They can't build for the max usage scenario, because that's just not going to last.
...t's not impossible to launch without day-long server queues, EA is just either incompetent or too cheap to pay for the sort of infrastructure their always-on DRM requires.
With the ease of usability that VMs offer, I'd lean on incompetent. EA's other studios have a small wealth of experience in dealing with online-dependent games, and Bioware's "Star Wars The Old Republic" comes to mind. Ignoring the experiences of online launches such as the launch of SWTOR (long wait queues and latency which were resolved through spinning up new VMs) is the very definition of incompetence.
EVE Online... and all you little shits complaining about Diablo III or SimCity sound like a day old nooblet that just got scammed by Spaceship Barbie...
See you little bitches in space.
I only play one game anymore, and I spend every night of it cowering in the cobblestone corner with a bow aimed at the door. Will the zombies let the creepers in? Each night I wonder...
I don't know about "simulating properly" when you lose connection to the server. Plenty of people have noticed traffic acting wonky, every single bus lining up to pick up a single passenger, every fire truck going to a single fire when there're other fires in the city, etc. These problems didn't exist during beta.
It's very probable that when the game loses internet connection or when the server is overloaded, the game simply fall back on a "dumb" AI. While this might work for the few minutes the connection is down, in the long term your city will suffer from so much traffic problems it just dies.
I believe an IGN reviewer noticed these issues as well, though IIRC he was reviewing an early release of the final product. Restarting the game resolved the issue, and it's likely this is an uncaught bug. Bugs DO make it through beta testing...
I played all last night and I had no issues.. made about 5 cities. So I don't know what this article is talking about. They were also still there this morning.
X Years? try now. Players are complaining that saved games won't load back.
The game has been deliberately broken in the name of DRM, without any thought of what the outcome would be. With no commitment from EA to remove this built-in self-destruct, anyone would be a fool to buy this game. In 18 months when the "water pumps that work" DLC and the "slightly larger map, so you can actually build a city"
Don't worry, those evil pirates will release a patch soon that will resolve all these issues...
'At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that digital was killing music,' said Edgar Berger, chief executive of the international arm of Sony Music Entertainment. Now, he added, it could be said 'that digital is saving music.'"
...and if they had adapted much sooner instead of waging a foolish war against their own customers, this would have been a much different story, something along the lines of "Music Industry Sees Business as Usual, Yet Continues to Screw Artists out of Royalties".
While simply being the subscriber is no longer (we hope) proof of infringement it would almost certainly be probable cause for a search warrant.
My entire complaint is that the judge denied the search warrant!
This is a civil case. So there is no such thing as a warrant. Instead, it is called a motion for discovery. But the judge denied he motion for discovery when he granted the dismissal. That was my entire complaint.
From the decision:
It is possible that Plaintiff sued Defendant because he is the subscriber to IP address 68.8.137.53. (The Court notes that it is actually unclear whether the IP address is registered to Defendant)
It appears that all they had was an IP address, which *may* link up to a subscriber. It's like going into court, saying "we know the guy lives in this town, and he drives a car that has numbers in the license plate". I also like this quote:
“it is no more likely that the subscriber to an IP address carried out a particular computer function...than to say an individual who pays the telephone bill made a specific telephone call.”
The judge rightly denied discovery as the plaintiff didn't have anything outside of "we think it came from there" while pointing in a general direction. If the bar was set so low for discovery to be granted, one could imagine how often it would be abused. I understand where you're coming from, this makes it much more difficult to pursue actual infringement cases. But if you've been observing even a little, you would see how eager groups like these are to jump at any chance to abuse the legal system.
While I don't have any suggestions for resolving the difficulties in pursuing actual infringement, I'm glad that some courts are raising the requirements to proceed with a suit. With my meager income, win or lose, such a lawsuit could be fiscally fatal to me, while costing pocket change to the plaintiff.
If it can be proven, this is breaking the lae in two ways. First, it's illegal age discrimination. Second, it's immigration fraud.
Even if it was proven in court, it seems the penalties wouldn't measure up to the benefits of ignoring the laws. When you're a corporation, the legal system's bark is often worse then it's bite...
I had worked for a major software company that was not Microsoft but worked in the virtualization area.
