I've been writing PC/console games for 10 years now, and these days if your system locks (at least while playing something like TF2, especially fullscreen) there's a 90% chance it's a driver issue, most likely video drivers. I've been a mac user since 1984, run ubuntu on my netbook, and have refused to install any MS software on my macs (mostly as a test). I also have to run windows at work (xbox dev sort of requires it), and it almost never crashes. It hurts me to say it, but it's true. There are still countless horrible design flaws all over windows, but frequent OS instability in the absence of buggy driver-level code is now rare.
Sure, the house makes its money from the rake, but since that's a percentage of the pot, the house has a vested interest in ensuring big hands. That's also the kind of drama that makes poker most exciting. Put simply, it's never in the house's benefit for a player to have a bad hand.
I'm not saying that the online poker sites are stacking decks this way, but it's a mistake to say that they don't have any incentive.
> The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only > You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either.
When I used Visual Studio regularly (don't hate - you try using something else to make Xbox games) I did everything through the keyboard as well. Ctrl-I to enter immediate mode, of UnBlah.cpp, keybinds to switch between associated headers and cpps, etc. I had keybinds macro'ed to build or run every configuration, so I could do it with a single key chord without moving my hands from the keyboard or even switching apps.
At the same time I was writing our linux-based dedicated server (for the PC SKU) over ssh using vim and makefiles. I love vim; I use it for just about everything text-based I do (and once as a hex editor in a pinch). But I don't use it for writing serious code. Simple perl scripts sure. But a project with hundreds of source files, dozens of libs, about a dozen build flavors of each, etc? The IDE wins.
The bit about being able to work from anywhere in the world is nice. It's hard for an IDE to match that (unless you can spare $20 for a thumb drive. Zing!). But if that's not a big deal, the IDE wins out for complex projects.
Writing code is complex. Complex projects are complex. Tools to manage them are also complex. This goes for the CLI and GUI tools (though the GUI tools often put a friendly face on the simple things). Either flavor is going to take time and attention to master, and either can be very powerful. Think back to when you were first learning emacs or vim - how long did that process take? Assume it will take 25-50% as long to learn a GUI tool well. Give it that time, then make your call.
While I agree with you that questions phrased like this one are stupid, it's just a simple regexp to turn:
"my boss at work wants me to do X, but I'd really rather do Y; what are the merits of X versus Y?"
into
"I'm trying to build a case at work for changing our policy of X to Y; can Slashdot provide any good arguments?"
And while this does have an air of "Can Slashdot do my math homework?", it could pose an interesting question, and doesn't deserve the summary dismissal that the first question does.
No. I insist that the adjective "Cyber" before the word "Attack" should indicate the means, not the target
A well-written post may indicate a command of the English language, but that command only goes so far.
If we accept this meaning of Cyber Attack, then that means that an airplane that drops a bomb on an ISP is a "Cyber Attack", while bombing any other form of infrastructure would be a "regular attack".
Not at all. Bombing an Army base is a military attack. Bombing a banking district is a financial attack. Bombing the highways is an infrastructure attack.
Bruce's whole point here is that if we think of cyber defense as making the internet stronger, were missing the big picture. It's not about securing the internet, it's about securing our entire communications infrastructure. The internet is just the brightest star there, but in an emergency it's not the internet per se that's required, but the ability for people to communicate.
Levels in LittleBigPlanet consist of creative rearrangement of assets that Sony has already created (and retains the copyright for). Player's aren't creating all their own models, textures, animations, etc.
In Word, MS doesn't own the letters in your language, so you're free to recombine them however you want, and that's not a derivative work. Levels you create in LBP are derivative of Sony's work in creating the base assets. They're more analogous to remixes or sampling, while the word doc is an original song.
Like a remix, the particular way that a player recombines the provided assets can demonstrate a high degree of creativity, and may well deserve to be thought of as an original creation. But saying there's no difference between LBP and Word vastly oversimplifies the issue.
Look, if we're going to presuppose a deity that can create the entire universe, I don't think it's hard for him to figure out a way around your little quandry. If he created all the physical laws in the first place, it seems reasonable that an omnipotent god could violate them with impunity, say. Or just make everything on earth act as if that had happened.
Attempting to apply logical arguments to omnipotent power is ultimately pointless. God is axiomatic; he can neither be proven nor disproven by the rules of logic. Belief in an omnipotent being is like taking "A & ~A" as your first premise; it's a divide by 0 that makes all future operations NaN.
