$10,000 raise as well. Several other people at my office are also getting raises this week. One office does not a trend make, but neither does one circle of friends.
I've used UCBerkeley's Searchable Online Archive of Recipes for years. Its biggest shortcoming is a lack of ingredient searches, but they've integrated Google into the search for full text search, which is good enough, if a bit clumsy.
Here's the skinny from their About Us page:
While RecipeSource may be one of the newest recipe sites on the Internet, we're also one of the oldest. Our collection was started in 1993 by Jennifer Snider when she discovered the wonders of Usenet newsgroups & Internet mailing lists as a student at the University of California at Berkeley. She started saving recipes posted to those sources and soon amassed thousands of recipes. When her friends found out about the collection, we encouraged her to put them on the web, and she agreed, provided we helped her. After several months of hard work, the recipes first appeared on the web in 1995 as SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes. From our start with around 10,000 recipes we've grown the collection to 7 times that size, and had our pages accessed millions of times from around the world. Thanks to our popularity, we've outgrown our original home, so we've moved the collection here to RecipeSource.com, where we hope it will continue to grow, while providing better response time and a better search engine than our old site.
As previously announced, that part has been awarded to Mos Def, who has turned in some pretty solid performances. His was one of the only watchable roles in The Italian Job remake and he did a great tirn with a minor role in Monster's Ball.
Luring and educating the consumers could actually be simple.
Step 1 -- Place free or extremely low-priced episode one near the register for impulse purchases. Anyone who sees a boxed game near the register for five bucks is going to take a look, including many non-gamers.
Step 2 -- Include in bold letters on the box "Part 1 of an exciting new series of games. Subsequent installments will be released each month for you're playing enjoyment."
Very little confusion there.
Of course, you still have to sell the store on pushing low-margin products, but there are ways to do that.
"When they standardized the movie camera in, say, 1950, all the movie companies that told good stories became dominant"
I'm not a big fan of movies from the 40's and 50's, so I don't know whether the above statement is true. Regardless, this statement represents the lynchpin of his argument. I do know that special effects have become a commodity today, and we blame them as the primary reason that we don't have good stories in movies these days. Technology has become a crutch.
I must be misunderstanding the spirit of the original article, because I think that your anaolgy is off base. Yes, I'd be pissed if my car was reporting where I was at all the time.
However, I would be more than happy if my car reported to the manufacture/insurance/police/whoever if it determined that someone had driven off without using the ignition key.
To me, the $64,000 question is how the software determines that it has been pirated.
"Building these bicycles is art. It is not something you just do. Every bamboo must be selected and fitted into the frame according to size and quality. The secret lies in treating and handling the material the right way. Learning that takes times and the maintenance takes time as well."
Yes, refining aluminum belches lots of nasty stuff into the sky. But at least you get lots of bikes quickly thanks to interchangable parts. How many resources (food, water, electricity, etc) are required to sustain the people building one bamboo bicyle a day?
I'd rather have a million people riding aluminum bikes and zero SUVs than 10,000 people riding bamboo bikes and 990,000 SUVs.
In the last 20 years we've gone from the idea of working at one company for your entire career, to working at several companies in your career, to having multiple careers. This just seems like another logical step.
It will certainly take some getting used to, and not everyone will compete, but I think that the average white collar American is finally learning what globalization means. Highly skilled folks in the rest of the world have been dealing with this for years -- they all learned English to compete. Now it's our turn.
The author suggests searching all "CACHE* directories and encrypting them. This is an (honestly weak) attempt to limit people from requesting songs and then keeping them on their computer for reuse, which I think would be theft in the RIAA's eyes.
As long as you weren't ripping your own music into this program's cache directory, it would be safe.
E3 demos are, at best, a time for a team to run a quick polish pass on their game and see whether it still has potential. At worst, they are unfortunate nuisances that take time away from development of the final product.
Almost all frame-rate and load-time optimazation happens after Alpha, and truthfully, too much usually happens after Beta.
If you're going to critique unfinished games at E3, please focus on the important stuff -- gameplay mechanics, innovation, story and overall graphical style. Criticizing areas that the team haven't even focused on is rude.
I've been to the last couple of GDCs and seen independent gaming's "best of the best". I've also downloaded hundreds of demos from independent developers. They're not very good.
