Your translating private industry to government. It is an apples to oranges comparison.
It is more like: "After wasting lots of money on expensive private consultants that have friends in high places, that generally do a poor job for lots and lots of money, and after much public outcry..." Political Government: IT is expensive - we should build talent and experience within government. 5 years later...
NEW Political Government: IT is expensive - the last government wasted your money, look how big government is! We must reduce the size of government, and put the jobs in the free market and let business do what it does best, Innovate! (queue up the juicy contractor and consultant pork) Workers souls dies a little bit inside...
All the PS3 does is play games. So you could say the gaming industry has a cornered market there.
Macs do a lot of other competing things. Things their owners may decide to spend their money on instead of a new game. Also not all Mac owners play games, where all PS3 owners presumably do. Also not all macs a capable of playing the games that are the equivalent of a PS3... if fact probably most of them are not. So it isn't a fair analogy by a long shot. To make it a bit fairer, include all the PS2 to the PS3, and now I am pretty sure Sony has a lot more out there, and that is only one aspect of that equation.
PC gaming is not dying. People say that all the time. It is just wrong. That is probably the same people that say movies are dying. Perhaps in both cases they like to list piracy or consoles, etc... BOTH industries made more money in 2009 than EVER before. EVER. During a economic downturn...
13 Billion. In JUST PC games. That's not even including console games. Also MORE games (ie. titles) are being made than ever before. Of course many of them are shitty, and by EA or something and are the yearly sport sequels, etc... However there are a lot of really good original games also. On top of that companies have realized the strength of "brand franchise" learned likely from Blizzard and Id Software among others, and are producing really good sequels to original good games. The idea being you build up brand trust with the consumer, and they will buy your games very willingly. I know I am buying StarCraft 2 as soon as it comes out LAN or no LAN... Some would argue that more crappy games are produced, and I would say that is just a correlation to the increased number of games. Most of the terrible ones can be attributed to a large corporation milking an old franchise for everything it is worth (EA), or the movie industry trying to get even more royalty money out of their movies, which has been done since Atari made E.T. back in the 80's.
Regardless of fault if Apple wants the gaming industry to make games for it, it must do one of two things.
1) Make itself more compatible with PC to the point where game makers, either do not have to make changes to their games for compatibility reasons, or little enough to justify the expense for the few Macs out there (comparatively speaking).
2) Either A) Grab more market share and/or B) Make it more profitable to sell a game for a single Mac than a PC. (Part of this might be less pirated copies for instance).
All of those things take a lot of time, and resources to accomplish, and take even longer to change attitudes and minds. I truly don't ever seen #1 happening. Mac got rid of their own hardware a long time ago, having a significantly different OS is what the Mac is all about.
Grabbing market share and making it more profitable should be what they are working towards, and the deal with Valve is likely a good move toward this end. The Mac elitists are not going to like it, but to really bottom line it, if they are serious in grabbing more of the market they MUST reduce the price of some of their offerings, and those models MUST be able to play the types of games they want the industry to make for them.
A gaming industry for Macs is only going to exist if there is profit in it for them.
So it is "industry's" fault for not releasing Halo on the Wii then is your argument? That's silly.
What I am saying is there is a MARKET.
That MARKET is on PC.
You build something that is NOT a PC, and NOT compatible with a PC.
You expect that they should create a completely NEW market to service the few chumps that bought a Mac.
It is the industry's fault that Apple makes something different than what they usually create and they should alter everything they are doing to accommodate them.
Your delusional. That would be like coming to the USA and then complaining that it is the book industry's fault that they don't make more books available in Swahili. There are some people in the USA that can read Swahili, therefore the market should make as many books available in Swahili as there is in English.
I don't know how to explain it in any more simple terms and I am sick of using analogies. Surely you get it?
I mean when you generate electricity with a gas turbine, you basically burn the gas, to heat the air, to make it flow, to turn the prop, to turn the dynamo, to make the electricity.
With wind power it is basically the same thing except skipping the burning of gas and heating of air.
