The issue of Web services has to be considered, he said. Some in the community are calling for a strong copyleft license with code that is used and changed to be returned to all. Others want the opposite.
"I do not believe that we will be reach consensus on this front, so I believe the license will have to accommodate options as to the question of Web services, but this must be squared with the ideological pursuit of freedom," he said.
This is *very* interesting. There is an enormous engine of online services that is running as a for-profit enterprise using GPL software. phpBB, OSCommerce, and more are provided commercially, quite possibly with modifications.
This means that in the new GPL, there will be a GNU-supported variant which requires a web service provider running a modified version of GPL software *as a web service* to release the source code to any changes they made. I'd love to hear major projects weigh in on their opinion. Would future phpBB/mysqladmin/OSC versions use this variant, or would they opt to allow non-released versions which ran only as web services to remain in the hands of the modifiers?
It will be interesting, too, because there may be disputes over what exactly is covered. For example, phpBB distributes a lot of *.php scripts, but they also have a slew of materials like SQL Schemas and.tpl (template) files. The.php scripts are clearly labelled as GPL licensed but no such label is attached to the.sql files or the.tpl files.
Morever, web services are very technically different because so many are written in interpreted languages. You can't modify Apache without compiling it. But with phpBB, you can open up a file, make a tweak, and it instantly takes effect on a live site. If you pre-install a GPL web service for your customer as a provider, how do you then make sure they're apprised of the license terms and don't inadvertantly commit themselves to a source code release because they edited some file in an application you installed for them?
I can say I'll certainly be watching this development with great interest.
Sonos is very, very cool looking, but even their discounted bundle is a fortune. $1200 for what amounts to a remote with a little LCD and 2 wireless combo receiver/amps? Ouch. Even if you can easily afford it, it's hard to justify. Then again, it is terribly convenient. Even if the functionality doesn't justify the price, maybe the ease of use does for some.
As the article pointed out, a generic spammer can't respond to a CAPTCHA that comes in an auto-responding email, because the sending addresses are invalid. Moreover, they're going to have to have a CAPTCHA for ever single email, because a good email interface should allow you to de-whitelist a successful CAPTCHA response. Even if a third world worker can spend an entire year decoding CAPTCHAs for $1000/year doing one every 8 seconds, they can still only decode 900,000 CAPTCHAs per year, and that has a cost of 1.1 cents per 10 CAPTCHAs. That would mean that emailing 40,000,000 people a piece of spam would cost $44,000. Suffice it to say, spammers do NOT make $.001 per spam sent; not even close.
Most adults also believe that diet aids sold on TV can really give you six-pack abs, that most rich people won the lottery, and that buying a certain perfume/cologne will get you hooked up with hotties of the opposite sex.
(1) I'm using a linux box, so I'll pass on the MAC. I'm not concerned about spyware and trojans even for my windows box, because I don't use ie, I have everything but the KSP (Kitchen Sink Protocol) filtered and so on. But I have no control over the DNS servers.
(2) I don't care about most people. I'm talking about how to stop phishers from stealing your data. If people don't want to go that far, fine... let them deal with the identity theft that follows. I'm more concerned with preventing attacks upon those who at least are aware of the danger and would like to prevent damage.
(3) That's funny. So you're taking on a higher risk (accessing your bank via non-trusted urls) activity so you can avoid a low-risk activity (storing a bookmark to a login page)? Especially when the bookmark is redundant to the history/cache?
The simply answer: for all places where you have sensitive information, bookmark an SSL-enabled url.
For example, instead of logging into your bank by typing in "www.mybank.com", bookmark their login info like:
https://www.mybank.com/login.bnk?gz=1
Or whatever.
When you visit the https url, even if a phisher has completely altered dns and hijacked your connection, they do not have the private key for the institution.
If you want to be paranoid, save your institutions certificates locally so that even if a hijacked compromised a root server and spoofed a response AND got a cert issued for the legitimate domain (which, as anyone familiar with it knows, is not that hard), they still can't trick your browser.
Really, all institutions containing sensitive data should establish secondary data channels as well - like, any time you log into your bank or brokerage, you should be able to specify an email address...say, of your cell phone.... which will receive an email saying you just logged in. Then someone who manages to get your info still can't effectively use it.
Considering that defendants own no comic characters themselves, it stands to reason that the comic books to which they refer are those that depict the characters of Marvel and others," wrote Marvel's attorneys in the complaint.
