"And they have a right to charge money for downloadable content that can't be sold with the game."
I'd like to see that tested in law actually.
"And if you don't like it, don't buy it."
I don't sell my games anyway. I care about consumer rights.
"You have some strange anger issues if you care about this so much."
And you're complacent at the ever-extending abuse of consumers if you don't care at all.
"Games aren't food. No one is going to die if they don't buy the latest game."
Irrelevant.
"You can still go to the used game store and buy games and your friend can still give you theirs once they are done."
Not if it's effectively crippled or only half a game without either first buyer bonuses or online extras I can't. He has them sitting, useless, on the hard drive in his console, and I have an incomplete product.
Hey, tell that to my brother who's been working behind a bar for just over minimum wage (UK) for the best part of ten years.
Otherwise I have no experience of drop-outs of either gender.
"are they traditional female roles because they don't require any specialist knowledge, experience or skills... or are they traditional female roles because they have crappy pay/social stature and thus less attractive to men who can get better jobs and better pay?"
I don't know why they're traditional female roles; I'm just commenting that those roles are in general unskilled and therefore low paid. Why society expects females to go into them, or why females end up in them I don't claim to know. What I don't think is that they should be legislated into better pay in order to close any sort of gender gap.
Why bother? With divorce and infidelity so popular these days, who cares about a piece of metal on your finger?
BTW, I'm not the harassing type. My workplace seems mercifully free of that and reasonably well balanced (for a software house). Just my observation on modern society.
Actually, in much of the world (US included) males are a minority. Meaning white females most likely make up the largest group in the US and much of the western world.
Actually that does hit the news every so often, usually in relation to the daemonisation of men seeking to work with kids.
Males are in decline, leaving the traditional female sectors even more to women for fear of being branded "too interested" in working with children etc. Some folks are decrying it because kids won't have any male role models left. I think it's just what you get when society consumes itself with frivolous fears and scares itself with a new pretend evil each week.
Comes of people being comfortable and having nothing to really be afraid of, they have to invent or inflate stuff.
"When did it become the gamestore's right to profit more than the developer?"
Where does the gamestore come into this? I'm talking about my rights as an individual to resell what I have bought.
"If used is virtually equal in value to new, and used is slightly cheaper - then many people will choose used"
Absolutely they will, like people do with all sorts of other things in life.
"The problem is that of the £50, probably most of that goes back to the game industry that creates these games. Of the £45, probably £10-15 goes to the game store, and £30 or so goes back to the consumer (and often a lot more unfair ratio than that) but £0 goes to the game industry."
So fucking what? The games industry does not have a right to profit. I have a right to resell things I have paid for. End of story. If you want to talk about lacklustre video or GAME or anyone else gouging kids on the used market and making obscene markups then I'm with you all the way.
"So the industry gets fucked"
No, it doesn't. It gets to sell games, people buy them, sell them, rent them, whatever. Just like every other type of product out there. The industry makes massive profits and is supposed to overtake Hollywood in terms of revenue pretty soon. That's not "fucked".
"the industry has to make up for it by making no-risk factory produced crap."
That's what sells. You can't blame the second hand market for the industry producing endless repeats of lowest common denominator bullcrap. What, you think if they got a new sale for each of the used ones they'd roll over and say "We've made enough money this year, lets not put out FIFA 2025:Drunk Edition after all". LOL.
No, they put out that crap because it's profitable. And they won't stop. And if they can squeeze more profit out by selling crippled games with "downloadable extras" or in-game advertising for perpetual revenue, they will, regardless of second hand sales.
Repeat after me - the games industry's interest in profit does not trump my right to resell what I own. And that includes downloadable extras in my opinion.
If you want to do poor wittle old EA a favour and not buy used or resell yours to protect their profits, then go ahead. I'll be sat over here in consumer rights corner.
Platinum is not that cheap. Used games are usually overpriced. For instance, most of the places in the UK will buy your game from you for less than £10 and then try to sell it to the public at just a couple of pounds less than the new price - £30-40. That's not only a massive profiteering exercise by the company, but both seller and buyer feel ripped off.
What Platinum should be doing is setting the price cap for used games. If you're gonna pay the seller peanuts and charge the buyer a huge margin then you should expect to be undercut.
Especially when it costs Sony $0 to shove out more copies...
It's definitely absurd, it's absurd that they don't feel absolutely disgusted with themselves for trying to fight people's right to re-sell content.
And FUCK YOU with your downloadable content. If I've bought that then I should have the right to sell it alongside the game, no?
Downloadable content and in box "bonuses" are a horrible way to squeeze customers ever more. The bonus should just be part of the game, not a one-time thing. And so should most downloadable content. A hell of a lot of it is just a trasnparent attempt to part people from even more cash to get the game they wanted.
