Eve is not a hard game at all, Go is a hard game, Chess is a hard game, Eve is a broad game with a lot of things you can choose to learn. The process to build a tech 3 cruiser and subsystems is pretty complex, but buying and flying one doesn't need you to know about that.
I play Eve with my 5 year old daughter (when she's been good of course) and she's quite capable of building a ship and taking it out to run missions, she'll tell you all about her Omen or Punisher and how the colour of the laser affects range and damage. She was even involved in a carrier kill recently, getting a grand total of 5hp damage before her frigate was demolished by smartbombs.
Anyway your characterisation of ' Widespread Protests is so ridiculously wide of the mark that it demands correction, the CSM process includes a method to protest the vote, you simply select the 'abstain' option, and in CSM4 less than 3% of votes registered this option. Turnout is low, sure, but that's more an indication of the indifference by many players, or a general acceptance that the people that do get elected generally are quite committed and don't do a bad job. Even Larkonis Trassler who was kicked off the council for insider trading had been relatively effective at raising issues.
I was also a candidate for CSM this year, wish this story had hit Slashdot yesterday so I could have trying to court the slashdot readers voted.
You're so wide of the mark, sure you start out with few skills, but real world skills make a huge difference. There's a great video showing a couple of 2 day old characters flying into 0.0 and PVP'ing in rifters successfully - real world skills and teamwork make a huge difference. I have 30million SP, but I'm not a great solo PVP legend, I do occasionally get on a few killmails as part of fleet actions with a team of people that know what they're dong, and there it's T1 battleships, which I've been able to fly since 3 months after I started. Sure I can fly all sorts of fancy t2 ships - Heavy Interdictors, Recons, Logistics, but I don't generally bother because there are usually better pilots filling those niche roles.
My kids got interested, and since I had some use for a spare character they both got low level pilots who *love* flying around with me in frigates and blowing things up, they don't have SP or real world skills but they get excited and have a whole lot of fun.
imeem has been doing something similar for a long time - supposedly it was started by some ex-napster people and has basicly turned into napster in a browser, where people can share any music by uploading it to the site, and anyone can listen to it. Advertising is all over the plance and is used to pay the labels/artist/lawyers.
imeem have been doing this for the last few years, and they don't use audible magic, they used the Snocap fingerprint system which apparently was good enough for them to buy Snocap. Their business model has always been built around using the content identification system to make sure the right people get paid for audio played on the site.
imeem is primarily used by people uploading and sharing audio, so using an audio fingerprinting system seems more appropriate than youtube relying on an audio fingerprinter for video content.
A bigger effect on the number of users downloading has been the emergence of imeem and Myspace Music which both provide instant on demand access to almost everything ever released.
imeem isn't nearly as well known as myspace, but because it allows users to upload their favorite tunes to share it has a larger selection (imeem was founded by a load of ex-napster 1.0 engineers). So between them they've essentially removed a huge number of people who would go to P2P to just find one or two songs.
There are a load of other less popular music sites (last.fm, pandora etc) but myspace and imeem are vastly more popular (and legal), so they're having the biggest effect.
imeem.com used to have a special version for the wii browser which let you play all their music, but it seemed to stop working. It had a few bugs, but it was amazing to be able to search for any artist and play all their music instantly.
It's not even accurate, when it comes to streaming music sites....
imeem.com has twice the users of last.fm, it was the biggest site until September when myspace music piggybacked on myspace and claimed more than double the users of imeem.com
Napster 2.0 is of course a Napster Branded music store created by Roxio.
All the engineers from napster went off to setup their own music sites, the most high profile children of Napster are of course Snocap, which was setup by Shawn after napster 1.0 died and later got acquired by imeem.com which was also started by napster engineers and has become the most popular web2.0 music site (over twice the users of last.fm).
There's also finetune and a few other small music projects that can trace some lineage to the original napster.
Every single one of these descendants from napster are a whole lot more interesting and innovative than what the Napster brand ever did.
imeem.com supports 'Near DVD Quality' in their own words, and they just use s flash player.
Most people use imeem for sharing mp3s but the video quality is pretty good too.
Eerily relevant is todays EFF Article pointing out that the Free Ad-Supported music sites imeem.com and lala.com both stream unenctrypted mp3s with the blessing of the record business. Indeed it was revealed that Warner Brothers Music invested millions of dollars in both of these (although their imeem investment looks a whole lot better). There are some speed bumps to filling your iPod with the music that fans have uploaded to imeem, but it's only sufficient to keep the honest people honest.
A couple of weeks ago they released their 'Best Of' album for free on imeem, well technically it's ad supported, so they get some cash from this page. But essentially you can listen to the whole album online at their page on imeem, you can't actually download it, it streams via the flash player and every downloader I've tried doesn't work (even though they frequently say that they do.....)
That's the more interesting question to me, a lot of these web2.0 companies have strong links to dotcom era organizations. Sure there were the opportunists who learned basic html and worked in the tech business for a few years before heading elsewhere, but there are plenty of coders and business people who are more closely bound to tech.
e.g. I know that many of the engineers from napster were all laid off on the same day and subsequently found themselves working together at companies like snocap, finetune, imeem, iTunes and others - staying in the music business (I don't think any actually went from Napster 1.0 to Napster 2.0)
last.fm ripoff. Nice slashvertisement though. Certainly not a last.fm ripoff, imeem's unlimited on demand streaming pre-dates last.fm's crippled (3 play) version by 3 months.