This statement can be split into two different areas -- gameplay and presentation. Anyone in the industry can tell you about the legions of fanboys who want to "reinvent" the FPS genre by adding an autocannon, or "save fighting games" with this really cool interactive environment ideas. Just because you love games does not make you a game design, any more than a love for music makes you a musician. I'm not saying you have to be a professional to have good ideas, but if you took a random sample of 100 professional game developers and 100 indies, the pros would have the most exciting ideas hands down.
The other side of the coin is presentation. Game costs are ballooning and people expect their games to look like Gran Turismo and Tekken and you WILL be knocked by the consumer, the press and the almighty retailer if you fall short. A group of independent developers with a staff of six will find it tough to compete. Even if they have kick-ass gameplay, without polished presentation it will never hit the over-crowded store shelves.
A lot of professional games are crap. It's romantic to think that the answer lies with independent developers. I think we're better off trying to balance the power between developer and publisher AND publisher and retailer (the former will never happen without the latter), so that developers have a better ability to stick to their guns.
The top-tier retailers such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CompUSA and Circuit City represent a huge percentage of gaming sales. Wal-Mart alone counts for something like 30% of all games sold in the US.
There have already been many cases of major retailers using this power to block publishers from selling games on the web, unless it is sold strictly through the publisher's own web site.
This reminds me a lot of Valve's streaming distribution plan -- it's a great idea, but the retailers will threaten to not sell the publishers' games if they start selling on the Infinium platform.
"During the 1990s, a lot of times we were just putting spots on the air because business was so robust," he says. "When the bubble burst, we realized a better way to run our business is to run less commercials, which in turn will make our listeners more loyal and stay longer."
As Dennis Miller once said, the only time these [jerks] find Jesus is when no one else will talk to them.
Said Frank Mandelbaum, chairman and chief executive of Intelli- Check, a manufacturer of license-scanning equipment based in Woodbury, N.Y.: "If I were to go into a bar and they had a photocopier, they could photocopy the license or they could write it down. They are not giving us any information that violates privacy."
Uh, numbnuts, if I were to go into a bar and they had a photocopier, they wouldn't photocopy my license. If they had opposable thumbs they still wouldn't write down my information. Why? Because as soon as they tried I would leave. I can decide who copies it.
The Intelli-Check equipment certainly violates privacy because the information is scanned regardless of the person's consent, and most often without their knowledge.
I worked as a product manager for several games magazines and web sites and am now a producer at a games developer, so I have a pretty good perspective on this issue. The whole "Conflict of Interest" issue is pure rubbish.
1) Developers are not part of the equation. They don't determine what gets shown to whom, when or how. Weare the guys behind the curtain and have no communication with the magazines unless a publisher specifically sets up a meeting or phone call. Forget about us.
2) Magazine editors deal with the Publisher PR folks. All the PR people care about is getting their games mentioned in the media. They don't particularly care whether it's a positive mention or a negative mention because:
a) Any publicity is good publicity
b) It's not their problem if the game sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway. All that matters is the mention.
3) Magazine Sales people deal with the Publisher Marketing people. Marketers do nothing except spend money getting ads in magazines and signage in stores. They also don't care if magazines slam their game because:
a) it's not part of their job
b) they believe they can counter bad press with full page ads
4) The only time Sales People and Editors talk to each other is when a Sales Person has to tell a magazine editor to cut four pages of content because the pages have been sold for ads. In an online site, there isn't even that much contact -- no pages.
5) PR folks and Marketing folks talk to each other about the same as Sales People and editors. They have no reason to talk, as their jobs don't intersect.
In the five years I worked in publishing, I can remember ONE time when Sales and Editorial overlapped, and that's when we published the level codes to Doom64 two months before the game's release. Midway asked (well, threatened) us to pull down the codes and we did.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot option that these lawmakers would probably take:
4) Try to outlaw all BB guns.
$10,000 raise as well. Several other people at my office are also getting raises this week. One office does not a trend make, but neither does one circle of friends.
Thank you, but no. I don't care how much of Lord of the Rings fan you are, GimliSex.com is just not acceptable.
I've used UCBerkeley's Searchable Online Archive of Recipes for years. Its biggest shortcoming is a lack of ingredient searches, but they've integrated Google into the search for full text search, which is good enough, if a bit clumsy.
