I hear accelerating tiny bits of metal towards people works perfectly well for killing them, and as China has both the capability to do so and few compunctions about doing it, I don't see them making Killer Scream Mk1000s.
Every major ISP sells completely unthrottled, you bought-it-enjoy-it bandwidth to businesses. Get yourself a T1 line, never worry about being throttled again! Prices are quite reasonable starting at about $600 to $1200 per month.
I use first party, so I'm not too worried, but I wouldn't be too worried if it were third party either. BitTorrent is designed to saturate your connection, in both directions. VoIP is not. BitTorrent, for the typical problematic use case (Jolly Roger), is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (And it would need to be, to bust those Comcast limits discussed earlier.) VoIP, for an *intense* user, is on for perhaps an hour or two a day. A more typical user is on for a few minutes and uses less bandwidth than watching one of those Will It Blend videos. (Chuck Norris just roundhouse kicked your usage statistics to the face!)
The number of legal users who end up in the top X% of their ISPs' resource expenditure graphs is so small as to be insignificant.
With Linux, you assume that anyone stupid enough to sudo rm -f/usr/bin/ls knows what they are doing. With Windows, you protect people from being stupid, safe in the correct knowledge that the overwhelming majority of folks who would attempt manual deletion of a DLL are not, in fact, as expert as they think they are. This saves you from having your paid support lines clogged up with would-be l33t p0w3r userz. (Linux, of course, has the option of just ignoring folks in the newsgroups.)
In the Windows paradigm, exposing extra developer-level information to the end user just encourages them to think it is safe to break things.
"Durr, I never use the graph feature in Excel, I will delete this to save 302 kb because I don't need any bloatware! Durr, why doesn't it start..."
"*slurrred* We've been waiting on RC2 for years now and you still haven't fixed B..b..bug #272 Sporadic Bubble Popping. Lazy bastards, I'd fork if I could tell the difference between a fork and a spoon right now."
After you get past the fascination with vague sci-fi dreams of finding little green men, and accept that even finding microbial life on Mars would cease to be interesting after about 2 weeks, then you're left with no reason to go to Mars.
It is inferior to Earth in every possible way. It's hostile to human life and will be for, essentially, forever on a historical time scale. Terraform a planet? Someone has been reading too much sci-fi -- just try playing around with high school physics for about five minutes on exactly how much work would be required to lower an entire atmosphere one stinking degree, and then compare that to the power consumption of the human race. Mars is far, far away and the cost of transporting people and materials to it is untenable for any serious colonization. (Oh, and every kilometer between here and there is pure death to humans. Like everywhere else in space.)
There is no reason to do serious colonization, because the only argument for it is "Oh noes if the earth dies out we'll be wiped out", with the alternative to create a human zoo on Mars with a few dozen or hundred specimens of the species who will die within years (and likely within months) of being separated from their umbilical cord back to earth. (What do you think, a few hundred people are going to reconstitute civilization? Hah. Leave aside the fact that establishing 100 people on Mars would currently cost more money than the world has.)
Take a look around you folks -- this is our planet. We're stuck here. Get used to it.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. Cooked it is really quite similar to a very lean cut of beef, but raw and with just a dash of soy sauce it is really, really good.
Please don't all go PETA (OMG think of the ponies!) at once. They're dumber than pigs and pigs are delicious, too.
You know, any time its 49 to 1 on states in America, you can be pretty sure that Texas is sitting out. Or perhaps Utah. Just once, I'd like to have a boring, milquetoast state like Rhode Island try to have a bit of a personality. "We're not a state! We're a Commonwealth! And we won't be having with any of your Internets!"
And mammals don't lay eggs or come with poison spines, but when has that ever stopped the platypus before?
I could never decide as a kid whether the platypus disproved intelligent design (I mean, come on, look at it) or whether it was just God's grand joke. "Suck on this, natural selection. I wonder how I can make something LESS plausible. Oh, needs more poison spines... and a beaver tail. Oh, and just to top it off, I'm going to stealth mod them with electrolocation so after the humans can actually detect that they'll just go 'Oh WTF no you didn't'. Its good being omnipotent."
