I'm about a month away from getting my hands the Wii development kit once it arrives at work. Things are looking real nice from my end... had he put point number 5 as point number 1, I would have stopped reading. Its like 2001 all over again. Knowing at what stage in development the titles at E3 would have been in, the Wii will have no problems producing some pretty stunning stuff.
> 5) The PS2 is actually faster than the GC by a substantial margin. However, it's designed more to push a huge number of polygons with relatively few special effects. If you look carefully at PS2 games versus Gamecube games, you'll notice that PS2 models are substantially higher in polygon count, while Gamecube models tend to mask lower-polygon counts with rich textures and special effects.
I'm a game developer, currently working on a console title that will release on PS2 and Gamecube, and you're repeating an oft quoted but totally baseless myth with point number 5 here. The gamecube hardware is more powerful than the PS2.. substantially? Well, maybe not, but lets just say unarguably. For a recent visual example, look at the Resident Evil 4 port to PS2 - it still looks awesome, but models all have lower poly counts. Note that the PS2 came out significantly before the gamecube too.. you really think a console that came out almost 2 years before the gamecube has more powerful hardware? We have to optimize to hit 30 fps on the PS2, while the gamecube cruises along at a nearly flawless 45 fps.
It is a testemant to Sony's "Super computer" cell processor hype and Nintendos "Its not about the power" company line that keeps this old wives tale still perpetuated in 2006.
But make no mistake, the GPU and CPU on gamecube are more powerful than those of the PS2. Higher clock rates, more ram (although the non CPU addressable ARAM in the gamecube requires more management for memory use optimisation).. just about everything except for raw disc capacity due to the use of mini-DVD on the gamecube, although the S3 texture compression here helps. I'm no fanboy; I own both systems, and they both rock.. but just because I work 50 hour work weeks doesn't mean I won't take the time out to correct some baseless myths.
Its not edit, like YOU edit the XML, its edit as in have non-programmers edit data. You can use Lazlo to build web apps using SWF or DHTML for the view layer, and from my experience, Lazlo is makes quite a nifty RAD web platform to provide the view/edit layer for XML data (and under that, the database layer.) Others have pointed out that your Lazlo app can speak directly to java applications as well. Its an extremely thin platform to provide a really rich user experience on, with minimal re-inventing-the-wheel overhead.
> The results (at least, with me as the creator) support every browser that at least basically conforms to the W3 standards.
What do you want, a gold star? Why is this site full of programmers who discount new tools to add to the toolbox out of hand? Lazlo is pretty neat. I was a distributed web application programmer for a long time (FreeBSD, CORBA), now I write games for consoles like the PS2... if I didn't have tools to make my job easier, and had to do everything in vi just to prove I could, I'd go crazy. I think programmers who are so self-contented with being able to do things the 'hard-core' way just because they can are seriously missing the point. I can do everything you can do, but the more important question is why would I want to? Sure, I still use vi from time to time, but only when it makes sense to do so. I'm open to anything from vi to Visual Studio, as long as it saves me time and makes it easier for me to make my knowledge more valuable to people around me.
From my tinkering with it a few years ago, its really quite a neat little sandbox develop neat little web componants (flash based or dhtml based) from xml feeds. To me, it kinda seemed like a neat 'OSX Dashboard' concept for the web. People could develop neat UI interfaces fed by xml data, and those componants could be shared, or forked, or what have you.
Just to put that in perspective, a ps2 dev kit is around 20,000 bucks.. its not worth that much, hardware wise, of course. Dunno how much the ps3/x360 dev kits are but its probably comprable. This is an interesting strategy on Nintendo's part.
I think thats a bit rash (I'm a game developer too.) If the content is in there (ie, fully rendered nipples), even if it should never be seen during normal program flow, I think the rating should take that into account. If its unlockable, it will eventually be accessible to the world at large.
