"People are just being cheapskates because they don't have to look the developers in the face."
The average gamer isn't even thinking about the developer, only the hardcore like us think about the developer. The average human being is thinking about how best to spend his money, versus ALL the other games he can spend it on.
No one in a free market is entitled to succeed, this is what I really hate about developers. They don't understand what a free market means and the level of competition for dollars between all other games that gamers could spend their money on.
Any developer should ask: "Why should people spend this amount of money on my game when the canget this game which is x times better for the same price or less?"
That is the fundamental outlook developers need to apply to themselves since that is how the market works in the real world.
He says : "Doom (story in it) was absolutely rubbish"
Story in most games is incidental and most game stories are bad, a game with great gameplay can save a bad story, but a game with a good story can't save a bad game.
"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
People care about how fun a game is ultimately, although I agree there are graphics whore games, but gameplay still is the core of any game. Good graphics cannot ultimately save the crappyness of a game. For instance Assasin's creed looked great but got boring and monotonous insanely fast.
... I notice a lot of people complaining that people paid so little. But that is irrelevant.
World of goo is for all intent's and purposes a small indie game. It is competing against all other older AAA games with many million dollar budgets that have now hit the bargain bin, for the same or similar prices (5$-10$).
I think people forget that the value of a game is what people are prepared to pay for it against all other games. Let's not also forget that games are massively overly produced.
"Day trading seems the perfect example of this. Day traders have no connection with the companies they trade in, no commitment to them, no stake in them at all."
The same thing could besaid of CEO's and employee's this is all part of captialisms race to the bototm (i.e. pay your employee's shit and treat them like they are disposable)
Day traders are the smart people here realizing that hoping for ridiculous returns is often foolish, you can earn 2-15% on a large position and make more money by playing the volatiltiy and the dips then you could if you held.
Trading is just another investment strategy because people, companies and CEO's are NOT rational and hence because people are stupid traders take advantage of that.
Let's not also forget about the fact that the way the stock market functions is like a legal ponzi scheme anyway, so everyone who participates in the ponzi game is merely a hypocrit.
Lets also please face reality. Many business men merely shift around and externalize costs and store up these problems for future generations to deal with, and anyone who's been in business long enough knows that much business is just uploading risk for future generations to deal with.
There are tonnes of business's who we could argue are "legitimately contributing" to society that do just as much damage to future societies today but we as human beings don't want to pay the TRUE full cost of anything, because we're stupid, lazy and cheap, the nature of captialism is to externalize costs and download risks onto other people (as we've seen with the bailout).
Myopic free market types refuse to understand human beings are assholes and hence a pure free market would never work.
Um it implied both, think of it this way, fraud is another word for theft. You usually you have to be malicious kind of person to steal from someone unless their are extenuating circumstances like starvation, etc.
You proved my point again. You claim that I haven't made a rational argument, yet you've made no counter claim, so what exactly do you have a problem with? Otherwise I can't address your claim. "You haven't made a rational argument" and saying "I'm just waving my hands" is not a response, it is you who's chickening out. If I made a mistake somewhere it has to exist by definition to say "all of it is a mistake" means you have to go through what I said and address it point by point otherwise: There are only two options 1) You don't have a clue as to what I said so you can't make a claim that it wasn't rational, because you couldn't even grasp it to begin with 2) you are too intellectually lazy to address my points because you might find something uncomfortable with the current view of the world you hold.
Either way I know you're immune from other viewpoints so as I said before it would be pointless to discuss this further with you unless you take an honest stab at it.
"Spoken like someone who really can't back up what he says with either logical or factual analysis."
Nonsense your response PROVES you've pre-decided what you think it is you know so discussing anything with you would be a waste of my time.
You have to understand that the concepts people hold consciously or unconsciously determine what the deem is true or false, when there are errors in those concepts and the people themselves are unable or unwilling to see those errors then you cannot ever have discourse with such people.
Your comment just proves my point 100% you have already pre-decided what's true therefore anything that goes against what you were taught you reject, and hence you resort to insults rather then addressing the points I made.
No doubt about it. I may have misconstrued your post and I apologize for that but I've had discussions with people with such people directly and they are often very immune to any kind of dialogue.
"That's a pretty long-winded way of saying you don't understand economics. But at least it's a good starting point."
This is exactly why I don't talk about economics, you exemplify my point:
"Most people are way too narrowminded to entertain thoughts that don't speak their language or to their master conceptions or theories they fancy, thats what I hate about not just austrians, but all economists."
You think I don't understand but that's simply not the case. No man has a monopoly on the truth and there are many different paths to it and ways it is expressed, you dislike the way I express my factual observations so you accuse me of not understanding economics. This is EXACTLY why I often avoid such discussions. People tend to pre-decide their positions and then look for reasons to support those positions, and if someone disagree's the accuse that person of not understanding economics, it's 100% bs though I'm sorry to say.