As for in-game advertising being a continuing source of revenue from the used game market.... so... angry... hard... to... speak... must... kill...
It's my RIGHT to buy and sell used games. It's not your right to continue to make a profit for a single copy of a game, or a single license or whatever the hell it is after you've already sold it to me.
Definitely worth pointing out. I'd like precisely 0 dollars of any charity I partake in to go either straight to MS's coffers, or towards propagating worldwide dependence on their single OS.
OLPC, and the other netbook companies, climbing down and making most stuff XP is slightly sickening.
I do find this hard to understand. Maybe OO.o is just not good on windows.
But for getting work done? They're almost identical. $LARG_CORP that I work for is now rolling it out in preference to MS because it's every bit as good, plus the odf support of course.
Whether it's man made or not is quite important, actually. If it's not (a scenario that's looking pretty damned unlikely) then doing something to halt or slow it becomes difficult as we have to find out what the hell IS causing the problem.
I had some problems with that. Not too much, but things like "making shit up" and telling lies that were semi-obvious and supposed to be a bit of a joke. I always had problems spotting them and ended up getting really pissed off when people did it, because I never understood why you would habitually lie about stuff, and why other people found it so hilarious.
"ou can get the source to Android, you just can't do anything useful with it."
You can run it on a nokia N800 or N810, or a neo freerunner. People are porting it to other devices. It's also useful for people to work out how it functions and write decent applications. You can also write your own apps and they don't have to be signed or approved by anyone.
"Google G1 / Android / HTC / TMobile have been telling us this is going to be an open platform."
It is, to some extent. The source is open and you can install whatever you like.
"Someone already "broke" the phone (which isn't a problem on an open platform)"
Yeah, google broke it. For some reason (poor QA) they left a terminal running under the GUI, at root, and getting all the keystrokes.
"Someone is already working on getting unsigned code working? I thought it was an open platform?"
There are two parts to this. you don't need java apps signed. BUT there's no officially sanctioned API for non-java apps. Maybe someone's working on that.
"Manu / Hacker arms race? Why? Isn't this an open platform?"
Nope, the hole (mentioned above) was a stupid QA problem, someone left debug mode on:)
"IOW, Good job, Google. You've turned into everything you detested."
Compared to any of the openmoko distributions (There are lots) it looks like it's going to be the best option. 2007.2 is discontinued and wasn't great anyway 2008.08/09/XX is a royal pain in the butt - it takes ages to boot, periodically doesn't wake up from sleep, has abysmal battery life, has some real design flaws and the developers seem to be working on bells and whistles rather than basic platform stuff. The sound quality is bad and I always got terrible echo. answering a call is a problem because the "answer" button is unresponsive and if you hit it twice then it stores up the event and applies it to the "hang up" button that appears in the same place. FDOM is just 2008.XX with a bunch of patches, fixes and more apps by default. FSO is experimental. Debian is a fun toy but runs the same interface as FSO, which is really basic and still as unresponsive as the rest.
Android - it's pretty, the hardware is responsive, call sound quality is great and echo is gone, most of the hardware works. Current problems are - no resume from suspend, therefore battery life is about 6 hours because it's always on, there's no way to answer a call because there aren't enough hardware buttons on the freerunner and nobody's put on-screen answer button in place, and you can't type anything because there's no on-screen keyboard. You can't implement one easily at present either.
Early next year (first quarter) Google are supposed to be fixing the on screen keyboard thing, and hopefully the rest will be sorted before long. I know that other than the community effort there is a company called Koolu doing an android-freerunner port.
Basically, I nearly sold my freerunner before android came along as I have little faith in the openmoko platform getting anywhere anytime soon. If I were you I'd wait until early next year, when I hope to have a usable device. For now it's a toy and I had to buy a cheap Pay As You Go phone for day to day use.
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In the western world, clothes manufacture is not slave labour. Nor is it skilled, just repetetive, production line stuff.
"Work flax into cloth on a spinning jenny, right now. No googling."
We have machines for that. That's why there's no money in flax. Not some great conspiracy to keep women down.
For fuck's sake...
"what about the glass ceiling?"
You'd have to ask someone that isn't stuck under the glass carpet.
"How many female execs are there at your company?"
Quite a number.
"how many of them got their through the technical side of things?"
About as many as male. They're all salespeople.
I don't believe for a second that the glass ceiling exists any more, at least not until the very top levels. And those are closed to nearly everyone.
"And they have a right to charge money for downloadable content that can't be sold with the game."
I'd like to see that tested in law actually.
"And if you don't like it, don't buy it."
I don't sell my games anyway. I care about consumer rights.
"You have some strange anger issues if you care about this so much."
