I also note that you trickily exclude unions from being a factor in your market, when in fact they are definitely a part of the market.
No, I didn't. Just as I didn't exclude the possibility of bait and switch asshats at the grocery store. My point was, however, that they demand recompense not justified by their added value, else they would just switch jobs rather than strike. Your next statement shows an unconventional understanding of the issue from a union supporter:
If an employer doesn't want to hire people who like to form alliances with other people competing for the same job, then I say that the employer should not hire union people.
I agree. So, an employer should be allowed to fire all striking workers and hire scabs. The problem though, is that
NO UNION HAS EVER PERMITTED THIS
They will refuse to leave or otherwise prevent the scabs from working, or invoke a law that forces them to deal with that particular employer. Why do you think they deal with them in the first place?
If there were any "union" that tried to get its demands met *merely* by threatening e.g., not to show up, to work elsewhere, i.e., dissociate rather than force terms on him, that union would be the exact opposite of every union that has actually existed under that name. Why call it a union?
So, it turns out you actually agree with the "cheap labor conservative" position.
Great! Now I can the question every pro-union poster dodges!
Consider the following scenario: you shop at various grocery stores. One of them has a habit of jacking up their prices right as you're checking out in an attempt to milk more money out of you. (Assume this is legal, and they give you the option to walk out entirely without buying anything.) Is this going to make you want to shop there? No, it won't. It may ensare you a few times, but long term it will just make people avoid that store. Now, people may still shop there, but only if it offers much lower prices to begin with so that the final price people expect to pay, *anticipating* the jacking-up of the price, will be competitive.
This is analagous to an investor purchasing labor. If a union randomly strikes and demands above-market compensation (which it would be, otherwise they'd just switch jobs), is that going to help wages long term? No, it won't: like with the grocery store, it will make them systematically discount the expected value of the labor (due to losses from slowdowns), bidding down wages, just as you systematically discounted the value of the goods at the asshat grocery store, bidding down their prices.
In light of this explanation, on what basis can you claim unions achieve, over the long term, better compensation for workers? See if you can answer without changing the topic.
Well, to be precise, no country does any part of what I described. Singapore has the quickest, most consistent execution policy of any nation, and even there it's like a year before you're executed (like with the case of the Vietnamese youth who was executed last year, forgot his name). They don't have summary executions for drugs when they find them on you. And wanting drugs so bad as to die for them pre-supposes someone supplied your first dose.
I'm not defending their policies. I'm not saying I support the harsh measures I listed. I'm just saying that they aren't examples of places that have put the full weight of the state behind drug enforcement like I described.
Yep, and enrich the prison guard unions, like how the California prison guards' union lobbied for the Three Strikes Law to give them more job security.
You were aware that ever-so-noble unions were in on this, right?
Summary execution of anyone in possession of drugs. Anyone tries to push? They're dead. Find a drug house? Bomb it. Even if there are hostages. Anti-aircraft fire? Napalm the block. Wall the borders and interdict all air traffic from nations that are sources of drugs. X-ray the bodies of all entrants. Etc.
The reason no one wants that is that the cure is worse than the disease.
Your on-screen saber behaves like a real sword would, e.g. it remains where it would remain if you had hit something hard. As soon as you move your controller into a position which would be physically possible again, the on-screen saber snaps to that position.
Good point. That's a less finicky version of my 1).
I throw a ball, you have to catch it. Who's job is the easier one?
I don't think that's analagous. The spammers are more like trying to hit me with a ball, and I'm trying to avoid it. Normally, defending is easier than attacking. The spammers are the attackers. What gives.
It seems to me that, and please prove me wrong, that whatever technique legitimate researchers come up with to stop spam, is quickly outsmarted by independent teams of illegal spammers. Do the spammers have an easier job, or are they just smarter?
Well, since you asked, the reasons why I didn't go as follows and begin now:
1) I've already terrible'd every email account I check regularly, and some I haven't.
2) The last time I was down to terrible -- with this account -- I was modded something like 12 times up and 6 times down. Unfortunately, all the downs were on my home computer (the only one from which I can register), and it got its IP temporarily banned, forcing me to work with it for the time being. I explained my upmoddings to an admin, but it went right over his head.
3) I get a feeling of accomplishment out of bringing an account from terrible back up to neutral (and today, positive).
