Never ask for points on the profits. No movie has ever made a profit.
Of course movies make profits. But where those profits are buried in the accountancy, nobody will fess up lightly. I hope Stan Lee has an ironclad judgement that can't be wiggled out with some fancy bookwork.
I really don't like the look of SmearType. I can easily see the hue sparkles in the edges of text, and it looks like the three channels aren't properly registered. I don't want cyan and yellow popcorn or confetti, I want clean type.
Online worlds should implement escrows, not gripe.
on
The Basics of EULAs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you're an online game implementor, you know that people will want to trade items. You know it, because you're not the first game out there, you're the fifteenth. You're the fiftieth. You can see that people want to trade items.
Sure, the arguments run in two major veins: it's not fair to the game for people to shortcut their character development, and it's not fair to the users, because sales fraud is rampant.
If you gripe about players trading items, you're pissing into the hurricane. Even if it's against all the rules, people will be trading items. And what's worse, people will be offering sales and not following through, so other people will scream about fraud. You're in a no-win situation: people who follow the "rules" are unhappy and people who try to get better game goods are unhappy.
Unhappy customers are not a good thing for any subscriber-oriented product. Unhappy customers who are highly connected, organized, and communicative are a major threat to a subscriber-oriented product.
So why make them unhappy unnecessarily?
Implement an escrow mechanism into the game service.
If a player wants to sell a +20 Sword of Wounding to another player (even on another server/shard/instance/cluster/whatever), let them. Have them put the item into a secure locker-style location in the game world. This takes the item out of the control of the player, to completely remove the ability to defraud. The item is listed up for sale, either to a specific customer, to a guild or alliance, or to anyone. Real cash will buy that item.
Now, where does the cash go? Most of it goes to the selling party. That's why they wanted to sell it in the first place. Whether the cash is presented as future service credits, or a company check, it doesn't matter. Games may differ on the finer points, but one thing is clear.
A cut of the escrow money goes to the game producer.
That's right: if you own the escrow, YOU earn money when YOUR players trade goods. You're the marketplace. It pays for all the effort you made to implement the secure lockers. It pays for the customer service aspect of managing the transactions. More transactions will go through without complaint, and you are in a position to ensure that.
You can't control eBay. You can't control the gentleman's handshake at the pub. You can control the secure locker mechanism that's hosted on your own servers. So earn some money from it.
What about that other line of reasoning, the thing about being fair to the players? What's more fair than instantiating a single set of rules, by which everyone has access? Many people don't trade because of the fraud, but they'll complain about how it's unfair that other people do trade. Others complain that if they don't trade, they can't be the best in the game. Well, it's not about being the best in the game, it's about being the best you can be.
When I was a big game player, the game I played had one simple warning to those who complain about fairness and balance and competition. There will ALWAYS be someone who is stronger, faster, better-equipped, higher-leveled, and prettier than you are. Get over it. It's a game, and the best way to have fun is to skip the notion that you'll be the biggest and baddest in the game. Just be the biggest and baddest you can be. If you don't want to trade, then don't. But if you want to trade, do it securely.
I went to the Barnes and Noble link. This is the paragraph that should have been cribbed for the main writeup, to tell people what in the hell this is about.
Following on the success of Wall Street Meat, his self-published book on the lives of Wall Street stock analysts, Andy Kessler recounts his years as an extraordinarily successful hedge fund manager. To run a successful hedge fund you must have an investing edge--that special insight that allows you to reap greater returns for your clients and yourself.
Then, I clicked on the "read more" to see the rest of the text. Did I just click the wrong thing, and end up on some slash fiction site? Why would any slashdot regular want to read through this sort of navel-gazing junk?
How many volkswagon beatles lined up side by side would be needed to encircle the Earth 12 times as is needed to match the height of stacked A380 planes from here to the moon?
The analysis of that question filled four Libraries of Congress.
obviously completely ignorant of the fact that the storage industry has consistently bested Moore's Law for at least a decade
Can you please tell me how you think that Moore's Law is supposed to relate to the capacity of persistent, non-volatile data media? Or could you please just stop suggesting that it applies?
