collections agents to process the payment and make sure it is done in full.
Financially profitable? Maybe not in and of themselves, but they're looking at the big picture: say, for every 1 guy we sue/settle with, 10 guys get scared off of kazaa and onto iTunes.
Although, I wouldn't be surprised to find the whole sue cycle to be at least financially self-sustaining.
Remember, lawyers are behind all this - the RIAA is basically nothing but industry lawyers, and they're pretty good at making sure they get paid.
It wouldn't have been going on this long if they didn't feel it was effective.
Wii-mote trumps mouse as a natural "gun" like pointing device. Hopefully Nintendo truly exploits this fact with some good FPS's. Far Cry for Wii is a decent teaser of whats to come.
I grew up on Atari, C64 and NES, then SNES. I'd play constantly. Then I hit "the age of chicks and parties".
I completely skipped the N64 and PSX years. Never got either system until a couple years ago, when I picked them up used for like 15 bucks.
After I finished university and settled down in a job, wife, etc, I'm back to playing games again. Dreamcast came out the year after I graduated, and I bought one.
I don't know if I'd use the word "hardcore", but I have time for games again.
Just like more moviegoers = more movies catering to the lowest common denominator.
More tv viewers = more drek reality TV. That's what the masses want.
Larger market for music = more Britney.
But, even so, there still are good movies made now and then, there is still enjoyable TV to watch, and some good music to listen to. Not everybody tries to target the largest possible audience, the business of it realizes that the little niche markets can be very lucrative.
This summary bases it's whole premise around Gears of War, and is the same fallacy the RIAA/MPAA use: they assume something should sell x jillion copies, then go pointing fingers at others when it doesn't. I'm sure the ESA will come out to tell you it's because of piracy, but frankly, I didn't think Gears of War was all that great. I found the gameplay was awkward, the plot generic. It just didn't float my boat.
Hardcore gamers don't buy based on hype alone. Sorry Cliffy B, you actually have to deliver more than shiny graphics and a paint by numbers shooter about "space marines fighting aliens".
Frankly, there was nothing hardcore about the game, IMO. I thought about buying it, ended up putting it on the shelf and getting Dead Rising instead.
Also, when you're charging 70 bucks a game after tax, don't expect me to buy the games in the same volume as I used to.
I agree with you. Suddenly I'm interested in a HD-DVD drive, I could rent^H^H^Hbuy movies, encode them to HD WMV9, fill up a portable HDD and attach it to my 360, or stream across the 'net. (Poor lil fella can't play DivX and it's what's hooked to my HDTV)
This whole "one box contains one movie" thing is so 1980s.
There is no format war, the future is going to be streaming online delivery to secure devices like the Xbox 360. Slashbots will be aghast at my statement, and say "no way will I buy from MSFT, etc". But they will line up around the block to buy the exact same thing from Apple, and there will be a million articles about how new and innovative it is, and how awesome the rules Steve Jobs thought up about how, where and with whom you can watch a movie.
Back to the HDDVD/BluRay disc:
The "protection" is just a lock that you have to pick to get at your media. The action of picking that lock makes you run afoul of the DMCA. The game isnt "make it impossible to hack", the game is "make sure we can prosecute people who do".
This is temporary, ultimately. The polycarbonate disc as a means of delivering digital content will go the way of the dodo. Well, not completely, there will always be collectors. Let's say it'll go the way of the vinyl LP. Forgotten, but not gone.
The very fact that they put any sort of lock on it, means you have to pick that lock to get the content. Getting the content isnt illegal (fair use). Picking a lock is (DMCA). They still have the "legal framework" for pursuing copyright violations.
They'd have stuck with CSS, but to attract new investors they needed a "shiney new more unhackable scheme". It's impossible to implement such a scheme without complete control over all the hardware. But, in the end, the very act of protecting the content is, legally, protection enough.
The only good turnout for "us" (the consumer, fair use advocate, or even casual pirate) is if the industry decides it's not worth it to set the lock in the first place.
There was never a doubt that it'd be possible to extract the data.
Get a burner with lightscribe, or an inkjet that can print on discs. I have the latter, and it can produce pretty amazing results, a casual glance and you'd never tell.
