he's not even that funny. ah well - they'll toss the results and name it whatever they want.
to each their own, humour is a matter of personal taste.
But he is a truly a nerd. his enthusiasm for comics, sci-fi, lord of the rings... etc, is genuine. And it always cracks me up when he makes a D&D reference.
I think the government tying themselves to any contractor and using leased apps is a bad idea. It will eventually back them into a corner and they will be looking at more huge costs to migrate to something else.
Agreed.
I think Open Source software is the only course right now.
I think Open *Standards* are required. Open software is less of an issue.
Continuing to use Microsoft products is the biggest mistake possible. The fact is that with Microsoft Windows, we might as well run telnet on every networked system with user name guest and password guest
That's only true if you stubbornly insist on sticking with XP. Both Vista and 7 are worlds more secure.
er... seriously? Your upset that companies have finally found a way to profitably re-release classic titles? Titles that would still comfortably be under copy right even if copyright terms were sane?
The important word was sells not software. He likes the fact that after a transaction with Microsoft, their employees have no ongoing access to what you bought.
Can you open a new steam account for each and every game?
You can, and probably should. But its a hassle if you want to use any of steams 'IM' or matching services if you or your friends each have a lot of accounts.
The EULA, from what I can tell doesn't explicitly ban you from having multiple accounts.
If you split the games into multiple accounts, it does make it possible to 'effecitvely' transfer ownership of a single title, but its still against the eula. Its also agaisnt the eula to have mutliple people access your accounts... so if you split your games up to let your kids play, that's technically against the eula too.
I personally don't give much weight to the eula, however, it's prudent to know what 'rules' you are breaking before you decide in and how you plan to break them.
(WoW being the exception, as I may own the game, I can't play it without their permission, but it's a MMO game).
MMOs is precisely the model. If you read the steam EULA you do not 'buy games' nor even 'buy a copy of a game' nor even 'buy a license to a copy of a game'. you merely 'subscribe to a game' (of course its a one time fee for a perpetual subscription, which is something of a distortion of the word 'subscribe', if you ask me, but that's how they are trying to structure it to get around any rights you might otherwise have.
I would hope that a reasonable court would decide that his intent is to make the other party believe he has signed, which, for me, is good enough to treat him as if he signed it.
Hmmm...
So then, a reasonable court should decide that my phone and cell phone bill should have been free and 25.95 per month... after all the sales rep talked on and on and on about how the phone was free, and the plan was 25.99... clearly that's what they intended for me to beleive, right?
And if I signed and walked out thinking that's what I got... yet a month later I get a much larger bill full of fees and service charges. Sure if I'd read the fine print in the contract it was ALL there... the $6.95 system access fee, the $.95 9-1-1 fee, the $30 activation fee.... but that's not what they intended me to beleive... clearly the word "FREE PHONES" in 5 foot tall letters on the banner and million dollar TV commericals talking about their 25.95 unimited voice plans...nah... they didn't intend for me to actually believe any of that.
And a poor musician... JACKPOT. They're home free. A reasonable court should decide that the [Big Label] intended for them to believe they would actually make significant amounts of money by signing up with the label, not end up permanently in debt to the label, working like slaves under their thumbs. I mean, how many bands do you think would sign THAT contract? "You will work like slaves for a year, with a 95% chance of owing us several thousand dollars at the end." Its the truth. But its certainly not what they 'intend' the band to believe when they sign it.
While I'm a happy Steam user (because I only buy games after much deliberation and have not yet come across one I've wanted to sell off)
Assuming your are both fairly young and that you put all your steam games in one account you'll get burned when you discover that you can't go and play Half Life 5 at the same time your 10 year old daughter is playing your copy of Bejeweled 3 multiplayer. (assuming you let her play your copy of bejeweled... sharing account info is against the eula... you should probably just buy a separate copy of every game for each member of your entire family, right?)
So even if you love all your games, you are only allowed to use one at a time. Steam is like having a bookshelf full of CDs, and then finding out that if your wife is listening to one of them in her car, you not only can't listen to that one, but you can't listen to any other CDs you own either.
Such is the 'excellent' steam model.
(Yes there is an 'offline mode' that sort of works some of the time for some games... but its hardly a solution, especially long term as more and more games have 'online' features.)
The prevailing argument seems to be that, since re-selling is legal, you should be able to do it completely unregulated, regardless of the damage it does to the industries that provide you that content.
If the industry is being that damaged by it, something is wrong with the industry.
Should used bicycle sales be outlawed because it too significantly reduces the number of new customers. The classifieds are chock full of used mountain bikes, road bikes...
Hey used cars too, for that matter, and dear god the auto industry could use a boost. We should pass regulations that prevent people from selling used cars... that'll boost the demand for new cars right?
So, if 10,000 copies of a game sell, but they go through a million hands due to rampant resales that the publishers/developers never see a cent of, well, there goes another dev. And that publisher, just had the same thing happen to their top 10 titles, so no more publisher. Guess there are no more devs or publishers left who can operate profitable businesses to provide your content.
Boo fucking hoo. If that's what is happening you business model is wrong. Assuming people are paying at least $15 for the used copy, and 'a million hands' bought it at that price; then you could have made $15 Million dollars selling it at that price, instead of $500K selling 10k copies for @$50 each.
