Sure, the parents should be liable. If the kids bought the game themselves, then the store that sold it to them should be liable, too.
But Sony has much, much, MUCH more money then the parents. Lawyers won't sue if they won't get paid.
The article pointed out that GTA is the best-selling computer game of all time. With all those people playing it, I fully expect a wave of GTA-inspired crime to sweep the nation. I mean, if the game is that bad...
Though GTA does have a bad reputation. I was playing last year at Thanksgiving, and my Mother-in-Law asked what I was doing. I told her the game, and she said "Oh, I've heard about that! That's the game that teaches you how to steal cars!".
So I showed her what it teaches you. Walk up beside a car, press *this* key on the keyboard, and viola! A stolen car. Hardly training for would-be auto thieves.
See if it say they can do what they're doing. If it doesn't, tell them to stop or you'll take them to court. If it does, tell them to stop or you won't renew the contract when it ends.
It sounds like they're doing a bunch of stuff that's not strictly necessary for them to do their job. It may convenient for them to scan your servers every second, but if that impacts your business, they need to stop. They're supposed to be there to enhance your business, not impede it.
And if they snagged a copy of your customer database to peddle their own products.. that's just plain wrong. Check the contract again, and if it doesn't explicitly sat they can do that, take them to court.
I appreciate your position that they do a good job, but I'm sure that there are other companies out there that can do an equally good job without the downside that you're having with your current vendor.
I love the GTA franchise... they're all great, fun games in my book. My boys like any game that Daddy likes, but unfortunately GTA is a category 3 game.
Category 1: Games the kids can play. Category 2: Games the kids can't play, but they can watch Daddy play. Category 3: Games the kids can't even watch Daddy play.
I can buy this and give them something close enough to GTA to keep them happy. Of course, I just might have to help them out a little with a few of the missions... you know, just doing what a good Dad does...
I think we've having trouble agreeing on a definition of "overrated" here. I took it to mean the contrast between the hype and buzz surrounding a game, and the actual quality of the game itself. You mentioned some figures about sales and pioneering "firsts" to defend games like Myst and The Sims and Halo. But to me, those very figures are actually part of what makes the games overrated.
The Sims and it's spinoffs have sold millions and millions of copies. It's been featured in mainstream news mags like Newsweek and Time. It's incredibly popular with women. All of this is part of the hype that surrounds the game.
Now, strip away and ignore all that. Just sit down with a copy of the Sims and try to play it. Pretend it's some no-name title you resued from teh bargain bin. If you do that, you'll probably find that the game is rather trite and boring and just not a fun thing to do. Thats the game itself.
So you have lots of hype from it's sales figures and female following. You have a game that's not much fun. Lots of hype, bad game... it's overrated.
You get $5.00 off your next domain registration with them. Since they charge $35.00 a year for a.com registration, you're still getting taken. Compare that to Godaddy.com 's 8.95 registration fee.
Register.com didn't settle out of court. They paid off the other sides lawyers to make them go away. I've got a feeling that when settlement negotiations started, the main bone of contention was how much register.com was going to pay in legal fees. Neither side cared about the consumers who were supposedly wronged. So $5.00 off makes it look like the plaintiffs lawyers actually did something to earn their money, lets register.com continue to charge inflated prices and rack up the profits. Consumers get ripped off again, but nobody really cares about that.
Physical media will always have a market, but will they always be available? I can easily foresee a future where ppv and on-demand have achieved such market penetration that content providers no longer find it necessary to release products for sale at the consumer level. They'll try to keep you hooked on paying rent for the same virtual product over and over and over...
1) Be considerate of others. 2) Don't be a wuss. If someone is doing something that is a problem, politely let them know. 3) Don't be thin-skinned. If someone tells you that something you're doing is bothering them, see what you can do to accomodate them.
The only practial suggestion I'd make is that management should try to set up a phone and a flat surface somewhere where people can get a little privacy. Usually a conference room will work fine, unless it's one of those that gets used every hour of the day. Everyone needs to make a private phone call at some point in time, and making it easy for people to just step away from their desk for a few minutes is better then making them leave to find a pay phone or whatever.
