But I fully intend to pay the NY Times subscription fee. Despite all the bitching we do, they are still the one of the primary go to news sources for me and for many others, and they are head and shoulders above most of the competition.
I won’t like paying it, especially since I know it is free, but I’ve always held a sort of firm line on this sort of thing. I don’t download illegal music even though I could, and never have. I buy the cd and import it, or I buy a digital copy. I don’t use hacked warez, and if there is shareware out there that I use and like, I gladly send them 10-15 bucks when they ask for it. I don’t watch pirated videos. It isn’t because I have money to burn (I don’t) or because I am some super moral being (a quick perusal of this blog will dispel that notion rather rapidly), but simply because I believe that if I like something, the only way people will continue to make the product and continue to provide me with what I like is to buy it. That’s really the only thing that matters. If the NY Times doesn’t make money, they will cease to exist. The only way I can help to keep that from happening is to buy their product.
The problem I have is that often times you are punished for this- I am going to pay for the Times, but now I am going to have to find a way to work around the paywall in order to quote them and provide links so that those of you who do not pay for the service can still access some form of the article. I’m having a similar sort of punishment the last few nights with Dragon Age: Origins. For reasons that remain a mystery, even though I have bought the program and registered it, it still requires me to have the disc in the computer to run. That makes no sense to me- it should be disabled as soon as you register. Only paying customers have this problem, because I could easily go to any warez site and get a no-cd hack. But I don’t, because that’s just not how I roll. I’m sure mistermix could explain why this is, and it probably has to do with DRM.
I know that DougJ and Mistermix are focusing on the ham-handed nature of the paywall rollout, but I do think it is important for those of you who value the work the Times and other folks provide to realize why you should, if you can, pay for it.
cyntax
Well there’s your problem: you’re supposed to be playing DA2.
But I know what you mean. I remember taking my console version of DA:O with the hard drive over to a friend’s house to play on his console—wouldn’t work. The overly prescriptive DRM software thought I was trying to pull one over on EA, when I was trying to do what amounted to a product demo, oh well.
rb
Seems to me the no-CD crack is different from the broader issue – you’ve already bought the game.
WereBear
Hear hear! Artists & writers have a tough enough struggle… it’s not right they don’t get paid for it, either.
John Cole
@rb: Worried that if there is a problem down the line I won’t have any standing because I used the crack.
cleek
Steam users don’t have that problem. sure, they have different problems, but not that one.
Jane2
I don’t mind paying for subscriptions to digital media, but I won’t pay the same amount as I would for a bricks and mortar product, because that production and distribution cost is just not there. I have NYT Reader at work, and it’s a very expensive product, considering that online and paper reading habits are very different.
The Guardian charges 6 bucks a year for an enhanced iPhone app and it’s well worth it. No, it’s not the entire newspaper, but I don’t want that, either.
wvng
They just gave me a free year, courtesy of Lincoln Towncars. I would really like to pay them, but not $200. $50 would be fine, given my amount of use.
Same thing with federal taxes. I would happily pay what IO would have been paying without the Bush tax cuts, and the FICA cut that just went into effect. And I’ll bet millions of Americans who are comfortably employed would do the same.
Sentient Puddle
@cyntax: I don’t know, I’ve heard quite a number of people bitch loudly and obnoxiously that Dragon Age II is total sucktitude compared to Origins. I think they’re total morons, but you can’t assume that people are really intending to play the sequel right now.
That and there are people who still have yet to finish Origins. I had to prod more than a few people to do that so I could tell them how I saw some characters from Origins (i.e., Alistair) without spoiling things around the end.
Sportelle
$15 a month (excuse me, every four weeks) seems fair to me, and is a huge discount over the print edition.
Bob
You can directly link to an article without having a subscription so blogs can continue to direct people to original articles.
meh
as for your dragon’s age issue…you can use a program called daemon tools to burn an ISO image of your cd and mount it to a virtual drive. Basically what it does is burn a “copy” of your cd’s image, which it then mounts to a virtual drive (i.e. the Q drive – or whatever designation you want to call it). Then every time the game asks for the disc, it will be pointed to the virtual drive and the burned copy. I understand you were just making a point and weren’t necessarily looking for a workaround, but here it is anyway…
Brachiator
I’m willing to pay for the NY Times, but not their current stupid model, which strangely charges more if you read the paper on a smartphone or iPad than if you get the physical paper. This is just stupid.