I'm a little befuddled by lack of sleep, but the talk of ass and matching front ends with back made me think you were suggesting that Perl would be involuntarily sodomizing someone. In my defense, we are talking about Perl here -- its not like the comment would be terribly out of bounds.
No offense to the starving college students in the audience, I was one once and I've been there, but: $10 is far, far below my care threshold these days. I'm a grown-up, I earn a salary, and $10 for an oodles-of-enjoyment toy is an absolute no-brainer for me even if it doesn't come with a discount for the actual game. Typically, nothing I buy for $10 is intended to last, anyhow. That doesn't even cover a sandwitch or movie ticket these days, and I can virtually guarantee that I will get more child-like glee out of that critter editor than I did out of seeing, e.g., Jumper.
(Maybe I can mock up that Anakin Skywalker guy, just so I can feed him to hungry predators.)
I don't know if the government bureacrats quite understand how fast asset production eats through money. Its insane, and it continues getting more insane because increasing hardware capability leads to increased asset production cost AND the winner-take-most leaders in the MMORPG space are running away from the field qualitatively. You can make an MMORPG for $3 million, sure, but it will be like comparing Pine to GMail. Hint: people who enjoy MMORPGs do not typically choose Pine over GMail. (Pipe down, you. You're atypical. Ask the other folks in your WoW guild.)
Maybe someone could clue the NASA folks in. "Hiya guys, MMORPG has costs approaching that of programming control code for the shuttle." "Gadzooks! Why, $3 million wouldn't cover the header file on the system clock function!" "Yeah, its sort of like that. Except minus the defense contractor slush fund. But mostly like that."
Remember when Blizzard made console games? Profitable, but then the Warcraft series came out and then it looked kind of silly to pay those licensing fees when they could sell for the same price on the PC and keep more of the sale. The difference in lifetime value of a WoW player and a War2 player makes the difference in War2 and Lost Vikings look like rounding error.
Blizzard made some of the popular boxed games in history, which were some of the most pirated games in history. One of them is practically a national sport. It made them quite a bit of money.
They also made the most commercially successful online game in history. There was essentially no piracy. It made them enough money to launch a national sport *every week*.
Pop quiz: pretend you're the money man. Which model appeals to you more? The one where your core audience loves to steal from you, or the one where they kvetch endlessly about having to pay recurring monthly fees which they *nonetheless actually pay*?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: China is the future of gaming in the US, and it will be thanks in large part to piracy. You can't buy a (legal) PC game in China for any amount of money, because no company is willing to sell you one. They know if they do you'll just buy it from the corner pirate for barely over the cost of media. Instead, they'll happily rent you time playing a game. Stop paying? Stop playing. Alternatively, they'll sell you items, which will reside on their server, covered by their EULA, and which they will be able to wipe or alter at their discretion.
Blizzard can afford to make a Starcraft 2, and it will be an enormous success and print money. Mark me on this, though: after the suits see the ROI on Starcraft 2 versus WoW, they will not greenlight Starcraft 3, at least not on the "You pay us money, we give you CD, you play with CD for years and maybe buy an expansion pack way down the road" model.
Its a difference based on whether you have a Paypal cookie on your system. If you do, they push the paypal option, since that means you move money from one Paypal account to another and Paypal gets an interchange fee but doesn't have to pay anything. If you don't, they give the credit card equal billing, since they know that maximizes the odds of them getting a transaction, even if they have to kick back most of their interchange fee to the credit card.
Since your IE and Firefox cookies are not shared, my guess is that you haven't logged in on IE recently. Try logging in for both browsers then logging out and attempting a purchase. You'll get identical behavior.
Disclaimer: IANAEOP (I am not an employee of Paypal) but half my business runs through them.