This is exactly why debate is most fruitless since it has been precided by the a group of persons what is or is not, so there is no room for discourse.
Interesting theory. Should I subscribe to your newsletter? I really can't follow what you are talking about here - it sounds like you think money itself should be eliminated. Do we go to barter? Is that supposed to "keep up" with upheaval and complexity better?
The problem is that money as a store of value is problematicc because people can't just wait forever for food/electricity/clothes/housing, an austrian run economy would quickly devolve into one where there would revolution I have no doubt, because they'd be forced to realize the world is a physical place and their theories of human action break under constraints of physics and physical systems and their transformation.
Any theory that does not account for how the world actually is physically integrated into the economy is laughably naive.
But it's exactly the Fed and central banking policies that interferes with that process.
But you're missing my point, the instability would not go away! You're missing the physical aspects of the economy, if x amount of people are umemployed for Y time and their money is quickly depleting, you can't have that happen to a huge population without huge political discontent and in the worse case scenario revolution.
Everyone (anyone who is anti-fed) assumes that moving back to a gold standard or some other currency is going to fix thing - it is not, you're just trading one set of policies for another, the fundamental problem of specialized society connected by interlocking and highly unstable trade networks, and technological displacement is still there.
By making credit artificially cheap (or artificially expensive), people make wrong choices about where to invest capital. Then you have a unsustainable bubble that will inevitably collapse. Creating money doesn't create extra consumers - it just puts industries and consumers deeper into debt until they can't continue to pay it - at which point the overdue correction drags the entire house of cards down.
Except that bubbles are natural outcome of using money, bubbles will ALWAYS occur under the fed, gold standard or not. People are the cause of bubbles not anything else, and because we live in a specialized society the effects of too many people failing at once is transmitted through the whole system and that means I get fucked for someone elses stupid economic decisions, austrians take a hyper individualistic view of the economy that is simply not real. Group of persons actions A far away from me can economically have negative effects on me without my consent.
Theit whole big push of "no initiation of force" is a farce, since monetary systems require the initiation of force else you would have rampant counterfeiting.
I don't know where you got this idea. Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Prices go up because there's more money in the system and production of goods is either stagnant or declining. And all this mis-allocation of resources is caused by central planners like the Fed sending the wrong signals to investors and consumers.
No there are different kinds of inflation, this is the whole problem to begin with. Once someone is taught somethign about economics by people they admire, or they are ideas they fancy. They are usually never willing to question it because that's what they've been taught. Inflation occurs for many reasons.
I'm not a big believer in economists understanding of inflation because the physics of how economies physically work. Once you stop thinking in terms of theory and in temrs of observable physical systems you come to understand money is a political conveneience to distribute debt and obligation, since money itself is a double edged sword as a medium of exchange.
Now I'm not saying I have all the answers, but I do know that the way we currently think about money and how we calculate the allocation of resources and obligations in society has
"This system is just not sustainable. How could it ever do anything but ultimately fail? Who are these people who expected it to be a paragon of stability and sustainability?"
The same thing was said about the gold standard, every tom dick and harry intellectual thinks they "know" how to run an economy I call 100% BULLSHIT. Especially austiran economists, some of the most dogmatic, ideologically driven people on the face of the earth.
The real issue is that because society has become so specialized and because we use money as a store of value it's one of the KEY components of why society is so unstable because in a specialized society money must constantly be circulating between people and real goods, the problem is jobs and industries are not permanent in economies, they are constantly in upheaval being moved around, created, or destroyed because and because we only pay people if they have a job or are working, the people without jobs for any length of time start to put stress on the system.
Money ideally is supposed to keep track of debt's and obligations but here's the thing: As a medium of exchange it can't deal with the real world upheavals complexities of specialized society.
Even if austrians got their way by eliminating the fed they would have all the same issues under the gold standard, because monetary policy is only one aspect of the economy, the other is to keep money constantly flowing between those who need it (for necessities) and those who produce them (the businesses), the problem is their becomes large asymmetries because of our technology and ability to do more things with less people, which leaves a huge surplus population in a precarious, temporary and unstable jobs as the march of tech moves on and people simply can't keep up with the real world technological and political changes taking place.
Inflation is nothing more then debt and risk distribution, if Group A charges more for necessities B, the group with the least money is constantly being indebted by inflation.
Certain kinds of inflation (not all kinds) of course is an aspect of using money as a medium of exchange.
"There's a pitfall there - the more your tools do for the user, the less significant their input becomes."
