You're right that tying yourself to a vendor will lead to constraints. It's worth noting, though, that many hospitals are already (as with many government departments) tied to MS and Windows - at least this seems to be the case in most developed countries, I'd be surprised to learn all Australian hospitals were using Linux or OSX. Therefore it makes sense that the hardware at the very least doesn't prevent a Windows installation. Is this just another case of politician doesn't understand that not all tablets are iPads (arguably the iPad is not a tablet but let's shelve that for now), just like not all smartphones are iPhones and not all portable music players are iPods, hence he's using the wrong terminology through ignorance rather than preference?
Indeed, unless there's only one supplier who offers to meet some specific need, I would have thought it would be a legal requirement to put such requests out to tender, otherwise you're just asking for even more corruption and nepertism.
Are you saying he's specifically trying to court the vote of doctors? I find that unlikely - there can't possibly be enough doctors spread around the country to sway the vote, even if he outright bought their votes for dollars (not to mention it's likely to annoy other people working with the doctors who then might vote elsewhere). Mind you, I'm not sure offering to pour money into flashy tablets is the right way to win votes either, unless there have been conclusive tests to show significant gains from doing so, and as GP said, why he'd specifically say iPads when a standard tablet PC is more likely to be easier to integrate with the hospital's current systems and to be able to install custom applications (especially if Aus is anything like the UK, where Windows is pretty much the only option in hospitals). Are we missing the real message or is this just a case of clueless politician tries to piggyback on the popularity of a new tech toy?
You're trying to paint this as a disagreement between gamers and hard-working games developers. That's not the case at all - in fact most gamers and games developers want exactly the same thing, a polished gaming experience, even if it costs a little more or takes a little more time to accomplish that. As is so often the case, it's the man in the middle, the publisher, who tries to rush out unfinished games to hit arbitary deadlines.
What's the difference between a community divide of those who are rich and poor and a community divide of those who have countless hours to sink into grinding for rare item drops and those who have very little gaming time and they want to enjoy it and not spend it grinding and still failing to keep up because students and people without jobs can spend all week on the game? As for the two profile idea, that's all well and good but if all your friends joined the pay as you go server, you'd either have to find a new bunch of friends or join their server but now without even the option to get the items from drops. Personally I don't think items that give a genuine advantage should ever be allowed for sale in multiplayer games, but if they are I'd rather see a mixed system where people who are cash rish and time poor and people who are time rich and cash poor can compete on a roughly even keel.
Red Dead is not about multiplayer. It is a single player game with multiplayer tacked on due to the fact that you can't sell a single player game in today's market for ridiculous reasons. Red Dead got amazing reviews because it is an amazing single player game and I never even once saw a review that commented on the multiplayer at all.
I'm not sure I completely agree with that assessment, games like Fallout 3/New Vegas and Mass Effect 2 show that it's entirely possible to do a single player game that sells. For me, multiplayer completely ruined RDR. I poured hours into the single player game doing every side quest, exploring every inch of the landscape, etc. (hell, the first time I found the poker minigame I spent the next three hours just playing poker) before finally completing it and I loved every part of it. Then I tried the multiplayer game and found it was a horrible experience - as usual one or two idiots (or sometimes even five or six) constantly ruin the experience for everyone else, to the point that I can't even think about going back to play the undead add-on. I know it's single player, but it's made me so frustrated with the main game that I just don't want to invest more money in it. That's a shame, when 60+ hours of gameplay is spoiled by a couple of hours playing a badly thought out, tacked on multiplayer that in no way adds anything to the game (and in fact probably took development time away that could have been used for a few more missions). Give me a solid single player experience any day.
While it's not something you can set hard and fast rules about, it's usually pretty clear if the DLC is reasonable or not. If you can enjoy the entire game experience without the DLC and are not left feeling like there were big gaps or that you are in some way disadvantaged by not having a DLC map or peiece of equipment, then that's fine. The DLC in that case will live or die on how useful/good it is. Selling half a game with the conclusion as DLC should never be allowed. Similarly putting nag characters directly in the original game who are there to try and pimp DLC should definitely not be allowed, not without the ability to disable that part of their character.
