BINGO. That was the Jerry I knew. I visited his home once back in the 90s and it was quite an adventure. Absolutely brilliant on a wide array of subjects and never one to miss a chance to show that off.

I wrote about this in my good-bye piece to Jerry on slashcomment.com. Jerry (and I) knew Art Lazere from Northgate and convinced them to make substantial changes to the original OmniKey keyboard. I preferred the OmniKey Ultra (which was mainly what I asked for) and he preferred a modified Ultra-T that had a thin Enter key. Thankfully, after a very long hiatus, and lots of searching, mechanical keyboards are back in vogue and I'm typing this now on a Corsair K95 that feels as good as the Northgate's and, of course, loaded with more features.

I knew Jerry for over 30 years and while I can easily see how people could have trouble with him, my experience was the exact opposite. https://slashcomment.com/every... Jerry got a bit more edgy in the latter years, but so have most of the people I know as everything has become more polarizing. I can tell you that he was absolutely among the smartest people I've met and I've met a pretty good swath of smart people. The KEY distinction I found is that, as an intellectual, he had a hell of a time dealing with ..... let's be blunt, ignorant people. If you couldn't defend a position you claimed to support he'd eat you alive. If you could support that position, he'd start by trying to roll over you, but would ultimately listen and consider the viewpoint. I can also tell you from first-hand experience that Jerry went out of his way to help others. I'm one of them.

It's amazing to me that people really haven't caught onto the combination of RSS and e-mail. I guess that speaks a lot to the rumored decline of e-mail. I use Blogtrottr to manage dozens of feeds and control the tags to that Gmail can cleanly place them all into nice folders that make sense. I then blitz through the headers and delete posts I read or have no interest in. I'm OCD and the readers I never liked as 90% of them just marked things as read and kept the articles there cluttering up the interface until they expired. Doing it by e-mail gives me incredible control, especially in Gmail and even more so when I save the articles. I hate when I find nice news/content sites that don't have the option of RSS. It really makes me think twice (or more) about the site as I know I'm not going to visit it anywhere near as often without a feed. Just not going to happen. RSS must have had an identity crisis at some point. It has all the pieces we need, but just didn't catch on like it should have (and still could).

We saw this a bit ago (we're film press) and enjoyed it thoroughly. There were a few scenes that were patently ridiculous, but that's almost to be expected from Hollywood. I found Damon to be perfect for the role. The visuals were, of course, stunning. http://slashcomment.com/entert...

The only issues with golf are the outrageous prices and the elitist people behind it all. When I first moved to my dream house neighborhood, the local private club called (this was in 1997) and offered me a membership. A mere $35,000 and that was for a NON-voting membership. Understand, I played golf in high school and had the good fortune to have actually played this course a few times every season (two schools were able to use it as their home course). I loved it, but not "I can buy a car for that money" loved it. This was INSANE and that didn't include anything else like greens fees which would run another $100 a round. No flipping way. Then, in 2012 they called and offered me a membership for $5,000 which included a number of amenities but I still wasn't listening. I'm not paying anyone thousands of dollars for something I may or may not use. Think about golf. You walk around on a nice lawn and hit a ball. There's just no way this should cost more than $40 a round per person. Carts should be extra, of course and there are other chances for extras which I'd consider if I didn't feel raped by everything else. A foursome is on a hole for all of 20 minutes. Let's call it 30 to be safe. Even if no one could tee off until you cleared the hole entirely, that's 8 people an hour heading out. and about a 10 hour day or 80 people a day paying $40 or $2,400 a day assuming no other extras like carts which you know are a given. No one works the course itself during hours other than the pro shop and there you're lucky if it's one person. Let's pay them well at $20 an hour. That leaves $2,200 a day to pay for water bills, a greenskeeper, equipment, etc. Watering the course runs about $180 a day. That still leaves $2,020 a day. Ground crew can't make more than $400 a day. So now we're at $1,620 every day and we're running out of fixed costs. So that's nearly $600,000 a year still left over on a plan at bare-bottom pricing. $100,000 a year for fertilizer? I can't even begin to imagine that. Compared to most any other business you can think of, I'd can't imagine a golf course is all that stressful. So now add in the high profit golf carts, food, the pro shop profits. Come on.

You say every single argument can't be applied to this? Wrong. As I posted above:

That this studio did this pretty much tells me that I made a huge mistake in supporting them back when I first bought this game for my Android phone. I won't do it again.

I've been in the industry since the mid-80s. I owned the largest (and first) third-party quality assurance testing company in the games industry. I've written about and spoken about the "impact" of piracy professionally for nearly 30 years now and the story has NEVER changed. Piracy of the type discussed is a fallacy and anyone that believes otherwise fails to take into consideration the most basic elements of their position:

1. The assumption that, denied access, "pirates" will pay for copies. Most people who believe this also believe it's a 1-to-1 relationship. Every person who downloads it illegally, if they couldn't, would choose to buy the game. That's ludicrous and flat-out WRONG. No one has EVER proved that those who don't pay, would pay. Many people, given access, do download games and it's been proven that huge numbers of those who do, do so simply because they can. Many think they'll take a look and see if the game is worth investing in. In other words, for many it's a form of MARKETING. Smart companies recognize this and move to leverage it.