I disagree, your example of the figure 8 track is actally a bad example. For instance you had advanced enough tools you could have tools totally redo the art/themes for the track and also change the rules, but this assumes the figure 8 track is a good design anyway, the design of the area of a level pretty much defines a good chunk of what you can do with it. This is how mods like Hero arena and DOTA for starcraft and warcraft 3 came about - people being able to take existing game mechanics and adding new rules/modifying the game within the game.
If developers could make that whole process easier and less time consuming for the user, a lot of time wouldn't be spent learning the tools so much as just pouring out of raw creativity.
I've done game modding and the biggest hurdle is definitely the developers not grasping that they need to make tools for non technical people. When Bioware released the original neverwintern nights, I became hooked on the toolset even though it had some pretty complicated (for the user) elements like scripting and whatnot. Neverwinter toolset IMHO is a great example of what developers could do if they had enough resources/time or human minds worked faster.
The truth is making a tool that advanced would most likely require a heck of a lot of time and money thrown at it. Part of the reason NWN suffered so badly as a game was because they only had a finite amount of money to throw around, if someone sat down or fantsizing here... the industry pooled it's resources to develop these kinds of tools they could make their games much more a vehicle of creativity for people who can't spend years learning about models, texture maps, UV coordinates, etc, etc.
Quite frankly I'd love to see a company like autodesk take a stab at something like that (gmax doesn't really count) but the whole problem is profitability of said tool would probably be zip since gamers don't buy mod tools, but games.
... the real issue is that tools for generating content are not advanced enough. If you look at a game like Need for speed underground or Galactic civilizations 2 which you can easily design your own ships, this is the beginning of what you need. Or how about the F zero GX for the gamecube with the car designer? You need to do all of the legwork in your tools, you can't expect users to train for years to become artists, programmers, technical people. Thats the *real issue*.
You need the computer to autogenerate and aid in generating content in a big way. People want to create content but the software tools just aren't up to scratch yet.
You should all go get a copy of Galciv 2 and play around with the ship builder, they make it easy for anyone to make stuff without having to learn about texture maps, modelling, etc. They have a bunch of pre-fab pieces with "hardpoints", it's basically like virtual lego set.
If you want people to participate in content creation your tools have to do the vast majority of the legwork. The truth is the software tools for the end user just aren't there yet.
"As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people"
Who backs up their ENTIRE hard drive on DVD or blue ray with hard disks so cheap? You use discs to archive excess stuff you want off your hard disks. The great thing about DVD's and blu-ray discs is that they are not mechanical and not subject to mechanical faliure like hard disks are which is still a significant risk. Just recently I had a hard drive die on me permanently for no reason wouldn't even detect at bootup. Thankfully it was one of the drive's in my RAID array and not my main drive, even though I don't always keep backups of important files on flash or DVD and they take far far less space then a single disc, anything that is replacable or redownloadable (most stuff) is easy to replace.
You put stuff you want to archive on DVD/Blu ray that you want to REMOVE from your hard drive. I have downloaded way more stuff then I could possibly fit on many terabyte hard disks. Trailers for games, movies, anime, youtube videos, etc. I'd be buying hard drives every couple months with the amount of stuff I download.
I also keep raw images of DVD's and blu-ray discs those eat up a lot of hard drive space and the only way to get rid of them is to... you guessed it - burn them!
If your critical information is that important you back up what you cannot replace on many media including hard disks.
I always burn multiple copies of things that I can't afford to lose as well as put important irreplacable files on removable flash media.
Blu-ray is not useless, I use Blu ray and DVD-R's to do a lot of archiving and while hard disks have come down in price they still are not competitive with blank DVD's you can get 100 4.7GB discs for under $20, most 50GB hard drives go for $50+ shipping, even more if it's an external hard disk, even more if it has 5 year warranty. Search Newegg.com for seagate 500gb to see what I mean. You can get 1200+ GB of writable DVD media for the cost of one 500GB hard drive.
"If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, "
This I can agree with, but lets not forget the investors of blu ray and DVD couldn't know before hand just how far hard drive would come. Who imagined that you would be able to buy a 2 terabytes for $200 when you were gettting between 4-20 GB in the late 90's.
"Considering that's almost 5 years of entertainment and actually a good game, is that really so much."
Yes it is, think about all the value people who've been playing diablo 2, starcraft and warcraft 3 for the last 10 year or more. Imagine they had to pay 800 per game to maintain their accounts everytime they wanted to play a game a few times a month, that would add up fast, ~180 vs over 1000 is a no brainer, especially since most people have enjoyed these games for well over a decade, that is INCREDIBLE value and sure beats the pants off any MMO, remember you're sinking all that money into a SINGLE game, that is a hell of a lot of money.
If you're a one game kind of person it's not too bad, but if you like to play lots of game's it's terrible, lets not also forget in console land you can RENT a game and finish it on $5-7 and have the game for week or more at a time without ever having to pay full price for games. If you play a lot of games MMO's are a waste of money.