Re:Do they have:
on
CES Tidbits
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I swear, Brookstone and Sharper Image share this business model: they make a huge grid chart with every geek gadget labeling each row, and every yuppie gadget labeling each column. They then produce a Taiwanese product that implements each intersecting grid. Mix most combinations of golfball-caddy, hammock-pole, grill-fork, lawn-lamp, wine-caddy with phone-minder, address-book, usb-stick, music-player, calculator. Now you get the picture.
It's cute and funny and charming how you call me a hypocrite, and call my post slander, and say this is all a sign of ignorance, when all I asked is how blame-shifting is user-friendly.
Let's review: a game caused an operating system to fail. If the OS can't protect itself, it needs to get patched. Oh, wait, this is an OS from a vendor well-known for their patch procedures, and to top it off, it's a quasi-embedded game platform system in which the user can't just download a new patch every Monday. So I think it's still fair to question WHY an operating system is architected for instability.
Let's continue: I said nothing about the camera. I don't know why you thought I did. Maybe you just didn't read my post, but felt you needed to protect your favorite "innovative" company.
Slander is saying untrue defamatory things; libel is writing untrue defamatory things. Opinions and questions are neither untrue nor defamatory; Microsoft can defame themselves quite handily. And for me to be a hypocrite, I'd have to believe the opposite rationale for the competing operating system; I use Linux precisely *because* enthusiasts *can* point out the specific boneheaded mistakes in drivers and kernel robustness.
The average user won't differentiate between OS and product. They'll just see that the stuff they've purchased turns out to suck rocks. They'll be frustrated without any way of understanding why. They'll return the wrong component and continue to experience problems without any tools to correct the root cause of their problems.
Lastly, ignorance is maintaining a status of unknowing; hardly compatible with questioning the rationale for the debated turn of events. Considering that I worked within Microsoft on their operating systems, I'd say my rationale for later switching to other products for any number of reasons is anything but ignorant.
Before you use big words like 'hypocrite' and 'slander,' I recommend you visit Dictionary.com. Really. And sign your posts, coward.
Okay, so (1) how is a video game able to tear down the entire operating system? and (2) how does this blame-shifting actually help the users?
Sure, a few game buyers might return their game, but they'll still have an operating system with lurking landmine bugs that will crash in exactly the same way for some other product next week.
I was a first-time Apple owner last fall. I figured out all of the above advice in my first week. Not too hard to figure out, you just have to explore all of the preferences and spend some time googling.
However, I would empathize with the person complaining in that it's easy to spot irritating "features" while in the Apple Store, and hard to discover their workarounds until you've decided to buy the machine despite them.
However, the one thing that still drives me absolutely batty is that I can't use some dialog box widgets by keyboard. If I tab through a form, I can adjust any data-entry fields, but can't adjust any pick fields. Is there some obscure setting or "extension" I have not found, which will let me manipulate a popup-list widget (in Windows, known as a Combo Box) without resorting to the mouse?
"Truckers check their brakes before a big hill, why don't astronauts check the heat shield?"
There's rarely any doubt about the trucker's ability to get back into the cab after doing said walkaround.
The trucker "check" to which the grandparent was referring is a test of the brakes, while in motion, as they near a large down-grade hillside. They don't always perform a stop-and-walk-around, they just run through each of the brake systems and try them out a little. They can feel the response. If the brakes are soft or ineffective at the level top of the hill, they will definitely need to stop (using other brakes) before stressing the systems in a steep hillside descent.
In shuttle terms, how can you "test" the heat shields before starting re-entry? There's no wiring on the outside, or through the tiles. You can't just heat up the tiles a few degrees and check a probe or two to learn much about how it'll deal with long-term, unevenly-applied, mach 20 heat friction.