The bigger issue at play here is why is everybody such a fucking prude. Its womans breasts, for crying out loud, what a freaking repressed society. Games should be rated for violence, and graphic sex, but boobies that can't be seen without a hack? Holy fuck, what is wrong with parents?!
That small detail slightly undermines the credibility of your argument. As a programmer, I can offer some insight into your argument which is trotted out everytime an OSX/Windows BBQ hits slashdot. The truth of the matter is that while Windows itself does support a wide range of hardware, its less than Linux (which is free, and comparatively stable, if not more stable) and only sort-of more than OSX since most hardware specific code is abstracted from the OS in the form of common APIs.
People can debate whether Windows is stable, not stable, better, not better than OSX until th cows come home, but the wide array of hardware argument is a tired old cliche that while somewhat relevant, pales on comparison to more important factors that contribute to code stability: the business approach, time to market policies, varying strategies in deploying product updates, level of integration with 2nd or 3rd party applications, internal organizational consistancy, etc, etc, etc. Most importantly, most everybody in the know agrees that it isn't supporting 'millions and millions' of configs that causes Windows to be such a huge codebase... its MS trying to remain backwards compatible to itself.. so millions and millions of programs might be more accurate. MS bends over backwards to keep your old applications runnable on newer versions of the OS. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing (bad, IMHO) is an exercise left to the buyer, who pays for this backwards compatibility in lack of feature advancement and stability with each new revision of Windows.
Most of the 'hardware' support is driven by the hardware (or OEM) vendors themselves; all OSes have sufficient hardware abstraction layers that make supporting 'millions and millions' of configs simply a matter of resources and market support, not technical hurdles.
Listen, I agree with alot of what you say, but you have to recognize that its all moot. Its easy to throw up your hands and say, "It can't be quanitified, so why bother," but there's a more interesting concept at play here that I think alot of people miss while they take the easy pot shots back and forth.
Nobody argues that piracy occurrs more frequently today than it did 40 years ago. Nobody. So thats different, and its worth studying what effects that shift in behaviour causes. I also support, any day of the week, angda-style-research over the "theres no problem" mentality, because "theres no problem" does not say anything other than, "I have an opinion, but no data to back it up."
I'd really like to see more studies dealing with whether a decline in *satistfaction* with movies produced (ie, what screenplays and movies are financed and released) is in any way related to the perceived risk of financial loss due to piracy. It always seemed like a downward spiral to me; financers think they'll be fleeced, so they produce more mass-media-friendly, merchendisable-friendly fare, in order to offset risks from the perceived risks of piracy, and in turn, people pirate movies more and more because they believe (and possibly rightly so, with RV getting panned by every critic with a pulse, yet opening at #1) that even if they *did* have a political agenda of bankrupting studios through piracy, they couldn't possibly due to the fail-safe nature of advertising and mechendising.
I want to see some social essays with data between piracy and the feedback loop it creates, whether the financial downside of piracy exists or not, inso far as its perceived and it effects the quality of movies being made.
I'm not worried about putting studios out of business; I'm more worried that we're becoming more and more a culture of people who are more interested in the ease of consumption than the value of what we're consuming.
And the programmers of this software didnt get RSI why? Its easy to avoid RSI. It seems like voice recognition software to help sufferers of RSI get back to work is tantamount to putting an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff instead of a big sign at the top that says, "DONT WALK OFF THE CLIFF"
> If the lunch is free, then make sure you've spoken to people you know and trust who've taken the offer before you
1. All the programs you mention have open, transparent communities where people share their experiences with those products.
2. The fact that they are 'free as in beer' is not the top selling point (IE is free, safari is free, with respect to Firefox), OpenOffice's top selling point is that its 'free as in speech' and runs on *nix, the Linux kernels top selling point is that its stable and free as in speech.. etc, none of those programs make the 'something for nothing' sales pitch. The fact that they are free as in beer is simply one of the many reasons listed on their pages why you may choose them, but there is little of the sales-pressure tone you see on 'free lunch' spyware sites. I think there is an important distinction between the 'too good to be true' sales pitch and the 'try it out, its a great product, and by the way, its free too, now go hit the forums and talk with other users' sales pitch.