Of course, I store all my movies (ripped from dvd, I find downloading torrents to be a pain in the ass and unnessesary risk) on a server I put together, and my kids know how to watch them from their computers, on TV via xbox360, modded xbox, or tivo, and so on. I just wish there was more coherence in the consumer marketplace. My modded xbox an play anything, tivo only plays mpeg2, xbox360 only plays WMV9 (though tversity's realtime reencoding does an acceptable job for movies/shows - can't ff or rewind though). More and more devices are out there that can play divx directly over the network. I'm nearly positive eventually the 360 will be able to play divx - the PS2 and nearly every DVD player can, MS will eventually follow suit when they see it hurt their bottom line.
Handling discs is so... 20th century. These guys need to start looking at other means of delivery more seriously. I've rented 3 HD movies since Xmas over Xbox Live marketplace. BluRay vs HDDVD? Neither. I will buy my movies online and download them, and store them however I want. That's the future. The internet really is just a big truck you can dump stuff on.
You're right. Hype kills the experience. Black and White was not a bad game, but it was nowhere near the hype, and it hurt the experience. I put Doom 3 in that pile too. Lots of hype, for a paint-by-numbers FPS with shiny graphics.
But, the hype sells lots of copies, and makes bank, which is what is important to the publishers - whether or not you feel the game lives up to it is irrelevant, so long as you buy it.
The movie industry has long functioned this way (and is having a harder time doing so now). They knew they could put out whatever shit they wanted, so long as it was hyped as this years summer blockbuster, complete with tie-ins with mcdonalds, huge advertising campaign, paid for "reviews" in mainstream media, and all that, and make their money back opening night - before people realize it's a piece of shit. All this internet instant communication stuff throws a monkey wrench in there.
Point is, you'll buy spore, and whether you like it or not, they'll have your $$.
The set builders and sfx guys can go f' themselves too, it's all CGI these days.
The costs of producing "big budget" films is peanuts compared to what it was. I guess that's just a statement I havent researched, but I don't see how it can't be true. Superman must have cost more to make than Spiderman - in the former, there were real special effects, in the latter, it was all CGI. Star Wars (A new hope) must have been comparitively harder to make than the jar jar binks bullshit, etc.
Everything about the production is cheaper. The only costs that keep going up are for the stars, and you can pin that on our "cult of celebrity", not "teh intarnet". Everything out of hollywood has to have one of these A-list stars, who wants 50 million to do three weeks of work. That's their decision, not the consumers. Personally, I think Ghost Rider could be good (probably better) with a relative no-name, instead of Nicholas Cage. But they assume they need Nicholas Cage, and maybe they're right - this country loves it's stars.
But there are so many stars, and they seem so easy to "manufacture", I don't see why they don't retire them once the salary demands get ridiculous, or at least reign them in to reality. Nobody will really miss Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson, both of whom have "crazied" themselves right out of the mainstream. We have a neverending line of celebrities to replace them with.
I read not too long ago the industry was making record profits.
Of course, the piece I read was in a business magazine, and seemed aimed at potential investors, not consumers.
Guess the message changes depending on who they're talking to.
I'll read about movies shattering box office records one day, and then read the sad, sad, tale of how Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Glazer "only" get 25% of the net from Da Vinci Code, instead of 40%, because it didn't make the box office they'd hoped and the studio wanted more bucks. This is all because of internet piracy, not because it's a shitty formulaic movie based on a shitty formulaic novel that many people were sick of hearing about.
I don't support pirating DVD rips, because IMO, unlike the RIAA, I actually think DVD's are priced fairly. They sell very well, as I'm told, and as far as I can see from anecdotal evidence: In our mall, the two music stores are gone - and a suncoast movie store just opened up, and another gamestop.
Whatever, they can whine about piracy and we can whine about how we feel justified in pirating, etc. Nothing is going to change, though. If the big studios cant compete they'll close down, and others will take their place.
If they have the infrastructure, they do. We deal with cities of all size, and a lot of the smaller county sheriff's offices, out in the sticks of butmandoo, simply dont have a wireless infrastructure at all, past their radios.
The ones who do, will run a laptop in the car, have a mobile CAD workstation, and be able to draft their reports on scene, sketch accident diagrams, etc, all that nifty stuff. Lots simply dont. We have a site where the officers copy all their days work onto a usb key before they leave the car, and import it into the RMS system. We have a few others who are a cut above, and actually have a wifi hotspot in the parking lot.