And you're complacent at the ever-extending abuse of consumers if you don't care at all.
"Games aren't food. No one is going to die if they don't buy the latest game."
Irrelevant.
"You can still go to the used game store and buy games and your friend can still give you theirs once they are done."
Not if it's effectively crippled or only half a game without either first buyer bonuses or online extras I can't. He has them sitting, useless, on the hard drive in his console, and I have an incomplete product.
Hey, tell that to my brother who's been working behind a bar for just over minimum wage (UK) for the best part of ten years.
Otherwise I have no experience of drop-outs of either gender.
"are they traditional female roles because they don't require any specialist knowledge, experience or skills... or are they traditional female roles because they have crappy pay/social stature and thus less attractive to men who can get better jobs and better pay?"
I don't know why they're traditional female roles; I'm just commenting that those roles are in general unskilled and therefore low paid. Why society expects females to go into them, or why females end up in them I don't claim to know. What I don't think is that they should be legislated into better pay in order to close any sort of gender gap.
"don't guys check for rings anymore?"
Why bother? With divorce and infidelity so popular these days, who cares about a piece of metal on your finger?
BTW, I'm not the harassing type. My workplace seems mercifully free of that and reasonably well balanced (for a software house). Just my observation on modern society.
This is mostly (Nurses not included here) because they don't require and specialist knowledge, experience or skills.
"white males aren't the minority"
Actually, in much of the world (US included) males are a minority. Meaning white females most likely make up the largest group in the US and much of the western world.
Actually that does hit the news every so often, usually in relation to the daemonisation of men seeking to work with kids.
Males are in decline, leaving the traditional female sectors even more to women for fear of being branded "too interested" in working with children etc. Some folks are decrying it because kids won't have any male role models left. I think it's just what you get when society consumes itself with frivolous fears and scares itself with a new pretend evil each week.
Comes of people being comfortable and having nothing to really be afraid of, they have to invent or inflate stuff.
"There is really nothing stopping the developers from offering content to the first owner"
Morality. It's part of the value of the product and should be available to the user to resell. Downloadable extras too.
False advertising or no, it's a question of consumer rights.
"When did it become the gamestore's right to profit more than the developer?"
Where does the gamestore come into this? I'm talking about my rights as an individual to resell what I have bought.
"If used is virtually equal in value to new, and used is slightly cheaper - then many people will choose used"
Absolutely they will, like people do with all sorts of other things in life.
"The problem is that of the £50, probably most of that goes back to the game industry that creates these games.
Of the £45, probably £10-15 goes to the game store, and £30 or so goes back to the consumer (and often a lot more unfair ratio than that) but £0 goes to the game industry."
So fucking what? The games industry does not have a right to profit. I have a right to resell things I have paid for. End of story.
If you want to talk about lacklustre video or GAME or anyone else gouging kids on the used market and making obscene markups then I'm with you all the way.
"So the industry gets fucked"
No, it doesn't. It gets to sell games, people buy them, sell them, rent them, whatever. Just like every other type of product out there. The industry makes massive profits and is supposed to overtake Hollywood in terms of revenue pretty soon. That's not "fucked".
"the industry has to make up for it by making no-risk factory produced crap."
That's what sells. You can't blame the second hand market for the industry producing endless repeats of lowest common denominator bullcrap. What, you think if they got a new sale for each of the used ones they'd roll over and say "We've made enough money this year, lets not put out FIFA 2025:Drunk Edition after all". LOL.
No, they put out that crap because it's profitable. And they won't stop. And if they can squeeze more profit out by selling crippled games with "downloadable extras" or in-game advertising for perpetual revenue, they will, regardless of second hand sales.
Repeat after me - the games industry's interest in profit does not trump my right to resell what I own. And that includes downloadable extras in my opinion.
If you want to do poor wittle old EA a favour and not buy used or resell yours to protect their profits, then go ahead. I'll be sat over here in consumer rights corner.
Platinum is not that cheap. Used games are usually overpriced. For instance, most of the places in the UK will buy your game from you for less than £10 and then try to sell it to the public at just a couple of pounds less than the new price - £30-40. That's not only a massive profiteering exercise by the company, but both seller and buyer feel ripped off.
What Platinum should be doing is setting the price cap for used games. If you're gonna pay the seller peanuts and charge the buyer a huge margin then you should expect to be undercut.
Especially when it costs Sony $0 to shove out more copies...
It's definitely absurd, it's absurd that they don't feel absolutely disgusted with themselves for trying to fight people's right to re-sell content.
And FUCK YOU with your downloadable content. If I've bought that then I should have the right to sell it alongside the game, no?
