Of course, the revenue stream enjoyed by the music industry covers both downloads and physical sales.
The download revenue stream is far greater than Apple's as well - in fact they get the lion's share (I think it's around 50 cents) and Apple get something like 10 cents on each song, with which they have to maintain and administer the entire global iTunes Music Store.
The money for the RIAA comes with no investment at all! They just get money to licence their songs. Apple literally does all the work in this arrangement.
And yet they cry "Foul!"
Claims like that one from the RIAA don't even stand up to a brief glance, let alone serious examination.
I'm in Australia. I know all about extra costs. Lately they've dropped a bit, but they used to be up around AUS$1000 extra for a medium or high end tower from Apple. I didn't think this was a surprise for anyone outside the US these days.
I don't care if you use a PC or a Mac, as long as you use the right thing for you. That's only common sense. I wasn't posting about the choices people make.
My earlier post was all about people who crap on and on endlessly about how they'll buy this or that piece of software, but in the end don't get their wallets out and instead pirate it.
I just don't believe the anecdotes of people wanting to pay for OS X on their commodity PCs will translate to actual sales.
I'm not sure your example (good though it is) applies to my point.
I don't believe it. I've thought about it, I've heard these anecdotes, but I just don't accept it as true.
People say that Macs are too expensive. So Apple finally released the Mini and people say it's not powerful enough. It's just excuses that boil down to "I won't pay for it no matter what, but here's my justification."
If people *really* wanted to play with OS X, the Mac Mini is good enough, and has a good resale value if they don't like it. The final result will be that they'd be down perhaps $100, around the OS X price.
But people want a high-powered desktop at the price of the Mini. And you know what? It's never going to happen from Apple. We've known that for twenty years now. This cannot be a suprise, surely?
And if people can legally get their copy of OS X installed on their generic PC, what are these people going to run on it? Are they going to buy Office, Photoshop, or something else? Or will they instead just compile and run X11 apps (so why run OS X instead of Linux)?
Just about everything worthwhile costs money, or is available for Linux for free, or both. There's no reason to buy OS X just to play around with it, because you have to get a whole swag of applications as well.
I've seen the anecdotes, but I've also seen too many people who, when you take their objections away, raise new objections as to why they won't ever spend the money. I believe that they only want to pirate the OS, and will probably never pay for it, even if they easily could.
In fact, my only Troll-rated comments were when I questioned why people want Ogg Vorbis. I actually wanted to know, but instead of answering my question, I was modded down as a troll.
Good use of stereotyping though. "Fawning sycophants" is great. It's like me asking a Windows users about all their viruses and BSODs or crapping on about how Linux is all command line crap and will never be ready for the desktop. Not grounded in reality, but close enough for something to stick.
You utter, utter bastard! Well... not you, Lisandro, so much as the evil bastards who foisted that steaming pile of dung upon an unsuspecting world.
That was the most atrocious piece of comic doggerel I've ever seen. It was written so badly that I started to feel more sympathy for the demons than the psychopathic character.
"Hell on Earth" is reading that bilge. If I was more litigious I'd want to sue the authors for mental damage, pain and suffering. And still I can't express just how bad that was. It... has to be seen to be believed.
My 60GB (55GB formatted) iBook sorely needs the space.
25GB for my CD collection in iTunes 10GB for my scanned photos (ready for cleaning up) 2.5GB for the OS folders (System and Library) 5GB for my documents (quite a few pdfs) 5GB for development apps, IDEs, examples, my own work
That leaves me with 7.5GB free.
I'd love a 100GB drive, just for the free room. I'd be able to install a few games, like UT2K4 (which plays acceptably well on the iBook) or Myst IV. I hate buying games that I can't afford the drive space for!
And Diablo, a big hit in the past ten years, is more than a little rooted in NetHack. It feels like NetHack with real time play and graphics and sound.
That's a lot of extra stuff, but the gameplay is very NetHack-like.
My iBook, bought early last year, had two motherboard replacements in the normal warranty period. The second was just before the warranty ran out, so I bought the Applecare extended warranty to give me another two years.
