DISQUS

Artur, while the cost-benefit analysis is important for any business to make, I am sure Wolfire has found that the benefits outweigh the costs. Quite a few game developers have found it to be true.

As for effort, I found that it is quite easy to write cross-platform code. Write the code once, compile it anywhere. I'm using C++ and SDL. I can enter one command, and out comes two builds: GNU/Linux and Win32. Obviously it would be much harder for anyone who uses DirectX and Win32-specific code, but if you're running a business, it should be clear that you don't want to limit your marketing opportunities, so stop doing that. B-)

Richard, not to start a flame war, but GNU/Linux is also written by a lot of American programmers, and I'm sure a lot of code in OS X is also outsourced.

Stability, efficiency, and user friendliness are arguable. The last one is subjective. The first two have plenty of counterexamples that would demonstrate OS X as less stable and less efficient.

iTunes and Quicktime aren't critical applications. I've seen plenty of people who don't use them on their machines. Entire schools get away without putting those apps on their machines.

All that said, I see no problem with supporting both GNU/Linux AND OS X.

Thanks for posting about the redesign. I now have some things to think about when it comes to the design of my blog and my website in general.

GBGamess last blog post..Indie Business Rules: Relationships and Service

LOL! I've been thinking about all of those points.

And I guess that could be your #5. If YOU think of something or notice something, write your own blog post about it before someone else does. B-)

Hah, I've dreamt of iterators and for loops. Can you give any details of what the problem was that you solved?

I once had a crash problem only to learn that I had to use a while loop instead of a for loop to iterate through a list to destroy the objects. In the for loop, erase() returned a new iterator to the next item in the list, but then the for loop would increment that iterator, which resulted in crashes when I would try to remove an object that wasn't in the list. I have encountered this crash a few times since then and recognized it for what it was, so the good news is that the experience of staying up that night means I solve the same problem in seconds from now on. B-)

Actually that is 177 online Pac-man clones. There are quite a few more games written in languages such as QBasic, Java, and C++ that don't play in a web browser.

And I like Pac-man. B-)

The explosions are particularly cool.

****WHY are there no investors flocking to develop high-quality content that is not protected by DRM? IF there is another way, this is a HUGE opportunity for someone to make a lot of money. WHERE are the new business models? Grokster is just a distribution technology, it doesn't PRODUCE content.

How is one supposed to tie music or movies to services if anyone with a digital editor can untie them and post the untied content!!!!! ****

That was from Solveig Singleton on May 15th in a comment on a previous TL post. So besides asking audiolunchbox (which offers ogg as well as mp3), I guess the query can be posed to all of the compaines listed above, too. B-)

watcher: I think it is very difficult to have multiple phone companies or multiple cable companies in an area if each company is expected to string up their own lines. So now the problem becomes one of infrastructure and who owns it. There isn't an incentive to spend tons of money when your competitors can get access to those lines, but at the same time customers probably won't like having redundancy in terms of wiring to their homes just so they can have a choice of competitors.

Bigger companies have the means to create some awesome infrastructure. Smaller companies don't. The free market would mean that bigger companies can become even more competitive, leaving smaller companies to either die or merge. Hence, duopolies and why AT&T; is now pretty much composed of its baby bells again.

When a company that provides such services gets large enough, the barrier to entry gets too high, I think. How does a new competitor enter a market in which they must first build up their own infrastructure to compete with an existing infrastructure? When selling regular products, you simply need a store front and the customers come to you, or you use some kind of a mailing system like USPS or UPS or Fedex. Those services don't need to lease the roads to send their delivery trucks. On the other hand, electric, phone, and cable companies get pretty much a guaranteed monopoly because once you put the infrastructure in place, it is like putting up your own private road and barring other companies from using it.

I once again admit ignorance of the details. Perhaps competition between telephone companies can exist without legally requiring one company to lease its lines to the other company at cost, but if it was possible, I imagine we would have seen it by now. The only other alternative would be government control of the lines, leasing them to any company, but then that goes back to larger government and regulations.

Government enforced net neutrality is probably not a good thing, but so far the market hasn't shown me that I can go to Google and MSN without worrying about Yahoo having somehow paid to degrade my experience with its competitors. Or that I could go to a website supporting a political view without another view somehow getting the ISPs to degrade its opposing viewpoint to the point of restricting free speech.

And competition only works if an ISP can spring up on the basis that it supports all manner of speech and allow me to see the Green or communist or anarchist or libertarian or whatever party that the other ISP for some reason has troubles with due to sufficient GOP/DNC money. I doubt such a competitor will be able to exist since I don't see how the infrastructure can be built. I don't see cities being happy having multiple sets of cable wires, especially if one set is only marginally better.

I don't know, but audiolunchbox.com seems to be doing fine without DRM. Ask them how they manage to stay afloat when any of their customers can just redistribute their content.

Oh right. Customers. As opposed to acting like their customers are criminals out to rip them off any chance they get. Fancy that.

