You know, this is totally off-topic, but that reminds me...
When I was in high-school, people would ask 'You know what?' and my answer was 'What is dead.' and then 'He got run over.' I usually eventually explained that my first girlfriend (hey, she asked me out, okay?) had a cat that had kittens... And she didn't name them fast enough. So I named them Spot, What and Horace. She was pretty pissed.
Money isn't free. If wages are raised (and it's not only the minimums that will be raised. Anyone with a half-decent employer or union will also get a raise) then everything has to go up in price so that employers can pay the new wage. It will provide a temporary respite for minimum wage earners, but in the long run, it provides nothing. Everything will balance back out, and in a capitalist economy, it will happen pretty fast. If the raise is announced beforehand, it might even drop before the wage hits so that it is balanced WHEN the raise hits, instead of after.
I fully agree that something needs to be done about the millions who cannot earn a living no matter how hard they work. But maybe the problem is at the top instead of the bottom. Sports and movie stars that earn 10 million dollars per year... Hmm, maybe that's a problem.
Or maybe tax reform? I keep hearing about this 'flat tax'... Assuming it's as fair as its proponents claim, maybe that should happen.
Or quite a few other things that actually improve the situation for the people we are trying to help, instead of just looking like it improves the situation.
Actually, that's not entirely true. When I worked for Gateway 2000 (they hadn't changed the name yet) I worked for 1 of the only 2 contracted call centers. The others were all owned by GW2k proper. Having volunteered in a computer shop for a few years while I was in highschool and college, I was already pretty far along the computer repair path. Once I got the hang of the call system and how to talk to people, my calls got REALLY short and at the same time, I fixed the problems. I didn't 'hose n close' as they called it.
One day, I get yelled at for my call times. Not because they are too long, but because they are TOO SHORT. 'You are to average between 7 and 11 minutes per call,' they said. I argued that I was fixing the customers' problems and that they were all leaving happy, with the exceptions of those that had to be elevated to 'second level'. 'It doesn't matter,' they said. 'Spend more time getting their information. Ask them some personal questions to stretch the time out.'
Not once did they suggest I wasn't helping the customer. My real problem was that I never got stuck on those 2 hour phone calls because I knew what I was doing and simply fixed the problem right away. I knew all the really tricky problems, like the taskbar that just WON'T move. (Boot into safe mode and back again and it'll fix itself. It IS actually possible for it to get stuck. It happened to a PC in the call center once.)
So in the end, it's not about short calls. It's about calls that are the right length and look like you helped the customer while keeping the call time down far enough to make money.
I think it's worth noting that even the small puzzle games are going this route. Check out the games on Reflexive.net and you'll see most of the new games are the same old puzzles, but with a story attached. Often the story is quite sad and uninspired, and nearly totally unrelated to the task at hand... But there IS a story.
Actually, 'damages' actually means money that they Plaintiff Company didn't earn that they feel they should have, had Google upheld their contract properly.
I don't know any numbers, so I'm going to make them up.
Company P (for Plaintiff) knows that if they get 1 billion hits from Google, they'll make 1 billion dollars. If they get 10,000 hits from Google, they'll make $10,000.
Company P has been paying Google $500 per month and getting 1 billion hits per month for 12 months. They have every right to expect that to continue. Suddenly, they get only 10,000 hits per month because Google changed how their ad was listed, but they still have exactly the same contract. If this goes on for 6 months, Company P has lost almost 6 billion dollars that they would have earned if Google had not made the change.
This is how the damages are calculated. There are other trickier ways to add to the damages, but they all stem from this, as far as I know. It actually has no bearing on the amount Google charged them.
If you still think Google is 100% in the right on this, think of this way:
You contract with Company G for 100 green widgets every month. These are really really great widgets, and you're making a killing on them. Company G realizes that it can run a sweat shop in Indonesia and make the widgets for 1/100th of the cost, but at 1/20th of the quality. You contract does not specify the quality of the widgets, only that they are green! It is perfectly legal for Company G to provide you with inferior widgets and because you are under contract, you cannot reject them! Suddenly, your whole business is bankrupt. Yes, shame on you for the lousy contract, but shame on Company G for changing their process without any input from their customers. (It won't make you feel any better when Company G goes bankrupt because you'll have been there first.)