It's partly about money, in some rural parts of america (think like Arkansas) you'll have these enormous counties the police have to cover, with very small populations, and tiny budgets. Frankly though, it's a lot about these smaller counties just simply not having the technical expertise to put together a plan. In rural parts, city employees dont get paid crap, and I've met the stupidest "computer guys" ever, while on this job. 25k a year doesn't buy much IT know-how.
Even when they do have the infrastructure, they don't necessarily use it. I can think of one site we have where the cops could issue NCIC, and other types of state/local/federal queries, but the powers that be in the comm center dont trust them to do it, so radioing dispatch is a matter of procedure. I had to fight an uphill battle to allow them to let the cops draft (electronic) reports in their cars, they figured they were just too stupid to fill in a form on a computer screen.
*shrug*
I get to play with the coolest toughbooks and fault-tolerant Stratus servers though. For something with 99.999% uptime, they sure crash a lot. We had two go down (hardware) simultaneously, at one of our hugest sites (big city you've heard of). Nice job, boys.
MS effectively controls access to the generic pre-installed market. If you think otherwise, you don't understand the way the market works at all.
Apple could beat them at their own game, if they wanted to.
Familiarity with Macs is a huge benefit, especially in certain circles, both for getting hired and getting work done. It also seems really nice for networking. I met some business contacts because they saw me using a MacBook at the bar. At conferences I've met people because they showed up via the zeroconf local chat users, so I could instantly communicate with them. Good luck to you, but ignorance isn't really something to brag about.
I never said I was ignorant, let alone bragged about it. Owning a mac does not make you special, nor is it something to brag about. I am a programmer, with 15 years of C, C++, Java, C#, SQl, etc, etc, etc. I've been hired to write code from everything from the Commodore 64 to System/36 to HP9000 series boxes running MPE. The folks who'd hire me wouldn't even look for a "familiar with these OS's" line on my resume, it'd make me look like a tool. It'd be like a mechanic not finding work because he's never changed the oil on a Corolla. It's all the same shit, and Apple has no more technology than any other player that's ever been in the market.
Notwithstanding, I've never, ever seen a job listing for a "mac programmer", at least not in my area.
Sorry you are in a field where you get no opportunity to try more advanced OS's and thus don't know what you're missing.
I'm sorry that you arent computer literate enough to realize that there's nothing at all "advanced" about OS/X, but most Mac owners aren't exactly tech guys. After all, you bought into that "faster than light" bullshit with the PowerPC, only to turn around and end up with same inferior CPUs as the rest of us (but are now somehow superior to ours because they're shipped in a shiny plastic case)
I don't want to here from environmental groups or the media on this. They both have agendas, and axes to grind. The environmental groups wont donations, so they're going to paint the bleakest picture they can. The media will pick up on this, and generate as much anxiety as they can - because that attracts viewers.
Nope, I want to here from the scientists themselves. The ones without an axe to grind, the ones who aren't on a crusade. The ones who aren't out to say that the world is ending, nor that everything is just fine - the one's who are examining that murky middle ground for the actual truth.
Fuck the environmentalists and the media, and their sensationalistic, bogus science. All the hyperbole and "sky is falling" bullshit is the reason the populace has largely ignored this issue. Crackpots and fanatics hurt their own causes.
Algae goes wild when you dump fertilizers in a stream, and can utterly choke off all life in a river or lake. I'd be very very wary about any plans to grow it "en masse" in the ocean, seems like the type of thing that'd easily get away from you.
You forget it's a global problem, not an american one. A worldwide "reforestation" effort would certainly help. Maybe not trees - but maybe something better than what's growing now.
But then, there we go, fucking with the ecosystem, talking about introducing flora into places they weren't before.
The "war on drugs" budget is small, the DEA is almost entirely funded by "civil forfeiture", the completely fair idea that if you are caught selling a bag of pot, then everything you own (car, house, photo album handed down from grandma) must have been the proceeds of your drug dealing, and deserve to be taken away and auctioned. Even if falsely accused, and acquitted, getting it back is nearly impossible.
But, people watched "Scarface" in the 80s, and said "WOW thats how drug dealers live? ferrari's and mansions? fuck that!", so here we are.
There's too much money involved there. You could tax marijuana to high hell, and still not generate the same amount of income. This is what the "war on drugs" is.