The region encoding turns the movie industry into the definition of a cartel, as a friend of mine likes to say.

I really liked this quote from Singleton: "The idea that there are two classes of content consumer, the determined pirate and the honest consumer, and nothing in between, is nonsense. There are in my experience precious few in the latter category, especially in certain age groups."

How about acknowledging the fact that most people don't like being considered a criminal first? Treat your customers like criminals out to rip you off, and you'll have criminals as customers.

I use Gnu/Linux as my main operating system, and Flash support is terrible. The audio is always a few seconds delayed so watching videos or playing games, assuming they work in the first place, is always a terrible experience. The latest Flash version available for Gnu/Linux users is 7.0, and apparently 8.0 is never coming. It is just skipping to the next version, but only after Windows and Mac OS X get theirs first. And if/when it does come out for Gnu/Linux, I have no idea if the experience will be any better.

So thanks for posting that tip. I've gone to a number of websites that turn out to be nothing but a black background because it has features that my version of Flash doesn't provide. No error message pops up or anything. So I just leave the site. It's rarely been worthwhile for me to boot up a Windows machine just to go to a website that uses Flash.

I think the argument against regulation is clear, but no one seems to have an answer about potential abuses. There aren't many ISPs where I lived, and I don't believe there is that much choice where I am now. If I want high speed Internet for cheap, I must go with an ISP that has terrible customer service and only one package. If I want good service, I have to go with an ISP that doesn't have very good speeds available in any of its packages.

So if the ISP I pick starts to degrade the service for a particular website, such as Google and Yahoo vs MSN, my choice would be to go to a different crappy ISP that will probably do the same with whatever other sites it chooses. That's not really a choice at all, is it?

If one business pays for better service, what guarantee do I have that the service of another business won't arbitrarily be degraded by the ISP? Market pressures would be a better argument if there was some choice involved.

I'm convinced that regulation is bad, but I don't believe anyone here has addressed the concerns of the net neutrality proponents. Each article I read argues a completely different point entirely.

I'll admit that the idea of regulating network neutrality isn't so appetizing anymore, but I do feel that James' arguments seemed to have been written in a deceptive kind of way. It felt like I was only reading one side of the argument without much commentary on why the other side is wrong. I'm not saying that it was deceptive, as I clearly don't know as much about it as you might, but I'm simply pointing out that when I read the articles, I felt like something was missing or being danced around.

And Heritage? A admittedly conservative think-tank? With a Rush Limbaugh quote at the top promoting it? It's not exactly inspiring me with confidence that it would be unbiased and fact based, either.

Still, I now have a feeling that Internet regulation would be bad and that the doom and gloom about the loss of network neutrality is likely exaggerated.

I'm not familiar with PFF, but I would argue that copyright is not well understood by the general population and surprisingly just as well understood by many copyright creators/owners. Because of this, whenever someone provides a plain language explanation of it, it is a lot easier to grasp.

"We need copyright extensions because otherwise no one would be able to make anything and companies would go out of business" is a lot easier to accept than trying to explain the nuances of copyright, the public domain, and the problems with continuing the extensions of copyright. Sound bites are easier to swallow than dissertations.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that you wrote a good article. I originally read it at jerrybrito.com. Copyright is something that a lot more people are able to get involved in since the advent of citizen publishing such as blogs, personal websites, and online journals. I think a big problem is the lack of education on the topic. The most people learn is that they are not allowed to make excessive copies of pages from books while doing research papers. No one learns of the importance of public domain works, and I remember reading that the major media industries were trying to fund education that would be favorable to their point of view.

Unfortunately the danger to most people isn't obvious. It's copyright law, after all. A large chunk of it isn't actually part of written law so much as court rulings. Any news on the topic will probably be ignored as something that "doesn't have anything to do with me".

Actually, Mike, if an independent game developer tries to sell his/her games online, the idea that he/she has to pay extra money to guarantee that the bits still get to their destination, something that TCP already is supposed to guarantee, is a bit absurd.

On the other hand, I was a bit suspicious that moveon.org didn't have an actual name for the legislation, nor any links to references about it. Still, I have had few reasons to not trust them before so I signed the petition.

I'm glad there are counter-points to read. I'll look into them. I hope that I don't come to a different conclusion and regret signing the petition prematurely, but I'm open to the possibility. Thanks for giving me the chance.

I haven't had a chance to see Vista in action yet, but I was able to check out Xgl. Apparently you can run it on today's hardware, which Vista supposedly won't even be able to boot from.

It also makes sense to pay for it. Domains are cheap, and hosting is also cheap, but it still makes it look more professional and more serious when you can tell someone to go to mybandsite.com rather than myband.somefreedomain.com.

It at least shows anyone interested that this band is serious. It's a good investment.

There are a few Gnu/Linux implementations of Expose, as well. I've used Skippy, but I thought it was lacking on XFree86. I haven't tried the advanced X.org version, however.

It sucks to lose your own things, but it definitely sucks more to lose someone else's. And in this case, it is even worse.