I've obviously greatly oversimplified the situation, and I don't actually believe Google has 'done evil' here, but this company definitely got the shaft, even though it was probably their own fault.
'Damages' in lawsuits are always a made-up number based on BS projections. I fail to see why this case should suddenly be realistic when no other case is.
I find it interesting that god/evolution/the great green arkleseizure/FSM/whatever invented metadata LONG before we did. Not surprising, just interesting.
You're thinking of 'Graphic Novel' and no, that's not what this is. This is for making interactive novels. They call them games, but a LOT of the 'interactive novels' I've seen were only interactive in that you could click to go to the next scene.
There ARE a few good ones, they're just few and far between already. Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.
I (finally) understand WHY you guys went through the trouble to do this, but that still doesn't explain why you bothered to fork.
Why not release patches and plugins for GAIM?
And just ignore all the trolls that can't understand that some countries don't guarantee free speech. If they haven't got a clue by now, there's nothing you can do to open their eyes.
I dunno, $4k/yr sounds pretty doggone good for a fast, efficient, clean car.
But that's not on top of what I pay, because of gas prices... Let's see. $3/gallon (http://www.gasbuddy.com/), and I get about 30m/gallon. So $.10 per mile. The Tesla Roadster gets 1-2 cents per mile. We'll just say 2.
I travel around 15,000 miles a year commuting. That's $1500 gas or $300 Roadster. So it's $4300 for the Roadster or $1500 for my car.
So I'd be paying $2800 extra per year to drive a clean car and I wouldn't ever have to stop at a gas pump again. (Travelling long distances is another story. I assume I'll find other transportation for that. Rental car, airplane, whatever.)
I'd pay it. Gladly.
The only thing that stops me is the up-front $70k. $30k would be quite a stretch for me, but $70k is dreamland. It'll be nice when these come down in price.
On a side note, cars like this would have people thinking about energy and other ways to get it. Sunlight, wind, etc. Everyone would want as much 'free' energy as they can, so I think the world would end up better off. In theory, anyhow.
I say it's a combination of both. MMOs -are- sucking time away from offline games, just like any new popular leisure activity sucks time away from other activities. It's just the nature of the beast.
But the real decline comes from 2 things: Your #2 above, and the mindless crap game devs are producing for the most part. Even with 3rd party games like Myst, LocoRoco, Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Colossus and many others making WAY more money than predicted, they still don't get it. Games are about NEW things. Not the same old crap.
And as for WoW 'raising the bar' for games... No. It has shown to be remarkably addictive, but there's no 1 thing about WoW that stands out as being obviously superior to other games. They just managed to get everything working right at the same time.
Just incase I didn't state it clear enough: Starforce sucks and I refuse to EVER buy a Starforce protected game again.
I was going to mod you insightful, but then I realized that some may not realize why.
The trick? The Tesla Roadster is powered by 6,831 rechargeable lithium-ion batteries -- the same cells that run a laptop computer.
They are not using laptop batteries, as you said, but instead using batteries that use lithium cells. They say they are the same cells, but they probably actually mean that they are the same kind of cells used in laptop batteries.
Anyhow, good call. I'm hoping others will read my post and rate yours insightful.
In that very same quote, it says 'marketing and sales'. Besides, it wouldn't be a 'store' if there was nothing for sale.
I think you're just trying to spin their comment to make them look bad. (Not that they need help. That thing is ugly and doesn't seem to be optimized for two-handed typing. I wouldn't put money on it selling well.)
Yeah, but no company in their right mind will releases exactly the same game under a new name and sells it again. They add things to it, and one of those things is plot.
Soul Calibur is a great example. It's Street Fighter with a plot. The plot is very basic, but instead of taking away from the experience as Jaffe suggests, it adds to it. Enough that I played it for quite a bit longer than all the other 'street fighter'-type games in the last 5 years combined. You can't honestly tell me that game would have sold better if they'd stripped the plot out.
Oh, and with the exception of Arkanoid, I -can't- pick up old games like that and have fun with them still, but Loom and Sam N Max Hit The Road still tickle me.
I'm just exactly the opposite of him. I ONLY play games for the 'story'. (I call it an adventure, cuz generally the plot is a little lame.)
