and yet who gets yelled out? the guys using DRM to protect their hard work from being freely taken? or the leeching scum who copied and distributed someone elses work knowingly? Yup, its the content creator who gets criticised, never the pirate. Strange.
*sigh* No, because that content is provided in agreement between the record company and the radio station. A legal agreement. That's why you only tend to hear the singles being played 9to promtoe the albums) and why the DJ often talks over the music. Glad to see that you don't have a problem with the definition of the whole album downloaders as free-loading then. At least we agree on that.
So you don't like the current model where 1,000 creative people try to create something that's a hit (ie popular, respected and genuinely what people want), in the knowledge that it will make them good money (maybe even enough to compensate them for the years of earning sod all playing gigs to nobody, or writing software / games nobody wanted.
It seems you would prefer a method where we pay all 1,000 people for the mere act of production, and we remove the assignment of cash reward based on product quality (generally tied to its popularity).
There is a system that does just this! you are in luck!
It's called communism.
I'm not using that as an insult (most Americans get upset if you mention the C word), but as a statement of fact. This is the economic model you are suggesting would be preferable.
Capitalism *does* lead to that 1 in a thousand creative people doing VERY nicely out of it, especially in the field of entertainment. This is counterbalanced by the 999 people living on welfare trying to become celebrities. Naturally we read all about the successes, and nothing about the failures. Who makes a fuss about copyright and issues lawsuits? well naturally it's the 0.1% who are a success, and as a result, slashdotters get fixated on this stupid "Madonna has enough cash, I ain't hurting anyone" nonsense, while they download a torrent of some small indie band that probably badly needs the sales.
For every rich megastar idiot like Cliff Richard arguing for an extension of copyright (terms ARE too long, I agree with that 100%, 10 years seems more reasonable to me), there are 100 bands and artists who are just scraping by, making barely enough to pay the rent. Amazingly, 99.99% of people downloading copyrighted content don't differentiate, and only download content made by the mega-rich.
Agreed 100%. It's always the people who don't make content, or who do so an amateur basis, without needing to pay the bills who love arguing over the finer points of legal definitions in arguments like this. I don't' care what you *call* it, if you are consuming content that cost money to make, and that was made because 100s or 1,000s of honest people *did* pay for their copy, then you may not be a criminal, or a pirate, but you are clearly a free-loader. Expect to be deluged with an armada of slashdotters calling you a "micro$oft shill", or evil corporate bastard though. People who make content for a living are normally given a hard time here;(
and also define how an artist can magically pay his rent with goodwill, whereas someone who works (for example) as an engineer, needs to pay his rent with actual cash, in return for his work and ideas.
I agree with you. However, it's pretty clear that law enforcement agencies don't give a damn. I could find 2,000 illegally shared applications and games before lunch, and provide exact URLS of these links to whatever authorities want them. Do you think they would investigate? do anything at all? That's why it's been left to the copyright holders to do what they can to protect their IP. The law may be on their side, but the enforcement isn't there. Maybe one day it will be, but for now, the crowd of people raving about how l33t it is to get everything for free is drowning out the protests of the content creators who actually make the stuff. Hopefully, this will change, as its (IMHO) very bad for the entertainment and software industry in the long term.
it's an extra step that prevents you trying out a new game. You suddenly have to wait till dad gets home and pester him to let you download one. Gone are the days of kids trying out 10 games and buying the best one. Yes, not everyone will use parental controls, but a lot of them will, and any additional grief that prevents people trying a game on a whim will hurt smaller devs hardest, because those are the games that rely on a good demo (as opposed to hype and PR) to get a sale.
most indie devs I know about consider $200k to be very high end. I know I'm not making that. If a game won't be usable on vista without a costly ESRB rating, then my company is dead in the water and so are most of the small indie developers. I'm all for supporting higher security, I don't see why any games need administrator rights on a machine (my last 2 certainly run fine without them), but anything that might require all games to have ESRB ratings is just plain stupid. Kiss goodbye to freeware games for starters.