Whether you believe in god or not, that argument no more disproves his existence than all the silly "proofs" adduced by believers.
Wow! We better get you in charge of a game company right away, since you so obviously know what's fun and entertaining. Man, I sure hate it when film makers forget their place^H^H^H^H^H job and make stupid, preachy movies like Brokeback Mountain, or Schindler's List, or any of those dumb movies meant to enlighten and inform. More explosions, that's what those movies needed. It's high time that they realized that the only thing we, the dollar-grasping public of America, find entertaining is being pandered to; things that make us think, consider alternate worldviews, any of that sort of thing just make our heads hurt. I've learned all I ever want to about the wider world, and now I'd just like to see things I've already seen and learned regurgitated back to me with ever larger special effects budgets. That's what we need more of.
</sarcasm>
For the record, I am interested in "ridiculous opinions on politics, culture, or anything else." I find those entertaining. I read the blog posts too. You don't, and that's fair, but try to avoid falling into the cognitive gap that says, "Everyone is just like me!" It's a big world out there, with a lot of different people who have a lot of different interests. The way the market is set up right now, we can only meet the interests of a subset of those people. We'd like to be able to talk to other parts of it, that's all. Don't worry, we'll keep making games for you too. After all, the guy saying this is working on a game about being a <dorkvoice> huge super-cool dragon that flies through the skies and burns up cities, and armies, and and other dragons! </dorkvoice> He understands what the current market finds interesting.
Most of the comments so far seem very upset that the TV channels did this, but it really doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Wikipedia is a community, a society like any other. It has its values, with accuracy being one of the most important, and someone did a social experiment to see how well that community adhered to its principles. Sure, it required being a little bit of a bad actor, but if Slashdot reported on a new study where researchers bumped into people while carrying several packages and found that Linux users were more likely to help them pick up their dropped items, I don't think the comments would be blasting them for assault.
This was minor public vandalism, of a kind the community sees every day, and a kind that it was built to correct. If they had launched a systematic campaign to spread disinformation throughout many articles, that would be a serious problem, but changing the date of Lennon's death to 2007 instead of 1977? If edits like that caused Wikipedia any kind of damage, it would have died years ago.
IANAL, but I don't think the guilt or innocence of the plaintiffs should have any real bearing on the case. The claims in the suit center around the way that the RIAA has gone about suing people: assuming that IPs can be uniquely identifying, faling to do real computer forensic work, etc. Whether they've got the right people or not, it's the method they used that is at issue.
This seems just like the police conducting an illegal search. Even if they find conclusive evidence of guilt, the police still violated the law in conducting the search.
I think the story summary misses the point (shocking, I know). It's not about Tivo measuring how many people skip ads, it's about measuring which ads people skip. Sure, Tivo users skip most of the ads, but there are some that they watch (I recall hearing statistics that people skip about 2/3 of the ads, but I can't cite a source). For the ad agencies that create these commercials, this information is gold. These agencies currently rely on focus groups and surveys that measure "brand recognition", but that kind of information is still very nebulous.
Imagine you're trying to decide between two ad agencies. One shows you some statistics from these type of surveys, indicating indirectly that their ads are failry succesful. The other shows you hard numbers indicating that their ads are watched through to the end twice as often as their competitor's. That's a pretty compelling argument.
Ad agencies can also use this data to determine which of their campaigns, art directors, or copywriters are more succesful. It's like going from profiling your app using a stopwatch to using a real profiling tool that gives you millisecond timings for individual functions. Your data are much more granular and much more direct, allowing you to really optimize your approach.
Honestly, as long as they keep the personal information out of this, I see it as a good thing. There are certain commercials that I'm sure everyone hates, and the faster those can be identified by ad agencies and their clients, the faster they get off the air and away from my eyeballs.
Make it 1/day, 5/week, whatever you think is fair, but after that threshold, they still get the stories posted, but the links get a "nofollow". That way you're still sharing interesting, unique stories with the Slashdot readers, but people have no incentive to submit hordes of stories. Combine this with prefering submissions from infrequent contributors, and the incentive of the Beatles-Beatles-crowd shitfs to trying to find the most unique stories.
It is in everyone's best interest to encourage a wide range of story submitters, and you point out the many problems that come from "celebrity" submitters. This is really no different than blogs screening comments to ensure they aren't spam. Any forum that allows relatively open submissions from the users will need to protect itself from spam. Sure, sometimes the stories are unique and interesting, a spam-y coating but a ham-y center. So block the spam with a "nofollow" after they hit their limit, and we still get to see the story, there's still a reward for good submissions, but there's no incentive to spam.