The Wall Street Journal gives you access to the online edition if you subscribe to the print version, but does not make it easy for you to subscribe to the online version only.
And in other major stupidity, even though the Times of London has a great obituary for Elizabeth Taylor, you can’t get to it unless you pay. Great photo of Liz in a major sexy dress, with husband Eddie Fisher.
At some point, someone is going to find a way to use the Internets intelligently to deliver news without bonehead access limitations. But it ain’t Murdoch and his Daily, and it ain’t the NY Times.
Comrade Javamanphil
@WereBear: Agreed however I do object to having most of my payment go to a bunch of no-value producing middlemen. Better business paradigms for artists, please!
Dave
@cleek: Steam drives me up a river sometimes. They’ve gotten better though…used to be if you lost internet connectivity, your games were dead.
Dave
DRM is nothing more than punishing people who actually buy the product.
zzyzx
I’m annoyed that I haven’t received the Lincoln ad yet…
paradox
Jesus on his electric scooter, John, I understand but have y’all seen the prices they want? Oh my fucking God, what am I, Warren Buffet? For their cringing, wannabe, shitcan journalism? Never.
I’ve been shut out for months on another technical problem, what I miss I easily find in other routes to their site. Not only are the cretins missing a viable alternative business model, they’re usurious greedy bastards while failing.
Bye the bye, I don’t have pirated music or warez on any of my machines. I have in fact given money to the Drupal people. We’re not that far apart, I just won’t get ripped off for their shit, and their business and code strategy is ass backwards, to put it charitably, so as usual, what does the New York Times get? No fokkin’ respect.
daveNYC
@Sentient Puddle: No shame in still working on Origins. I got done with the slog that is the Deep Roads after two days of hammering away (and this is with a three mage party). Did the elves next and they were a relative cakewalk. Kill It With Fire, and There Is No Kill Like Overkill are two tropes that work for every situation.
And I second rp: You bought the game, get yourself the no-CD hack. One of the worst things about PC gaming is the requirement to put the CD in for almost every game. Of course I’m mostly on the Xbox now, so that’s a requirement for pretty much everything there too, but that’s a console.
Kristine
This writer thanks you.
cyntax
@Sentient Puddle:
Oh, I’ve got some complaints about DA2. What I think they did well was improve a lot of the game mechanics like combat, voicing the main character, balancing out the various classes (though dual wielding rogues seem a bit over-powered now).
Where DA2 disappoints for me is that the opportunities for interaction with the other characters are much more limited. It’s not like DA:O where you can choose to strike up a conversation in camp whenever you like. I found the role-playing a nice break from fighting through various levels. And Bioware still does that thing where most of the enemies for a given level are pretty easy to deal with until the final battle, and then the “boss fight” can be brutal. The disparity there doesn’t make for enjoyable gameplay.
Jim Pharo
For me, it’s a chance to determine what NYT access really is worth. Without any payment required, it only had to worth my time — and frankly more often than not I didn’t find it met even that requirement.
I want to see how, exactly it’s implemented (remembering John’s wisdom that a lot of companies see value in screwing their best customers), AND how much I’ll miss having it. If it turns out that I don’t really miss it (at least enough to cough up the $$), I suspect the NYT will find that it has overplayed it’s hand and that it’s online audience — the real source of their funding – is drifting away.
There’s a reason they stopped making us pay to read Bobo.
Jim Pharo
For me, it’s a chance to determine what NYT access really is worth. Without any payment required, it only had to worth my time — and frankly more often than not I didn’t find it met even that requirement.
I want to see how, exactly it’s implemented (remembering John’s wisdom that a lot of companies see value in screwing their best customers), AND how much I’ll miss having it. If it turns out that I don’t really miss it (at least enough to cough up the $$), I suspect the NYT will find that it has overplayed it’s hand and that it’s online audience — the real source of their funding – is drifting away.
There’s a reason they stopped making us pay to read Bobo.
Grand Wazoo
I don’t mind having to have the CD in the machine for DA:O, what grinds my gears is that if I lose my X-Box live connection for any reason, I lose all of my DLC items. Don’t know if DA2 is the same because I haven’t started it yet. I pre-ordered the lux version but then this silly little game called Torchlight got released for the X-Box and it somehow became the time suck that I thought DA2 would be.