The other day the hard drive failed in a catastrophic manner (a meteor hit it). The replacement drive was a warranty repair, but to get Apple techs to do this out of warranty would have cost me far more than the extended warranty did.
It's already paid for itself. I'm hoping that I won't see further value out of it, but suspect I will...
A desktop machine is less prone to fail like my laptop did, and if it did, is more easily user-servicable.
As a Mac user...... but seriously - I don't think GPU screen rendering is a bad thing. Microsoft are going in the right direction by offloading that sort of donkey work.
But why such a powerful GPU? If Apple can achieve the same thing using a minimum of 32MB (like my little iBook), why can't Microsoft?
What's the compelling reason for such a hefty GPU requirement? Do you have to launch Doom III to 'delete' files? This is serious GPU power here, and if it's just rendering windows it seems to be poorly optimised.
Maybe it's a beta thing, and by the time it ships you can get by with lower GPU requirements.
I may not have made my point very well... The antitrust violation is (as you point out) around Microsoft using monopoly power to ensure that competitors cannot compete. The method is the bundling of apps and the inability of vendors to change that software bundle.
Apple cannot be as guilty as Microsoft, even if they do exactly the same thing, because they don't hold the same position in the market. They're not a monopoly by any definition, so they can't be accused of antitrust violations under US law.
I'm not so sure that removing IE is as easy as you say. I'll give it a try when I get home tonight.
OS X does include a bunch of bundled apps, but they are trivially removed.
Don't like iTunes? Delete it. You'll never see it again.
Don't like the QuickTime player? Delete it. You'll never see it again.
Don't like iMovie, Safari, iDVD, etc, etc, etc...
That's the difference. You can easily remove any application that comes with OS X and that's the end of it.
Other parts of the OS, such as the QuickTime framework (not the app, but the multimedia layer) are harder to remove, but many people would argue that they're in the OS layer, much like the window manager and memory manager.
It's very hard to see a parallel case against OS X, and even if you do find one, the fact that Apple are not a monopoly means that it's not an issue of illegally leveraging marketshare to hurt competition.
Exec A: "I'm thinking "The Sandman" from those cool comics, only in the movie he's not some skinny guy, but a musclebound hero!"
Exec B: "I'm listening..."
Exec A: "He's got the power of making people sleep, or hallucinate during the day. He fights crime and recharges his magic bag of sleeping dust every night. And his arch-enemy is his own sister, Desire!"
Exec B: "Good twist. What about the love interest?"
Exec A: "Well, his girlfriend is a rock-grrl from New York, street-hip and so marketable. We've got sketches of a clothing line"
Exec B: "I like it. We need to drop some of that touchy-feely crap from the stories. I want action, and long fight sequences. Is that Woo guy available? I'm thinking of a huge fight scene, where the Sandman fights that sister, starting with fists and then getting swords from a wall or something. It'll end with him cutting off her head just when she's about to skewer him. We'll need some special effects though. Do these guys fly?"
Exec A: "They do now!"
Exec B: "Shit we're going to make so much money from this. Maybe there's a sequel, and she's not dead but comes back for revenge. It doesn't matter though."
Different issue, and you should have been able to perceive this difference.
I'm talking about the prevalent culture that pervades all aspects of daily life, and how it portrays women and men. A subset of that culture is in video games, and because of the nature of graphics (not being necessarily based in reality) the images of women and men are even worse than you see on billboards.
That's what I believe drives many people away from video games.
It's absolutely nothing to do with violent games, but it's nice of you to try to slip me up.
Is it just me, or does someone else think of the scene in Monsters Inc where Mike screams out "Put that thing back where it came from!" and then pretends it's a musical?
Pixar put it in the DVD as an extra bit. It was very good, but somehow I keep thinking of this story in the same vein.
Have you looked at the rise in cosmetic surgery in the last ten to twenty years? Or the way that increasingly more women feel unhappy with their physical form, even if they actually *are* slim and attractive?