4) I get a feeling of accomplishment out of how many times my status cycles -- NOT because I'm trying to troll people, but because some get really sensitive about certain issues.
5) The effort of bringing an account back from terrible will show my sincerity against people who want to call me a troll.
By the way, a piece of advice: never, EVER diss Linux on Slashdot. ESPECIALLY if it's true. Your posts WILL be pummled to the point where you can post two responses in your defense every day.
well, combining those that others have suggested with some things I can think of, here are some (note that they aren't necessarily realistic but still have significant immersive effect)"
1) When you hit, your saber on screen fades, and is powerless until you pull it back through the point where you hit, effectively training you to act like you connected.
2) When you hit, the enemy doesn't move, but rather, you "push yourself back", and the camera moves back to your new position.
3) When you hit, the *enemy* is knocked back.
4) (hopefully not) There are no foes with sabers, so your saber just goes through everything.
And note to people who mention the vibration: it's great if the Wii vibrates when you connect, but the focus is here is on how to handle your living-room wiimote physically going through a point it should not be able to go through, *not* that you need to be informed you are going through another saber, although that does help.
Maybe someone can find the old thread where this was discussed?
For example, how are they going to handle the hitting-air-when-lightsaber-hits-lightsaber problem? I know there are a number of ways to resolve it, I just want to know which one they're going with.
Re:Flash as an application development platform
on
The Future of Flash
·
· Score: 1
Stupid question: Isn't there some program, perhaps open source, that allows you to store a video of what's going on (graphically) in some pre-defined portion of your desktop, effectively allowing you to "record" a video appearing on your screen? I figured such a program would be easy to write in that it's just screenshotting and forming a set portion of each into a video. Then, to store the sound, you can record it into a microphone (at least).
Yes, I did. However, if you were to actually read my post, you would see that my caveat was to discourage people from debating the semantics of whether piracy "is" shoplifting, but rather focus on more substantive issues, such as their moral, legal, and economic similarities.
How about and industry that allows us to return a game we don't like?
How about allowing the software to be such that returning it means you really can't play it anymore?
How about the fact that whole scale piracy has been giong on in china for years, and there is still a thriving game industry?
Really? With Chinese-written games? With good, novel, innovative games? Could you explain their revenue model to me please? That of the Chinese developers, that is? No on here has disputed that ones the software makes it into a place where piracy is legal, people will distribute it efficiently.
How about the loss of sales by making a game exclusive to a console?
Gee, thanks for letting them know you can get more sales by developing for more systems. I'm sure they *never* thought of that. Maybe you can also tell them about the additional cost!
How about the fact that console games get pirated as well?
How about the fact that it happens far less often?
How about the fact that the American dollar is sinking, and the American economy is in the pits?
It's been like it is now for a while, so you can't pin this trend within it on that.
No, lets not consider all the data, lest just jump on a bandwagon and blame piracy for all are woes, even though there is no facts behind it.
I didn't say that, just that he couldn't blame piracy on devs making bad games. But yes, the fact that people will not actually, you know, give you money for making the game will have a significant effect.
That's true, and I should have been more specific. What I was getting at was: While they would have to enforce some claims to intellectual property in order to get people to use only their servers or ones they'd license (and thereby make their profit), it's a signficantly greater hurdle for pirates than simply downloading and cracking the game. First of all, most initial adopters of the game will go to the official servers since it's the only one. That creates the network effect: more people, better gaming environment, might as well get the subscription. Then, since pirate servers would make more noise, and be repeatedly shut down, that provides additional incentive to pay. If your entire character will be wiped out randomly (typically taking 6 months), what's the poitn of the investment in a character on that server?
Long story short, that model *does* involve copyright, just far less intrusively and less reliant on copy-protection and with more built-in incentives to pay for a real subscription.
Well, yes, I hope I'm on the right philosophical track, which is why I don't see why you felt the need to remind me of the basics of intellectual works (positive value, high fixed cost, zero or negligible marginal cost). However, you then went on to make some errors:
The idea that an artist (or, worse yet, a distributor) is entitled to payment for anything is a serious economic faux pas
Where to begin.
First, the concept of "entitlement" is a moral one, not economic, so it can't be an "economic faux pas".
Second, you seem to be claiming the the distributor adds no value, which is false because someone has to inform people of the existence of the intellectual work and bring it within easy grasp, but is doubly false because until the artist, he *can* easily withhold the service of providing marginal units.