Ah, but the 'resale market' would just price them at $5 and we'd be back where we started. No. We wouldn't. Because gamestop wouldn't get into the market of buying and selling used games if the price point was $5. They'd have to buying them from customers for 50 cents just to make $4.5 margin... that's not really worth it to them given the number scratched discs, and related costs that they'll have to absorb, and even if it was viable for them at that price, who is going to go to the trouble of selling their games back to gamestop etc if they only get a lousy 50 cents?
The old hacker creed of "information should be free" may be the prevailing attitude on/., but it's taken to unsustainable and asinine levels both here and among "content consumers" in general, as if you have have a constitutional right to the (millions of dollars and tens of thousands of people months spent developing titles) games you consume every year without paying a dime.
Look if that's truly unsustainable, then it should just stop!!
Either charge what you need to make the money back / set the pricing so that you recoup your costs, or stop making that sort of game. World of Goo made money hand over fist. Portal too.
If the movie industry tomorrow decided they wanted to make a 2Billion dollar movies, and then decided that the only way they could pay for it is if the government applies regulations and taxes to force everyone in the country to pay for it... then guess what DON'T MAKE THAT MOVIE.
I'm sure there are all sorts of flaws in my own dissertation, but if someone can provide a REAL business model that doesn't involve making every game subscription based (MMO) or based on 90% multiplayer (COD4) to keep people from selling them over and over and over again, I'd love to hear it.
How about like every other business model, set your game budget around the reality of the market, rather than demand regulations to distort the market in a way you'd like.
Or hey, how about this... let people who get your game used 'register it' for a small fee. Profit from those transfers rather than ban them outright.
Let people buy a used copy of Portal (a $20 title in a box at retail), and transfer the registration key on it to another steam user for $2. Sure its $18 less than if you'd sold a new copy... but how much do you REALLY make on a retail game sale anyway (after distribution and channel costs) which we've just bypassed? Not $20. Now at least if that box passes through a million hands you've just made another $2 million bucks.
Next up offer better deals to people with more games registered. I'm not go
IANAL, but perhaps you should talk to one. I believe anything you intend or represent to be your signature legally IS your signature.
Clearly he doesn't intend the mark to be his signature so the intent requirement isn't met. The leaves whether he represented the mark to be his signature. That's trickier... if someone hands me a document and says sign it, and I write in neat legible cursive 'terms declined' and hand it back... could you really say I represented that to be my signature, and not the rather plain rejection of the terms.
You willingly put those games into the same account with other games when you could have created a seperate steam account for each game or package you bought.
Actually I've been doing this for quite a while now. It is indeed the best solution I can find. But its a clumsy work around, not a proper solution.
It sounds annoying but it is not much different from putting in a different disc or cartridge into your console.
It becomes quite a bit more annoying if you try and use some of the online friend services etc. If a friend as 20 games and 20 accounts, I have to add him as a friend 20 times in order to see him when he's online, and vice versa.... which is, of course, stupid. So we keep in touch different ways, and forego those steam features.
You seem to be more angry at your lack of foresight than at how steam works.
I know exactly how how steam works, in gory detail. NOW. I am angry that I learned the details in the fine print after I had been, in my opinion, ripped off. And I would like to spare others the same fate. There are clearly lots of people out there who do NOT realize the implications of steams service.
Luckily I learned the reality, and determined the work around after only a few titles, and now avoid steam entirely when possible, and create additional accounts when not.
It's called gifting. I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, but later bought the Orange Box. It notified me that I had one extra copy of HL2 and I was able to give it as a gift to one of my buddies.
OrangeBox was a partial exception. A one time special deal for Orange Box buyers who already had other components of the game. It is not generally true. (And it only applied to duplicate components... you couldn't gift features you only had one of.)
You can gift any game that you've purchased. Just have someone send you paypal, then gift the game to their username.
Why don't you try just that? You are wrong. It **doesn't work**.
You can buy a game and gift it (but you have to buy it 'as a gift' and you absolutely can't play it yourself first), and who ever receives it can't gift it again.
"A Steam gift purchase is a one-time transfer--after the recipient has activated and installed the game, it is a non-refundable game in his or her Steam games collection. Also note that you may only gift new purchases--you may not transfer games you already own. That'd be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you've used every morning for the past year."
or further down:
"You can not gift games that were previously purchased on your Steam account to friends. Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One can be gifted when purchased as part of the Orange Box package. For more information about Orange Box gifting, please see..."
They couldn't be more clear that you can't transfer games you already own (OrangeBox duplicates being the ONLY exception.)
You can sell your Steam games. By saying otherwise you're just spreading FUD.
No you can't. Its you that is spreading misinformation. Sad thing is, I believe you genuinely believed you were right, which means their whole 'gifting' system marketing has completely deluded you into thinking it worked the way you thought it worked. But it doesn't, and you wouldn't have found out until you actually tried to gift one of you other used games and found you couldn't. At which point it is FAR to late to do anything about it.
I have spoken with support, argued with them live and via email over this on a number of occasions. I have actually TRIED to gift a in my account that isn't an orange box duplicate.
Don't trust me on this; do your own research. But unfortunately you WILL find that I am right.
I would think that if the law says you are allowed to sell a copy of the game, it would be against that law to prevent the re-sale.