Seriously, I contributed to MegaMek for a few years. Great if you like classic Battletech, and the most popular game project on Sourceforge as I recall. Most OSS games are terrible -- design and, in particular, asset production don't really work all that well without some central direction and, um, budget for finding talent. (I'd say the same of programming, which is why the programmers on your favorite OSS products are almost all being paid to do it.)
Not to mention that typical team sizes for MMORPGs are in the several dozens just for artists, and that is solid, continuous work for a period of years. You can't replace that with "No problem, we'll just get one texture each from every graphics student with pirated Photosh^H^H^H Gimp who wants to help out."
Shame about them losing funding. I wonder how it could possibly have happened.
Seriously, can you imagine Netflix, another business which has a license to make money off of you for forever, say "We're glad you have enjoyed watching 47 consecutive disks of Naruto. However, we've determined that you're not nearly hardcore about quality movies enough to be using our service. This was partially based on our black magic algorithms and partially based on a random number generator. Oh, don't worry, we're not canceling your service -- we're just making it impossible for you to rent any movie that has an N in it, and reducing your quota to one movie a month. Grind some romance comedies and, in time, you may be allowed to watch anime again. If we feel like it."
Meanwhile Blockbuster says:
"Uhh, you pay us your monies, we'll even let you watch Gigli... if you sign a waiver first. Heck, want to watch it every day for a year? Just make sure your credit card is updated. We aim to please."
Think of what is going through your head when you walk into the last room before becoming a Mage of Total Awesomeness and then, boom, you died because you forgot to pack your Staff of Anti-Dragon, which you were clearly informed that you needed 37 hours before. You're thinking "!"#$"# this game SUCKS I've wasted HOW many hours" Except you're not thinking that, because you've already heard it happens to people, and instead you're playing WoW.
>> Well if you open source the code im sure that someone who needs* a "bingo card creator" would be happy to contribute >>
I gave you a link to the OSS project in grandparent. It hasn't seen a patch since 2004. Reality sucks, doesn't it.
>> *disclaimer: no one needs this. >>
This is why we let customers decide what they "need" instead of letting lazy programmers on Slashdot decide it. Customers have signaled, via paying me ~$18,000, that they really do need this.
There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that my software actually works and the OSS version is broken. The other is that the profit incentive makes it worthwhile for me to spend a sigificant amount of time and money promoting the use of the software, rather than just uploading it to a server somewhere with a description that doesn't even address the needs of the end user and then calling it a day.
It is what makes up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let the laborer execercise some limited degree of control over the fruits of the labor. This does not mean any one person can own their labor, any more than they can own a sunset.
There, I fixed that for you. Sounds like a crappy way to structure a society... good thing nobody would ever be stupid enough to go for it. Oh wait...
I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be any more sunsets, for the ~1,000 people who are dependent on my software. You can claim "society owns the idea" all you want, but "ideas" are hard to compile. Society has not produced workable bytecode, except insofar as "society" has chosen to make a "market" and the market pays enough to make it worthwhile for one engineer to create bytecode. (And to market and whatnot, which are my more important contributions. It wouldn't help society out very much if the solution were buried in the basement water closet behind a sign that said Beware Of The Hairy OSS Programmer, right?)
Here is my broken OSS competitor. Get cracking, it needs a LOT of work. I suggest starting by fixing whatever the bug is that prevents it from working on Windows. Then you might clean up the GUI a bit. Go on, get cracking -- you owe it to society, after all.
Slashdot Mirror
Its copyright infringement.
*rimshot*
I hear accelerating tiny bits of metal towards people works perfectly well for killing them, and as China has both the capability to do so and few compunctions about doing it, I don't see them making Killer Scream Mk1000s.
Every major ISP sells completely unthrottled, you bought-it-enjoy-it bandwidth to businesses. Get yourself a T1 line, never worry about being throttled again! Prices are quite reasonable starting at about $600 to $1200 per month.
Its an obvious consumer winner!