When I get a new game, I want it to be new. New characters, lands, weapons, magic, story, and yes, new challenges. A 'perfect' game for me has all of these. A game with only 1 or 2 is nearly useless to me and I'll quit in minutes. (Tao's Adventure for DS.)
This guy is exactly the opposite. He just wants challenge for its own sake, apparently even if its been done a million times.
I have to disagree with this. Have you SEEN some of the things people do with games, taking them 'out of the box'?
And let's not forget games like The Sims. What started out as a simple 'wander around and be bored' game turned into a HUGE 'make-your-own-stuff' game. (Disclaimer: I wrote the first mesh converter for The Sims.) People have added all kinds of things to that game, from simple wings (me!) to entirely different avatars (robots, etc) and many, many kinds of furniture and even scripted objects. You can't tell me there's no imagination being used there.
And now that companies support this (Second Life) it is easy for any child old enough to use a computer to do.
Don't blame the companies for toys that 'kill imagination'. Blame the people who buy those toys. There are still PLENTY of toys out there that encourage imagination. Play Doh, Hot Wheels, Barbie, Lego, etc.
Another poster also said that when he was a kid, a towel and a stick was a cape and sword and he was He-Man. Newsflash: Those items still exist. There are just other choices as well. I was born like 15 years later than him, and I still did the cape thing with a towel. In fact, I believe I recall my nephews (another 15 years later) doing the same thing when they were small.
It's nice to blame mega-corps for our perceived problems, but maybe we should focus a little more on paying attention to our children, instead of complaining that the mega-corps don't.
Yes, technically you could send an xmlhttprequest without any xml. But since a large part of 'ajax' is the dynamic pages resulting from the request, you can't really do 'AJAX' without the XHTML, at the very least. (And for what little it's worth, XHTML is really just specific XML.)
Slashdot Mirror
You know, this is totally off-topic, but that reminds me...
When I was in high-school, people would ask 'You know what?' and my answer was 'What is dead.' and then 'He got run over.' I usually eventually explained that my first girlfriend (hey, she asked me out, okay?) had a cat that had kittens... And she didn't name them fast enough. So I named them Spot, What and Horace. She was pretty pissed.
There are lots of arguments against rising minimum wage, but let me give you mine:
Money isn't free. If wages are raised (and it's not only the minimums that will be raised. Anyone with a half-decent employer or union will also get a raise) then everything has to go up in price so that employers can pay the new wage. It will provide a temporary respite for minimum wage earners, but in the long run, it provides nothing. Everything will balance back out, and in a capitalist economy, it will happen pretty fast. If the raise is announced beforehand, it might even drop before the wage hits so that it is balanced WHEN the raise hits, instead of after.
I fully agree that something needs to be done about the millions who cannot earn a living no matter how hard they work. But maybe the problem is at the top instead of the bottom. Sports and movie stars that earn 10 million dollars per year ... Hmm, maybe that's a problem.
Or maybe tax reform? I keep hearing about this 'flat tax' ... Assuming it's as fair as its proponents claim, maybe that should happen.
Or quite a few other things that actually improve the situation for the people we are trying to help, instead of just looking like it improves the situation.
Actually, that's not entirely true. When I worked for Gateway 2000 (they hadn't changed the name yet) I worked for 1 of the only 2 contracted call centers. The others were all owned by GW2k proper. Having volunteered in a computer shop for a few years while I was in highschool and college, I was already pretty far along the computer repair path. Once I got the hang of the call system and how to talk to people, my calls got REALLY short and at the same time, I fixed the problems. I didn't 'hose n close' as they called it.
One day, I get yelled at for my call times. Not because they are too long, but because they are TOO SHORT. 'You are to average between 7 and 11 minutes per call,' they said. I argued that I was fixing the customers' problems and that they were all leaving happy, with the exceptions of those that had to be elevated to 'second level'. 'It doesn't matter,' they said. 'Spend more time getting their information. Ask them some personal questions to stretch the time out.'
Not once did they suggest I wasn't helping the customer. My real problem was that I never got stuck on those 2 hour phone calls because I knew what I was doing and simply fixed the problem right away. I knew all the really tricky problems, like the taskbar that just WON'T move. (Boot into safe mode and back again and it'll fix itself. It IS actually possible for it to get stuck. It happened to a PC in the call center once.)
So in the end, it's not about short calls. It's about calls that are the right length and look like you helped the customer while keeping the call time down far enough to make money.