Over the last few years saw anybody over 50 terminated and then subsequently replaced with immigrant workers for lower wages. The workers terminated had alot of experience and could do the job more correctly and faster than staff subsequently hired -- suspect longer vacation time and higher wages made them targets for termination.
This has happened consistently over 3 years.
This is wrong.
Couldn't agree more. Seems like something those "outdated" employee unions were formed to resolve.
Note: I'm not a union shill, I wouldn't be able to stand the politics, but I am employed in a job that requires me to be a member and pay dues, and were I work there are many over 50 in non-management positions, and some of them are in IT positions as well.
...and would make bringing in H1B workers more expensive, thus possibly forcing companies to hire locally again.
Widening the H1B to be a general work visa would also accomplish this, would it not? Without the employee lock-in, workers would be free to pursue higher paying jobs and positions. This constant change-over would also increase costs on HR, having to fill positions that are consistently underpaid, and thus making it less attractive to hire outside of the country. Then they would have to raise wages to increase retention, and then you might as well be paying for actual talent instead of "duct-tape and baling wire" talent.
It's interesting to see the Michael Morisy "security through no using internets". Google is not the internet, no matter how hard they try, and yet a large population thinks that if you can't reach google, the internet is down...
And yet this is neither a face, nor is a hospital involved. This kind of retarded logic...
It's called an analogy. Attacking the hypothetical part of someone''s analogy is what Scott Adams likes to call a "win by knockout."
I also failed to mention the third analogy, the one where I compared the original analogy to the logic that corporations use. For someone who can't recognize an analogy, I sure do use alot of them =D
And yet this is neither a face, nor is a hospital involved. This kind of retarded logic...
It's called an analogy. Attacking the hypothetical part of someone''s analogy is what Scott Adams likes to call a "win by knockout."
I disagreed with the analogy, as he was comparing people to things in an attempt to elicit a stronger emotional response. Comparing a physical assault on a human being to bringing down a website through over-use isn't an analogy, it's a failed attempt at one. I also presented a more comparable situation, an analogy if you will, in referencing the slashdot effect. It would seem you can only recognize the first analogy you see in a paragraph, maybe you should work on that...
If you punch someone in the face and put them in the hospital, you don't get to say,"Oh, one punch to the face put you in the hospital? You really need to toughen up!" and get out of it. You still get arrested and go to jail.
And yet this is neither a face, nor is a hospital involved. This kind of retarded logic is similar to what corporations use to assign themselves rights that belong to people and not companies. Aaron may have been bringing those servers to a crawl, but he did so by using the websites, not a denial of service attack. By your logic, slashdot readers would be at fault for bringing down websites by simply trying to view their contents. Would you like to be in court for your part in "Slashdot Effect"?
Also, anyone who says "Nikon doesn't have a monopoly" isn't familiar with the way camera systems work. Nikon, Canon, etc have a pretty strong monopoly on any non-rich photographer who has bought into their lens system over the years. You can't easily jump ship to another manufacturer when you've got 3 years worth of salary sunk into proprietary glass.
I'm not a photographer so this will probably sound ignorant (because it is), but what makes lenses proprietary? Isn't it just physics, light input/output? Is it really impossible considering the pro-level costs to build mounting adapters to mate different branded components?
I'm going to go lightweight on the descriptive because I'm not a physicist, and I only know what I've read and researched as a photographer. In addition, I'm loosely relating what I can recall.
"Proprietary" is covered in the mount and the wiring. There are mounting adapters that can mate different mounting types (even from different brands) but in all that I've seen, you lose any auto-focus and on-lens image stabilization. These are typically used by people who have some top-notch old lenses that don't have electronic features, they were completely manual to begin with.
Isn't it just physics, light input/output?
As far as the light in/out portion, if it can reach the sensor focused and sized to paint across the sensor, yes. You can see this from the boutique lens makers like Lensbaby (which has some pretty awesome creative lenses), and the alternative makers like Tamron and Sigma. However each of these makers produces different models of lenses for different lens mounts, which means the lenses you buy are still stuck with the mounting system of your camera maker.