On this last point, I thought Dragon Age was bad enough, placing a character in my camp who, when spoken to, would encourage me to buy a certain DLC mission. That position has now been usurped by Fable 3, where there's a character in my sanctuary who tries to sell me DLC from the in game shop almost every time I visit the sanctuary. For those who haven't played the game, the sanctuary is effectively your options menu, map and inventory combined - yes that's right, they nag me to buy content EVERY TIME I USE MY INVENTORY. I could even live with this horrific abuse if they just told me about each new item once and then left it at that, but so far there's only one item of DLC (a suit so you can dress up as a dog, I kid you not) and yet Jasper feels this is worthy of mentioning constantly. I should have known better than to expect anything different from Lionhead, of course - these are the same people who, in Fable 2, took key items required to obtain all the achievements for the main game and made them only available through DLC purchases (in contravention of MS's policy that all achievements in a release game must be obtainable without the need to buy DLC - they claimed that it wasn't in breach of the rules because a friend could gift you the items you needed, but of course that friend needed to get them from somewhere and ultimately someone would have to buy them).
It's probably more that, once the game has taken shape enough for you to realise it's bad, do you just ship it as soon as possible, cut your losses and hope the next one is a AAA title, or do you pour more time and money into something that's so far proved a failure, hoping to one day make it come good? It seems like, if you could get away with doing the first approach two or three times before you nail the awesome title without leaving your reputation in tatters, it might make more sense financially. The key thing is, nobody ever sets out to make a bad game, so if the product you've got on your hands is bad and you have what you think is a winning idea on the drawing board, the temptation is going to be to move on as quickly as you can, before you sap all the money and motivation from the company.
Most restaurants I've eaten in either bring a wireless card processing handset to your table, or they have a point that you can go to to make a payment, or both. Very few seem to want to take the card away from the table by default, now - probably because people are a lot more cautious about letting them do so.
Depends what he's planning to use it for - he might have some killer app in mind that will more than make up for the lost $3k (it seems he has somewhat of a track record for coming up with custom uses for console hardware and selling that knowledge). If that's the case, he might conceivably prefer to keep his code closed so he can exploit it however he wants, but just released the video because he wanted some geek points for doing it first (that, or his hack wasn't as complete as this one and was still a work in progress).
I agree that MS hardware is much more of a craps shoot these days - they used to do great keyboards, mice (if you didn't go for the base model) and joysticks (don't have much experience outside of those). The Red Ring of Death, undoubtedly a major screw up that should never have happened, but I will give them some credit that they did eventually offer repairs/replacements outside of warranty (mine died after 18 months and, being ready for weeks of hassle and a long period with no console, I was surprised how quick and easy the process was, especially as it was weeks before Christmas). It might not seem like much, but in these days of the consumer getting screwed, it actually felt pretty good to get a quick and easy resolution. That misstep aside, I think the XBOX range of hardware is alright, anything else I'd definitely read a few reviews these days before buying, whereas at one time their hardware was the one thing I felt I could trust to impulse buy.
So long as they're making a profit on each unit sold, that shouldn't matter, the profit will still go towards paying off the R&D costs. Sure, it's not as profitable as selling the device plus a dozen games, but so long as they can match supply to demand and this is not an imminently finite resource, it still benefits them to be selling these to geeks for unrelated projects.
If they really want that to fly as a central part of the contract of sale, they're going to have to get game stores to enforce it by making me sign something when I buy one, otherwise it's trivial to argue that this is either not a part of the contract of sale or that it's an unfair term (because of the way it's added without them making it apparent to me and gives them an undue amount of control over what I do with my legally purchased goods).
When someone plugs your product in such a way that it is likely to sell more units, YOU THANK THEM.
