If I ever have kids, I can envision in a decade or two saying "Yes Timmy, when I was younger, we really did have people whose job it was to take content from productive members of society and sell it on to consumers, whilst pocketing 95% of the profits themselves and passing a meagre 5% to the actual content producer". It sounds stupid now, god knows how stupid it'll sound in a few decades, but hey, it's not like it's the only non-industry in the world I suppose.
You are, of course, neglecting the part where those people pocketing 95% of the profit were paying the other party's expenses (office space, salaries, etc.) for months or years. So no, they aren't doing nothing; they're floating the studio the money they need to survive and make the game, in exchange for (they hope) a return on investment at retail.
DRM would double their income if that 90% and 80% are of the same volume of sales. There's no way to prove the validity of that assumption, though, so your argument has no basis.
Googling her name and Oracle reveals a bunch of listserv postings with her name and oracle.com and (on older ones) sun.com e-mail addresses. If it's a fake, they chose a viable person to imitate.
OpenGL works well... for the features it provides. Direct3D still has a larger feature set, as well as the added bonus of the other DirectX APIs.
There are cases where OpenGL makes sense, but if your target is Windows and you want features like Tesselation, it doesn't make any sense to cripple yourself for the sake of possible ports down the road.
Ah. Turns out that Activision handles distribution of LucasArts titles in Europe and Asia. Which would explain why you're seeing the logo, and I'm not on my North American copy.:)
I still don't think it's fair to say that Activision is milking them, though, if they don't have "power of creation" over the titles.
i wonder, what kind of hardware would it take to render babylon 5 quality animations today?
Not much—the first few seasons of B5 were rendered on Amigas. Desktop computers nowadays probably have the processing horsepower; it's the software & skill that's harder to come by.
My cable box, what looks like a Motorola DCT3416 (don't have the unit in front of me) uses about 40W of power whether the unit is on or not. Neither Motorola nor the cable company care about the fact that it adds $4 per month to the power bill.
On the one hand, that box sounds like a piece of crap. On the other hand, that's a cable box + DVR, which is a bit more involved than the digital-to-analog adapters under discussion here.
Nor do they care that the UI is an utter disaster. For example, to turn on or off Closed captioning, you have to turn off the unit, press menu, and access it in the service menu. You can't just use the TV's CC decoder because it's garbled on digital channels from the box.
How do you have the box hooked up to your TV? As I understand it, HDMI and component don't support the normal closed captions (they might on 480i/480p content, but they definitely don't at higher resolutions), which means it has to be the box or nothing. Not that the UI isn't shit for how you have to turn them on, but I doubt the box is going out of its way to garble them.
100W per box is way high; the model Comcast gave me (the Motorola DTA100) uses 5.37 watts while on, per the manufacturer. Not nothing, but over an order of magnitude better than you're claiming.
That's how it's normally done at present, but you indicated that everyone should be able to do so. You failed "to see how keeping the names out of the public record stops anyone from verifying the legitimacy of the signature". Well, I'm anyone. If I can't see the signature, I can't verify its legitimacy.
Well... I agree that ePub is the way to go. But so far there's no fully-compliant readers that I'm aware of; at a minimum, nobody supports the official page-mapping method. (Adobe has their own, implemented in most ePub-supporting devices, but books implementing it violate the ePub spec.)
"Check the license" of a developer-supplied binary? Unless the developer says somewhere that it's using an incompatible license Apple has no way of knowing...
Slashdot Mirror
If I ever have kids, I can envision in a decade or two saying "Yes Timmy, when I was younger, we really did have people whose job it was to take content from productive members of society and sell it on to consumers, whilst pocketing 95% of the profits themselves and passing a meagre 5% to the actual content producer". It sounds stupid now, god knows how stupid it'll sound in a few decades, but hey, it's not like it's the only non-industry in the world I suppose.
You are, of course, neglecting the part where those people pocketing 95% of the profit were paying the other party's expenses (office space, salaries, etc.) for months or years. So no, they aren't doing nothing; they're floating the studio the money they need to survive and make the game, in exchange for (they hope) a return on investment at retail.
