Its only a problematic theory if you don't look at the big picture. XBox 360 has been out a year and has one jRPG. PS3 and Wii were just launched. Then you have the fact that the XBox 360 is a successor to a console that failed to release games of interest to the Japanese market throughout its entire lifespan. Its only natural that Japanese gamers aren't rushing out to buy an expensive console from a company who has demonstrated it doesn't know how to create entertainment appropriate for the market. One jRPG is basically nothing in the grand scheme of thing, especially when you compare it to the PS2's huge library.
And the fact of the matter is, that Blue Dragon did move 360 consoles in Japan.
I realize its trendy for XBox fans to blame failure in Japan on xenophobia or nationalism. Fact of the matter is that Japanese will buy plenty of foreign goods, including American, if they appeal to them. I saw plenty of American movies, music, and clothes in Japan. iPod is the number one selling player there. Write games that cater to their tastes, and they'll buy them.
Artists don't have a natural right to control how their work is used after they distribute it. Copyright is a contract between creators and society, where we give them a short term monopoly on distributor to encourage them to contribute to the public domain. Setting copyright lengths to life defeats the purpose.
Honestly, I'd say 5 to 10 years is more than fair. If you haven't made money off of your stuff by then, then you're not likely to.
Point being that copyright is supposed to benefit us by benefiting them.
No the 360 launch was a lot better than this. At this time last year, 360s were still unavailable. PS3 is currently doing poorly. Despite unit shortages, they're meeting demand, and this early in the console lifetime thats a bad thing.
PS3 doesn't have any killer apps right now. Of the games out, the only one I hear about is Resistance, and even then its not a must have title. We'll have to wait and see what kind of exclusives Sony can pull out. MGS4 and FFXIII will move units, I'm sure.
Because the XBox simply doesn't have the kinds of games that Japanese gamers traditionally enjoy. That is, Japanese style RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and dating sim style games.
The XBox software is very American, which isn't a bad thing at all, but it does mean that it doesn't sell well in Japan.
Nope. If anything I think its too easy. You just have to click ok, and don't even have to put in your password. On my Linux machine, I have to sudo and put in a password to install software.
The article is pretty much a near-spyware maker crying that Microsoft started shipping their software with a slightly more secure default setting.
That's just my opinion of the thing, anyway. We can't keep throwing 'monopoly' at MS to prevent them from doing anything at all. Though obviously that makes me pretty unpopular on Slashdot, eh?
Nope, I agree with your sentiment. I think the level of, "You can't do that because you have a monopoly!" has gotten a bit ridiculous.
But the question isn't whether they have a monopoly in the game console market, its whether or not they're leveraging their monopoly to unfairly compete in another market. For example, with the Netscape-IE thing, the problem was that they used their monopoly in Windows to kill off Netscape.
But I agree with you despite that point. While they are using monopoly profits to push the XBox, I don't see anything that implies they're doing so unfairly. Their console seems to be priced fairly, and they haven't been pulling any tricks that Sony and Nintendo haven't been doing. About their worst sin is buying out Bungie to get an exclusive killer app, which isn't even a blip on the radar.
There are no XBox profits. XBox consistently loses money. The original XBox, when alls said and done, lost something on the order of several billion dollars. They can do this because of Windows and Office profits. So, the OP has a point.
Well, its not like hobbyists can develop for PS3 or the Wii in the first place. And if you're talking about OSX and Linux market share, I doubt many hobbyists would feel the market share was large enough to warrant using a different set of tools.
I was asked for a code sample only once. More common was to email me a quiz that involved a simple coding problem. But even that was fairly rare, as most companies just did a quick phone screen and got me to whiteboard stuff in interviews.
What I did when I was asked was simply state that all my relevant work in the language they asked for was done for my current job, and thus I couldn't disclose any of the code to them in good concious. I then asked them if, instead, they would like to give me a simple programming task that I could write up for them. They were very flexible, and agreed. In the end, I was told that this made an impression on them because it not only showed them I was able to accomplish a simple task in the target language, but that I also respected my employer's intellectual property.