Could be someone in marketing annoyed that a lone geek is doing a better job of selling the benefits of their hardware than they and their huge marketing budget are capable of, maybe?:) I'm only half joking - I'm a long-time XBOX gamer and currently have no intention of buying a Kinect for gaming, despite having watched the videos, read the reviews and heard about the glitzy launch party, but this new development opens up all kinds of other possibilities that might encourage me to invest in one, so it's already succeeding where MS's marketing department have failed.
I can understand them being annoyed at someone fiddling with their devices. Of course, that's not what was happening here, this was someone fiddling with his own device. Unless he broke into MS and did all the testing on their hardware, they have no right to tell him what he can and can't do with a piece of kit he bought and paid for. Want to retain control over the device? How about renting it instead of selling it. Of course they can try to prevent him using that kit with their services (Live, achievements, etc) as these are subject to specific rules, but the actual hardware is his, and if they don't like it there's not a lot they can do about it - whining doesn't win them any sympathy.
Because XBMC made the original XBOX look so bad. Maybe MS should realise there are people with a little more creativity and imagination out there than their own marketing/legal departments and see where this goes before stomping all over it. Something really innovative might come of this and MS could gain some goodwill by just not trying to shut it down. Goodwill used to be worth something to companies.
The only reason I could see for them caring is if demand was massively outsripping supply, meaning people using these for non-XBOX related purposes are blocking sales of units+games to XBOX gamers. At the moment that seems to be a non-issue, some places are sold out but it looks like it's still pretty easy to get hold of a device. Seriously, though, how big do they expect the uptake to be - I can imagine a handful of interested geeks playing with this in the first few months, at least until/unless some killer apps come along that make the $150 outlay worthwhile. They're no more hurting MS than people who buy this as a Christmas present and leave it in a cupboard for six weeks, or people who get bored with it and don't buy any more games after release - are these the next people on the hit list, who dare to buy a piece of technology and then refuse to buy additional products to use with that piece of technology?
Considering you'd still have to grow, feed and educate, train and equip them, I'm not sure cloning would be all that cheap when you can just recruit ready grown troops on the open market and elminate all costs other than the training and equipment (and this nicely side-steps the ethical questions around cloning).
I thought we already had this stuff over here (UK) for at least a few years. I know everywhere I go, cinemas, supermarkets, train stations etc. I see vending machines with teeth cleaning gum, although I will admit I've never been curious enough to investigate exactly what it is or how it works (the machines are usually in the men's room, and call me picky but I prefer not to buy gum I'm going to put in my mouth from a machine in a room that stinks of urine).
In case you missed it, the story was her reaction. We're all expected to silently take this crap like sheep, while she gets to blow up about it (sorry, poor choice of words). If you or I made any kind of fuss we'd be off to the back-room for interro^H^Hview (and probably miss flights/connections etc as a result).
More likely they just wanted to make their tedious jobs sound a little more interesting. "Hey, today I attended a meeting at COBRA!" Good for you. The stupid thing is, I bet there's not even a Cabinet Office Briefing Room Beta - they just realised that they could turn COBR into a "cool" acronym by appending an extra letter.
The worst part about policing and enforcement in this country is the move to automate everything. Now computers and other machines get to automatically act as judge, jury and executioner - watching our every move and issuing fines and penalty points if we ever overstep the mark. I'm loathe to suggest that police have much common sense, but at least with a real cop you have a chance of some common sense coming in to play in edge cases where you made an honest mistake or were left no choice, a machine is cold and works in shades of only black and white, guilty and yet-to-be-found guilty. I thought Skynet was meant to sieze power, not that we were going to just willingly let it enslave us.
If it ever affected them in any real way, don't you think they'd just put in place regulations that specifically let them bypass the checks (something along the lines of diplomatic immunity) citing that it affected their ability to effectively do their job (and ignoring the massive irony of what it means to everyone else trying to do their jobs)?
Haha, seriously? What's wrong with a VM running an old OS+browser combo. Are the spinning, flaming skull gifs animating too quickly on modern hardware?