Dave
@Grand Wazoo: Torchlight is the Diablo 3 I keep waiting for…
cat48
I paid for the NYT digital before when some of the Columnist’s & writers were behind the paywall briefly, and I will again. It beats the Hell out of the Charleston Post & Courier. I’ll either go weekend w/free digital or just digital.
Comrade DougJ
I was planning on paying it too, until I became inundated with legal ways to get it for free.
Joe Beese
If you want to support quality journalism, give your money to ProPublica instead. Their mission is informing the public – rather than enriching the Sulzbergers.
Joey Maloney
Calling the NYT “head and shoulders above most of the competition” might be the ultimate of damning with faint praise.
With the exception of Paul Krugman, the only times I go to the Times website is when I’m following someone else’s link, usually a blogger, and usually only to point and laugh.
I mean, think of all the major news stories that the Times has blown to the great detriment of our country, from sitting on the story of the Bush admin’s illegal wiretapping until after the 2004 election, all the way back to the Clinton pseudo-scandals of the early 1990s.
This is not news judgement I respect or trust, and I’m certainly not going to pay for it.
Disco
I got the Lincoln offer. Very grateful.
Don
I don’t have a problem paying for product.
I don’t have a problem with accepting that someone has the right to set their own price for their product, and if I don’t like it I don’t have to pay for it. Disliking that price doesn’t give me some moral authority to set my own price.
But when someone creates multiple pricing levels based not on the product or even their expenditures to deliver the product – as in the differentiation by the NYT between the iPad and iPhone pricing – that’s just insulting. And I don’t like doing business with people who insult me.
I have enough trouble with the fact that the newspaper business wants to pretend that the internet and “giving it away free” is the core of their problem. When they assert this they’re either too stupid to know the truth or hoping we’re too stupid to know they’re lying. Newspapers have an issue because of how evolving media has altered the profitability of ad sales. But I’m so tired of this nonsense that it no longer makes me as angry as it used to so I can just ignore it as constant noise.’
But now they’re creating a pay model where you can get the dead tree version thrown on your lawn (which costs money to print and deliver) which you can then toss in the recycle bin and go read the digital version… for a lower cost than just paying for the digital version.
I could live with THAT as only marginally insulting and a sop to the print guys and a way to keep up print ad numbers. But charging me more to read it on the iPad than the iPhone? Are they being billed by the pixels? They can’t pass that off as development cost between the two because amortized over time it’s irrelevant.
What it is, instead, is an enforced artificial scarcity to attempt to gouge more money. I think it’s repugnant in the diamond business and I think it’s repugnant here.
I accept that the changing ad model means that SOMEONE has to pay for news gathering and maybe it needs to be news consumers rather than ad buyers. But if I’m going to pay for news gathering then that’s what I’ll pay for. Not a tax based on which way I choose to consume your digital product.
Bob
Bravo! I’m the same, especially when it comes to music. I pay for home delivery of the Times, so the changes don’t hit me. With all the bitching about the condition of the middle class it seem odd to me to object to paying working men and women for their time, efforts, talent
JGabriel
John Cole @ Top:
The Times-Lincoln complimentary offer originated with The Times:
It doesn’t seem fair to compare it to internet piracy. The Times has clearly found away to monetize giving away a few hundred thousand subscriptions. From any kind of business and ethical analysis, it’s perfectly legitimate to accept the offer.
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Cris
The internet has put enormous downward pressure on the price that consumers are willing to pay for content. We really expect that everything should be free. Some of us do so unconsciously — I believe the mentality dates back at least to radio, where once you buy the box, you can listen to whatever is being broadcast. Others are very deliberate about it — you know those high-tech libertarian/anarchists who feel it’s their right to get everything free, and come up with elaborate justifications for it.
Ted Rall (I know, I know) has been pretty vocal about this for a long time. He often notes that a cartoonist like himself is absolutely dependent on syndication, and has little incentive to make his cartoons freely available online, even though everybody insists that he does. He foresaw the Huffington Post model of digital sharecropping long before Arianna made it a reality.
Elia
Besides the Lincoln ad is there any other way to get a free hook-up that’s legal? I’m a lowly college student who is soon going to be an unemployed schmuck with a worthless BA…absolutely no way I can afford it.