I'm sorry, but they do, in fact, publish their own comic. In fact, due to the bundling with the game, I believe I read it had the 3rd highest circulation of any comic in print.
The complaint says that the "defendants have created, marketed, distributed and provided a host environment for a game that 'brings the world of comic books alive,' not by the creation of new or original characters but, instead, by directly, contributorily and vicariously infringing upon Marvel copyrights and trademarks."
There are typically around 1500-2500 players on Virtue every night, it seems. I almost never see a copycat.
A great quote from Cory Doctorow:
"Asking City of Heroes to police their users to ensure that they don't replicate Marvel characters is like asking a school to police its students to make sure none of them show up for Halloween in a homemade Spider-Man costume," said Cory Doctorow, a renowned writer and advocate for free speech and fair use. "It's unreasonable bullying, and it is bad corporate citizenship."
And of course, it's a click away to report a copycat character, and NCSoft removes them rapidly.
Aren't there enough people that have worked in call centers at one time or another that this is just common knowledge? I spent 9 months doing tech support. If you called, there was a tiny chance your call would get monitored. Where I was, it meant you were likely to get the best possible service, too; our supervisors warned us (especially those they liked) that they would be doing monitoring in the near future. It usually happened on a quarterly basis and would consist of a couple hours of their listening and taking notes.
I'm sure the details vary from place to place, but there's no conspiracy here.
That's sort of amazing... seems like that's probably due to the lack of fragmentation. Back when I got the original NES, I seem to recall the only competition being the TurboGrafx (sp?) console. I think Sega released theirs a bit later along with the original Sonic the Hedgehog game that made it sell like hotcakes.
I think the 13M number may be wrong too - that may be North American, because I see numbers of 20M too for GTA: Vice City. I wonder if the 40M was worldwide and included Japanese sales? I'm skeptical there were 40M consoles in the US way back when. IIRC correctly, I saw console numbers recently and there were about 9M xboxes out and 20-something million (~23, I think) PS2s. But there were 40M NESes back then? But I bet the original NES was widely adopted in Japan.
Halo 2 sold over 2M copies its first day, and as of 12/3/04 had already sold over 5M copies.
GTA: Vice City holds the sales record for console games at around 13M copies.
The original Half-life sold over 10M copies... I'm betting a huge amount of that was driven by Counterstrike.
It's unknown, I think, exactly how many copies of HL2 have been sold, but Valve said over 2M copies JUST over Steam, not counting boxs in stores. I'd say that means conservatively 4M+ copies now, if not more, especially given the rave reviews.
Doom 3 came in way behind in sales overall in 2004; I read an article saying Activision planned to ship between 700k and 800k copies to retailers by end of September.
There's a UK list of top titles here, and HL2 isn't on the list, but I'll bet that's because of the number sold directly via Steam.
That said, none of those games come with a monthly fee, and that's a huge, huge, huge difference. Those games may produce an xpak or something, but that's it. The MMO will drag the cost of *3* AAA titles out of the players after a year's play. Given that most MMOs use numbers between 20k and 100k to be cash-flow positive, it's safe to say that WoW is achieving a huge, huge victory here. Plus, by critical accounts, it's a better game than EQ2, so people who had to pick one may trickle over to WoW... probably in greater numbers than the other way around. And it is likely to have excellent retention if the rave reviews are justified.
Personally, I'm still playing City of Heroes when I can find the time; I've been very happy how they continue to dump out new content without waiting for expansion packs to sell it instead.
It's a compelling article, although there's a huge amount of number fudging.
(1) If you count DVD sales and rentals, aren't you double counting sales to the big rental chains? And of course, studios don't see the money from rentals any more than a game developer sees money from blockbuster renting a game, so why should that be counted?
(2) Does the $10B figure for the game industry include game rentals? Or is it possible that perhaps the rentals of games at, say, Blockbuster, got grouped into the movie rental business, since they do so much game renting?
(3) How does resale figure into this? There's a huge market for "pre-owned" games AND movies, including a lot of trade-in credits. Personally, I'd expect movies to be rented more but traded in less (at least as a percentage of their sales revenue).
(4) How do you account for cross-licensed stuff? It seems silly to count the Spider-Man 2 game as a purely "video game industry" thing, as it wouldn't even exist without the movie. And when Doom comes out in theatres, how does one account for that? Clearly, the brand names generated in each industry create value and that value is hard to measure solely off sales in one genre or another.