As a twitch game programmer, I disagree. While what you say is right for the current crop of games, you are neglecting the improvments that game developers could implement if our customers had more speed. To put it another way, a higher-speed connection won't improve your Counterstrike game (much), since, as you say, that mostly depends on latency. However, if more people had more speed, there are many things developers could do to take advantage of that. Just being able to trim the amount of time we spend optimizing our net code would be a big help, allowing more time for bug-fixing, and preventing many bugs outright, as highly-optimized code usually means brittle code, which over time becomes buggy code.
So, everyone, take Gandhi's advice, be the change you want to see in the world, and always push for faster connections. If you don't do it for yourself, please, think of the developers.
While I agree with you completely, I think you misunderstand the source of the common attitude here. I think we would all agree that lyrics are entitled to as much copyright protection as any other part of the song, I, at least, feel that by buying the song I have also (implicitly) bought a license to the lyrics. Since this app was written as a plug-in for iTunes, one great use was to get the lyrics for songs you had purchased online, and therefore had no booklet for.
So, while it would (could) be a copyright violation for me to get the lyrics to a song I don't own, purchasing the song should give me as much right to the lyrics as to the melody, performance, etc. This is another case of a major industry taking out a tool because of its potential copyright-breaking uses, with no regard to its non-infringing uses. As the law has shown, a tool that is capable of non-infringing uses is a non-infringing tool. Though the users might exceed their rights, the tool is still very much within the rights.
I own a Tivo, and like many of you say, I really enjoy skipping the adds. Being able to watch a 30-min show in 23 minutes is a great timesaver, but it does have some downsides. I miss several jokes around the office, because they start with "Oh man, have you seen the new FooCorp add?" I have a very poor idea of what movies are coming out, because I don't see any of the trailers on TV. So, I can see several uses for this service. I'd love to be able to tell my Tivo: "Show me all the movie trailers for movies coming out Friday." Or something similar. I've thought for a while that PVRs should allow ad recording and ad sharing. You know that there are lots of people who would send that really funny ad to all their friends, and it would get the advertiser's off your back a bit. They usually have a set of ads they're featuring on the main page as well. You have to deliberatley select to watch them, but often I do. For LOTR they had behind the scenes interviews and several extended trailers. Ditto for most any other geek-friendly movie. They also showcased the BMW films when those were running. This new system just sounds like a beefed-up version of that, which is no bad thing.
Sure, most commercials are annoying and deserve to be skipped, but some are actually entertaining, interesting, and (rarely) even informative. Can't say I see a problem with providing me another way to get information, as long as it's opt-in.
(Disclaimer: I work in the video game industry, so I'm hardly impartial here, but I do know what I'm talking about.)
There's a key difference between controlling cigaretts, alcohol, etc. and controlling M and AO games. The former are clearly defined: does this product contain tobacco? Then it's not for kids. With video games (and movies, music, etc.) the question is much murkier. Does this game contain violence? And how do you rate that violence? These are very subjective decisions. That kind of subjectivity is fine for a self-policed rating system (like game or movie ratings), but bad for a governmental standard. (It is important to point out in these discussion that there is no legal weight behind MPAA ratings. Individual theater chains are solely respoinsible for ensuring that only those 17 and older go to see R-rated movies.)
Consider the position of power that this would give the ESRB (the board who rates games) if their ratings became enshrined in law. They suddenly become the sole arbitrator of what games are freely available and which are restricted. Even if they don't use this power in overtly controlling ways ("It's looking like an M to me, but maybe a little "fiscal persuasion" could fix that."), the ESRB can be difficult to work with. They have no set guidelines for what constitutes a T or M game, and apply double standards all the time. I recall on one FPS title I worked on we were told flat-out that if there was any blood when peole got shot, that made the game an M. However, there are numerous examples of similar titles that have blood but were rated T (orig. Call of Duty comes to mind). In another title I worked on we were trying to build an FPS for kids, and getting an E rating was imperative. We would contact the ESRB frequently, asking if this or that feature would violate the rules for an E game, but were always unable to get an answer. "Well, we just need to look at everything in context and then decide." That's a fair position to take if the rating is just a guideline for parents, but if gains legal weight that kind of process is completely unworkable. Do some research on what the Hayes Comission did to movies in the forties and fifties. This is the textbook case of chilling effect. Game creators, finding it impossible to toe a line that is both invisible and in constan flux, would be forced to create games that were absolutely uncontroversial, which makes this very much a first-amendment issue.
