Fair enough, but really all they're doing is making more complicated quests, and maybe tying them together by weaving the major aspects through some larger plot line. Ok, but since you've got (hopefully) thousands of players all playing through the same quests, then each individual's "story" is going to be basically the same, or follow one of the predetermined paths. Either way, there's going to be scores of characters that all have the exact same backstory, which sort of makes any connection to the greater story arc pointless.
What you end up with is a collection of single player/co-op campaigns, loosely held together by the social aspects of a fancy 3D chatroom. And maybe some PVP thrown in on the side. There are already many successful games that follow that mold, so more power to 'em.
But that's not what I want to think when someone tells me their MMO will be story-driven. I want a game where the world is shaped by the story, and the story is shaped by the players. But I'm not sure that that's really a feasible target. I don't think it's possible for developers to create the story as fast as the players' decisions will demand. I think the road to success is more along the lines of cutting out the story part, and making mechanics that allow the players to shape the game world more directly .
Your point about OSS is certainly valid, and while I certainly don't think Linux is going to die or anything like that, there will likely be a slow-down in development for certain pieces of software, and specific aspects of the software.
While there are many people who enjoy the fun and challenge of writing software, it's important that not all steps in the process are the same. The adage that the last 10% of the project is 90% of the work is somewhat true, in that making a really well polished product inevitably requires some grind work at the end. In the software world, that might manifest itself as bug squashing, or user testing, or interface tweaking, etc.
It's important work, but it's often time consuming, monotonous, and not fun, and it's hard to get people to volunteer to do it. That's a part of the OSS process that can really benefit by having paid labor to help make sure that it gets the attention it deserves (although there's no doubt that even proprietary companies often skip out on this part).
If the tech economy turns to crap and there are lots of newly unemployed programmers sitting around, I'd actually expect the amount of OSS activity to increase somewhat. All those geeks aren't going to turn off their computers and never code again. But the effort will go towards the sorts of things that are interesting, not towards the dull (but important) drudgery work. If companies stop paying their developers to work on OSS, there are certain types of work that will fall to the wayside.
The EVE event that I described was indeed awesome. It was actually completely hilarious. But like you said, it was player-driven. And that's different than story-driven. EVE is all about a player-driven universe, and it does it pretty well. Although it definitely has its problems, it's a successful game, with many very dedicated and passionate players.
My anecdote wasn't meant to dump on EvE, just to illustrate that even a small scale story-line with open participation is basically impossible to plan out. In fact, if I remember correctly, the aformentioned event was only the first part of a larger story-arc, which consequently had to be dumped because after that first event it was impossible to get the players to buy into it. The people who were running the story tried to ad-lib it from there, but making compelling content takes time. Your only hope is to try and predict all the possible paths through the story that the players might take and create content for each, but that's basically impossible, and wouldn't be economically feasible anyways.
The real meat of EVE is in the player-driven game. It's not about stories, it's about the social aspect. And like you said, there are more dedicated people who end up being more influential (EVE has alliances of literally thousands of players, but run by individuals), but the more casual players are willing to engage in those larger campaigns, and I believe the fact that those campaigns are thought up and waged purely by other players is a big part of that. I could delve into that idea further, but I have to go to work:(
True, but I'm not sure how many people play games like that just to feel like a "nobody" foot soldier. WoW's implementation is basically just moving the grinding from the individual level to the server level. The players aren't making choices that affect the future path of the story, they're just trying to reach some pre-set conditions to trigger the next part of the script. The only real control the players have is how soon that trigger gets reached. It's not a terrible gameplay mechanic, but it's not really players helping to define a story.
Yeah, that's true, but then it's not really a story-driven MMO, it's more like a bunch of little single player or small teams effort games that are just kind of tied together through an otherwise run-of-the-mill MMO. You're basically talking about instancing. Not inherently a bad thing, just a compromise that developers have had to make because of the nature of MMO's. It's not economical, or fun on a mass appeal gameplay level to develop a bunch of content that can only happen in the game once, and only be experienced by those players that were in the right place at the right time.
But at the end of the day, if anybody can go into that instance and replay that part of the game, then any one player going through it can't feel like he/she is having a real effect on the overall storyline of the game. Not saying that that makes instancing pointless, but that it's not a path towards making an MMO that is story driven in a greater sense.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I really have a hard time seeing how story can meaningfully be integrated into an MMO. There's just too many people participating in the world in completely different ways. There's just practical matters, like what time zone do you put big events in? How do you evolve the story in a way that entertains the hardcore players on a day to day basis but also maintain consistency and meaningful interaction for more casual players who only put in a couple hours per week? What happens to your story when the players react in a way completely unexpected?