I use first party, so I'm not too worried, but I wouldn't be too worried if it were third party either. BitTorrent is designed to saturate your connection, in both directions. VoIP is not. BitTorrent, for the typical problematic use case (Jolly Roger), is on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. (And it would need to be, to bust those Comcast limits discussed earlier.) VoIP, for an *intense* user, is on for perhaps an hour or two a day. A more typical user is on for a few minutes and uses less bandwidth than watching one of those Will It Blend videos. (Chuck Norris just roundhouse kicked your usage statistics to the face!)
The number of legal users who end up in the top X% of their ISPs' resource expenditure graphs is so small as to be insignificant.
With Linux, you assume that anyone stupid enough to sudo rm -f /usr/bin/ls knows what they are doing. With Windows, you protect people from being stupid, safe in the correct knowledge that the overwhelming majority of folks who would attempt manual deletion of a DLL are not, in fact, as expert as they think they are. This saves you from having your paid support lines clogged up with would-be l33t p0w3r userz. (Linux, of course, has the option of just ignoring folks in the newsgroups.)
In the Windows paradigm, exposing extra developer-level information to the end user just encourages them to think it is safe to break things.
"Durr, I never use the graph feature in Excel, I will delete this to save 302 kb because I don't need any bloatware! Durr, why doesn't it start..."
... for all three users who needed an updated Linux distro RIGHT NOW, as opposed to a few hours later.
... listen to the bug reports for this one.
"*slurrred* We've been waiting on RC2 for years now and you still haven't fixed B..b..bug #272 Sporadic Bubble Popping. Lazy bastards, I'd fork if I could tell the difference between a fork and a spoon right now."
After you get past the fascination with vague sci-fi dreams of finding little green men, and accept that even finding microbial life on Mars would cease to be interesting after about 2 weeks, then you're left with no reason to go to Mars.
It is inferior to Earth in every possible way. It's hostile to human life and will be for, essentially, forever on a historical time scale. Terraform a planet? Someone has been reading too much sci-fi -- just try playing around with high school physics for about five minutes on exactly how much work would be required to lower an entire atmosphere one stinking degree, and then compare that to the power consumption of the human race. Mars is far, far away and the cost of transporting people and materials to it is untenable for any serious colonization. (Oh, and every kilometer between here and there is pure death to humans. Like everywhere else in space.)
There is no reason to do serious colonization, because the only argument for it is "Oh noes if the earth dies out we'll be wiped out", with the alternative to create a human zoo on Mars with a few dozen or hundred specimens of the species who will die within years (and likely within months) of being separated from their umbilical cord back to earth. (What do you think, a few hundred people are going to reconstitute civilization? Hah. Leave aside the fact that establishing 100 people on Mars would currently cost more money than the world has.)
Take a look around you folks -- this is our planet. We're stuck here. Get used to it.
... as Japan does not have a president.
Don't knock it until you've tried it. Cooked it is really quite similar to a very lean cut of beef, but raw and with just a dash of soy sauce it is really, really good.
Please don't all go PETA (OMG think of the ponies!) at once. They're dumber than pigs and pigs are delicious, too.
You know, any time its 49 to 1 on states in America, you can be pretty sure that Texas is sitting out. Or perhaps Utah. Just once, I'd like to have a boring, milquetoast state like Rhode Island try to have a bit of a personality. "We're not a state! We're a Commonwealth! And we won't be having with any of your Internets!"
Hey, it could happen.
Plus, if they ever ask to see the source, you can just say its a build file and God Himself would not be able to tell the difference.
And mammals don't lay eggs or come with poison spines, but when has that ever stopped the platypus before?
I could never decide as a kid whether the platypus disproved intelligent design (I mean, come on, look at it) or whether it was just God's grand joke. "Suck on this, natural selection. I wonder how I can make something LESS plausible. Oh, needs more poison spines... and a beaver tail. Oh, and just to top it off, I'm going to stealth mod them with electrolocation so after the humans can actually detect that they'll just go 'Oh WTF no you didn't'. Its good being omnipotent."