Those who keep thinking "ooh, ooh, use the fifth!" are confused. You would not want the text of the Fifth Amendment to be the passphrase. You might want a phrase like, "I exercise my rights to decline testimony guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment," but saying the actual text of the Fifth is not the same as invoking it.
I thought of the duress keyphrase, too. While we're randomly thinking, I once imagined that a good keyphrase (decoy or otherwise) would be the full text to the Fourth Amendment. Then recite the keyphrase only under oath before a Judge. Worth a shot, anyway.
My stock micro-rant on this topic is mostly just a quotation.
Federal Judge Richard Posner, 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, had this to say about 'protecting our kids':
Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old's right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well- functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.
--American Amusement Machine Assoc. v. Kendrick No. 00-3643 (7th Cir., March 23, 2001)
Any elected government, be it Democracy, or Representative Republic, or otherwise, owes it to their constituents to allow unfettered access to ideas and information, praiseworthy or critical. To deny a citizen the right to know their own world is to deny them identity.
You, Nova1313, could be a Slashdot Editor today!;)
It could also be the
readers' fault. Those of us with slashdot ads disabled get to see the articles early and mention to the mods if there is a problem before the general public sees it. However, with the number of subscribers being a lot lower than the normal number of slashdot readers, that means fewer of us to hit the website to catch an article before it goes out. We have the ability to comment and have links/titles fixed. As for content though, I assume that link is just as good as a broken link.
So readers lose because there isn't a lot of subscribers I guess(?) and we see more crap then.
The opening performance for the new Disney-branded, Frank Gehry-designed Los Angeles Concert Hall played a full orchestral concert of "The Music of Final Fantasy." How is this new concert tour "bringing it to the US?"
FINAL FANTASY Debuts First Orchestral Concert in North America Celebrating Video Game Music
LOS ANGELES, Calif., February 18, 2004 - Square Enix U.S.A., Inc. ("Square Enix U.S.A."), the publisher of Square Enix(TM) interactive entertainment products in North America, announced today that they will present the first FINAL FANTASY® symphony concert in the U.S. on Monday, May 10, 2004, at the prestigious Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Calif. The performance will feature music from Square Enix's world-renowned FINAL FANTASY video game series, performed by the acclaimed Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. This exciting event will be taking place during the week of E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), the largest interactive entertainment trade show in the U.S.
I've got a few machines around the house, and one is an eMac in the living room. It's mostly for edutainment titles, games, and to act as a print server, but I played with Mac OS X's "Speakable Items" capabilities.
I use the text-to-speech on several crontab entries. Chip (yes, that's the computer's name) will announce basic daily schedule items, such as the date in the morning, kid's bedtime, and a final signoff at 11pm. I added some checks so it wouldn't talk whenever iDVD or iTunes was running. I used to have it monitor news headlines too, but it would talk too often and we would tune it out.
I also tried some "Speakable Items" for basic tasks. Essentially, there is a special folder with a number of AppleScript files. The filenames are their voice triggers. If the computer hears you say one of those filenames, it runs the AppleScript. There are nested directories with items for specific applications, so you can speak the global commands or the active app's specific commands. Well thought-out.
Some Speakable Items could come in handy, but the eMac microphone is too limited to be able to command the machine from across the room. You also cannot have a set of Speakable Items somewhere which are still active when nobody's logged in. Thus, I need to have a user logged in (and then turned away with user switch). Lastly, for most of the automation tasks I'd like to run, Perl or Bash is a better choice than AppleScript, but Speakable Items must be special text-command files or AppleScript, and I can't imagine making a bunch of AppleScript stubs for each Unix-style script I would write. These each limit the usefulness of the voice-commandable appliance I was hoping for.
On the utility side, speech command would be great for specific queries, "Chip, what day is it?" and generic countdowns: "Chip, give me ten!" and he'll tell you when ten minutes have elapsed.
It's even easier to see the influences on modern English. There's a real and historical reason, prejudice or not, behind the fact that "right" means "not left" and "right" means "correct."