Pretty strange definition of gambling there. Seems to me that if you're competing in an event in which you can lose money, you're gambling. Don't poker players gamble? I suppose you could argue that they're submitting a fee (the ante) and then competing, but it sure looks like gambling to me.
Tiger Woods isn't gambling because he doesn't pay a fee to play in a tournament. If he and I go out on Monday and play for five bucks a hole, we're gambling.
I thought the term was "willing suspension of disbelief".
I've got no problem with it if you can't have the story without it. Let's face it, "Star Trek" would be pretty boring if we couldn't accept FTL travel. "LOTR" would'nt exist without magic and Hobbits and Elves. Christmas specials become pretty stale without Santa Claus.
I just have a problem when the science is wrong and it's not germane to the story. How many times have we seen a film where a character has to use a computer to accomplish some task, and the interface looks like something out of a cartoon? Would it be that hard to come up with something a little more realistic looking? When I'm watching something thats a modern-day "this could happen to you" drama, those fake computer scenes just ruin it for me.
As long as we're reporting strange-but-true floppy drives stories...
My buddy and I were doing something to my Apple ][. I don't remember what it was, something spectacularly geeky and unproductive, I'm sure. In the middle of it all, my floppy drive stopped working. I just sat and spun and chattered every few seconds.
We turned the machine off, tore it apart, put it back together, and the drive worked. We went back to what we were doing, and after a bit the drive stopped working again. Same symptoms.
After much heartache and trial and error, we determined that the drive would not work if it was placed on top of the monitor. Put it beside, or underneath, and it worked fine. Put it on top, and it hosed. Some sort of EMI thing I suppose.
My "worst game ever" experience. It was about hmmmm.. 10 years ago.
1. Box has a little piece of paper with manual errata. Stuff like "though the manual says you can blow walls up, you really can't". Game was hurried out the door, maybe?
2. Installation process runs for HALF AN HOUR and is only 10% done. This is off of a floppy disk. I quit in disgust, take a look at the game file in a hex editor, and find it's an.arj file. I decompress it with my.arj decompressor program, and game installs in five minutes. Obviously they didn't want to pay royalties on a commercial program, and tried to write their own installer.
3. Time for some gameplay! Listed specs: 286/8, 2 meg of ram. My computer: 386/25, 16 meg. Game crawwwwwwwwls. Character AI is non-existent. Controls are buggy and unresponsive. It's real-time, but order and character information screens cover up the gameplay screen. My characters get slaughtered because I can't control them and they're too stupid to save themselves.
4. I finally give up and check out some of the other files in the game. I find a.gif with the games final screen. Seems like the guy who's been giving you missions the whole time was actually one of the aliens you've been fighting, and he gloats about how he used you etc etc etc. Damn, what a shocking surprise.
5. I came across the game a few years later sitting in the back of my floppy disk bin. Thought I'd try it with my new system, a 486/33. Maybe it would be okay with that much raw processing power. Nope. Still buggy, still slow, still sucked.
During WWI, pilots would signal the enemy if their machine guns jammed. Then it was considered the gentlemanly thing to do for the opponent to wait until the pilot had cleared the jam before resuming the dogfight.
I wonder if modern day pilots are going to need a way to signal their opponent that their computers are rebooting?
Actually, it's probably quite stable. Most electric cars have 80% or more of their mass in the batteries that are down below the axle level. So from that standpoint anyway, they're pretty safe.
The first thing I thought of when I read the article was WHY? Why would anybody make an electric with that kind of performance? With an 80 mile range, it's obviously just going to be a commuter car. It'll probably spend 90% of its time in heavy stop and go traffic. I mean, that's supposed to be part of the appeal of the thing, right? It's small and maneuverable and you can park it just about anywhere. So why does it need to go from 0-60 in four seconds and top out at 130? (and is anyone else wondering what the real numbers would be if someone took that thing out to a drag strip and timed it?)
Couldn't they put in a motor that's a little less beefy and knock the price down a few thou? Wouldn't that improve its range and make it safer?
Do they just stop selling cartridges in North Carolina altogether, and cede all the sales to clone cartridge manufacturers? Do they make special cartridge just for sale in NC? Do they just keep up business as usual and dare NC to come after them?
