Yeah, and scientists that say that they "only want to do research" don't realize how much salesmanship goes into getting grants. Musicians that just want to play don't realize how much salesmanship goes into getting gigs or a record deal. If you prefer to leave it up to sales to make it profitable, then you're paying someone else (hence, lowering the overall profit) to explain your beautiful piece of code. A straight-up salesman may be able to grease your customers better so that the purchase goes smoothly, but I would guess that he can't explain the product was well as the guy who coded it.

There's a lot to be said for dragging one's butt from the basement and interacting with customers, assuming that there's any capability to do so. Maybe you can't put your lead programmer in front of the customer but maybe one of his direct reports with a high understanding of the program and an ability to speak intelligently to the customer would create a better sales experience. (Of course, that direct report will get promoted sooner that way.) If you make a product that is intended to be sold to other humans in meatspace, some amount of responsibility should be yours to help explain and sell it. The best part about some interaction between design and customer relations is that it shortens the feedback loop.

Of course, you have to send someone that isn't going to tell the prospective customer to man up and use the command line every time there's a difficulty implementing a feature. :P

Although I can't vouch for the sound quality, there have been laser turntables since the late 1980's - although it was a while before they showed up for sale. A friend of mine (serious vinyl collector) found an article about them when we were in high school (demo at CES?), and we never saw the actual finished model advertised for sale until we were both back from college. The pro is that you don't have a needle dragging across the surface of your vinyl and wearing it down, and even some really old records that would otherwise be unplayable can be played on it. The con is that it was harder (at the time) to ignore dust particles and such, and a lot of the funny-colored records didn't play on it. I hope that the math has improved in 20 years, but there's no telling since I'm not a museum or a rich audiophile. Maybe the IRENE system that the Library of Congress uses (similar tech, but with conventional photography) could be ported to iPhone.

Doesn't the laissez faire capitalism model dictate that they do exactly this? With the threat of new bands forming at any time, demand for their product could inexplicably dry up at any moment.

Fine, yell "Poe's Law" and "shenanigans".

Honestly, I think bands would do well to provide quality service to fans, insuring that they still have fans. If musicians felt like they worked for their fans instead of the record company, there might not be such a disconnect between their actions and the economics of it all. If a band has a sufficient following on their website, why shouldn't they sell it there? Andy Partridge and Thomas Dolby are niche markets at best, but they're able to provide things now to their fans direct from their website that no record company executive would ever consider. Sure, it's not as convenient as iTunes or Amazon, but the crazy dedicated fans that every artist really wants are probably going to the band's website anyway.

I'm surprised that, since this is Slashdot, there weren't 300 "Zelda isn't an RPG because..." comments after this.

I am also surprised by two other things. I am surprised that despite the dozens of previews and reviews, you act like that you didn't know that Deadspace:Extraction was a rail shooter until after you bought it. Many of the previews talked about it trying to reach the same demographic as Resident Evil:The Umbrella Chronicles (which is also a rail shooter that is on Wii because Capcom's newest offering at the time, RE5 wasn't being developed for Wii). I am also surprised that you could pretend to believably compare the state of PC gaming to Wii gaming given the differences in demographics and control style. There is no reasonable way anyone can expect a mature title from a Nintendo game that wasn't shoehorned in from somewhere else, because on other systems, PC especially, the actual state of development is genuinely mature. Developers making a game for Wii are trying not to take a bath in red ink at this point. On PC, we've had over twenty years to develop what works and what sells. Nintendo, on the other hand, is constantly changing the playing field for itself. It makes it easier for them to profit, but it leaves third-party developers scrambling to make things work every singe development cycle. Maybe if a mouse and keyboard (not that you couldn't connect a USB keyboard) were standard you could have resource management sims then. I thought those didn't get done on anything you hook to a TV becase you can't read enough information on 480 lines of resolution.

I'd bet you're more likely to find mature titles on Wiiware than on a physical disk due the lower cost of entry for developers. Could you argue that "World of Goo" is a mature game, since we've had physics since before 1687?

Nice handle, oddly appropriate in this case. Do you even have any contact with children?

(Don't answer that - it was rhetorical and I don't really want to know. Ask yourself what kind of kids you interact with and decide for yourself.)