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Ahh, you mean it's a "promise". Got ya!
You're right that tying yourself to a vendor will lead to constraints. It's worth noting, though, that many hospitals are already (as with many government departments) tied to MS and Windows - at least this seems to be the case in most developed countries, I'd be surprised to learn all Australian hospitals were using Linux or OSX. Therefore it makes sense that the hardware at the very least doesn't prevent a Windows installation. Is this just another case of politician doesn't understand that not all tablets are iPads (arguably the iPad is not a tablet but let's shelve that for now), just like not all smartphones are iPhones and not all portable music players are iPods, hence he's using the wrong terminology through ignorance rather than preference?
Indeed, unless there's only one supplier who offers to meet some specific need, I would have thought it would be a legal requirement to put such requests out to tender, otherwise you're just asking for even more corruption and nepertism.
Are you saying he's specifically trying to court the vote of doctors? I find that unlikely - there can't possibly be enough doctors spread around the country to sway the vote, even if he outright bought their votes for dollars (not to mention it's likely to annoy other people working with the doctors who then might vote elsewhere). Mind you, I'm not sure offering to pour money into flashy tablets is the right way to win votes either, unless there have been conclusive tests to show significant gains from doing so, and as GP said, why he'd specifically say iPads when a standard tablet PC is more likely to be easier to integrate with the hospital's current systems and to be able to install custom applications (especially if Aus is anything like the UK, where Windows is pretty much the only option in hospitals). Are we missing the real message or is this just a case of clueless politician tries to piggyback on the popularity of a new tech toy?
You're trying to paint this as a disagreement between gamers and hard-working games developers. That's not the case at all - in fact most gamers and games developers want exactly the same thing, a polished gaming experience, even if it costs a little more or takes a little more time to accomplish that. As is so often the case, it's the man in the middle, the publisher, who tries to rush out unfinished games to hit arbitary deadlines.
What's the difference between a community divide of those who are rich and poor and a community divide of those who have countless hours to sink into grinding for rare item drops and those who have very little gaming time and they want to enjoy it and not spend it grinding and still failing to keep up because students and people without jobs can spend all week on the game? As for the two profile idea, that's all well and good but if all your friends joined the pay as you go server, you'd either have to find a new bunch of friends or join their server but now without even the option to get the items from drops. Personally I don't think items that give a genuine advantage should ever be allowed for sale in multiplayer games, but if they are I'd rather see a mixed system where people who are cash rish and time poor and people who are time rich and cash poor can compete on a roughly even keel.
Red Dead is not about multiplayer. It is a single player game with multiplayer tacked on due to the fact that you can't sell a single player game in today's market for ridiculous reasons. Red Dead got amazing reviews because it is an amazing single player game and I never even once saw a review that commented on the multiplayer at all.
I'm not sure I completely agree with that assessment, games like Fallout 3/New Vegas and Mass Effect 2 show that it's entirely possible to do a single player game that sells. For me, multiplayer completely ruined RDR. I poured hours into the single player game doing every side quest, exploring every inch of the landscape, etc. (hell, the first time I found the poker minigame I spent the next three hours just playing poker) before finally completing it and I loved every part of it. Then I tried the multiplayer game and found it was a horrible experience - as usual one or two idiots (or sometimes even five or six) constantly ruin the experience for everyone else, to the point that I can't even think about going back to play the undead add-on. I know it's single player, but it's made me so frustrated with the main game that I just don't want to invest more money in it. That's a shame, when 60+ hours of gameplay is spoiled by a couple of hours playing a badly thought out, tacked on multiplayer that in no way adds anything to the game (and in fact probably took development time away that could have been used for a few more missions). Give me a solid single player experience any day.
While it's not something you can set hard and fast rules about, it's usually pretty clear if the DLC is reasonable or not. If you can enjoy the entire game experience without the DLC and are not left feeling like there were big gaps or that you are in some way disadvantaged by not having a DLC map or peiece of equipment, then that's fine. The DLC in that case will live or die on how useful/good it is. Selling half a game with the conclusion as DLC should never be allowed. Similarly putting nag characters directly in the original game who are there to try and pimp DLC should definitely not be allowed, not without the ability to disable that part of their character.