If you installed the host blocks, you know how to remove a few lines.
If the study is taken at face value (which I think might be reasonable if you're on crack), then all its saying is that you'll remove the screensaver.com block from your hosts file.
My personal opinion is no study was needed; if there is a something-for-nothing proposition, and you take it without being 100% sure of multiple, non-associated sources stating that it really is something-for-nothing (like a good freeware app like Blender, or a trial or lite version of a respected commercial package), you will be paying somebody for something.
Many intelligent, successful people still believe theres such a thing as a free lunch that you dont need to run background checks on. There are none. If the lunch is free, then make sure you've spoken to people you know and trust who've taken the offer before you, or you might as well write "guinea pig" across your forehead in magic marker.
Basically, avoid the word 'free'. As soon as free is the top selling point of anything, it isn't. Its either spyware, or upsell.
That must have been a bad dream, because there are no adult-oriented suspenseful gorefests with dreamy gameplay games that won game of the year from numerous industry heavyweights on a kiddy console for the price of a new game.
But seriously, nice catch. Make sure you pick up Killer7 cheap too, Eternal Darkness, Viewtiful Joe 1, Ikaruga, Paper Mario.. ah crap, I give up, there are too many good games over the years.
Worldwide (because Microsoft and Nintendo operate furthur than your parents basement) the Gamecube outsold the Xbox.
Nintendo made SHITLOADS more money than Microsoft on their console businesses'.
What was your point again? That in the US, if you spend 10 times the amount of another company on advertising, even if the other company comes from Japan and you're the richest company on the planet, you can eek out selling about a million more units than your competitor (while losing to the winner by more than a factor of 3)?
Is that it? You'd be fired on a good day at any of these three companies for analysing their respective performances in the market that way. Nintendoheads? Thats so cute, attacking a bunch of ditto-heads with a similar ditto-head moniker.
Sony won the console wars. Microsoft lost it in a big way, in so far as their shareholders are concerned. And Nintendo kept quietly making hand over dollar wonder what all the fuss was about.
Slashdot is not a community of purchasing power people. End of story. Recommendations sure, but to serve up that load for a well connected computer crowd (and even that can be debated), and its a risk on investment, which isn't good business.
To the grandparent who said, "But its Sun!," I giggle.
Welcome to programming. Your whole experience sounds pretty normal, given that most programmers who work on other peoples code have MAJOR hindsight is 20/20 advantage.
> Yahoo! claims that it loses the ability to track its ads when they are passed on in this manner.
Which they do. They can 'track it' in terms of, okay it was clicked on, or it was seen, but they can't in terms of knowing the breakdown of the audience and trusting the validity of the traffic.
But still, this is standard wild west online advertising. I'm not shedding tears, but they do waste the money of their advertiser if they dont clamp down on sites that resell their ad supply.
If you owned a piece of patented technology made by a company that violated the patent, you could not be in violation for owning it. No society, at any point in time in the history of patents has come anywhere near trying to persecute people who own patented technology they did not manufacture themselves.
There are no wider implications here. Welcome to slashdot, where many articles will make you want to crap your pants if you're not well informed in patent and copyright law.
Lots of terrible things are happening these days, but being locked up or being fined for owning a 360 is never gunna happen.
If MS violated a patent, well, they should be fined or punished. If not, well, they shouldn't. Note that billions of people have taken drugs or used products that were later deemed in violation of a patent, never have I heard of a consumer being charged for purchasing or owning those products, only the governments or companies that produce them. Not that I support patent law in its current form to begin with...