There's another key issue here as well: no study has shown a link between games and real-world violence. None. There are studies that get frequently cited, but to quote from TFA:
It's also worth noting that, despite certain research from the APA and others, Judge Steeh found that the brain imaging and social science cited by Michigan "was unpersuasive and insufficient to sustain the argument that violent video games cause aggressive behavior," the ESA said.
In other words, the science doesn't even back up the claims of harm, again a clear distinction from other controlled substances. (Hey you. Yeah you with the hemp backpack. Shutup.)
Believe me, I and everyone I've ever talked to in the industry don't want children playing M-rated games, but we *do* want to be able to make them for adults. If you remember Kingpin, a game very violent for it time, when you installed it the first thing you saw was a big letter from the publisher, saying basically "I have kids. I love kids. Whatever you do, DON'T LET YOUR KIDS PLAY THIS GAME." We in the industry really do care about feeding violence to kids, but with the kind of stiff penalties that this law introduces, many stores may simple stop carrying M-rated titles. (AO games are exceedingly rare and are usually only thrown into the mix to raise the rhetoric. Sony, MS, and Nintendo all disallow AO titles on their consoles anyway.) Protecting the children is certainly a noble goal, but laws like this chill expression for adults as well, and there's not even good evidence that the content is harmful
Sure, and Warcraft wasn't the first RTS, Everquest wasn't the first MMORPG, and, hell, Tolkein wasn't the first author to talk about elves. All of those still "laid down many of the rules" that their respective genres continue to follow. I've logged thousands of hours in ZAngband, so I know where you're coming from, but Dungeon Siege (and the rest of the post-Diablo hack-and-slash explosion) aren't ripping off Roguelikes, they're ripping off Diablo.
I've been working in the game industry for 5+ years. My current title is Lead Programmer/Designer. I've put out 6 titles, all mass-market crap. I know what I'm talking about, and I know what Greg's talking about. And frankly, I'm tired of hearing it. Don't misunderstand me: he is right about the absolutely sorry state of the industry, but wrong about its *relatively* sorry state.
Consider the movie industry: I'm sure that most people reading this didn't go see War of the Worlds because Tom Cruise is, like, ya know, so cool and all, but there's millions of people who did. Most of the problems Greg's pointing out aren't truly problems with the industry, but problems with mainstream consumers. Yes, all of us in game development would *love* a return to the days when only the hardcore bought our titles, and we were communicating directly with a horde of fans who grokked what we were doing. But now things have gone big budget, and you can't make a game with a few guys, a vision, and a garage. You can't count on your players grokking your vision anymore. You can't even count on them knowing what grok means.
Video games have surged in popularity like no other medium. It took centuries for the novel to achieve its current form, and decades even for relative newcomers like film and comics. Games, as a medium, aren't ready for the mainstream. In these other media, the early creators had a long time to develop and tune techniques of expression free from the constraints of profitability. (Of course, most of them were also quite poor; more on this later.) Video games haven't had this time. The entire medium is just barely alpha-quality, and yet the money drove it mainstream. And, like any other medium, the majority of casually-interested consumers don't prize the same things that hardcore fans do. That majority has the money. They don't care about gameplay any more than they care about a good script, but they love pretty graphics the same way they love Tom Cruise.
This leaves developers with a choice. (Yes, Virginia, we do have a choice.) In fact, there are 3 choices: 1) Side with the mainstream and the money. This is what almost everyone is doing, and what Greg is railing against. 2) Fuck the mainstream. Make good games. "But what will we eat? How will we pay rent?" Yeah, those are problems. Deal with it. No one is going to make realizing your personal vision easy for you. You're going to have to go out on a limb to do it. Is it uncomfortable? Yes, horribly, but it's utterly ridiculous for someone to claim that the industry is unfair because you have to sell 100,000 titles to be profitable and there are only 10,000 people who want to play the game you're making. That leads us to option number 3. 3) Get better. The best creators, in any medium, appeal to both the mainstream and the hardcore. Shakespeare was popular in his day, across many strata of sophistication. So is Katamari Damacy. So is Animal Crossing. Find a way to hit both crowds. Is it easy? Hell no; it's next to impossible. But it's what you have to do to be great.
