Can you think of any 'magazines of the trade' that actually had a blind testing policy?
Hi-Fi Choice in the UK used to do (or claim they did) blind testing for whatever super test they were running that month and would describe the methodology. Then Future bought them, budgets were cut and they became just like What Hi-Fi.
Heh. All fair points (and you don't even mention the front pages which attempt to promote outrage rather than report the news - Daily Mail tactics applied to a "progressive" agenda) but Toynbee annoyed me so much I decided I didn't want to be contributing to her salary any more, and I need something to read on the Tube...
I do. Gave up on the Guardian following the last election when Polly Toynbee's pro-Blair puff pieces actually started to get offensive (her assertion that anybody who takes the War and the handling of the occupation into account when making their voting decision is 'decadent' and her sudden conversion to PR (which, I suspect, she's never mentioned again) did it for me.)
Hardly, they'll just enforce the fines through the courts in the member states in exactly the same way any other governmental regulatory authority would. There are various directly effective EU regulations (and national laws made in relation to EU directives) which provide for this.
Well the government doesn't seem so bothered about it that they've revised the laws, or disciplined the bouncers (who, incidentally Blair lied about claiming they were labour councillors when they'd been hired from outside agencies and some had criminal records), or the police involved. They just say what they need to say at the time and wait for people to get bored and focus on something else. I think it's the doublespeak which annoys me most of all.
And then when copyright periods are about to expire you just pay the government to extend. Tthe British record industry is currently lobbying heavily to extend copyright on recordings from 50 to 75 years - they started losing early Elvis recordings this year and want to have something in place before the 60s stuff starts becoming PD which will devastate their back catalogue sales (tough, they knew the copyright period when they got into this business). Yet nobody seems to understand the point that to do this is a massive government sanctioned transfer of wealth from the public to the record companies.
Well the dialogue and story aren't aimed at anyone above the age of 12... (and the gore seems to mostly peter out after the first couple of levels - or maybe I've just become desensitised). Surpisingly fun tactical shooter though.
Have you been to Britain in a while? Illegal to read out a list of war dead in central London, 86 year olds who mildly heckle the foreign secretary get detained under the prevention of terrorism act (after being assaulted by the night club bouncers with criminal records hired by the labour party to patrol the speech), a leader of the opposition who wants his party to sit with the anti-semitic Eastern European right wing parties in the EU parliament just to prove his euro sceptic credentials, an absolutely slavish belief that's impossible for the police to ever make a mistake and this is just the start...
We have the final abolition of the presumption of innocence coming in the New Year. At least I have enough cash to move out when things get really bad.
That used to happen to me all the time in many of the shops in Tottenham Court Road in London. It also became clear to me that many of the shops must either be owned by the same people or, at least, be affiliated as, on several occassions, I'd spend the morning comparison shopping for a bit of kit in the independant stores, find the cheapest store, ask them for it and have to wait 10 minutes while the salesman sent someone to pick it up from one of the other stores I'd been in. Had to be on your toes as well, there were plenty of times they brought back the model down from the one you were trying to get (and attempting to exchange a water damaged (it appeared) VCR was all sorts of fun... should've wondered why it was half price I guess... )
Note: A lot of those type of shops have gone now with the redevelopment of TCR in the last 10 years, with their leases being bought out by the chains and big computer seller's. A pity really, while you had to be very careful dealing with them these old electronic shops had everything you could want.
I think there's also a tribal element to it as well with the platform specific mags. They don't want to enrage off the fanboy section of their audience by "betraying" the platform by giving a much hyped game the score it deserves.