(5) What about subscriptions? There's obviously plenty of license money being thrown around by HBO when they get movies, and likewise, on the Video Games side, how much are all those MMO subscriptions worth?
One could even go into an in-depth review of piracy. How does piracy in each segment compare and effect revenues? What sort of margins do big hits have, and what sort of margins does the industry overall have? And what sort of residuals? It's a lot harder to squeeze more life out of an old game than an old movie. Old movies show up on TV and such, but old games just end up getting cracked.
And they give examples of bestsellers, but they don't look at the breadth of titles. How many video games came out vs how many movies?
And certainly International Box Office is absolutely colossal for big movies. How does gaming compare? A lot of major Hollywood movies take in 65%+ of their gross overseas. How do localized versions of Video Games compare?
I think what we can all agree on is that Video Games comprise an ever-increasing portion of the GDP and probably of the entertainment dollar that we spend, and as such, it's a lot harder to predict where they will go. Most video game players can imagine a *long* way into the future for video games in terms of technology, to the point where I could see people paying thousands of dollars for holodeck-type video game vacations that last a week; it's hard to see where movies go from here for sure, whereas Video Games have shown a seemingly endless appetite for more advanced technology.
From this C|Net article, These agreements normally take effect as a condition of installing software, and they ordinarily require customers to waive their right to sue over alleged defects. Such EULAs have been repeatedly upheld by the courts.
One such case is Zeidenberg v Silken Mountain Web Services, Inc, in which Zeidenberg won his case claiming the shrink-wrap license was invalid after he violated it to rip off the database on a CD and resell it cheaper - the case was overturned on appeal where the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld shrink-wrap licenses. They do make mention of a need to be able to return the product or see a refund if you refuse the license; but if it says, "by installing/using this you agree to these terms", then it considered that a valid contract under the UCC.
If you want to play lawyer on Slashdot, and least try to have your rudimentary facts correct.
Not all people work long hours because of naivete
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NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 5, Interesting
In my second job, I cheerfully slept under my desk once, and worked really long hours all the time. I remember bragging that I had our IT manager beat wednesday night - she'd worked 42 hours since Monday. I was young, and in my time off I just programmed hobby projects anyhow. The company was on track to IPO, I had shares, and I was collecting big raises frequently.
Anyhow, I don't regret that at all. Now that I'm older, have a daughter and different priorities, I hate that young people are still willing to do that, because it makes me look like a less desirable employee.
The problem with EA, however, is not the way they work their employees with long hours, but the way they deceive people to get them and keep them before turnover finally claims them. If EA said: we're going to pay you $25k/yr base, but work you 100 hours a week, so you'll make $85k with overtime, then there would be no problem. (And, quite possibly, no people accepting jobs there)
As noted in a footnote to the article), U.S. employers *must* pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.
When I worked at Netcom in SJ, my first tech job, I had a friend who immigrated from Canada. The way the requirement for this was satisfied was by placing a newspaper ad to run for 3 days. People who called for an interview would send resumes. The best of those would come in for interviews, be asked standard questions, and told "Thanks for coming in."
Also, the person in question was overqualified which made him better at his job than the average person there, but he still made at the low end of the scale. So his skills were at the top of the range, but his pay was at the low end of the range.
Then there's the whole salary/unpaid OT thing. You basically can hit the H1-B with "We need you to work Saturday... oh, and Sunday too" as often as you want. What are they going to do? Quit, and go back home?
Welcome to my friend list, Adam;) Who would have guessed you were lurking around slashdot?:p
And you deserve the offers - your mods were all very good, but some of them were *amazing*. The Dreamcatcher series had more jaw-dropping moments than any modules, including Bioware's own. (HotU was pretty nice, but the resized dragon, the thrown sword slomo cutscene, the dragon ride to Evermeet... I mean, wow)
But that said, I know what you're saying. I consult now doing web app development (for a few years; before that I did network security engineering). I work any hours I want, get paid very well, get lots of kudos from my clients - and when I work odds hours for them, they go out of their way to show gratitude. Move to -20 degree weather and work long hours for low pay? Nah. I think you've got your priorities right, and I'm sure your son will thank you for it, when he grows up, if he learns of the Road Not Taken.