Or better still, work for yourself. Where I work is fantastic, there are some friendly cats in the office, a fridge full of chocolate, tons of games to play at lunch, and the boss thinks nothing of letting me drift off to practice archery once or twice a week during working hours. I've also never had to sit in a meeting, and the commute is a vertical one of about 8 feet. And that's without the fantastically fair profit-sharing scheme. Often, the best manager and employer for you is.... you.
Re:Why is it so hard to make a good Star Trek game
on
Star Trek Legacy Review
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
it helps if you don't blow half the budget on licensing voice actors though. I don't give a damn if modern games have no vocals whatsoever. If I wanted to hear Patrick stewarts voice I'd put a DVD on. I want to 'interact' and have 'fun' in a 'game'. More effort is required on the game, and less on ticking the marketing boxes like "all 5 star trek captains voices". I found the game dull and uninspired long before getting to hear more than 1 of the celebrity voices.
during those 10 years can expect tourist visits to the USA to dwindle to trivial levels. I'd love to revisit Las Vegas, but having been fingerprinted in atlanta just on a stopover flight recently, I've no intention of repeating the process, especially when I'm supposed to be relaxed on holiday. Canadian tourist resorts must be laughing like hyenas everytime the USA does stuff like this.
"If all you really do is surf the web, check email, and write Word Processor documents"
you just described what 90% of normal computer users do with their PCs. Just because all your friends have streaming media servers and RAID arrays doesn't mean that's representative of everybody else.
did you actually READ my post? I'm talking about the VAST majority of users who use their home PC to check the news headlines and chat on msn. has it ever occurred to you that all the slashdot posters talking about how they are building data centers for particle accelerators just might *not* be typical computer users. I made it quite clear that I was referring to joe average in my post, and *still* got an army of people pointing out business uses for it, usually with some sarcasm and abuse added in for free. Ho hum.
My whole point is that 2) is not true. Or if it is, they keep quiet about it. Have you ever seen Mean Time Between Failure rated alongside capacity in any consumer hard drive marketing?
Your argument seems to be "more is always better". That's not always true. a bigger engine isn't always a better engine. beyond the point where it gets you from a to b, its often just wasted effort, expense, and resources.
Given a choice of a high-reliability, quiet, high performance 200 gig drive, or an 800 gig one without those features, I'd choose the smaller drive, and I suspect many others would too. That's what my post was saying. Chill out.
Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these? In my experience, PC hard disks are already way too big. A friend of mine uses his 100 gig drive for some emailing, websurfing, playing a few games, and music playback. Last time I checked his PC it was over 85% empty. And most of the space that was consumed was the O/S. All a bigger drive gives joe average is a longer defrag time, and longer search time. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of current domestic end-user drive space is currently empty. Sure, many slashdotters will have filled their disks with all manner of stuff. I'm a developer, and the obj files alone for games stretching back 10 years certainly take a up a huge chunk of my disk, but we aren't average joes. I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:
Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK) Seek Time Cost
Why innovate on capacity? it's the one major metric that most people have stopped caring about. I'm not being a luddite, for a long time disk capacity *was* a major issue, and we regularly ran out of space. I think that time is over.
That sounds very certain. I was told that BSE is 'probably' a prion disease. I thought they aren't 100% certain about that yet. This is what my missus told me, and she is doing research into BSE in the UK. Interestingly, she said she wouldn't eat these animals (with the prions removed). I wouldn't either. Until a scientist can explain with 100% certainty and accuracy exactly what something does, I'm not happy with them artificially adding it or removing it from stuff I eat. By all means research the stuff more, and by all means use some cutting edge science for stuff like laptops, mp3 players and cars, but I'd rather *not* be an 'early adopter' tech-wise, when it relates to stuff I actually put inside my body and absorb.
im 100% for using tech to fight climate change, but not blue-sky we-dont-know- tech, simply because *we don't have time*. In 20 years, if we have widespread cheap, clean fusion power, then that's a different question, but we aren't there yet. As for the poverty thing, I'm not arguing for a communist uptopia, just to spend enough money on infrastructure for places like Africa so people aren't actually dying of starvation so often. That costs money, and the opportunity cost of building a space station is X billion that's not spent on alleviating poverty.
