Dotcom is just fortune that he is like a jabillionaire. Or, rather, if the government(s) don't screw him over, he's theoretically a jabillionaire. If he weren't, he would quickly be an example for all to cower over (which he sort of is, anyway, I guess) or he would be swiftly disappeared. If any of us where in his situation, sans the riches and connections, we would be totally and utterly fucked.
I don't think they've ever put out the numbers on that, but since there have been something like 30,000 to 40,000 Kickstarters in the last few years, I'd say the failure rate is pretty low or else it would have a shit reputation and nobody would use it anymore.
Only a few kickstarters that I've backed are older than a year and all of those have paid off. Two for albums and one for Diaspora... Erm. Well, "paid off" is pretty questionable, there, actually -- at it at least fulfilled what it was going to do (launch the product and distribute the code).
Most of the other stuff I have backed only in the past year, so while some are fulfilling every couple of weeks or so, others are a long time off from reaching their estimated deadlines (and I assume most will miss those deadlines, which is fine as long as it's kept reasonable). In the more recent ones, I've received another album I backed. I've received a few games that have completed and launched. I've received access to participate in the creative and testing processes of many of the games not yet released (though I don't really care to do that). I was even able to arrange lunch for my younger brother with John Romero and Will Wright.
Out of the 200 kickstarters I've backed, about 40% (85) succeeded funding. About 10 were canceled (either by kickstarter or the project itself). Of the 40% that succeeded, about 12% (10+) have fulfilled their promises. The others remain as works in progress -- most offering fairly regular updates via Kickstarter or through the forums on their own site. In the next six months, most of these should start reaching their delivery dates and we'll see how things really pan out. I expect some outright failures and I have to take that into account when I chip in my support.
There's only so much that Kickstarter can be expected to do. However, I do think they should perform more vetting. Especially if they want to continue to grow and remain relevant. Their entire revenue is built on maintaining a place of trust. If that means they need to do more than get a credit card number and tax identification number from someone before they post their project, then that's what they'll need to do. Not because of legal concerns -- but due to the need to maintain themselves as a place the community feels comfortable with.
In the universe where that game couldn't get made without funding and simply waiting around for it to be made before buying a couple would result in there never being a game made for you to buy. . . ?
You do realize that many/most of the game-related Kickstarter projects are just a dude with some experience making a game on his own, right? Or a couple or so dudes. Or a handful of dudes out of their bedrooms across the globe (often with professional backgrounds) moonlighting on a project with no funding at all. Just because you've seen a few very popular places blow the doors off with their crazy Kickstarter fundraising doesn't mean that's representative of most of the projects.
Kickstarter has some flaws and it's going to hit some major speed-bumps down the road when some high profile projects inevitably go to shit, but the only thing I'm growing more tired of than all the Kickstarter hype is having to explain how Kickstarter works to people when it has been around for years and they could just go visit the website and figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Kickstarter has a lot of established businesses taking advantage of it. Sometimes that's reasonable. Just because it's a "company" doesn't mean that they could do the project without support. There are a lot of interesting new game projects that probably would never have a shot without the crowd-funding solution. Of course, there's some shady shit, too. Like the Eternity project whose lead recently discussed how an unnamed AAA publisher came to them awhile ago and proposed that they be the "front-men" for the project to gather funding on Kickstarter . . . and the AAA publisher would give them the project to do. And keep most of the raised money and profits. And all the IP rights.
But there are a hell of a lot of "so I had this idea and I've researched how I can do it, but I need to know there are enough people that would want it to go forward and I also need funding to get it off the ground" projects. A ton of these in the board games section. Also, the technology section. And the Fashion/Design section. Oh - and some really cool web series and documentary projects.
Kickstarter will only become over-run by commercial companies using it as a cheap source of extra cash, if people support that. The great thing about Kickstarter is that if people don't buy into the idea and don't care about it, you won't succeed. This is why a guy with an idea for a new machined aluminum pen casing raised a million bucks instead of the $20,000 he was asking for and the video game with nothing to show for it except a couple of high school-looking kids talking on a shitty web-cam about the game they'd like to make failed with like nine total dollars raised.
It's not that you don't get the point of kickstarter so much as you clearly can't be bothered to find out what kickstarter is or how it works. It would really only take you like two minutes to do it.
