the 'software house president' works for isn't selling as many games as they would like because their particular games suck balls."
If I only had mod points for you.
Aside from big N's own first party titles, the Wii is suffering a lot of shovelware. After two generations of lackluster market performance, Studios practically ignored the newest Nintendo machine, only to be dumbfounded by its roaring success. Thus, when all the crappy, derivative "wagglemote" games were pushed quickly to market, the same studios are now wondering why their crapware isn't selling.
(Personally, I'd be more worried about the studios who hitched their train to PS3. Given North American numbers, I don't think a single PS3 software title has sold even a quarter-million units.)
It makes one wonder how many of these companies eschewed open-source solutions, in favor of expensive "supported" software.
Hopefully enough of these examples will eventually reach the tipping point where PHBs will finally begin to wonder what exactly they're getting for their money.
I hate to say it, but I can't say I'm surprised. Seems that in recent years TiVO has been losing support from their most-ardent fans -- the longtime TiVo owners (like myself). Tivo has squandered a lot of the goodwill from their own community.
There have been a lot of crazy pricing structure changes, all of which are more expensive than previously.
Tivo now wants a minimum one-year "lock-in" similar to the cell-phone dealers. You cannot try the service for a couple of months to see if you like it.
They ended the Lifetime Subscription option which was popular with folks who hate recurring bills.
After a year on the market there are serious questions about the performance and reliability of their newest and most-expensive HiDef units. And its incompatible with the new SDV (Switched Digital Video) being introduced on a lot of cable systems.
Encroachment of more and more insidious kinds of advertising on a machine already expensive to buy and maintain.
Customer service leaves a lot wanting. For the cost, you'd think they would have better/more-knowledgable CSRs without the long wait-times.
And most-dangerously... inexpensive, competing units direct from the Cable Companies and Satellite vendors which have moved from "outright horrible" to "moderately usable". TiVo is fighting a war of attrition.
Tivo's biggest problem seems to be losing evangelism from their (former) biggest fans. It's too expensive and the lock-in seems abusive. And without the Lifetime to fall back on, I can't really recommend it anymore. I'm not the only old-timer who feels this way.
This is what has been keeping me off Firefox on my memory-lacking iBook.
Maybe when they finally fix the memory bug, perhaps they'll begin fixing the Copy-Paste clipboard bug. Or should I say, the not Copy-Paste bug. It is especially bad on my intel iMac. (Opening New windows instead of tabs exposes the problem particularly well.)
I like Firefox, but these ongoing years-long problems make you difficult to recommend!
I'd say five years is a pretty good amount of time. What percent of the population keep a number for that long, anyway?
If the Do-Not-Call list were to never expire, eventually it will fill to all available U.S. phone numbers. We might as well simply impose a Telemarketer Banning Law in that case.
Another ridiculous example of Microsoft hubris. Plenty of us remember MS itself being late to the Internet party back in the 1990s.
If anything, Google came about because of Yahoo (with banner ads, etc), and possibly Altavista which was also being sold as local document search/archival platform.
Yes, I am familiar with the DEC keys. The parent was, however, referring specifically to IBM.
To answer as elequently as you did me: bzzzt...wrong! (IOW, You needn't start off as a pedantic jerk.)
I invite you to re-read my post, and you should find I was responding with a generalized comment (about Microsoft returning to the old-days software-as-lease) to a generalized comment concerning the book Mythical Man Month. The book happened to use the OS/360 as an example, which I suppose is as good as any, but certainly not the only one out there. And about how much system 'resources' an OS takes for itself. Hopefully the fact that I was modded up reflects the agreement of many sysadmins who have dealt with the annual Upgrading Of The Keys process, for any number of programs on their systems. Indeed, a number of software packages still rely on annual keys to keep operating, and I am noting that this 'phone-home' behavior is a new but similar tactic which has bled into personal computer systems. And its not just Microsoft, anymore. I've got calendaring systems which need to 'phone home' to keep working, audio editing software, and I've even seen a child's reward tracking system which needed to 'phone home' each time it launched. It is getting out of control.