You don't hear many people living under the poverty line saying "gee, I wish we spent more on space travel".
To me, that sounds like someone trying to find a solution that involves space. That's the whole problem. Yes, you can monkey around with fancy high-tech mirrors in space, and orbiting power stations, all of which is unproven, expensive, technologically challenging, and a long way off or...
we could actually make vaguely efficient use of energy.
Our problem is that we waste most of the power we generate. We can solve that by finding a new-fangled way to make the power, or we could just stop the waste. I vote for stopping the waste. I'm very happy for us to explore the galaxy and go build colonies on mars and the moon. However, I'm against spending any tax dollars / pounds on this stuff while we have such pressing matters on the homeworld, such as poverty, climate change, terrorism etc etc.
I like the way that having discovered that people aren't interested in space exploration, the solution is more public relations spending. Does it not occur to people that if its tax dollars, and the people paying the tax don't want it spent on X, the solution might be to *NOT* spend it on X, as opposed to spend it on educating the people on why they are wrong? Priorities should be set by elected officials, broadly conforming to the will of the people, not to whichever government body spends most on marketing.
Well actually that's sort of my position. Its not *that* old, maybe I got my TV in 1997-8 but it was a nice flashy sony one, big enough to watch movies on, and the picture quality is superb. Unless it actually does *die*, I can't see any reason to blow a pile of cash on anything newer. Sure, it's not flat, but I have no pressing need for the space behind the TV to be put to use. If I watched TV 5 hours a day, I might feel different, but does *anyone* do that any more?
I use (amongst other thing) spamhilator. It's free, and its pretty reliable. The trouble I have is that I *have* to allow everyone to mail me. When you run a business, you *do* occasionally get people guessing your email address from your domain and sending you a potentially vital email. I just can't afford to block emails by default. And anything (like captchas or auto-response systems) that makes it hard for my customers to contact me is just BAD.
I don't see why we are always fighting this problem at the reception end, rather than the source. Spam filters can work quite well, but why are they mostly applied right at the very endpoint of the chain? I'd be very happy for some basic filtering to take place on my outgoing mail at the ISP level. If it meant the odd automatic email with a captcha saying "are you sure you intended to send this mail?" before a spammy-looking email went out, thats fine with me, and wouldn't that approach cut down on all those twits whose PC's are part of a botnet without them realising it?
Bah, why is firefox suddenly getting me to spell check in American?
"in russia all intellectual property is owned by the governemt,"
whose intellectual property? just that of russian citizens? or everyone on the planet earth? And if so, how does that work exactly? Does this mean they own all the IP to microsoft windows? all of apples IP? If I write a comedy sketch tommorow, does the russian government own the IP to it? and therefore can make it available cheaply to everyone in the world thanks to the web?
Anyone can see thats totally nutso, but people will turn a blind eye to the irrationality of such systems if they think it enables them to get stuff cheap and still have a clear conscience.
Wow, such hostility. Are you british and upset that your licence fee funded the shows and you should have them free? or non british, and just reckon you were born with the right to have them for free anyway, while us lot pay for it?
Slashdot Mirror
and yet who gets yelled out? the guys using DRM to protect their hard work from being freely taken? or the leeching scum who copied and distributed someone elses work knowingly?
Yup, its the content creator who gets criticised, never the pirate.
Strange.
*sigh*
No, because that content is provided in agreement between the record company and the radio station. A legal agreement. That's why you only tend to hear the singles being played 9to promtoe the albums) and why the DJ often talks over the music.