Now, I'm being a bit hard on Greg. Some of this is made harder by the way publishers (and retailers, etc.) treat creativity. (i.e. they hate and fear it.) They've fed people pabulum until the masses believe it's ambrosia, and that's a crime against a medium I love with all my heart, and I will never forgive them for it. But it's *our* responsibility as creators to show the masses there's a better way. Is it easy? No. Is it profitable? Not likely. Is there an alternative? No.
I'll fall back on a favorite quote: "Neither individuals nor corporations have any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or turned back, for their private benefit." - Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line" That holds the same for the legal courts and the court of public opinion. It holds even if the clock of history is moving in in the
At GDC 2003 or 2004 (can't quite recall) Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month, in case you're here by mistake) gave the programming keynote, and one of his suggestions was exactly this: to give your employees 20% of their time to work on whatever they want. He mentioned the benefits to morale, retention, etc., but he said the main benefit was the freedom to find new methods and new technologies. Pounding away on the day-to-day coding will only give you incremental benefits, but these 20% projects could provide the germ for an entire new product or business model. It's basically making everyone part of the R&D department.
Also, if you have the chance, I highly recommend seeing him speak. In addition to being obviously brilliant, he's also a very entertaining and amusing speaker.
In case you're a cat lover with allergies (like me) and not entirely fond of genetic engineering (also like me), there are a few breeds of cats that are naturally hypo-allergenic. We had a devon rex (http://www.cfainc.org/breeds/profiles/devon.html) that never gave me any allergy problems. They look a little odd until you get used to them, but now all other cats just look strange to me. I believe there are other breeds as well (the cornish rex, for one) that play nice with your allergies. And the $3500 price tag on one of these makes the $600 I spent look a lot more reasonable.
We (and others) don't typically self-publish titles because it's too expensive and you would be largely limited to electronic distribution. Modern games can easily cost 5-10 million to make, and most game developers don't have that kind of cash lying around. As for the e-distribution, it might sound effective to this crowd, but most games are sold through walmart and it's kin right now, and their cutomers are not likely to search out for themselves what's available and then download it.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for id and don't know the details of their situation, but I do work in the game industry and am familiar with the practices in general.)
In many cases, copy protection like this is forced on developers by the publishers. The devs usually have absolutely nothing to do with it, never even touching (or knowing) the copy protection software used. For all of us, it's very frustrating because we try to provide users with as bug-free an experience as we can get, and then publishers slap a buggy-as-hell copy protection system on and we take the flak. They're the ones who are all paranoid about pirates, while we mostly just want people to have fun playing our game.
Disclaimer: IAAGPDFXAPC (I am a game programmer developing for Xbox and PC) Most of this is just hype. It's all well and good to have a common base on mulitple platforms (which, as many have pointed out, is exactly what DirectX currently provides), but the dream of writing it once and having it work great on Xbox and PC is foolish. I'll cite just a few reasons. The UI needs to be completely different, and once you start bringing "Xbox Live style functionality" into the mix, UI becomes a very big deal indeed. Also, we all know the classic tradeoffs of speed vs memory. On the PC you're probably looking at 256-512 megs of sys ram, plus 64 of vram, and if you go over that, things get a bit choppy. On the Xbox you get 64 total, and if you go over that you crash and can't ship. Those tradeoffs need to be completely different. I can only imagine the changes once you extend this to mobile phone gaming.
It sounds, though, like this is more about making middleware and tools common on both platforms, which would be pretty nice. Not having to re-write XACT for the PC build would be helpful, and PIX is one of the most amazing graphics analyzers I've seen.
In the end, mostly hype since they need a big GDC push, but there are some nice things burried in there.
There's a case near Seattle right now where several people bought homes near a power line without knowing that it was slated to carry a lot more power than it was currently. When the change was made, it created an audible and annoying hum. ( link)
Moral of the story: Check with whomever owns and operates those lines and see if there are any changes scheduled.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been writing PC/console games for 10 years now, and these days if your system locks (at least while playing something like TF2, especially fullscreen) there's a 90% chance it's a driver issue, most likely video drivers.
I've been a mac user since 1984, run ubuntu on my netbook, and have refused to install any MS software on my macs (mostly as a test). I also have to run windows at work (xbox dev sort of requires it), and it almost never crashes. It hurts me to say it, but it's true.