I'm a little befuddled by lack of sleep, but the talk of ass and matching front ends with back made me think you were suggesting that Perl would be involuntarily sodomizing someone. In my defense, we are talking about Perl here -- its not like the comment would be terribly out of bounds.
No offense to the starving college students in the audience, I was one once and I've been there, but: $10 is far, far below my care threshold these days. I'm a grown-up, I earn a salary, and $10 for an oodles-of-enjoyment toy is an absolute no-brainer for me even if it doesn't come with a discount for the actual game. Typically, nothing I buy for $10 is intended to last, anyhow. That doesn't even cover a sandwitch or movie ticket these days, and I can virtually guarantee that I will get more child-like glee out of that critter editor than I did out of seeing, e.g., Jumper.
(Maybe I can mock up that Anakin Skywalker guy, just so I can feed him to hungry predators.)
I don't know if the government bureacrats quite understand how fast asset production eats through money. Its insane, and it continues getting more insane because increasing hardware capability leads to increased asset production cost AND the winner-take-most leaders in the MMORPG space are running away from the field qualitatively. You can make an MMORPG for $3 million, sure, but it will be like comparing Pine to GMail. Hint: people who enjoy MMORPGs do not typically choose Pine over GMail. (Pipe down, you. You're atypical. Ask the other folks in your WoW guild.)
Maybe someone could clue the NASA folks in. "Hiya guys, MMORPG has costs approaching that of programming control code for the shuttle." "Gadzooks! Why, $3 million wouldn't cover the header file on the system clock function!" "Yeah, its sort of like that. Except minus the defense contractor slush fund. But mostly like that."
Remember when Blizzard made console games? Profitable, but then the Warcraft series came out and then it looked kind of silly to pay those licensing fees when they could sell for the same price on the PC and keep more of the sale. The difference in lifetime value of a WoW player and a War2 player makes the difference in War2 and Lost Vikings look like rounding error.
Blizzard made some of the popular boxed games in history, which were some of the most pirated games in history. One of them is practically a national sport. It made them quite a bit of money.
They also made the most commercially successful online game in history. There was essentially no piracy. It made them enough money to launch a national sport *every week*.
Pop quiz: pretend you're the money man. Which model appeals to you more? The one where your core audience loves to steal from you, or the one where they kvetch endlessly about having to pay recurring monthly fees which they *nonetheless actually pay*?
I've said it before and I'll say it again: China is the future of gaming in the US, and it will be thanks in large part to piracy. You can't buy a (legal) PC game in China for any amount of money, because no company is willing to sell you one. They know if they do you'll just buy it from the corner pirate for barely over the cost of media. Instead, they'll happily rent you time playing a game. Stop paying? Stop playing. Alternatively, they'll sell you items, which will reside on their server, covered by their EULA, and which they will be able to wipe or alter at their discretion.
Blizzard can afford to make a Starcraft 2, and it will be an enormous success and print money. Mark me on this, though: after the suits see the ROI on Starcraft 2 versus WoW, they will not greenlight Starcraft 3, at least not on the "You pay us money, we give you CD, you play with CD for years and maybe buy an expansion pack way down the road" model.
Its a difference based on whether you have a Paypal cookie on your system. If you do, they push the paypal option, since that means you move money from one Paypal account to another and Paypal gets an interchange fee but doesn't have to pay anything. If you don't, they give the credit card equal billing, since they know that maximizes the odds of them getting a transaction, even if they have to kick back most of their interchange fee to the credit card.
Since your IE and Firefox cookies are not shared, my guess is that you haven't logged in on IE recently. Try logging in for both browsers then logging out and attempting a purchase. You'll get identical behavior.
Disclaimer: IANAEOP (I am not an employee of Paypal) but half my business runs through them.
...
Yeah.
Seriously, I contributed to MegaMek for a few years. Great if you like classic Battletech, and the most popular game project on Sourceforge as I recall. Most OSS games are terrible -- design and, in particular, asset production don't really work all that well without some central direction and, um, budget for finding talent. (I'd say the same of programming, which is why the programmers on your favorite OSS products are almost all being paid to do it.)