2. "We lost X dollars to piracy". Bull. Virtually all of us had parents who told us, "Never count your money before it's in the bank." You cannot steal something from someone that they don't have in the first place. The various industry groups who talk about theft miss this key point. When people break into your bank account and steal your money then it's theft. Until that happens it's not theft no matter how you try to rationalize it. Piracy is, and always will remain, a cost of doing business. You accepted it when you got into the business and now you want to complain? Get over it. If you can't pay the price then you made the mistake yourself and you're in the wrong business.

3. Piracy is always bad. Countless real world examples exist of companies and individuals heavily benefitting from so-called piracy. As Neil Gaiman so famously pointed out, think about your favorite book. Did you buy it? For the vast majority of people the answer to that is no. They borrowed the book from a friend, were given it as a gift, read it from the library, "pirated" it, etc. However, later a huge number of those people did buy another book from the writer or told friends they need to read it and many of those did buy it. In my first example of this (which I've recounted many times), the top football sim in the late 80s was a game called NFL Challenge. It cost $129 at the time. It was pretty amazing packaging but it was out of reach of most people (in part due to horrific licensing of the then totally confused NFL who didn't understand the reach of PC games). The game was heavily copy protected. It sold 250,000 copies year in, year out (which in those days made it a huge success). Then one year they put out a data disk which cost just $19.95 (and most of that was profit due to much reduced percentages on licensing only the NFLPA license). They sold exponentially more copies of the data disk than the game which told them they had a "piracy issue". At first they were aghast. Then they realized this was fantastic. They made a higher profit from the data disk which more people could afford and, as a result, they dropped the copy protection from the game and started carefully suggesting that it was okay to acquire it by any means. They then changed their business model to putting out lots of data disks. Hmm..... Lastly you stated that this was just a "fun experiment". Again, wrong. From their own release, "we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers." This belies their own position on this and clearly shows this wasn't just a "fun experiment". They judged and preached to these people. Plain and simple. I paid for the game way back. As I noted, I won't support this company any longer. I firmly believe that if you cannot understand the most basic of economics and marketing then I see no point in believing you'll be the kind of company I can be glad to be associated with as a consumer.

That this studio did this pretty much tells me that I made a huge mistake in supporting them back when I first bought this game for my Android phone. I won't do it again.

I've been in the industry since the mid-80s. I owned the largest (and first) third-party quality assurance testing company in the games industry. I've written about and spoken about the "impact" of piracy professionally for nearly 30 years now and the story has NEVER changed. Piracy of the type discussed is a fallacy and anyone that believes otherwise fails to take into consideration the most basic elements of their position:

1. The assumption that, denied access, "pirates" will pay for copies. Most people who believe this also believe it's a 1-to-1 relationship. Every person who downloads it illegally, if they couldn't, would choose to buy the game. That's ludicrous and flat-out WRONG. No one has EVER proved that those who don't pay, would pay. Many people, given access, do download games and it's been proven that huge numbers of those who do, do so simply because they can. Many think they'll take a look and see if the game is worth investing in. In other words, for many it's a form of MARKETING. Smart companies recognize this and move to leverage it.

2. "We lost X dollars to piracy". Bull. Virtually all of us had parents who told us, "Never count your money before it's in the bank." You cannot steal something from someone that they don't have in the first place. The various industry groups who talk about theft miss this key point. When people break into your bank account and steal your money then it's theft. Until that happens it's not theft no matter how you try to rationalize it. Piracy is, and always will remain, a cost of doing business. You accepted it when you got into the business and now you want to complain? Get over it. If you can't pay the price then you made the mistake yourself and you're in the wrong business.

3. Piracy is always bad. Countless real world examples exist of companies and individuals heavily benefitting from so-called piracy. As Neil Gaiman so famously pointed out, think about your favorite book. Did you buy it? For the vast majority of people the answer to that is no. They borrowed the book from a friend, were given it as a gift, read it from the library, "pirated" it, etc. However, later a huge number of those people did buy another book from the writer or told friends they need to read it and many of those did buy it. In my first example of this (which I've recounted many times), the top football sim in the late 80s was a game called NFL Challenge. It cost $129 at the time. It was pretty amazing packaging but it was out of reach of most people (in part due to horrific licensing of the then totally confused NFL who didn't understand the reach of PC games). The game was heavily copy protected. It sold 250,000 copies year in, year out (which in those days made it a huge success). Then one year they put out a data disk which cost just $19.95 (and most of that was profit due to much reduced percentages on licensing only the NFLPA license). They sold exponentially more copies of the data disk than the game which told them they had a "piracy issue". At first they were aghast. Then they realized this was fantastic. They made a higher profit from the data disk which more people could afford and, as a result, they dropped the copy protection from the game and started carefully suggesting that it was okay to acquire it by any means. They then changed their business model to putting out lots of data disks. Hmm.....

I've posted a nostalgic look back at LucasArts. They were a client of my game testing company and I also was a member of the press during their most creative years. I remember these guys well. You can find the post at http://slashcomment.com/entertainment/good-bye-lucasarts/