What humans do is natural too. Beavers build dams in rivers. Animals deficate in rivers too. Yes, we are a lot more impactfull than the animals, and thats why we need to exercise restraint, but its counter-intuitive to place ourselves seperate from nature. Not only is it innacurate, but it distances ourselves from the idea that we are a network of co-dependent living things. That, in turn, clouds our ability to make rational decisions about our actions in nature. Its important that we think of this scientifically and not emotionally.
Nature has no concept of "just." You adapt or die. Justness is one concept that humans have developed, because it has served us well in our building of societies.
Whether or not the baiji served a purpose for our immediate environment, I don't know. The tragedy is that it is already too late even if we figure it out. That and we now have less to learn about our world than we did before.
I'm an environmentalist for many reasons chief among them is that I'm selfish. No matter how much we may like to hide in our offices we depend, completely depend, upon the life on the earth around us.
Yes, we're natural, which means the mere act of displacing an animal isn't necessarily bad (and nature doesn't deal with morality, so lets leave evil out of this). But since we got where we are because of our evolved ability to think and account for our actions, we should also consider the consequences of our actions and make sure that we don't make our envinment inhabitable by human beings.
So, maybe species A is edged out by us, not a big deal, but if we're directly warming the average temperature of our planet and causes massive environmental changes, then we should deal with that. Whatever the case, by the mere fact we exist, we will always be competing with other inhabitants of nature and impacting our environment. That would be true even if we were cavemen. The key words here are restraint and foresight. Lets not devolve into some sort of "OMG humans are raping mother earth!" psuedo-religious line of thought. Its counter productive.
What about those of us that care for real practical reasons, instead of made up moral feel-good reasons that the reality of nature and this earth doesn't share in the slightest?
We're only responsible for this globe only to the point of extending our survival. Nothing suddenly gave us rights over the planet or its species. The reason why we care, and why we should care, is to make this place a comfortable and resiliant place for us to survive. We're responsible for our own survival, and conservation is a part of that survival.
Humans are part of the ecosystem too. Those dolphins also impacted the ecosystem, although not to the degree that humans did. If we impact the ecosystem too much, then natural selection will kick us in the ass, and the world will continue, just without our existance. Not a pretty thing to think about, but its not quite the same as "harming" the ecosystem, or the "collapse" of an ecosystem.
I'm with you on the "interesting and wondrous" thing though. Plus I'll never know how white dolphin meat tastes.
Why should we respect them? Why do they automatically deserve respect? People seem to have this funny notion that because an animal is there right now that it "should" be there forever. But thats not how natural selection, adaptation, and evolution work. You, as a species, don't deserve to exist. Its something that you continuously earn as part of the natural process, overcomming your environment and the other animals vying for that slice of it that you inhabit.
And make no mistake, humans are just as much a part of nature as those dolphins. If you look at it coldly and rationally, there's absolutely no reason we should feel bad about edging out other animals when its necessary. If nature threw some new mammal that really liked the taste of human flesh, we wouldn't get a free pass. We'd have to fight for our survival.
Which is not to say that I'm for raping and pillaging the earth. There's plenty of good reasons for conservation. But make no mistake that its not due to some feel-good moral warm-and-fuzzy reason, its because I want my species to survive, and having biodiversity and an envonment that can sustain us is important for that. If these dolphins can't adapt, and serve us no purpose, well then, "Good bye, you don't have to thank us for the fish."
If I had a film/game/cd to publish, I could do so without a rating with no problem. Sure, places like Wal Mart wouldn't carry it without a rating, but the police wouldn't be knocking down my door, and I wouldn't be banned from selling it in whatever avenue I could find. The rating system is voluntary here, and yes, the biggest retail stores and publishers enforce it, but its not the same as government compulsion.
