Isnt the registered office address of any company a matter of public record in the US?
In the UK all limited liability companies have their registered office listed for the public record at Companies House (curiously only available from Monday to Saturday 07:00 - 12 Midnight UK Time).
Granted it's only their legal address and not necessarily where anyone goes on a daily basis (a lot of really small companies use their accountants address) and I think there are some exceptions made e.g. for animal testing companies who are subjected to violent activists.
Free market is not about making cheaper, it is about allocating scarce resources better. Cheaper does not always equal better - only when the product is entirely homogeneous. One reason US healthcare could be more expensive is the public values healthcare more highly than government, resulting in more expensive but higher quality healthcare. People can/will/dont-have-any-choice-but-to pay more in US. American individuals do not however have the collective barganing power that the UK government does, nor can they offer the scale economies on their choices.
Also, I speak from ignorance but got the impression that in US anybody in any kind of medical business has an awful lot of insurance to pay. This is not an overhead that a business can reduce without also increasing their risk, and hence their required reward. Increased overheads means the equillibrium point (maximum free market efficiency) is at a higher price.
There are also numerous reasons for possible free market failure, perhaps most obvious assumption is that there are significant barriers to new suppliers entering the market. Further, "efficiency" as an economic term does not necessarily have a similar meaning when put into the context of a good so firmly in the public interest as healthcare.
FWIW, The NHS is horribly inefficient and expensive, and has been from the moment the public figured out it was important.
doesn't have any motive to make any money off of this
Well, they could and likely will do, in a roundabout way sometime in the future. The method is just as you state:
some burgeoning programmer will have many sleepless nights ahead spending his/her own time learning the tips and tricks employed in this source code
People like potential future id employees, potential new firms like Splashdamage, potential authors of game-selling modifications. with this release there's more people with an excellent oppertunity to gain some interest, skills and experience of game code - even better, of id's code. Then there's the karma rating.
Just because there's no direct accountability of how id will eventually make a return on this, doesnt mean releasing code under GPL isnt good business acumen.
(I realise this is probably more inline with rather than contrary to what you meant and I dont mean to rebuke.)
I assume the figures for recordable-media piracy are propped up heavily from countries where broadband is rare while pirate stalls are common. While in Moscow, I couldnt aviod the stalls selling pirate music, software and games were all over the place - especially in the subways but even right outside the enterance to shopping malls.
I'd also expect that this piracy has a much stronger effect (by ratio) on actual sales. Whereas obtaining MP3 is causal and it's so easy to obtain a song you're not yet particularily interested in, getting a pirated CD takes considered effort and is more of a substitute for shopping.
I can easily envision someone downloading MP3 to check out songs for later purchase, but if you've got an exact duplicate (especially if you've paid for it), few would bother following up with a ligit purchase. There's almost no difference between a pirated CD and a purchased one, bar packaging.
What concerns me is when will they start to connect ingame advertising with the likes of GameSpy logins?
It's temping to assume it would be the idea of some seedy spyware company and only allowed by some cheap money grabbing whores like EA. But in the mind of marketers, it's an honest and well-intended system to make their advertising targeted and more effective - on the surface a positive thing.
And where's the revenue for the guys paying the running costs for the servers hosting these ads? No way I'd be SomeServerHost.com and paying for cpu and bandwidth of a machine serving someone else's ads for Coke - or worse, SomeOtherServerHost.com. Then there's going to be the paying customers asking why they pay full retail rate despite the thing being choked with ads.
It's not all negative, advertising will result in a stream of income that is tied to the number of players they have and the lengh of time they can keep them playing. This means better support, for longer. Advertising has the potential to be a real positive benefit to gamers, developers and the industry in general. If it's done properly. The problem is, I've little faith in marketers, and the only people to watch over them are the publishers, who I hardly value any higher these days.
Am I right in thinking that all you need is one person to figure out how to bypass it (I also assume this is highly likely to happen sooner rather than later) and then there's nothing to prevent "indiscriminate redistribution... over digital networks"? Also, likely many countries wont support the broadcast flag, yet the studios will still want to sell shows.
I'd have thought all this would do is prevent Joe recording a programme for Jane. If anything "digital networks" get more users because it becomes the only alternative to recording at home, alternatives even Joe Public is used to, so maybe he becomes more comfortable with the idea of downloading the show missed because he had to work late.