There is just flow. Because of that it is less predictable and dependable, but then again you don't have to buy the gas either. Of course on a macro scale one might argue that continued exploration for gas is also unpredictable and not dependable.
Having said all that, until we all learn to conserve and stop wasting pretty much everything, we will need a mix of energy sources for a very long time. That includes things like gas, wind, nuke, solar, hydro, etc... You need base power, and only nuke, gas, coal, oil, does that for you really (hydro can also if managed). The rest are great, but unless you have the ability to store the energy (usually at a significant loss of energy due to mechanics), buy say using Wind Power/Solar to run water pumps, on an hydro dam, increasing the potential energy, which isn't always the case.... then they will always be "secondary" sources of energy, and a potential point of failure in the system. Don't get me wrong, I heart wind power, however it has to know its place, and people should be aware of that.
I think someday way down into our future, historians will look back in astonishment and wonder at our "centralized" power systems. The key into the future I believe is conservation and distributive systems. One is bound by culture, and the other technology, and both are a ways off.
Not worried. Capitalism will take care of all of that.
I mean if Ayn Rand taught me anything it was if there is a need and a market for something, then some young enterprising USA industrialist will pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and build a market driven company that will solve all the economy's problems.
I mean it really works that way right? Everything else is pinko commie BS right? DOWN WITH DEATH PANELS! Baaaaaa!:)
"Third, Apple's market share's been increasing while the share of PC's who can run games has been decreasing. Compared to ten years ago MS lost the top end to Apple, the bottom end to netbooks and most of the middle's running intel integrated crap."
Also not to nitpick, but in no way shape or form is "Apple" anywhere by anybody the "top end" of anything except maybe expense. Get real. I won't bother citing stuff here as I think it is common sense, but if you wish I am sure I can find a couple hundred references pretty quick to that effect.
Next, given we are talking about "games" the bottom end is "Intel integrated crap" NOT netbooks (which ironically are ALSO Intel integrated crap). Netbooks are NOT part of the gaming market at all. It is likely easier to play games on my iPhone. Netbook, is a basic computer used for browsing the internet, sending emails, and doing some basic office tasks, not games.
Apple has very little if you could call it any of the gaming market (which is why the move by Valve is a "big deal"). PC owns, Low, Mid, and High end. Period. Full stop. Apple has a minute portion of the mid and low end. Something less than 10% I would think (though I haven't tried to find an industry produced number).
Anyway that's my rant. I did look seriously at buying a Mac a few years ago. I tried to do the due diligence as unbiased as possible. I was shocked at how few options there were out there, and how expensive they were. They looked cool and slick, but at the core, not for me anyway.
"Apple users otoh are more likely to have more money than brains."
There fixed that for you!:)
Just kidding really, however I think the opposite may be true in many cases. My sister is a Mac devotee, however she was faced recently (last week) with the decision of owning a Mac and no software, or a PC and software, due to costs, and the PC won out, as she needed to you know, be able to do stuff on it.
If you think about it (and I know gaming demographics have changed) but traditionally it is the younger crowd that has more time for games, yet has little disposable income.
That's one thing that I don't think PC gaming companies "get". There is a threshold of what people can afford, or are willing to pay, and I think we have been beyond that for some time. Combine that with the advent of technologies such as p2p that make it easier to copy games, and that is where you get into problems. I truly believe ff companies spent half the money they spend on DRM schemes on making gaming more affordable and accessible (believe it or not I think Steam offers more for accessibility than it does for DRM), they would be doing themselves a bit favor into the future. Charging 70$ for a DRM crippled game that you have to buy at Futureshop which is only available for a particular medium, is only perpetuating the current climate, which I doubt they really want.
LOL that's a matter of perspective. I know Mac Zelots are morons, but wow.
So your argument is that it is basically the USA's fault for having a market with Cars that have the driver on the left hand side. So when a British car company comes in and tries to sell an incompatible car with a right have drive, that the problem is clearly with the US for having the market and NOT with the British for making a car that is different?
There Slashdot, a car analogy, who would have thunk it...
I don't own a Mac, but today seems like a good day if you do.