Thats my main job description, and I'm mainly aligned with the development team (I report to the production support team). Good advice, especially when you work on large products that involve a lot of people.
Yep, thats how we do it at my place of work, at a very large bank. I wrote some scripts that create an installation package, which we developers run whenever we want to do a deploy. We then hand the packages off to our deployment team, who installs them on the server. We usually have a developer or two who are around to help debug configuration issues when they're working on a deploy. Also, I keep in pretty close contact with our deployment team to make sure that they are aware of changes in configuration, and that they have everything they need to successfully install the application on their side. I guess you could say one of my job responsibilities is to be a liaison to the deployment team.
But in our case, we also need the deployment team for auditing and tracking purposes. Given that this is a bank, we deal with some pretty sensitive customer information that is subject to a lot of regulations, meaning that we can't just have the developers muck about on production servers.
I'd say the system works pretty well. Give some developers the responsibility to keep in touch with the IT people who will be deploying your application, and make sure that you guys work out any issues before they come to pass. Write scripts and installation documents. Document any configuration changes and make those available to IT. It may not seem like it, but IT is part of the team too.
No graphic acceleration. Sorry, that doesn't count as officially supporting homebrew game dev. Once Sony opens up and lets people use the graphics hardware, we'll talk.
Yeah but a PC isn't an XBox, nor is it a game console. The last system that let you do homebrew on a game console was the Playstation Yaroze, and that was $800. You can also do some dev on systems like the Dreamcast and the GBA, but thats using unnoficial tools.
If you look at it that way, $99 is a pretty good deal. Yeah you can develop games for your PC for free, but the people who are going to be paying that want to develop on a console.
Slashdot Mirror
Its only a problematic theory if you don't look at the big picture. XBox 360 has been out a year and has one jRPG. PS3 and Wii were just launched. Then you have the fact that the XBox 360 is a successor to a console that failed to release games of interest to the Japanese market throughout its entire lifespan. Its only natural that Japanese gamers aren't rushing out to buy an expensive console from a company who has demonstrated it doesn't know how to create entertainment appropriate for the market. One jRPG is basically nothing in the grand scheme of thing, especially when you compare it to the PS2's huge library.
And the fact of the matter is, that Blue Dragon did move 360 consoles in Japan.
I realize its trendy for XBox fans to blame failure in Japan on xenophobia or nationalism. Fact of the matter is that Japanese will buy plenty of foreign goods, including American, if they appeal to them. I saw plenty of American movies, music, and clothes in Japan. iPod is the number one selling player there. Write games that cater to their tastes, and they'll buy them.
Artists don't have a natural right to control how their work is used after they distribute it. Copyright is a contract between creators and society, where we give them a short term monopoly on distributor to encourage them to contribute to the public domain. Setting copyright lengths to life defeats the purpose.
Honestly, I'd say 5 to 10 years is more than fair. If you haven't made money off of your stuff by then, then you're not likely to.
Point being that copyright is supposed to benefit us by benefiting them.
No the 360 launch was a lot better than this. At this time last year, 360s were still unavailable. PS3 is currently doing poorly. Despite unit shortages, they're meeting demand, and this early in the console lifetime thats a bad thing.
PS3 doesn't have any killer apps right now. Of the games out, the only one I hear about is Resistance, and even then its not a must have title. We'll have to wait and see what kind of exclusives Sony can pull out. MGS4 and FFXIII will move units, I'm sure.
Because the XBox simply doesn't have the kinds of games that Japanese gamers traditionally enjoy. That is, Japanese style RPGs such as Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest, and dating sim style games.
The XBox software is very American, which isn't a bad thing at all, but it does mean that it doesn't sell well in Japan.
Nope. If anything I think its too easy. You just have to click ok, and don't even have to put in your password. On my Linux machine, I have to sudo and put in a password to install software.
The article is pretty much a near-spyware maker crying that Microsoft started shipping their software with a slightly more secure default setting.