That's the problem. They won't stop me from selling it to a new owner. They've just set it up, so that there is no point, because the new owner can't do anything with it. There is nothing 'illegal' about it, and so there is really nothing to challenge them on.
Essentially, they are selling you a 'consumable activation ticket' with your media and box. You can resell it all you want, but the activation ticket is only consumable once. And the media and box is basically pointless with out it.
Sort of like selling you Cellphones bundled with a prepaid card. If you use the cellphone and consume the card, you can resell the phone, but the card is all used up. And the new owner has to buy a new card. No problem so far... but with PC games, they don't sell the cards separately, so what good is a used cellphone?... and even if they did sell the cards separately, they'd just charge the full price of the game for it.
And of course, with a cellphone needing a pre-paid airtime card makes sense... with a video game its purely an artificial constraint for the sole purpose of preventing you from being able to transfer the game to someone else... of course they phrase it terms of the 'valuable steam account services like instant messaging and player matching' that they are providing you.
But... you can always sell your Steam account. Less than selling each game separatly, but it's still possible.
1) selling (even sharing) your steam account is against the eula. If that becomes widespread enough that they think its costing them enough money to worry about, they'll just start banning people over it.
2) you have to sell all your steam linked games or none of them. For most people that's a deal breaker. In my case I want to give one of my games away to a freind I know would enjoy it (nevermind sell it), but with steam its all or none. (Yes, I could give him my account info, but again, that's against the eula, and more importantly: only one of us can be logged in at a time.
So if I go down that road, if I have 'lent' out a few games to friends, odds are I won't be able to use my own steam account, not even play games no one else is playing.
I already ran into that at home. I can't even play game A, while my wife plays game B(*). That's FUCKED.
(*Sure I can dick around with offline mode, but that's a hassle and doesn't always work, and in this case both the games are online so offline mode is moot.)
Whether you own it or not is one thing, but no publisher or developer has successfully argued that you do not have the right to resell a physical, original copy of a game.
They don't need to make the argument if they can prevent me from doing it by technical means instead. Its the whole "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?" situation.
I bought both portal and lost planet, in a box, with a disc, at a store. Do I have the right to resell them? Sure, do, but who ever buys them can't use them. The activation key is already used up, tied to my steam account.
And I can't move a title out of my steam account. Either I hand over the password/login and all the games in it, or I don't. There is no way to separate out a title and say, here, this isn't mine anymore, and re-enable the activation key for someone else.
Hell, per the EULA I can't even give the entire steam account away. (Not that I'd want to because I still want -some- of the games.)
So, even if I do have the right to resell them, what good is it? I can't meaningfully exercise it.
Many games are available through Steam online, but if you purchase them physically in the store, there's no connection to Steam.
Is there a trend though? Are steam available games moving towards being all linked back to steam?
Spore, Far Cry 2, Prey, just-about-anything-that-isn't-Valve-made
Yeah, I wasn't particularly surprised Portal required a steam account... But Lost Planet is a Capcom game, and was out for the Xbox360... To be fair, it did disclose it required steam in the fine print on the box; but I didn't read the box. My desktop PC is far and away beyond needing to worry about system requirements... so it came as a surprise. And its now something I watch more closely for.
To play devil's advocate, I've used Steam, etc., for my PC, and I still prefer physical media.
Trouble is, if you buy a physical media version of a steam game, you might as well have just used steam, because it still ties it to your steam account.
Second (and I have done this) - I can sell my games LEGALLY to friends when I'm done with them and vice-versa
Forget selling them. I just want to be able to GIVE them to my brothers and brothers-in-law when I'm done, without handing over my steam account.
I currently avoid steam games. But I have 2, Portal and Lost Planet... both bought physically, but with all the downsides of being steam games.
My plan for the future, is any steam game I end up with I'll simply register a new account for. Then I can give it away, by giving away that steam login/password. As long as all my games are on separate accounts, I can exercise most of the freedoms I want... against the eula of course, but they can go fuck themselves.
Yeah, but the point (I thought) of the electronic voting was to make this easier and more accurate. If it's just as flawed as the previous system, why bother going through the trouble of changing?
If it were faster and/or cheaper and/or took less space without making accuracy worse that would be an improvement too.
Plus I'm sure accuracy was -supposed- to actually be better.
But in reality, most elections aren't that close, and making it faster and cheaper is probably more important than further improving the accuracy in most cases.
If you put the right thing in the right field, and always in the right field, and only in the right field (so help me God) you just need some kind of template per country, e.g for Belgium: boxnumber, street housenumber [newline] postcode city.
You should be able to find them from the IPU, or deduce them by looking foor a company in the required country. Shouldn't take you a year, if you ignore all the Bongo-Bongo Land type places.
Even before you get to bongo-bongo land.
For Canada your base template might be:
Mr. Randy Jones Widget Manufacturing Inc. #101 21 Cordova Street East Vancouver, BC, V3H 1T3 Canada
But then in comes:
Mrs. Irene Smith General Delivery Small Creek, MB, R0E 0K0 Canada
"General Delivery", isn't a street or a company; it means drop it off at the post office, they don't bother with mail boxes for each person here. People just come in and ask the postmaster for their mail.) Used to be very common in small rural towns, still a reality in out-of-the-way enough places.
or another type of rural address like:
Alice Smith Box 22F RR4 Somewhere, SK, S0N 0A0 Canada
Where instead of the street address of the recipient you are identifying a lockbox on a rural route somewhere.