One of the things I don't like about Mac (and there are a few) is that many games are not released for Mac or if they are, they are released way after they are released for everything else.
This seems to be a nice step in the right direction, and I got to say so far as a fit goes, Valve and Steam seem to me a great fit for Macs. Makes me think of the App store on their iPhones.
As much as I like to bash Macs, this is a very astute move for Apple and for Valve. More competition the better I say, Windows has had much the world bent over a bench for long time now and pretty much a monopoly over the gaming market outside of consoles (and a big chunk of that also with the Xboxen). Next step, price Macs more competitively?
Some people I know that used to work at Futureshop told me about this one.
This is something they did before working at Futureshop, and people did do to Furtureshop while they were working there.
Here is what you do.
1) Buy a top o' the line 500$ video card. 2) Replace your POS video card with the new one... ya games! 3) Take your old video card and put it in the new box and return it for a full refund. 4) PROFIT!
In addition, the minimum wage flunky that is tasked either can't identify, or simply doesn't give a minimum wage shit about it, and shrink wraps the package and sells the returned video card.
For extra credit, you can also shrinkwrap the box at home, and that way a flunky will not even look at it, it will just go on the shelf. In addition, if you are actually buying a video card at futureshop there is a good chance the consumer will just install your old card and not know the difference.
For extra extra credit, you could also remove the heatsink from the new card (because you have an after market one anyway) and replace it, using the old heatsink on your old card, making it pretty much look the part of the 500$ card.
I have also heard of the less savvy but apparently still works, stuffing the box with heavy stuff, rocks, floor tiles etc...
Anyway a nightmare if you take it home and open it I suspect.
Large companies/corporations/government etc... do not like people using unauthorized software on their systems. Usually it is locked down so the user cannot change it, though it is impossible to totally lock it down and not become overly problematic.
There is a limited amount of tech support for a given system, and typically they are trained and required to know how to fix authorized things. Go outside of that scope and not only do some of the tech support become lost, but the number of things that can go wrong increases exponentially.
A pertinent example of this occurred last year for me. I am one of those users that doesn't have his admin rights totally taken away, many times I need to use custom software, or non-standard software not covered corporately. Anyway this also allows me to install Firefox, so that is what I use for most things.
However one time I called down to tech support they couldn't for the life of them figure out why a custom web application wasn't working for me. In the end I figured it out myself. It didn't initially occur to me because I just got used to using Firefox, and never considered that the crappy web application was not optimized or even compatible with other browsers other than IE. So now when using 3 distinct web applications that were designed in house (badly apparently), I switch over to IE so I can use them, and use Firefox for everything else.
Tech support, however within its narrow scope of responsibility wouldn't have a clue that I was using Firefox, nor that that would cause a problem, as the standard is IE.
If anything the only fault I saw is designing web applications on such a narrow scope of IE, just because that is all we are supposed to use currently. Bad design and short sighted. Anyway bottom line is tech help desk doesn't want to have to support every piece of software (or operating system in this case) in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Your translating private industry to government. It is an apples to oranges comparison.
It is more like:
"After wasting lots of money on expensive private consultants that have friends in high places, that generally do a poor job for lots and lots of money, and after much public outcry..."
Political Government: IT is expensive - we should build talent and experience within government.
5 years later...
NEW Political Government: IT is expensive - the last government wasted your money, look how big government is! We must reduce the size of government, and put the jobs in the free market and let business do what it does best, Innovate! (queue up the juicy contractor and consultant pork)
Workers souls dies a little bit inside...
Repeat until the world burns.
Welcome our Chinese Ice Burning Overlords!
Big distinction between Macs and PS3.
All the PS3 does is play games. So you could say the gaming industry has a cornered market there.
Macs do a lot of other competing things. Things their owners may decide to spend their money on instead of a new game. Also not all Mac owners play games, where all PS3 owners presumably do. Also not all macs a capable of playing the games that are the equivalent of a PS3... if fact probably most of them are not. So it isn't a fair analogy by a long shot. To make it a bit fairer, include all the PS2 to the PS3, and now I am pretty sure Sony has a lot more out there, and that is only one aspect of that equation.