Those people got way more value out of those games and saved the money not spent MMO's elsewhere. 800 bucks is a lot of money to sink into a single game that is not really any better then many other single or multiplayer games that don't have the monthly fee. Not only that you're telling developers you're willing to pay for games that don't innovate or don't take risks.
Not to mention that MMO's cater to the lowest common denominator to keep the barrier of entry extremely low so any drooling fool can play it.
"A time lens can focus a chunk of time to a point,"
Since einstein we really know that space and time is the same thing, we really should just call it "squishing space", since time is really a measurement of a distribution of matter and energy, we've compressed the space (and hence the time).
"Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter.... Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept 'empty space' loses its meaning.... Since the theory of general relativity implies the representation of physical reality by a continuous field, the concept of particles or material points cannot play a fundamental part,... and can only appear as a limited region in space where the field strength / energy density are particularly high."--- (Albert Einstein, 1950)
"Maybe the IT industry should look inwards on itself and consider how we've failed to educate the public about the technology we make them use."
What makes you think the public wants to know? Trust me the public doesn't want to know, it's partly a generational thing and partly a personality thing (for the younger generation).
Most young kids have to know something about tech in order to use it for purposes (games, texting, art, tablet drawing, whatever).
Anyone from the boomer and part of the (earlier born) x'er generation doesn't really want to know and could care less about tech unless it effects them in some way.
There's just too much distraction and overwork in people's daily lives to want to waste what precious little free time they have already on things they just don't want to know.
Now I admit there are some people out there a part of those generations that want to learn and those people I commend but they are not the majority.
Part of it is certain people come to believe that they just aren't smart enough to handle it and part of it I believe is belief in their lack of ability to learn, and also perhaps half consciously they want excuse to be lazy and have other people do the hard work without them realizing it.
For example in my famnily all my family members come to me for advice on what they should buy and what they shouldn't buy, so we geeks/nerds tend to act as a specialist, thinking about stuff so they don't have to.
But mostly I believe its a generational thing, the more you grow up around technology that has been with you since birth you aren't intimidated by it since as children we tend to forget we just asborb a slurry of new stuff a lot easier then many adults and plus we have oodles of free time, energy and motivation to do so.
Most peoples great ideas for games suck, it takes a lot of trial and error to find something that will appeal to people. And often times mediocrity is what appeals to the masses.
"It is amusing that game companies want to shut down used game sales. Maybe they should work on making timeless games with good content."
The truth is games are over produced, and those that are produced are produced by companies that are driven by the demands of shareholders for short term profits.
You can see this with EA's pushing out Need for speed every year, I feel sorry for blackbox I bet they were forced to release NFS carbon before it was ready. Most wanted was excellent but carbon was so obviously pushed out, and/or the key people responsible for most wanted left.
I agree making good games works but not all godo games sell, there are lots of good games that failed financially.
Planescape torment and Freespace 2 come to mind, FS2 is hailed as one of the best space sims of all time yet it flopped finacnially and volition went to making FPS games for consoles to keep itself alive.
Timeless game does not always equal financially successful. We see this time and time again with companies making me too clones of FPS, RTS and racing every year.
"Yeah, I have to agree: I don't see Nvidia dying anytime soon, but I have to say that (barring some impressive new market), their days of growth are over."
Doubtful, no one other then AMD is able to succesfully compete in the graphics market, also AMD does not have any GPU's or ultra mobile devices, and that market is simply enormous and nvidia is hoping with their next gen mobile chip to get into everything from phones to portable video players, that is a growth market. High perf, low power graphics chips for mobile devices if the can pull it off (and the killer apps come along) will definitely be a growth area.
Bloat isn't bad if it's necessary or addds more value then the performance takes. The real problem IMHO is that human beings still aren't very good at designing software, there's just too much to keep track of as projects get really large.
My guess is good BUT.... I was an owner of first generation Wii and they had terrible heatsinks you'd see artifacts in metroid 3 which would drive you nuts. I called them and got a replacement thankfully.
Slashdot Mirror
"Capitalism? Copyright is a form of government regulation on what would otherwise be a free market. It "
Wrong the whole justification for coypright is private property (i.e. intellectual property), which is capitalisms raison d'être.
Copyright is just another form of intellectual proeprty rights, which is just another form of private property. Capitalism all the way through there.
"That's what this is."
This is a natural outcome of applying the concept of private property to information.
"People are just being cheapskates because they don't have to look the developers in the face."
The average gamer isn't even thinking about the developer, only the hardcore like us think about the developer. The average human being is thinking about how best to spend his money, versus ALL the other games he can spend it on.