Glad to see that you don't have a problem with the definition of the whole album downloaders as free-loading then. At least we agree on that.
So you don't like the current model where 1,000 creative people try to create something that's a hit (ie popular, respected and genuinely what people want), in the knowledge that it will make them good money (maybe even enough to compensate them for the years of earning sod all playing gigs to nobody, or writing software / games nobody wanted.
It seems you would prefer a method where we pay all 1,000 people for the mere act of production, and we remove the assignment of cash reward based on product quality (generally tied to its popularity).
There is a system that does just this! you are in luck!
It's called communism.
I'm not using that as an insult (most Americans get upset if you mention the C word), but as a statement of fact. This is the economic model you are suggesting would be preferable.
Capitalism *does* lead to that 1 in a thousand creative people doing VERY nicely out of it, especially in the field of entertainment. This is counterbalanced by the 999 people living on welfare trying to become celebrities. Naturally we read all about the successes, and nothing about the failures. Who makes a fuss about copyright and issues lawsuits? well naturally it's the 0.1% who are a success, and as a result, slashdotters get fixated on this stupid "Madonna has enough cash, I ain't hurting anyone" nonsense, while they download a torrent of some small indie band that probably badly needs the sales.
For every rich megastar idiot like Cliff Richard arguing for an extension of copyright (terms ARE too long, I agree with that 100%, 10 years seems more reasonable to me), there are 100 bands and artists who are just scraping by, making barely enough to pay the rent. Amazingly, 99.99% of people downloading copyrighted content don't differentiate, and only download content made by the mega-rich.
Agreed 100%. It's always the people who don't make content, or who do so an amateur basis, without needing to pay the bills who love arguing over the finer points of legal definitions in arguments like this. I don't' care what you *call* it, if you are consuming content that cost money to make, and that was made because 100s or 1,000s of honest people *did* pay for their copy, then you may not be a criminal, or a pirate, but you are clearly a free-loader. ;(
Expect to be deluged with an armada of slashdotters calling you a "micro$oft shill", or evil corporate bastard though. People who make content for a living are normally given a hard time here
LOL.
Are you serious?
define art.
and also define how an artist can magically pay his rent with goodwill, whereas someone who works (for example) as an engineer, needs to pay his rent with actual cash, in return for his work and ideas.
I agree with you. However, it's pretty clear that law enforcement agencies don't give a damn. I could find 2,000 illegally shared applications and games before lunch, and provide exact URLS of these links to whatever authorities want them. Do you think they would investigate? do anything at all? That's why it's been left to the copyright holders to do what they can to protect their IP. The law may be on their side, but the enforcement isn't there. Maybe one day it will be, but for now, the crowd of people raving about how l33t it is to get everything for free is drowning out the protests of the content creators who actually make the stuff. Hopefully, this will change, as its (IMHO) very bad for the entertainment and software industry in the long term.
it's an extra step that prevents you trying out a new game. You suddenly have to wait till dad gets home and pester him to let you download one. Gone are the days of kids trying out 10 games and buying the best one.
Yes, not everyone will use parental controls, but a lot of them will, and any additional grief that prevents people trying a game on a whim will hurt smaller devs hardest, because those are the games that rely on a good demo (as opposed to hype and PR) to get a sale.
most indie devs I know about consider $200k to be very high end. I know I'm not making that. If a game won't be usable on vista without a costly ESRB rating, then my company is dead in the water and so are most of the small indie developers.
I'm all for supporting higher security, I don't see why any games need administrator rights on a machine (my last 2 certainly run fine without them), but anything that might require all games to have ESRB ratings is just plain stupid. Kiss goodbye to freeware games for starters.
Or better still, work for yourself. Where I work is fantastic, there are some friendly cats in the office, a fridge full of chocolate, tons of games to play at lunch, and the boss thinks nothing of letting me drift off to practice archery once or twice a week during working hours. I've also never had to sit in a meeting, and the commute is a vertical one of about 8 feet.