On this last point, I thought Dragon Age was bad enough, placing a character in my camp who, when spoken to, would encourage me to buy a certain DLC mission. That position has now been usurped by Fable 3, where there's a character in my sanctuary who tries to sell me DLC from the in game shop almost every time I visit the sanctuary. For those who haven't played the game, the sanctuary is effectively your options menu, map and inventory combined - yes that's right, they nag me to buy content EVERY TIME I USE MY INVENTORY. I could even live with this horrific abuse if they just told me about each new item once and then left it at that, but so far there's only one item of DLC (a suit so you can dress up as a dog, I kid you not) and yet Jasper feels this is worthy of mentioning constantly. I should have known better than to expect anything different from Lionhead, of course - these are the same people who, in Fable 2, took key items required to obtain all the achievements for the main game and made them only available through DLC purchases (in contravention of MS's policy that all achievements in a release game must be obtainable without the need to buy DLC - they claimed that it wasn't in breach of the rules because a friend could gift you the items you needed, but of course that friend needed to get them from somewhere and ultimately someone would have to buy them).
It's probably more that, once the game has taken shape enough for you to realise it's bad, do you just ship it as soon as possible, cut your losses and hope the next one is a AAA title, or do you pour more time and money into something that's so far proved a failure, hoping to one day make it come good? It seems like, if you could get away with doing the first approach two or three times before you nail the awesome title without leaving your reputation in tatters, it might make more sense financially. The key thing is, nobody ever sets out to make a bad game, so if the product you've got on your hands is bad and you have what you think is a winning idea on the drawing board, the temptation is going to be to move on as quickly as you can, before you sap all the money and motivation from the company.
Most restaurants I've eaten in either bring a wireless card processing handset to your table, or they have a point that you can go to to make a payment, or both. Very few seem to want to take the card away from the table by default, now - probably because people are a lot more cautious about letting them do so.
Depends what he's planning to use it for - he might have some killer app in mind that will more than make up for the lost $3k (it seems he has somewhat of a track record for coming up with custom uses for console hardware and selling that knowledge). If that's the case, he might conceivably prefer to keep his code closed so he can exploit it however he wants, but just released the video because he wanted some geek points for doing it first (that, or his hack wasn't as complete as this one and was still a work in progress).
I agree that MS hardware is much more of a craps shoot these days - they used to do great keyboards, mice (if you didn't go for the base model) and joysticks (don't have much experience outside of those). The Red Ring of Death, undoubtedly a major screw up that should never have happened, but I will give them some credit that they did eventually offer repairs/replacements outside of warranty (mine died after 18 months and, being ready for weeks of hassle and a long period with no console, I was surprised how quick and easy the process was, especially as it was weeks before Christmas). It might not seem like much, but in these days of the consumer getting screwed, it actually felt pretty good to get a quick and easy resolution. That misstep aside, I think the XBOX range of hardware is alright, anything else I'd definitely read a few reviews these days before buying, whereas at one time their hardware was the one thing I felt I could trust to impulse buy.
So long as they're making a profit on each unit sold, that shouldn't matter, the profit will still go towards paying off the R&D costs. Sure, it's not as profitable as selling the device plus a dozen games, but so long as they can match supply to demand and this is not an imminently finite resource, it still benefits them to be selling these to geeks for unrelated projects.
If they really want that to fly as a central part of the contract of sale, they're going to have to get game stores to enforce it by making me sign something when I buy one, otherwise it's trivial to argue that this is either not a part of the contract of sale or that it's an unfair term (because of the way it's added without them making it apparent to me and gives them an undue amount of control over what I do with my legally purchased goods).
When someone plugs your product in such a way that it is likely to sell more units, YOU THANK THEM.