An real world example is EvE Online. Along side a mostly player driven universe, the devs have tried to run "storyline" events, and they hardly ever worked out. The players just didn't react as was hoped/expected (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully.) I remember one event where the devs tried to get a big bunch of casual players together to go fight a big scary ship that they'd never expect to be in combat with otherwise. But players of a large and powerful corporation accidently stumbled upon the target ship before the casual group could get there, and destroyed it first. When the casual group arrived and the ship was already dead, they turned against the dev characters' ships. And that's not even getting into the many cases where groups have purposely thwarted the devs' plans. Fortunately for EVE, these sorts of "story" events aren't a big part of the game, and not particularly important to its success.
If you're going to focus your game design on the story driven part, then you'd better find a way to let every single player be a part of it in a meaningful way. Otherwise a small group of hardcore players will dominate the storyline, and leave nothing for the rest
Your specific example effectively demonstra a serious limitation for Wikipedia. One of wikipedia's flaws is not that it has such limitations, but that it doesn't recognize them. Wikipedia is not well suited for the task of distilling rumors and such to predict the future. That doesn't mean that wikipedia is worthless or somehow broken, it just means that it shouldn't have entries that try and guess.
Like you said, when operating at its fullest potential, Wikipedia is really an aggregation of well supported facts. I think everyone would be better served if Wikipedia as a general philosophy would remove topics where those sorts of facts can't be found. Keeping them around only serves to draw into question the usefulness of the entire site.
I think the more useful solution is multiple wiki's, each geared towards a more specific category of knowledge, and having the appropriate level of requirements for an entry to be considered valid. A wiki about future trends of the video game industry is not a bad thing, but it has, inherent in its subject matter, a huge amount of uncertainty. The very idea that such information would be compiled in the same collection and through the same process as something as straight-forward as descriptions of historical medieval weaponry is sort of silly. (Of course, it's also half the fun of wikipedia, following the strange paths that you can end up taking by clicking interesting links between entries.)
More subject specific wiki's do exist, and more are popping up every day, but they're all currently stuck in the shadow of Wikipedia. Hopefully as people become more savvy about finding information online, they'll start to look for more focused sources.
I think there's a lesson here for both sides. For the consumer, you're out of control of some things. For the service provider, forcing upgrades is bad.
I don't think this free google portal stuff is all that significant in the grand scheme of things, but if this was an important service that my business was paying for, then this sort of behavior would have me super pissed off. I would expect that as a paying customer that I could "upgrade" my service at my leisure. I would expect the company I'm paying to continue to offer the old version for quite some time, and repeatedly remind me about the upgrade during that time. Eventually, sure they need to discontinue the old stuff, but they should establish very flexible procedures to help customers roll out the new.
Yeah, but in any commercially useful application of the technology, you're going to have computers at each end dealing with the data once it's decrypted.
That's Schneier's whole point really. The weak link isn't actually sending encrypted data, it's dealing with the data at either end of chain. For the data to be useful, it has to be decrypted at some point in time, and the listener's computer has to know how to do the decryption. An attacker isn't going to attack the encrypted data stream. They're going to attack either the source or the listener, and either get the stored decrypted data, or get the stored encrypted data and the necessary info to decrypt it.
If your total communications network consists only of a encrypted communications line, plus a computer on each end, and both of those computers have no other connection to any other sort of network, and also have foolproof physical security, then maybe the encryption line might become the weakest point. But in the real world, computers are generally interconnected with many others, allowing lots of directions to attack from.
Unless someone comes up with some amazing breakthrough that makes factoring very large numbers trivial, there aren't really any practical cases where the encrypted data stream is the likely target of an attack.
No, this is something written into the Android OS by Google. It's a part of their app store. Any Android phone will have this as a part of it, unless Google changes Android in order to remove it (which they most likely won't). But that being said, I don't think it's a terrible feature, and I'm sure that in the near future, there will be plenty of ways to install software onto Android without going through the app store, and thereby take Google out of that part of the loop.