Third, if you are referring to the question of who adds value as the basis of entitlement, the artist certainly does, to the extent that people reveal through action that they are willing to spend their own money for access to something that would not exist save for his creative act.
Fourth, the economics on which you based that are in error:
If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.
This is totally false. It most certainly does matter how many people experience it without paying. The artist makes his decision what to produce based on what he expects to get for it (plus whatever non-monetary good he sees in doing so, but we'll stick with the case of for-profit production). If e.g. 2 of a million people will respect his copyright on option A and want him to produce A, while 3 of 3 people will respect his copyright on option B and want him to produce B, and he expects this, he will do B. The non-payment skewed his incentives to perform an activity not justified by the demands of the consuming public. It's true that after-the-fact non-payers *can* have no influence -- if they decide they like it long after production, when time discount had obliterated the value of whatever they could have given the artist, and thus could not have affected his incentives, then they would have no influence. But in the general case, they certainly can matter.
it is impossible to steal a service,
False. You promise to pay, you get the service, you don't pay. That is theft in all sigificant respects. (It's not what's happening here, but I'm showing your general statement to be false.)
With the rest of your post, I don't see your point: you labor to make what appears to be a semantic distinction to show how accessing an intellectual work "isn't theft" despite how I said such a distinction bypasses more substantive issues.
Well, I can't quite buy that. I hate to risk my karma after FINALLY restoring it to neutral, but I'm going to say it anyway. People don't pirate games for because the games suck. They pirate them because they're good. Whatever the reason for piracy, it isn't bad games. And frankly the whole, "make good games and I'll deign to pay you" strikes me as being a version of "I'm not stealing because it's their fault they made me want it and charge so much for it!" that you hear out of young shoplifters. Note: I did not just say that piracy is theft, spare me the lecture on semantics so we can get to more substantive issues.
Does anyone know how game devs can recover their costs and make a profit (on good games) without copyright and serious enforcement of it? No, charity generally doesn't work. Subscription models are a great way of doing it, esp if they give the game away, so I don't see why it's so condemned here. I don't think you can deny that one reason devs are shifting to consoles is because it's harder to pirate there.
I think what reviewers say going in is that, "okay, 5 is average, if you get above 5, hey, you're doing something right." But then they hand out 6's and 7's and the companies are like "OMG!!!! totally unfair!!! That's a failing grade! And it's a good game!" (I think this actually came up in Electronic Gaming Monthly about 10+ years ago when they wanted to defend giving a game a 7 on just that basis - it *was* above average, but that's not "good enough" a reason to leave it at 7. Maybe the game was Super Empire Strikes Back.)
To answer your question, you *should* see a 1-10 bell curve peaking at 5. But they won't use a genuine 1-10 scale because people will read it like an (American) grading scale, where 6 (of 10) is failing. So what you should expect in reality is some sort of bizarre pseudo-logarithmic asymetric scale: "normal" is 6 or 7, and you have to get disproportionally better or suckier to get to 8 or 9 or to 4 or 3.
Like with grade inflation, no one is really served by that. But it doesn't help that there are no objective, well-defined units for an inherently subjective experience. What exactly does it mean that a game is "twice as good" as another? Or that a game is "one point" better.
Um, I thought my mind was pretty made-up. Whatever good grub is, it shouldn't be STRONGLY RECOMMENDED during the install, and I should be warned that there is a significant (and unnecessary) risk of me being locked out of all OS's should I chose to use it. I should be informed that it's possible to boot the Ubuntu OS by choosing the install CD as the boot drive at startup. I should be informed of how to change or reverse it if it fails. Oh, and as a bonus, the error message shouln't be a complete lie.
Of course, that's would involve applying basic software design principles that anyone could have thought to do if they were thinking of user friendliness, which means it *definitely* wouldn't show up on any open source project.
Ignoring the FUD you are furiously wafting towards GRUB...
Uh huh... RIGHT. Because I have *so much* to gain from ridiculing an effective OSS bootloader. I will be wealthy beyong measure if only I could stop people from using GRUB! Because I'm selling my alternative of:
???
Because I programmed for the alternate OSS bootloader:
???
Because I know the name of alternate bootloader of any type:
???