Mandatory penalties are a really bad idea. Punishments should always fit the crime, not the usual severity of broadly similar crimes. Mandatory penalties work OK for minor things with minor penalties, where frequency and relevent similarity is high, like parking tickets for example.
25 years in prison should never be a mandatory punishment, especially not when set by politicians who are liable to be interested in making political capital out of public hysteria. Common or recommended punishment for certain things perhaps, but a judge should always have the ability to allow for the exceptions - wether it be stricter or lighter than usual.
No, it's horribly biased by British culture. I remember during the DC sniper case, their American correspondent couldn't get it through her head that Americans weren't going to rise up and demand a national gun ban. She went into a gun-store like it was a weapons depot in some third-world country.
Is this evidence of a culture-biased BBC, or a culture-biased YOU not being able to get it through your head that increasing restrictions on firearms could be seen as a natural and logical result of such an occurance? An event like that in Britain would certainly have led to such calls for banning guns (google Dunblane for example), so it is an interesting aspect worth reporting on when another culture does no such thing.
Cultural bias comes from every direction there's a culture at. Many countries find American gun ownership laws bizarre in the extreme, and judging by the popularity of Michael Moore, so do quite a few Americans (note I said the popularity of Moore, wether he's right or wrong is irrespective of the point).
I read a while ago an article (IIRC from The Guardian, whom almost certainly finds BBC as it's biggest competetor online) complaining how BBC websites are paid by the domestic licence fee and yet a massive chunk of it's cost is from foreign readers.
You cant just buy that kind of advertising of British culture, or influence of British values. Nobody ever complained about people in Africa learning English (proper English, I might add) from BBC Worldwide. Online: Americans, Chinese, Iraqis, perhaps a few North Koreans read from a perspective alien to their domestic news corporations. Anyway how many of these foreign connections are British overseas? Pretty much every Briton I know who travels reads BBC website every time they get 'net access in order to catch up with whats going on at home.
Try Newsnight or Question Time, both essentially news programmes. Not incedentally, it's Newsnight's Paxman who is famous for interrogating guests, particularily repeating a question to Michael Howard 14 times because he wasnt satisfied that he got a proper answer (I think there's a video but I dont have Realplayer). Being interviewed by Paxman is seen like some kind of hazing ritual by policicians. Question Time has the public giving the policicians a hammering - especially the recent election special one.
FWIW I watch both BBC and Ch4 news, and would agree with you that Ch4 is more analytical, but taken in the context of news coverage rather than just newscasts and I think BBC actually takes it, though both are commendable.
Goldeneye had a well designed control system, on an unusually suitable controller. But, the main thing that made Goldeneye so good was that the game was not designed to be a mouse+kb game with some pad controls hacked on. Instead, what they did was design Goldeneye with the controller in mind. Mouse and keyboard would have sucked for Goldeneye, even worse than the same N64 controller did for QuakeII.
People say different games work better on different input hardware all the time, but then follow on with some example like Tekken vs Quake, always crossing genre. It makes for convenient examples, but also implies the main reason is genre, when it's actually game design.
PS. aim-assist was only for the easy difficulty levels on Goldeneye, and not normally enabled for multiplayer. I found it harder to land headshots quickly with it anyway. Speaking of aim-assist, there's plenty of PC gamers using that online:/
While that might seem an attractive option to some, helpdesk employees worldwide are screaming at the thought of the association for.doc and.rtf files suddenly switching to Wordpad.
Jhon's solution is much better. Why switch program when you can have your firewall 'take care' of your work for you?
Linux and Firefox hold the world's imagination these days, not Windows and Explorer.
A small fraction of the computer-using world have even heard of Linux, and of those who have, a huge majority can only imagine, because they have never directly used it.
MS have lost some of their dominance, and will lose a little more. They wont collapse any time soon, not while they have real prospect of a decent P/E ratio and not unless something really amazing comes along to do REAL harm to Windows, Office et al. Famous last words and all that, but such amazing things are unpredictable almost by default.
MS seems to be having poor "leadership and vision" right now, these things come and go. The smell has probably been there since they moved out of Gates' garage, such things dont come and go so easily.