The web is a moving target in almost whatever direction you want to look at it from. Standards are constantly in development. There are multiple significant browsers all being developed at different rates and with different priorities. The technologies that are available are continually evolving. And the needs of clients are forever becoming more complex. The job of a web designer/developer is to pick the best compromises from all of those competing interests and to make a product.
The point is, 100% standards compliance is not a realistic goal for most websites. And that's ok. It's just another one of those pieces that is nice and helpful to a degree, but there is a point of diminishing returns, and a few compromises here and there is not some sort of crime against humanity.
I like to draw comparisons to the building design/construction industry because that's the career that I'm currently involved in. When designing a building, we have about a bazillion life safety/fire protection/accessibility/etc. codes that are legally enforced. We have to balance the demands of those codes with the needs of the client, our own "architectural vision", issues with energy useage, issues with budget, issues with gravity, and others.
But the thing is, even though those codes are very important and have serious liability issues involved in them, they're still administered with some flexibility and compromise in them. Since the stakes are so high, there's all sorts of review processes that you have to go through, but it's possible to ask for and receive waviers for various issues, although they almost always require you to make a compromise of your own somewhere else.
It's just the nature of the beast when you're designing complex systems. And whether that complex system is an office building, or the online store of the company that works in the office building, you can't realistically expect to get 100% of what you ideally want. And that's ok.
I think you're right that with the right kind of leadership and organization, a company can keep formal internal meetings to a minimum and everyone will be happier because of it.
If that works well all the time for 37Signals, then good for them. But it's important to realize that it works for them to a large degree because of the nature of their work. The "product" that they're producing is fairly simple in the sense that it can be done with a small in-house team. It's feasible for one individual to completely wrap their head around every aspect of a project if needed. That's not possible in every industry.
There are many lines of work where you just need way more people. There are consultants, and engineers, and manufacturers, and code officials, etc.
I know these guys are working hard, but I think they should step back and make sure they appreciate the relative freedom that exists in much of the software industry. It's far less accountable than most jobs and far less regulated. I have many days where I wish I didn't have to constantly deal with safety codes and governmental reviews.
I'm certainly no lawyer, but I'd imagine that numerous things fall under the term "intentionally damaging a computer system." And that rendering the machine unusable, even for a limited time, counts as damage. If not, then there certainly would have to be a sister law that covered that sort of thing, as well as the integrity of software and data. That being the case, why wouldn't they combine it all under one law?
Messing with data is often times more "damaging" to the victim than the hardware would be. It would cost me money to replace my power supply or RAM or whatever, but assuming that I can afford it, I can get hardware basically identical to what I had before. Data can be much harder to replace. Hopefully you've got some backups. But in the case of a DOS, the victim is potentially losing data before they even get a chance to back it up. That's really worse in a lot of ways.
If you've already got 1.2 billion dollars in orders, you can probably throw a little bit of money towards automating your production line. And while I don't know much about the specifics of this particular product, solar panel manufacturing is generally a fairly high precision activity, and often involves raw materials that aren't the most healthy substances for humans to be around. A nice, clean, automated production facility is ideal for solar panels.
This isn't a couple of guys who started a business out of their garage last week. They've already done the bulk of the messy design work, and they're moving on to mass production. They're probably still doing more of the hands-on design work as well, but it likely happens in a whole separate building from their factory.
I'm sure they have. But that doesn't mean that investors won't panic. The stock market is constantly looking for reasons to act irrationally. And the secrecy that Apple tends to practice keeps its investors even more jittery.
I guess that's a decent idea, but it relies to a degree on the assumption that the people creating the bots are doing so just for the fun and challenge of it. But with Glider, there's a clear example of someone creating a bot for financial gain, and if that is their goal, then it's unlikely that the customers will limit their bots to a specified server.
Although you can make an argument that having a purposely bot-ridden server would give Blizzard lots of useful information on how the different bots work, which would help them detect bots on other servers, and also help them modify their game to be less bot friendly, so that's another good argument.
Just a counterpoint, you can put a Gamecube disc into the Wii and it'll play just fine. Try doing that with any other Nintendo living room console. Any backwards compatibility at all in your living room is new for Nintendo.
All that being said, I don't think the DSi not playing GBA games is that huge of a deal for the large majority of the market. It's not aimed at replacing GBA's, it's aimed at replacing DS's, which it's mostly backwards compatible with.
There's only so much you can do to make creating bots impossible. At the end of the day, the client needs to have enough information to allow it to display everything the player needs to play the game. If all the bot is trying to do is play the game, then it's going to have access to that same information.