There are still countless horrible design flaws all over windows, but frequent OS instability in the absence of buggy driver-level code is now rare.
Sure, the house makes its money from the rake, but since that's a percentage of the pot, the house has a vested interest in ensuring big hands. That's also the kind of drama that makes poker most exciting. Put simply, it's never in the house's benefit for a player to have a bad hand.
I'm not saying that the online poker sites are stacking decks this way, but it's a mistake to say that they don't have any incentive.
> The reason why so many people still prefer vim or emacs is that we can do everything efficiently using the keyboard only
> You might think that something as simple as switching between files isn't trivial in vim/emacs, but that only shows that you haven't learned either.
When I used Visual Studio regularly (don't hate - you try using something else to make Xbox games) I did everything through the keyboard as well. Ctrl-I to enter immediate mode, of UnBlah.cpp, keybinds to switch between associated headers and cpps, etc. I had keybinds macro'ed to build or run every configuration, so I could do it with a single key chord without moving my hands from the keyboard or even switching apps.
At the same time I was writing our linux-based dedicated server (for the PC SKU) over ssh using vim and makefiles. I love vim; I use it for just about everything text-based I do (and once as a hex editor in a pinch). But I don't use it for writing serious code. Simple perl scripts sure. But a project with hundreds of source files, dozens of libs, about a dozen build flavors of each, etc? The IDE wins.
The bit about being able to work from anywhere in the world is nice. It's hard for an IDE to match that (unless you can spare $20 for a thumb drive. Zing!). But if that's not a big deal, the IDE wins out for complex projects.
Writing code is complex. Complex projects are complex. Tools to manage them are also complex. This goes for the CLI and GUI tools (though the GUI tools often put a friendly face on the simple things). Either flavor is going to take time and attention to master, and either can be very powerful. Think back to when you were first learning emacs or vim - how long did that process take? Assume it will take 25-50% as long to learn a GUI tool well. Give it that time, then make your call.
While I agree with you that questions phrased like this one are stupid, it's just a simple regexp to turn:
"my boss at work wants me to do X, but I'd really rather do Y; what are the merits of X versus Y?"
into
"I'm trying to build a case at work for changing our policy of X to Y; can Slashdot provide any good arguments?"
And while this does have an air of "Can Slashdot do my math homework?", it could pose an interesting question, and doesn't deserve the summary dismissal that the first question does.
No. I insist that the adjective "Cyber" before the word "Attack" should indicate the means, not the target
A well-written post may indicate a command of the English language, but that command only goes so far.
If we accept this meaning of Cyber Attack, then that means that an airplane that drops a bomb on an ISP is a "Cyber Attack", while bombing any other form of infrastructure would be a "regular attack".
Not at all. Bombing an Army base is a military attack. Bombing a banking district is a financial attack. Bombing the highways is an infrastructure attack.
Bruce's whole point here is that if we think of cyber defense as making the internet stronger, were missing the big picture. It's not about securing the internet, it's about securing our entire communications infrastructure. The internet is just the brightest star there, but in an emergency it's not the internet per se that's required, but the ability for people to communicate.
Levels in LittleBigPlanet consist of creative rearrangement of assets that Sony has already created (and retains the copyright for). Player's aren't creating all their own models, textures, animations, etc.
In Word, MS doesn't own the letters in your language, so you're free to recombine them however you want, and that's not a derivative work. Levels you create in LBP are derivative of Sony's work in creating the base assets. They're more analogous to remixes or sampling, while the word doc is an original song.
Like a remix, the particular way that a player recombines the provided assets can demonstrate a high degree of creativity, and may well deserve to be thought of as an original creation. But saying there's no difference between LBP and Word vastly oversimplifies the issue.
Look, if we're going to presuppose a deity that can create the entire universe, I don't think it's hard for him to figure out a way around your little quandry. If he created all the physical laws in the first place, it seems reasonable that an omnipotent god could violate them with impunity, say. Or just make everything on earth act as if that had happened.
Attempting to apply logical arguments to omnipotent power is ultimately pointless. God is axiomatic; he can neither be proven nor disproven by the rules of logic. Belief in an omnipotent being is like taking "A & ~A" as your first premise; it's a divide by 0 that makes all future operations NaN.
Whether you believe in god or not, that argument no more disproves his existence than all the silly "proofs" adduced by believers.