I cant actually think of anything I do that requires the second mouse button, or has it as a primary function for anything. Ditto for any but the main one of the 10 buttons on this thing.
When I purchased this replacement mouse, I had imagined that the other people who occasional make use of my PC would be confused by all these buttons at least at first, but to my surprise they simply ignore unfamiliar buttons and use what they know. Even though these people have very little experience of computers and even need me to connect since "the internet button [IE icon] doesnt work", physical objects cause no such problems. Due to good design carefully placing these buttons, I've not had anyone yet even get confused due to accidentally hitting a button.
Each of the extra buttons is simply useful if you want them. I use all but one of them (some Logitech Program Selector, maybe I can change it to always go to WinAmp or something).
You're supposed to tweak like a l33t gamer. r_mapoverbrightbits is a favourite for brightening it up without either burning retinas or making it too fugly.
The millenium bridge? It was never unsafe. The issue resulted from the engineer subcontracted didnt figure for the tendency for people to step in unison, and this tendency to increase with rhythm of movement. The issue with it was merely that it made people on the bridge feel uncomfortable, and the fix was simply to make the dampers more rigid.
The author seems to remember to consider that Quake4 will show that DOOM3's engine can (or be made to) do outdoor environments reasonably, and then forgets about Quake4 when it comes to likely networking improvements. He also fails to mention the post-DOOM3 deal with Creative, which means sound will improve on other games using the engine.
I doubt id will be selling the "DOOM3" engine to other devs in the future, rather they will be selling the base DOOM3 engine plus the additions they made to it with other games. Right now that's namely Quake4, but in the future enhancements for RTCW2 and their "new IP" game will come with the engine sales too.
This is a very sensible approach towards continuous development of an engine that took rather a lot of investment. It also follows on from previous id methods: if you buy the Quake3 engine now, it's actually the RTCW engine - and probably with more enhancements e.g. the scripted movers from Enemy Territory. Naturally id wouldnt be using assets of completely 3rd party developers --they will have various different contracts and engine-packages, like any company who sells extremely complex services to other businesses-- but they will for games they co-develop (like they did with RTCW, ET, and are doing with Quake4). id's approach regarding their game-engine product seems to be changing only that while RTCW enhancements were made because they realised they had to react to the market and improve their product, this time it's planned. Hollenshead probably has a lot to do with this, from what he learned working as a consultant (with AndersenConsulting IIRC, I cant find the interview someone made at a Qcon where I found this out).
Soley comparing the game DOOM3 with the game HL2 to decide what engine product to develop on would be like comparing two spin-off products which were built on incomplete versions of the engine products available to you. You'd also be forgetting other services the companies may be able to provide for you. To make the choice you're really going to have to plan your requirements and then contact id & valve and see what they have to offer.
Apple one-upped Gillette by making money on both blades and razors.
But... Microsoft one-upped Apple by selling only the blades!
Or, Gillette invented one business model which has done it extremely well over a relatively very long period, while Apple is using the old "make money on everything" model, and is also doing really well with it.
Non-competing companies only "one-up" each other with finance-related percentages (and this is the only way all companies are competitors, competeting for investors).
Policicians meddling where they are not needed, or wanted. The argument that inmates should not be enjoying themselves playing computer games can be applied immediately with regard to other forms of entertainment and it shows how ridiculous it is.
A week with little stimulus for entertainment is a long, long time for anyone, and almost certainly not good for them. For people who spend a lot of time locked in a small room, and are only allowed to go outdoors even for excercise at specified times, thumbs get idle.
Neither, I'd wager, is it good for weaning criminals from nasty habits. Ever tried to give up smoking (read: drugs, kicking the crap out of people) with nothing engaging to keep you occupied?
Video games can make for some good, and convenient entertainment - can start and stop playing more or less exactly when you want, and its very engrossing. Sure, prisoners shouldnt be spending all day playing games, but an hour or two in the evening is an easy reward for good behavior that wardens can control comparatively easily.
One of the key skills of management is knowing when to leave responsibility and decision-making with those below you who are positioned best.
As is to be expected, some of the bigger files are downloading slowly, I'm currently downloading the 210mb of bot (2nd place movie) goodness at about 15kb/s.
Any torrents (or at least major mirrors) going around for the bigger files?
hmm I would like to know which video game it ran to get equal performance. Also, was the game software rendered or was there a graphics chipset involved?