I think you're more on-topic then you think. I feel compelled to respond to your observations with my own:
the OS/360 operating system...the machine had 2MB of memory and the operating system cost 400Kb of the memory.
Keep in mind that 400K is about 20% of the machine's available resources, which doesn't seem to different from today. Although today we have a lot more choice in how many 'resources' to put into a workstation or server type system.
There is also the difference between hosting old world text terminal interfaces and the modern high color depth, fancy windowing systems we have today.
They charged something like $9.50 a month for 1Kb of system memory. That meant that every Kilobyte of memory saved was worth hundered or even thousands of dollars over the life time of the machine.
Now this is the interesting point, IMO. In the past, you would often lease your 'mainframe' software, and need to renew it every year. Often you would have to contact your sales rep, get a new key, and 'activate' the software for another year. With a computer on every desktop, people were sold on the idea that you 'buy' your OS and software from the store and its yours -- forever. While 'Activation' and WGA are ostensibly an anti-pirating measure, in my eyes Microsoft is trying to steer the desktop PC market back to the old mainframe model of paying a yearly (or perhaps monthly) tithe to keep your computer working. Get the market used to phone-home features, and slowly close the net. They've been interested in subscription models for quite awhile, now.
The problem for Microsoft is that, unlike mainframe vendors, they suck at reliability. So while Microsoft is eager for a lease-type model, they don't have the corporate culture or experience to make a robust system, they still have a lot of design issues with the tracking and activation back end which is of course necessary for a 'rental' paradigm.
I've read these reports over the last couple of days. I have been waiting and delaying the idea of getting a PS3 because lack of compelling games and my own lack of HDTV to play it on. With this news, I was beginning to worry about spending the cash now to pick up a 60GB unit with the included Emotion Engine (EE) hardware support for true backwards compatibility. I have a lot of PS1 and PS2 games I want to make sure work properly.
Then it occurred to me... I already have a machine which works with my regular old TV set and plays all my PS1 and PS2 games perfectly: my PS2. And if I want a wireless control with missing rumble action... well, I already have a 3rd party wireless controller with that (lack of) feature.
Realizing that Sony has a good chance of coming in a distant third for this generation's console race and that software studios are focusing on Xbox360 and Wii (with those systems' easier development tools) there really is no point to bothering with PS3. All the 'good' games are coming out on Xbox360 anyway. The stomach pangs of losing out on the hardware EE support simply went away with the realization that PS3 is already finished in the market. I'll simply keep my PS2 for awhile longer at no additional cost.
said that warranty replacements on the Wii take forever and are expensive because you have to pay to ship to Japan. He was flat-out lying...
Of course he was lying. The real reason those console warranties are so expensive is because of the widely publicized (guestimates of 25-33%) failure rates of Microsoft's Xbox 360. A number of stores, including GameStop, increased their silly third-party warranty prices for all game consoles. These stores obviously have dollar-signs spinning in their eyes, and floor-droids seem to be forced to make up horse manure rationales for the warranty price increases spilling across to the other brands.
I believe the fact that TorrentSpy is being compelled to keep server logs by the MPAA is fucked up on a few levels.
What's really fucked up is how this U.S. court magistrate, and now Federal Judge Cooper, think they can order new evidence to be created after-the-fact. Not to mention how fucked up it is that a U.S. court thinks it can give any order outside their jurisdiction to TorrentSpy located in the Netherlands. And how further fucked up they must think TorrentSpy must be to violate European privacy laws which prevent them from keeping such logs against their published policy, which carry much harsher penalties than some token U.S. ruling.
Truly you are correct, the most fucked up thing about this whole case is how one company (MPAA) can force a change in I.T. policy on someone else (TorrentSpy) all the way in another country!
ee, I'm not convinced the idea is to make money. What if it's just advertising for the microsoft brand?