The world (especially voters and politicians) believe in nutjob armageddon/rapture bullshit and are hell-bent on making sure it happens as soon as possible. I, for one, would love to know that beer will be safe to drink if I happen to be fortunate enough to still be alive after all the crazies have self-fulfilled their insane prophecies.
It's just another one of those idiot judges who do things like "I'm gonna make you wear a sandwich board and mark around all weekend outside of the Walmart declaring that you're a shoplifter". Just fucking punish people for crime's they've committed and stop trying to play a motherfucking "reality" TV judge, you twats.
I'll just never get the point of any of it and I'll never understand why people would rather get something for free than pay a little and get ads.
First, when someone says "hey, shut up, you can't complain about it because it's free". Bullshit. Charge me a buck a month or something. If you're a worthwhile service, my sanity and reducing the visual clutter of everything is worth a buck to me. Give me the damn *choice* to decide what is more important to me. Let me decide if I want to be the product or if I want your service to be the product and pay you for it. You know, like real life. Value for value transaction.
Second, I don't need targeted advertising, anyway. No amount of advertising changes how many tubes of toothpaste I need in a year or how much food I need to buy or how often my dishwasher has to be replaced. And when those things ARE needed, I will go investigate to find out what fits the bill and what has the best reputation, quality, price, etc. Throwing up a giant advertisement somewhere saying "HEY COME BUY OUR KITCHENWARE!" is meaningless. It's like the idiots who come to my door every god damn day all summer long, trying to sell me new siding or windows or sprinkler systems or insulation. If I was in the market for those things, wouldn't I already be looking at them? Who the hell says "why, yes, stranger -- now that a totally anonymous person has come to my door, I guess I *do* need some roofing done!".
Advertising -- targeted or not -- is just a fucking nuisance.
And in the meantime, we can make random accusations about innocent people that can disrupt their lives, ruin their reputation, and financially bankrupt them while sending the determination of whether someone was "making a joke, being sarcastic, or truly threatening to murder wittle baby childwen" to some fuck-hole-jack-off government official. BRILLIANT.
Right, while the rest of us who DO use ad-blockers participate in really intelligent discussions like making some fucking hippy ridiculously wealthy by eating fucking weeds of the sea, because it's trendy.
It's really crazy how they nailed the co-op in this game (the first and second). It's adequate as a single-player game, but it completely opens up with other players in a way that co-op usually doesn't add to other games. I'm really hoping they've improved facilitation of co-op drop-ins and arrangements in the second, though. The first was adequate, but disparities between party levels, mob levels, and story progression often left something to be desired.
It will be interesting to see if they're able to pull a third game out of the hat. It seems obvious they'll attempt it. But how far can they push this while still being a beloved success?
The amount of obvious spam and the constant politicizing of everything around here (encouraged by the often very political; not necessarily geek-oriented editorial submissions) has been pretty off-putting, too. And the comments don't help that, either. More each day, I run across discussions on here that sound like the vomit I read spewed out by mouth-breathing jack-holes on any random website that Matt Drudge links to (say, the comment section of a CBS News article about a hit and run accident that immediately turns into a room full of five year olds blathering about Obama's birth certificate and jesus this and god that and libtard this and republithug that.
. . . and then, there's the slow redditization of Slashdot. That's probably the ultimate insult. You see this evidenced by the back and forth idiotic circle-jerks of one-liners and occasional links to "FOREVER ALONE GUY" and other bullshit.
Slashdot may be turning fifteen, but it has been clinically brain-dead for the last five years.
Aside from the often miserable editorial failures, it's rapidly becoming one of those sites that decays to the point that most of its content is spambots posting links to sites that sell shoes and fake Rolex watches. I will not be at all surprised when the day comes that I visit slashdot.org and am greeted with one of those link-trolling sites that pop up in your google search results where a domain has long-since expired and been taken over by spammers trying to funnel you into their crap (like this site).
What this clearly does is make it possible to tie additional "personas" to a primary account. That is, you can be "anonymous" to other people on some forum, but Google (and anyone who accesses the data that I'm sure they'll gladly had over) could immediately connect that back to you, because these "personas" will all be tied to your primary account. Meaning that you're just one accident in the data warehouse or one hack away from everything being instantly de-anonymized across the internet, everywhere that you used said personas tied to your account to login.