Here's the skinny from their About Us page:
While RecipeSource may be one of the newest recipe sites on the Internet, we're also one of the oldest. Our collection was started in 1993 by Jennifer Snider when she discovered the wonders of Usenet newsgroups & Internet mailing lists as a student at the University of California at Berkeley. She started saving recipes posted to those sources and soon amassed thousands of recipes. When her friends found out about the collection, we encouraged her to put them on the web, and she agreed, provided we helped her. After several months of hard work, the recipes first appeared on the web in 1995 as SOAR: The Searchable Online Archive of Recipes. From our start with around 10,000 recipes we've grown the collection to 7 times that size, and had our pages accessed millions of times from around the world. Thanks to our popularity, we've outgrown our original home, so we've moved the collection here to RecipeSource.com, where we hope it will continue to grow, while providing better response time and a better search engine than our old site.
As previously announced, that part has been awarded to Mos Def, who has turned in some pretty solid performances. His was one of the only watchable roles in The Italian Job remake and he did a great tirn with a minor role in Monster's Ball.
Luring and educating the consumers could actually be simple.
Step 1 -- Place free or extremely low-priced episode one near the register for impulse purchases. Anyone who sees a boxed game near the register for five bucks is going to take a look, including many non-gamers.
Step 2 -- Include in bold letters on the box "Part 1 of an exciting new series of games. Subsequent installments will be released each month for you're playing enjoyment."
Very little confusion there.
Of course, you still have to sell the store on pushing low-margin products, but there are ways to do that.
Buying used Cds is only one small step above piracy. Sure, it gives nothing to the RIAA, but it also gives nothing back to the artists.
I am a games developer and this is been a major issue with our industry. The rise of used game sales is far scarier than outright piracy.
There is nothing more annoying than paying $17 and being annoyed on a date.
Just tell your date to put down her camcorder then.
"When they standardized the movie camera in, say, 1950, all the movie companies that told good stories became dominant"
I'm not a big fan of movies from the 40's and 50's, so I don't know whether the above statement is true. Regardless, this statement represents the lynchpin of his argument. I do know that special effects have become a commodity today, and we blame them as the primary reason that we don't have good stories in movies these days. Technology has become a crutch.
Why would it be any different for games?
I must be misunderstanding the spirit of the original article, because I think that your anaolgy is off base. Yes, I'd be pissed if my car was reporting where I was at all the time.
However, I would be more than happy if my car reported to the manufacture/insurance/police/whoever if it determined that someone had driven off without using the ignition key.
To me, the $64,000 question is how the software determines that it has been pirated.
"Building these bicycles is art. It is not something you just do. Every bamboo must be selected and fitted into the frame according to size and quality. The secret lies in treating and handling the material the right way. Learning that takes times and the maintenance takes time as well."
Yes, refining aluminum belches lots of nasty stuff into the sky. But at least you get lots of bikes quickly thanks to interchangable parts. How many resources (food, water, electricity, etc) are required to sustain the people building one bamboo bicyle a day?
I'd rather have a million people riding aluminum bikes and zero SUVs than 10,000 people riding bamboo bikes and 990,000 SUVs.
In the last 20 years we've gone from the idea of working at one company for your entire career, to working at several companies in your career, to having multiple careers. This just seems like another logical step.
It will certainly take some getting used to, and not everyone will compete, but I think that the average white collar American is finally learning what globalization means. Highly skilled folks in the rest of the world have been dealing with this for years -- they all learned English to compete. Now it's our turn.
The author suggests searching all "CACHE* directories and encrypting them. This is an (honestly weak) attempt to limit people from requesting songs and then keeping them on their computer for reuse, which I think would be theft in the RIAA's eyes.
As long as you weren't ripping your own music into this program's cache directory, it would be safe.
E3 demos are, at best, a time for a team to run a quick polish pass on their game and see whether it still has potential. At worst, they are unfortunate nuisances that take time away from development of the final product.
Almost all frame-rate and load-time optimazation happens after Alpha, and truthfully, too much usually happens after Beta.
If you're going to critique unfinished games at E3, please focus on the important stuff -- gameplay mechanics, innovation, story and overall graphical style. Criticizing areas that the team haven't even focused on is rude.
He's stuck here unless he can generate 1.21 jigawatts of electricity.
Hey Raymond -- I thought it was hilarious, bro. Definitely good for a good chuckle in the middle of a work day.
IAAAPGD
I've been to the last couple of GDCs and seen independent gaming's "best of the best". I've also downloaded hundreds of demos from independent developers. They're not very good.