No, I want it to work. I don't care what bootloader I use. I installed that STRONGLY RECOMMENDED bootloader only to get "error 25", a hard drive read error on a hard drive that works perfectly fine in Windows.
Occam's Razor says GRUB genuinely failed on me.
No. The default installation CD for the latest Ubuntu releases *is* the live CD;
OH!!! I understand now! I shouldn't expect Ubuntu to meet minimal standards of software design (i.e., that it tell you everything you need to install and diagnose install errors) if I'm an *early* adopter, like ALLLL the way back in Ubuntu's pre-historical days of Feb 2006.
and even if you only have the 'real' install CD, you can still boot off it, mount your root filesystem and do whatever you need to do to get it booting again.
Hm, I don't know, when Ubuntu locked me out of both OS's, and I had to drive to my brother's to get it re-installed, he seemed to think he needed the Live CD (which by the way, you kinda can't download and burn when you're locked out of both OS's). I guess Ubuntu is intended for experts.
And then of course, the bright, bushy-tailed Ubuntu forum was a TREMENDOUS help:
"Hi, I tried to install, GRUB failed, I got error message X, I tried solutions A, B, and C."
"Obviously, you need to do A." "Obviously, you need to do B." "Obviously, you need to do C."
"Did you not read my post? I did A, B, and C already."
"Well, you need to do D, E, or F, all of which are impossible if I had bothered to read your message." "Here, try G."
"Okay, I tried G. It failed. Here's what happened."
*never hear from suggester of G again* "Oh, I can help you, just tell me your version of Windows?"
"Um, if I can't even get past the bootloader, how is that the problem?"
"Fine, be that way. I just won't help you."
Maybe if Ubuntu's programmers spent more time thinking about software design rather than cutesy names for the latest hobbled together version, I wouldn't have had that problem.
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One trick I know is that you can avoid spamming people.
I also note that you trickily exclude unions from being a factor in your market, when in fact they are definitely a part of the market.
No, I didn't. Just as I didn't exclude the possibility of bait and switch asshats at the grocery store. My point was, however, that they demand recompense not justified by their added value, else they would just switch jobs rather than strike. Your next statement shows an unconventional understanding of the issue from a union supporter:
If an employer doesn't want to hire people who like to form alliances with other people competing for the same job, then I say that the employer should not hire union people.
I agree. So, an employer should be allowed to fire all striking workers and hire scabs. The problem though, is that
NO UNION HAS EVER PERMITTED THIS
They will refuse to leave or otherwise prevent the scabs from working, or invoke a law that forces them to deal with that particular employer. Why do you think they deal with them in the first place?
If there were any "union" that tried to get its demands met *merely* by threatening e.g., not to show up, to work elsewhere, i.e., dissociate rather than force terms on him, that union would be the exact opposite of every union that has actually existed under that name. Why call it a union?
So, it turns out you actually agree with the "cheap labor conservative" position.
How is this different from "Windows 95 = Mac '86"?
Great! Now I can the question every pro-union poster dodges!
Consider the following scenario: you shop at various grocery stores. One of them has a habit of jacking up their prices right as you're checking out in an attempt to milk more money out of you. (Assume this is legal, and they give you the option to walk out entirely without buying anything.) Is this going to make you want to shop there? No, it won't. It may ensare you a few times, but long term it will just make people avoid that store. Now, people may still shop there, but only if it offers much lower prices to begin with so that the final price people expect to pay, *anticipating* the jacking-up of the price, will be competitive.
This is analagous to an investor purchasing labor. If a union randomly strikes and demands above-market compensation (which it would be, otherwise they'd just switch jobs), is that going to help wages long term? No, it won't: like with the grocery store, it will make them systematically discount the expected value of the labor (due to losses from slowdowns), bidding down wages, just as you systematically discounted the value of the goods at the asshat grocery store, bidding down their prices.
In light of this explanation, on what basis can you claim unions achieve, over the long term, better compensation for workers? See if you can answer without changing the topic.
who said unions were noble?
/.ers who post here whenever the topic comes up, and most of the ones who get modded to five.
Half the
Well, to be precise, no country does any part of what I described. Singapore has the quickest, most consistent execution policy of any nation, and even there it's like a year before you're executed (like with the case of the Vietnamese youth who was executed last year, forgot his name). They don't have summary executions for drugs when they find them on you. And wanting drugs so bad as to die for them pre-supposes someone supplied your first dose.