No one in a free market is entitled to succeed, this is what I really hate about developers. They don't understand what a free market means and the level of competition for dollars between all other games that gamers could spend their money on.
Any developer should ask: "Why should people spend this amount of money on my game when the canget this game which is x times better for the same price or less?"
That is the fundamental outlook developers need to apply to themselves since that is how the market works in the real world.
He says : "Doom (story in it) was absolutely rubbish"
Story in most games is incidental and most game stories are bad, a game with great gameplay can save a bad story, but a game with a good story can't save a bad game.
"There were years and years where the lessons of early story-driven games were forgotten and all anyone really cared about was having as many sprites or polygons as possible."
People care about how fun a game is ultimately, although I agree there are graphics whore games, but gameplay still is the core of any game. Good graphics cannot ultimately save the crappyness of a game. For instance Assasin's creed looked great but got boring and monotonous insanely fast.
... I notice a lot of people complaining that people paid so little. But that is irrelevant.
World of goo is for all intent's and purposes a small indie game. It is competing against all other older AAA games with many million dollar budgets that have now hit the bargain bin, for the same or similar prices (5$-10$).
I think people forget that the value of a game is what people are prepared to pay for it against all other games. Let's not also forget that games are massively overly produced.
"Day trading seems the perfect example of this. Day traders have no connection with the companies they trade in, no commitment to them, no stake in them at all."
The same thing could besaid of CEO's and employee's this is all part of captialisms race to the bototm (i.e. pay your employee's shit and treat them like they are disposable)
Day traders are the smart people here realizing that hoping for ridiculous returns is often foolish, you can earn 2-15% on a large position and make more money by playing the volatiltiy and the dips then you could if you held.
Trading is just another investment strategy because people, companies and CEO's are NOT rational and hence because people are stupid traders take advantage of that.
Let's not also forget about the fact that the way the stock market functions is like a legal ponzi scheme anyway, so everyone who participates in the ponzi game is merely a hypocrit.
Lets also please face reality. Many business men merely shift around and externalize costs and store up these problems for future generations to deal with, and anyone who's been in business long enough knows that much business is just uploading risk for future generations to deal with.
There are tonnes of business's who we could argue are "legitimately contributing" to society that do just as much damage to future societies today but we as human beings don't want to pay the TRUE full cost of anything, because we're stupid, lazy and cheap, the nature of captialism is to externalize costs and download risks onto other people (as we've seen with the bailout).
Myopic free market types refuse to understand human beings are assholes and hence a pure free market would never work.
"Fraud doesn't imply malice, it implies greed."
Um it implied both, think of it this way, fraud is another word for theft. You usually you have to be malicious kind of person to steal from someone unless their are extenuating circumstances like starvation, etc.
You proved my point again. You claim that I haven't made a rational argument, yet you've made no counter claim, so what exactly do you have a problem with? Otherwise I can't address your claim. "You haven't made a rational argument" and saying "I'm just waving my hands" is not a response, it is you who's chickening out. If I made a mistake somewhere it has to exist by definition to say "all of it is a mistake" means you have to go through what I said and address it point by point otherwise: There are only two options 1) You don't have a clue as to what I said so you can't make a claim that it wasn't rational, because you couldn't even grasp it to begin with 2) you are too intellectually lazy to address my points because you might find something uncomfortable with the current view of the world you hold.
Either way I know you're immune from other viewpoints so as I said before it would be pointless to discuss this further with you unless you take an honest stab at it.
"Spoken like someone who really can't back up what he says with either logical or factual analysis."
Nonsense your response PROVES you've pre-decided what you think it is you know so discussing anything with you would be a waste of my time.
You have to understand that the concepts people hold consciously or unconsciously determine what the deem is true or false, when there are errors in those concepts and the people themselves are unable or unwilling to see those errors then you cannot ever have discourse with such people.
Your comment just proves my point 100% you have already pre-decided what's true therefore anything that goes against what you were taught you reject, and hence you resort to insults rather then addressing the points I made.
No doubt about it. I may have misconstrued your post and I apologize for that but I've had discussions with people with such people directly and they are often very immune to any kind of dialogue.
"That's a pretty long-winded way of saying you don't understand economics. But at least it's a good starting point."
This is exactly why I don't talk about economics, you exemplify my point:
"Most people are way too narrowminded to entertain thoughts that don't speak their language or to their master conceptions or theories they fancy, thats what I hate about not just austrians, but all economists."
You think I don't understand but that's simply not the case. No man has a monopoly on the truth and there are many different paths to it and ways it is expressed, you dislike the way I express my factual observations so you accuse me of not understanding economics. This is EXACTLY why I often avoid such discussions. People tend to pre-decide their positions and then look for reasons to support those positions, and if someone disagree's the accuse that person of not understanding economics, it's 100% bs though I'm sorry to say.