Yahoo goes to serve an ad on a partner site, lets say site X. They know X, they have a business relationship with X. But X makes a deal with Y.. I'll give you some of my ads, X says to Y.. Yahoo is going to give me a million per day, and my website only does 750,000 views a day. Y doesn't do business with Yahoo, and Yahoo loses the ability to track the site the website ran on, because to them it looks like it was delivered to X. Now, X's traffic is worth a certain amount per million views, but because X forwarded the ad to Y, there is no trusted business relationship between what Yahoo is paying and the place the ad is delivered. If its delivered via a spyware program, then the value of the delivery of the ad is WAY lower than running on reputable site X due to the difference in quality of X and Ys audience.
It sounds complicated, but its basically like Yahoo paying a company to show a billboard beside a highway, and that company then taking the money, handing the billboard over to somebody who shoves it in a dark alley, and they split the money Yahoo paid them. Because the ad is brought to the eyeballs tho, in web advertising, as opposed to the eyeballs to the ad in traditional media, it becomes increasingly difficult to know that the money you paid to place the ad isn't being wasted on fraudulant clicks, especially if the ad is redirected many times before its actually shown.
I used to work for a primarily CPM online ad network, and sometimes ads would go from the first party ad server through 4 or 5 networks until it was shown. Its a shady industry, because there is a wide range of participants; some networks or publishers are flat out fraudulant, while many others simply tend to put minimal effort into defeating fraudulant traffic because in the end it does end up generating many of the middle tier networks more money simply by occurring.
Really dont see how this is anything but commidized peace of mind. Its not 1984 as some other posters have said, but its another example of a product in search of convincing potential customers that the value proposition really solves a currently existing problem.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm about a month away from getting my hands the Wii development kit once it arrives at work. Things are looking real nice from my end ... had he put point number 5 as point number 1, I would have stopped reading. Its like 2001 all over again. Knowing at what stage in development the titles at E3 would have been in, the Wii will have no problems producing some pretty stunning stuff.
> 5) The PS2 is actually faster than the GC by a substantial margin. However, it's designed more to push a huge number of polygons with relatively few special effects. If you look carefully at PS2 games versus Gamecube games, you'll notice that PS2 models are substantially higher in polygon count, while Gamecube models tend to mask lower-polygon counts with rich textures and special effects.
.. substantially? Well, maybe not, but lets just say unarguably. For a recent visual example, look at the Resident Evil 4 port to PS2 - it still looks awesome, but models all have lower poly counts. Note that the PS2 came out significantly before the gamecube too .. you really think a console that came out almost 2 years before the gamecube has more powerful hardware? We have to optimize to hit 30 fps on the PS2, while the gamecube cruises along at a nearly flawless 45 fps.
.. just about everything except for raw disc capacity due to the use of mini-DVD on the gamecube, although the S3 texture compression here helps. I'm no fanboy; I own both systems, and they both rock .. but just because I work 50 hour work weeks doesn't mean I won't take the time out to correct some baseless myths.
I'm a game developer, currently working on a console title that will release on PS2 and Gamecube, and you're repeating an oft quoted but totally baseless myth with point number 5 here. The gamecube hardware is more powerful than the PS2
It is a testemant to Sony's "Super computer" cell processor hype and Nintendos "Its not about the power" company line that keeps this old wives tale still perpetuated in 2006.
But make no mistake, the GPU and CPU on gamecube are more powerful than those of the PS2. Higher clock rates, more ram (although the non CPU addressable ARAM in the gamecube requires more management for memory use optimisation)
MGS4 not in playable form? 0$.
Assassin's Creed, in playable form, by invite only? Price of flight down to E3 by employer.
Videogame fanboy a little confused with Game Critics list of choices? Priceless.
Its not edit, like YOU edit the XML, its edit as in have non-programmers edit data. You can use Lazlo to build web apps using SWF or DHTML for the view layer, and from my experience, Lazlo is makes quite a nifty RAD web platform to provide the view/edit layer for XML data (and under that, the database layer.) Others have pointed out that your Lazlo app can speak directly to java applications as well. Its an extremely thin platform to provide a really rich user experience on, with minimal re-inventing-the-wheel overhead.