I guess my point is that there's a difference between security in terms of keeping someone from hacking the game, and security in terms of keeping someone from automating parts of playing the game. At the end of the day, there's still an unknown player running the game on a machine that they control. You can't stop them from running other software along side your game. You can try to detect what they're doing, and I believe Blizzard does that to some degree, but that's still a reactive approach.
Fair enough, I'm not suggesting that everyone should love it, merely that they should try it. The post that I was responding to sounded like someone who was dismissing it without even giving it a shot, based purely on their preconceived idea about how a "comic" should work.
It took significant pestering from me to get my wife to spend a little bit of time reading through the Achewood archives, and when she finally did, she wasn't as amused by it as I am. And that's fine, but I'm glad she gave it a shot.
That's too bad, because you're missing out on some very entertaining stories because of an arbitrary value that you've put on the act of drawing inside little boxes.
If you only think of comic strips as tiny segments that you read each day in a newspaper before you throw it away, then your opinion makes some sense. But you maybe have heard of this cool thing called the internet, which allows someone to easily store information and almost instantly distribute it on demand.
You don't go to achewood.com to read just read whatever 3 panels are up today. You go there to read the latest paragraph in a story that you've been following for days/weeks/months.
Achewood uses "comics" as a medium more than the end goal. Where the author differs from more traditional comics is that he doesn't feel the need to have each separate comic have its own completeness, basically meaning that you can't take any individual comic and have it make much sense on its own. Achewood isn't the first comic to work that way, but it certainly has trended away from it very strongly at times, with story arcs that have lasted weeks.
The bigger story arcs are sort of like a comic book, but there's just one guy writing it, and he dribbles it out a little bit at a time, as he gets each page done. That, plus there's a semi-rigid continuity that runs through the entire of the history of the strip. Not necessarily continuity of plot details, but more about the development of the characters.
It's not a comic like you'd see in a newspaper for sure, even if you could convince the author to leave out the profanity and other "inappropriate content".
Slashdot Mirror
Fair enough, but really all they're doing is making more complicated quests, and maybe tying them together by weaving the major aspects through some larger plot line. Ok, but since you've got (hopefully) thousands of players all playing through the same quests, then each individual's "story" is going to be basically the same, or follow one of the predetermined paths. Either way, there's going to be scores of characters that all have the exact same backstory, which sort of makes any connection to the greater story arc pointless.
What you end up with is a collection of single player/co-op campaigns, loosely held together by the social aspects of a fancy 3D chatroom. And maybe some PVP thrown in on the side. There are already many successful games that follow that mold, so more power to 'em.
But that's not what I want to think when someone tells me their MMO will be story-driven. I want a game where the world is shaped by the story, and the story is shaped by the players. But I'm not sure that that's really a feasible target. I don't think it's possible for developers to create the story as fast as the players' decisions will demand. I think the road to success is more along the lines of cutting out the story part, and making mechanics that allow the players to shape the game world more directly .
Your point about OSS is certainly valid, and while I certainly don't think Linux is going to die or anything like that, there will likely be a slow-down in development for certain pieces of software, and specific aspects of the software.
While there are many people who enjoy the fun and challenge of writing software, it's important that not all steps in the process are the same. The adage that the last 10% of the project is 90% of the work is somewhat true, in that making a really well polished product inevitably requires some grind work at the end. In the software world, that might manifest itself as bug squashing, or user testing, or interface tweaking, etc.
It's important work, but it's often time consuming, monotonous, and not fun, and it's hard to get people to volunteer to do it. That's a part of the OSS process that can really benefit by having paid labor to help make sure that it gets the attention it deserves (although there's no doubt that even proprietary companies often skip out on this part).
If the tech economy turns to crap and there are lots of newly unemployed programmers sitting around, I'd actually expect the amount of OSS activity to increase somewhat. All those geeks aren't going to turn off their computers and never code again. But the effort will go towards the sorts of things that are interesting, not towards the dull (but important) drudgery work. If companies stop paying their developers to work on OSS, there are certain types of work that will fall to the wayside.
The EVE event that I described was indeed awesome. It was actually completely hilarious. But like you said, it was player-driven. And that's different than story-driven. EVE is all about a player-driven universe, and it does it pretty well. Although it definitely has its problems, it's a successful game, with many very dedicated and passionate players.