Then you've got institutional addresses like:
Dr. Jon Driver Office of the Vice President 3100 Strand Hall Simon Fraser University 8888 University Drive Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6 Canada
which needs a bunch of space for all kinds of internal routing information.
And we haven't gotten out of Canada yet.
Its not so much that you can't keep adding fields and templates to accomodate these, its that every time you build a system and roll it out, users will shortly bump into an address that doesn't fit... and then they cram the information into the 'wrong fields'. And you might as well have just given them a few blank lines to fill.
Its also a royal hassle because the address entry form in your application becomes increasingly complicated to use, and the order the system needs to know information, is usually opposite from the way people like giving it.
Giving them multiple lines to just write what they need is simpler, and doesn't cause problems on the corner cases. I usually use a hybrid for systems used in Canada: a few generic 'address lines' and then city/province/postalcode fields. And I think even there we've run into a couple addresses that don't have cities. Although things have gotten better... the post office in their efforts to automate things have been arbitrarily assigning street addresses to things that don't really have them. (Simon Fraser University, didn't used to have a 'proper' street address, it was just "Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC". They added a street address "8888 University Drive" primarily to accomodate computer systems that kept choking on there not being a street address.
But even today, you might send a message to:
Dr. John Smith Faculty of Arts and Sciences University Hall Cambridge, MA, 02138 USA
So you don't like the technique because you don't know the correct syntax for querying it?
Do you typically read half a post and then reply to it? Because it makes you sound like a tool.
If you'd made it to the very next line of my post, you'd see that I did a left outer join to solve the "problem".
The trouble with outer joins, however, as I go on to explain, is that you end up with nulls in the query result.
Given the whole point of normalizing addressline2 into its own table was so that we wouldn't have to deal with nulls in our database... clearly this is ineffectual, because we still have to deal with them in query results.
Normalizing the database can create a situation where the NULL is unnecessary.
Not reallly. Suppose I'm going to do a mail out to my customers... so I need a table of addresses
select * from addresses inner join addressline2s on addresses.pkey = addressline2s.fkey
And what happens? I'm now missing all the addresses that don't have a line 2. Well that's worthless. how about:
select * from addresses left outer join addressline2s on addresses.pkey = addressline2s.fkey
Yay, all my addresses. And I can cursor through them.... except wait... I've got a bunch of nulls in the returned set. Even though my database doesn't contain any nulls, my simple query does...
So what was the point of eliminating them from the database?
Now in the real world, any amount of information might be missing, not just line 2. There are addresses without cities, without streets, Addresses in particular are difficult to model well. In fact the whole 'address line 1, line 2, line 3' thing is aready a cop-out because its too much effort to normalize addresses into separate fields. And when dealing with international addresses, it usually just simplest to give them a multiline text block and say, here, you fill it out the way you want...
Russian addresses for example are supposed to be upside down. In Canada the postal code is supposed to be after the province, in Sweden its before the city (and there is no province...)... etc. So even if you've got the right fields, the order is wrong. You could spend a year just modeling street addresses.
They don't control access to the roads. And if they vanished off the face of the earth, the roads would still be there.
The people who design the tanks, ships, missiles, et cetera are third parties. They hold the rights to the schematics and protect them from view.
They don't control access to them though. The terms are dictated by the government. Can you imagine the government accepting terms such that the missiles wouldn't fire unless they could phone home to companyX for approval. And CompanyX isn't even allowed to sell the same missiles to China without the governments say so. And yes, while the IP is proprietary, they are contractually obligated to provide suitable levels of maintenance and service, and if they vanished off the face of the earth... the schematics etc are safely in escrow to be released.... and so on...
There is a big difference between hiring someone to do something on your terms. And using a service on someone elses terms.
That said, the one point we agreed on is the most important one.
Not too surprising given the situation with the economy. I'm sure its far cheaper manufacturing chips overseas than it is here.
Why?
Labor costs? I doubt a chip fab is really that senstive to hourly wages. Its not like each chip is hand crafted. Its all automated; and the robots are the same price anywhere. So sure labor is a bit cheaper, but we're probably talking a labor as fractional cents per cpu... they can afford it.
Materials cost? I can't really see it making much difference.
Environmental regulation compliance? Maybe; I have no idea how much a chip fab pollutes.
IP? Are there per cpu royalties that would be owed in the manufacturing process itself that they can avoid by doing it elsewhere? Maybe; but I doubt it. Intel's got plenty of patents and surely has the ability to easily cross-license with anyone that could prevent it from manufacturing.
Or is TMSC hurting for business due to the economic downturn, and is willing to make them dirt cheap, just to keep the factories running...?
So, serious question, why is it cheaper to have it done overseas?
Slashdot Mirror
Let me explain it:
The jokes not as funny if you explain it.
he's not even that funny. ah well - they'll toss the results and name it whatever they want.
to each their own, humour is a matter of personal taste.
But he is a truly a nerd. his enthusiasm for comics, sci-fi, lord of the rings... etc, is genuine. And it always cracks me up when he makes a D&D reference.