There are even reality TV shows now where people get cut up to make them look better. That's so sick and twisted that it's almost beyond comprehension.
Is your point that it's good advertising practice to mutate women's bodies in a way that no women could possibly live up to (through extensive use of Photoshop and similar tools), and that games *don't* stereotype both men and women?
I think the industry needs to focus not on what women would enjoy, but on making games less obviously targeted at the young demographic.
Characters in games are so often caricatures - men with lantern jaws and bulging biceps, women with cavernous cleavage and wasp waists. It'd be better to have people who actually look like you could meet them in the street.
Women seem to react more negatively to stereotypes of women than men react to stereotypes of men. That drives them away from many games.
What the industry needs is a free and open source suite of tools and engine components that nobody can buy, but that anyone can use.
What about the Torque engine? It's cheap enough that anyone can use it, looks good, has a good contract and apparently is straightforward to develop with. You get the source code, too.
It's not open source, but the time taken to build a commercial-quality engine may mean open source never happens. It'd be nice if it does though!
By using a pre-built engine, you focus on delivering content, not getting the renderer working or the network code right. The game content is more important than the renderer in most cases (cue Doom 3 wisecracks) and that's where developers should be.
That's where games are going, I think. I'm going to get a Torque licence soon to play around with it.
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Of course, the revenue stream enjoyed by the music industry covers both downloads and physical sales.
The download revenue stream is far greater than Apple's as well - in fact they get the lion's share (I think it's around 50 cents) and Apple get something like 10 cents on each song, with which they have to maintain and administer the entire global iTunes Music Store.
The money for the RIAA comes with no investment at all! They just get money to licence their songs. Apple literally does all the work in this arrangement.
And yet they cry "Foul!"
Claims like that one from the RIAA don't even stand up to a brief glance, let alone serious examination.
I'm in Australia. I know all about extra costs. Lately they've dropped a bit, but they used to be up around AUS$1000 extra for a medium or high end tower from Apple. I didn't think this was a surprise for anyone outside the US these days.
I don't care if you use a PC or a Mac, as long as you use the right thing for you. That's only common sense. I wasn't posting about the choices people make.
My earlier post was all about people who crap on and on endlessly about how they'll buy this or that piece of software, but in the end don't get their wallets out and instead pirate it.
I just don't believe the anecdotes of people wanting to pay for OS X on their commodity PCs will translate to actual sales.
I'm not sure your example (good though it is) applies to my point.
I don't believe it. I've thought about it, I've heard these anecdotes, but I just don't accept it as true.
People say that Macs are too expensive. So Apple finally released the Mini and people say it's not powerful enough. It's just excuses that boil down to "I won't pay for it no matter what, but here's my justification."
If people *really* wanted to play with OS X, the Mac Mini is good enough, and has a good resale value if they don't like it. The final result will be that they'd be down perhaps $100, around the OS X price.
But people want a high-powered desktop at the price of the Mini. And you know what? It's never going to happen from Apple. We've known that for twenty years now. This cannot be a suprise, surely?
And if people can legally get their copy of OS X installed on their generic PC, what are these people going to run on it? Are they going to buy Office, Photoshop, or something else? Or will they instead just compile and run X11 apps (so why run OS X instead of Linux)?
Just about everything worthwhile costs money, or is available for Linux for free, or both. There's no reason to buy OS X just to play around with it, because you have to get a whole swag of applications as well.
I've seen the anecdotes, but I've also seen too many people who, when you take their objections away, raise new objections as to why they won't ever spend the money. I believe that they only want to pirate the OS, and will probably never pay for it, even if they easily could.
I've got 25GB of music ripped into iTunes, and the CDs in another room. What exactly is your point?
The same applies to negative opinions of Linux.
In fact, my only Troll-rated comments were when I questioned why people want Ogg Vorbis. I actually wanted to know, but instead of answering my question, I was modded down as a troll.
Good use of stereotyping though. "Fawning sycophants" is great. It's like me asking a Windows users about all their viruses and BSODs or crapping on about how Linux is all command line crap and will never be ready for the desktop. Not grounded in reality, but close enough for something to stick.