I think "work at something you truly love" is a good byword for being happy with your work. But even if you "love" game development, that doesn't mean you want to work 80-100 hours grinding so your corporate masters can make big bucks.
That's one reason I love NWN - the fact those guys put in a lot of EXTRA time on the side is hopefully and indicator that Bioware wasn't grinding them into a pulp to ship titles.
Anyhow, hopefully you'll sign up to do a premium module - I think your good name alone could probably bring in sales like no other. I certainly would *have* to get a copy.
Wasn't it obvious? People get charged with jaywalking, conspiracy to jaywalk, purchase of running shoes with intent to jaywalk, reckless jaywalking, disregarding traffic signals with intent to jaywalk, and end up pleading down to "just" a year.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." - Ayn Rand
Not that spammers don't deserve jail time, but realize that we're quickly approaching a stage where everyone is guilty of something.
Your drugs are only cheap because you don't make them - the US does, and sells them to you near the cost of manufacturing while the US subsidizes the R&D. Didn't you stop and wonder why Americans could buy drugs made by American companies cheaper in Canada?
I'm going to enjoy it when Canadians have to pay their fair share. It's not far off.
Assuming I am under contract to produce code on a deadline, and I read your account of combat with Gibson, and snorted coffee all over my keyboard, rendering my computer inoperable and causing me to miss my contractual deadline, can I sue you for tortious interference?
Hmmmmm....
patents and nukes: not extreme comparison
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Rob Pike Responds
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Pike: Comparing patents to nuclear weapons is a bit extreme.
No it isn't. The comparison is drawn often, because both large patent portfolios as well as large nuclear arms stockpiles create a situaiton of Mutually Assured Destruction. Once the nukes start flying, nobody wins. Likewise, once the lawyers start slinging patent lawsuits, only the lawyers win.
So the answer may be, "I have no idea", but the comparison is legitimate.
I wonder how many people's first reaction to "DDO the MMO" is, "Wow, finally, I can dance off against people online!"
The MMO market is now "mature". A lot of people have found that they have games they like, and won't leave them. You have to differentiate. A lot of games will have great stories and a few interesting features, but getting a 4-year EQ players to drop his subscription and his plans for EQ2 is going to take some work.
City of Heroes, however, is a bona fide hit; they're proving that they can break the formula, both in setting and in gameplay, and be rewarded for it. It was over 180,000 subscribers at last count, and still growing fast (atop the retail sales chart). They're also pounding out updates, have their sequel in full development, and will have an additional angle on updates powered by their release to euro and asian markets (which NCSoft obviously knows).
D&D Online, however, is going somewhere weird. Originally, I read they were "doing away" with attack bonuses and planned to do "combo attacks" instead, but now it sounds like you'll have to use keyboard combos to use all your attacks your attack bonus entitles you to. This is scary. Real time-ish combat which does away with the long-in-development nuances of attacks of opportunity and initiative hurts the ruleset - witness the issues with Neverwinter Nights, and stupid likes like 1-action spells being interrupted by random attacks that just HAPPENED to be scheduled by the engine during the animation sequence of the spell. If there hadn't been all this weirdness, I would have been very enthused over DDO.
There's also the Matrix MMO coming out soon; people are getting their beta test entries now. They certainly have interesting combat animations. We'll have to see how the gameplay goes; I know a lot of people won't even touch it unless the word of mouth is incredible, since they're bitter over the final 2 movies and the buggy PC game. (which I thought was very fun, but it DID have some issues)
(1) If you're proscribed antibiotics, you should take them exactly as instructed; take them for the whole course, do not stop in the last couple days or when the symptoms go away;
(2) Do not attempt to "chase off" what you think might be an oncoming infection by taking a "leftover" pill or two from a previous subscription
(3) Realize that many infections are viral; do not expect or demand to be proscribed antibiotics contrary to your doctor's wishes
Doctors are now becoming very aware of bad behaviors which cause bacteria to become antibiotic-resistant, but convincing people to follow good practice is apparently harder.
Remember way back in the good old days, before piracy, when a movie like Finding Nemo could really move DVDs out the door? Boy, it's too bad nowadays, that more recent releases have such dismal sales.
Slashdot Mirror
The issue of Web services has to be considered, he said. Some in the community are calling for a strong copyleft license with code that is used and changed to be returned to all. Others want the opposite.
"I do not believe that we will be reach consensus on this front, so I believe the license will have to accommodate options as to the question of Web services, but this must be squared with the ideological pursuit of freedom," he said.