I'm not defending their policies. I'm not saying I support the harsh measures I listed. I'm just saying that they aren't examples of places that have put the full weight of the state behind drug enforcement like I described.
Yep, and enrich the prison guard unions, like how the California prison guards' union lobbied for the Three Strikes Law to give them more job security.
You were aware that ever-so-noble unions were in on this, right?
Summary execution of anyone in possession of drugs. Anyone tries to push? They're dead. Find a drug house? Bomb it. Even if there are hostages. Anti-aircraft fire? Napalm the block. Wall the borders and interdict all air traffic from nations that are sources of drugs. X-ray the bodies of all entrants. Etc.
The reason no one wants that is that the cure is worse than the disease.
Your on-screen saber behaves like a real sword would, e.g. it remains where it would remain if you had hit something hard. As soon as you move your controller into a position which would be physically possible again, the on-screen saber snaps to that position.
Good point. That's a less finicky version of my 1).
Minimum flair items: 16
You currently have: 16
?You are member of subset "Always Do Minimum"? (Y/N)
Alright, alright, serious response:
I throw a ball, you have to catch it. Who's job is the easier one?
I don't think that's analagous. The spammers are more like trying to hit me with a ball, and I'm trying to avoid it. Normally, defending is easier than attacking. The spammers are the attackers. What gives.
I throw a ball, you have to catch it. Who's job is the easier one?
Aha! Trick question! You're an AC! You have no balls!
It seems to me that, and please prove me wrong, that whatever technique legitimate researchers come up with to stop spam, is quickly outsmarted by independent teams of illegal spammers. Do the spammers have an easier job, or are they just smarter?
No, but there's a troll moderation. Ah, I see the two of you have already been introduced!
Well, since you asked, the reasons why I didn't go as follows and begin now:
1) I've already terrible'd every email account I check regularly, and some I haven't.
2) The last time I was down to terrible -- with this account -- I was modded something like 12 times up and 6 times down. Unfortunately, all the downs were on my home computer (the only one from which I can register), and it got its IP temporarily banned, forcing me to work with it for the time being. I explained my upmoddings to an admin, but it went right over his head.
3) I get a feeling of accomplishment out of bringing an account from terrible back up to neutral (and today, positive).
4) I get a feeling of accomplishment out of how many times my status cycles -- NOT because I'm trying to troll people, but because some get really sensitive about certain issues.
5) The effort of bringing an account back from terrible will show my sincerity against people who want to call me a troll.
By the way, a piece of advice: never, EVER diss Linux on Slashdot. ESPECIALLY if it's true. Your posts WILL be pummled to the point where you can post two responses in your defense every day.
What ways are those?
well, combining those that others have suggested with some things I can think of, here are some (note that they aren't necessarily realistic but still have significant immersive effect)"
1) When you hit, your saber on screen fades, and is powerless until you pull it back through the point where you hit, effectively training you to act like you connected.
2) When you hit, the enemy doesn't move, but rather, you "push yourself back", and the camera moves back to your new position.
3) When you hit, the *enemy* is knocked back.
4) (hopefully not) There are no foes with sabers, so your saber just goes through everything.
And note to people who mention the vibration: it's great if the Wii vibrates when you connect, but the focus is here is on how to handle your living-room wiimote physically going through a point it should not be able to go through, *not* that you need to be informed you are going through another saber, although that does help.
Maybe someone can find the old thread where this was discussed?
I just want to know about the Wiisaber. :-(
For example, how are they going to handle the hitting-air-when-lightsaber-hits-lightsaber problem? I know there are a number of ways to resolve it, I just want to know which one they're going with.
Stupid question: Isn't there some program, perhaps open source, that allows you to store a video of what's going on (graphically) in some pre-defined portion of your desktop, effectively allowing you to "record" a video appearing on your screen? I figured such a program would be easy to write in that it's just screenshotting and forming a set portion of each into a video. Then, to store the sound, you can record it into a microphone (at least).
Surely someone's done this?
First off, you DID relate shoplifting to piracy.
Yes, I did. However, if you were to actually read my post, you would see that my caveat was to discourage people from debating the semantics of whether piracy "is" shoplifting, but rather focus on more substantive issues, such as their moral, legal, and economic similarities.
How about and industry that allows us to return a game we don't like?