We are swiftly heading in the direction that at *worst* you will have to register with a government agency using your real identity to have and use the internet and everything will be publicly tied to your real account. At *best* you won't have to use your real identity online the same way that you don't have to have a credit card. Or the way you don't have to have a driver's license. That is, you aren't going to be technically *forced* to participate, but if you don't, you're going to be stripped of the ability to do almost anything that you need to function in day to day life.
Last I calculated, I pay about about $5.50 per hour, 24x7x52 to rent the right to air, water, food, and survival. They call it taxes, but it's essentially leasing freedom (the alternative being prison).
OpenOffice has worked just fine for me for ages. Actually, I have mostly used a plain old text editor for almost everything and Google Docs for simple spreadsheets. OpenOffice comes when I need something fairly hefty. I can't remember the last time I ever felt the need to isntall MSOffice or use it. It has been at least seven years. It's just unnecessary. I wouldn't even bother installing it on a system, if it were free.
Seriously, though, the only thing anyone really needs it for is the spreadsheet. I mean, unless you're writing a book (and even then...) you just don't need the power of a massive word processor.
The length of IP addresses isn't your problem, here.
And even if it were, we bitched about phone numbers when area codes started becoming important (suddenly having to remember ten digits instead of seven).
Exactly. The idea that we're fretting over sixteen million addresses when IPv6 can literally provide about a hundred IP addresses for every atom on earth is ridiculous.
Then again, when when there are more IP addresses than there are molecules of air, providers won't be able to charge you $15/mo for a static IP address any more.
Slashdot has become just another shitty link-fest. There should be a policy against accepting submissions for Engadget, Gizmodo, Gawker, Venturebeat, AllThingsD. Shitty pseudo-news sites full of hacks and sensationalist pajama-journalists parroting the latest meaningless crap. If I wanted to discuss a shitty linkbait article from these sub-par publications, I'd just hang out at Reddit or on those sites directly.
Slashdot Mirror
Dotcom is just fortune that he is like a jabillionaire. Or, rather, if the government(s) don't screw him over, he's theoretically a jabillionaire. If he weren't, he would quickly be an example for all to cower over (which he sort of is, anyway, I guess) or he would be swiftly disappeared. If any of us where in his situation, sans the riches and connections, we would be totally and utterly fucked.
How did a Drudgereport commentor end up here?
I don't think they've ever put out the numbers on that, but since there have been something like 30,000 to 40,000 Kickstarters in the last few years, I'd say the failure rate is pretty low or else it would have a shit reputation and nobody would use it anymore.
Only a few kickstarters that I've backed are older than a year and all of those have paid off. Two for albums and one for Diaspora... Erm. Well, "paid off" is pretty questionable, there, actually -- at it at least fulfilled what it was going to do (launch the product and distribute the code).
Most of the other stuff I have backed only in the past year, so while some are fulfilling every couple of weeks or so, others are a long time off from reaching their estimated deadlines (and I assume most will miss those deadlines, which is fine as long as it's kept reasonable). In the more recent ones, I've received another album I backed. I've received a few games that have completed and launched. I've received access to participate in the creative and testing processes of many of the games not yet released (though I don't really care to do that). I was even able to arrange lunch for my younger brother with John Romero and Will Wright.
Out of the 200 kickstarters I've backed, about 40% (85) succeeded funding. About 10 were canceled (either by kickstarter or the project itself). Of the 40% that succeeded, about 12% (10+) have fulfilled their promises. The others remain as works in progress -- most offering fairly regular updates via Kickstarter or through the forums on their own site. In the next six months, most of these should start reaching their delivery dates and we'll see how things really pan out. I expect some outright failures and I have to take that into account when I chip in my support.
There's only so much that Kickstarter can be expected to do. However, I do think they should perform more vetting. Especially if they want to continue to grow and remain relevant. Their entire revenue is built on maintaining a place of trust. If that means they need to do more than get a credit card number and tax identification number from someone before they post their project, then that's what they'll need to do. Not because of legal concerns -- but due to the need to maintain themselves as a place the community feels comfortable with.
In the universe where that game couldn't get made without funding and simply waiting around for it to be made before buying a couple would result in there never being a game made for you to buy. . . ?