Actually, in our current non-free market, that is the only way they can have significant growth.
You can significantly grow year after year, and never achieve 10% market penetration, let alone dominance. They can grow, and their competition will outgrow them, as it always has been.
iTunes is a music jukebox application with about 1/10 the penetration of MS's Windows Media Player. Your comments don't make a lot of sense in that light.
I was referring to iTunes, the online store/service, or if you will, iTunes, who would like to be the gateway to any and all online media. Not the shitty bloated app that my kid installed on my PC after he wasted his hard earned money on an iPod (all the other kids have them, gotta be cool, i remember how it is).
Great. With you and all the other people that can afford to pay for a copy and who know how to install an OS, or even what an OS is, and who aren't locked into Windows for some applications or purposes that should boost Apple's market share about 3%, while completely killing the 50% of their revenue they get from hardware sales.
No, they'd be playing the same game as MS. The Dells and eMachines would offer OS/X on their boxes, just like they offer Windows and are starting to offer linux.
Apple does not target business for a number of pretty good reasons I'm not going into right now. Apple can slowly grow market share (as they have been) so long as they maintain their hardware/software chain.
They can grow, only because the market continues to grow. More and more people will be willing to invest more in their home PC. Business wise, its smart on their part, and if I was Jobs I wouldnt change it. But their marketshare - as a percentage of the whole - is inherently limited. The market for computers in business and government will dwarf the market for computers at home.
They will simply never have the amount of clout that microsoft has. It's ridiculous on it's premise. They can be a crappy company all they want, but it'll never affect me. Jobs could go super evil and come up with ridiculous licensing terms, and have the next kitty cat version of OS/X send snapshots and a full DNA profile of me to the russian secret police, and it would be irrelevant.
I don't have to use a Mac, and my unfamiliarity with Macs has never affected my career in software development and computers. But, like them or hate them, I have to know what microsoft is doing, and these days, I have to stay on top of the F/OSS community and the developments there. But talking about Apple in the office would be like talking about Nintendo. They just dont make computers that run our software, and the iMac might as well be a Wii.
Apple requires DRM, and Jobs is pulling a spin job saying "we'd Loooove to drop it but the media guys wont let us". There's an assload of artists and content owners who'd love to sell DRM-less mp3's through iTunes right now, and there's nothing stopping Apple from letting that happen, right now.
Jobs knows the media companies won't pick up the "challenge" he issued. It's pure PR. He looks to his followers like some hero "fighting the fight against DRM", all the while knowing that nothing will change, and he will retain his control.
He decides what you can and cant do with those files, not the media companies. They merely accepted the terms he offered. If you believed his call for "an end to DRM" then you are the victim of simple misdirection. Look, over there! A deer.
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Bullshit, people will always be getting cancer.
I might buy into your logic if this was some sort of cancer-innoculation that would wipe the disease from existance. Might, but wouldn't. We've done that with a ton of other diseases, and they make fine money selling the innoculations.
My point is, there's money to be made selling a treatment, cure or innoculation. Equal money, it's just a matter of adjusting the price points.
ISPs simply provide a series of tubes - what comes out of your straw is your own business.
The internet is a sort of truck you can just dump stuff on, not a series of tubes.
THIS is an amp stack. /dundee
Sun still thinks they're "the whole tech industry". Except Microsoft.
Depends who you ask and for what purpose.
The RIAA themselves will tell you that sales have never been better, and the industry has never been healthier - if you're an investor.
Warner music losing money doesn't mean that album and song sales can't be going up. They are, but the numbers are weird.
Digital music sales tripled last year, but album sales continued to slowly trickle off. This article says overall sales are up 19% - including digital music, videos, etc.
The market is different - people are less likely to buy a CD, when they can buy just a song, or with so many portable video devices like video iPods, are buying music related DVDs - live concerts, or video compilations. The market is much more diverse - music listeners don't necessarily buy "albums" as they have conventionally.
At the end of the day, it's all (potential, if they can realize it) profit for RIAA members.
However, when the discussion turns to piracy, they only talk about CD sales. These are of course dwindling - they would be even if there was absolutely no piracy at all. But a huge chunk of the money they "lose" in album sales they make up in digital downloads, or other products.