How about allowing the software to be such that returning it means you really can't play it anymore?
How about the fact that whole scale piracy has been giong on in china for years, and there is still a thriving game industry?
Really? With Chinese-written games? With good, novel, innovative games? Could you explain their revenue model to me please? That of the Chinese developers, that is? No on here has disputed that ones the software makes it into a place where piracy is legal, people will distribute it efficiently.
How about the loss of sales by making a game exclusive to a console?
Gee, thanks for letting them know you can get more sales by developing for more systems. I'm sure they *never* thought of that. Maybe you can also tell them about the additional cost!
How about the fact that console games get pirated as well?
How about the fact that it happens far less often?
How about the fact that the American dollar is sinking, and the American economy is in the pits?
It's been like it is now for a while, so you can't pin this trend within it on that.
No, lets not consider all the data, lest just jump on a bandwagon and blame piracy for all are woes, even though there is no facts behind it.
I didn't say that, just that he couldn't blame piracy on devs making bad games. But yes, the fact that people will not actually, you know, give you money for making the game will have a significant effect.
That's true, and I should have been more specific. What I was getting at was: While they would have to enforce some claims to intellectual property in order to get people to use only their servers or ones they'd license (and thereby make their profit), it's a signficantly greater hurdle for pirates than simply downloading and cracking the game. First of all, most initial adopters of the game will go to the official servers since it's the only one. That creates the network effect: more people, better gaming environment, might as well get the subscription. Then, since pirate servers would make more noise, and be repeatedly shut down, that provides additional incentive to pay. If your entire character will be wiped out randomly (typically taking 6 months), what's the poitn of the investment in a character on that server?
Long story short, that model *does* involve copyright, just far less intrusively and less reliant on copy-protection and with more built-in incentives to pay for a real subscription.
Well, yes, I hope I'm on the right philosophical track, which is why I don't see why you felt the need to remind me of the basics of intellectual works (positive value, high fixed cost, zero or negligible marginal cost). However, you then went on to make some errors:
The idea that an artist (or, worse yet, a distributor) is entitled to payment for anything is a serious economic faux pas
Where to begin.
First, the concept of "entitlement" is a moral one, not economic, so it can't be an "economic faux pas".
Second, you seem to be claiming the the distributor adds no value, which is false because someone has to inform people of the existence of the intellectual work and bring it within easy grasp, but is doubly false because until the artist, he *can* easily withhold the service of providing marginal units.
Third, if you are referring to the question of who adds value as the basis of entitlement, the artist certainly does, to the extent that people reveal through action that they are willing to spend their own money for access to something that would not exist save for his creative act.
Fourth, the economics on which you based that are in error:
If enough people pay an artist or programmer for producing something so that the artist or programmer keeps producing, it does not matter how many people experience the work of art without paying the artist because the work is already produced and the use of the work does not deprive anyone of anything.
This is totally false. It most certainly does matter how many people experience it without paying. The artist makes his decision what to produce based on what he expects to get for it (plus whatever non-monetary good he sees in doing so, but we'll stick with the case of for-profit production). If e.g. 2 of a million people will respect his copyright on option A and want him to produce A, while 3 of 3 people will respect his copyright on option B and want him to produce B, and he expects this, he will do B. The non-payment skewed his incentives to perform an activity not justified by the demands of the consuming public. It's true that after-the-fact non-payers *can* have no influence -- if they decide they like it long after production, when time discount had obliterated the value of whatever they could have given the artist, and thus could not have affected his incentives, then they would have no influence. But in the general case, they certainly can matter.
it is impossible to steal a service,
False. You promise to pay, you get the service, you don't pay. That is theft in all sigificant respects. (It's not what's happening here, but I'm showing your general statement to be false.)
With the rest of your post, I don't see your point: you labor to make what appears to be a semantic distinction to show how accessing an intellectual work "isn't theft" despite how I said such a distinction bypasses more substantive issues.
Yes, you were rambling.
Well, I can't quite buy that. I hate to risk my karma after FINALLY restoring it to neutral, but I'm going to say it anyway. People don't pirate games for because the games suck. They pirate them because they're good. Whatever the reason for piracy, it isn't bad games. And frankly the whole, "make good games and I'll deign to pay you" strikes me as being a version of "I'm not stealing because it's their fault they made me want it and charge so much for it!" that you hear out of young shoplifters. Note: I did not just say that piracy is theft, spare me the lecture on semantics so we can get to more substantive issues.