This is exactly why debate is most fruitless since it has been precided by the a group of persons what is or is not, so there is no room for discourse.
Interesting theory. Should I subscribe to your newsletter? I really can't follow what you are talking about here - it sounds like you think money itself should be eliminated. Do we go to barter? Is that supposed to "keep up" with upheaval and complexity better?
The problem is that money as a store of value is problematicc because people can't just wait forever for food/electricity/clothes/housing, an austrian run economy would quickly devolve into one where there would revolution I have no doubt, because they'd be forced to realize the world is a physical place and their theories of human action break under constraints of physics and physical systems and their transformation.
Any theory that does not account for how the world actually is physically integrated into the economy is laughably naive.
But it's exactly the Fed and central banking policies that interferes with that process.
But you're missing my point, the instability would not go away! You're missing the physical aspects of the economy, if x amount of people are umemployed for Y time and their money is quickly depleting, you can't have that happen to a huge population without huge political discontent and in the worse case scenario revolution.
Everyone (anyone who is anti-fed) assumes that moving back to a gold standard or some other currency is going to fix thing - it is not, you're just trading one set of policies for another, the fundamental problem of specialized society connected by interlocking and highly unstable trade networks, and technological displacement is still there.
By making credit artificially cheap (or artificially expensive), people make wrong choices about where to invest capital. Then you have a unsustainable bubble that will inevitably collapse. Creating money doesn't create extra consumers - it just puts industries and consumers deeper into debt until they can't continue to pay it - at which point the overdue correction drags the entire house of cards down.
Except that bubbles are natural outcome of using money, bubbles will ALWAYS occur under the fed, gold standard or not. People are the cause of bubbles not anything else, and because we live in a specialized society the effects of too many people failing at once is transmitted through the whole system and that means I get fucked for someone elses stupid economic decisions, austrians take a hyper individualistic view of the economy that is simply not real. Group of persons actions A far away from me can economically have negative effects on me without my consent.
Theit whole big push of "no initiation of force" is a farce, since monetary systems require the initiation of force else you would have rampant counterfeiting.
I don't know where you got this idea. Inflation is too much money chasing too few goods. Prices go up because there's more money in the system and production of goods is either stagnant or declining. And all this mis-allocation of resources is caused by central planners like the Fed sending the wrong signals to investors and consumers.
No there are different kinds of inflation, this is the whole problem to begin with. Once someone is taught somethign about economics by people they admire, or they are ideas they fancy. They are usually never willing to question it because that's what they've been taught. Inflation occurs for many reasons.
I'm not a big believer in economists understanding of inflation because the physics of how economies physically work. Once you stop thinking in terms of theory and in temrs of observable physical systems you come to understand money is a political conveneience to distribute debt and obligation, since money itself is a double edged sword as a medium of exchange.
Now I'm not saying I have all the answers, but I do know that the way we currently think about money and how we calculate the allocation of resources and obligations in society has
"This system is just not sustainable. How could it ever do anything but ultimately fail? Who are these people who expected it to be a paragon of stability and sustainability?"
The same thing was said about the gold standard, every tom dick and harry intellectual thinks they "know" how to run an economy I call 100% BULLSHIT. Especially austiran economists, some of the most dogmatic, ideologically driven people on the face of the earth.
The real issue is that because society has become so specialized and because we use money as a store of value it's one of the KEY components of why society is so unstable because in a specialized society money must constantly be circulating between people and real goods, the problem is jobs and industries are not permanent in economies, they are constantly in upheaval being moved around, created, or destroyed because and because we only pay people if they have a job or are working, the people without jobs for any length of time start to put stress on the system.
Money ideally is supposed to keep track of debt's and obligations but here's the thing: As a medium of exchange it can't deal with the real world upheavals complexities of specialized society.
Even if austrians got their way by eliminating the fed they would have all the same issues under the gold standard, because monetary policy is only one aspect of the economy, the other is to keep money constantly flowing between those who need it (for necessities) and those who produce them (the businesses), the problem is their becomes large asymmetries because of our technology and ability to do more things with less people, which leaves a huge surplus population in a precarious, temporary and unstable jobs as the march of tech moves on and people simply can't keep up with the real world technological and political changes taking place.
Inflation is nothing more then debt and risk distribution, if Group A charges more for necessities B, the group with the least money is constantly being indebted by inflation.
Certain kinds of inflation (not all kinds) of course is an aspect of using money as a medium of exchange.
"There's a pitfall there - the more your tools do for the user, the less significant their input becomes."