I seriously hope you work for Sony if you're spending this much effort promoting the console online.
Don't forget to thank Sony for "inventing 3d video games."
Thats interesting, but not surprising. I'm guessing that, like the OP said, the technique is very old and used pretty much everywhere UDP is.
Where did you see the Battle.Net code? Did you work for Blizzard or are you talking about bnetd?
The OpenTNL library (a game networking library pulled from the Torque engine) does this too. I remember thinking it was pretty clever at the time.
That's just my opinion of the thing, anyway. We can't keep throwing 'monopoly' at MS to prevent them from doing anything at all. Though obviously that makes me pretty unpopular on Slashdot, eh? Nope, I agree with your sentiment. I think the level of, "You can't do that because you have a monopoly!" has gotten a bit ridiculous. But the question isn't whether they have a monopoly in the game console market, its whether or not they're leveraging their monopoly to unfairly compete in another market. For example, with the Netscape-IE thing, the problem was that they used their monopoly in Windows to kill off Netscape. But I agree with you despite that point. While they are using monopoly profits to push the XBox, I don't see anything that implies they're doing so unfairly. Their console seems to be priced fairly, and they haven't been pulling any tricks that Sony and Nintendo haven't been doing. About their worst sin is buying out Bungie to get an exclusive killer app, which isn't even a blip on the radar.
There are no XBox profits. XBox consistently loses money. The original XBox, when alls said and done, lost something on the order of several billion dollars. They can do this because of Windows and Office profits. So, the OP has a point.
Well, its not like hobbyists can develop for PS3 or the Wii in the first place. And if you're talking about OSX and Linux market share, I doubt many hobbyists would feel the market share was large enough to warrant using a different set of tools.
I was asked for a code sample only once. More common was to email me a quiz that involved a simple coding problem. But even that was fairly rare, as most companies just did a quick phone screen and got me to whiteboard stuff in interviews.
What I did when I was asked was simply state that all my relevant work in the language they asked for was done for my current job, and thus I couldn't disclose any of the code to them in good concious. I then asked them if, instead, they would like to give me a simple programming task that I could write up for them. They were very flexible, and agreed. In the end, I was told that this made an impression on them because it not only showed them I was able to accomplish a simple task in the target language, but that I also respected my employer's intellectual property.
What humans do is natural too. Beavers build dams in rivers. Animals deficate in rivers too. Yes, we are a lot more impactfull than the animals, and thats why we need to exercise restraint, but its counter-intuitive to place ourselves seperate from nature. Not only is it innacurate, but it distances ourselves from the idea that we are a network of co-dependent living things. That, in turn, clouds our ability to make rational decisions about our actions in nature. Its important that we think of this scientifically and not emotionally.
Nature has no concept of "just." You adapt or die. Justness is one concept that humans have developed, because it has served us well in our building of societies.
Whether or not the baiji served a purpose for our immediate environment, I don't know. The tragedy is that it is already too late even if we figure it out. That and we now have less to learn about our world than we did before.
I'm an environmentalist for many reasons chief among them is that I'm selfish. No matter how much we may like to hide in our offices we depend, completely depend, upon the life on the earth around us.
Totally agree.
Why the false dichotomy?
Yes, we're natural, which means the mere act of displacing an animal isn't necessarily bad (and nature doesn't deal with morality, so lets leave evil out of this). But since we got where we are because of our evolved ability to think and account for our actions, we should also consider the consequences of our actions and make sure that we don't make our envinment inhabitable by human beings.
So, maybe species A is edged out by us, not a big deal, but if we're directly warming the average temperature of our planet and causes massive environmental changes, then we should deal with that. Whatever the case, by the mere fact we exist, we will always be competing with other inhabitants of nature and impacting our environment. That would be true even if we were cavemen. The key words here are restraint and foresight. Lets not devolve into some sort of "OMG humans are raping mother earth!" psuedo-religious line of thought. Its counter productive.