You utter, utter bastard! Well... not you, Lisandro, so much as the evil bastards who foisted that steaming pile of dung upon an unsuspecting world.
That was the most atrocious piece of comic doggerel I've ever seen. It was written so badly that I started to feel more sympathy for the demons than the psychopathic character.
"Hell on Earth" is reading that bilge. If I was more litigious I'd want to sue the authors for mental damage, pain and suffering. And still I can't express just how bad that was. It... has to be seen to be believed.
My 60GB (55GB formatted) iBook sorely needs the space.
25GB for my CD collection in iTunes
10GB for my scanned photos (ready for cleaning up)
2.5GB for the OS folders (System and Library)
5GB for my documents (quite a few pdfs)
5GB for development apps, IDEs, examples, my own work
That leaves me with 7.5GB free.
I'd love a 100GB drive, just for the free room. I'd be able to install a few games, like UT2K4 (which plays acceptably well on the iBook) or Myst IV. I hate buying games that I can't afford the drive space for!
And Diablo, a big hit in the past ten years, is more than a little rooted in NetHack. It feels like NetHack with real time play and graphics and sound.
That's a lot of extra stuff, but the gameplay is very NetHack-like.
My iBook, bought early last year, had two motherboard replacements in the normal warranty period. The second was just before the warranty ran out, so I bought the Applecare extended warranty to give me another two years.
The other day the hard drive failed in a catastrophic manner (a meteor hit it). The replacement drive was a warranty repair, but to get Apple techs to do this out of warranty would have cost me far more than the extended warranty did.
It's already paid for itself. I'm hoping that I won't see further value out of it, but suspect I will...
A desktop machine is less prone to fail like my laptop did, and if it did, is more easily user-servicable.
As a Mac user... ... but seriously - I don't think GPU screen rendering is a bad thing. Microsoft are going in the right direction by offloading that sort of donkey work.
But why such a powerful GPU? If Apple can achieve the same thing using a minimum of 32MB (like my little iBook), why can't Microsoft?
What's the compelling reason for such a hefty GPU requirement? Do you have to launch Doom III to 'delete' files? This is serious GPU power here, and if it's just rendering windows it seems to be poorly optimised.
Maybe it's a beta thing, and by the time it ships you can get by with lower GPU requirements.
I may not have made my point very well... The antitrust violation is (as you point out) around Microsoft using monopoly power to ensure that competitors cannot compete. The method is the bundling of apps and the inability of vendors to change that software bundle.
Apple cannot be as guilty as Microsoft, even if they do exactly the same thing, because they don't hold the same position in the market. They're not a monopoly by any definition, so they can't be accused of antitrust violations under US law.
I'm not so sure that removing IE is as easy as you say. I'll give it a try when I get home tonight.
OS X does include a bunch of bundled apps, but they are trivially removed.
Don't like iTunes? Delete it. You'll never see it again.
Don't like the QuickTime player? Delete it. You'll never see it again.
Don't like iMovie, Safari, iDVD, etc, etc, etc...
That's the difference. You can easily remove any application that comes with OS X and that's the end of it.
Other parts of the OS, such as the QuickTime framework (not the app, but the multimedia layer) are harder to remove, but many people would argue that they're in the OS layer, much like the window manager and memory manager.
It's very hard to see a parallel case against OS X, and even if you do find one, the fact that Apple are not a monopoly means that it's not an issue of illegally leveraging marketshare to hurt competition.
The first time I read the specs here, I thought "Wow - Infineon are finally getting their new console specced up."
Then I realised it had nothing to do with them.
Strange how I confused a vapourware console with this.
(somewhere in Hollywood...)
Exec A:
"I'm thinking "The Sandman" from those cool comics, only in the movie he's not some skinny guy, but a musclebound hero!"
Exec B:
"I'm listening..."
Exec A:
"He's got the power of making people sleep, or hallucinate during the day. He fights crime and recharges his magic bag of sleeping dust every night. And his arch-enemy is his own sister, Desire!"