It's a justified analogy to what the RIAA is doing, but I welcome the work they spend trying to button up music "piracy." For one thing, the costs of the RIAA are pushed onto the consumer -- leading to higher prices of the music they're trying to protect, giving consumers more reason to work with alternative distribution mechanisms
They're making record amounts of money, despite what they tell you. This is about maximizing profit. They aren't dumb, they've run the numbers.
ISPs are being financially harmed, too, because they're going to have to keep these logs
Why should the RIAA care? Besides, in lots of cases, the ISP is going to be owned by the same set of companies that own the members of the RIAA.
'm noticing that medium-level artists are finding more ways to produce an income without the sale of recorded music
It's always been that way. The $$$ for the artist is in touring and merchandise sales, why do you think they'd work 11 months a year, if they can get fat and rich floating in their gold-lined swimming pool? Love of art? Maybe for 1 in a million, for the rest - performing live is their job. Recording an album is marketing.
Are these "early settlements" financially profitable for the RIAA? Lawyers aren't cheap, and settlement lawyers even less so. Even if you agree to a settlement, they still need collections agents to process the payment and make sure it is done in full.
Financially profitable? Maybe not in and of themselves, but they're looking at the big picture: say, for every 1 guy we sue/settle with, 10 guys get scared off of kazaa and onto iTunes.
Although, I wouldn't be surprised to find the whole sue cycle to be at least financially self-sustaining.
Remember, lawyers are behind all this - the RIAA is basically nothing but industry lawyers, and they're pretty good at making sure they get paid.
It wouldn't have been going on this long if they didn't feel it was effective.
Wii-mote trumps mouse as a natural "gun" like pointing device. Hopefully Nintendo truly exploits this fact with some good FPS's. Far Cry for Wii is a decent teaser of whats to come.
It'll come back.
I grew up on Atari, C64 and NES, then SNES. I'd play constantly. Then I hit "the age of chicks and parties".
I completely skipped the N64 and PSX years. Never got either system until a couple years ago, when I picked them up used for like 15 bucks.
After I finished university and settled down in a job, wife, etc, I'm back to playing games again. Dreamcast came out the year after I graduated, and I bought one.
I don't know if I'd use the word "hardcore", but I have time for games again.
Just like more moviegoers = more movies catering to the lowest common denominator.
More tv viewers = more drek reality TV. That's what the masses want.
Larger market for music = more Britney.
But, even so, there still are good movies made now and then, there is still enjoyable TV to watch, and some good music to listen to. Not everybody tries to target the largest possible audience, the business of it realizes that the little niche markets can be very lucrative.
This summary bases it's whole premise around Gears of War, and is the same fallacy the RIAA/MPAA use: they assume something should sell x jillion copies, then go pointing fingers at others when it doesn't. I'm sure the ESA will come out to tell you it's because of piracy, but frankly, I didn't think Gears of War was all that great. I found the gameplay was awkward, the plot generic. It just didn't float my boat.
Hardcore gamers don't buy based on hype alone. Sorry Cliffy B, you actually have to deliver more than shiny graphics and a paint by numbers shooter about "space marines fighting aliens".
Frankly, there was nothing hardcore about the game, IMO. I thought about buying it, ended up putting it on the shelf and getting Dead Rising instead.
Also, when you're charging 70 bucks a game after tax, don't expect me to buy the games in the same volume as I used to.
I agree with you. Suddenly I'm interested in a HD-DVD drive, I could rent^H^H^Hbuy movies, encode them to HD WMV9, fill up a portable HDD and attach it to my 360, or stream across the 'net. (Poor lil fella can't play DivX and it's what's hooked to my HDTV)
This whole "one box contains one movie" thing is so 1980s.
There is no format war, the future is going to be streaming online delivery to secure devices like the Xbox 360. Slashbots will be aghast at my statement, and say "no way will I buy from MSFT, etc". But they will line up around the block to buy the exact same thing from Apple, and there will be a million articles about how new and innovative it is, and how awesome the rules Steve Jobs thought up about how, where and with whom you can watch a movie.
Back to the HDDVD/BluRay disc:
The "protection" is just a lock that you have to pick to get at your media. The action of picking that lock makes you run afoul of the DMCA. The game isnt "make it impossible to hack", the game is "make sure we can prosecute people who do".