Corner Stone
This post could’ve went just about anywhere from there. I mean, a dozen damned ways. And at this point none of them would’ve been surprising in the least.
stormhit
@cyntax:
Bioware seems like they’ve been trying to come up with a good way to get around the issue of having to “make the rounds” with your companions for a couple games now. It does get a little old to have to slog through their discussion options over and over just to see if they have anything new to say. So I didn’t really find the way DA2 technically handles it to be a negative, but there’s always room for more dialogue.
The biggest issue I have with the game are the recycled environments. Going repeatedly to the same cave and the same house gets really old after about the 3rd time. But most everything else I thought was changed for the better.
Grand Wazoo
@Dave: Yes, indeedly do, it is. Maybe a bit simplified, but still a satisfying dungeon crawl. Hell, even the music reminds me of a lot of the original Diablo, which makes sense since it’s some of the original Diablo guys that put this sweet little game together. I’m recommending it to all of my gamer friends that have been waiting (and waiting and waiting…) for D3 to be released.
Nylund
I’m a grad student that survives off $15k a year. Buying movies, music, newspaper subscriptions just isn’t an option.
I guess that means that I just don’t deserve any of those things and shouldn’t get them. So be it. Another model might be one where certain well-off people pay more than they need to and this subsidizes those who can’t afford it. Such payments could be mandated (like ACA) for important things like health care, or volunteer-based (like NPR donations). This model doesn’t really work with things like newspaper subscriptions or music, although, in a sense, its how it will happen de facto. Legitimate users pay higher fees to subsidize copyright pirates. The question that remains is which pirates are hardship cases and which are simply free-riders? Music, news, etc. aren’t a necessity, so the point is moot here, but in other cases, it relates to how one views a poverty-stricken thief that steals bread to feed his family different from a malicious pickpocket.
What bothers me is that in order to be the best grad student I can be, I should utilize things that benefit my work, be it (very) expensive statistical software or reading the musings of columnists that actually inspire new research thoughts. Its a sort of catch-22…too poor to do your job well, and because you can’t do your job well, you remain poor. So what does every grad student do? They pirate software, download illegal copies of textbooks, and exploit holes in paywall systems.
And all of you get punished for that.
James Hare
Publishing companies have to do a great deal better than NYT’s effort to stay around. I work for a publishing company and I’ve seen some of the painful things we’ve had to do. This is not going to change anything for NYT.
Sentient Puddle
@cyntax: Oh I absolutely agree with your criticisms, and would add the recycling of interior spaces as another. But then there are those who think it’s something like the worst game ever because somehow the combat and dialogue options (the wheel) were utterly dumbed down. Those are the people that I think are living in la la land.
Comrade DougJ
@Elia:
If you mess around on the site, I think it will eventually offer you a free subscription.
Paul Gottlieb
I’m with John. The NYT has more faults than I have time to list, but it’s the only decent national newspaper we have, and it’s a mighty expensive operation. If the Times can’t keep up it’s scale of operations, we will be delivering the national stage to Murdoch by default
J.W. Hamner
@Joey Maloney:
Then don’t. Problem solved!
Though strangely it seems that people who have close to zero respect for the NYT are the ones that complain the loudest about a pay wall.
Brachiator
@Cris:
But the problem is that TV and radio also relied on advertising. But for some reason, you get people wanting news on the Internet to be “free,” but also with no ads.
Elia
@Comrade DougJ: Mess around as in putter about?
WereBear
Definitely. But the resource shift to “very little” is making that happen right now. I have self-published Kindle books (use John’s Amazon link to search for Cat 911 to see them, so if you succumb the blog gets the commission) but I aspire to the heights reached by Amanda Hocking:
At this point, getting a publisher would work against her… the price of the books would go up, ticking off her fans, and she would get a pittance per book, instead of the full royalty (less Amazon cut) she gets now.
This is what made me give up pestering publishers who only cared if I was already a celebrity, and who wanted me to submit an entire media plan before they’d even look at the book.
If I’m going to work that hard, it’s going to be for myself.
MikeJ
@Elia: LEgal? It appears that the way they’ll enforce things is by sending the whole text of the article to your browser and then javascripting it off.
Whatever you do to the contents of your browsers address space is your business. (NB:IANAL) Unethical, yes, but I can’t see how viewing the source code of a web page could be illegal.
JPL
I get Sunday home delivery and enjoy it. I have been thinking of discontinuing it and accessing it online only but I’m just not ready to wean myself from the paper version.
