After a period of growth, opportunities are closing, budgets are increasing to tens of millions of dollars, and companies need global infrastructure in order to publish.
I think this is because in order to maximize profit, you must have the best product which requires teams of coders, hordes of graphic designers, and armies of network admins to roll out WoW, EQ, and whatever other blockbuster game comes out.
So this is what is done...
However, larger companies tend to not take risks on unproven ground so there still will be room for startups to nudge their way, but they won't be blockbusters with 100,000 players.
Eventually, after technology and bandwidth costs aren't prohibitive or a factor and the game engines have gotten as realistic as they can so there isn't anything left but to create game content, then perhaps it will be more mom and pop shops again. But this might be a while...
I guess talking BEFORE and AFTER a game is kinda pointless.
Hrm.... Kind of like sex.
Re:When was the last time you visited gran dad?
on
No Time Travel, Sorry
·
· Score: 1
If time travel will ever be possible then where are the time travelers? Shouldn't they be visiting us or maybe our great-great grandparents?
Look... This is the future we are talking about. They have robot sex partners that look better than most supermodels today and VR systems that could just simulate the past if they got bored enough to do so.
Why in gods name would they drop all that and come visit us? They won't even give their great great great grandparents even a phone call!
The only way to time travel would be to force every particle of matter and every bit of energy back to where it was at some point we remember from the past. Then we would have the perfect illusion of time travel.
Wouldn't it be easier to simulate the universe on a computer?
And then just jump in on whatever time frame you want?
Or secondly if you really could alter the entire universe to specific states, then you'd have to leave the universe while doing this and then come back.
Hi, remember me? Of course not! Because I am an 45" HDTV and you'll never see me because I'll cost more than your VHS, DVD, Blu Ray Player, used car, and house payment... COMBINED!
And do you really think you'll see a difference between a DVD and a Blu Ray on my old man NTSC TV? Hah! That lazy bastard has hard enough time getting his S-Video up in the morning.
It's kind of like Toys 'R' Us getting in to the nuclear power industry - nobody would really take it seriously, because of the brand name.
Or maybe like a certain computer company getting into the music industry and everyone said it wouldn't work.
Remember Westinghouse? They used to make blenders... Now they make nuclear reactors.;)
Or maybe Nintendo? They used to make poker cards back in the 1800's. Now look what they do.
If a company wants to exist more than 10 years, then they have to constantly reinvent themselves.
Secondly, if you already have a brand name you might as well hold on to it since you have spent decades already building on it.
If I saw a package in the store and saw "SuperBotic's Household Robot" I'd probaly pass it over thinking it was a fad.
If I saw a package that said "Lego's Household Robot", I'd go "Hey I remember that company! I used to play with those block things when I was a kid!" and pick up the box and take a look.
By the way... If you are going to make the worlds first pseudoesque self replicating robot, Legos would be the way to go. Just write a program for you bot to seek out certain lego parts in the local area and have it assemble another one of itself.
I'd be interested to know how they intend to measure the micro-black holes.
I dunno... Is this kind of treading on the "igniting the atmosphere" kind of problem with A-bombs.
I mean if make a mini-black hole and drop it on the floor by acident, wouldn't it just absorb more and more mass on the way to the center of the earth.
I know... I know... You can't "drop" a black hole on the floor... But if you could wouldn't it be neat;)
Did they land on the moon? They did. It's not a matter of belief but of fact.
Are you sure? Have you seen imperical proof? Have you been to the moon? Have you personally met anyone who has been to the moon?
For that matter... Can we prove that there was the cold war? Or maybe World War 2?
Maybe my Grandfather was lying to me. Or better yet, he believed he was telling the truth and was brainwashed? What if there is a grand conspiracy to write text books and doctor photographs of events that never happened.
I mean what if we had photoshop for centuries and our ancestors were simply making up events as they went along and all our history boooks are made up?
How do can I prove that all my family members aren't actors and the universe isn't a big joke and all my memories aren't simply false and the universe isn't only 6 seconds old and god is a big supercomputer sitting in some aliens basement?
I can't.
So I'll have to assume everything everyone tells me is true... except the people who are lying to me.;)
For that matter, just where the fuck did the idea that the proper use of language is reserved solely for job interviews and schools come from?!
ARRRRGHHGHHGH!
There is no such thing as "correct English" or "proper English" in a sense that English never changes and follows a set of rules set in stone.
Otherwise if you want proper English we need to revert back to the Middle Olde English and use thee and thou and thou art!
People don't talk the same as they did 10 years ago. English was meant to be mutable and should not be restricted in order to be able to create ideas quickly and easily that we could not previously express with our limited language.
