And on a side note, I have seen the lead developer of Paradox personally ban someone.

Your specific example notwithstanding, the wiser developers know full well that "nigh unanimous" complaints on a forum, in general, means "unanimous only among the people complaining", given the people who are happy with (or just don't mind) whatever "unanimously" needs to be changed aren't going to manically gush on and on about every bit of minutia they love about the game.

In retail, there is a saying that goes like this "For everyone one customer who complains, there are 2 who silently decide never to visit your store again so you best take care of the person who complains as you'll loose 3 customers instead of 2."

I think that forums do provide useful input, but it has to be filtered. If people do have opinions about certain items it means that they can be changed for the next major release, but maybe not at all in the way that what's said on the forum.

I think if an indie dev does not read his forums and personally respond to posts, he won't be an indie developer for long.

Yes, the dev should not personally moderate the forums, but they have to understand that they are going to have a small player base to start with because they are most likely a niche game and in order to continue sales it is imperative they have some response to concerns and quests by the community. If you alienate the people who have actually bought your product with a wall of silence, then they will think "this douche doesn't care that I spent $20 on his game... f' him!"

Now there are some people you aren't going to please at all no matter what you say and most of the time you are going to reply "feature was WAD" was as designed and "patch is forthcoming and will be ready when it is ready" but it shows that you are trying and that is good enough for some.

Also, as a small time developer you aren't going to have paid QA staff and 9 times out of 10, your player base is going to be the ones reporting bugs through the forums.

A really good (no longer small) company is Paradox interactive where it is not uncommon for a developer to respond to a post complaining about a game saying "That shouldn't be happening. Could you send me a save game so I can take a look for myself?"

And as far as niche goes... Paradox is very niche and they are going strong after 10 years because they are active in their forums and people really respect them for it.

Did't Microsoft already try this idea, but the other social networking sites have just left them in the dust.

Yes, but they did it the worst way possible.

Require a hotmail or MSN account. Require IE and for most of the usable features. Require the site hosting openID to use IIS and .NET stuff.

Also... It never worked.

There's nothing novel or technically interesting about Facebook. It is not the be-all and end-all of useful tools. It's a way to build a vanity page for people who are too lazy to learn HTML.

Hrm... I actually use Facebook as a news aggregating tool. All websites have a FB stream these days and it is an easy way to keep track of game development and patches as I'd rather not frantically hit F5 on some forums everyday to see a dev blog or patch notes that may only happen once a month. Its an easy way to stay informed of something in a "fire and forget" mode.

In fact, I'd say 25% of the info I read is from friends and the other 75% is from news feeds. Heck you can follow a Slashdot feed on there. And FB mobile is better way to view news feeds than most RSS feed apps and mobile browsers.

The typical home user rarely needs to do any really heavy number-crunching - the closest they get is physics in games.

For the past 5 to 8 years there has been a "rasterization vs. ray tracing" debate in the game developing and graphics community (with ray tracing in real time in games only being a theoretical pipe dream until recently).

If someone were to make ray tracing feasible, cheap, and practical for either a console or desktop PC, then yes... Home users will need that number crunching as Ray Tracing is a very embarrassing parallel task.

But that might not be for some time...

Technological advancement is peaking. The 20th century, the era-when-everything-happened is over. It was an aberation caused by huge amounts of cheap petroleum energy. With cheap oil depleting, the huge technology positive-feedback loop slows and stops.

Really now? What about nations which are not dependent on oil such as France, Germany, and Japan. Yes peak oil would most likley be a pain for international shipping, but nations who had the forethought to actually build nuclear power plants and decent mass transit systems will shrug and keep on going.

Plus there isn't any money. The banking system is fundamentally broken, nobody trusts that due-process rule-of-law applies to the financial sector anymore. And one-by-one all the industries in the USA are going down like the housing industry in a chain reaction. Government will frozen and powerless to do anything to stop it from happening.

Government? Whose government? Are we talking about? You talk as if the past 200 years of advances were primarily made by people who lived on Washington, DC's payroll.