Mounting Adapters also introduce a wide array of difficulties, as they increase the distance from the back of the lens to the surface of the sensor. Different lenses use different types of glass (even within the same lens) and also use different numbers of lenses. Adding more glass between the rear element of the lens and the sensor will almost always degrade photo quality, and trying to do it in a 1-size-fits-all adapter will definitely degrade most lenses photo quality. Some lenses zoom by moving the rear element as well, and some of these bring that rear element *very* close to the sensor, I'd imagine such lenses would be increasingly difficult to design adapters for. There are issues such as chromatic aberation (CA), lens distortion, barrel distortion, depth of field/focus (DoF), and diffraction that each lens is designed to avoid or correct when made. Adding anything between the lens and the sensor, even a few mm of air, can foul up those details and lead to shoddy images.
If companies had an obligation never to make anyone worse off for every change they made to their business practices, there would be no economic growth. And morally, why does Nixon owe this man who has come to rely on them, anything. They never claimed that replacement parts would always be made available in the future.
Well as I understand it, he was a crook. He should probably be required to resolve this issue before he's allowed to guest-star on Futurama again...
But, the manufacturer does not necessarily have to make it easy for the owner to get the broken-out-of-warranty camera fixed either.
There's a difference between making it easy and making it harder to obtain OOW camera repairs. This is Nikon doing the latter. It would appear they're clamping down on the supply chains for replacement parts to only those "authorized repair stations" (read: approved money funnels) to either increase the cost of ownerships for OOW cameras or to make it so difficult to get OOW repairs that you're nearly forced to purchase a new camera.
Also, anyone who says "Nikon doesn't have a monopoly" isn't familiar with the way camera systems work. Nikon, Canon, etc have a pretty strong monopoly on any non-rich photographer who has bought into their lens system over the years. You can't easily jump ship to another manufacturer when you've got 3 years worth of salary sunk into proprietary glass.
Slashdot Mirror
They can't build for the max usage scenario, because that's just not going to last.
...t's not impossible to launch without day-long server queues, EA is just either incompetent or too cheap to pay for the sort of infrastructure their always-on DRM requires.
With the ease of usability that VMs offer, I'd lean on incompetent. EA's other studios have a small wealth of experience in dealing with online-dependent games, and Bioware's "Star Wars The Old Republic" comes to mind. Ignoring the experiences of online launches such as the launch of SWTOR (long wait queues and latency which were resolved through spinning up new VMs) is the very definition of incompetence.
EVE Online... and all you little shits complaining about Diablo III or SimCity sound like a day old nooblet that just got scammed by Spaceship Barbie...
See you little bitches in space.
I only play one game anymore, and I spend every night of it cowering in the cobblestone corner with a bow aimed at the door. Will the zombies let the creepers in? Each night I wonder...
How one would "enforce" this document is pretty vague to me.
How about at LOIC-point aimed at your DRM servers?
I don't know about "simulating properly" when you lose connection to the server. Plenty of people have noticed traffic acting wonky, every single bus lining up to pick up a single passenger, every fire truck going to a single fire when there're other fires in the city, etc. These problems didn't exist during beta.
It's very probable that when the game loses internet connection or when the server is overloaded, the game simply fall back on a "dumb" AI. While this might work for the few minutes the connection is down, in the long term your city will suffer from so much traffic problems it just dies.
I believe an IGN reviewer noticed these issues as well, though IIRC he was reviewing an early release of the final product. Restarting the game resolved the issue, and it's likely this is an uncaught bug. Bugs DO make it through beta testing...
Cue the fools who don't know the difference between "cue" and "queue" What manner of hybrid beast is this? Kway? Kweh?
Sorry, I must have been thinking about swimming...
I'd hate to pay the roaming charges on this.
It's stuck with a 2 year contract
At least it doesn't have to interface with iTunes
WHO FORGOT TO ADD TETHERING TO THE PLAN!?!
etc, etc, etc
I played all last night and I had no issues.. made about 5 cities. So I don't know what this article is talking about. They were also still there this morning.
The beta of the crack works that well? Awesome...
At the tail end, so we're talking like a year and a couple months... big whoop.
Games are still being taken down when new ones are released.
..and yet I can still get a multi-player game of quake going. When older tech is more capable then newer tech, you have an issue somewhere...
X Years? try now. Players are complaining that saved games won't load back.
The game has been deliberately broken in the name of DRM, without any thought of what the outcome would be. With no commitment from EA to remove this built-in self-destruct, anyone would be a fool to buy this game. In 18 months when the "water pumps that work" DLC and the "slightly larger map, so you can actually build a city"
Don't worry, those evil pirates will release a patch soon that will resolve all these issues...