This is temporary, ultimately. The polycarbonate disc as a means of delivering digital content will go the way of the dodo. Well, not completely, there will always be collectors. Let's say it'll go the way of the vinyl LP. Forgotten, but not gone.
The very fact that they put any sort of lock on it, means you have to pick that lock to get the content. Getting the content isnt illegal (fair use). Picking a lock is (DMCA). They still have the "legal framework" for pursuing copyright violations.
They'd have stuck with CSS, but to attract new investors they needed a "shiney new more unhackable scheme". It's impossible to implement such a scheme without complete control over all the hardware. But, in the end, the very act of protecting the content is, legally, protection enough.
The only good turnout for "us" (the consumer, fair use advocate, or even casual pirate) is if the industry decides it's not worth it to set the lock in the first place.
There was never a doubt that it'd be possible to extract the data.
Get a burner with lightscribe, or an inkjet that can print on discs. I have the latter, and it can produce pretty amazing results, a casual glance and you'd never tell.
Of course, I store all my movies (ripped from dvd, I find downloading torrents to be a pain in the ass and unnessesary risk) on a server I put together, and my kids know how to watch them from their computers, on TV via xbox360, modded xbox, or tivo, and so on. I just wish there was more coherence in the consumer marketplace. My modded xbox an play anything, tivo only plays mpeg2, xbox360 only plays WMV9 (though tversity's realtime reencoding does an acceptable job for movies/shows - can't ff or rewind though). More and more devices are out there that can play divx directly over the network. I'm nearly positive eventually the 360 will be able to play divx - the PS2 and nearly every DVD player can, MS will eventually follow suit when they see it hurt their bottom line.
Handling discs is so... 20th century. These guys need to start looking at other means of delivery more seriously. I've rented 3 HD movies since Xmas over Xbox Live marketplace. BluRay vs HDDVD? Neither. I will buy my movies online and download them, and store them however I want. That's the future. The internet really is just a big truck you can dump stuff on.
You're right. Hype kills the experience. Black and White was not a bad game, but it was nowhere near the hype, and it hurt the experience. I put Doom 3 in that pile too. Lots of hype, for a paint-by-numbers FPS with shiny graphics.
But, the hype sells lots of copies, and makes bank, which is what is important to the publishers - whether or not you feel the game lives up to it is irrelevant, so long as you buy it.
The movie industry has long functioned this way (and is having a harder time doing so now). They knew they could put out whatever shit they wanted, so long as it was hyped as this years summer blockbuster, complete with tie-ins with mcdonalds, huge advertising campaign, paid for "reviews" in mainstream media, and all that, and make their money back opening night - before people realize it's a piece of shit. All this internet instant communication stuff throws a monkey wrench in there.
Point is, you'll buy spore, and whether you like it or not, they'll have your $$.
The set builders and sfx guys can go f' themselves too, it's all CGI these days.
The costs of producing "big budget" films is peanuts compared to what it was. I guess that's just a statement I havent researched, but I don't see how it can't be true. Superman must have cost more to make than Spiderman - in the former, there were real special effects, in the latter, it was all CGI. Star Wars (A new hope) must have been comparitively harder to make than the jar jar binks bullshit, etc.
Everything about the production is cheaper. The only costs that keep going up are for the stars, and you can pin that on our "cult of celebrity", not "teh intarnet". Everything out of hollywood has to have one of these A-list stars, who wants 50 million to do three weeks of work. That's their decision, not the consumers. Personally, I think Ghost Rider could be good (probably better) with a relative no-name, instead of Nicholas Cage. But they assume they need Nicholas Cage, and maybe they're right - this country loves it's stars.
But there are so many stars, and they seem so easy to "manufacture", I don't see why they don't retire them once the salary demands get ridiculous, or at least reign them in to reality. Nobody will really miss Tom Cruise or Mel Gibson, both of whom have "crazied" themselves right out of the mainstream. We have a neverending line of celebrities to replace them with.
I read not too long ago the industry was making record profits.
Of course, the piece I read was in a business magazine, and seemed aimed at potential investors, not consumers.
Guess the message changes depending on who they're talking to.
I'll read about movies shattering box office records one day, and then read the sad, sad, tale of how Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Glazer "only" get 25% of the net from Da Vinci Code, instead of 40%, because it didn't make the box office they'd hoped and the studio wanted more bucks. This is all because of internet piracy, not because it's a shitty formulaic movie based on a shitty formulaic novel that many people were sick of hearing about.