The delivery allows me to do the crosswords during week and access the print version if I wish through my account page.
When they were updating their accounts they knocked off home subscribers from accessing the online puzzles. Customer service helped me out and showed me how to access the crossword page in order to print it. The person I spoke with was very helpful and laughed about the crossword puzzle people being special. I think that was the most polite term he could use.
bobbo
I gladly pay 99 cents for songs because I see the value. NY Times, not so much. I know there is plenty of good content, and I probably don’t realize how much of it I get because I read blogs, but it’s pretty clear to me that once I am asked to pay for it, I will find other uses for my time and money.
Elia
@MikeJ: Yeah I saw that from here the other day. I’m not worried about getting in trouble…I’d just rather be a good little piggie if I could.
Dave
@stormhit: I thought the camera default was a little off-putting. You can easily find yourself in combat looking out towards the screen instead of the standard “from behind/locked on the enemy” view. The original, IIRC, didn’t do that. That and the recycled views are my biggest gripe. But still a great game and the storyline is fantastic.
NonyNony
But I fully intend to pay the NY Times subscription fee.
I’m not, but I don’t intend to route myself around their paywall either. I’ll read whatever free content they provide and once I hit my limit on that I’ll just shrug and move on.
The money that would be going to the NYT is going to be going to my local public radio station instead. Because despite how much I actually have come to dislike the editorializing on NPR, the station does do some good work on their local shows and I was reminded of that this weekend.
(It gets hard to write a check out to people who pay Megan McArdle to talk about economics and David Brooks to talk about whatever his smug voice is talking about this week. But I just remind myself that my local station aren’t the ones hiring her and their school board coverage and choice of other shows is really quite good and I grin and bear it. It’s not like i get higher quality from the Times when you get right down to it.)
JGabriel
@Elia: Mess around as in, create an account there if you don’t already have one, post a comment or two in the comment threads somewhere, say Krigman’s blog, and log in & out a couple times.
Do all that, and you’ll probably have an invite in your mailbox tomorrow morning.
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gex
The only “pirating” I do is on media I own. BTW, John, the record companies believe importing a CD to be illegal too, and the cases around that haven’t been settled as far as I know. The version of pirating I do is importing DVDs which is definitely not legal, even if it should be.
I’ve never understood why they get to say we don’t OWN the DVD, we’ve just licensed the content. But then if I put the content on my computer, somehow I’ve cheated.
Elia
@JGabriel: Thank you.
Cris
That’s fundamentally what’s going on with the advertising-based publication model. It’s not well-off subscribers who subsidize those who can’t afford it, it’s the advertisers who do. In print, the cover price usually contributes little to nothing to the bottom line of the publisher. (It may help pay for distribution.) It’s the advertising that keeps the presses running.
Maybe the Times just needs to charge more for ads.
JGabriel
@Elia: You’re welcome. Let us know if it works. I have a theory that the Times doesn’t want to lose traffic in its comment threads when the pay wall goes up, so that might be a trigger for getting an invite.
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gex
@Comrade Javamanphil: This. I remember reading an article where the president of some german record company was COMPLAINING because they only got $0.70 for a song on iTunes. For a single song download, I think $0.25 is the transaction charge, leaving $0.04 for the artist. None of that is right. I’m thinking the artist should get 70, the record company should get 04, and the company that provides the distribution technology should be in the middle.
And I’m not even sure what the record company does for their cut. Promotion I guess.
Dennis SGMM
@cleek:
Okay, my geek post for the month: I played Civilization since MicroProse put it out on 3.5″ floppies in 1991. So great was my devotion that I was a Beta tester on Civ III and one expansion pack.
So along comes Civ V. I figured that it would be like every other release; great, with flaws that would be addressed with patches, mods, and input from the user community. Nuh uh, you have to open a Steam account to even get the fucker to play.
So I’m staying with Civ IV. Besides, I’ve already perfected my Horse Archer rush and Montezuma is just a sneering pansy.
Geek out.
NonyNony
@MikeJ:
You know, after reading that article I wonder why the Times is bothering with a paywall at all.
Why not just give the stories up for free (with advertising) and have a fund raiser, public broadcasting style? As you read more and more stories, start throwing up blurbs talking about how much it costs to provide these kinds of stories. Just some quick blurbs about where the money goes and how becoming a “subscriber” helps provide the stories you like to read with a “Become a subscriber” and a “No thanks” button underneath.