So........... what you're saying is: An ugly white machine which scratches discs, overheats, and fails with a Red Ring of Death is just a way to advertise the Microsoft brand?
Except that those "middle men" really DO provide service of immense value... they filter out the crap. And let me assure you, there's lots and LOTS of that crap out there. And much of what they do is help train marginal artists into much better (or even great) artists.
Except that its still a top-down approach, where they groom "talent" to fit their own pre-conceived notions of what the 'market' wants, and then force it onto the airwaves and into stores.
Once upon a time, there was more of a bottom-up approach. The so-called crap-filterers had a name: local radio DJ's, who were familiar with the music scene. They'd find and put the best stuff on the radio and wait for listener feedback. If the audience liked it, they'd ask for more. And maybe even purchase the song on a 45rpm vinyl single disk or something. Imagine that!
So you see, we don't need overpaid middlemen in an industry promoting overproduced shlock. We need the bottom to fall out of the current music market, so the artists and audience themselves can build it back up.
After reading the article (which is akin to blasphemy here on/. ), he hits upon a real concern about DRM: The effort to turn the US into a risky "IP economy", relying on DRM to protect our interests while outsourcing actual manufacturing and labor to cheaper countries.
The Pollyanna dream that western countries will be able to sit on ivory towers as "idea centers" while trying to sell DRM'ed Intellectual Property to newly affluent laborers in sovereign China and India is extremely misguided. Especially when these places are used to cheaper (and often better/unhindered) knockoff copies of movies/music/games already.
Many channels have wised up to offering their content hosted from their own sites for free -- with commercials
I'm not sure they've taken every aspect into account. While 'free' sounds good, I'm pretty sure people don't want to hunt all around different sites, all with different viewing/codec requirements, all with different site logins and other logisitcal hoops, just to find something they might want to watch.
On the contrary, I believe sites that will survive which can collect the most shows/movies from all the content providers in one place, all with short previews, all encoded reliabily the same. While the 'Net allows for wild west style secluded towns for each studio, it doesn't have staying power. People tend to prefer a centralized distributor they can count on.
iTune's biggest issue IMHO is that they need more studios to supply content in order to make them a one-stop shop. The studios need to get past this walled garden idea.
Now they're modifying their logo for readability. ORLY? Is their target demographic aging enough that this is now a problem? Are readers deserting them due to headaches just as they graduate into serious spending money?
I get the print version, and for a few years WIRED actually improved the readability of their magazine quite a bit. I'm surprised they're now promoting this "Law of Optical Volumes" crap when they've recently gone ahead and trashed the readability of the rest of the magazine with those new horrific fonts, often many mixed on the same page for short articles. I'm letting my subscription lapse this year because it gives me headaches trying to read WIRED these days.
I've worked in an organization that went through a BSA audit - nothing came of it, but it took about a month of real time and cost several man-months of work from us.
You really have to wonder if the 'savings' offered by your BSA-encumbered licenses ever made up for all the days (you use the term man-months) of wasted company time involved in such an audit.
I just couldn't handle the stress of chainsaws and stuff popping up behind me!
Actually, that's what did Doom 3 in, at least for me. It got very repetitive and cheap, to the point where you'd walk into a place and pretty know that something was going to pop out of a hidden door as you walk past to attack you. Then there was the magical spawn-from-thin-air enemies which made it even worse.
All in all, Doom3 seemed more a tech demo and less of a full-fledged game.
The common perception about the VideoScan numbers is that a lot of PS3 owners used their "free Blu-ray movie" coupon, boosting 'sales' after Christmas. Especially since there doesn't seem to be anything else available worth doing on the PS3 device right now. This is in addition to a rather dry HD-DVD lineup in January. Let's remember, the first two weeks in January after Christmas doesn't necessarily set a trend.