I think the government tying themselves to any contractor and using leased apps is a bad idea. It will eventually back them into a corner and they will be looking at more huge costs to migrate to something else.
Agreed.
I think Open Source software is the only course right now.
I think Open *Standards* are required. Open software is less of an issue.
Continuing to use Microsoft products is the biggest mistake possible. The fact is that with Microsoft Windows, we might as well run telnet on every networked system with user name guest and password guest
That's only true if you stubbornly insist on sticking with XP. Both Vista and 7 are worlds more secure.
er... seriously? Your upset that companies have finally found a way to profitably re-release classic titles? Titles that would still comfortably be under copy right even if copyright terms were sane?
Xbox
The important word was sells not software. He likes the fact that after a transaction with Microsoft, their employees have no ongoing access to what you bought.
Really? I thought the whole point of Steam was that games are licensed software, not physical products.
Actually, if you read their EULA they think they are 'subscriptions'. You don't even own a software license.
Can you open a new steam account for each and every game?
You can, and probably should. But its a hassle if you want to use any of steams 'IM' or matching services if you or your friends each have a lot of accounts.
The EULA, from what I can tell doesn't explicitly ban you from having multiple accounts.
If you split the games into multiple accounts, it does make it possible to 'effecitvely' transfer ownership of a single title, but its still against the eula. Its also agaisnt the eula to have mutliple people access your accounts... so if you split your games up to let your kids play, that's technically against the eula too.
I personally don't give much weight to the eula, however, it's prudent to know what 'rules' you are breaking before you decide in and how you plan to break them.
(WoW being the exception, as I may own the game, I can't play it without their permission, but it's a MMO game).
MMOs is precisely the model. If you read the steam EULA you do not 'buy games' nor even 'buy a copy of a game' nor even 'buy a license to a copy of a game'. you merely 'subscribe to a game' (of course its a one time fee for a perpetual subscription, which is something of a distortion of the word 'subscribe', if you ask me, but that's how they are trying to structure it to get around any rights you might otherwise have.
I would hope that a reasonable court would decide that his intent is to make the other party believe he has signed, which, for me, is good enough to treat him as if he signed it.
Hmmm...
So then, a reasonable court should decide that my phone and cell phone bill should have been free and 25.95 per month... after all the sales rep talked on and on and on about how the phone was free, and the plan was 25.99... clearly that's what they intended for me to beleive, right?
And if I signed and walked out thinking that's what I got... yet a month later I get a much larger bill full of fees and service charges. Sure if I'd read the fine print in the contract it was ALL there... the $6.95 system access fee, the $.95 9-1-1 fee, the $30 activation fee.... but that's not what they intended me to beleive... clearly the word "FREE PHONES" in 5 foot tall letters on the banner and million dollar TV commericals talking about their 25.95 unimited voice plans...nah... they didn't intend for me to actually believe any of that.
And a poor musician... JACKPOT. They're home free. A reasonable court should decide that the [Big Label] intended for them to believe they would actually make significant amounts of money by signing up with the label, not end up permanently in debt to the label, working like slaves under their thumbs. I mean, how many bands do you think would sign THAT contract? "You will work like slaves for a year, with a 95% chance of owing us several thousand dollars at the end." Its the truth. But its certainly not what they 'intend' the band to believe when they sign it.
While I'm a happy Steam user (because I only buy games after much deliberation and have not yet come across one I've wanted to sell off)
Assuming your are both fairly young and that you put all your steam games in one account you'll get burned when you discover that you can't go and play Half Life 5 at the same time your 10 year old daughter is playing your copy of Bejeweled 3 multiplayer. (assuming you let her play your copy of bejeweled... sharing account info is against the eula... you should probably just buy a separate copy of every game for each member of your entire family, right?)
So even if you love all your games, you are only allowed to use one at a time. Steam is like having a bookshelf full of CDs, and then finding out that if your wife is listening to one of them in her car, you not only can't listen to that one, but you can't listen to any other CDs you own either.
Such is the 'excellent' steam model.
(Yes there is an 'offline mode' that sort of works some of the time for some games... but its hardly a solution, especially long term as more and more games have 'online' features.)
The prevailing argument seems to be that, since re-selling is legal, you should be able to do it completely unregulated, regardless of the damage it does to the industries that provide you that content.
If the industry is being that damaged by it, something is wrong with the industry.
Should used bicycle sales be outlawed because it too significantly reduces the number of new customers. The classifieds are chock full of used mountain bikes, road bikes...
Hey used cars too, for that matter, and dear god the auto industry could use a boost. We should pass regulations that prevent people from selling used cars... that'll boost the demand for new cars right?
So, if 10,000 copies of a game sell, but they go through a million hands due to rampant resales that the publishers/developers never see a cent of, well, there goes another dev. And that publisher, just had the same thing happen to their top 10 titles, so no more publisher. Guess there are no more devs or publishers left who can operate profitable businesses to provide your content.
Boo fucking hoo. If that's what is happening you business model is wrong. Assuming people are paying at least $15 for the used copy, and 'a million hands' bought it at that price; then you could have made $15 Million dollars selling it at that price, instead of $500K selling 10k copies for @$50 each.