You do realize that many/most of the game-related Kickstarter projects are just a dude with some experience making a game on his own, right? Or a couple or so dudes. Or a handful of dudes out of their bedrooms across the globe (often with professional backgrounds) moonlighting on a project with no funding at all. Just because you've seen a few very popular places blow the doors off with their crazy Kickstarter fundraising doesn't mean that's representative of most of the projects.
Kickstarter has some flaws and it's going to hit some major speed-bumps down the road when some high profile projects inevitably go to shit, but the only thing I'm growing more tired of than all the Kickstarter hype is having to explain how Kickstarter works to people when it has been around for years and they could just go visit the website and figure out how it works in a couple of minutes.
Kickstarter has a lot of established businesses taking advantage of it. Sometimes that's reasonable. Just because it's a "company" doesn't mean that they could do the project without support. There are a lot of interesting new game projects that probably would never have a shot without the crowd-funding solution. Of course, there's some shady shit, too. Like the Eternity project whose lead recently discussed how an unnamed AAA publisher came to them awhile ago and proposed that they be the "front-men" for the project to gather funding on Kickstarter . . . and the AAA publisher would give them the project to do. And keep most of the raised money and profits. And all the IP rights.
But there are a hell of a lot of "so I had this idea and I've researched how I can do it, but I need to know there are enough people that would want it to go forward and I also need funding to get it off the ground" projects. A ton of these in the board games section. Also, the technology section. And the Fashion/Design section. Oh - and some really cool web series and documentary projects.
Kickstarter will only become over-run by commercial companies using it as a cheap source of extra cash, if people support that. The great thing about Kickstarter is that if people don't buy into the idea and don't care about it, you won't succeed. This is why a guy with an idea for a new machined aluminum pen casing raised a million bucks instead of the $20,000 he was asking for and the video game with nothing to show for it except a couple of high school-looking kids talking on a shitty web-cam about the game they'd like to make failed with like nine total dollars raised.
It's not that you don't get the point of kickstarter so much as you clearly can't be bothered to find out what kickstarter is or how it works. It would really only take you like two minutes to do it.
Tell that to KimDotCom.
Or TPB guys.
The world (especially voters and politicians) believe in nutjob armageddon/rapture bullshit and are hell-bent on making sure it happens as soon as possible. I, for one, would love to know that beer will be safe to drink if I happen to be fortunate enough to still be alive after all the crazies have self-fulfilled their insane prophecies.
It's just another one of those idiot judges who do things like "I'm gonna make you wear a sandwich board and mark around all weekend outside of the Walmart declaring that you're a shoplifter". Just fucking punish people for crime's they've committed and stop trying to play a motherfucking "reality" TV judge, you twats.
I'll just never get the point of any of it and I'll never understand why people would rather get something for free than pay a little and get ads.
First, when someone says "hey, shut up, you can't complain about it because it's free". Bullshit. Charge me a buck a month or something. If you're a worthwhile service, my sanity and reducing the visual clutter of everything is worth a buck to me. Give me the damn *choice* to decide what is more important to me. Let me decide if I want to be the product or if I want your service to be the product and pay you for it. You know, like real life. Value for value transaction.
Second, I don't need targeted advertising, anyway. No amount of advertising changes how many tubes of toothpaste I need in a year or how much food I need to buy or how often my dishwasher has to be replaced. And when those things ARE needed, I will go investigate to find out what fits the bill and what has the best reputation, quality, price, etc. Throwing up a giant advertisement somewhere saying "HEY COME BUY OUR KITCHENWARE!" is meaningless. It's like the idiots who come to my door every god damn day all summer long, trying to sell me new siding or windows or sprinkler systems or insulation. If I was in the market for those things, wouldn't I already be looking at them? Who the hell says "why, yes, stranger -- now that a totally anonymous person has come to my door, I guess I *do* need some roofing done!".
Advertising -- targeted or not -- is just a fucking nuisance.
And in the meantime, we can make random accusations about innocent people that can disrupt their lives, ruin their reputation, and financially bankrupt them while sending the determination of whether someone was "making a joke, being sarcastic, or truly threatening to murder wittle baby childwen" to some fuck-hole-jack-off government official. BRILLIANT.
TERRORIST!
That's it, I'm reporting you!
I guess we're just calling all crime and possible crime and suggestion of theoretical criminal activities that may or may not ever happen "terrorism".
Shoplifter? MORE LIKE TERRORIST!