'At the beginning of the digital revolution it was common to say that digital was killing music,' said Edgar Berger, chief executive of the international arm of Sony Music Entertainment. Now, he added, it could be said 'that digital is saving music.'"
...and if they had adapted much sooner instead of waging a foolish war against their own customers, this would have been a much different story, something along the lines of "Music Industry Sees Business as Usual, Yet Continues to Screw Artists out of Royalties".
While simply being the subscriber is no longer (we hope) proof of infringement it would almost certainly be probable cause for a search warrant.
My entire complaint is that the judge denied the search warrant!
This is a civil case. So there is no such thing as a warrant. Instead, it is called a motion for discovery. But the judge denied he motion for discovery when he granted the dismissal. That was my entire complaint.
From the decision:
It is possible that Plaintiff sued Defendant because he is the subscriber to IP address 68.8.137.53. (The Court notes that it is actually unclear whether the IP address is registered to Defendant)
It appears that all they had was an IP address, which *may* link up to a subscriber. It's like going into court, saying "we know the guy lives in this town, and he drives a car that has numbers in the license plate". I also like this quote:
“it is no more likely that the subscriber to an IP address carried out a particular computer function...than to say an individual who pays the telephone bill made a specific telephone call.”
The judge rightly denied discovery as the plaintiff didn't have anything outside of "we think it came from there" while pointing in a general direction. If the bar was set so low for discovery to be granted, one could imagine how often it would be abused. I understand where you're coming from, this makes it much more difficult to pursue actual infringement cases. But if you've been observing even a little, you would see how eager groups like these are to jump at any chance to abuse the legal system.
While I don't have any suggestions for resolving the difficulties in pursuing actual infringement, I'm glad that some courts are raising the requirements to proceed with a suit. With my meager income, win or lose, such a lawsuit could be fiscally fatal to me, while costing pocket change to the plaintiff.
If it can be proven, this is breaking the lae in two ways. First, it's illegal age discrimination. Second, it's immigration fraud.
Even if it was proven in court, it seems the penalties wouldn't measure up to the benefits of ignoring the laws. When you're a corporation, the legal system's bark is often worse then it's bite...
Karma whoreing with a double post? For shame...
1
2
... peaks as the indentured foreign workers bolster their incomes by selling company information. A few well publicize cases will set things right.
Which of course will never be publicized as this would negatively affect the stock price...
I had worked for a major software company that was not Microsoft but worked in the virtualization area.
Over the last few years saw anybody over 50 terminated and then subsequently replaced with immigrant workers for lower wages. The workers terminated had alot of experience and could do the job more correctly and faster than staff subsequently hired -- suspect longer vacation time and higher wages made them targets for termination.
This has happened consistently over 3 years.
This is wrong.
Couldn't agree more. Seems like something those "outdated" employee unions were formed to resolve.
Note: I'm not a union shill, I wouldn't be able to stand the politics, but I am employed in a job that requires me to be a member and pay dues, and were I work there are many over 50 in non-management positions, and some of them are in IT positions as well.
...and would make bringing in H1B workers more expensive, thus possibly forcing companies to hire locally again.
Widening the H1B to be a general work visa would also accomplish this, would it not? Without the employee lock-in, workers would be free to pursue higher paying jobs and positions. This constant change-over would also increase costs on HR, having to fill positions that are consistently underpaid, and thus making it less attractive to hire outside of the country. Then they would have to raise wages to increase retention, and then you might as well be paying for actual talent instead of "duct-tape and baling wire" talent.
It's interesting to see the Michael Morisy "security through no using internets". Google is not the internet, no matter how hard they try, and yet a large population thinks that if you can't reach google, the internet is down...
And yet this is neither a face, nor is a hospital involved. This kind of retarded logic...
It's called an analogy . Attacking the hypothetical part of someone''s analogy is what Scott Adams likes to call a "win by knockout."
I also failed to mention the third analogy, the one where I compared the original analogy to the logic that corporations use. For someone who can't recognize an analogy, I sure do use alot of them =D
And yet this is neither a face, nor is a hospital involved. This kind of retarded logic...
It's called an analogy . Attacking the hypothetical part of someone''s analogy is what Scott Adams likes to call a "win by knockout."