Otherwise Latin would have been fine.
Take Japanese for example. They have a formal Japanese used in professional settings and more vernacular variant. Why can't we?
This insane restriction of the English language is something that should be done away with. If you travel from New York to Georgia to Texas to California to say... England... And back to Canada you will notice that no one has exact rules and everyone has different ways of talking in English.
Yet I can amazingly talk to any of those people (well maybe except people in Scotland after a Pub Crawl).
If you want an exact and immutable language switch to Latin.
English bastardization and improper usage is here to stay.
Yeah! And that's why, if he had kept a backup, he wouldn't have been able to use it again and would have had to buy a second copy!
Um... But with DRM you aren't able to make a backup most of the time! And if you do so you might be breaking the DMCA law if you bypass the DRM security.
when I buy a CD at the store, they replace it for free (or at-physical-cost) when I break it so I don't have to buy it again!
What store do you buy CDs at? No seriously, I want to know because all the major stores I shopped at won't let you return CDs without going through a fuss with a manager or two about "because of copyright laws" (actual quote of a Target employee) that they can't exchange it for money and what happens if they don't have a copy of the original?
If they can't then map their skills from one game to another, they're suddenly out of luck and out of a job - how sustainable is this sort of job?
How sustainable is your current job?
I certainly wouldn't quit my day job simply out of the security it would afford me - if the game ends tomorrow, at least I still have a paycheque.
Right, but if the CEO of your company decides they need to cut labors costs, you might not.
Any job is volitile, even if you are self employeed or a tenured state employee. Some jobs are more volitile than another depending on what you do, but every job in the world can simply end with an overnight notice due to economic, political, or environmental changes.
So it is just silly to say that brick and mortar jobs is more secure than any of these online ones, because they are both insecure.
However, the important factor in finding a job is how well you adapt to the ever changing job market and be able to learn new skills.
That or put up with crap jobs inbetween while you make up stuff on your resume.
and daring to point out repeated mistakes (most of which are obviously due to a failure to absorb basic lessons in grade school) is moderated (-1, Flamebait) and (-1, Troll).
If we wanted to learn proper english, we'd be trolling ProperEnglishdot.org and not trying to discuss technology and geek releated things.
I mean, I have horrible grammar because I don't really care what other people on this forum think and I'm probaly multitasking talking with someone else on a phone (at work) and writing tech support request emails so its amazing I even post comments in an understandable format.
On occasion I find myself copying and pasting my comment into word and doing a spell check for blatantly obvious problems... But face it guys... I don't really care if you know how to spell nor if I make a good impression on you with my excellent grammar and spelling.
Slashdot isn't a job interview after all and not all of us have the time to sit and proof read everything we type.
Re:Paying twice is the point of DRM
on
Songbird Flies Today
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
It's still bullshit that he had to pay twice for the same songs, but in an Apple world, that's how things work.
The point of DRM is to make legitimate customer pay twice for songs. Not to prevent piracy.
I see nothing wrong with iTunes. I take issue with the submission's "DRM ridden" phrase. iTunes is not "ridden" with DRM; you don't even have to buy any music from iTunes and have a completely DRM-free experience.
True, but I think having an open source counterpart is a good idea.
Remember when they added the mini-store and there was all that stink about it being spyware? I was aggravated because it took up too much screen space with ads. Well luckily, they gave the option to turn it off.
What happens if Apple goes evil and decides to make these options always on after a compulsory upgrade that you can't bypass or uninstall? Or what if Apple goes bankrupt or decides you have to use AAC format from now on instead of MP3?
Even though I would seriously doubt these worse case scenarios will ever happen, there is a reason for having open source alternatives.
Secondly, if the open source alternative becomes more popular and has better features than the proprietary then chances are the proprietary version will upgrade its features as well after being stale for a while.
I think you're overstating Google's power a tad here. Sure Verizon will lose customers, but in the end it's a lot easier to switch search engines than it is to switch ISPs.
However, I don't think we should go to the moon at all. I think we should get our house in order first.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" -- Larry Niven, quoted by Arthur Clarke in interview at space.com, 2001
But what about a DVR?" you ask, and with good reason. The cable company did not build all this encryption into the product only to see it thwarted by a digital video recorder that outputs an unencrypted HDTV signal to the television. Therefore, if the host device is not a display device, it is required to encrypt the video stream yet again for transmission to another device. This last type of encryption is "link encryption" such as HDCP, which Vista will also require between the PC and the monitor in order to display protected content in its full high resolution glory. It is likely that other operating systems (e.g., Mac OS X) as well as consumer electronics will use HDCP too.