Does anyone know how game devs can recover their costs and make a profit (on good games) without copyright and serious enforcement of it? No, charity generally doesn't work. Subscription models are a great way of doing it, esp if they give the game away, so I don't see why it's so condemned here. I don't think you can deny that one reason devs are shifting to consoles is because it's harder to pirate there.
I think what reviewers say going in is that, "okay, 5 is average, if you get above 5, hey, you're doing something right." But then they hand out 6's and 7's and the companies are like "OMG!!!! totally unfair!!! That's a failing grade! And it's a good game!" (I think this actually came up in Electronic Gaming Monthly about 10+ years ago when they wanted to defend giving a game a 7 on just that basis - it *was* above average, but that's not "good enough" a reason to leave it at 7. Maybe the game was Super Empire Strikes Back.)
To answer your question, you *should* see a 1-10 bell curve peaking at 5. But they won't use a genuine 1-10 scale because people will read it like an (American) grading scale, where 6 (of 10) is failing. So what you should expect in reality is some sort of bizarre pseudo-logarithmic asymetric scale: "normal" is 6 or 7, and you have to get disproportionally better or suckier to get to 8 or 9 or to 4 or 3.
Like with grade inflation, no one is really served by that. But it doesn't help that there are no objective, well-defined units for an inherently subjective experience. What exactly does it mean that a game is "twice as good" as another? Or that a game is "one point" better.
Um, I thought my mind was pretty made-up. Whatever good grub is, it shouldn't be STRONGLY RECOMMENDED during the install, and I should be warned that there is a significant (and unnecessary) risk of me being locked out of all OS's should I chose to use it. I should be informed that it's possible to boot the Ubuntu OS by choosing the install CD as the boot drive at startup. I should be informed of how to change or reverse it if it fails. Oh, and as a bonus, the error message shouln't be a complete lie.
Of course, that's would involve applying basic software design principles that anyone could have thought to do if they were thinking of user friendliness, which means it *definitely* wouldn't show up on any open source project.
Ignoring the FUD you are furiously wafting towards GRUB...
Uh huh... RIGHT. Because I have *so much* to gain from ridiculing an effective OSS bootloader. I will be wealthy beyong measure if only I could stop people from using GRUB! Because I'm selling my alternative of:
???
Because I programmed for the alternate OSS bootloader:
???
Because I know the name of alternate bootloader of any type:
???
No, I want it to work. I don't care what bootloader I use. I installed that STRONGLY RECOMMENDED bootloader only to get "error 25", a hard drive read error on a hard drive that works perfectly fine in Windows.
Occam's Razor says GRUB genuinely failed on me.
No. The default installation CD for the latest Ubuntu releases *is* the live CD;
OH!!! I understand now! I shouldn't expect Ubuntu to meet minimal standards of software design (i.e., that it tell you everything you need to install and diagnose install errors) if I'm an *early* adopter, like ALLLL the way back in Ubuntu's pre-historical days of Feb 2006.
and even if you only have the 'real' install CD, you can still boot off it, mount your root filesystem and do whatever you need to do to get it booting again.
Hm, I don't know, when Ubuntu locked me out of both OS's, and I had to drive to my brother's to get it re-installed, he seemed to think he needed the Live CD (which by the way, you kinda can't download and burn when you're locked out of both OS's). I guess Ubuntu is intended for experts.
And then of course, the bright, bushy-tailed Ubuntu forum was a TREMENDOUS help:
"Hi, I tried to install, GRUB failed, I got error message X, I tried solutions A, B, and C."
"Obviously, you need to do A." "Obviously, you need to do B." "Obviously, you need to do C."
"Did you not read my post? I did A, B, and C already."
"Well, you need to do D, E, or F, all of which are impossible if I had bothered to read your message." "Here, try G."
"Okay, I tried G. It failed. Here's what happened."
*never hear from suggester of G again* "Oh, I can help you, just tell me your version of Windows?"
"Um, if I can't even get past the bootloader, how is that the problem?"
"Fine, be that way. I just won't help you."
Maybe if Ubuntu's programmers spent more time thinking about software design rather than cutesy names for the latest hobbled together version, I wouldn't have had that problem.