This is *very* interesting. There is an enormous engine of online services that is running as a for-profit enterprise using GPL software. phpBB, OSCommerce, and more are provided commercially, quite possibly with modifications.
This means that in the new GPL, there will be a GNU-supported variant which requires a web service provider running a modified version of GPL software *as a web service* to release the source code to any changes they made. I'd love to hear major projects weigh in on their opinion. Would future phpBB/mysqladmin/OSC versions use this variant, or would they opt to allow non-released versions which ran only as web services to remain in the hands of the modifiers?
It will be interesting, too, because there may be disputes over what exactly is covered. For example, phpBB distributes a lot of *.php scripts, but they also have a slew of materials like SQL Schemas and
Morever, web services are very technically different because so many are written in interpreted languages. You can't modify Apache without compiling it. But with phpBB, you can open up a file, make a tweak, and it instantly takes effect on a live site. If you pre-install a GPL web service for your customer as a provider, how do you then make sure they're apprised of the license terms and don't inadvertantly commit themselves to a source code release because they edited some file in an application you installed for them?
I can say I'll certainly be watching this development with great interest.
Sonos is very, very cool looking, but even their discounted bundle is a fortune. $1200 for what amounts to a remote with a little LCD and 2 wireless combo receiver/amps? Ouch. Even if you can easily afford it, it's hard to justify. Then again, it is terribly convenient. Even if the functionality doesn't justify the price, maybe the ease of use does for some.
As the article pointed out, a generic spammer can't respond to a CAPTCHA that comes in an auto-responding email, because the sending addresses are invalid. Moreover, they're going to have to have a CAPTCHA for ever single email, because a good email interface should allow you to de-whitelist a successful CAPTCHA response. Even if a third world worker can spend an entire year decoding CAPTCHAs for $1000/year doing one every 8 seconds, they can still only decode 900,000 CAPTCHAs per year, and that has a cost of 1.1 cents per 10 CAPTCHAs. That would mean that emailing 40,000,000 people a piece of spam would cost $44,000. Suffice it to say, spammers do NOT make $.001 per spam sent; not even close.
Most adults also believe that diet aids sold on TV can really give you six-pack abs, that most rich people won the lottery, and that buying a certain perfume/cologne will get you hooked up with hotties of the opposite sex.
(1) I'm using a linux box, so I'll pass on the MAC. I'm not concerned about spyware and trojans even for my windows box, because I don't use ie, I have everything but the KSP (Kitchen Sink Protocol) filtered and so on. But I have no control over the DNS servers.
(2) I don't care about most people. I'm talking about how to stop phishers from stealing your data. If people don't want to go that far, fine... let them deal with the identity theft that follows. I'm more concerned with preventing attacks upon those who at least are aware of the danger and would like to prevent damage.
(3) That's funny. So you're taking on a higher risk (accessing your bank via non-trusted urls) activity so you can avoid a low-risk activity (storing a bookmark to a login page)? Especially when the bookmark is redundant to the history/cache?
I'll go ahead and stick with Plan A.
The simply answer: for all places where you have sensitive information, bookmark an SSL-enabled url.
For example, instead of logging into your bank by typing in "www.mybank.com", bookmark their login info like:
https://www.mybank.com/login.bnk?gz=1
Or whatever.
When you visit the https url, even if a phisher has completely altered dns and hijacked your connection, they do not have the private key for the institution.
If you want to be paranoid, save your institutions certificates locally so that even if a hijacked compromised a root server and spoofed a response AND got a cert issued for the legitimate domain (which, as anyone familiar with it knows, is not that hard), they still can't trick your browser.
Really, all institutions containing sensitive data should establish secondary data channels as well - like, any time you log into your bank or brokerage, you should be able to specify an email address...say, of your cell phone.... which will receive an email saying you just logged in. Then someone who manages to get your info still can't effectively use it.
It seems like Marvel is the SCO of the comic book industry. Let's hope their lawsuit against NCSoft and Cryptic Studios, makers of City of Heroes, goes just as poorly.
I just love some of the quotes by Marvel.
Considering that defendants own no comic characters themselves, it stands to reason that the comic books to which they refer are those that depict the characters of Marvel and others," wrote Marvel's attorneys in the complaint.