Except that either way, you're forced to buy a Lexmark product. Thats the problem.. that Lexmark is using the DMCA to force consumers to buy their ink cartridges from Lexmark, and Lexmark only.
You'd certainly hope that the contract wouldn't let R* do something this simple to get out of it. If not, then maybe Sony needs to fire their lawyers and hire Rockstars.
Nice attempt to cover your ass, monkey-boy... but we're still coming after you!
Sincerely, The RIAA
But seriously folks... I'm assuming that the whole data collection process is automated. It's not going to be a whole lot harder for the RIAA to dump the results from each individual search into a database and just run some crosstab totals. Anyone who thinks this new version is going to protect them from the big, bad RIAA is liable to be in for a rude awakening by jackbooted thugs in the middle of the night.
Blocking the IP address or range of addresses that they suspect the RIAA is using. Yeah, that'll stop them. No way they'll be able to scan from a different IP. I feel safer already.
Not letting people see what other files a user has might be a bit more useful, but I don't think either of these measures is going to do much to stop the RIAA from prosecuting people.
Well.. you'd *think* that an online game would have better customer service because they're depending on monthly subscription fees. Regular software is usually a one-time cost. The company already has your money, so they can afford to be a little cavalier in the customer service department.
Not so with an online game. They want you to pay up every month to keep playing. You'd think they'd realize that it's a lot easier and cheaper to keep existing customers happy then it is to go out recruiting new ones. The fact that they don't seem to care would seem to indicate either that poor customer service doesn't cost them customers, or that nobody has ever bothered to try to quantify just what the effect is.
Cynics would say that having a lot of different rulebooks is worse then having no rulebook at all. Whats a player to do when the different rulebooks directly contradict each other?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, the parents should be liable. If the kids bought the game themselves, then the store that sold it to them should be liable, too.
But Sony has much, much, MUCH more money then the parents. Lawyers won't sue if they won't get paid.
The article pointed out that GTA is the best-selling computer game of all time. With all those people playing it, I fully expect a wave of GTA-inspired crime to sweep the nation. I mean, if the game is that bad...
Though GTA does have a bad reputation. I was playing last year at Thanksgiving, and my Mother-in-Law asked what I was doing. I told her the game, and she said "Oh, I've heard about that! That's the game that teaches you how to steal cars!".
So I showed her what it teaches you. Walk up beside a car, press *this* key on the keyboard, and viola! A stolen car. Hardly training for would-be auto thieves.
See if it say they can do what they're doing. If it doesn't, tell them to stop or you'll take them to court. If it does, tell them to stop or you won't renew the contract when it ends.
It sounds like they're doing a bunch of stuff that's not strictly necessary for them to do their job. It may convenient for them to scan your servers every second, but if that impacts your business, they need to stop. They're supposed to be there to enhance your business, not impede it.
And if they snagged a copy of your customer database to peddle their own products.. that's just plain wrong. Check the contract again, and if it doesn't explicitly sat they can do that, take them to court.
I appreciate your position that they do a good job, but I'm sure that there are other companies out there that can do an equally good job without the downside that you're having with your current vendor.
Finally, a chance for me to show what COBOL can really do!
I love the GTA franchise... they're all great, fun games in my book. My boys like any game that Daddy likes, but unfortunately GTA is a category 3 game.
Category 1: Games the kids can play.
Category 2: Games the kids can't play, but they can watch Daddy play.
Category 3: Games the kids can't even watch Daddy play.
I can buy this and give them something close enough to GTA to keep them happy. Of course, I just might have to help them out a little with a few of the missions... you know, just doing what a good Dad does...
I think we've having trouble agreeing on a definition of "overrated" here. I took it to mean the contrast between the hype and buzz surrounding a game, and the actual quality of the game itself. You mentioned some figures about sales and pioneering "firsts" to defend games like Myst and The Sims and Halo. But to me, those very figures are actually part of what makes the games overrated.
The Sims and it's spinoffs have sold millions and millions of copies. It's been featured in mainstream news mags like Newsweek and Time. It's incredibly popular with women. All of this is part of the hype that surrounds the game.