Ah, but the 'resale market' would just price them at $5 and we'd be back where we started. No. We wouldn't. Because gamestop wouldn't get into the market of buying and selling used games if the price point was $5. They'd have to buying them from customers for 50 cents just to make $4.5 margin... that's not really worth it to them given the number scratched discs, and related costs that they'll have to absorb, and even if it was viable for them at that price, who is going to go to the trouble of selling their games back to gamestop etc if they only get a lousy 50 cents?
The old hacker creed of "information should be free" may be the prevailing attitude on /., but it's taken to unsustainable and asinine levels both here and among "content consumers" in general, as if you have have a constitutional right to the (millions of dollars and tens of thousands of people months spent developing titles) games you consume every year without paying a dime.
Look if that's truly unsustainable, then it should just stop!!
Either charge what you need to make the money back / set the pricing so that you recoup your costs, or stop making that sort of game. World of Goo made money hand over fist. Portal too.
If the movie industry tomorrow decided they wanted to make a 2Billion dollar movies, and then decided that the only way they could pay for it is if the government applies regulations and taxes to force everyone in the country to pay for it... then guess what DON'T MAKE THAT MOVIE.
I'm sure there are all sorts of flaws in my own dissertation, but if someone can provide a REAL business model that doesn't involve making every game subscription based (MMO) or based on 90% multiplayer (COD4) to keep people from selling them over and over and over again, I'd love to hear it.
How about like every other business model, set your game budget around the reality of the market, rather than demand regulations to distort the market in a way you'd like.
Or hey, how about this... let people who get your game used 'register it' for a small fee. Profit from those transfers rather than ban them outright.
Let people buy a used copy of Portal (a $20 title in a box at retail), and transfer the registration key on it to another steam user for $2. Sure its $18 less than if you'd sold a new copy... but how much do you REALLY make on a retail game sale anyway (after distribution and channel costs) which we've just bypassed? Not $20. Now at least if that box passes through a million hands you've just made another $2 million bucks.
Next up offer better deals to people with more games registered. I'm not go
IANAL, but perhaps you should talk to one. I believe anything you intend or represent to be your signature legally IS your signature.
Clearly he doesn't intend the mark to be his signature so the intent requirement isn't met.
The leaves whether he represented the mark to be his signature. That's trickier... if someone hands me a document and says sign it, and I write in neat legible cursive 'terms declined' and hand it back... could you really say I represented that to be my signature, and not the rather plain rejection of the terms.
You willingly put those games into the same account with other games when you could have created a seperate steam account for each game or package you bought.
Actually I've been doing this for quite a while now. It is indeed the best solution I can find. But its a clumsy work around, not a proper solution.
It sounds annoying but it is not much different from putting in a different disc or cartridge into your console.
It becomes quite a bit more annoying if you try and use some of the online friend services etc. If a friend as 20 games and 20 accounts, I have to add him as a friend 20 times in order to see him when he's online, and vice versa.... which is, of course, stupid. So we keep in touch different ways, and forego those steam features.
You seem to be more angry at your lack of foresight than at how steam works.
I know exactly how how steam works, in gory detail. NOW. I am angry that I learned the details in the fine print after I had been, in my opinion, ripped off. And I would like to spare others the same fate. There are clearly lots of people out there who do NOT realize the implications of steams service.
Luckily I learned the reality, and determined the work around after only a few titles, and now avoid steam entirely when possible, and create additional accounts when not.
You are sadly misinformed.
It's called gifting. I bought Half Life 2 when it came out, but later bought the Orange Box. It notified me that I had one extra copy of HL2 and I was able to give it as a gift to one of my buddies.
OrangeBox was a partial exception. A one time special deal for Orange Box buyers who already had other components of the game. It is not generally true. (And it only applied to duplicate components... you couldn't gift features you only had one of.)
You can gift any game that you've purchased. Just have someone send you paypal, then gift the game to their username.
Why don't you try just that? You are wrong. It **doesn't work**.
You can buy a game and gift it (but you have to buy it 'as a gift' and you absolutely can't play it yourself first), and who ever receives it can't gift it again.
Read all about it right from steam:
https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?p_faqid=549
"A Steam gift purchase is a one-time transfer--after the recipient has activated and installed the game, it is a non-refundable game in his or her Steam games collection. Also note that you may only gift new purchases--you may not transfer games you already own. That'd be like wrapping up and presenting the toaster you've used every morning for the past year."
or further down:
"You can not gift games that were previously purchased on your Steam account to friends. Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One can be gifted when purchased as part of the Orange Box package. For more information about Orange Box gifting, please see..."
They couldn't be more clear that you can't transfer games you already own (OrangeBox duplicates being the ONLY exception.)
You can sell your Steam games. By saying otherwise you're just spreading FUD.
No you can't. Its you that is spreading misinformation. Sad thing is, I believe you genuinely believed you were right, which means their whole 'gifting' system marketing has completely deluded you into thinking it worked the way you thought it worked. But it doesn't, and you wouldn't have found out until you actually tried to gift one of you other used games and found you couldn't. At which point it is FAR to late to do anything about it.
I have spoken with support, argued with them live and via email over this on a number of occasions. I have actually TRIED to gift a in my account that isn't an orange box duplicate.
Don't trust me on this; do your own research. But unfortunately you WILL find that I am right.