What's even more interesting to me is the side-connotations of the words in other languages. For example, "adroit" in English means capable, but in French, it is the word for "right;" the word "gauche" is used as a slur for tactless or uncivilized behavior, and in French, it is merely the word for "left."
Slashdot Mirror
Never ask for points on the profits. No movie has ever made a profit.
Of course movies make profits. But where those profits are buried in the accountancy, nobody will fess up lightly. I hope Stan Lee has an ironclad judgement that can't be wiggled out with some fancy bookwork.
I really don't like the look of SmearType. I can easily see the hue sparkles in the edges of text, and it looks like the three channels aren't properly registered. I don't want cyan and yellow popcorn or confetti, I want clean type.
If you're an online game implementor, you know that people will want to trade items. You know it, because you're not the first game out there, you're the fifteenth. You're the fiftieth. You can see that people want to trade items.
Sure, the arguments run in two major veins: it's not fair to the game for people to shortcut their character development, and it's not fair to the users, because sales fraud is rampant.
If you gripe about players trading items, you're pissing into the hurricane. Even if it's against all the rules, people will be trading items. And what's worse, people will be offering sales and not following through, so other people will scream about fraud. You're in a no-win situation: people who follow the "rules" are unhappy and people who try to get better game goods are unhappy.
Unhappy customers are not a good thing for any subscriber-oriented product. Unhappy customers who are highly connected, organized, and communicative are a major threat to a subscriber-oriented product.
So why make them unhappy unnecessarily?
Implement an escrow mechanism into the game service.
If a player wants to sell a +20 Sword of Wounding to another player (even on another server/shard/instance/cluster/whatever), let them. Have them put the item into a secure locker-style location in the game world. This takes the item out of the control of the player, to completely remove the ability to defraud. The item is listed up for sale, either to a specific customer, to a guild or alliance, or to anyone. Real cash will buy that item.
Now, where does the cash go? Most of it goes to the selling party. That's why they wanted to sell it in the first place. Whether the cash is presented as future service credits, or a company check, it doesn't matter. Games may differ on the finer points, but one thing is clear.
A cut of the escrow money goes to the game producer.
That's right: if you own the escrow, YOU earn money when YOUR players trade goods. You're the marketplace. It pays for all the effort you made to implement the secure lockers. It pays for the customer service aspect of managing the transactions. More transactions will go through without complaint, and you are in a position to ensure that.
You can't control eBay. You can't control the gentleman's handshake at the pub. You can control the secure locker mechanism that's hosted on your own servers. So earn some money from it.
What about that other line of reasoning, the thing about being fair to the players? What's more fair than instantiating a single set of rules, by which everyone has access? Many people don't trade because of the fraud, but they'll complain about how it's unfair that other people do trade. Others complain that if they don't trade, they can't be the best in the game. Well, it's not about being the best in the game, it's about being the best you can be.
When I was a big game player, the game I played had one simple warning to those who complain about fairness and balance and competition. There will ALWAYS be someone who is stronger, faster, better-equipped, higher-leveled, and prettier than you are. Get over it. It's a game, and the best way to have fun is to skip the notion that you'll be the biggest and baddest in the game. Just be the biggest and baddest you can be. If you don't want to trade, then don't. But if you want to trade, do it securely.
- Following on the success of Wall Street Meat, his self-published book on the lives of Wall Street stock analysts, Andy Kessler recounts his years as an extraordinarily successful hedge fund manager. To run a successful hedge fund you must have an investing edge--that special insight that allows you to reap greater returns for your clients and yourself.
Then, I clicked on the "read more" to see the rest of the text. Did I just click the wrong thing, and end up on some slash fiction site? Why would any slashdot regular want to read through this sort of navel-gazing junk?How many volkswagon beatles lined up side by side would be needed to encircle the Earth 12 times as is needed to match the height of stacked A380 planes from here to the moon?
The analysis of that question filled four Libraries of Congress.