I disagree, your example of the figure 8 track is actally a bad example. For instance you had advanced enough tools you could have tools totally redo the art/themes for the track and also change the rules, but this assumes the figure 8 track is a good design anyway, the design of the area of a level pretty much defines a good chunk of what you can do with it. This is how mods like Hero arena and DOTA for starcraft and warcraft 3 came about - people being able to take existing game mechanics and adding new rules/modifying the game within the game.
If developers could make that whole process easier and less time consuming for the user, a lot of time wouldn't be spent learning the tools so much as just pouring out of raw creativity.
I've done game modding and the biggest hurdle is definitely the developers not grasping that they need to make tools for non technical people. When Bioware released the original neverwintern nights, I became hooked on the toolset even though it had some pretty complicated (for the user) elements like scripting and whatnot. Neverwinter toolset IMHO is a great example of what developers could do if they had enough resources/time or human minds worked faster.
The truth is making a tool that advanced would most likely require a heck of a lot of time and money thrown at it. Part of the reason NWN suffered so badly as a game was because they only had a finite amount of money to throw around, if someone sat down or fantsizing here... the industry pooled it's resources to develop these kinds of tools they could make their games much more a vehicle of creativity for people who can't spend years learning about models, texture maps, UV coordinates, etc, etc.
Quite frankly I'd love to see a company like autodesk take a stab at something like that (gmax doesn't really count) but the whole problem is profitability of said tool would probably be zip since gamers don't buy mod tools, but games.
... the real issue is that tools for generating content are not advanced enough. If you look at a game like Need for speed underground or Galactic civilizations 2 which you can easily design your own ships, this is the beginning of what you need. Or how about the F zero GX for the gamecube with the car designer? You need to do all of the legwork in your tools, you can't expect users to train for years to become artists, programmers, technical people. Thats the *real issue*.
You need the computer to autogenerate and aid in generating content in a big way. People want to create content but the software tools just aren't up to scratch yet.
You should all go get a copy of Galciv 2 and play around with the ship builder, they make it easy for anyone to make stuff without having to learn about texture maps, modelling, etc. They have a bunch of pre-fab pieces with "hardpoints", it's basically like virtual lego set.
If you want people to participate in content creation your tools have to do the vast majority of the legwork. The truth is the software tools for the end user just aren't there yet.
"As a result, recordable optical media is basically worthless except for people burning content to give to other people"
Who backs up their ENTIRE hard drive on DVD or blue ray with hard disks so cheap? You use discs to archive excess stuff you want off your hard disks. The great thing about DVD's and blu-ray discs is that they are not mechanical and not subject to mechanical faliure like hard disks are which is still a significant risk. Just recently I had a hard drive die on me permanently for no reason wouldn't even detect at bootup. Thankfully it was one of the drive's in my RAID array and not my main drive, even though I don't always keep backups of important files on flash or DVD and they take far far less space then a single disc, anything that is replacable or redownloadable (most stuff) is easy to replace.
You put stuff you want to archive on DVD/Blu ray that you want to REMOVE from your hard drive. I have downloaded way more stuff then I could possibly fit on many terabyte hard disks. Trailers for games, movies, anime, youtube videos, etc. I'd be buying hard drives every couple months with the amount of stuff I download.
I also keep raw images of DVD's and blu-ray discs those eat up a lot of hard drive space and the only way to get rid of them is to... you guessed it - burn them!
If your critical information is that important you back up what you cannot replace on many media including hard disks.
I always burn multiple copies of things that I can't afford to lose as well as put important irreplacable files on removable flash media.
Blu-ray is not useless, I use Blu ray and DVD-R's to do a lot of archiving and while hard disks have come down in price they still are not competitive with blank DVD's you can get 100 4.7GB discs for under $20, most 50GB hard drives go for $50+ shipping, even more if it's an external hard disk, even more if it has 5 year warranty. Search Newegg.com for seagate 500gb to see what I mean. You can get 1200+ GB of writable DVD media for the cost of one 500GB hard drive.
"If they would ramp production way up and flood the market with cheap media immediately even before the recorders are available in quantities, people would flock to them in droves. It's counterintuitive, but the only way any optical format will ever be particularly useful to the general consumer is if the industry decides to make it a loss leader for about a year. By the end of that year, you'll have so much adoption that it won't be losing money anymore, "
This I can agree with, but lets not forget the investors of blu ray and DVD couldn't know before hand just how far hard drive would come. Who imagined that you would be able to buy a 2 terabytes for $200 when you were gettting between 4-20 GB in the late 90's.
"Considering that's almost 5 years of entertainment and actually a good game, is that really so much."
Yes it is, think about all the value people who've been playing diablo 2, starcraft and warcraft 3 for the last 10 year or more. Imagine they had to pay 800 per game to maintain their accounts everytime they wanted to play a game a few times a month, that would add up fast, ~180 vs over 1000 is a no brainer, especially since most people have enjoyed these games for well over a decade, that is INCREDIBLE value and sure beats the pants off any MMO, remember you're sinking all that money into a SINGLE game, that is a hell of a lot of money.