Because really – it looks like the Times is trying to have their cake (freely linkable stories that anyone can access whenever they want) and eat it too (getting people to pay for it because they’re afraid of having access cut off). It won’t work – better to be up front and say “look, this shit costs money. If you like it, become a donor so we can continue to provide you with news.”
Joey Maloney
@J.W. Hamner:
Cmplain? Moi? Au contraire, mon frère. If the Times wants to insist on a broken, obsolete business model, more power to them. It’ll just hasten their slide into irrelevance and then oblivion.
taylormattd
John, the problem is that there is no way the amount of money they are asking is worth the product, which, I’m sorry, is terrible.
It’s garbage. The amount of good journalism coming from that newspaper is not outweighed by years of false journalism, including a 7 year witch hunt against Bill Clinton, good ole Judy regurgitating Dick cheney’s lies to falsify the case for invading Iraq, and constantly providing editorial space for lunatics like Bill Kristol, Bill Safire, and now a dumb wingnut blogger.
MikeJ
@gex:
They loan the artist money to cut the album, but repaying that loan all comes out of the artist’s end (the 4 cents you mentioned.)
Promotion? Same deal, it all comes out of the artist’s end. Tour support? Would you like to guess who pays for that?
Sentient Puddle
@Dennis SGMM: I think Civ V has enough questionable design decisions that I ultimately prefer IV, but why is Steam such a deal breaker? I do not get this at all.
Elizabelle
Agreed John, re paying for the NY Times.
I signed up for free access with my new best friends, Lincoln.
But will also sign up for M-F delivery dead tree version, home delivery to West Coast.
Gotta support what you value.
gex
@Brachiator: I think it factors in that our broadband policy sucks in this country. I don’t particularly feel like online content is free if I pay $70/month to get 4 Mbps from the only broadband option in my area. I’m not a pirate, but that definitely cuts into the money I CAN pay for the stuff that is delivered to me online.
Joey Maloney
@MikeJ: Just because it’s in your possession and under your control doesn’t make it yours. The Times digital content is provided to you under license.. Even though the Javascript is trivial to defeat, they were speculating on Techdirt that doing so would count as illegal circumvention under the very broad, ill-defined language of the DMCA.
gex
@WereBear: There’s the trick. There is definitely a wave of self-made artists using the Internet to replace the publishing companies. No, you can’t get a megacorp to inundate society with your stuff to push sales, ala Brittney Spears or Norah Jones. On the other hand, plenty of artists are realizing that if you get 2000 dedicated fans who will spend $20 – $50 bucks per year on your work, you’ll do okay. You don’t need to move a billion widgets on day one to be a “successful” artist.
MikeJ
@Joey Maloney: Notice I didn’t say anything about circumventing. I said “view source.” Hard to call that circumvention.
Also, this license agreement you seem to think I signed, do they have a copy of my signature on file somewhere? It takes two parties to make a contract.
J.W. Hamner
@NonyNony:
I don’t know why this is characterized as nefarious… it seems to me to be the best possible solution. Heavy users are encouraged to pay, but otherwise it doesn’t really impact anybody. So what’s the big deal?
gex
@MikeJ: I suppose. I realize they don’t do NOTHING, but the business is just warped. The promotion is the most beneficial to the artists, but it seems that there is a real limit on what record companies want to promote. Used to be rap wasn’t all gangsta, but white execs really liked selling gangsta rap to white suburban teens. I guess I believe there are better ways to promote and support artists.
cyntax
@stormhit:
I can see what you’re saying, but what I dislike is that the conversation points are now much more predetermined, and I notice that more than having talk to the characters a lot.
The map thing is a bit obvious this time. I mean we all know they’re going to recycle stuff but they didn’t seem to put much effort into dressing it up and trying to make it look different.
@Sentient Puddle:
Yeah, I don’t see the wheel as dumbed down all that much. I mean sure there’s the little icon that gives you the gist of what the answer will be, but because it’s fully voiced now, what the character actually says can be an expansion of your choice, an elaboration, and as a result, worth listening to.
Overall, I’m relatively pleased. I think they’ve over-corrected on a few things, but they haven’t “ruined the franchise” or anything.