What about those of us that care for real practical reasons, instead of made up moral feel-good reasons that the reality of nature and this earth doesn't share in the slightest?
We're only responsible for this globe only to the point of extending our survival. Nothing suddenly gave us rights over the planet or its species. The reason why we care, and why we should care, is to make this place a comfortable and resiliant place for us to survive. We're responsible for our own survival, and conservation is a part of that survival.
Humans are part of the ecosystem too. Those dolphins also impacted the ecosystem, although not to the degree that humans did. If we impact the ecosystem too much, then natural selection will kick us in the ass, and the world will continue, just without our existance. Not a pretty thing to think about, but its not quite the same as "harming" the ecosystem, or the "collapse" of an ecosystem.
I'm with you on the "interesting and wondrous" thing though. Plus I'll never know how white dolphin meat tastes.
Why should we respect them? Why do they automatically deserve respect? People seem to have this funny notion that because an animal is there right now that it "should" be there forever. But thats not how natural selection, adaptation, and evolution work. You, as a species, don't deserve to exist. Its something that you continuously earn as part of the natural process, overcomming your environment and the other animals vying for that slice of it that you inhabit.
And make no mistake, humans are just as much a part of nature as those dolphins. If you look at it coldly and rationally, there's absolutely no reason we should feel bad about edging out other animals when its necessary. If nature threw some new mammal that really liked the taste of human flesh, we wouldn't get a free pass. We'd have to fight for our survival.
Which is not to say that I'm for raping and pillaging the earth. There's plenty of good reasons for conservation. But make no mistake that its not due to some feel-good moral warm-and-fuzzy reason, its because I want my species to survive, and having biodiversity and an envonment that can sustain us is important for that. If these dolphins can't adapt, and serve us no purpose, well then, "Good bye, you don't have to thank us for the fish."
If I had a film/game/cd to publish, I could do so without a rating with no problem. Sure, places like Wal Mart wouldn't carry it without a rating, but the police wouldn't be knocking down my door, and I wouldn't be banned from selling it in whatever avenue I could find. The rating system is voluntary here, and yes, the biggest retail stores and publishers enforce it, but its not the same as government compulsion.
Thats my main job description, and I'm mainly aligned with the development team (I report to the production support team). Good advice, especially when you work on large products that involve a lot of people.
Yep, thats how we do it at my place of work, at a very large bank. I wrote some scripts that create an installation package, which we developers run whenever we want to do a deploy. We then hand the packages off to our deployment team, who installs them on the server. We usually have a developer or two who are around to help debug configuration issues when they're working on a deploy. Also, I keep in pretty close contact with our deployment team to make sure that they are aware of changes in configuration, and that they have everything they need to successfully install the application on their side. I guess you could say one of my job responsibilities is to be a liaison to the deployment team.
But in our case, we also need the deployment team for auditing and tracking purposes. Given that this is a bank, we deal with some pretty sensitive customer information that is subject to a lot of regulations, meaning that we can't just have the developers muck about on production servers.
I'd say the system works pretty well. Give some developers the responsibility to keep in touch with the IT people who will be deploying your application, and make sure that you guys work out any issues before they come to pass. Write scripts and installation documents. Document any configuration changes and make those available to IT. It may not seem like it, but IT is part of the team too.
Its more about getting the kids to shut up on those long road trips.
No graphic acceleration. Sorry, that doesn't count as officially supporting homebrew game dev. Once Sony opens up and lets people use the graphics hardware, we'll talk.
Yeah but a PC isn't an XBox, nor is it a game console. The last system that let you do homebrew on a game console was the Playstation Yaroze, and that was $800. You can also do some dev on systems like the Dreamcast and the GBA, but thats using unnoficial tools.
If you look at it that way, $99 is a pretty good deal. Yeah you can develop games for your PC for free, but the people who are going to be paying that want to develop on a console.