I posit that last.fm is the one ripping off imeem here.
CNet has been struggling recently and that valuation seems too high, but traditional media have a bad habit of paying too much for aqcuisitions of tech companies....
Comcast Acquires Plaxo, even though nobody can figure out how to make money
AOL Acquires Bebo (popular, but not enough to justify almost a billion dollars)
CBS (again!) Acquires last.fm (popular among bloggers but eclipsed by other sites in the real world)
the only big media deal I can think of in recent years that was a good bet was Newscorp's undervalued' acquisition of myspace.
And that's even before we get to the ones of questionable legality like muxtape and projectplaylist
Yet p2p sharing of music is still huge, youtube and its clones seems to have made a big difference in the amount of movie sharing via p2p, why haven't the music sites done the same?
I hate when people link to youtube videos of old flash animations.
That's only marginally more annoying that people who upload music to youtube by multiplexing a music file with an image.
Interestingly, Metallica is on Warner Brothers records, which means that last year they were one of the first acts to be available
for free on imeem.com - all the more interesting when you realise imeem's links to the old napster.
So, until myspace music launches the biggest web2.0 music site will be imeem.com and you only have to look at their site to get a feeling of deja vu. imeem has been operating a 'youtube for music' for a few years now, needless to say this was very popular and last year they were sued by a record label and everyone was sad and predicted the end for imeem. But them imeem came out of the legal proceedings with a deal that let them stream music on their site in exchange for revenue sharing with the label.
So now you have imeem as this monster service where you can essentially listen to any tune ever recorded, and it's all paid for by advertising.
Similarly, myspace has been in litigation with the record labels and has taken a page from the imeem playbook, copying the deal making, the business model and everything else. Only this isn't some tiny startup, this is Fox Interactive with it's massive pockets.
Exactly, if you can go to imeem.com and listen to any piece of music using your iPhone then suddenly the 'streaming only' limitation of imeem doesn't seem like such a restriction, which in turn means less of those all important 'buy from itunes' clicks.
"Can you please cite even one site that offers comparable quality and usability "
I think the 'Usability' of stage6 largely came from sites like tvlinks which indexed all the material that people wanted to see.
So are you seriously saying that stage6 was best because a doubleclick on the video makes it full screen, whereas lesser sites like imeem/dailymotion/vimeo could only offer a little button on the video player to make the full screen player kick in? What kind of UI nazi are you?
Downloads make make the site better for the users, but they reduce the potential for displaying ads and making revenue as well as increasing potential legal liability, so while the site may be better, it may not be 'successful' and I think stage6's demise only reinforces this hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
The Voting for the new CSM finished just over 12 hours ago - so I guess it's a tie into the current CSM election
Eve is not a hard game at all, Go is a hard game, Chess is a hard game, Eve is a broad game with a lot of things you can choose to learn. The process to build a tech 3 cruiser and subsystems is pretty complex, but buying and flying one doesn't need you to know about that.
I play Eve with my 5 year old daughter (when she's been good of course) and she's quite capable of building a ship and taking it out to run missions, she'll tell you all about her Omen or Punisher and how the colour of the laser affects range and damage. She was even involved in a carrier kill recently, getting a grand total of 5hp damage before her frigate was demolished by smartbombs.
Anyway your characterisation of ' Widespread Protests is so ridiculously wide of the mark that it demands correction, the CSM process includes a method to protest the vote, you simply select the 'abstain' option, and in CSM4 less than 3% of votes registered this option. Turnout is low, sure, but that's more an indication of the indifference by many players, or a general acceptance that the people that do get elected generally are quite committed and don't do a bad job. Even Larkonis Trassler who was kicked off the council for insider trading had been relatively effective at raising issues.
I was also a candidate for CSM this year, wish this story had hit Slashdot yesterday so I could have trying to court the slashdot readers voted.
My kids got interested, and since I had some use for a spare character they both got low level pilots who *love* flying around with me in frigates and blowing things up, they don't have SP or real world skills but they get excited and have a whole lot of fun.
imeem has been doing something similar for a long time - supposedly it was started by some ex-napster people and has basicly turned into napster in a browser, where people can share any music by uploading it to the site, and anyone can listen to it. Advertising is all over the plance and is used to pay the labels/artist/lawyers.
imeem have been doing this for the last few years, and they don't use audible magic, they used the Snocap fingerprint system which apparently was good enough for them to buy Snocap. Their business model has always been built around using the content identification system to make sure the right people get paid for audio played on the site.
imeem is primarily used by people uploading and sharing audio, so using an audio fingerprinting system seems more appropriate than youtube relying on an audio fingerprinter for video content.