Do you happen to know if your MAC can run PERL?
obviously completely ignorant of the fact that the storage industry has consistently bested Moore's Law for at least a decade
Can you please tell me how you think that Moore's Law is supposed to relate to the capacity of persistent, non-volatile data media? Or could you please just stop suggesting that it applies?
I swear, Brookstone and Sharper Image share this business model: they make a huge grid chart with every geek gadget labeling each row, and every yuppie gadget labeling each column. They then produce a Taiwanese product that implements each intersecting grid. Mix most combinations of golfball-caddy, hammock-pole, grill-fork, lawn-lamp, wine-caddy with phone-minder, address-book, usb-stick, music-player, calculator. Now you get the picture.
Let's review: a game caused an operating system to fail. If the OS can't protect itself, it needs to get patched. Oh, wait, this is an OS from a vendor well-known for their patch procedures, and to top it off, it's a quasi-embedded game platform system in which the user can't just download a new patch every Monday. So I think it's still fair to question WHY an operating system is architected for instability.
Let's continue: I said nothing about the camera. I don't know why you thought I did. Maybe you just didn't read my post, but felt you needed to protect your favorite "innovative" company.
Slander is saying untrue defamatory things; libel is writing untrue defamatory things. Opinions and questions are neither untrue nor defamatory; Microsoft can defame themselves quite handily. And for me to be a hypocrite, I'd have to believe the opposite rationale for the competing operating system; I use Linux precisely *because* enthusiasts *can* point out the specific boneheaded mistakes in drivers and kernel robustness.
The average user won't differentiate between OS and product. They'll just see that the stuff they've purchased turns out to suck rocks. They'll be frustrated without any way of understanding why. They'll return the wrong component and continue to experience problems without any tools to correct the root cause of their problems.
Lastly, ignorance is maintaining a status of unknowing; hardly compatible with questioning the rationale for the debated turn of events. Considering that I worked within Microsoft on their operating systems, I'd say my rationale for later switching to other products for any number of reasons is anything but ignorant.
Before you use big words like 'hypocrite' and 'slander,' I recommend you visit Dictionary.com. Really. And sign your posts, coward.
Sure, a few game buyers might return their game, but they'll still have an operating system with lurking landmine bugs that will crash in exactly the same way for some other product next week.
Don't you mean an Infinium Loop?
However, I would empathize with the person complaining in that it's easy to spot irritating "features" while in the Apple Store, and hard to discover their workarounds until you've decided to buy the machine despite them.
However, the one thing that still drives me absolutely batty is that I can't use some dialog box widgets by keyboard. If I tab through a form, I can adjust any data-entry fields, but can't adjust any pick fields. Is there some obscure setting or "extension" I have not found, which will let me manipulate a popup-list widget (in Windows, known as a Combo Box) without resorting to the mouse?
There's rarely any doubt about the trucker's ability to get back into the cab after doing said walkaround.
The trucker "check" to which the grandparent was referring is a test of the brakes, while in motion, as they near a large down-grade hillside. They don't always perform a stop-and-walk-around, they just run through each of the brake systems and try them out a little. They can feel the response. If the brakes are soft or ineffective at the level top of the hill, they will definitely need to stop (using other brakes) before stressing the systems in a steep hillside descent.
In shuttle terms, how can you "test" the heat shields before starting re-entry? There's no wiring on the outside, or through the tiles. You can't just heat up the tiles a few degrees and check a probe or two to learn much about how it'll deal with long-term, unevenly-applied, mach 20 heat friction.
You might also be interested in Hello Cthulhu, which mixes Sanrio cuteness with underworld dread.
Those who keep thinking "ooh, ooh, use the fifth!" are confused. You would not want the text of the Fifth Amendment to be the passphrase. You might want a phrase like, "I exercise my rights to decline testimony guaranteed under the Fifth Amendment," but saying the actual text of the Fifth is not the same as invoking it.
I thought of the duress keyphrase, too. While we're randomly thinking, I once imagined that a good keyphrase (decoy or otherwise) would be the full text to the Fourth Amendment. Then recite the keyphrase only under oath before a Judge. Worth a shot, anyway.