My anecdote wasn't meant to dump on EvE, just to illustrate that even a small scale story-line with open participation is basically impossible to plan out. In fact, if I remember correctly, the aformentioned event was only the first part of a larger story-arc, which consequently had to be dumped because after that first event it was impossible to get the players to buy into it. The people who were running the story tried to ad-lib it from there, but making compelling content takes time. Your only hope is to try and predict all the possible paths through the story that the players might take and create content for each, but that's basically impossible, and wouldn't be economically feasible anyways.
The real meat of EVE is in the player-driven game. It's not about stories, it's about the social aspect. And like you said, there are more dedicated people who end up being more influential (EVE has alliances of literally thousands of players, but run by individuals), but the more casual players are willing to engage in those larger campaigns, and I believe the fact that those campaigns are thought up and waged purely by other players is a big part of that. I could delve into that idea further, but I have to go to work :(
True, but I'm not sure how many people play games like that just to feel like a "nobody" foot soldier. WoW's implementation is basically just moving the grinding from the individual level to the server level. The players aren't making choices that affect the future path of the story, they're just trying to reach some pre-set conditions to trigger the next part of the script. The only real control the players have is how soon that trigger gets reached. It's not a terrible gameplay mechanic, but it's not really players helping to define a story.
Yeah, that's true, but then it's not really a story-driven MMO, it's more like a bunch of little single player or small teams effort games that are just kind of tied together through an otherwise run-of-the-mill MMO. You're basically talking about instancing. Not inherently a bad thing, just a compromise that developers have had to make because of the nature of MMO's. It's not economical, or fun on a mass appeal gameplay level to develop a bunch of content that can only happen in the game once, and only be experienced by those players that were in the right place at the right time.
But at the end of the day, if anybody can go into that instance and replay that part of the game, then any one player going through it can't feel like he/she is having a real effect on the overall storyline of the game. Not saying that that makes instancing pointless, but that it's not a path towards making an MMO that is story driven in a greater sense.
Nope, that ain't no good either, nope not one bit.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I really have a hard time seeing how story can meaningfully be integrated into an MMO. There's just too many people participating in the world in completely different ways. There's just practical matters, like what time zone do you put big events in? How do you evolve the story in a way that entertains the hardcore players on a day to day basis but also maintain consistency and meaningful interaction for more casual players who only put in a couple hours per week? What happens to your story when the players react in a way completely unexpected?
An real world example is EvE Online. Along side a mostly player driven universe, the devs have tried to run "storyline" events, and they hardly ever worked out. The players just didn't react as was hoped/expected (sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposefully.) I remember one event where the devs tried to get a big bunch of casual players together to go fight a big scary ship that they'd never expect to be in combat with otherwise. But players of a large and powerful corporation accidently stumbled upon the target ship before the casual group could get there, and destroyed it first. When the casual group arrived and the ship was already dead, they turned against the dev characters' ships. And that's not even getting into the many cases where groups have purposely thwarted the devs' plans. Fortunately for EVE, these sorts of "story" events aren't a big part of the game, and not particularly important to its success.
If you're going to focus your game design on the story driven part, then you'd better find a way to let every single player be a part of it in a meaningful way. Otherwise a small group of hardcore players will dominate the storyline, and leave nothing for the rest
Your specific example effectively demonstra a serious limitation for Wikipedia. One of wikipedia's flaws is not that it has such limitations, but that it doesn't recognize them. Wikipedia is not well suited for the task of distilling rumors and such to predict the future. That doesn't mean that wikipedia is worthless or somehow broken, it just means that it shouldn't have entries that try and guess.
Like you said, when operating at its fullest potential, Wikipedia is really an aggregation of well supported facts. I think everyone would be better served if Wikipedia as a general philosophy would remove topics where those sorts of facts can't be found. Keeping them around only serves to draw into question the usefulness of the entire site.
I think the more useful solution is multiple wiki's, each geared towards a more specific category of knowledge, and having the appropriate level of requirements for an entry to be considered valid. A wiki about future trends of the video game industry is not a bad thing, but it has, inherent in its subject matter, a huge amount of uncertainty. The very idea that such information would be compiled in the same collection and through the same process as something as straight-forward as descriptions of historical medieval weaponry is sort of silly. (Of course, it's also half the fun of wikipedia, following the strange paths that you can end up taking by clicking interesting links between entries.)