Downloadable content and in box "bonuses" are a horrible way to squeeze customers ever more. The bonus should just be part of the game, not a one-time thing. And so should most downloadable content. A hell of a lot of it is just a trasnparent attempt to part people from even more cash to get the game they wanted.
As for in-game advertising being a continuing source of revenue from the used game market.... so... angry... hard... to... speak... must... kill...
It's my RIGHT to buy and sell used games. It's not your right to continue to make a profit for a single copy of a game, or a single license or whatever the hell it is after you've already sold it to me.
Die in a fire.
Definitely worth pointing out. I'd like precisely 0 dollars of any charity I partake in to go either straight to MS's coffers, or towards propagating worldwide dependence on their single OS.
OLPC, and the other netbook companies, climbing down and making most stuff XP is slightly sickening.
oh that's true - being kicked off the marketplace would suck.
360 games ARE area coded, one of the reasons that I buy ps3 games when on holiday but not 360 or Wii.
I'd be tempted to hack the 360, especially as I don't play online. I'm not in the business of losing to 14 year-olds with more time on their hands.
I do find this hard to understand. Maybe OO.o is just not good on windows.
But for getting work done? They're almost identical. $LARG_CORP that I work for is now rolling it out in preference to MS because it's every bit as good, plus the odf support of course.
Something is wrong with your setup, OO.o is snappy and responsive, even on my netbook.
Whether it's man made or not is quite important, actually. If it's not (a scenario that's looking pretty damned unlikely) then doing something to halt or slow it becomes difficult as we have to find out what the hell IS causing the problem.
product is a bit of a strong word. As I say, it's more of a linux-geek toy at the moment.
I had some problems with that. Not too much, but things like "making shit up" and telling lies that were semi-obvious and supposed to be a bit of a joke. I always had problems spotting them and ended up getting really pissed off when people did it, because I never understood why you would habitually lie about stuff, and why other people found it so hilarious.
meh.
"ou can get the source to Android, you just can't do anything useful with it."
You can run it on a nokia N800 or N810, or a neo freerunner. People are porting it to other devices. It's also useful for people to work out how it functions and write decent applications. You can also write your own apps and they don't have to be signed or approved by anyone.
Totally not like iPhone.
Also, the interface is pretty shiny.
"Google G1 / Android / HTC / TMobile have been telling us this is going to be an open platform."
It is, to some extent. The source is open and you can install whatever you like.
"Someone already "broke" the phone (which isn't a problem on an open platform)"
Yeah, google broke it. For some reason (poor QA) they left a terminal running under the GUI, at root, and getting all the keystrokes.
"Someone is already working on getting unsigned code working? I thought it was an open platform?"
There are two parts to this. you don't need java apps signed. BUT there's no officially sanctioned API for non-java apps. Maybe someone's working on that.
"Manu / Hacker arms race? Why? Isn't this an open platform?"
Nope, the hole (mentioned above) was a stupid QA problem, someone left debug mode on :)
"IOW, Good job, Google. You've turned into everything you detested."
Nah, you've just misread the situation.
OK, I'd say not yet.
Compared to any of the openmoko distributions (There are lots) it looks like it's going to be the best option.
2007.2 is discontinued and wasn't great anyway
2008.08/09/XX is a royal pain in the butt - it takes ages to boot, periodically doesn't wake up from sleep, has abysmal battery life, has some real design flaws and the developers seem to be working on bells and whistles rather than basic platform stuff. The sound quality is bad and I always got terrible echo. answering a call is a problem because the "answer" button is unresponsive and if you hit it twice then it stores up the event and applies it to the "hang up" button that appears in the same place.
FDOM is just 2008.XX with a bunch of patches, fixes and more apps by default.
FSO is experimental.
Debian is a fun toy but runs the same interface as FSO, which is really basic and still as unresponsive as the rest.
Android - it's pretty, the hardware is responsive, call sound quality is great and echo is gone, most of the hardware works. Current problems are - no resume from suspend, therefore battery life is about 6 hours because it's always on, there's no way to answer a call because there aren't enough hardware buttons on the freerunner and nobody's put on-screen answer button in place, and you can't type anything because there's no on-screen keyboard. You can't implement one easily at present either.
Early next year (first quarter) Google are supposed to be fixing the on screen keyboard thing, and hopefully the rest will be sorted before long. I know that other than the community effort there is a company called Koolu doing an android-freerunner port.
Basically, I nearly sold my freerunner before android came along as I have little faith in the openmoko platform getting anywhere anytime soon. If I were you I'd wait until early next year, when I hope to have a usable device. For now it's a toy and I had to buy a cheap Pay As You Go phone for day to day use.
"I can set up fake job interviews with as many people as I want. So can the feds."
Good luck with that.
Is the US trying to make its public/international image even worse?