These days the only magazines whose reviews I'll trust are Edge and GamesTM. It's interesting, given the assumption that it's presure from advertisers that's mostly responsible for absurdly high review scores of certain games, that Edge is published by Future, the same company that publishes a number of other titles, including console specific ones which are well known for overrating certain hyped games (I won't give examples to avoid being flamed). My point is that both magazines are, presumably, subject to the same pressures to keep the advertisers happy via their publisher as both rely on the same set of advertisers. Yet Edge consistently produces well written, reasoned reviews while the console specific ones often produce fan boy pleasing puff pieces. Also magazines in areas outside of computer gaming do not have the reputation for soft reviewing that game mags have despite, in many cases, being published by the exact same companies (even film magazines, where one would have thought the marketing is at least as aggressive as in video games tend to be reasonably honest - example: Future's film magazine, Total Film, gave Catwoman one star notwithstanding that they got an exclusive 6 page Halle Berry photo spread and put her on the front cover of the same issue (they did go the "it's everybody's fault but her's" route in the review though)).
The other point to note, I think, is that the video game magazines which seem to have "soft review" policies continue to sell. Their audience clearly doesn't mind the review policy (I've often wondered if fan boys are more likely than average to pirate their games, making them less bothered when a title clearly does not live up to expectations), indeed they often seem to actively prefer it as shown by the email campaigns which tend to begin on those rare occassions when games do not get the scores the fan boys expect (does anybody know if magazines ever receive death threats over their review scores? Given the intensity of some of the letters you see disputing review scores I wouldn't be surprised but I've never heard of specific examples).
My point, then, given the foregoing is that the publishers of review magazines are capable of resisting advertiser pressure. I believe that the reason they often do not do so in the context of game review magazines is that their audience doesn't want it. The core readership of many of the console specific mags are not, I believe, looking for a magazine which gives objective and informative comment, rather they want magazines which will confirm their prejudices and give them ammunition to use against their PS2/Xbox/GC owning rivals.
Who is the audience for this patch?
Presumably Sony's lawyers who will have advised them that it will look a lot better for the purposes of the inevitable law suit if a fix has been made available.
That's how market research usually works as I understand it. It's normally pretty obvious to the research company what their client would like the results to be and phrase the questions accordingly (there was a wonderful example of this, in the context of political polling, in the old British satire Yes Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey lists the two different sets of polling questions you would ask to get the public to appear to support or be against the reintroduction of conscription).
Remember: market "research" is rarely initiated for the purpose of gathering hitherto unknown information about your market, it's to justify the decisions management have already made.
Similar to how when you step into an Embassy, you are considered to be on that nations land. (So if you step into the Russian Embassy, you are technically in Russia.)
That's a common misconception. An embassy is not foreign territory. The myth arises because an embassy does have diplomatic immunity which prevents the host country's laws being enforceable in the embassy and prohibits the host country's security services entering to investigate crimes (or for any other reason), although the immunity can be waived. This can seem like the same thing and the distinction is subtle and not important for most purposes. I'm only aware of it because I once had to research the question of whether an embassy is considered to be off-shore for tax purposes for a client who wanted to avoid stamp duty and managment and control issues by signing a load of documents in the French embassy in London and claiming the closing took place on French soil. Unfortunately it doesn't work (although I did get two nights at a rather nice Parisian hotel as a result).
That sort of defence might work for, say, a magazine cover disc that inadvertantly included a virus but not here. The inclusion of this software will have been a big thing for Sony. They will have paid to license the code from F4I and deliberately included it in their products. For them to say they didn't know what it did or that it didn't work as believed it did is no more of a defence than it would be for a car manufacturer to claim it isn't liable for it's vehicles catching fire because this is caused by a faulty fuel pump made by somebody else. Sony may be entitled to an indemnity from F4I (although when a company has shown themselves to be this incompetent I wouldn't be at all surprised if Sony forgot to demand this...) but that's a different matter (and probably worthless given the size of the mess).
Where damage has been done it's been caused by a Sony product. Therefore Sony are liable. The fact they don't seem to have bothered with any sort of due dilligence on the software they were licensing which caused the damage is no defence.
More than that, the whole sorry fiasco shows a disturbing lack of control and accountability at Sony Music. The more I read about it the more I wonder how the decision to actually implement this software was made. Did any of Sony's own software engineers examine the code? Were marketting and customer service fully briefed on how to deal with enquiries and complaints arising from it? Was it run past legal for a proper risk assessment?