... if I didn't have tools to make my job easier, and had to do everything in vi just to prove I could, I'd go crazy. I think programmers who are so self-contented with being able to do things the 'hard-core' way just because they can are seriously missing the point. I can do everything you can do, but the more important question is why would I want to? Sure, I still use vi from time to time, but only when it makes sense to do so. I'm open to anything from vi to Visual Studio, as long as it saves me time and makes it easier for me to make my knowledge more valuable to people around me.
> The results (at least, with me as the creator) support every browser that at least basically conforms to the W3 standards.
What do you want, a gold star? Why is this site full of programmers who discount new tools to add to the toolbox out of hand? Lazlo is pretty neat. I was a distributed web application programmer for a long time (FreeBSD, CORBA), now I write games for consoles like the PS2
From my tinkering with it a few years ago, its really quite a neat little sandbox develop neat little web componants (flash based or dhtml based) from xml feeds. To me, it kinda seemed like a neat 'OSX Dashboard' concept for the web. People could develop neat UI interfaces fed by xml data, and those componants could be shared, or forked, or what have you.
Just to put that in perspective, a ps2 dev kit is around 20,000 bucks .. its not worth that much, hardware wise, of course. Dunno how much the ps3/x360 dev kits are but its probably comprable. This is an interesting strategy on Nintendo's part.
I think thats a bit rash (I'm a game developer too.) If the content is in there (ie, fully rendered nipples), even if it should never be seen during normal program flow, I think the rating should take that into account. If its unlockable, it will eventually be accessible to the world at large.
The bigger issue at play here is why is everybody such a fucking prude. Its womans breasts, for crying out loud, what a freaking repressed society. Games should be rated for violence, and graphic sex, but boobies that can't be seen without a hack? Holy fuck, what is wrong with parents?!
> (probably, I don't code)
... its MS trying to remain backwards compatible to itself .. so millions and millions of programs might be more accurate. MS bends over backwards to keep your old applications runnable on newer versions of the OS. Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing (bad, IMHO) is an exercise left to the buyer, who pays for this backwards compatibility in lack of feature advancement and stability with each new revision of Windows.
That small detail slightly undermines the credibility of your argument. As a programmer, I can offer some insight into your argument which is trotted out everytime an OSX/Windows BBQ hits slashdot. The truth of the matter is that while Windows itself does support a wide range of hardware, its less than Linux (which is free, and comparatively stable, if not more stable) and only sort-of more than OSX since most hardware specific code is abstracted from the OS in the form of common APIs.
People can debate whether Windows is stable, not stable, better, not better than OSX until th cows come home, but the wide array of hardware argument is a tired old cliche that while somewhat relevant, pales on comparison to more important factors that contribute to code stability: the business approach, time to market policies, varying strategies in deploying product updates, level of integration with 2nd or 3rd party applications, internal organizational consistancy, etc, etc, etc. Most importantly, most everybody in the know agrees that it isn't supporting 'millions and millions' of configs that causes Windows to be such a huge codebase
Most of the 'hardware' support is driven by the hardware (or OEM) vendors themselves; all OSes have sufficient hardware abstraction layers that make supporting 'millions and millions' of configs simply a matter of resources and market support, not technical hurdles.
Listen, I agree with alot of what you say, but you have to recognize that its all moot. Its easy to throw up your hands and say, "It can't be quanitified, so why bother," but there's a more interesting concept at play here that I think alot of people miss while they take the easy pot shots back and forth.
Nobody argues that piracy occurrs more frequently today than it did 40 years ago. Nobody. So thats different, and its worth studying what effects that shift in behaviour causes. I also support, any day of the week, angda-style-research over the "theres no problem" mentality, because "theres no problem" does not say anything other than, "I have an opinion, but no data to back it up."