Hah, yeah. I realized that the answer didn't fit (even if syntactically correct) after I posted, but it was too late of course.
;)
It's okay, though, I'm happy with my 'general geek', 'linux user' and 'programmer' titles.
Amazingly, you failed the test. apt-get install bash
Wait, are you saying I can get PAID? Where's my nearest clinic?
I think it's worth noting that even the small puzzle games are going this route. Check out the games on Reflexive.net and you'll see most of the new games are the same old puzzles, but with a story attached. Often the story is quite sad and uninspired, and nearly totally unrelated to the task at hand... But there IS a story.
Actually, 'damages' actually means money that they Plaintiff Company didn't earn that they feel they should have, had Google upheld their contract properly.
I don't know any numbers, so I'm going to make them up.
Company P (for Plaintiff) knows that if they get 1 billion hits from Google, they'll make 1 billion dollars. If they get 10,000 hits from Google, they'll make $10,000.
Company P has been paying Google $500 per month and getting 1 billion hits per month for 12 months. They have every right to expect that to continue. Suddenly, they get only 10,000 hits per month because Google changed how their ad was listed, but they still have exactly the same contract. If this goes on for 6 months, Company P has lost almost 6 billion dollars that they would have earned if Google had not made the change.
This is how the damages are calculated. There are other trickier ways to add to the damages, but they all stem from this, as far as I know. It actually has no bearing on the amount Google charged them.
If you still think Google is 100% in the right on this, think of this way:
You contract with Company G for 100 green widgets every month. These are really really great widgets, and you're making a killing on them. Company G realizes that it can run a sweat shop in Indonesia and make the widgets for 1/100th of the cost, but at 1/20th of the quality. You contract does not specify the quality of the widgets, only that they are green! It is perfectly legal for Company G to provide you with inferior widgets and because you are under contract, you cannot reject them! Suddenly, your whole business is bankrupt. Yes, shame on you for the lousy contract, but shame on Company G for changing their process without any input from their customers. (It won't make you feel any better when Company G goes bankrupt because you'll have been there first.)
I've obviously greatly oversimplified the situation, and I don't actually believe Google has 'done evil' here, but this company definitely got the shaft, even though it was probably their own fault.
'Damages' in lawsuits are always a made-up number based on BS projections. I fail to see why this case should suddenly be realistic when no other case is.
Damages to a third party CAN be more than the company makes.
The number itself might be unreasonable, but not the fact that the damages are more than the income.
I find it interesting that god/evolution/the great green arkleseizure/FSM/whatever invented metadata LONG before we did. Not surprising, just interesting.
I didn't. The article says it costs 1-2 cents per mile.
You're thinking of 'Graphic Novel' and no, that's not what this is. This is for making interactive novels. They call them games, but a LOT of the 'interactive novels' I've seen were only interactive in that you could click to go to the next scene.
There ARE a few good ones, they're just few and far between already. Making it easy for idiots to make their own won't improve things.
No.
It makes games. Interactive novels. Really simple ones.
I must admit that 'Visual novel' is a stupid name for it, but the summary even explains what it is.
I (finally) understand WHY you guys went through the trouble to do this, but that still doesn't explain why you bothered to fork.
Why not release patches and plugins for GAIM?
And just ignore all the trolls that can't understand that some countries don't guarantee free speech. If they haven't got a clue by now, there's nothing you can do to open their eyes.
OMG, it said:
"Could not run the specified command."
Does this mean my Ubuntu is pirated!?!/!111!one!!?!
I dunno, $4k/yr sounds pretty doggone good for a fast, efficient, clean car.
But that's not on top of what I pay, because of gas prices... Let's see. $3/gallon (http://www.gasbuddy.com/), and I get about 30m/gallon. So $.10 per mile. The Tesla Roadster gets 1-2 cents per mile. We'll just say 2.
I travel around 15,000 miles a year commuting. That's $1500 gas or $300 Roadster. So it's $4300 for the Roadster or $1500 for my car.
So I'd be paying $2800 extra per year to drive a clean car and I wouldn't ever have to stop at a gas pump again. (Travelling long distances is another story. I assume I'll find other transportation for that. Rental car, airplane, whatever.)
I'd pay it. Gladly.