In short, did anybody at Sony actually understand what this software did and were they ever interested in finding out? Or did they just accept the the First4Internet's word for it and get an indemnity in the contract (ignoring, of course, the fact that there's no way First4Internet will have the resources to compensate Sony for all this mess).
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Hi-Fi Choice in the UK used to do (or claim they did) blind testing for whatever super test they were running that month and would describe the methodology. Then Future bought them, budgets were cut and they became just like What Hi-Fi.
Heh. All fair points (and you don't even mention the front pages which attempt to promote outrage rather than report the news - Daily Mail tactics applied to a "progressive" agenda) but Toynbee annoyed me so much I decided I didn't want to be contributing to her salary any more, and I need something to read on the Tube...
I do. Gave up on the Guardian following the last election when Polly Toynbee's pro-Blair puff pieces actually started to get offensive (her assertion that anybody who takes the War and the handling of the occupation into account when making their voting decision is 'decadent' and her sudden conversion to PR (which, I suspect, she's never mentioned again) did it for me.)
Hardly, they'll just enforce the fines through the courts in the member states in exactly the same way any other governmental regulatory authority would. There are various directly effective EU regulations (and national laws made in relation to EU directives) which provide for this.
Well the government doesn't seem so bothered about it that they've revised the laws, or disciplined the bouncers (who, incidentally Blair lied about claiming they were labour councillors when they'd been hired from outside agencies and some had criminal records), or the police involved. They just say what they need to say at the time and wait for people to get bored and focus on something else. I think it's the doublespeak which annoys me most of all.
As reported by The Onion... http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43029
And then when copyright periods are about to expire you just pay the government to extend. Tthe British record industry is currently lobbying heavily to extend copyright on recordings from 50 to 75 years - they started losing early Elvis recordings this year and want to have something in place before the 60s stuff starts becoming PD which will devastate their back catalogue sales (tough, they knew the copyright period when they got into this business). Yet nobody seems to understand the point that to do this is a massive government sanctioned transfer of wealth from the public to the record companies.
Well the dialogue and story aren't aimed at anyone above the age of 12... (and the gore seems to mostly peter out after the first couple of levels - or maybe I've just become desensitised). Surpisingly fun tactical shooter though.
We have the final abolition of the presumption of innocence coming in the New Year. At least I have enough cash to move out when things get really bad.
Note: A lot of those type of shops have gone now with the redevelopment of TCR in the last 10 years, with their leases being bought out by the chains and big computer seller's. A pity really, while you had to be very careful dealing with them these old electronic shops had everything you could want.
I think there's also a tribal element to it as well with the platform specific mags. They don't want to enrage off the fanboy section of their audience by "betraying" the platform by giving a much hyped game the score it deserves. These days the only magazines whose reviews I'll trust are Edge and GamesTM. It's interesting, given the assumption that it's presure from advertisers that's mostly responsible for absurdly high review scores of certain games, that Edge is published by Future, the same company that publishes a number of other titles, including console specific ones which are well known for overrating certain hyped games (I won't give examples to avoid being flamed). My point is that both magazines are, presumably, subject to the same pressures to keep the advertisers happy via their publisher as both rely on the same set of advertisers. Yet Edge consistently produces well written, reasoned reviews while the console specific ones often produce fan boy pleasing puff pieces. Also magazines in areas outside of computer gaming do not have the reputation for soft reviewing that game mags have despite, in many cases, being published by the exact same companies (even film magazines, where one would have thought the marketing is at least as aggressive as in video games tend to be reasonably honest - example: Future's film magazine, Total Film, gave Catwoman one star notwithstanding that they got an exclusive 6 page Halle Berry photo spread and put her on the front cover of the same issue (they did go the "it's everybody's fault but her's" route in the review though)). The other point to note, I think, is that the video game magazines which seem to have "soft review" policies continue to sell. Their audience clearly doesn't mind the review policy (I've often wondered if fan boys are more likely than average to pirate their games, making them less bothered when a title clearly does not live up to expectations), indeed they often seem to actively prefer it as shown by the email campaigns which tend to begin on those rare occassions when games do not get the scores the fan boys expect (does anybody know if magazines ever receive death threats over their review scores? Given the intensity of some of the letters you see disputing review scores I wouldn't be surprised but I've never heard of specific examples). My point, then, given the foregoing is that the publishers of review magazines are capable of resisting advertiser pressure. I believe that the reason they often do not do so in the context of game review magazines is that their audience doesn't want it. The core readership of many of the console specific mags are not, I believe, looking for a magazine which gives objective and informative comment, rather they want magazines which will confirm their prejudices and give them ammunition to use against their PS2/Xbox/GC owning rivals.