The VideoScan numbers for the third week in January, not reported in the article, already show Blu-Ray slumping down again, compared to HD-DVD.
All this sounds vaguely similar to the narrowly-defined "Zune leads 30GB music player market in first two days of sales" reports we saw a few weeks ago. Much ado about nothing.
When you talk about about "most respected" TV game journalist, the only name which immediately comes to my mind is Adam Sessler of X-Play. Morgan Webb is nice, too, but a more recent addition to X-Play. But Adam has been on TV doing game converage and honest reviews for far longer than anyone, including this Keighley fella.
and SCO is now claiming that OSes like HP-US and Solaris are derivatives of code that they 'own'.
Okay, if the entire point of this 10K filing is that your claims are in danger of being summarily thrown out of court why in the world would they then publically publish paperwork laying the same claims against two new large behomoth companies?
When I found out that Hollywood regularly adjusts their accounting practices to show their movies all lose money, I decided to adjust my own checkbook to show that I paid for all the movies on my computer.
Slashdot Mirror
If I only had mod points for you.
Aside from big N's own first party titles, the Wii is suffering a lot of shovelware. After two generations of lackluster market performance, Studios practically ignored the newest Nintendo machine, only to be dumbfounded by its roaring success. Thus, when all the crappy, derivative "wagglemote" games were pushed quickly to market, the same studios are now wondering why their crapware isn't selling.
(Personally, I'd be more worried about the studios who hitched their train to PS3. Given North American numbers, I don't think a single PS3 software title has sold even a quarter-million units.)
It makes one wonder how many of these companies eschewed open-source solutions, in favor of expensive "supported" software.
Hopefully enough of these examples will eventually reach the tipping point where PHBs will finally begin to wonder what exactly they're getting for their money.
I hate to say it, but I can't say I'm surprised. Seems that in recent years TiVO has been losing support from their most-ardent fans -- the longtime TiVo owners (like myself). Tivo has squandered a lot of the goodwill from their own community.
Tivo's biggest problem seems to be losing evangelism from their (former) biggest fans. It's too expensive and the lock-in seems abusive. And without the Lifetime to fall back on, I can't really recommend it anymore. I'm not the only old-timer who feels this way.
It's no wonder they need to turn to astroturfing.
I'm getting this image in my mind of nuclear waste going in one end of the facility and giant loaves of pumpernickel coming out the other side.
Maybe when they finally fix the memory bug, perhaps they'll begin fixing the Copy-Paste clipboard bug. Or should I say, the not Copy-Paste bug. It is especially bad on my intel iMac. (Opening New windows instead of tabs exposes the problem particularly well.)
I like Firefox, but these ongoing years-long problems make you difficult to recommend!
I'd say five years is a pretty good amount of time. What percent of the population keep a number for that long, anyway?
If the Do-Not-Call list were to never expire, eventually it will fill to all available U.S. phone numbers. We might as well simply impose a Telemarketer Banning Law in that case.
Yes, it would be a terrible shame if courts began admitting polygraphs as evidence.
Another ridiculous example of Microsoft hubris. Plenty of us remember MS itself being late to the Internet party back in the 1990s.
If anything, Google came about because of Yahoo (with banner ads, etc), and possibly Altavista which was also being sold as local document search/archival platform.
To answer as elequently as you did me: bzzzt...wrong! (IOW, You needn't start off as a pedantic jerk.)
I invite you to re-read my post, and you should find I was responding with a generalized comment (about Microsoft returning to the old-days software-as-lease) to a generalized comment concerning the book Mythical Man Month. The book happened to use the OS/360 as an example, which I suppose is as good as any, but certainly not the only one out there. And about how much system 'resources' an OS takes for itself. Hopefully the fact that I was modded up reflects the agreement of many sysadmins who have dealt with the annual Upgrading Of The Keys process, for any number of programs on their systems. Indeed, a number of software packages still rely on annual keys to keep operating, and I am noting that this 'phone-home' behavior is a new but similar tactic which has bled into personal computer systems. And its not just Microsoft, anymore. I've got calendaring systems which need to 'phone home' to keep working, audio editing software, and I've even seen a child's reward tracking system which needed to 'phone home' each time it launched. It is getting out of control.