I'd really like to see more studies dealing with whether a decline in *satistfaction* with movies produced (ie, what screenplays and movies are financed and released) is in any way related to the perceived risk of financial loss due to piracy. It always seemed like a downward spiral to me; financers think they'll be fleeced, so they produce more mass-media-friendly, merchendisable-friendly fare, in order to offset risks from the perceived risks of piracy, and in turn, people pirate movies more and more because they believe (and possibly rightly so, with RV getting panned by every critic with a pulse, yet opening at #1) that even if they *did* have a political agenda of bankrupting studios through piracy, they couldn't possibly due to the fail-safe nature of advertising and mechendising.
I want to see some social essays with data between piracy and the feedback loop it creates, whether the financial downside of piracy exists or not, inso far as its perceived and it effects the quality of movies being made.
I'm not worried about putting studios out of business; I'm more worried that we're becoming more and more a culture of people who are more interested in the ease of consumption than the value of what we're consuming.
Jesus, if good teachers are people like you, then stay the fuck out of the schools.
> Get stuck doing odd jobs like minding the bus loading/unloading area and trying to stop food fights.
OH THE HUMANITY!!!!!
And the programmers of this software didnt get RSI why? Its easy to avoid RSI. It seems like voice recognition software to help sufferers of RSI get back to work is tantamount to putting an ambulance at the bottom of a cliff instead of a big sign at the top that says, "DONT WALK OFF THE CLIFF"
> If the lunch is free, then make sure you've spoken to people you know and trust who've taken the offer before you
.. etc, none of those programs make the 'something for nothing' sales pitch. The fact that they are free as in beer is simply one of the many reasons listed on their pages why you may choose them, but there is little of the sales-pressure tone you see on 'free lunch' spyware sites. I think there is an important distinction between the 'too good to be true' sales pitch and the 'try it out, its a great product, and by the way, its free too, now go hit the forums and talk with other users' sales pitch.
1. All the programs you mention have open, transparent communities where people share their experiences with those products.
2. The fact that they are 'free as in beer' is not the top selling point (IE is free, safari is free, with respect to Firefox), OpenOffice's top selling point is that its 'free as in speech' and runs on *nix, the Linux kernels top selling point is that its stable and free as in speech
If you installed the host blocks, you know how to remove a few lines.
If the study is taken at face value (which I think might be reasonable if you're on crack), then all its saying is that you'll remove the screensaver.com block from your hosts file.
My personal opinion is no study was needed; if there is a something-for-nothing proposition, and you take it without being 100% sure of multiple, non-associated sources stating that it really is something-for-nothing (like a good freeware app like Blender, or a trial or lite version of a respected commercial package), you will be paying somebody for something.
Many intelligent, successful people still believe theres such a thing as a free lunch that you dont need to run background checks on. There are none. If the lunch is free, then make sure you've spoken to people you know and trust who've taken the offer before you, or you might as well write "guinea pig" across your forehead in magic marker.
Basically, avoid the word 'free'. As soon as free is the top selling point of anything, it isn't. Its either spyware, or upsell.
That must have been a bad dream, because there are no adult-oriented suspenseful gorefests with dreamy gameplay games that won game of the year from numerous industry heavyweights on a kiddy console for the price of a new game.
.. ah crap, I give up, there are too many good games over the years.
But seriously, nice catch. Make sure you pick up Killer7 cheap too, Eternal Darkness, Viewtiful Joe 1, Ikaruga, Paper Mario
Hey what the fuck. That thread is from 2005?!
Worldwide (because Microsoft and Nintendo operate furthur than your parents basement) the Gamecube outsold the Xbox.
Nintendo made SHITLOADS more money than Microsoft on their console businesses'.
What was your point again? That in the US, if you spend 10 times the amount of another company on advertising, even if the other company comes from Japan and you're the richest company on the planet, you can eek out selling about a million more units than your competitor (while losing to the winner by more than a factor of 3)?