I'm sorry, but they do, in fact, publish their own comic. In fact, due to the bundling with the game, I believe I read it had the 3rd highest circulation of any comic in print.
The complaint says that the "defendants have created, marketed, distributed and provided a host environment for a game that 'brings the world of comic books alive,' not by the creation of new or original characters but, instead, by directly, contributorily and vicariously infringing upon Marvel copyrights and trademarks."
There are typically around 1500-2500 players on Virtue every night, it seems. I almost never see a copycat.
A great quote from Cory Doctorow:
"Asking City of Heroes to police their users to ensure that they don't replicate Marvel characters is like asking a school to police its students to make sure none of them show up for Halloween in a homemade Spider-Man costume," said Cory Doctorow, a renowned writer and advocate for free speech and fair use. "It's unreasonable bullying, and it is bad corporate citizenship."
And of course, it's a click away to report a copycat character, and NCSoft removes them rapidly.
Er, they just announced Six Apart was buying them like days ago. I doubt they transitioned the servers in the first week.
Aren't there enough people that have worked in call centers at one time or another that this is just common knowledge? I spent 9 months doing tech support. If you called, there was a tiny chance your call would get monitored. Where I was, it meant you were likely to get the best possible service, too; our supervisors warned us (especially those they liked) that they would be doing monitoring in the near future. It usually happened on a quarterly basis and would consist of a couple hours of their listening and taking notes.
I'm sure the details vary from place to place, but there's no conspiracy here.
I'd have bought WoW already if I could just d/l it. I was at Target tonight, and they were sold out. Oh, well.
That's sort of amazing... seems like that's probably due to the lack of fragmentation. Back when I got the original NES, I seem to recall the only competition being the TurboGrafx (sp?) console. I think Sega released theirs a bit later along with the original Sonic the Hedgehog game that made it sell like hotcakes.
:D
I think the 13M number may be wrong too - that may be North American, because I see numbers of 20M too for GTA: Vice City. I wonder if the 40M was worldwide and included Japanese sales? I'm skeptical there were 40M consoles in the US way back when. IIRC correctly, I saw console numbers recently and there were about 9M xboxes out and 20-something million (~23, I think) PS2s. But there were 40M NESes back then? But I bet the original NES was widely adopted in Japan.
And yet Tetris pwnz them all!!
Halo 2 sold over 2M copies its first day, and as of 12/3/04 had already sold over 5M copies.
GTA: Vice City holds the sales record for console games at around 13M copies.
The original Half-life sold over 10M copies... I'm betting a huge amount of that was driven by Counterstrike.
It's unknown, I think, exactly how many copies of HL2 have been sold, but Valve said over 2M copies JUST over Steam, not counting boxs in stores. I'd say that means conservatively 4M+ copies now, if not more, especially given the rave reviews.
Doom 3 came in way behind in sales overall in 2004; I read an article saying Activision planned to ship between 700k and 800k copies to retailers by end of September.
There's a UK list of top titles here, and HL2 isn't on the list, but I'll bet that's because of the number sold directly via Steam.
That said, none of those games come with a monthly fee, and that's a huge, huge, huge difference. Those games may produce an xpak or something, but that's it. The MMO will drag the cost of *3* AAA titles out of the players after a year's play. Given that most MMOs use numbers between 20k and 100k to be cash-flow positive, it's safe to say that WoW is achieving a huge, huge victory here. Plus, by critical accounts, it's a better game than EQ2, so people who had to pick one may trickle over to WoW... probably in greater numbers than the other way around. And it is likely to have excellent retention if the rave reviews are justified.
Personally, I'm still playing City of Heroes when I can find the time; I've been very happy how they continue to dump out new content without waiting for expansion packs to sell it instead.
It's a compelling article, although there's a huge amount of number fudging.
(1) If you count DVD sales and rentals, aren't you double counting sales to the big rental chains? And of course, studios don't see the money from rentals any more than a game developer sees money from blockbuster renting a game, so why should that be counted?
(2) Does the $10B figure for the game industry include game rentals? Or is it possible that perhaps the rentals of games at, say, Blockbuster, got grouped into the movie rental business, since they do so much game renting?
(3) How does resale figure into this? There's a huge market for "pre-owned" games AND movies, including a lot of trade-in credits. Personally, I'd expect movies to be rented more but traded in less (at least as a percentage of their sales revenue).