My stock micro-rant on this topic is mostly just a quotation.
- Now that eighteen-year-olds have the right to vote, it is obvious that they must be allowed the freedom to form their political views on the basis of uncensored speech before they turn eighteen, so that their minds are not a blank when they first exercise the franchise. And since an eighteen-year-old's right to vote is a right personal to him rather than a right to be exercised on his behalf by his parents, the right of parents to enlist the aid of the state to shield their children from ideas of which the parents disapprove cannot be plenary either. People are unlikely to become well- functioning, independent-minded adults and responsible citizens if they are raised in an intellectual bubble.
Any elected government, be it Democracy, or Representative Republic, or otherwise, owes it to their constituents to allow unfettered access to ideas and information, praiseworthy or critical. To deny a citizen the right to know their own world is to deny them identity.--American Amusement Machine Assoc. v. Kendrick No. 00-3643 (7th Cir., March 23, 2001)
You, Nova1313, could be a Slashdot Editor today! ;)
FINAL FANTASY Debuts First Orchestral Concert in North America Celebrating Video Game Music
LOS ANGELES, Calif., February 18, 2004 - Square Enix U.S.A., Inc. ("Square Enix U.S.A."), the publisher of Square Enix(TM) interactive entertainment products in North America, announced today that they will present the first FINAL FANTASY® symphony concert in the U.S. on Monday, May 10, 2004, at the prestigious Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Calif. The performance will feature music from Square Enix's world-renowned FINAL FANTASY video game series, performed by the acclaimed Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Los Angeles Master Chorale. This exciting event will be taking place during the week of E3 (Electronic Entertainment Expo), the largest interactive entertainment trade show in the U.S.
Honey, don't buy me none of them irradiated foods!
But darling, what do you think the microwave oven does?
I use the text-to-speech on several crontab entries. Chip (yes, that's the computer's name) will announce basic daily schedule items, such as the date in the morning, kid's bedtime, and a final signoff at 11pm. I added some checks so it wouldn't talk whenever iDVD or iTunes was running. I used to have it monitor news headlines too, but it would talk too often and we would tune it out.
I also tried some "Speakable Items" for basic tasks. Essentially, there is a special folder with a number of AppleScript files. The filenames are their voice triggers. If the computer hears you say one of those filenames, it runs the AppleScript. There are nested directories with items for specific applications, so you can speak the global commands or the active app's specific commands. Well thought-out.
Some Speakable Items could come in handy, but the eMac microphone is too limited to be able to command the machine from across the room. You also cannot have a set of Speakable Items somewhere which are still active when nobody's logged in. Thus, I need to have a user logged in (and then turned away with user switch). Lastly, for most of the automation tasks I'd like to run, Perl or Bash is a better choice than AppleScript, but Speakable Items must be special text-command files or AppleScript, and I can't imagine making a bunch of AppleScript stubs for each Unix-style script I would write. These each limit the usefulness of the voice-commandable appliance I was hoping for.
On the utility side, speech command would be great for specific queries, "Chip, what day is it?" and generic countdowns: "Chip, give me ten!" and he'll tell you when ten minutes have elapsed.
Boy, for not "existing in english," a lot of English dictionaries seem to list it (along with English-like forms such as adroitly, adroitness, etc.).
It's even easier to see the influences on modern English. There's a real and historical reason, prejudice or not, behind the fact that "right" means "not left" and "right" means "correct."
What's even more interesting to me is the side-connotations of the words in other languages. For example, "adroit" in English means capable, but in French, it is the word for "right;" the word "gauche" is used as a slur for tactless or uncivilized behavior, and in French, it is merely the word for "left."
Koyaanisqatsi was the title of the 1983 film which has the prophecy:...
Okay, Ken Jennings, we know you're bored after that winning Jeopardy series finally ended, but please don't go showing off your trivia-fu here, mmkay?