I would think that if the law says you are allowed to sell a copy of the game, it would be against that law to prevent the re-sale.
That's the problem. They won't stop me from selling it to a new owner. They've just set it up, so that there is no point, because the new owner can't do anything with it. There is nothing 'illegal' about it, and so there is really nothing to challenge them on.
Essentially, they are selling you a 'consumable activation ticket' with your media and box. You can resell it all you want, but the activation ticket is only consumable once. And the media and box is basically pointless with out it.
Sort of like selling you Cellphones bundled with a prepaid card. If you use the cellphone and consume the card, you can resell the phone, but the card is all used up. And the new owner has to buy a new card. No problem so far... but with PC games, they don't sell the cards separately, so what good is a used cellphone?... and even if they did sell the cards separately, they'd just charge the full price of the game for it.
And of course, with a cellphone needing a pre-paid airtime card makes sense... with a video game its purely an artificial constraint for the sole purpose of preventing you from being able to transfer the game to someone else... of course they phrase it terms of the 'valuable steam account services like instant messaging and player matching' that they are providing you.
But... you can always sell your Steam account. Less than selling each game separatly, but it's still possible.
1) selling (even sharing) your steam account is against the eula. If that becomes widespread enough that they think its costing them enough money to worry about, they'll just start banning people over it.
2) you have to sell all your steam linked games or none of them. For most people that's a deal breaker. In my case I want to give one of my games away to a freind I know would enjoy it (nevermind sell it), but with steam its all or none. (Yes, I could give him my account info, but again, that's against the eula, and more importantly: only one of us can be logged in at a time.
So if I go down that road, if I have 'lent' out a few games to friends, odds are I won't be able to use my own steam account, not even play games no one else is playing.
I already ran into that at home. I can't even play game A, while my wife plays game B(*). That's FUCKED.
(*Sure I can dick around with offline mode, but that's a hassle and doesn't always work, and in this case both the games are online so offline mode is moot.)
Whether you own it or not is one thing, but no publisher or developer has successfully argued that you do not have the right to resell a physical, original copy of a game.
They don't need to make the argument if they can prevent me from doing it by technical means instead. Its the whole "What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?" situation.
I bought both portal and lost planet, in a box, with a disc, at a store. Do I have the right to resell them? Sure, do, but who ever buys them can't use them. The activation key is already used up, tied to my steam account.
And I can't move a title out of my steam account. Either I hand over the password/login and all the games in it, or I don't. There is no way to separate out a title and say, here, this isn't mine anymore, and re-enable the activation key for someone else.
Hell, per the EULA I can't even give the entire steam account away. (Not that I'd want to because I still want -some- of the games.)
So, even if I do have the right to resell them, what good is it? I can't meaningfully exercise it.
Many games are available through Steam online, but if you purchase them physically in the store, there's no connection to Steam.
Is there a trend though? Are steam available games moving towards being all linked back to steam?
Spore, Far Cry 2, Prey, just-about-anything-that-isn't-Valve-made
Yeah, I wasn't particularly surprised Portal required a steam account... But Lost Planet is a Capcom game, and was out for the Xbox360... To be fair, it did disclose it required steam in the fine print on the box; but I didn't read the box. My desktop PC is far and away beyond needing to worry about system requirements... so it came as a surprise. And its now something I watch more closely for.
To play devil's advocate, I've used Steam, etc., for my PC, and I still prefer physical media.
Trouble is, if you buy a physical media version of a steam game, you might as well have just used steam, because it still ties it to your steam account.
Second (and I have done this) - I can sell my games LEGALLY to friends when I'm done with them and vice-versa
Forget selling them. I just want to be able to GIVE them to my brothers and brothers-in-law when I'm done, without handing over my steam account.
I currently avoid steam games. But I have 2, Portal and Lost Planet ... both bought physically, but with all the downsides of being steam games.
My plan for the future, is any steam game I end up with I'll simply register a new account for. Then I can give it away, by giving away that steam login/password. As long as all my games are on separate accounts, I can exercise most of the freedoms I want... against the eula of course, but they can go fuck themselves.
Yeah, but the point (I thought) of the electronic voting was to make this easier and more accurate. If it's just as flawed as the previous system, why bother going through the trouble of changing?
If it were faster and/or cheaper and/or took less space without making accuracy worse that would be an improvement too.
Plus I'm sure accuracy was -supposed- to actually be better.
But in reality, most elections aren't that close, and making it faster and cheaper is probably more important than further improving the accuracy in most cases.
If you put the right thing in the right field, and always in the right field, and only in the right field (so help me God) you just need some kind of template per country, e.g for Belgium: boxnumber, street housenumber [newline] postcode city.
You should be able to find them from the IPU, or deduce them by looking foor a company in the required country. Shouldn't take you a year, if you ignore all the Bongo-Bongo Land type places.
Even before you get to bongo-bongo land.
For Canada your base template might be:
Mr. Randy Jones
Widget Manufacturing Inc.