(4) How do you account for cross-licensed stuff? It seems silly to count the Spider-Man 2 game as a purely "video game industry" thing, as it wouldn't even exist without the movie. And when Doom comes out in theatres, how does one account for that? Clearly, the brand names generated in each industry create value and that value is hard to measure solely off sales in one genre or another.
(5) What about subscriptions? There's obviously plenty of license money being thrown around by HBO when they get movies, and likewise, on the Video Games side, how much are all those MMO subscriptions worth?
One could even go into an in-depth review of piracy. How does piracy in each segment compare and effect revenues? What sort of margins do big hits have, and what sort of margins does the industry overall have? And what sort of residuals? It's a lot harder to squeeze more life out of an old game than an old movie. Old movies show up on TV and such, but old games just end up getting cracked.
And they give examples of bestsellers, but they don't look at the breadth of titles. How many video games came out vs how many movies?
And certainly International Box Office is absolutely colossal for big movies. How does gaming compare? A lot of major Hollywood movies take in 65%+ of their gross overseas. How do localized versions of Video Games compare?
I think what we can all agree on is that Video Games comprise an ever-increasing portion of the GDP and probably of the entertainment dollar that we spend, and as such, it's a lot harder to predict where they will go. Most video game players can imagine a *long* way into the future for video games in terms of technology, to the point where I could see people paying thousands of dollars for holodeck-type video game vacations that last a week; it's hard to see where movies go from here for sure, whereas Video Games have shown a seemingly endless appetite for more advanced technology.
From this C|Net article, These agreements normally take effect as a condition of installing software, and they ordinarily require customers to waive their right to sue over alleged defects. Such EULAs have been repeatedly upheld by the courts.
One such case is Zeidenberg v Silken Mountain Web Services, Inc, in which Zeidenberg won his case claiming the shrink-wrap license was invalid after he violated it to rip off the database on a CD and resell it cheaper - the case was overturned on appeal where the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld shrink-wrap licenses. They do make mention of a need to be able to return the product or see a refund if you refuse the license; but if it says, "by installing/using this you agree to these terms", then it considered that a valid contract under the UCC.
If you want to play lawyer on Slashdot, and least try to have your rudimentary facts correct.
In my second job, I cheerfully slept under my desk once, and worked really long hours all the time. I remember bragging that I had our IT manager beat wednesday night - she'd worked 42 hours since Monday. I was young, and in my time off I just programmed hobby projects anyhow. The company was on track to IPO, I had shares, and I was collecting big raises frequently.
Anyhow, I don't regret that at all. Now that I'm older, have a daughter and different priorities, I hate that young people are still willing to do that, because it makes me look like a less desirable employee.
The problem with EA, however, is not the way they work their employees with long hours, but the way they deceive people to get them and keep them before turnover finally claims them. If EA said: we're going to pay you $25k/yr base, but work you 100 hours a week, so you'll make $85k with overtime, then there would be no problem. (And, quite possibly, no people accepting jobs there)
As noted in a footnote to the article), U.S. employers *must* pay foreign workers the prevailing wage for their job fields and show that qualified U.S. workers are not being passed over.
When I worked at Netcom in SJ, my first tech job, I had a friend who immigrated from Canada. The way the requirement for this was satisfied was by placing a newspaper ad to run for 3 days. People who called for an interview would send resumes. The best of those would come in for interviews, be asked standard questions, and told "Thanks for coming in."
Also, the person in question was overqualified which made him better at his job than the average person there, but he still made at the low end of the scale. So his skills were at the top of the range, but his pay was at the low end of the range.
Then there's the whole salary/unpaid OT thing. You basically can hit the H1-B with "We need you to work Saturday... oh, and Sunday too" as often as you want. What are they going to do? Quit, and go back home?
Welcome to my friend list, Adam ;) Who would have guessed you were lurking around slashdot? :p
And you deserve the offers - your mods were all very good, but some of them were *amazing*. The Dreamcatcher series had more jaw-dropping moments than any modules, including Bioware's own. (HotU was pretty nice, but the resized dragon, the thrown sword slomo cutscene, the dragon ride to Evermeet... I mean, wow)
But that said, I know what you're saying. I consult now doing web app development (for a few years; before that I did network security engineering). I work any hours I want, get paid very well, get lots of kudos from my clients - and when I work odds hours for them, they go out of their way to show gratitude. Move to -20 degree weather and work long hours for low pay? Nah. I think you've got your priorities right, and I'm sure your son will thank you for it, when he grows up, if he learns of the Road Not Taken.