Now, strip away and ignore all that. Just sit down with a copy of the Sims and try to play it. Pretend it's some no-name title you resued from teh bargain bin. If you do that, you'll probably find that the game is rather trite and boring and just not a fun thing to do. Thats the game itself.
So you have lots of hype from it's sales figures and female following. You have a game that's not much fun. Lots of hype, bad game... it's overrated.
You don't even get $5.00
.com registration, you're still getting taken. Compare that to Godaddy.com 's 8.95 registration fee.
You get $5.00 off your next domain registration with them. Since they charge $35.00 a year for a
Register.com didn't settle out of court. They paid off the other sides lawyers to make them go away. I've got a feeling that when settlement negotiations started, the main bone of contention was how much register.com was going to pay in legal fees. Neither side cared about the consumers who were supposedly wronged. So $5.00 off makes it look like the plaintiffs lawyers actually did something to earn their money, lets register.com continue to charge inflated prices and rack up the profits. Consumers get ripped off again, but nobody really cares about that.
Tell me she didn't miss out on her second chance, when the dot com boom happened. ACKTHPT.COM is hers, right?
Physical media will always have a market, but will they always be available? I can easily foresee a future where ppv and on-demand have achieved such market penetration that content providers no longer find it necessary to release products for sale at the consumer level. They'll try to keep you hooked on paying rent for the same virtual product over and over and over...
I disagree with you, my friend. I think it's pretty clear that the Register DID report that Forrester predicts the end of physical media.
Don't try any of those fancy media spinning tricks around here. We're way too clever.
1) Be considerate of others.
2) Don't be a wuss. If someone is doing something that is a problem, politely let them know.
3) Don't be thin-skinned. If someone tells you that something you're doing is bothering them, see what you can do to accomodate them.
The only practial suggestion I'd make is that management should try to set up a phone and a flat surface somewhere where people can get a little privacy. Usually a conference room will work fine, unless it's one of those that gets used every hour of the day. Everyone needs to make a private phone call at some point in time, and making it easy for people to just step away from their desk for a few minutes is better then making them leave to find a pay phone or whatever.
Pretty strange definition of gambling there. Seems to me that if you're competing in an event in which you can lose money, you're gambling. Don't poker players gamble? I suppose you could argue that they're submitting a fee (the ante) and then competing, but it sure looks like gambling to me.
Tiger Woods isn't gambling because he doesn't pay a fee to play in a tournament. If he and I go out on Monday and play for five bucks a hole, we're gambling.
I thought the term was "willing suspension of disbelief".
I've got no problem with it if you can't have the story without it. Let's face it, "Star Trek" would be pretty boring if we couldn't accept FTL travel. "LOTR" would'nt exist without magic and Hobbits and Elves. Christmas specials become pretty stale without Santa Claus.
I just have a problem when the science is wrong and it's not germane to the story. How many times have we seen a film where a character has to use a computer to accomplish some task, and the interface looks like something out of a cartoon? Would it be that hard to come up with something a little more realistic looking? When I'm watching something thats a modern-day "this could happen to you" drama, those fake computer scenes just ruin it for me.
As long as we're reporting strange-but-true floppy drives stories...
My buddy and I were doing something to my Apple ][. I don't remember what it was, something spectacularly geeky and unproductive, I'm sure. In the middle of it all, my floppy drive stopped working. I just sat and spun and chattered every few seconds.
We turned the machine off, tore it apart, put it back together, and the drive worked. We went back to what we were doing, and after a bit the drive stopped working again. Same symptoms.
After much heartache and trial and error, we determined that the drive would not work if it was placed on top of the monitor. Put it beside, or underneath, and it worked fine. Put it on top, and it hosed. Some sort of EMI thing I suppose.
Ohhh... maybe it'll run smooth under a AMD 2200...
Or not.
My "worst game ever" experience. It was about hmmmm.. 10 years ago.
.arj file. I decompress it with my .arj decompressor program, and game installs in five minutes. Obviously they didn't want to pay royalties on a commercial program, and tried to write their own installer.