This statement can be split into two different areas -- gameplay and presentation. Anyone in the industry can tell you about the legions of fanboys who want to "reinvent" the FPS genre by adding an autocannon, or "save fighting games" with this really cool interactive environment ideas. Just because you love games does not make you a game design, any more than a love for music makes you a musician. I'm not saying you have to be a professional to have good ideas, but if you took a random sample of 100 professional game developers and 100 indies, the pros would have the most exciting ideas hands down.
The other side of the coin is presentation. Game costs are ballooning and people expect their games to look like Gran Turismo and Tekken and you WILL be knocked by the consumer, the press and the almighty retailer if you fall short. A group of independent developers with a staff of six will find it tough to compete. Even if they have kick-ass gameplay, without polished presentation it will never hit the over-crowded store shelves.
A lot of professional games are crap. It's romantic to think that the answer lies with independent developers. I think we're better off trying to balance the power between developer and publisher AND publisher and retailer (the former will never happen without the latter), so that developers have a better ability to stick to their guns.
The top-tier retailers such as Wal-Mart, Best Buy, CompUSA and Circuit City represent a huge percentage of gaming sales. Wal-Mart alone counts for something like 30% of all games sold in the US.
There have already been many cases of major retailers using this power to block publishers from selling games on the web, unless it is sold strictly through the publisher's own web site.
This reminds me a lot of Valve's streaming distribution plan -- it's a great idea, but the retailers will threaten to not sell the publishers' games if they start selling on the Infinium platform.
Too bad.
"During the 1990s, a lot of times we were just putting spots on the air because business was so robust," he says. "When the bubble burst, we realized a better way to run our business is to run less commercials, which in turn will make our listeners more loyal and stay longer."
As Dennis Miller once said, the only time these [jerks] find Jesus is when no one else will talk to them.
And it wasn't even a jab -- it mentioned that Microsoft, like several other companies, has had their encryption scheme cracked.
At least getting modded down means you're getting noticed.
But hell yeah, Slate rocked. So did Bill, Lucky, Mike and the rest of the GP crew.
As I have no reason for using a hot tub other than "quality time" with the missus, I think I'd have to pass on this model, regardless of cost.
Said Frank Mandelbaum, chairman and chief executive of Intelli- Check, a manufacturer of license-scanning equipment based in Woodbury, N.Y.: "If I were to go into a bar and they had a photocopier, they could photocopy the license or they could write it down. They are not giving us any information that violates privacy."
Uh, numbnuts, if I were to go into a bar and they had a photocopier, they wouldn't photocopy my license. If they had opposable thumbs they still wouldn't write down my information. Why? Because as soon as they tried I would leave. I can decide who copies it.
The Intelli-Check equipment certainly violates privacy because the information is scanned regardless of the person's consent, and most often without their knowledge.
I worked as a product manager for several games magazines and web sites and am now a producer at a games developer, so I have a pretty good perspective on this issue. The whole "Conflict of Interest" issue is pure rubbish.
1) Developers are not part of the equation. They don't determine what gets shown to whom, when or how. Weare the guys behind the curtain and have no communication with the magazines unless a publisher specifically sets up a meeting or phone call. Forget about us.
2) Magazine editors deal with the Publisher PR folks. All the PR people care about is getting their games mentioned in the media. They don't particularly care whether it's a positive mention or a negative mention because:
a) Any publicity is good publicity
b) It's not their problem if the game sucks. They can't do anything about it anyway. All that matters is the mention.
3) Magazine Sales people deal with the Publisher Marketing people. Marketers do nothing except spend money getting ads in magazines and signage in stores. They also don't care if magazines slam their game because:
a) it's not part of their job
b) they believe they can counter bad press with full page ads
4) The only time Sales People and Editors talk to each other is when a Sales Person has to tell a magazine editor to cut four pages of content because the pages have been sold for ads. In an online site, there isn't even that much contact -- no pages.
5) PR folks and Marketing folks talk to each other about the same as Sales People and editors. They have no reason to talk, as their jobs don't intersect.
In the five years I worked in publishing, I can remember ONE time when Sales and Editorial overlapped, and that's when we published the level codes to Doom64 two months before the game's release. Midway asked (well, threatened) us to pull down the codes and we did.
Grrr!
If whitey-tighties make it uncomfortable for your sperm, just imagine what a Pentium 4 in your pocket will do.