Granted, helicopter parents may totally funnel children into too much structured activity, but there are still lots of kids that have plenty of creativity. I don't see any problem with crayons yet, or Play-Doh, as long as the situation keeps kids from the sort of one-upmanship that would preclude it. If one older kid brings a DS or a PSP with him to a group, it can distract kids from playing with the simple stuff for a while. On the other hand, if that's what the group is doing, (crayons or clay or even blocks!) I've yet to see a real shortage of creativity. My oldest can be a problem for the a similar reason - he's almost always got a Bionicle or two with him, and not a spec, out-of-the-package one. Most of his Bionicles are borrowing heads and weapons from other guys, changed color schemes, extra weapons built with standard LEGO or Technic parts, or hybrids.

If you doubt the creativity of kids, try listening to them. I hope you will be pleasantly surprised, or maybe you have a bunch of dumbbells in your neighborhood. As far as the parents go - parents that play video games are probably still in the minority. Most of the parents that my wife and I know IRL watch a lot of "Big Brother" and "American Idol" and "Brooke Knows Best" and "Dancing with the Geico Cavemen Spectacular". Most of my serious video game playing adult friends fall into the "Kids? I haven't found a spouse I can tolerate yet!" category. I didn't count people who only played Wii sports for two hours at a party.

Another thing that strikes me is that you can't have a class of 20-30 kids in school and expect all of them to whip out dogs in a spaceship to the moon or a cow with wheels on it with their 8-pack of Crayolas. Some kids aren't going to be at the same place intellectually, some kids aren't going to have the same cultural context, some kids are only going to draw pictures about stuff they learned in Sunday school because their parents won't let them watch TV or play with the heathens next door, some kids don't read and will only generate TV related imagery, and so on. Kids are creative, but they're not all going to be at the same place - and I'm basing a lot of this on my own formative crayon time in the 70's. This is not a new problem. Do you suppose that James Naismith and Johannes Gutenberg had to listen to crap from city leaders about how basketball was keeping kids from being creative when playing outside with a ball and the printing press kept kids from embellishing their folk tales and oral history?

To your two points - probably not, and no. I could see how you might think this is a problem. Input lag of LCD monitors probably don't contribute to the problem with these games not selling. I am certain that Guitar Hero 2 includes a calibration screen where you could completely correct for lag. (Oddly enough, Guitar Hero 3 either does not have that or put it someplace hard for me to find...) I would assume that Rock Band does also, since Harmonix made GH2 (but not GH3 and up) and Rock Band. As for the CRT monitors not suffering from that problem, that is not always the case. I have a Samsung wide format CRT TV, and with my PS2 hooked up via component cable and Rock Band 2 running in Progressive/Widescreen, the correction is usually around 65. I assume that number is ms, but it could be some made-up metric. Hooked up to a standard CRT with composite cables, the correction is 0. As usual, Your Mileage May Vary, This was performed with guitarists on a closed course, I may have a crap TV, etc.

Since when do you let electricians _design_ your system? You should have actual engineers for that.

I will second wilby's comment and say that Electricians are not the problem. Any licensed contractor that's worth his salt will know what his capabilities are and act accordingly. The BICSI standards have been in place for a long time, and BICSI has done a great job getting the word out to both electricians and low voltage contractors about how to do things to industry standard. If someone wires CAT5 like it's something else, then you have a dumbass problem, not an electrician problem. All of the jack vendors have done a great job disseminating information about how to do CAT5, and several have certified installer programs aimed at getting people putting together a system, not just wires. If field personnel cannot avail themselves with current information then I wouldn't even trust them to put in a fluorescent dimmer or a thermostat made in the last ten years.

With this, and the RIAA stuff, what I'd really like to see is the punishment be some combination of actual replacement cost, reimbursement of documented legal fees, and community service helping out IP enforcement in some capacity. I'm tired of hearing about these insane unjustifiable damages with the sole intent of burdening the defendant far beyond their financial capability. If the defendant had $30K laying around, he could theoretically start a legitimate business instead of getting caught with the shady one. Is it too much to ask that people actually know in advance what the punishment is instead of finding out how many zeroes go on the end of the damage figure by the jury or judge's roulette wheel spin?

What's worse with this particular case is that since Call of Duty 3 XBox has been out for a while we're only talking about a $30 replacement cost, and the actual impact on Activision's initial investment is lower than had the guy been pirating CoD4. (If he was pirating CoD3:Wii, then we're talking $50 RC and I presume that was just a port and not a rebuilt game.) That makes $150,000 seem pretty crazy. The other $100,000 fines make me even more nervous, since TFA talks about some of them not having representation. As much as lawyers may give us the willies, not having them in some cases is a lot worse.