Not to mention that typical team sizes for MMORPGs are in the several dozens just for artists, and that is solid, continuous work for a period of years. You can't replace that with "No problem, we'll just get one texture each from every graphics student with pirated Photosh^H^H^H Gimp who wants to help out."
Shame about them losing funding. I wonder how it could possibly have happened.
Seriously, can you imagine Netflix, another business which has a license to make money off of you for forever, say "We're glad you have enjoyed watching 47 consecutive disks of Naruto. However, we've determined that you're not nearly hardcore about quality movies enough to be using our service. This was partially based on our black magic algorithms and partially based on a random number generator. Oh, don't worry, we're not canceling your service -- we're just making it impossible for you to rent any movie that has an N in it, and reducing your quota to one movie a month. Grind some romance comedies and, in time, you may be allowed to watch anime again. If we feel like it."
Meanwhile Blockbuster says:
"Uhh, you pay us your monies, we'll even let you watch Gigli... if you sign a waiver first. Heck, want to watch it every day for a year? Just make sure your credit card is updated. We aim to please."
Think of what is going through your head when you walk into the last room before becoming a Mage of Total Awesomeness and then, boom, you died because you forgot to pack your Staff of Anti-Dragon, which you were clearly informed that you needed 37 hours before. You're thinking "!"#$"# this game SUCKS I've wasted HOW many hours" Except you're not thinking that, because you've already heard it happens to people, and instead you're playing WoW.
>>
Well if you open source the code im sure that someone who needs* a "bingo card creator" would be happy to contribute
>>
I gave you a link to the OSS project in grandparent. It hasn't seen a patch since 2004. Reality sucks, doesn't it.
>>
*disclaimer: no one needs this.
>>
This is why we let customers decide what they "need" instead of letting lazy programmers on Slashdot decide it. Customers have signaled, via paying me ~$18,000, that they really do need this.
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/sales-by-month
This is *not a hypothetical* -- Sourceforge gives out downloads as public information, and so do I.
My OSS competitor has been downloaded 40 times in the last week.
http://sourceforge.net/project/stats/detail.php?group_id=47026&ugn=bingo-cards&type=prdownload
My software has been downloaded 40 times in the last thirty minutes.
(A related statistic, which typically tracks at a ratio of about 1 of these to 1.2 downloads: http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats/bingo-card-downloads )
There are a variety of reasons for that. One is that my software actually works and the OSS version is broken. The other is that the profit incentive makes it worthwhile for me to spend a sigificant amount of time and money promoting the use of the software, rather than just uploading it to a server somewhere with a description that doesn't even address the needs of the end user and then calling it a day.
... giving Paypal money. Wow, right on brother. Sock it to the man.
It is what makes up our culture. Sometimes we, as a society, have seen fit to let the laborer execercise some limited degree of control over the fruits of the labor. This does not mean any one person can own their labor, any more than they can own a sunset.
There, I fixed that for you. Sounds like a crappy way to structure a society... good thing nobody would ever be stupid enough to go for it. Oh wait...
I write software for a living. If I stop getting paid for it, I'll stop doing it. There won't be any more sunsets, for the ~1,000 people who are dependent on my software. You can claim "society owns the idea" all you want, but "ideas" are hard to compile. Society has not produced workable bytecode, except insofar as "society" has chosen to make a "market" and the market pays enough to make it worthwhile for one engineer to create bytecode. (And to market and whatnot, which are my more important contributions. It wouldn't help society out very much if the solution were buried in the basement water closet behind a sign that said Beware Of The Hairy OSS Programmer, right?)
http://www.bingocardcreator.com/
Here is my broken OSS competitor. Get cracking, it needs a LOT of work. I suggest starting by fixing whatever the bug is that prevents it from working on Windows. Then you might clean up the GUI a bit. Go on, get cracking -- you owe it to society, after all.
http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/bingo-cards