Someone is obviously spending a lot of research time and money that won't really improve their product.
I mean seriously, if your company is spending money (and lots of it) on technology just to restrict what a customer can do by removing features, then you might as well be shoveling money into a gaping fire pit of doom.
For an anology as think it as if a Microsoft Office project manager showed up at a meeting and said "Hey guys! I'm going to get us a million dollar budget so we can find out how to remove the Save feature for Word and Excel! Our customers will be so pleased they'll buy two copies of Office for every computer they own!"
They have put a great deal of effort into something that won't earn them a cent of profit. The majority of people who were going to use DVR aren't going to pay twice for things and if you try to force them to then they'll probaly go elsewhere for their movies (DVD, satellite, or iTunes Video).
On the flip side, I'm sure it keeps techy engineers employed helping them spend all this money on HDCP.
Just create a playlist that selects a random 1 or 2 Gig and loads them onto the iPod. Delete all the songs from the playlist and it grabs another random 1 or 2 Gig and reloads the iPod.
I actually did that the first time I setup the Nano. However, I'm kind of leary of constantly read/writing/erasing an entire flash drive over and over again. But maybe that limited number of writes issue with flash memory is over rated.
Secondly, I discovered I don't like to listen to most of my music collection since I am still old fashioned and buy CD's and the rip them (at 256kps). Finding that I may only like one song out of an album doesn't help this either.
I got a 2 gig Nano for Christmas (no complaints mind you), but I already filled it up on the day that I started moving files to it Even then I am constantly scratching my head trying to figure out what songs I can delete so I can squeeze in another favorite song I just picked up.
I could only imagine what the 1gb would be like, but I suppose if you wanted to give someone an iPod on the cheep or had a small music collection then it would be the best route to go.
I had thought about returning it and getting a 4gb nano, but I think that would be rude to the person who got it for me. And come to think of it, I would want around 10+ gb to satisfy my musical needs anways.
Maybe we'll see higher memories by Christmas this year or next.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, I find that from the WSJ, the number of wiretaps last year is only at 1,710 in 2004.
;)
But what about the wiretaps that they don't disclose?
If you are right and you respectfully, calmly and clearly explain why to others you will almost always prevail.*
*Offer not valid with uppermangment, stock holders, or Edward** in the supply room.
**Edward is a bastard.
After a period of growth, opportunities are closing, budgets are increasing to tens of millions of dollars, and companies need global infrastructure in order to publish.
I think this is because in order to maximize profit, you must have the best product which requires teams of coders, hordes of graphic designers, and armies of network admins to roll out WoW, EQ, and whatever other blockbuster game comes out.
So this is what is done...
However, larger companies tend to not take risks on unproven ground so there still will be room for startups to nudge their way, but they won't be blockbusters with 100,000 players.
Eventually, after technology and bandwidth costs aren't prohibitive or a factor and the game engines have gotten as realistic as they can so there isn't anything left but to create game content, then perhaps it will be more mom and pop shops again. But this might be a while...
Now, what would be really great is a Nintendo-branded flash card for the GBA slot - say 512MB
Or maybe a dedicated VoIP chip.
It would probaly kill battery life though.
I guess talking BEFORE and AFTER a game is kinda pointless.
Hrm.... Kind of like sex.
If time travel will ever be possible then where are the time travelers? Shouldn't they be visiting us or maybe our great-great grandparents?
Look... This is the future we are talking about. They have robot sex partners that look better than most supermodels today and VR systems that could just simulate the past if they got bored enough to do so.
Why in gods name would they drop all that and come visit us? They won't even give their great great great grandparents even a phone call!
Ungrateful bastards!
The only way to time travel would be to force every particle of matter and every bit of energy back to where it was at some point we remember from the past. Then we would have the perfect illusion of time travel.
Wouldn't it be easier to simulate the universe on a computer?
And then just jump in on whatever time frame you want?
Or secondly if you really could alter the entire universe to specific states, then you'd have to leave the universe while doing this and then come back.
Hi, remember me? Of course not! Because I am an 45" HDTV and you'll never see me because I'll cost more than your VHS, DVD, Blu Ray Player, used car, and house payment... COMBINED!
And do you really think you'll see a difference between a DVD and a Blu Ray on my old man NTSC TV? Hah! That lazy bastard has hard enough time getting his S-Video up in the morning.
It's kind of like Toys 'R' Us getting in to the nuclear power industry - nobody would really take it seriously, because of the brand name.
;)
Or maybe like a certain computer company getting into the music industry and everyone said it wouldn't work.