Though I am a little embarrassed at how well-endowed some of the female characters are, in particular the dual wielding rogue (who will remain nameless for anyone that hasn’t gotten that far), but come on Bioware–that’s Lara Croft levels of unlikely.
JGabriel
I have to confess, I do find it odd that Lincoln Town Cars is paying for subscriptions to the hometown newspaper of the city with, I’m guessing, the greatest percentage of non-drivers in the country.
Seriously. I don’t even have a fucking driver’s license.
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Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
I’d warn against Daemontools for the virtual cd loophole. There are some programs that will outright refuse to install if they detect Daemontools (or other similar virtual drives) on your machine.
I use to bemoan my steam account, only using it for the valve games, but the further we get down this digital road, the more i’m using steam for everything PC. It’s so nice to be able to download the game again and re-install it after a complete wipe without having to go dig up a disc stored in some drawer in my house.
The only thing better than steam is Good Old Games, with no drm and full installable packages that you can redownload whenever you need to, which is where i’ll be buying Witcher 2 from
/endgeek
MikeJ
@gex: The point of my comment was that the record companies don’t really do anything for the artist. Everything they claim to do is charged back to the artist anyway. There’s no reason to give them 90% of your profits so that you can pay for all the expenses out of your 10%.
WereBear
@MikeJ: Which is why musicians are more and more tending to just tour for themselves and sell their own CDs. The music biz is too busy searching for the next toothsome teenager they can Vocoder to stardom.
I call it “music chow.”
@gex: True, that. As a struggling artist practically my whole life, I do like this model… better.
Linnaeus
A lot of good comments here have been made about how we value things, what’s worth paying for and how much, business models and what not.
In the end, paying people for their labor is the right thing to do. We can discuss how best to do that, but I think that’s a good foundational principle.
ET
As a librarian who uses information a lot and is increasingly having a hard time accessing it (be it free or subscription) I just have to say that the creation of news costs the producer. They don’t and have never done it just because. There may have been some altruism but these are businesses. If people won’t pay for it companies will stop producing it. There may be non-profits that do a good job but it still costs them – it is just that it comes though donations.
You get what you pay for. Not all companies that provide news are worth much and not all free providers are bad so that isn’t the defining characteristic of good reporting. If they can’t make money or at least recoup it then they will stop. All that “free” news on the Internet is only free to the extent that you aren’t asked to pay for it each time you access it, but it did cost to produce and others have paid for it. However, there won’t be any of the “free” stuff if some people don’t continue to purchase it and subsidize those who get it for “free.”
Cris
And as a lot of musicians will readily tell you (both in conversation and in their lyrics), touring sucks. It has its upsides, but there’s a reason bands are eager to sign a contract that gives them an advance for a specified number of studio albums.
Joey Maloney
@MikeJ: Tell it to the judge, my friend. The courts have been only indifferently receptive to common sense on these issues.
Kristine
@WereBear: It’s my understanding that e-books/e-readers, while becoming more and more popular here, still constitute 30% of the book buying market. Print publishing, at least over the next few years, will allow Hocking to access the 70% of the book buying public that still reads paper only.
Then there are the foreign markets, where e-books have not yet made the inroads that they have here.
Print publishing has its issues, but it still offers advantages as well.
MikeJ
@Cris: Touring does suck, but it seems like it might suck a bit less if you could do it Jonathan Coulton style. Sell out the club first and string together a few nights.
Of course it helps that he doesn’t need a whole van full of stuff. It also doesn’t expose new audiences and grow your fanbase.
Werebear’s point about the artists selling music directly is really what counts, whether they do it at shows or on the web. Will Apple allow those who aren’t heavily in debt to a megacorp to sell on iTunes?
gene108
Playing Dragon Age Origins on my PS3, since my home computer is a Mac, which disqualifies me from most games. They require the CD in the PS3 as well. I don’t think it’s a big deal, since I’m not taking my PS3 anywhere.
On the other hand, I’ve not seen too many PC games require CD’s after installation, in many many years. I remember Diablo and Diablo II were like that, where you needed the CD in the computer to run the game.
Anyone playing Dragon Age 2? I got a late start with Dragon Age and haven’t finished it yet.
How does DA2 compare?