More subject specific wiki's do exist, and more are popping up every day, but they're all currently stuck in the shadow of Wikipedia. Hopefully as people become more savvy about finding information online, they'll start to look for more focused sources.
I think there's a lesson here for both sides. For the consumer, you're out of control of some things. For the service provider, forcing upgrades is bad.
I don't think this free google portal stuff is all that significant in the grand scheme of things, but if this was an important service that my business was paying for, then this sort of behavior would have me super pissed off. I would expect that as a paying customer that I could "upgrade" my service at my leisure. I would expect the company I'm paying to continue to offer the old version for quite some time, and repeatedly remind me about the upgrade during that time. Eventually, sure they need to discontinue the old stuff, but they should establish very flexible procedures to help customers roll out the new.
Yeah, but in any commercially useful application of the technology, you're going to have computers at each end dealing with the data once it's decrypted.
That's Schneier's whole point really. The weak link isn't actually sending encrypted data, it's dealing with the data at either end of chain. For the data to be useful, it has to be decrypted at some point in time, and the listener's computer has to know how to do the decryption. An attacker isn't going to attack the encrypted data stream. They're going to attack either the source or the listener, and either get the stored decrypted data, or get the stored encrypted data and the necessary info to decrypt it.
If your total communications network consists only of a encrypted communications line, plus a computer on each end, and both of those computers have no other connection to any other sort of network, and also have foolproof physical security, then maybe the encryption line might become the weakest point. But in the real world, computers are generally interconnected with many others, allowing lots of directions to attack from.
Unless someone comes up with some amazing breakthrough that makes factoring very large numbers trivial, there aren't really any practical cases where the encrypted data stream is the likely target of an attack.
You're right. The web hasn't changed at all in the last decade. Thanks for clearing this up.
No, this is something written into the Android OS by Google. It's a part of their app store. Any Android phone will have this as a part of it, unless Google changes Android in order to remove it (which they most likely won't). But that being said, I don't think it's a terrible feature, and I'm sure that in the near future, there will be plenty of ways to install software onto Android without going through the app store, and thereby take Google out of that part of the loop.
The web is a moving target in almost whatever direction you want to look at it from. Standards are constantly in development. There are multiple significant browsers all being developed at different rates and with different priorities. The technologies that are available are continually evolving. And the needs of clients are forever becoming more complex. The job of a web designer/developer is to pick the best compromises from all of those competing interests and to make a product.
The point is, 100% standards compliance is not a realistic goal for most websites. And that's ok. It's just another one of those pieces that is nice and helpful to a degree, but there is a point of diminishing returns, and a few compromises here and there is not some sort of crime against humanity.
I like to draw comparisons to the building design/construction industry because that's the career that I'm currently involved in. When designing a building, we have about a bazillion life safety/fire protection/accessibility/etc. codes that are legally enforced. We have to balance the demands of those codes with the needs of the client, our own "architectural vision", issues with energy useage, issues with budget, issues with gravity, and others.
But the thing is, even though those codes are very important and have serious liability issues involved in them, they're still administered with some flexibility and compromise in them. Since the stakes are so high, there's all sorts of review processes that you have to go through, but it's possible to ask for and receive waviers for various issues, although they almost always require you to make a compromise of your own somewhere else.
It's just the nature of the beast when you're designing complex systems. And whether that complex system is an office building, or the online store of the company that works in the office building, you can't realistically expect to get 100% of what you ideally want. And that's ok.
I think you're right that with the right kind of leadership and organization, a company can keep formal internal meetings to a minimum and everyone will be happier because of it.
If that works well all the time for 37Signals, then good for them. But it's important to realize that it works for them to a large degree because of the nature of their work. The "product" that they're producing is fairly simple in the sense that it can be done with a small in-house team. It's feasible for one individual to completely wrap their head around every aspect of a project if needed. That's not possible in every industry.
There are many lines of work where you just need way more people. There are consultants, and engineers, and manufacturers, and code officials, etc.
I know these guys are working hard, but I think they should step back and make sure they appreciate the relative freedom that exists in much of the software industry. It's far less accountable than most jobs and far less regulated. I have many days where I wish I didn't have to constantly deal with safety codes and governmental reviews.
I'm certainly no lawyer, but I'd imagine that numerous things fall under the term "intentionally damaging a computer system." And that rendering the machine unusable, even for a limited time, counts as damage. If not, then there certainly would have to be a sister law that covered that sort of thing, as well as the integrity of software and data. That being the case, why wouldn't they combine it all under one law?