PC gaming is not dying. People say that all the time. It is just wrong. That is probably the same people that say movies are dying. Perhaps in both cases they like to list piracy or consoles, etc... BOTH industries made more money in 2009 than EVER before. EVER. During a economic downturn...
http://www.videogamesblogger.com/2010/03/11/pc-gaming-revenue-tops-13-billion-in-2009-digital-downloads-now-80-of-pc-market.htm
http://news.bigdownload.com/2010/03/10/report-pc-gaming-revenues-were-13-1-million-worldwide-in-2009/
13 Billion. In JUST PC games. That's not even including console games. Also MORE games (ie. titles) are being made than ever before. Of course many of them are shitty, and by EA or something and are the yearly sport sequels, etc... However there are a lot of really good original games also. On top of that companies have realized the strength of "brand franchise" learned likely from Blizzard and Id Software among others, and are producing really good sequels to original good games. The idea being you build up brand trust with the consumer, and they will buy your games very willingly. I know I am buying StarCraft 2 as soon as it comes out LAN or no LAN... Some would argue that more crappy games are produced, and I would say that is just a correlation to the increased number of games. Most of the terrible ones can be attributed to a large corporation milking an old franchise for everything it is worth (EA), or the movie industry trying to get even more royalty money out of their movies, which has been done since Atari made E.T. back in the 80's.
Regardless of fault if Apple wants the gaming industry to make games for it, it must do one of two things.
1) Make itself more compatible with PC to the point where game makers, either do not have to make changes to their games for compatibility reasons, or little enough to justify the expense for the few Macs out there (comparatively speaking).
2) Either A) Grab more market share and/or B) Make it more profitable to sell a game for a single Mac than a PC. (Part of this might be less pirated copies for instance).
All of those things take a lot of time, and resources to accomplish, and take even longer to change attitudes and minds. I truly don't ever seen #1 happening. Mac got rid of their own hardware a long time ago, having a significantly different OS is what the Mac is all about.
Grabbing market share and making it more profitable should be what they are working towards, and the deal with Valve is likely a good move toward this end. The Mac elitists are not going to like it, but to really bottom line it, if they are serious in grabbing more of the market they MUST reduce the price of some of their offerings, and those models MUST be able to play the types of games they want the industry to make for them.
A gaming industry for Macs is only going to exist if there is profit in it for them.
So it is "industry's" fault for not releasing Halo on the Wii then is your argument? That's silly.
What I am saying is there is a MARKET.
That MARKET is on PC.
You build something that is NOT a PC, and NOT compatible with a PC.
You expect that they should create a completely NEW market to service the few chumps that bought a Mac.
It is the industry's fault that Apple makes something different than what they usually create and they should alter everything they are doing to accommodate them.
Your delusional. That would be like coming to the USA and then complaining that it is the book industry's fault that they don't make more books available in Swahili. There are some people in the USA that can read Swahili, therefore the market should make as many books available in Swahili as there is in English.
I don't know how to explain it in any more simple terms and I am sick of using analogies. Surely you get it?
By last week, I mean her Dell was delivered last week...
"untrusted devices"
Its not like this phone was bought on e-bay or some back ally. This is straight from the manufacture.
It baffles me that products get through QA and carry viruses, Trojans or other malware, I mean come on.
I mean between your wars and your economy, I think I have a solution for you...
it is kind of funny.
I mean when you generate electricity with a gas turbine, you basically burn the gas, to heat the air, to make it flow, to turn the prop, to turn the dynamo, to make the electricity.
With wind power it is basically the same thing except skipping the burning of gas and heating of air.
There is just flow. Because of that it is less predictable and dependable, but then again you don't have to buy the gas either. Of course on a macro scale one might argue that continued exploration for gas is also unpredictable and not dependable.