Cris
Yes they will. At least two small-time musicians I know personally have their songs on iTunes. No idea what hoops they had to jump through to get there.
cyntax
@JGabriel:
Yeah but I’ve never been anyplace where I’ve seen more Linclon Town cars. I mean when you’re in Manhattan, it seems like those chauffeured town cars are everywhere.
rb
@John Cole: Point taken; especially if you intend to, you know, be honest about it.
Foiled again.
Brachiator
@gex:
Point noted. Lots of problems here as cable, telco and broacast companies fight and impede innovation, and the publishing industry tries to deal with massive changes in their business models.
gex
@MikeJ: Ah. I totally misread your angle on ot.
cokane
John about Dragon Age. In the future if you buy games through Steam (http://store.steampowered.com/), you run them without the CD. Of course it requires more hard drive space, but this is something to consider in the future. Doesnt require going to the store either, plus you own a digital copy of the game so you never lose it.
Care to post a review of the game? Even in the comments? I hear really bad things about it. As someone who played DA:O and the BG series, I’m interested in how good this game is.
PJO
Some of the posters are misinformed about iTunes payments. A simplified breakdown: iTunes takes $0.29 from each $0.99 download for the privilege of selling songs through their store. This leaves $.70 to be divided by the sound recording copyright owner (typically a record label) among various rights holders. The publisher gets $0.091 per song (typically half of which goes to the songwriter), and, on a typical major label contract, the performer gets 12% of $0.70, or $0.1092 per song. This leaves a little less than $0.50 for the label, which goes to pay for promotion, recording costs, artwork, tour support, and overhead (e.g., hookers and blow). With relatively few people actually paying for recorded music these days, of course, there’s much less money to be divided. Whether or not a label deserves this big a cut is eminently debatable, but any artist involved did sign a contract, and it’s certain that you would not have heard of most major label artists without the tens of thousands of dollars thrown into promotion. All of the business crap that the label can do (if it chooses) allows an artist to focus on creating music. Any independent artist can put up their music on an online store through an aggregator (such as CDBaby or Tunecore), but if that is all they do, no one will ever hear their music.
SKI
I have a similar approach to paying for products but found a solution to this “cd required” issue that does NOT involve downloading the no-cd hack.
I used the freeware magic cd to mount a virtual copy of my purchased CD, allowing me to access the game without keeping the disk in the computer.
gex
@PJO: I can only comment that the numbers I cited were from the article I read, and so if you have an issue with my numbers, I can’t help you there.
techno
Really? You honestly think the stuff in the New York Times is so important you are willing to pay real money for it?
In the name of everything holy, WHY? I stopped reading the NYT in 1982 when I it dawned on me that the overwhelming majority of its writers were fools. In those days, it took a serious effort to stay informed while boycotting the mainstream media–a couple of local newstands with an extensive selection of overseas overpriced papers saved me.
But these days, keeping up while ignoring the NYT and the Kaplan Post is EASY. I can find 100 reliable sources for my information that are better researched, better written, with more historic context built in, than ANYTHING our media serves up. And the levels of stupidity are deliberate–even CNN must have better news coverage for its international audience than for domestic consumption.
I suppose its good to check on the NYT once in a while to see what the idiots are talking about, but goodness, it is painful. I find what passes for information in the commercial USA media actually embarrassing.
It was fun to watch all my friends get hooked on Al Jazeera during the protests in Egypt. I have been patiently (and not so patiently) trying to explain how much better the practices of journalism are in the rest of the world. And now they could see what I have been talking about. I am 61. I have been trying to sell the idea of better journalism for almost 30 years. Why oh Lord, is something so obvious so hard for some to see?
asiangrrlMN
I’m with you, Cole. I don’t have illegal software or music or anything like that, either. I even agree that the NYT should charge something for their product–I just disagree in the value of said product. From my understanding, you can read twenty articles per month for free. That’s enough for me.
Triassic Sands
@Bob:
When I read the Times rules for payment the other day, I believe they said what Bob says. John, you can link to a Times article and non-subscribers can access the article via that link.
Obviously, we expect you to link to the entire paper.
JGabriel
@cyntax:
True, but you would think that would make their target audience the readers of Chauffeur Professional Today, or whatever is the name of the trade magazine for limo services, rather than the readers of the NY Times.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Just … puzzled.
.
parsimon
@Triassic Sands:
John Cole, did you note this? I don’t think you have to work around the paywall to provide access to an article for those readers who haven’t paid (or can’t afford to).
So no worries there.