A bigger effect on the number of users downloading has been the emergence of imeem and Myspace Music which both provide instant on demand access to almost everything ever released. imeem isn't nearly as well known as myspace, but because it allows users to upload their favorite tunes to share it has a larger selection (imeem was founded by a load of ex-napster 1.0 engineers). So between them they've essentially removed a huge number of people who would go to P2P to just find one or two songs. There are a load of other less popular music sites (last.fm, pandora etc) but myspace and imeem are vastly more popular (and legal), so they're having the biggest effect.
imeem.com used to have a special version for the wii browser which let you play all their music, but it seemed to stop working. It had a few bugs, but it was amazing to be able to search for any artist and play all their music instantly.
It's not even accurate, when it comes to streaming music sites.... imeem.com has twice the users of last.fm, it was the biggest site until September when myspace music piggybacked on myspace and claimed more than double the users of imeem.com
Falcon's Eye or Vulture's Eye both add a nice isometric interface to Nethack which might make the game palatable to teens.
Yes, the revolutionary and industry shaking part of napster 1.0 clearly never got sold along with the brandname.
All the engineers from napster went off to setup their own music sites, the most high profile children of Napster are of course Snocap, which was setup by Shawn after napster 1.0 died and later got acquired by imeem.com which was also started by napster engineers and has become the most popular web2.0 music site (over twice the users of last.fm).
There's also finetune and a few other small music projects that can trace some lineage to the original napster. Every single one of these descendants from napster are a whole lot more interesting and innovative than what the Napster brand ever did.
imeem.com supports 'Near DVD Quality' in their own words, and they just use s flash player. Most people use imeem for sharing mp3s but the video quality is pretty good too.
Eerily relevant is todays EFF Article pointing out that the Free Ad-Supported music sites imeem.com and lala.com both stream unenctrypted mp3s with the blessing of the record business. Indeed it was revealed that Warner Brothers Music invested millions of dollars in both of these (although their imeem investment looks a whole lot better). There are some speed bumps to filling your iPod with the music that fans have uploaded to imeem, but it's only sufficient to keep the honest people honest.
A couple of weeks ago they released their 'Best Of' album for free on imeem, well technically it's ad supported, so they get some cash from this page. But essentially you can listen to the whole album online at their page on imeem, you can't actually download it, it streams via the flash player and every downloader I've tried doesn't work (even though they frequently say that they do.....)
That's the more interesting question to me, a lot of these web2.0 companies have strong links to dotcom era organizations. Sure there were the opportunists who learned basic html and worked in the tech business for a few years before heading elsewhere, but there are plenty of coders and business people who are more closely bound to tech. e.g. I know that many of the engineers from napster were all laid off on the same day and subsequently found themselves working together at companies like snocap, finetune, imeem, iTunes and others - staying in the music business (I don't think any actually went from Napster 1.0 to Napster 2.0)
CNet has been struggling recently and that valuation seems too high, but traditional media have a bad habit of paying too much for aqcuisitions of tech companies.... Comcast Acquires Plaxo, even though nobody can figure out how to make money AOL Acquires Bebo (popular, but not enough to justify almost a billion dollars) CBS (again!) Acquires last.fm (popular among bloggers but eclipsed by other sites in the real world) the only big media deal I can think of in recent years that was a good bet was Newscorp's undervalued' acquisition of myspace.
imeem.com
last.fm
spiralfrog.com
deezer.com
qtrax.com
And that's even before we get to the ones of questionable legality like muxtape and projectplaylist Yet p2p sharing of music is still huge, youtube and its clones seems to have made a big difference in the amount of movie sharing via p2p, why haven't the music sites done the same?
I hate when people link to youtube videos of old flash animations. That's only marginally more annoying that people who upload music to youtube by multiplexing a music file with an image.
Interestingly, Metallica is on Warner Brothers records, which means that last year they were one of the first acts to be available for free on imeem.com - all the more interesting when you realise imeem's links to the old napster.
And last.fm was beaten to the punch by imeem.com, and imeem doesn't have that annoying 3 listen limit that last.fm does.
Yeah I think myspace is fixated on major label music, but even then it puts them in third place behind imeem and last.fm.
So now you have imeem as this monster service where you can essentially listen to any tune ever recorded, and it's all paid for by advertising.
Similarly, myspace has been in litigation with the record labels and has taken a page from the imeem playbook, copying the deal making, the business model and everything else. Only this isn't some tiny startup, this is Fox Interactive with it's massive pockets.
I really hope myspace loses this time.
Exactly, if you can go to imeem.com and listen to any piece of music using your iPhone then suddenly the 'streaming only' limitation of imeem doesn't seem like such a restriction, which in turn means less of those all important 'buy from itunes' clicks.
"Can you please cite even one site that offers comparable quality and usability "
I think the 'Usability' of stage6 largely came from sites like tvlinks which indexed all the material that people wanted to see.
So are you seriously saying that stage6 was best because a doubleclick on the video makes it full screen, whereas lesser sites like imeem/dailymotion/vimeo could only offer a little button on the video player to make the full screen player kick in?
What kind of UI nazi are you?
Downloads make make the site better for the users, but they reduce the potential for displaying ads and making revenue as well as increasing potential legal liability, so while the site may be better, it may not be 'successful' and I think stage6's demise only reinforces this hypothesis.