The world will advance. It will adapt and it will progress... The statement you should be saying that the world will not progress should say "The United States will not progress, while China, Japan, and Europe keep going."

Its not like China is short on cash.

So soldiers are trained to be like teenagers? That is creepy.

Most soldiers are teenagers.

(At least the recruits)

Get a formal education and you get a much broader foundation.

That said, a car mechanic, a plumber, and house maid have better job security than college grad these days.

Give this book some serious thought:

http://www.thelightsinthetunnel.com/

If I had a chance to talk with myself 20 years ago and tell them how to live their life I would say the following:

Join the military for a few years. You'll have health insurance for life.
Don't take on debt for college.
Buy a house early and pay it off.
Get a job that you cannot be outsourced from.

Yeah college is nice, but in 20 years from the point you have graduated, you might think different if you found yourself laid off from a job once though un-outsource..

Anyways... Not to ramble, but most knowledge jobs will be outsourced or contracted in 20 years and it won't matter if you have that piece of paper or not. Some guy in India or China will have your job because it was cheaper.

lets say all of my views and information is made up. i still have much more spine than you, since i have the guts to actually voice it myself, instead of posting anonymous like spineless cowards.

Maybe he was too lazy to log on or trust the terminal he was on?

Also, its not that hard to just make up throw away account. So simply posting as anon doesn't invalidate the poster.

Of course he didn't have a valid point but it had nothing to whether or not he logged on.

No, this is completely wrong. If you copy the characters- i.e. Pacman, then it IS copyright infringement, that is Namco's IP.

No. Characters are not covered by copyright, but the media about them.

In theory, you could write your own fanfiction of "Harry Potter" and publish it as long as you don't use any source material of the original books and not violate copyright.

You can be sure as heck to be violating a trademark though.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Can_you_get_a_copyright_on_a_character

Why isn't it a copyright violation. He used their characters, their name (SuperPacman came out in 1982), and mechanic. This about as much of a derivative work as you get.

IANAL but there has been quite a bit of hoo doo about this in the 1970s over board games. From my recollection, the courts determined that you can copyright the art and words, but you can't copyright the rules or the design of the game itself.

Recently Hasbro filed suit against Scrabulous over the copyright infringment of Scrabble. (source)

The courts said that Scrabble was a trademark but the game itself was not in which the company in question simply changed their name of the copycat game.

In that regard, anyone could take say super mario brothers or pac man, and as long as they use their own grpahics, game code, and art, can basically create a copy cat of sorts.

Same thing applies to this issue the article brings forth. He probably shouldn't have used the word "Pac" tho as it might be trademarked.

Color me stumped.

No. The answer is obvious.

This shuttle vehicle is designed to retrieve satellites deemed too risky to fall back to earth in any shape or form.

Also... It has the ability to retrieve foreign satellites. This is more of a chilling effect as they seem to want everyone to know they have this ability so before Russia or China decided to send up anything of note in the spy department that they will have to be aware that the Americans can pull it down to find out what makes it tick.

It makes sense this thing is unmanned as such satellites have been known to be able to self destruct if it is believed to be falling back to earth anyways.

Someone once used a car to kill someone.

I don't think anyone has used a car to kill just about everything that moves in a city.

A rich lawyer or CEO is NOT the equal of a McDonalds burger flipper that studied liberal arts in college. The rich lawyer has a job, the CEO has a job, and they are both rich; the burger flipper cannot argue a court case reliably or run a company (or gracefully drop it if it's destined to fail-- some CEOs are repeatedly hired by companies that are winding down to make this process graceful; others just suck at their jobs). Likewise the lawyer probably would need some training to flip burgers; though this is a lot less training and a LOT less upkeep than entering and staying in the legal profession.

The key point people should remember is that the CEOs and lawyers are able to make their income off the collective wellbeing of society.

As in... If the CEO and laywer lived in Somalia, then they would not really have much to do in the way of income. So arguably, they should pay their fair share of their income to support such a way of life to the rest of society so that they themselves don't have to worry about the collapse of said society (yes I'm being over dramatic, but if there were no laws or a functioning government and society than CEO's and laywers would just be as bad off)