I don't support pirating DVD rips, because IMO, unlike the RIAA, I actually think DVD's are priced fairly. They sell very well, as I'm told, and as far as I can see from anecdotal evidence: In our mall, the two music stores are gone - and a suncoast movie store just opened up, and another gamestop.
Whatever, they can whine about piracy and we can whine about how we feel justified in pirating, etc. Nothing is going to change, though. If the big studios cant compete they'll close down, and others will take their place.
If they have the infrastructure, they do. We deal with cities of all size, and a lot of the smaller county sheriff's offices, out in the sticks of butmandoo, simply dont have a wireless infrastructure at all, past their radios.
The ones who do, will run a laptop in the car, have a mobile CAD workstation, and be able to draft their reports on scene, sketch accident diagrams, etc, all that nifty stuff. Lots simply dont. We have a site where the officers copy all their days work onto a usb key before they leave the car, and import it into the RMS system. We have a few others who are a cut above, and actually have a wifi hotspot in the parking lot.
It's partly about money, in some rural parts of america (think like Arkansas) you'll have these enormous counties the police have to cover, with very small populations, and tiny budgets. Frankly though, it's a lot about these smaller counties just simply not having the technical expertise to put together a plan. In rural parts, city employees dont get paid crap, and I've met the stupidest "computer guys" ever, while on this job. 25k a year doesn't buy much IT know-how.
Even when they do have the infrastructure, they don't necessarily use it. I can think of one site we have where the cops could issue NCIC, and other types of state/local/federal queries, but the powers that be in the comm center dont trust them to do it, so radioing dispatch is a matter of procedure. I had to fight an uphill battle to allow them to let the cops draft (electronic) reports in their cars, they figured they were just too stupid to fill in a form on a computer screen.
*shrug*
I get to play with the coolest toughbooks and fault-tolerant Stratus servers though. For something with 99.999% uptime, they sure crash a lot. We had two go down (hardware) simultaneously, at one of our hugest sites (big city you've heard of). Nice job, boys.
MS effectively controls access to the generic pre-installed market. If you think otherwise, you don't understand the way the market works at all.
Apple could beat them at their own game, if they wanted to.
Familiarity with Macs is a huge benefit, especially in certain circles, both for getting hired and getting work done. It also seems really nice for networking. I met some business contacts because they saw me using a MacBook at the bar. At conferences I've met people because they showed up via the zeroconf local chat users, so I could instantly communicate with them. Good luck to you, but ignorance isn't really something to brag about.
I never said I was ignorant, let alone bragged about it. Owning a mac does not make you special, nor is it something to brag about. I am a programmer, with 15 years of C, C++, Java, C#, SQl, etc, etc, etc. I've been hired to write code from everything from the Commodore 64 to System/36 to HP9000 series boxes running MPE. The folks who'd hire me wouldn't even look for a "familiar with these OS's" line on my resume, it'd make me look like a tool. It'd be like a mechanic not finding work because he's never changed the oil on a Corolla. It's all the same shit, and Apple has no more technology than any other player that's ever been in the market.
Notwithstanding, I've never, ever seen a job listing for a "mac programmer", at least not in my area.
Sorry you are in a field where you get no opportunity to try more advanced OS's and thus don't know what you're missing.
I'm sorry that you arent computer literate enough to realize that there's nothing at all "advanced" about OS/X, but most Mac owners aren't exactly tech guys. After all, you bought into that "faster than light" bullshit with the PowerPC, only to turn around and end up with same inferior CPUs as the rest of us (but are now somehow superior to ours because they're shipped in a shiny plastic case)
No, they wouldnt install it on their PC. But they'd buy a cheap 300 dollar eMachines that came bundled with it, before they'd drop 800 on a minimac.
Here's the problem:
environmental groups and the media in particular
I don't want to here from environmental groups or the media on this. They both have agendas, and axes to grind. The environmental groups wont donations, so they're going to paint the bleakest picture they can. The media will pick up on this, and generate as much anxiety as they can - because that attracts viewers.
Nope, I want to here from the scientists themselves. The ones without an axe to grind, the ones who aren't on a crusade. The ones who aren't out to say that the world is ending, nor that everything is just fine - the one's who are examining that murky middle ground for the actual truth.