Remember Westinghouse? They used to make blenders... Now they make nuclear reactors.
Or maybe Nintendo? They used to make poker cards back in the 1800's. Now look what they do.
If a company wants to exist more than 10 years, then they have to constantly reinvent themselves.
Secondly, if you already have a brand name you might as well hold on to it since you have spent decades already building on it.
If I saw a package in the store and saw "SuperBotic's Household Robot" I'd probaly pass it over thinking it was a fad.
If I saw a package that said "Lego's Household Robot", I'd go "Hey I remember that company! I used to play with those block things when I was a kid!" and pick up the box and take a look.
By the way... If you are going to make the worlds first pseudoesque self replicating robot, Legos would be the way to go. Just write a program for you bot to seek out certain lego parts in the local area and have it assemble another one of itself.
I'd be interested to know how they intend to measure the micro-black holes.
;)
I dunno... Is this kind of treading on the "igniting the atmosphere" kind of problem with A-bombs.
I mean if make a mini-black hole and drop it on the floor by acident, wouldn't it just absorb more and more mass on the way to the center of the earth.
I know... I know... You can't "drop" a black hole on the floor... But if you could wouldn't it be neat
Did they land on the moon? They did. It's not a matter of belief but of fact.
;)
Are you sure? Have you seen imperical proof? Have you been to the moon? Have you personally met anyone who has been to the moon?
For that matter... Can we prove that there was the cold war? Or maybe World War 2?
Maybe my Grandfather was lying to me. Or better yet, he believed he was telling the truth and was brainwashed? What if there is a grand conspiracy to write text books and doctor photographs of events that never happened.
I mean what if we had photoshop for centuries and our ancestors were simply making up events as they went along and all our history boooks are made up?
How do can I prove that all my family members aren't actors and the universe isn't a big joke and all my memories aren't simply false and the universe isn't only 6 seconds old and god is a big supercomputer sitting in some aliens basement?
I can't.
So I'll have to assume everything everyone tells me is true... except the people who are lying to me.
Now I just have to figure out who is lying to me.
For that matter, just where the fuck did the idea that the proper use of language is reserved solely for job interviews and schools come from?!
ARRRRGHHGHHGH!
There is no such thing as "correct English" or "proper English" in a sense that English never changes and follows a set of rules set in stone.
Otherwise if you want proper English we need to revert back to the Middle Olde English and use thee and thou and thou art!
People don't talk the same as they did 10 years ago. English was meant to be mutable and should not be restricted in order to be able to create ideas quickly and easily that we could not previously express with our limited language.
Otherwise Latin would have been fine.
Take Japanese for example. They have a formal Japanese used in professional settings and more vernacular variant. Why can't we?
This insane restriction of the English language is something that should be done away with. If you travel from New York to Georgia to Texas to California to say... England... And back to Canada you will notice that no one has exact rules and everyone has different ways of talking in English.
Yet I can amazingly talk to any of those people (well maybe except people in Scotland after a Pub Crawl).
If you want an exact and immutable language switch to Latin.
English bastardization and improper usage is here to stay.
Those making money are nothing but sheep farmers, harvesting from n00bs that wanna play with their paper dolls simulating getting laid.
And this is any different from real life?
I mean do you really need buy her those diamond rings, fancy shoes, and prance around in that new sports car just for the hell of it?
Someone will always take advantage of the human desire to get laid. Even if it is just virtual.
Yeah! And that's why, if he had kept a backup, he wouldn't have been able to use it again and would have had to buy a second copy!
Um... But with DRM you aren't able to make a backup most of the time! And if you do so you might be breaking the DMCA law if you bypass the DRM security.
when I buy a CD at the store, they replace it for free (or at-physical-cost) when I break it so I don't have to buy it again!
What store do you buy CDs at? No seriously, I want to know because all the major stores I shopped at won't let you return CDs without going through a fuss with a manager or two about "because of copyright laws" (actual quote of a Target employee) that they can't exchange it for money and what happens if they don't have a copy of the original?
Oh. You are shit out of luck.
If they can't then map their skills from one game to another, they're suddenly out of luck and out of a job - how sustainable is this sort of job?
How sustainable is your current job?
I certainly wouldn't quit my day job simply out of the security it would afford me - if the game ends tomorrow, at least I still have a paycheque.
Right, but if the CEO of your company decides they need to cut labors costs, you might not.
Any job is volitile, even if you are self employeed or a tenured state employee. Some jobs are more volitile than another depending on what you do, but every job in the world can simply end with an overnight notice due to economic, political, or environmental changes.
So it is just silly to say that brick and mortar jobs is more secure than any of these online ones, because they are both insecure.