I find it odd they do not mention the game, but even more odd is the wording was said to be comparable, which seems to confirm PCWorld is regurgitating rather than writing from witnessing it themselves.
"Comparable" is also rather vague, comparable as in they both seemed playable or comparable in that they both scored 63.4 in the timedemo benchmark?
Slashdot Mirror
Isnt the registered office address of any company a matter of public record in the US?
In the UK all limited liability companies have their registered office listed for the public record at Companies House (curiously only available from Monday to Saturday 07:00 - 12 Midnight UK Time).
Granted it's only their legal address and not necessarily where anyone goes on a daily basis (a lot of really small companies use their accountants address) and I think there are some exceptions made e.g. for animal testing companies who are subjected to violent activists.
Free market is not about making cheaper, it is about allocating scarce resources better. Cheaper does not always equal better - only when the product is entirely homogeneous. One reason US healthcare could be more expensive is the public values healthcare more highly than government, resulting in more expensive but higher quality healthcare. People can/will/dont-have-any-choice-but-to pay more in US. American individuals do not however have the collective barganing power that the UK government does, nor can they offer the scale economies on their choices.
Also, I speak from ignorance but got the impression that in US anybody in any kind of medical business has an awful lot of insurance to pay. This is not an overhead that a business can reduce without also increasing their risk, and hence their required reward. Increased overheads means the equillibrium point (maximum free market efficiency) is at a higher price.
There are also numerous reasons for possible free market failure, perhaps most obvious assumption is that there are significant barriers to new suppliers entering the market. Further, "efficiency" as an economic term does not necessarily have a similar meaning when put into the context of a good so firmly in the public interest as healthcare.
FWIW, The NHS is horribly inefficient and expensive, and has been from the moment the public figured out it was important.
Well, they could and likely will do, in a roundabout way sometime in the future. The method is just as you state:
People like potential future id employees, potential new firms like Splashdamage, potential authors of game-selling modifications. with this release there's more people with an excellent oppertunity to gain some interest, skills and experience of game code - even better, of id's code. Then there's the karma rating.
Just because there's no direct accountability of how id will eventually make a return on this, doesnt mean releasing code under GPL isnt good business acumen.
(I realise this is probably more inline with rather than contrary to what you meant and I dont mean to rebuke.)
I assume the figures for recordable-media piracy are propped up heavily from countries where broadband is rare while pirate stalls are common. While in Moscow, I couldnt aviod the stalls selling pirate music, software and games were all over the place - especially in the subways but even right outside the enterance to shopping malls.
I'd also expect that this piracy has a much stronger effect (by ratio) on actual sales. Whereas obtaining MP3 is causal and it's so easy to obtain a song you're not yet particularily interested in, getting a pirated CD takes considered effort and is more of a substitute for shopping.
I can easily envision someone downloading MP3 to check out songs for later purchase, but if you've got an exact duplicate (especially if you've paid for it), few would bother following up with a ligit purchase. There's almost no difference between a pirated CD and a purchased one, bar packaging.
What concerns me is when will they start to connect ingame advertising with the likes of GameSpy logins?
It's temping to assume it would be the idea of some seedy spyware company and only allowed by some cheap money grabbing whores like EA. But in the mind of marketers, it's an honest and well-intended system to make their advertising targeted and more effective - on the surface a positive thing.
And where's the revenue for the guys paying the running costs for the servers hosting these ads? No way I'd be SomeServerHost.com and paying for cpu and bandwidth of a machine serving someone else's ads for Coke - or worse, SomeOtherServerHost.com. Then there's going to be the paying customers asking why they pay full retail rate despite the thing being choked with ads.
It's not all negative, advertising will result in a stream of income that is tied to the number of players they have and the lengh of time they can keep them playing. This means better support, for longer. Advertising has the potential to be a real positive benefit to gamers, developers and the industry in general. If it's done properly. The problem is, I've little faith in marketers, and the only people to watch over them are the publishers, who I hardly value any higher these days.
Am I right in thinking that all you need is one person to figure out how to bypass it (I also assume this is highly likely to happen sooner rather than later) and then there's nothing to prevent "indiscriminate redistribution ... over digital networks"? Also, likely many countries wont support the broadcast flag, yet the studios will still want to sell shows.