Right, while the rest of us who DO use ad-blockers participate in really intelligent discussions like making some fucking hippy ridiculously wealthy by eating fucking weeds of the sea, because it's trendy.
It's really crazy how they nailed the co-op in this game (the first and second). It's adequate as a single-player game, but it completely opens up with other players in a way that co-op usually doesn't add to other games. I'm really hoping they've improved facilitation of co-op drop-ins and arrangements in the second, though. The first was adequate, but disparities between party levels, mob levels, and story progression often left something to be desired.
It will be interesting to see if they're able to pull a third game out of the hat. It seems obvious they'll attempt it. But how far can they push this while still being a beloved success?
Head jar?
The amount of obvious spam and the constant politicizing of everything around here (encouraged by the often very political; not necessarily geek-oriented editorial submissions) has been pretty off-putting, too. And the comments don't help that, either. More each day, I run across discussions on here that sound like the vomit I read spewed out by mouth-breathing jack-holes on any random website that Matt Drudge links to (say, the comment section of a CBS News article about a hit and run accident that immediately turns into a room full of five year olds blathering about Obama's birth certificate and jesus this and god that and libtard this and republithug that.
. . . and then, there's the slow redditization of Slashdot. That's probably the ultimate insult. You see this evidenced by the back and forth idiotic circle-jerks of one-liners and occasional links to "FOREVER ALONE GUY" and other bullshit.
I wish I had three friends.
"Borderlands is such an amazing co-op game. I mean, I imagine that it probably is."
Slashdot may be turning fifteen, but it has been clinically brain-dead for the last five years.
Aside from the often miserable editorial failures, it's rapidly becoming one of those sites that decays to the point that most of its content is spambots posting links to sites that sell shoes and fake Rolex watches. I will not be at all surprised when the day comes that I visit slashdot.org and am greeted with one of those link-trolling sites that pop up in your google search results where a domain has long-since expired and been taken over by spammers trying to funnel you into their crap (like this site).
What this clearly does is make it possible to tie additional "personas" to a primary account. That is, you can be "anonymous" to other people on some forum, but Google (and anyone who accesses the data that I'm sure they'll gladly had over) could immediately connect that back to you, because these "personas" will all be tied to your primary account. Meaning that you're just one accident in the data warehouse or one hack away from everything being instantly de-anonymized across the internet, everywhere that you used said personas tied to your account to login.
We are swiftly heading in the direction that at *worst* you will have to register with a government agency using your real identity to have and use the internet and everything will be publicly tied to your real account. At *best* you won't have to use your real identity online the same way that you don't have to have a credit card. Or the way you don't have to have a driver's license. That is, you aren't going to be technically *forced* to participate, but if you don't, you're going to be stripped of the ability to do almost anything that you need to function in day to day life.
Last I calculated, I pay about about $5.50 per hour, 24x7x52 to rent the right to air, water, food, and survival. They call it taxes, but it's essentially leasing freedom (the alternative being prison).
OpenOffice has worked just fine for me for ages. Actually, I have mostly used a plain old text editor for almost everything and Google Docs for simple spreadsheets. OpenOffice comes when I need something fairly hefty. I can't remember the last time I ever felt the need to isntall MSOffice or use it. It has been at least seven years. It's just unnecessary. I wouldn't even bother installing it on a system, if it were free.
Seriously, though, the only thing anyone really needs it for is the spreadsheet. I mean, unless you're writing a book (and even then...) you just don't need the power of a massive word processor.
The length of IP addresses isn't your problem, here.
And even if it were, we bitched about phone numbers when area codes started becoming important (suddenly having to remember ten digits instead of seven).
Exactly. The idea that we're fretting over sixteen million addresses when IPv6 can literally provide about a hundred IP addresses for every atom on earth is ridiculous.
Then again, when when there are more IP addresses than there are molecules of air, providers won't be able to charge you $15/mo for a static IP address any more.
Slashdot has become just another shitty link-fest. There should be a policy against accepting submissions for Engadget, Gizmodo, Gawker, Venturebeat, AllThingsD. Shitty pseudo-news sites full of hacks and sensationalist pajama-journalists parroting the latest meaningless crap. If I wanted to discuss a shitty linkbait article from these sub-par publications, I'd just hang out at Reddit or on those sites directly.