And that's without the fantastically fair profit-sharing scheme.
Often, the best manager and employer for you is.... you.
it helps if you don't blow half the budget on licensing voice actors though. I don't give a damn if modern games have no vocals whatsoever. If I wanted to hear Patrick stewarts voice I'd put a DVD on. I want to 'interact' and have 'fun' in a 'game'. More effort is required on the game, and less on ticking the marketing boxes like "all 5 star trek captains voices". I found the game dull and uninspired long before getting to hear more than 1 of the celebrity voices.
during those 10 years can expect tourist visits to the USA to dwindle to trivial levels. I'd love to revisit Las Vegas, but having been fingerprinted in atlanta just on a stopover flight recently, I've no intention of repeating the process, especially when I'm supposed to be relaxed on holiday.
Canadian tourist resorts must be laughing like hyenas everytime the USA does stuff like this.
"If all you really do is surf the web, check email, and write Word Processor documents"
you just described what 90% of normal computer users do with their PCs. Just because all your friends have streaming media servers and RAID arrays doesn't mean that's representative of everybody else.
did you actually READ my post? I'm talking about the VAST majority of users who use their home PC to check the news headlines and chat on msn. has it ever occurred to you that all the slashdot posters talking about how they are building data centers for particle accelerators just might *not* be typical computer users.
I made it quite clear that I was referring to joe average in my post, and *still* got an army of people pointing out business uses for it, usually with some sarcasm and abuse added in for free.
Ho hum.
My whole point is that 2) is not true. Or if it is, they keep quiet about it. Have you ever seen Mean Time Between Failure rated alongside capacity in any consumer hard drive marketing?
Your argument seems to be "more is always better". That's not always true. a bigger engine isn't always a better engine. beyond the point where it gets you from a to b, its often just wasted effort, expense, and resources.
Given a choice of a high-reliability, quiet, high performance 200 gig drive, or an 800 gig one without those features, I'd choose the smaller drive, and I suspect many others would too. That's what my post was saying. Chill out.
Ok, so on the more general point of high capacity 3.5 inch drives, Does anyone really need these? In my experience, PC hard disks are already way too big. A friend of mine uses his 100 gig drive for some emailing, websurfing, playing a few games, and music playback. Last time I checked his PC it was over 85% empty. And most of the space that was consumed was the O/S.
All a bigger drive gives joe average is a longer defrag time, and longer search time. I'd hazard a guess that 80% of current domestic end-user drive space is currently empty.
Sure, many slashdotters will have filled their disks with all manner of stuff. I'm a developer, and the obj files alone for games stretching back 10 years certainly take a up a huge chunk of my disk, but we aren't average joes.
I'll get a new PC next year for vista (I need it for checking games compatibility) and no doubt it will come with a 500-1000GB drive as standard. I'd rather it didn't, I've got by for years with my 80gig friend here. If theyt *really* want to innovate on disks innovate here:
Power consumption (esp with electricity prices going menatl as they ahve in the UK)
Seek Time
Cost
Why innovate on capacity? it's the one major metric that most people have stopped caring about. I'm not being a luddite, for a long time disk capacity *was* a major issue, and we regularly ran out of space. I think that time is over.
That sounds very certain. I was told that BSE is 'probably' a prion disease. I thought they aren't 100% certain about that yet. This is what my missus told me, and she is doing research into BSE in the UK. Interestingly, she said she wouldn't eat these animals (with the prions removed). I wouldn't either. Until a scientist can explain with 100% certainty and accuracy exactly what something does, I'm not happy with them artificially adding it or removing it from stuff I eat. By all means research the stuff more, and by all means use some cutting edge science for stuff like laptops, mp3 players and cars, but I'd rather *not* be an 'early adopter' tech-wise, when it relates to stuff I actually put inside my body and absorb.
it was reviewed at the site:b =3
http://www.gametunnel.com/gamespace.php?id=342&ta
Defcon is one of those love it or hate it games. just luck of the draw.
im 100% for using tech to fight climate change, but not blue-sky we-dont-know- tech, simply because *we don't have time*.