Fuck the environmentalists and the media, and their sensationalistic, bogus science. All the hyperbole and "sky is falling" bullshit is the reason the populace has largely ignored this issue. Crackpots and fanatics hurt their own causes.
Algae goes wild when you dump fertilizers in a stream, and can utterly choke off all life in a river or lake. I'd be very very wary about any plans to grow it "en masse" in the ocean, seems like the type of thing that'd easily get away from you.
You forget it's a global problem, not an american one. A worldwide "reforestation" effort would certainly help. Maybe not trees - but maybe something better than what's growing now.
But then, there we go, fucking with the ecosystem, talking about introducing flora into places they weren't before.
How about we dont go looking for a short term bandaid fix? We all know what the solution is, and it is to reduce our CO2 footprint in the long run.
We have time, we have hudreds of years, we can phase changes in slowly as we develop them and become tenable.
I worry about some jackass firing off some goofy device of his, without examining possible side effects, and putting us in a worse situation.
The "war on drugs" budget is small, the DEA is almost entirely funded by "civil forfeiture", the completely fair idea that if you are caught selling a bag of pot, then everything you own (car, house, photo album handed down from grandma) must have been the proceeds of your drug dealing, and deserve to be taken away and auctioned. Even if falsely accused, and acquitted, getting it back is nearly impossible.
But, people watched "Scarface" in the 80s, and said "WOW thats how drug dealers live? ferrari's and mansions? fuck that!", so here we are.
There's too much money involved there. You could tax marijuana to high hell, and still not generate the same amount of income. This is what the "war on drugs" is.
Actually, in our current non-free market, that is the only way they can have significant growth.
You can significantly grow year after year, and never achieve 10% market penetration, let alone dominance. They can grow, and their competition will outgrow them, as it always has been.
iTunes is a music jukebox application with about 1/10 the penetration of MS's Windows Media Player. Your comments don't make a lot of sense in that light.
I was referring to iTunes, the online store/service, or if you will, iTunes, who would like to be the gateway to any and all online media. Not the shitty bloated app that my kid installed on my PC after he wasted his hard earned money on an iPod (all the other kids have them, gotta be cool, i remember how it is).
Great. With you and all the other people that can afford to pay for a copy and who know how to install an OS, or even what an OS is, and who aren't locked into Windows for some applications or purposes that should boost Apple's market share about 3%, while completely killing the 50% of their revenue they get from hardware sales.
No, they'd be playing the same game as MS. The Dells and eMachines would offer OS/X on their boxes, just like they offer Windows and are starting to offer linux.
Apple does not target business for a number of pretty good reasons I'm not going into right now. Apple can slowly grow market share (as they have been) so long as they maintain their hardware/software chain.
They can grow, only because the market continues to grow. More and more people will be willing to invest more in their home PC. Business wise, its smart on their part, and if I was Jobs I wouldnt change it. But their marketshare - as a percentage of the whole - is inherently limited. The market for computers in business and government will dwarf the market for computers at home.
They will simply never have the amount of clout that microsoft has. It's ridiculous on it's premise. They can be a crappy company all they want, but it'll never affect me. Jobs could go super evil and come up with ridiculous licensing terms, and have the next kitty cat version of OS/X send snapshots and a full DNA profile of me to the russian secret police, and it would be irrelevant.
I don't have to use a Mac, and my unfamiliarity with Macs has never affected my career in software development and computers. But, like them or hate them, I have to know what microsoft is doing, and these days, I have to stay on top of the F/OSS community and the developments there. But talking about Apple in the office would be like talking about Nintendo. They just dont make computers that run our software, and the iMac might as well be a Wii.
Apple requires DRM, and Jobs is pulling a spin job saying "we'd Loooove to drop it but the media guys wont let us". There's an assload of artists and content owners who'd love to sell DRM-less mp3's through iTunes right now, and there's nothing stopping Apple from letting that happen, right now.
Jobs knows the media companies won't pick up the "challenge" he issued. It's pure PR. He looks to his followers like some hero "fighting the fight against DRM", all the while knowing that nothing will change, and he will retain his control.
He decides what you can and cant do with those files, not the media companies. They merely accepted the terms he offered. If you believed his call for "an end to DRM" then you are the victim of simple misdirection. Look, over there! A deer.
*poof*