Who is the audience for this patch? Presumably Sony's lawyers who will have advised them that it will look a lot better for the purposes of the inevitable law suit if a fix has been made available.
Sony were taken to court by Camden and Manchester councils in the UK last year to get anti-social behaviour orders (ASBOs) against Sony Music and certain of it's executives in relation to fly posting. http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/121/12109 3_music_company_spared_asbo_over_flyposting_pledge .html
That's how market research usually works as I understand it. It's normally pretty obvious to the research company what their client would like the results to be and phrase the questions accordingly (there was a wonderful example of this, in the context of political polling, in the old British satire Yes Prime Minister where Sir Humphrey lists the two different sets of polling questions you would ask to get the public to appear to support or be against the reintroduction of conscription). Remember: market "research" is rarely initiated for the purpose of gathering hitherto unknown information about your market, it's to justify the decisions management have already made.
Similar to how when you step into an Embassy, you are considered to be on that nations land. (So if you step into the Russian Embassy, you are technically in Russia.) That's a common misconception. An embassy is not foreign territory. The myth arises because an embassy does have diplomatic immunity which prevents the host country's laws being enforceable in the embassy and prohibits the host country's security services entering to investigate crimes (or for any other reason), although the immunity can be waived. This can seem like the same thing and the distinction is subtle and not important for most purposes. I'm only aware of it because I once had to research the question of whether an embassy is considered to be off-shore for tax purposes for a client who wanted to avoid stamp duty and managment and control issues by signing a load of documents in the French embassy in London and claiming the closing took place on French soil. Unfortunately it doesn't work (although I did get two nights at a rather nice Parisian hotel as a result).
That sort of defence might work for, say, a magazine cover disc that inadvertantly included a virus but not here. The inclusion of this software will have been a big thing for Sony. They will have paid to license the code from F4I and deliberately included it in their products. For them to say they didn't know what it did or that it didn't work as believed it did is no more of a defence than it would be for a car manufacturer to claim it isn't liable for it's vehicles catching fire because this is caused by a faulty fuel pump made by somebody else. Sony may be entitled to an indemnity from F4I (although when a company has shown themselves to be this incompetent I wouldn't be at all surprised if Sony forgot to demand this...) but that's a different matter (and probably worthless given the size of the mess). Where damage has been done it's been caused by a Sony product. Therefore Sony are liable. The fact they don't seem to have bothered with any sort of due dilligence on the software they were licensing which caused the damage is no defence.
More than that, the whole sorry fiasco shows a disturbing lack of control and accountability at Sony Music. The more I read about it the more I wonder how the decision to actually implement this software was made. Did any of Sony's own software engineers examine the code? Were marketting and customer service fully briefed on how to deal with enquiries and complaints arising from it? Was it run past legal for a proper risk assessment? In short, did anybody at Sony actually understand what this software did and were they ever interested in finding out? Or did they just accept the the First4Internet's word for it and get an indemnity in the contract (ignoring, of course, the fact that there's no way First4Internet will have the resources to compensate Sony for all this mess).