.gif with the games final screen. Seems like the guy who's been giving you missions the whole time was actually one of the aliens you've been fighting, and he gloats about how he used you etc etc etc. Damn, what a shocking surprise.
1. Box has a little piece of paper with manual errata. Stuff like "though the manual says you can blow walls up, you really can't". Game was hurried out the door, maybe?
2. Installation process runs for HALF AN HOUR and is only 10% done. This is off of a floppy disk. I quit in disgust, take a look at the game file in a hex editor, and find it's an
3. Time for some gameplay! Listed specs: 286/8, 2 meg of ram. My computer: 386/25, 16 meg. Game crawwwwwwwwls. Character AI is non-existent. Controls are buggy and unresponsive. It's real-time, but order and character information screens cover up the gameplay screen. My characters get slaughtered because I can't control them and they're too stupid to save themselves.
4. I finally give up and check out some of the other files in the game. I find a
5. I came across the game a few years later sitting in the back of my floppy disk bin. Thought I'd try it with my new system, a 486/33. Maybe it would be okay with that much raw processing power. Nope. Still buggy, still slow, still sucked.
During WWI, pilots would signal the enemy if their machine guns jammed. Then it was considered the gentlemanly thing to do for the opponent to wait until the pilot had cleared the jam before resuming the dogfight.
I wonder if modern day pilots are going to need a way to signal their opponent that their computers are rebooting?
Actually, it's probably quite stable. Most electric cars have 80% or more of their mass in the batteries that are down below the axle level. So from that standpoint anyway, they're pretty safe.
The first thing I thought of when I read the article was WHY? Why would anybody make an electric with that kind of performance? With an 80 mile range, it's obviously just going to be a commuter car. It'll probably spend 90% of its time in heavy stop and go traffic. I mean, that's supposed to be part of the appeal of the thing, right? It's small and maneuverable and you can park it just about anywhere. So why does it need to go from 0-60 in four seconds and top out at 130? (and is anyone else wondering what the real numbers would be if someone took that thing out to a drag strip and timed it?)
Couldn't they put in a motor that's a little less beefy and knock the price down a few thou? Wouldn't that improve its range and make it safer?
Seems like a natural. Lots of zombies to kill. The players goal could simply be to survive until the virus runs its course.
Do they just stop selling cartridges in North Carolina altogether, and cede all the sales to clone cartridge manufacturers? Do they make special cartridge just for sale in NC? Do they just keep up business as usual and dare NC to come after them?
Except that either way, you're forced to buy a Lexmark product. Thats the problem.. that Lexmark is using the DMCA to force consumers to buy their ink cartridges from Lexmark, and Lexmark only.
You'd certainly hope that the contract wouldn't let R* do something this simple to get out of it. If not, then maybe Sony needs to fire their lawyers and hire Rockstars.
Nice attempt to cover your ass, monkey-boy... but we're still coming after you!
Sincerely,
The RIAA
But seriously folks... I'm assuming that the whole data collection process is automated. It's not going to be a whole lot harder for the RIAA to dump the results from each individual search into a database and just run some crosstab totals. Anyone who thinks this new version is going to protect them from the big, bad RIAA is liable to be in for a rude awakening by jackbooted thugs in the middle of the night.
Blocking the IP address or range of addresses that they suspect the RIAA is using. Yeah, that'll stop them. No way they'll be able to scan from a different IP. I feel safer already.
Not letting people see what other files a user has might be a bit more useful, but I don't think either of these measures is going to do much to stop the RIAA from prosecuting people.
Well.. you'd *think* that an online game would have better customer service because they're depending on monthly subscription fees. Regular software is usually a one-time cost. The company already has your money, so they can afford to be a little cavalier in the customer service department.
Not so with an online game. They want you to pay up every month to keep playing. You'd think they'd realize that it's a lot easier and cheaper to keep existing customers happy then it is to go out recruiting new ones. The fact that they don't seem to care would seem to indicate either that poor customer service doesn't cost them customers, or that nobody has ever bothered to try to quantify just what the effect is.
Cynics would say that having a lot of different rulebooks is worse then having no rulebook at all. Whats a player to do when the different rulebooks directly contradict each other?