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Living Room / Re: CIA to sign 600 million dollar deal with Amazon
« Last post by 40hz on March 20, 2013, 09:41 AM »Wonder if they get streaming video and free second day shipping with that? 
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BartPE is also a very good alternative. 
Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy.
I think I can safely say that Super Meat Boy has been pirated at least 200,000 times. We are closing in on 2 million sales and assuming a 10% piracy to sales ratio does not seem unreasonable. As a forward thinking developer who exists in the present, I realize and accept that a pirated copy of a digital game does not equate to money being taken out of my pocket. Team Meat shows no loss in our year end totals due to piracy and neither should any other developer.
For the sake of argument, some of those people that did pirate Super Meat Boy could have bought the game if piracy didn’t exist but there is no actual way to calculate that lost revenue. It is impossible to know with certainty the intentions of people. With the SimCity fiasco and several companies trying to find new ways to combat piracy and stating piracy has negatively affected their bottom line I wonder if they’ve taken the time to accurately try to determine what their losses are due to piracy.
All loss in a retail setting is calculable because items to be sold are physical objects that come from manufacturers that have to be placed on shelves by employees. You have a chain of inventory numbers, money spent and labor spent that goes from the consumer all the way to the manufacturer. A stolen, broken, or lost item is an item that you cannot sell. In the retail world your stock is worth money.
In the digital world, you don’t have a set inventory. Your game is infinitely replicable at a negligible or zero cost (the cost bandwidth off your own site or nothing if you’re on a portal like Steam, eShop, etc). Digital inventory has no value. Your company isn’t worth an infinite amount because you have infinite copies of your game. As such, calculating worth and loss based on infinite inventory is impossible. If you have infinite stock, and someone steals one unit from that stock, you still have infinite stock. If you have infinite stock and someone steals 1 trillion units from that stock , you still have infinite stock. There is no loss of stock when you have an infinite amount.
Consumer confidence plays a very important role in how customers spend money. I think its safe to say that EA and Maxis do not have a lot of consumer confidence at this point. I think its also safe to say that the next EA/Maxis game is going to be a tough sell to people who experienced or were turned away by talk of frustration regarding SimCity.
As a result of piracy developers feel their hand is forced to implement measures to stop piracy. Often, these efforts to combat piracy only result in frustration for paying customers. I challenge a developer to show evidence that accurately shows implementation of DRM is a return on investment and that losses due to piracy can be calculated. I do not believe this is possible.
The reality is the fight against piracy equates to spending time and money combating a loss that cannot be quantified. Everyone needs to accept that piracy cannot be stopped and loss prevention is not a concept that can be applied to the digital world. Developers should focus on their paying customers and stop wasting time and money on non-paying customers. Respect your customers and they may in turn respect your efforts enough to purchase your game instead of pirating it.
for posting a link to Mr. Refenes' blog post. )Stop creepy cofounder ‘dating’ and start convincing someone you are awesome enough to work with
I had a phone call a couple weeks back with someone who was looking for a cofounder (not an uncommon thing, right?) I asked what he's been doing to find a cofounder and his response nearly made me spit out my coffee.
“I posted a few ads on job sites,” he said. “Then I'm interviewing the people who reply to see if they'd be a good cofounder.”
What? Are you serious? Like seriously serious? WTF?
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Deo posted it before somewhere here-tomos (March 20, 2013, 03:08 AM)
The internet has made it easier to do in many ways, but the decline of personal privacy has been here for a long time.-Jibz (March 19, 2013, 02:39 PM)
Anyone ever watch any old episodes of "The Twilight Zone" or "The Outer Limits"? Lots of those deal with these exact same issues.
I just watched "The Obsolete Man":
http://en.wikipedia....iki/The_Obsolete_Man
Not the exact same topic, but related and relevant.
Privacy is a control issue, and most issues seem to come around eventually to control.-Renegade (March 18, 2013, 09:48 PM)
The Outer Band Individuated Teletracer, or O.B.I.T., is a remarkable technology that can track and monitor any individual, anywhere, for any length of time. When a man is found dead, slumped over the machine, it and the military base where it is in use come under scrutiny. But what no one suspects is who built O.B.I.T. and why. And on that answer may hang the fate of civilization.
More Details On Copyright Register Maria Pallante's Call For Comprehensive, 'Forward-Thinking, But Flexible' Copyright Reform
from the details,-details,-details dept
On Friday, we had two stories breaking the news that the Register of Copyright is expected this week to call for comprehensive copyright reform, including both a slight reduction in term as well as some of other changes. It's somewhat surprising that (as far as I can tell), no other publications are reporting on this, considering the magnitude of this bit of news. There was a brief bit of speculation in Billboard, but most other publications have stayed silent so far.
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...the Copyright Office has released the full text of her speech at Columbia University from two weeks ago, in which she lays out her ideas in much greater detail. It's an interesting read, and I hope that most people here will take the time to read through the whole thing carefully before jumping into the discussion. There is a lot in there to process -- some of it good, some of it troubling, some of it that requires more thought and study. Assuming that Congress does move forward on this point, there is going to be an awful lot of back and forth over the next few years, and it wouldn't surprise me if it takes a decade or more before something is finally hammered out.
And if your using Open Source Code, don't that open a channel for hackers to figure out how to bypass it?-Tinman57 (March 18, 2013, 08:33 PM)
) security apps can only be deemed as trustworthy as the people who create and distribute them. And there are plenty of bogus security apps out there.Basically I've been saying the same thing for the last 10 years, and have been "boo'ed" over it too many times to count. So I just sit behind my computer wearing my tin-foil hat and watch as the world goes to hell in a handbasket....-Tinman57 (March 18, 2013, 07:50 PM)
I'd just like to separate the "Author" and the "Distributor". You can have opinions of what CNN tends to carry, but Bruce Schneier has been in the game enough to read no matter what outlet he shows up in.-TaoPhoenix (March 18, 2013, 09:56 AM)
Maxis GM: Our Vision Is More Important Than Our Customers & Lots Of People Love Our Crappy DRM
from the so,-so-much-wrong dept
Well, it's been several hours, so obviously someone must have done something stupid over at the SimCity franchise. I could run through a long list of links from our coverage of this debacle, but I'll make it easy on you. The key links are the launch debacle, the backlash, and the evidence that all of this is wholly unnecessary. That last one is important because during the initial stages of this muck up, EA/Maxis came out hard, saying that offline modes were logistically impossible because of all the cloud-based resources needed to run the games simulation calculations. The evidence in the link proves rather conclusively that that is absolutely not the case. In that post, I had suggested that it was time for the game's producers to finally come out with a strong mea culpa. Here is that mea culpa, from Maxis GM Lucy Bradshaw:
So, could we have built a subset offline mode? Yes. But we rejected that idea because it didn't fit with our vision. We did not focus on the "single city in isolation" that we have delivered in past SimCities. We recognize that there are fans – people who love the original SimCity – who want that. But we're also hearing from thousands of people who are playing across regions, trading, communicating and loving the Always-Connected functionality. The SimCity we delivered captures the magic of its heritage but catches up with ever-improving technology.
Okay, so it isn't so much a mea culpa as a, "Hey, customers, why don't you go outside and play hide and go f@#$ yourself!" ...
anyway. Sounds like good advice......., about1015+ years ago.-Ath (March 18, 2013, 03:55 PM)
Given the kind of results google returns, this seems pretty fishy.-f0dder (March 18, 2013, 10:02 AM)
BTW - A link could be useful...-Renegade (March 18, 2013, 06:38 AM)