However, the important factor in finding a job is how well you adapt to the ever changing job market and be able to learn new skills.
That or put up with crap jobs inbetween while you make up stuff on your resume.
and daring to point out repeated mistakes (most of which are obviously due to a failure to absorb basic lessons in grade school) is moderated (-1, Flamebait) and (-1, Troll).
If we wanted to learn proper english, we'd be trolling ProperEnglishdot.org and not trying to discuss technology and geek releated things.
I mean, I have horrible grammar because I don't really care what other people on this forum think and I'm probaly multitasking talking with someone else on a phone (at work) and writing tech support request emails so its amazing I even post comments in an understandable format.
On occasion I find myself copying and pasting my comment into word and doing a spell check for blatantly obvious problems... But face it guys... I don't really care if you know how to spell nor if I make a good impression on you with my excellent grammar and spelling.
Slashdot isn't a job interview after all and not all of us have the time to sit and proof read everything we type.
It's still bullshit that he had to pay twice for the same songs, but in an Apple world, that's how things work.
The point of DRM is to make legitimate customer pay twice for songs. Not to prevent piracy.
I see nothing wrong with iTunes. I take issue with the submission's "DRM ridden" phrase. iTunes is not "ridden" with DRM; you don't even have to buy any music from iTunes and have a completely DRM-free experience.
True, but I think having an open source counterpart is a good idea.
Remember when they added the mini-store and there was all that stink about it being spyware? I was aggravated because it took up too much screen space with ads. Well luckily, they gave the option to turn it off.
What happens if Apple goes evil and decides to make these options always on after a compulsory upgrade that you can't bypass or uninstall? Or what if Apple goes bankrupt or decides you have to use AAC format from now on instead of MP3?
Even though I would seriously doubt these worse case scenarios will ever happen, there is a reason for having open source alternatives.
Secondly, if the open source alternative becomes more popular and has better features than the proprietary then chances are the proprietary version will upgrade its features as well after being stale for a while.
You know... Like IE7 and Firefox.
I think you're overstating Google's power a tad here. Sure Verizon will lose customers, but in the end it's a lot easier to switch search engines than it is to switch ISPs.
Let me make a challenge to you.
Stop using Google for an entire week.
See if you can do it.
I certainly could not.
However, I don't think we should go to the moon at all. I think we should get our house in order first.
"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!"
-- Larry Niven, quoted by Arthur Clarke in interview at space.com, 2001
I mean seriously, if your company is spending money (and lots of it) on technology just to restrict what a customer can do by removing features, then you might as well be shoveling money into a gaping fire pit of doom.
For an anology as think it as if a Microsoft Office project manager showed up at a meeting and said "Hey guys! I'm going to get us a million dollar budget so we can find out how to remove the Save feature for Word and Excel! Our customers will be so pleased they'll buy two copies of Office for every computer they own!"
They have put a great deal of effort into something that won't earn them a cent of profit. The majority of people who were going to use DVR aren't going to pay twice for things and if you try to force them to then they'll probaly go elsewhere for their movies (DVD, satellite, or iTunes Video).
On the flip side, I'm sure it keeps techy engineers employed helping them spend all this money on HDCP.
Just create a playlist that selects a random 1 or 2 Gig and loads them onto the iPod. Delete all the songs from the playlist and it grabs another random 1 or 2 Gig and reloads the iPod.
I actually did that the first time I setup the Nano. However, I'm kind of leary of constantly read/writing/erasing an entire flash drive over and over again. But maybe that limited number of writes issue with flash memory is over rated.
Secondly, I discovered I don't like to listen to most of my music collection since I am still old fashioned and buy CD's and the rip them (at 256kps). Finding that I may only like one song out of an album doesn't help this either.
I suppose you could look at the issue and decide for yourself.
Ok... *click*
Sorry, links to Bugzilla from Slashdot are disabled.
Ook! I suppose not.
When even a normal user finds that Firefox has consumed 400+ MB of their 512 MB of RAM,
;)
Buy more RAM!
I got a 2 gig Nano for Christmas (no complaints mind you), but I already filled it up on the day that I started moving files to it Even then I am constantly scratching my head trying to figure out what songs I can delete so I can squeeze in another favorite song I just picked up.
I could only imagine what the 1gb would be like, but I suppose if you wanted to give someone an iPod on the cheep or had a small music collection then it would be the best route to go.
I had thought about returning it and getting a 4gb nano, but I think that would be rude to the person who got it for me. And come to think of it, I would want around 10+ gb to satisfy my musical needs anways.
Maybe we'll see higher memories by Christmas this year or next.