I disagreed with the analogy, as he was comparing people to things in an attempt to elicit a stronger emotional response. Comparing a physical assault on a human being to bringing down a website through over-use isn't an analogy, it's a failed attempt at one. I also presented a more comparable situation, an analogy if you will, in referencing the slashdot effect. It would seem you can only recognize the first analogy you see in a paragraph, maybe you should work on that...
If you punch someone in the face and put them in the hospital, you don't get to say,"Oh, one punch to the face put you in the hospital? You really need to toughen up!" and get out of it. You still get arrested and go to jail.
And yet this is neither a face, nor is a hospital involved. This kind of retarded logic is similar to what corporations use to assign themselves rights that belong to people and not companies. Aaron may have been bringing those servers to a crawl, but he did so by using the websites, not a denial of service attack. By your logic, slashdot readers would be at fault for bringing down websites by simply trying to view their contents. Would you like to be in court for your part in "Slashdot Effect"?
Thanks M$. I suddenly want a Wii U!
Also, anyone who says "Nikon doesn't have a monopoly" isn't familiar with the way camera systems work. Nikon, Canon, etc have a pretty strong monopoly on any non-rich photographer who has bought into their lens system over the years. You can't easily jump ship to another manufacturer when you've got 3 years worth of salary sunk into proprietary glass.
I'm not a photographer so this will probably sound ignorant (because it is), but what makes lenses proprietary? Isn't it just physics, light input/output? Is it really impossible considering the pro-level costs to build mounting adapters to mate different branded components?
I'm going to go lightweight on the descriptive because I'm not a physicist, and I only know what I've read and researched as a photographer. In addition, I'm loosely relating what I can recall.
"Proprietary" is covered in the mount and the wiring. There are mounting adapters that can mate different mounting types (even from different brands) but in all that I've seen, you lose any auto-focus and on-lens image stabilization. These are typically used by people who have some top-notch old lenses that don't have electronic features, they were completely manual to begin with.
Isn't it just physics, light input/output?
As far as the light in/out portion, if it can reach the sensor focused and sized to paint across the sensor, yes. You can see this from the boutique lens makers like Lensbaby (which has some pretty awesome creative lenses), and the alternative makers like Tamron and Sigma. However each of these makers produces different models of lenses for different lens mounts, which means the lenses you buy are still stuck with the mounting system of your camera maker.
Mounting Adapters also introduce a wide array of difficulties, as they increase the distance from the back of the lens to the surface of the sensor. Different lenses use different types of glass (even within the same lens) and also use different numbers of lenses. Adding more glass between the rear element of the lens and the sensor will almost always degrade photo quality, and trying to do it in a 1-size-fits-all adapter will definitely degrade most lenses photo quality. Some lenses zoom by moving the rear element as well, and some of these bring that rear element *very* close to the sensor, I'd imagine such lenses would be increasingly difficult to design adapters for. There are issues such as chromatic aberation (CA), lens distortion, barrel distortion, depth of field/focus (DoF), and diffraction that each lens is designed to avoid or correct when made. Adding anything between the lens and the sensor, even a few mm of air, can foul up those details and lead to shoddy images.
Finding a way to sue Microsoft into bankruptcy is never irrelevant.
I just don't think they'll find anything, MS can do this w/o leaving a trail.
If only they hadn't removed undelete....
If companies had an obligation never to make anyone worse off for every change they made to their business practices, there would be no economic growth. And morally, why does Nixon owe this man who has come to rely on them, anything. They never claimed that replacement parts would always be made available in the future.
Well as I understand it, he was a crook. He should probably be required to resolve this issue before he's allowed to guest-star on Futurama again...
But, the manufacturer does not necessarily have to make it easy for the owner to get the broken-out-of-warranty camera fixed either.
There's a difference between making it easy and making it harder to obtain OOW camera repairs. This is Nikon doing the latter. It would appear they're clamping down on the supply chains for replacement parts to only those "authorized repair stations" (read: approved money funnels) to either increase the cost of ownerships for OOW cameras or to make it so difficult to get OOW repairs that you're nearly forced to purchase a new camera.
Also, anyone who says "Nikon doesn't have a monopoly" isn't familiar with the way camera systems work. Nikon, Canon, etc have a pretty strong monopoly on any non-rich photographer who has bought into their lens system over the years. You can't easily jump ship to another manufacturer when you've got 3 years worth of salary sunk into proprietary glass.