Could be someone in marketing annoyed that a lone geek is doing a better job of selling the benefits of their hardware than they and their huge marketing budget are capable of, maybe? :) I'm only half joking - I'm a long-time XBOX gamer and currently have no intention of buying a Kinect for gaming, despite having watched the videos, read the reviews and heard about the glitzy launch party, but this new development opens up all kinds of other possibilities that might encourage me to invest in one, so it's already succeeding where MS's marketing department have failed.
I can understand them being annoyed at someone fiddling with their devices. Of course, that's not what was happening here, this was someone fiddling with his own device. Unless he broke into MS and did all the testing on their hardware, they have no right to tell him what he can and can't do with a piece of kit he bought and paid for. Want to retain control over the device? How about renting it instead of selling it. Of course they can try to prevent him using that kit with their services (Live, achievements, etc) as these are subject to specific rules, but the actual hardware is his, and if they don't like it there's not a lot they can do about it - whining doesn't win them any sympathy.
Because XBMC made the original XBOX look so bad. Maybe MS should realise there are people with a little more creativity and imagination out there than their own marketing/legal departments and see where this goes before stomping all over it. Something really innovative might come of this and MS could gain some goodwill by just not trying to shut it down. Goodwill used to be worth something to companies.
The only reason I could see for them caring is if demand was massively outsripping supply, meaning people using these for non-XBOX related purposes are blocking sales of units+games to XBOX gamers. At the moment that seems to be a non-issue, some places are sold out but it looks like it's still pretty easy to get hold of a device. Seriously, though, how big do they expect the uptake to be - I can imagine a handful of interested geeks playing with this in the first few months, at least until/unless some killer apps come along that make the $150 outlay worthwhile. They're no more hurting MS than people who buy this as a Christmas present and leave it in a cupboard for six weeks, or people who get bored with it and don't buy any more games after release - are these the next people on the hit list, who dare to buy a piece of technology and then refuse to buy additional products to use with that piece of technology?
Considering you'd still have to grow, feed and educate, train and equip them, I'm not sure cloning would be all that cheap when you can just recruit ready grown troops on the open market and elminate all costs other than the training and equipment (and this nicely side-steps the ethical questions around cloning).
I thought we already had this stuff over here (UK) for at least a few years. I know everywhere I go, cinemas, supermarkets, train stations etc. I see vending machines with teeth cleaning gum, although I will admit I've never been curious enough to investigate exactly what it is or how it works (the machines are usually in the men's room, and call me picky but I prefer not to buy gum I'm going to put in my mouth from a machine in a room that stinks of urine).
In case you missed it, the story was her reaction. We're all expected to silently take this crap like sheep, while she gets to blow up about it (sorry, poor choice of words). If you or I made any kind of fuss we'd be off to the back-room for interro^H^Hview (and probably miss flights/connections etc as a result).
More likely they just wanted to make their tedious jobs sound a little more interesting. "Hey, today I attended a meeting at COBRA!" Good for you. The stupid thing is, I bet there's not even a Cabinet Office Briefing Room Beta - they just realised that they could turn COBR into a "cool" acronym by appending an extra letter.
The worst part about policing and enforcement in this country is the move to automate everything. Now computers and other machines get to automatically act as judge, jury and executioner - watching our every move and issuing fines and penalty points if we ever overstep the mark. I'm loathe to suggest that police have much common sense, but at least with a real cop you have a chance of some common sense coming in to play in edge cases where you made an honest mistake or were left no choice, a machine is cold and works in shades of only black and white, guilty and yet-to-be-found guilty. I thought Skynet was meant to sieze power, not that we were going to just willingly let it enslave us.
If it ever affected them in any real way, don't you think they'd just put in place regulations that specifically let them bypass the checks (something along the lines of diplomatic immunity) citing that it affected their ability to effectively do their job (and ignoring the massive irony of what it means to everyone else trying to do their jobs)?
Haha, seriously? What's wrong with a VM running an old OS+browser combo. Are the spinning, flaming skull gifs animating too quickly on modern hardware?