The only thing that stops me is the up-front $70k. $30k would be quite a stretch for me, but $70k is dreamland. It'll be nice when these come down in price.
On a side note, cars like this would have people thinking about energy and other ways to get it. Sunlight, wind, etc. Everyone would want as much 'free' energy as they can, so I think the world would end up better off. In theory, anyhow.
I say it's a combination of both. MMOs -are- sucking time away from offline games, just like any new popular leisure activity sucks time away from other activities. It's just the nature of the beast.
But the real decline comes from 2 things: Your #2 above, and the mindless crap game devs are producing for the most part. Even with 3rd party games like Myst, LocoRoco, Katamari Damacy, Shadow of the Colossus and many others making WAY more money than predicted, they still don't get it. Games are about NEW things. Not the same old crap.
And as for WoW 'raising the bar' for games... No. It has shown to be remarkably addictive, but there's no 1 thing about WoW that stands out as being obviously superior to other games. They just managed to get everything working right at the same time.
Just incase I didn't state it clear enough: Starforce sucks and I refuse to EVER buy a Starforce protected game again.
Yes, but it lied. (MSN was first result, when I checked. Google was second.)
I was going to mod you insightful, but then I realized that some may not realize why.
They are not using laptop batteries, as you said, but instead using batteries that use lithium cells. They say they are the same cells, but they probably actually mean that they are the same kind of cells used in laptop batteries.
Anyhow, good call. I'm hoping others will read my post and rate yours insightful.
In that very same quote, it says 'marketing and sales'. Besides, it wouldn't be a 'store' if there was nothing for sale.
I think you're just trying to spin their comment to make them look bad. (Not that they need help. That thing is ugly and doesn't seem to be optimized for two-handed typing. I wouldn't put money on it selling well.)
Yeah, but no company in their right mind will releases exactly the same game under a new name and sells it again. They add things to it, and one of those things is plot.
Soul Calibur is a great example. It's Street Fighter with a plot. The plot is very basic, but instead of taking away from the experience as Jaffe suggests, it adds to it. Enough that I played it for quite a bit longer than all the other 'street fighter'-type games in the last 5 years combined. You can't honestly tell me that game would have sold better if they'd stripped the plot out.
Oh, and with the exception of Arkanoid, I -can't- pick up old games like that and have fun with them still, but Loom and Sam N Max Hit The Road still tickle me.
I'm just exactly the opposite of him. I ONLY play games for the 'story'. (I call it an adventure, cuz generally the plot is a little lame.)
When I get a new game, I want it to be new. New characters, lands, weapons, magic, story, and yes, new challenges. A 'perfect' game for me has all of these. A game with only 1 or 2 is nearly useless to me and I'll quit in minutes. (Tao's Adventure for DS.)
This guy is exactly the opposite. He just wants challenge for its own sake, apparently even if its been done a million times.
Wow.
I have to disagree with this. Have you SEEN some of the things people do with games, taking them 'out of the box'?
And let's not forget games like The Sims. What started out as a simple 'wander around and be bored' game turned into a HUGE 'make-your-own-stuff' game. (Disclaimer: I wrote the first mesh converter for The Sims.) People have added all kinds of things to that game, from simple wings (me!) to entirely different avatars (robots, etc) and many, many kinds of furniture and even scripted objects. You can't tell me there's no imagination being used there.
And now that companies support this (Second Life) it is easy for any child old enough to use a computer to do.
Don't blame the companies for toys that 'kill imagination'. Blame the people who buy those toys. There are still PLENTY of toys out there that encourage imagination. Play Doh, Hot Wheels, Barbie, Lego, etc.
Another poster also said that when he was a kid, a towel and a stick was a cape and sword and he was He-Man. Newsflash: Those items still exist. There are just other choices as well. I was born like 15 years later than him, and I still did the cape thing with a towel. In fact, I believe I recall my nephews (another 15 years later) doing the same thing when they were small.
It's nice to blame mega-corps for our perceived problems, but maybe we should focus a little more on paying attention to our children, instead of complaining that the mega-corps don't.
Yes, technically you could send an xmlhttprequest without any xml. But since a large part of 'ajax' is the dynamic pages resulting from the request, you can't really do 'AJAX' without the XHTML, at the very least. (And for what little it's worth, XHTML is really just specific XML.)