In 20 years, if we have widespread cheap, clean fusion power, then that's a different question, but we aren't there yet.
As for the poverty thing, I'm not arguing for a communist uptopia, just to spend enough money on infrastructure for places like Africa so people aren't actually dying of starvation so often. That costs money, and the opportunity cost of building a space station is X billion that's not spent on alleviating poverty.
You don't hear many people living under the poverty line saying "gee, I wish we spent more on space travel".
To me, that sounds like someone trying to find a solution that involves space. That's the whole problem. Yes, you can monkey around with fancy high-tech mirrors in space, and orbiting power stations, all of which is unproven, expensive, technologically challenging, and a long way off or...
we could actually make vaguely efficient use of energy.
Our problem is that we waste most of the power we generate. We can solve that by finding a new-fangled way to make the power, or we could just stop the waste. I vote for stopping the waste.
I'm very happy for us to explore the galaxy and go build colonies on mars and the moon. However, I'm against spending any tax dollars / pounds on this stuff while we have such pressing matters on the homeworld, such as poverty, climate change, terrorism etc etc.
I like the way that having discovered that people aren't interested in space exploration, the solution is more public relations spending. Does it not occur to people that if its tax dollars, and the people paying the tax don't want it spent on X, the solution might be to *NOT* spend it on X, as opposed to spend it on educating the people on why they are wrong? Priorities should be set by elected officials, broadly conforming to the will of the people, not to whichever government body spends most on marketing.
Well actually that's sort of my position. Its not *that* old, maybe I got my TV in 1997-8 but it was a nice flashy sony one, big enough to watch movies on, and the picture quality is superb.
Unless it actually does *die*, I can't see any reason to blow a pile of cash on anything newer. Sure, it's not flat, but I have no pressing need for the space behind the TV to be put to use.
If I watched TV 5 hours a day, I might feel different, but does *anyone* do that any more?
I use (amongst other thing) spamhilator. It's free, and its pretty reliable. The trouble I have is that I *have* to allow everyone to mail me. When you run a business, you *do* occasionally get people guessing your email address from your domain and sending you a potentially vital email. I just can't afford to block emails by default. And anything (like captchas or auto-response systems) that makes it hard for my customers to contact me is just BAD.
I don't see why we are always fighting this problem at the reception end, rather than the source. Spam filters can work quite well, but why are they mostly applied right at the very endpoint of the chain?
I'd be very happy for some basic filtering to take place on my outgoing mail at the ISP level. If it meant the odd automatic email with a captcha saying "are you sure you intended to send this mail?" before a spammy-looking email went out, thats fine with me, and wouldn't that approach cut down on all those twits whose PC's are part of a botnet without them realising it?
Bah, why is firefox suddenly getting me to spell check in American?
"in russia all intellectual property is owned by the governemt,"
whose intellectual property? just that of russian citizens? or everyone on the planet earth? And if so, how does that work exactly? Does this mean they own all the IP to microsoft windows? all of apples IP? If I write a comedy sketch tommorow, does the russian government own the IP to it? and therefore can make it available cheaply to everyone in the world thanks to the web?
Anyone can see thats totally nutso, but people will turn a blind eye to the irrationality of such systems if they think it enables them to get stuff cheap and still have a clear conscience.
its the bbc website. i'm glad they use british english. Can you please correct all your american websites that can't spell colour.
Cheers,
Wow, such hostility. Are you british and upset that your licence fee funded the shows and you should have them free? or non british, and just reckon you were born with the right to have them for free anyway, while us lot pay for it?
even so, they dont show up at your house and offer to give you a lift to the meeting. Hyperlinks effectively do that.