I think "work at something you truly love" is a good byword for being happy with your work. But even if you "love" game development, that doesn't mean you want to work 80-100 hours grinding so your corporate masters can make big bucks.
That's one reason I love NWN - the fact those guys put in a lot of EXTRA time on the side is hopefully and indicator that Bioware wasn't grinding them into a pulp to ship titles.
Anyhow, hopefully you'll sign up to do a premium module - I think your good name alone could probably bring in sales like no other. I certainly would *have* to get a copy.
Wasn't it obvious? People get charged with jaywalking, conspiracy to jaywalk, purchase of running shoes with intent to jaywalk, reckless jaywalking, disregarding traffic signals with intent to jaywalk, and end up pleading down to "just" a year.
"There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them." - Ayn Rand
Not that spammers don't deserve jail time, but realize that we're quickly approaching a stage where everyone is guilty of something.
I wonder how the TOS nazis plan to handle P2P apps like BT?
ROFL.
You are a fucking moron.
Your drugs are only cheap because you don't make them - the US does, and sells them to you near the cost of manufacturing while the US subsidizes the R&D. Didn't you stop and wonder why Americans could buy drugs made by American companies cheaper in Canada?
I'm going to enjoy it when Canadians have to pay their fair share. It's not far off.
Assuming I am under contract to produce code on a deadline, and I read your account of combat with Gibson, and snorted coffee all over my keyboard, rendering my computer inoperable and causing me to miss my contractual deadline, can I sue you for tortious interference?
Hmmmmm....
Pike:
Comparing patents to nuclear weapons is a bit extreme.
No it isn't. The comparison is drawn often, because both large patent portfolios as well as large nuclear arms stockpiles create a situaiton of Mutually Assured Destruction. Once the nukes start flying, nobody wins. Likewise, once the lawyers start slinging patent lawsuits, only the lawyers win.
So the answer may be, "I have no idea", but the comparison is legitimate.
I wonder how many people's first reaction to "DDO the MMO" is, "Wow, finally, I can dance off against people online!"
The MMO market is now "mature". A lot of people have found that they have games they like, and won't leave them. You have to differentiate. A lot of games will have great stories and a few interesting features, but getting a 4-year EQ players to drop his subscription and his plans for EQ2 is going to take some work.
City of Heroes, however, is a bona fide hit; they're proving that they can break the formula, both in setting and in gameplay, and be rewarded for it. It was over 180,000 subscribers at last count, and still growing fast (atop the retail sales chart). They're also pounding out updates, have their sequel in full development, and will have an additional angle on updates powered by their release to euro and asian markets (which NCSoft obviously knows).
D&D Online, however, is going somewhere weird. Originally, I read they were "doing away" with attack bonuses and planned to do "combo attacks" instead, but now it sounds like you'll have to use keyboard combos to use all your attacks your attack bonus entitles you to. This is scary. Real time-ish combat which does away with the long-in-development nuances of attacks of opportunity and initiative hurts the ruleset - witness the issues with Neverwinter Nights, and stupid likes like 1-action spells being interrupted by random attacks that just HAPPENED to be scheduled by the engine during the animation sequence of the spell. If there hadn't been all this weirdness, I would have been very enthused over DDO.
There's also the Matrix MMO coming out soon; people are getting their beta test entries now. They certainly have interesting combat animations. We'll have to see how the gameplay goes; I know a lot of people won't even touch it unless the word of mouth is incredible, since they're bitter over the final 2 movies and the buggy PC game. (which I thought was very fun, but it DID have some issues)
This is why:
(1) If you're proscribed antibiotics, you should take them exactly as instructed; take them for the whole course, do not stop in the last couple days or when the symptoms go away;
(2) Do not attempt to "chase off" what you think might be an oncoming infection by taking a "leftover" pill or two from a previous subscription
(3) Realize that many infections are viral; do not expect or demand to be proscribed antibiotics contrary to your doctor's wishes
Doctors are now becoming very aware of bad behaviors which cause bacteria to become antibiotic-resistant, but convincing people to follow good practice is apparently harder.
Remember way back in the good old days, before piracy, when a movie like Finding Nemo could really move DVDs out the door? Boy, it's too bad nowadays, that more recent releases have such dismal sales.
Poor George. Your pain must be unbearable.