I think you're more on-topic then you think. I feel compelled to respond to your observations with my own:
Keep in mind that 400K is about 20% of the machine's available resources, which doesn't seem to different from today. Although today we have a lot more choice in how many 'resources' to put into a workstation or server type system.
There is also the difference between hosting old world text terminal interfaces and the modern high color depth, fancy windowing systems we have today.
Now this is the interesting point, IMO. In the past, you would often lease your 'mainframe' software, and need to renew it every year. Often you would have to contact your sales rep, get a new key, and 'activate' the software for another year. With a computer on every desktop, people were sold on the idea that you 'buy' your OS and software from the store and its yours -- forever. While 'Activation' and WGA are ostensibly an anti-pirating measure, in my eyes Microsoft is trying to steer the desktop PC market back to the old mainframe model of paying a yearly (or perhaps monthly) tithe to keep your computer working. Get the market used to phone-home features, and slowly close the net. They've been interested in subscription models for quite awhile, now.
The problem for Microsoft is that, unlike mainframe vendors, they suck at reliability. So while Microsoft is eager for a lease-type model, they don't have the corporate culture or experience to make a robust system, they still have a lot of design issues with the tracking and activation back end which is of course necessary for a 'rental' paradigm.
I've read these reports over the last couple of days. I have been waiting and delaying the idea of getting a PS3 because lack of compelling games and my own lack of HDTV to play it on. With this news, I was beginning to worry about spending the cash now to pick up a 60GB unit with the included Emotion Engine (EE) hardware support for true backwards compatibility. I have a lot of PS1 and PS2 games I want to make sure work properly.
Then it occurred to me... I already have a machine which works with my regular old TV set and plays all my PS1 and PS2 games perfectly: my PS2. And if I want a wireless control with missing rumble action... well, I already have a 3rd party wireless controller with that (lack of) feature.
Realizing that Sony has a good chance of coming in a distant third for this generation's console race and that software studios are focusing on Xbox360 and Wii (with those systems' easier development tools) there really is no point to bothering with PS3. All the 'good' games are coming out on Xbox360 anyway. The stomach pangs of losing out on the hardware EE support simply went away with the realization that PS3 is already finished in the market. I'll simply keep my PS2 for awhile longer at no additional cost.
Of course he was lying. The real reason those console warranties are so expensive is because of the widely publicized (guestimates of 25-33%) failure rates of Microsoft's Xbox 360. A number of stores, including GameStop, increased their silly third-party warranty prices for all game consoles. These stores obviously have dollar-signs spinning in their eyes, and floor-droids seem to be forced to make up horse manure rationales for the warranty price increases spilling across to the other brands.
What's really fucked up is how this U.S. court magistrate, and now Federal Judge Cooper, think they can order new evidence to be created after-the-fact. Not to mention how fucked up it is that a U.S. court thinks it can give any order outside their jurisdiction to TorrentSpy located in the Netherlands. And how further fucked up they must think TorrentSpy must be to violate European privacy laws which prevent them from keeping such logs against their published policy, which carry much harsher penalties than some token U.S. ruling.
Truly you are correct, the most fucked up thing about this whole case is how one company (MPAA) can force a change in I.T. policy on someone else (TorrentSpy) all the way in another country!
Genius!
Except that its still a top-down approach, where they groom "talent" to fit their own pre-conceived notions of what the 'market' wants, and then force it onto the airwaves and into stores.