Exec B:
"Good twist. What about the love interest?"
Exec A:
"Well, his girlfriend is a rock-grrl from New York, street-hip and so marketable. We've got sketches of a clothing line"
Exec B:
"I like it. We need to drop some of that touchy-feely crap from the stories. I want action, and long fight sequences. Is that Woo guy available? I'm thinking of a huge fight scene, where the Sandman fights that sister, starting with fists and then getting swords from a wall or something. It'll end with him cutting off her head just when she's about to skewer him. We'll need some special effects though. Do these guys fly?"
Exec A:
"They do now!"
Exec B:
"Shit we're going to make so much money from this. Maybe there's a sequel, and she's not dead but comes back for revenge. It doesn't matter though."
Fair enough - I was overly rude.
I shouldn't post after a long, frustrating day with SQL Server. My ability to see sarcasm and humour was more than a little impaired.
Sorry.
You need to do your homework before you post.
In Australia guns are generally not legal to own, unless you can show a reason for having them.
Pistols are almost impossible to get a licence for.
Shops don't stock guns either. Nor bullets.
Good? Bad? Gun deaths are very few here, so that's kind of nice.
You look for a single cause?
Wow. That's brave.
Different issue, and you should have been able to perceive this difference.
I'm talking about the prevalent culture that pervades all aspects of daily life, and how it portrays women and men. A subset of that culture is in video games, and because of the nature of graphics (not being necessarily based in reality) the images of women and men are even worse than you see on billboards.
That's what I believe drives many people away from video games.
It's absolutely nothing to do with violent games, but it's nice of you to try to slip me up.
Is it just me, or does someone else think of the scene in Monsters Inc where Mike screams out "Put that thing back where it came from!" and then pretends it's a musical?
Pixar put it in the DVD as an extra bit. It was very good, but somehow I keep thinking of this story in the same vein.
Have you looked at the rise in cosmetic surgery in the last ten to twenty years? Or the way that increasingly more women feel unhappy with their physical form, even if they actually *are* slim and attractive?
There are even reality TV shows now where people get cut up to make them look better. That's so sick and twisted that it's almost beyond comprehension.
Is your point that it's good advertising practice to mutate women's bodies in a way that no women could possibly live up to (through extensive use of Photoshop and similar tools), and that games *don't* stereotype both men and women?
I think the industry needs to focus not on what women would enjoy, but on making games less obviously targeted at the young demographic.
Characters in games are so often caricatures - men with lantern jaws and bulging biceps, women with cavernous cleavage and wasp waists. It'd be better to have people who actually look like you could meet them in the street.
Women seem to react more negatively to stereotypes of women than men react to stereotypes of men. That drives them away from many games.
Maybe, maybe not. I'm not keen on releasing anything under the GPL unless I want to. That steers me away from Q3.
GarageGames seem to have a community behind them right now, and have some good looking tools (like the shading packs and the RTS pack) today.
Q3 will take a while to get to that stage, and besides which, I just can't stand the look and feel of id games. I've never liked one, try as I might.
What the industry needs is a free and open source suite of tools and engine components that nobody can buy, but that anyone can use.
What about the Torque engine? It's cheap enough that anyone can use it, looks good, has a good contract and apparently is straightforward to develop with. You get the source code, too.
It's not open source, but the time taken to build a commercial-quality engine may mean open source never happens. It'd be nice if it does though!
By using a pre-built engine, you focus on delivering content, not getting the renderer working or the network code right. The game content is more important than the renderer in most cases (cue Doom 3 wisecracks) and that's where developers should be.
That's where games are going, I think. I'm going to get a Torque licence soon to play around with it.
You know, while I don't mind the mod points, even *I* can't see that as insightful.
Who's modding me around here? And where have you been when I posted something a bit more intelligent?
The word you're looking for is "licencing."
As in "Apple licenced technology from Xerox in return for stock which Xerox sold at quite a profit."
It's nitpicking though, and while true, it's not commonly accepted wisdom.