Is that it? You'd be fired on a good day at any of these three companies for analysing their respective performances in the market that way. Nintendoheads? Thats so cute, attacking a bunch of ditto-heads with a similar ditto-head moniker.
Sony won the console wars. Microsoft lost it in a big way, in so far as their shareholders are concerned. And Nintendo kept quietly making hand over dollar wonder what all the fuss was about.
Clearly you've never sucked dick for crack.
Slashdot is not a community of purchasing power people. End of story. Recommendations sure, but to serve up that load for a well connected computer crowd (and even that can be debated), and its a risk on investment, which isn't good business.
To the grandparent who said, "But its Sun!," I giggle.
> The controler for the Revolution is a solution in search of a problem.
And videogames, as a whole, arnt?
As a console game programmer, I'm fucking exicted.
Welcome to programming. Your whole experience sounds pretty normal, given that most programmers who work on other peoples code have MAJOR hindsight is 20/20 advantage.
:)
Still, quite amusing.
Thats not informative, thats flat out wrong.
> Yahoo! claims that it loses the ability to track its ads when they are passed on in this manner.
Which they do. They can 'track it' in terms of, okay it was clicked on, or it was seen, but they can't in terms of knowing the breakdown of the audience and trusting the validity of the traffic.
But still, this is standard wild west online advertising. I'm not shedding tears, but they do waste the money of their advertiser if they dont clamp down on sites that resell their ad supply.
If you owned a piece of patented technology made by a company that violated the patent, you could not be in violation for owning it. No society, at any point in time in the history of patents has come anywhere near trying to persecute people who own patented technology they did not manufacture themselves.
...
There are no wider implications here. Welcome to slashdot, where many articles will make you want to crap your pants if you're not well informed in patent and copyright law.
Lots of terrible things are happening these days, but being locked up or being fined for owning a 360 is never gunna happen.
If MS violated a patent, well, they should be fined or punished. If not, well, they shouldn't. Note that billions of people have taken drugs or used products that were later deemed in violation of a patent, never have I heard of a consumer being charged for purchasing or owning those products, only the governments or companies that produce them. Not that I support patent law in its current form to begin with
Yahoo goes to serve an ad on a partner site, lets say site X. They know X, they have a business relationship with X. But X makes a deal with Y .. I'll give you some of my ads, X says to Y .. Yahoo is going to give me a million per day, and my website only does 750,000 views a day. Y doesn't do business with Yahoo, and Yahoo loses the ability to track the site the website ran on, because to them it looks like it was delivered to X. Now, X's traffic is worth a certain amount per million views, but because X forwarded the ad to Y, there is no trusted business relationship between what Yahoo is paying and the place the ad is delivered. If its delivered via a spyware program, then the value of the delivery of the ad is WAY lower than running on reputable site X due to the difference in quality of X and Ys audience.
It sounds complicated, but its basically like Yahoo paying a company to show a billboard beside a highway, and that company then taking the money, handing the billboard over to somebody who shoves it in a dark alley, and they split the money Yahoo paid them. Because the ad is brought to the eyeballs tho, in web advertising, as opposed to the eyeballs to the ad in traditional media, it becomes increasingly difficult to know that the money you paid to place the ad isn't being wasted on fraudulant clicks, especially if the ad is redirected many times before its actually shown.
I used to work for a primarily CPM online ad network, and sometimes ads would go from the first party ad server through 4 or 5 networks until it was shown. Its a shady industry, because there is a wide range of participants; some networks or publishers are flat out fraudulant, while many others simply tend to put minimal effort into defeating fraudulant traffic because in the end it does end up generating many of the middle tier networks more money simply by occurring.
Really dont see how this is anything but commidized peace of mind. Its not 1984 as some other posters have said, but its another example of a product in search of convincing potential customers that the value proposition really solves a currently existing problem.