Once upon a time, there was more of a bottom-up approach. The so-called crap-filterers had a name: local radio DJ's, who were familiar with the music scene. They'd find and put the best stuff on the radio and wait for listener feedback. If the audience liked it, they'd ask for more. And maybe even purchase the song on a 45rpm vinyl single disk or something. Imagine that!
So you see, we don't need overpaid middlemen in an industry promoting overproduced shlock. We need the bottom to fall out of the current music market, so the artists and audience themselves can build it back up.
If the OS X style anti-aliasing is what is used on the iPhone, then it makes perfect sense.
As some others have already pointed out, the entire point of Safari for Windows is iPhone development, not necessarily winning over converts.
After reading the article (which is akin to blasphemy here on /. ), he hits upon a real concern about DRM: The effort to turn the US into a risky "IP economy", relying on DRM to protect our interests while outsourcing actual manufacturing and labor to cheaper countries.
The Pollyanna dream that western countries will be able to sit on ivory towers as "idea centers" while trying to sell DRM'ed Intellectual Property to newly affluent laborers in sovereign China and India is extremely misguided. Especially when these places are used to cheaper (and often better/unhindered) knockoff copies of movies/music/games already.
I'm not sure they've taken every aspect into account. While 'free' sounds good, I'm pretty sure people don't want to hunt all around different sites, all with different viewing/codec requirements, all with different site logins and other logisitcal hoops, just to find something they might want to watch.
On the contrary, I believe sites that will survive which can collect the most shows/movies from all the content providers in one place, all with short previews, all encoded reliabily the same. While the 'Net allows for wild west style secluded towns for each studio, it doesn't have staying power. People tend to prefer a centralized distributor they can count on.
iTune's biggest issue IMHO is that they need more studios to supply content in order to make them a one-stop shop. The studios need to get past this walled garden idea.
I get the print version, and for a few years WIRED actually improved the readability of their magazine quite a bit. I'm surprised they're now promoting this "Law of Optical Volumes" crap when they've recently gone ahead and trashed the readability of the rest of the magazine with those new horrific fonts, often many mixed on the same page for short articles. I'm letting my subscription lapse this year because it gives me headaches trying to read WIRED these days.
You really have to wonder if the 'savings' offered by your BSA-encumbered licenses ever made up for all the days (you use the term man-months) of wasted company time involved in such an audit.
Actually, that's what did Doom 3 in, at least for me. It got very repetitive and cheap, to the point where you'd walk into a place and pretty know that something was going to pop out of a hidden door as you walk past to attack you. Then there was the magical spawn-from-thin-air enemies which made it even worse.
All in all, Doom3 seemed more a tech demo and less of a full-fledged game.
Even a dead cat will bounce once on its way down.
The common perception about the VideoScan numbers is that a lot of PS3 owners used their "free Blu-ray movie" coupon, boosting 'sales' after Christmas. Especially since there doesn't seem to be anything else available worth doing on the PS3 device right now. This is in addition to a rather dry HD-DVD lineup in January. Let's remember, the first two weeks in January after Christmas doesn't necessarily set a trend.
The VideoScan numbers for the third week in January, not reported in the article, already show Blu-Ray slumping down again, compared to HD-DVD.
All this sounds vaguely similar to the narrowly-defined "Zune leads 30GB music player market in first two days of sales" reports we saw a few weeks ago. Much ado about nothing.
When you talk about about "most respected" TV game journalist, the only name which immediately comes to my mind is Adam Sessler of X-Play. Morgan Webb is nice, too, but a more recent addition to X-Play. But Adam has been on TV doing game converage and honest reviews for far longer than anyone, including this Keighley fella.
Okay, if the entire point of this 10K filing is that your claims are in danger of being summarily thrown out of court why in the world would they then publically publish paperwork laying the same claims against two new large behomoth companies?
Oh wait... Pump 'N Dump. I remember, now.
When I found out that Hollywood regularly adjusts their accounting practices to show their movies all lose money, I decided to adjust my own checkbook to show that I paid for all the movies on my computer.