If you're a one game kind of person it's not too bad, but if you like to play lots of game's it's terrible, lets not also forget in console land you can RENT a game and finish it on $5-7 and have the game for week or more at a time without ever having to pay full price for games. If you play a lot of games MMO's are a waste of money.
Those people got way more value out of those games and saved the money not spent MMO's elsewhere. 800 bucks is a lot of money to sink into a single game that is not really any better then many other single or multiplayer games that don't have the monthly fee. Not only that you're telling developers you're willing to pay for games that don't innovate or don't take risks.
Not to mention that MMO's cater to the lowest common denominator to keep the barrier of entry extremely low so any drooling fool can play it.
"A time lens can focus a chunk of time to a point,"
Since einstein we really know that space and time is the same thing, we really should just call it "squishing space", since time is really a measurement of a distribution of matter and energy, we've compressed the space (and hence the time).
"Time and space and gravitation have no separate existence from matter. ... Physical objects are not in space, but these objects are spatially extended. In this way the concept 'empty space' loses its meaning. ... Since the theory of general relativity implies the representation of physical reality by a continuous field, the concept of particles or material points cannot play a fundamental part, ... and can only appear as a limited region in space where the field strength / energy density are particularly high."--- (Albert Einstein, 1950)
"Maybe the IT industry should look inwards on itself and consider how we've failed to educate the public about the technology we make them use."
What makes you think the public wants to know? Trust me the public doesn't want to know, it's partly a generational thing and partly a personality thing (for the younger generation).
Most young kids have to know something about tech in order to use it for purposes (games, texting, art, tablet drawing, whatever).
Anyone from the boomer and part of the (earlier born) x'er generation doesn't really want to know and could care less about tech unless it effects them in some way.
There's just too much distraction and overwork in people's daily lives to want to waste what precious little free time they have already on things they just don't want to know.
Now I admit there are some people out there a part of those generations that want to learn and those people I commend but they are not the majority.
Part of it is certain people come to believe that they just aren't smart enough to handle it and part of it I believe is belief in their lack of ability to learn, and also perhaps half consciously they want excuse to be lazy and have other people do the hard work without them realizing it.
For example in my famnily all my family members come to me for advice on what they should buy and what they shouldn't buy, so we geeks/nerds tend to act as a specialist, thinking about stuff so they don't have to.
But mostly I believe its a generational thing, the more you grow up around technology that has been with you since birth you aren't intimidated by it since as children we tend to forget we just asborb a slurry of new stuff a lot easier then many adults and plus we have oodles of free time, energy and motivation to do so.
Most peoples great ideas for games suck, it takes a lot of trial and error to find something that will appeal to people. And often times mediocrity is what appeals to the masses.
"It is amusing that game companies want to shut down used game sales. Maybe they should work on making timeless games with good content."
The truth is games are over produced, and those that are produced are produced by companies that are driven by the demands of shareholders for short term profits.
You can see this with EA's pushing out Need for speed every year, I feel sorry for blackbox I bet they were forced to release NFS carbon before it was ready. Most wanted was excellent but carbon was so obviously pushed out, and/or the key people responsible for most wanted left.
I agree making good games works but not all godo games sell, there are lots of good games that failed financially.
Planescape torment and Freespace 2 come to mind, FS2 is hailed as one of the best space sims of all time yet it flopped finacnially and volition went to making FPS games for consoles to keep itself alive.
Timeless game does not always equal financially successful. We see this time and time again with companies making me too clones of FPS, RTS and racing every year.
"Yeah, I have to agree: I don't see Nvidia dying anytime soon, but I have to say that (barring some impressive new market), their days of growth are over."
Doubtful, no one other then AMD is able to succesfully compete in the graphics market, also AMD does not have any GPU's or ultra mobile devices, and that market is simply enormous and nvidia is hoping with their next gen mobile chip to get into everything from phones to portable video players, that is a growth market. High perf, low power graphics chips for mobile devices if the can pull it off (and the killer apps come along) will definitely be a growth area.
Bloat isn't bad if it's necessary or addds more value then the performance takes. The real problem IMHO is that human beings still aren't very good at designing software, there's just too much to keep track of as projects get really large.
"how have survival rates been for the Wii?"
My guess is good BUT.... I was an owner of first generation Wii and they had terrible heatsinks you'd see artifacts in metroid 3 which would drive you nuts. I called them and got a replacement thankfully.
Sigh you don't get it, you should check out this documentary on daniel tammet.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqLzoiVzEY8
Watch the whole thing when you get the time. Notice his unusual experience of numbers as shapes.