DRM would double their income if that 90% and 80% are of the same volume of sales. There's no way to prove the validity of that assumption, though, so your argument has no basis.
TFA implies (though admittedly doesn't seem to outright state) that it's being deployed on the school's hardware, not students'.
Elsewhere in the world, perhaps. In the United States, they insert it for you while you're walking through Security at the airport.
Googling her name and Oracle reveals a bunch of listserv postings with her name and oracle.com and (on older ones) sun.com e-mail addresses. If it's a fake, they chose a viable person to imitate.
OpenGL works well... for the features it provides. Direct3D still has a larger feature set, as well as the added bonus of the other DirectX APIs.
There are cases where OpenGL makes sense, but if your target is Windows and you want features like Tesselation, it doesn't make any sense to cripple yourself for the sake of possible ports down the road.
Jet injector, aka a hypospray.
Ah. Turns out that Activision handles distribution of LucasArts titles in Europe and Asia. Which would explain why you're seeing the logo, and I'm not on my North American copy. :)
I still don't think it's fair to say that Activision is milking them, though, if they don't have "power of creation" over the titles.
The free market can't handle it in the US anymore, though; there's too much government interference in the process as things stand.
That would be logical if Activision were at all involved in the Lego games. They aren't. LucasArts and Warner Brothers have been publishing them.
Yeah, putting the government in charge would _really_ improve airline travel.
I think the point wasn't "put them in charge to improve it", it was "put them in charge so the right people get blamed for the failures"
i wonder, what kind of hardware would it take to render babylon 5 quality animations today?
Not much—the first few seasons of B5 were rendered on Amigas. Desktop computers nowadays probably have the processing horsepower; it's the software & skill that's harder to come by.
My cable box, what looks like a Motorola DCT3416 (don't have the unit in front of me) uses about 40W of power whether the unit is on or not. Neither Motorola nor the cable company care about the fact that it adds $4 per month to the power bill.
On the one hand, that box sounds like a piece of crap. On the other hand, that's a cable box + DVR, which is a bit more involved than the digital-to-analog adapters under discussion here.
Nor do they care that the UI is an utter disaster. For example, to turn on or off Closed captioning, you have to turn off the unit, press menu, and access it in the service menu. You can't just use the TV's CC decoder because it's garbled on digital channels from the box.
How do you have the box hooked up to your TV? As I understand it, HDMI and component don't support the normal closed captions (they might on 480i/480p content, but they definitely don't at higher resolutions), which means it has to be the box or nothing. Not that the UI isn't shit for how you have to turn them on, but I doubt the box is going out of its way to garble them.
100W per box is way high; the model Comcast gave me (the Motorola DTA100) uses 5.37 watts while on, per the manufacturer. Not nothing, but over an order of magnitude better than you're claiming.
Tabs on top makes sense. Tabs as the window's title bar doesn't.
Nope, my Samsung t459 dumbphone supports 850 and 900. It might be the first smartphone to support both...?
That's how it's normally done at present, but you indicated that everyone should be able to do so. You failed "to see how keeping the names out of the public record stops anyone from verifying the legitimacy of the signature". Well, I'm anyone. If I can't see the signature, I can't verify its legitimacy.
How am I supposed to verify a signature that I can't see, because it's not part of the public record?
Funny. I've never had that happen with UPS, only with the USPS.
Is your "four hours" with wifi on or off? GP obviously has it on, which will suck the battery like there's no tomorrow.
He said it was the fourth model, it's just not the fourth generation (rolling the iPhone 3G and the 3GS into the same, second generation).
The Blu-ray-quality movie? No, you're still buffering it.
Well... I agree that ePub is the way to go. But so far there's no fully-compliant readers that I'm aware of; at a minimum, nobody supports the official page-mapping method. (Adobe has their own, implemented in most ePub-supporting devices, but books implementing it violate the ePub spec.)
"Check the license" of a developer-supplied binary? Unless the developer says somewhere that it's using an incompatible license Apple has no way of knowing...
Umm..., no I don't have the option to return it for a refund; the store won't take it back once opened.