#101 21 Cordova Street East
Vancouver, BC, V3H 1T3
Canada
But then in comes:
Mrs. Irene Smith
General Delivery
Small Creek, MB, R0E 0K0
Canada
"General Delivery", isn't a street or a company; it means drop it off at the post office, they don't bother with mail boxes for each person here. People just come in and ask the postmaster for their mail.) Used to be very common in small rural towns, still a reality in out-of-the-way enough places.
or another type of rural address like:
Alice Smith
Box 22F RR4
Somewhere, SK, S0N 0A0
Canada
Where instead of the street address of the recipient you are identifying a lockbox on a rural route somewhere.
Then you've got institutional addresses like:
Dr. Jon Driver
Office of the Vice President
3100 Strand Hall
Simon Fraser University
8888 University Drive
Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6
Canada
which needs a bunch of space for all kinds of internal routing information.
And we haven't gotten out of Canada yet.
Its not so much that you can't keep adding fields and templates to accomodate these, its that every time you build a system and roll it out, users will shortly bump into an address that doesn't fit... and then they cram the information into the 'wrong fields'. And you might as well have just given them a few blank lines to fill.
Its also a royal hassle because the address entry form in your application becomes increasingly complicated to use, and the order the system needs to know information, is usually opposite from the way people like giving it.
Giving them multiple lines to just write what they need is simpler, and doesn't cause problems on the corner cases. I usually use a hybrid for systems used in Canada: a few generic 'address lines' and then city/province/postalcode fields. And I think even there we've run into a couple addresses that don't have cities. Although things have gotten better... the post office in their efforts to automate things have been arbitrarily assigning street addresses to things that don't really have them. (Simon Fraser University, didn't used to have a 'proper' street address, it was just "Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC". They added a street address "8888 University Drive" primarily to accomodate computer systems that kept choking on there not being a street address.
But even today, you might send a message to:
Dr. John Smith
Faculty of Arts and Sciences
University Hall
Cambridge, MA, 02138
USA
with no street number.
So you don't like the technique because you don't know the correct syntax for querying it?
Do you typically read half a post and then reply to it? Because it makes you sound like a tool.
If you'd made it to the very next line of my post, you'd see that I did a left outer join to solve the "problem".
The trouble with outer joins, however, as I go on to explain, is that you end up with nulls in the query result.
Given the whole point of normalizing addressline2 into its own table was so that we wouldn't have to deal with nulls in our database... clearly this is ineffectual, because we still have to deal with them in query results.
There is an *allowed* number??
Look at previous systems:
People counting manually will make mistakes.
Mechanical systems will have flaws.
So electronic systems inherit the rules that mechanical/manual systems ran under.
Normalizing the database can create a situation where the NULL is unnecessary.
Not reallly. Suppose I'm going to do a mail out to my customers... so I need a table of addresses
select *
from addresses inner join addressline2s on addresses.pkey = addressline2s.fkey
And what happens? I'm now missing all the addresses that don't have a line 2. Well that's worthless.
how about:
select *
from addresses left outer join addressline2s on addresses.pkey = addressline2s.fkey
Yay, all my addresses. And I can cursor through them. ... except wait... I've got a bunch of nulls in the returned set. Even though my database doesn't contain any nulls, my simple query does...
So what was the point of eliminating them from the database?
Now in the real world, any amount of information might be missing, not just line 2. There are addresses without cities, without streets, Addresses in particular are difficult to model well. In fact the whole 'address line 1, line 2, line 3' thing is aready a cop-out because its too much effort to normalize addresses into separate fields. And when dealing with international addresses, it usually just simplest to give them a multiline text block and say, here, you fill it out the way you want...
Russian addresses for example are supposed to be upside down. In Canada the postal code is supposed to be after the province, in Sweden its before the city (and there is no province...)... etc. So even if you've got the right fields, the order is wrong. You could spend a year just modeling street addresses.
The people who build the roads are third parties.
They don't control access to the roads. And if they vanished off the face of the earth, the roads would still be there.
The people who design the tanks, ships, missiles, et cetera are third parties. They hold the rights to the schematics and protect them from view.
They don't control access to them though. The terms are dictated by the government. Can you imagine the government accepting terms such that the missiles wouldn't fire unless they could phone home to companyX for approval. And CompanyX isn't even allowed to sell the same missiles to China without the governments say so. And yes, while the IP is proprietary, they are contractually obligated to provide suitable levels of maintenance and service, and if they vanished off the face of the earth... the schematics etc are safely in escrow to be released. ... and so on...
There is a big difference between hiring someone to do something on your terms. And using a service on someone elses terms.
That said, the one point we agreed on is the most important one.
Not too surprising given the situation with the economy. I'm sure its far cheaper manufacturing chips overseas than it is here.
Why?
Labor costs? I doubt a chip fab is really that senstive to hourly wages. Its not like each chip is hand crafted. Its all automated; and the robots are the same price anywhere. So sure labor is a bit cheaper, but we're probably talking a labor as fractional cents per cpu... they can afford it.
Materials cost? I can't really see it making much difference.
Environmental regulation compliance? Maybe; I have no idea how much a chip fab pollutes.
IP? Are there per cpu royalties that would be owed in the manufacturing process itself that they can avoid by doing it elsewhere? Maybe; but I doubt it. Intel's got plenty of patents and surely has the ability to easily cross-license with anyone that could prevent it from manufacturing.
Or is TMSC hurting for business due to the economic downturn, and is willing to make them dirt cheap, just to keep the factories running...?
So, serious question, why is it cheaper to have it done overseas?