Having said all that, until we all learn to conserve and stop wasting pretty much everything, we will need a mix of energy sources for a very long time. That includes things like gas, wind, nuke, solar, hydro, etc... You need base power, and only nuke, gas, coal, oil, does that for you really (hydro can also if managed). The rest are great, but unless you have the ability to store the energy (usually at a significant loss of energy due to mechanics), buy say using Wind Power/Solar to run water pumps, on an hydro dam, increasing the potential energy, which isn't always the case.... then they will always be "secondary" sources of energy, and a potential point of failure in the system. Don't get me wrong, I heart wind power, however it has to know its place, and people should be aware of that.
I think someday way down into our future, historians will look back in astonishment and wonder at our "centralized" power systems. The key into the future I believe is conservation and distributive systems. One is bound by culture, and the other technology, and both are a ways off.
Not worried. Capitalism will take care of all of that.
I mean if Ayn Rand taught me anything it was if there is a need and a market for something, then some young enterprising USA industrialist will pull themselves up by the bootstraps, and build a market driven company that will solve all the economy's problems.
I mean it really works that way right? Everything else is pinko commie BS right? DOWN WITH DEATH PANELS! Baaaaaa! :)
Here is your cud sheeple, now chew.
So what your trying to say is "Never!"
try and take over the world!
"Third, Apple's market share's been increasing while the share of PC's who can run games has been decreasing. Compared to ten years ago MS lost the top end to Apple, the bottom end to netbooks and most of the middle's running intel integrated crap."
Also not to nitpick, but in no way shape or form is "Apple" anywhere by anybody the "top end" of anything except maybe expense. Get real. I won't bother citing stuff here as I think it is common sense, but if you wish I am sure I can find a couple hundred references pretty quick to that effect.
Next, given we are talking about "games" the bottom end is "Intel integrated crap" NOT netbooks (which ironically are ALSO Intel integrated crap). Netbooks are NOT part of the gaming market at all. It is likely easier to play games on my iPhone. Netbook, is a basic computer used for browsing the internet, sending emails, and doing some basic office tasks, not games.
Apple has very little if you could call it any of the gaming market (which is why the move by Valve is a "big deal"). PC owns, Low, Mid, and High end. Period. Full stop. Apple has a minute portion of the mid and low end. Something less than 10% I would think (though I haven't tried to find an industry produced number).
Anyway that's my rant. I did look seriously at buying a Mac a few years ago. I tried to do the due diligence as unbiased as possible. I was shocked at how few options there were out there, and how expensive they were. They looked cool and slick, but at the core, not for me anyway.
"Apple users otoh are more likely to have more money than brains."
There fixed that for you! :)
Just kidding really, however I think the opposite may be true in many cases. My sister is a Mac devotee, however she was faced recently (last week) with the decision of owning a Mac and no software, or a PC and software, due to costs, and the PC won out, as she needed to you know, be able to do stuff on it.
If you think about it (and I know gaming demographics have changed) but traditionally it is the younger crowd that has more time for games, yet has little disposable income.
That's one thing that I don't think PC gaming companies "get". There is a threshold of what people can afford, or are willing to pay, and I think we have been beyond that for some time. Combine that with the advent of technologies such as p2p that make it easier to copy games, and that is where you get into problems. I truly believe ff companies spent half the money they spend on DRM schemes on making gaming more affordable and accessible (believe it or not I think Steam offers more for accessibility than it does for DRM), they would be doing themselves a bit favor into the future. Charging 70$ for a DRM crippled game that you have to buy at Futureshop which is only available for a particular medium, is only perpetuating the current climate, which I doubt they really want.
Godwin's law meets the chewbacca defense, I love it.
LOL that's a matter of perspective. I know Mac Zelots are morons, but wow.
So your argument is that it is basically the USA's fault for having a market with Cars that have the driver on the left hand side. So when a British car company comes in and tries to sell an incompatible car with a right have drive, that the problem is clearly with the US for having the market and NOT with the British for making a car that is different?
There Slashdot, a car analogy, who would have thunk it...
I don't own a Mac, but today seems like a good day if you do.
One of the things I don't like about Mac (and there are a few) is that many games are not released for Mac or if they are, they are released way after they are released for everything else.