I'd have thought all this would do is prevent Joe recording a programme for Jane. If anything "digital networks" get more users because it becomes the only alternative to recording at home, alternatives even Joe Public is used to, so maybe he becomes more comfortable with the idea of downloading the show missed because he had to work late.
Mandatory penalties are a really bad idea. Punishments should always fit the crime, not the usual severity of broadly similar crimes. Mandatory penalties work OK for minor things with minor penalties, where frequency and relevent similarity is high, like parking tickets for example.
25 years in prison should never be a mandatory punishment, especially not when set by politicians who are liable to be interested in making political capital out of public hysteria. Common or recommended punishment for certain things perhaps, but a judge should always have the ability to allow for the exceptions - wether it be stricter or lighter than usual.
Is this evidence of a culture-biased BBC, or a culture-biased YOU not being able to get it through your head that increasing restrictions on firearms could be seen as a natural and logical result of such an occurance? An event like that in Britain would certainly have led to such calls for banning guns (google Dunblane for example), so it is an interesting aspect worth reporting on when another culture does no such thing.
Cultural bias comes from every direction there's a culture at. Many countries find American gun ownership laws bizarre in the extreme, and judging by the popularity of Michael Moore, so do quite a few Americans (note I said the popularity of Moore, wether he's right or wrong is irrespective of the point).
I read a while ago an article (IIRC from The Guardian, whom almost certainly finds BBC as it's biggest competetor online) complaining how BBC websites are paid by the domestic licence fee and yet a massive chunk of it's cost is from foreign readers.
You cant just buy that kind of advertising of British culture, or influence of British values. Nobody ever complained about people in Africa learning English (proper English, I might add) from BBC Worldwide. Online: Americans, Chinese, Iraqis, perhaps a few North Koreans read from a perspective alien to their domestic news corporations. Anyway how many of these foreign connections are British overseas? Pretty much every Briton I know who travels reads BBC website every time they get 'net access in order to catch up with whats going on at home.
Try Newsnight or Question Time, both essentially news programmes. Not incedentally, it's Newsnight's Paxman who is famous for interrogating guests, particularily repeating a question to Michael Howard 14 times because he wasnt satisfied that he got a proper answer (I think there's a video but I dont have Realplayer). Being interviewed by Paxman is seen like some kind of hazing ritual by policicians. Question Time has the public giving the policicians a hammering - especially the recent election special one.
FWIW I watch both BBC and Ch4 news, and would agree with you that Ch4 is more analytical, but taken in the context of news coverage rather than just newscasts and I think BBC actually takes it, though both are commendable.
Goldeneye had a well designed control system, on an unusually suitable controller. But, the main thing that made Goldeneye so good was that the game was not designed to be a mouse+kb game with some pad controls hacked on. Instead, what they did was design Goldeneye with the controller in mind. Mouse and keyboard would have sucked for Goldeneye, even worse than the same N64 controller did for QuakeII.
People say different games work better on different input hardware all the time, but then follow on with some example like Tekken vs Quake, always crossing genre. It makes for convenient examples, but also implies the main reason is genre, when it's actually game design.
PS. aim-assist was only for the easy difficulty levels on Goldeneye, and not normally enabled for multiplayer. I found it harder to land headshots quickly with it anyway. Speaking of aim-assist, there's plenty of PC gamers using that online :/
MS have lost some of their dominance, and will lose a little more. They wont collapse any time soon, not while they have real prospect of a decent P/E ratio and not unless something really amazing comes along to do REAL harm to Windows, Office et al. Famous last words and all that, but such amazing things are unpredictable almost by default.
MS seems to be having poor "leadership and vision" right now, these things come and go. The smell has probably been there since they moved out of Gates' garage, such things dont come and go so easily.
They told the US, and every other country who offered it, that their armed forces were not required to maintain law & order.
assign an extra mouse button to Show Desktop, failing that keystroke (windows+m).
Next time the bastards are on strike this [.swf] [bad language] [etc] is getting blasted out at every station.
I cant actually think of anything I do that requires the second mouse button, or has it as a primary function for anything. Ditto for any but the main one of the 10 buttons on this thing.