Messing with data is often times more "damaging" to the victim than the hardware would be. It would cost me money to replace my power supply or RAM or whatever, but assuming that I can afford it, I can get hardware basically identical to what I had before. Data can be much harder to replace. Hopefully you've got some backups. But in the case of a DOS, the victim is potentially losing data before they even get a chance to back it up. That's really worse in a lot of ways.
If you've already got 1.2 billion dollars in orders, you can probably throw a little bit of money towards automating your production line. And while I don't know much about the specifics of this particular product, solar panel manufacturing is generally a fairly high precision activity, and often involves raw materials that aren't the most healthy substances for humans to be around. A nice, clean, automated production facility is ideal for solar panels.
This isn't a couple of guys who started a business out of their garage last week. They've already done the bulk of the messy design work, and they're moving on to mass production. They're probably still doing more of the hands-on design work as well, but it likely happens in a whole separate building from their factory.
I'm sure they have. But that doesn't mean that investors won't panic. The stock market is constantly looking for reasons to act irrationally. And the secrecy that Apple tends to practice keeps its investors even more jittery.
There are a number of places to buy non-DRM'd music, in both physical and digital form. Why don't you try those?
I guess that's a decent idea, but it relies to a degree on the assumption that the people creating the bots are doing so just for the fun and challenge of it. But with Glider, there's a clear example of someone creating a bot for financial gain, and if that is their goal, then it's unlikely that the customers will limit their bots to a specified server.
Although you can make an argument that having a purposely bot-ridden server would give Blizzard lots of useful information on how the different bots work, which would help them detect bots on other servers, and also help them modify their game to be less bot friendly, so that's another good argument.
Just a counterpoint, you can put a Gamecube disc into the Wii and it'll play just fine. Try doing that with any other Nintendo living room console. Any backwards compatibility at all in your living room is new for Nintendo.
All that being said, I don't think the DSi not playing GBA games is that huge of a deal for the large majority of the market. It's not aimed at replacing GBA's, it's aimed at replacing DS's, which it's mostly backwards compatible with.
Yes, it's exactly like slavery. Thanks for such a useful analogy.
There's only so much you can do to make creating bots impossible. At the end of the day, the client needs to have enough information to allow it to display everything the player needs to play the game. If all the bot is trying to do is play the game, then it's going to have access to that same information.
I guess my point is that there's a difference between security in terms of keeping someone from hacking the game, and security in terms of keeping someone from automating parts of playing the game. At the end of the day, there's still an unknown player running the game on a machine that they control. You can't stop them from running other software along side your game. You can try to detect what they're doing, and I believe Blizzard does that to some degree, but that's still a reactive approach.
Fair enough, I'm not suggesting that everyone should love it, merely that they should try it. The post that I was responding to sounded like someone who was dismissing it without even giving it a shot, based purely on their preconceived idea about how a "comic" should work.
It took significant pestering from me to get my wife to spend a little bit of time reading through the Achewood archives, and when she finally did, she wasn't as amused by it as I am. And that's fine, but I'm glad she gave it a shot.
That's too bad, because you're missing out on some very entertaining stories because of an arbitrary value that you've put on the act of drawing inside little boxes.
If you only think of comic strips as tiny segments that you read each day in a newspaper before you throw it away, then your opinion makes some sense. But you maybe have heard of this cool thing called the internet, which allows someone to easily store information and almost instantly distribute it on demand.
You don't go to achewood.com to read just read whatever 3 panels are up today. You go there to read the latest paragraph in a story that you've been following for days/weeks/months.
Achewood uses "comics" as a medium more than the end goal. Where the author differs from more traditional comics is that he doesn't feel the need to have each separate comic have its own completeness, basically meaning that you can't take any individual comic and have it make much sense on its own. Achewood isn't the first comic to work that way, but it certainly has trended away from it very strongly at times, with story arcs that have lasted weeks.
The bigger story arcs are sort of like a comic book, but there's just one guy writing it, and he dribbles it out a little bit at a time, as he gets each page done. That, plus there's a semi-rigid continuity that runs through the entire of the history of the strip. Not necessarily continuity of plot details, but more about the development of the characters.
It's not a comic like you'd see in a newspaper for sure, even if you could convince the author to leave out the profanity and other "inappropriate content".