This seems to be a nice step in the right direction, and I got to say so far as a fit goes, Valve and Steam seem to me a great fit for Macs. Makes me think of the App store on their iPhones.
As much as I like to bash Macs, this is a very astute move for Apple and for Valve. More competition the better I say, Windows has had much the world bent over a bench for long time now and pretty much a monopoly over the gaming market outside of consoles (and a big chunk of that also with the Xboxen). Next step, price Macs more competitively?
Is that the Internet called, and they said "we told you so."
When this was announced EVERYONE said this was a bad idea. It is a bad idea.
Ubi somehow thought that they are smarter than everyone else in the world, and that it was a good idea.
Are they really all that surprised that this happened at all? Because if they are, they must be the biggest idiots of all time.
I mean really. Everyone saw this coming a mile away, I find it hard to believe that UbiSoft refused to accept reality.
Isn't the rejection of reality, substituting your own personal fantasy, a definition of being crazy?
Harvard thinks everyone that doesn't go to Harvard are idiots.
The idiots disagree.
Also the time I give him is the time I do not want. Usually when I am unproductive and cranky.
Some people I know that used to work at Futureshop told me about this one.
This is something they did before working at Futureshop, and people did do to Furtureshop while they were working there.
Here is what you do.
1) Buy a top o' the line 500$ video card.
2) Replace your POS video card with the new one... ya games!
3) Take your old video card and put it in the new box and return it for a full refund.
4) PROFIT!
In addition, the minimum wage flunky that is tasked either can't identify, or simply doesn't give a minimum wage shit about it, and shrink wraps the package and sells the returned video card.
For extra credit, you can also shrinkwrap the box at home, and that way a flunky will not even look at it, it will just go on the shelf. In addition, if you are actually buying a video card at futureshop there is a good chance the consumer will just install your old card and not know the difference.
For extra extra credit, you could also remove the heatsink from the new card (because you have an after market one anyway) and replace it, using the old heatsink on your old card, making it pretty much look the part of the 500$ card.
I have also heard of the less savvy but apparently still works, stuffing the box with heavy stuff, rocks, floor tiles etc...
Anyway a nightmare if you take it home and open it I suspect.
Pretty sure that's called Wolfenstien, and your too late, Activision already wreaked the crap out of that.
http://www.gamerankings.com/pc/930284-wolfenstein/index.html
Ah, ET how I miss you... oh wait I guess I can still go play that... sweet!
The reason in a word is "Support".
Large companies/corporations/government etc... do not like people using unauthorized software on their systems. Usually it is locked down so the user cannot change it, though it is impossible to totally lock it down and not become overly problematic.
There is a limited amount of tech support for a given system, and typically they are trained and required to know how to fix authorized things. Go outside of that scope and not only do some of the tech support become lost, but the number of things that can go wrong increases exponentially.
A pertinent example of this occurred last year for me. I am one of those users that doesn't have his admin rights totally taken away, many times I need to use custom software, or non-standard software not covered corporately. Anyway this also allows me to install Firefox, so that is what I use for most things.
However one time I called down to tech support they couldn't for the life of them figure out why a custom web application wasn't working for me. In the end I figured it out myself. It didn't initially occur to me because I just got used to using Firefox, and never considered that the crappy web application was not optimized or even compatible with other browsers other than IE. So now when using 3 distinct web applications that were designed in house (badly apparently), I switch over to IE so I can use them, and use Firefox for everything else.
Tech support, however within its narrow scope of responsibility wouldn't have a clue that I was using Firefox, nor that that would cause a problem, as the standard is IE.
If anything the only fault I saw is designing web applications on such a narrow scope of IE, just because that is all we are supposed to use currently. Bad design and short sighted. Anyway bottom line is tech help desk doesn't want to have to support every piece of software (or operating system in this case) in the world.
Lest we forget:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie's_Angels_(film)
Perhaps the Supreme Leader simply wishes to be invaded by Cameron Diaz, Drew Barrymore, and Lucy Liu.
"more professional color scheme with purple and orange"
What like the Joker?