When I purchased this replacement mouse, I had imagined that the other people who occasional make use of my PC would be confused by all these buttons at least at first, but to my surprise they simply ignore unfamiliar buttons and use what they know. Even though these people have very little experience of computers and even need me to connect since "the internet button [IE icon] doesnt work", physical objects cause no such problems. Due to good design carefully placing these buttons, I've not had anyone yet even get confused due to accidentally hitting a button.
Each of the extra buttons is simply useful if you want them. I use all but one of them (some Logitech Program Selector, maybe I can change it to always go to WinAmp or something).
(I did not RTFA because it is slashdotted)
You're supposed to tweak like a l33t gamer. r_mapoverbrightbits is a favourite for brightening it up without either burning retinas or making it too fugly.
The millenium bridge? It was never unsafe. The issue resulted from the engineer subcontracted didnt figure for the tendency for people to step in unison, and this tendency to increase with rhythm of movement. The issue with it was merely that it made people on the bridge feel uncomfortable, and the fix was simply to make the dampers more rigid.
The author seems to remember to consider that Quake4 will show that DOOM3's engine can (or be made to) do outdoor environments reasonably, and then forgets about Quake4 when it comes to likely networking improvements. He also fails to mention the post-DOOM3 deal with Creative, which means sound will improve on other games using the engine.
I doubt id will be selling the "DOOM3" engine to other devs in the future, rather they will be selling the base DOOM3 engine plus the additions they made to it with other games. Right now that's namely Quake4, but in the future enhancements for RTCW2 and their "new IP" game will come with the engine sales too.
This is a very sensible approach towards continuous development of an engine that took rather a lot of investment. It also follows on from previous id methods: if you buy the Quake3 engine now, it's actually the RTCW engine - and probably with more enhancements e.g. the scripted movers from Enemy Territory. Naturally id wouldnt be using assets of completely 3rd party developers --they will have various different contracts and engine-packages, like any company who sells extremely complex services to other businesses-- but they will for games they co-develop (like they did with RTCW, ET, and are doing with Quake4). id's approach regarding their game-engine product seems to be changing only that while RTCW enhancements were made because they realised they had to react to the market and improve their product, this time it's planned. Hollenshead probably has a lot to do with this, from what he learned working as a consultant (with AndersenConsulting IIRC, I cant find the interview someone made at a Qcon where I found this out).
Soley comparing the game DOOM3 with the game HL2 to decide what engine product to develop on would be like comparing two spin-off products which were built on incomplete versions of the engine products available to you. You'd also be forgetting other services the companies may be able to provide for you. To make the choice you're really going to have to plan your requirements and then contact id & valve and see what they have to offer.
But... Microsoft one-upped Apple by selling only the blades!
Or, Gillette invented one business model which has done it extremely well over a relatively very long period, while Apple is using the old "make money on everything" model, and is also doing really well with it.
Non-competing companies only "one-up" each other with finance-related percentages (and this is the only way all companies are competitors, competeting for investors).
Policicians meddling where they are not needed, or wanted. The argument that inmates should not be enjoying themselves playing computer games can be applied immediately with regard to other forms of entertainment and it shows how ridiculous it is.
A week with little stimulus for entertainment is a long, long time for anyone, and almost certainly not good for them. For people who spend a lot of time locked in a small room, and are only allowed to go outdoors even for excercise at specified times, thumbs get idle.
Neither, I'd wager, is it good for weaning criminals from nasty habits. Ever tried to give up smoking (read: drugs, kicking the crap out of people) with nothing engaging to keep you occupied?
Video games can make for some good, and convenient entertainment - can start and stop playing more or less exactly when you want, and its very engrossing. Sure, prisoners shouldnt be spending all day playing games, but an hour or two in the evening is an easy reward for good behavior that wardens can control comparatively easily.
One of the key skills of management is knowing when to leave responsibility and decision-making with those below you who are positioned best.
As is to be expected, some of the bigger files are downloading slowly, I'm currently downloading the 210mb of bot (2nd place movie) goodness at about 15kb/s.
Any torrents (or at least major mirrors) going around for the bigger files?
I find it odd they do not mention the game, but even more odd is the wording was said to be comparable, which seems to confirm PCWorld is regurgitating rather than writing from witnessing it themselves.
"Comparable" is also rather vague, comparable as in they both seemed playable or comparable in that they both scored 63.4 in the timedemo benchmark?