Wow! We better get you in charge of a game company right away, since you so obviously know what's fun and entertaining. Man, I sure hate it when film makers forget their place^H^H^H^H^H job and make stupid, preachy movies like Brokeback Mountain, or Schindler's List, or any of those dumb movies meant to enlighten and inform. More explosions, that's what those movies needed. It's high time that they realized that the only thing we, the dollar-grasping public of America, find entertaining is being pandered to; things that make us think, consider alternate worldviews, any of that sort of thing just make our heads hurt. I've learned all I ever want to about the wider world, and now I'd just like to see things I've already seen and learned regurgitated back to me with ever larger special effects budgets. That's what we need more of.
</sarcasm>
For the record, I am interested in "ridiculous opinions on politics, culture, or anything else." I find those entertaining. I read the blog posts too. You don't, and that's fair, but try to avoid falling into the cognitive gap that says, "Everyone is just like me!" It's a big world out there, with a lot of different people who have a lot of different interests. The way the market is set up right now, we can only meet the interests of a subset of those people. We'd like to be able to talk to other parts of it, that's all. Don't worry, we'll keep making games for you too. After all, the guy saying this is working on a game about being a <dorkvoice> huge super-cool dragon that flies through the skies and burns up cities, and armies, and and other dragons! </dorkvoice> He understands what the current market finds interesting.
Most of the comments so far seem very upset that the TV channels did this, but it really doesn't seem like a big deal to me. Wikipedia is a community, a society like any other. It has its values, with accuracy being one of the most important, and someone did a social experiment to see how well that community adhered to its principles. Sure, it required being a little bit of a bad actor, but if Slashdot reported on a new study where researchers bumped into people while carrying several packages and found that Linux users were more likely to help them pick up their dropped items, I don't think the comments would be blasting them for assault.
This was minor public vandalism, of a kind the community sees every day, and a kind that it was built to correct. If they had launched a systematic campaign to spread disinformation throughout many articles, that would be a serious problem, but changing the date of Lennon's death to 2007 instead of 1977? If edits like that caused Wikipedia any kind of damage, it would have died years ago.
IANAL, but I don't think the guilt or innocence of the plaintiffs should have any real bearing on the case. The claims in the suit center around the way that the RIAA has gone about suing people: assuming that IPs can be uniquely identifying, faling to do real computer forensic work, etc. Whether they've got the right people or not, it's the method they used that is at issue.
This seems just like the police conducting an illegal search. Even if they find conclusive evidence of guilt, the police still violated the law in conducting the search.
I think the story summary misses the point (shocking, I know). It's not about Tivo measuring how many people skip ads, it's about measuring which ads people skip. Sure, Tivo users skip most of the ads, but there are some that they watch (I recall hearing statistics that people skip about 2/3 of the ads, but I can't cite a source). For the ad agencies that create these commercials, this information is gold. These agencies currently rely on focus groups and surveys that measure "brand recognition", but that kind of information is still very nebulous.
Imagine you're trying to decide between two ad agencies. One shows you some statistics from these type of surveys, indicating indirectly that their ads are failry succesful. The other shows you hard numbers indicating that their ads are watched through to the end twice as often as their competitor's. That's a pretty compelling argument.
Ad agencies can also use this data to determine which of their campaigns, art directors, or copywriters are more succesful. It's like going from profiling your app using a stopwatch to using a real profiling tool that gives you millisecond timings for individual functions. Your data are much more granular and much more direct, allowing you to really optimize your approach.
Honestly, as long as they keep the personal information out of this, I see it as a good thing. There are certain commercials that I'm sure everyone hates, and the faster those can be identified by ad agencies and their clients, the faster they get off the air and away from my eyeballs.
Make it 1/day, 5/week, whatever you think is fair, but after that threshold, they still get the stories posted, but the links get a "nofollow". That way you're still sharing interesting, unique stories with the Slashdot readers, but people have no incentive to submit hordes of stories. Combine this with prefering submissions from infrequent contributors, and the incentive of the Beatles-Beatles-crowd shitfs to trying to find the most unique stories.
It is in everyone's best interest to encourage a wide range of story submitters, and you point out the many problems that come from "celebrity" submitters. This is really no different than blogs screening comments to ensure they aren't spam. Any forum that allows relatively open submissions from the users will need to protect itself from spam. Sure, sometimes the stories are unique and interesting, a spam-y coating but a ham-y center. So block the spam with a "nofollow" after they hit their limit, and we still get to see the story, there's still a reward for good submissions, but there's no incentive to spam.
As a twitch game programmer, I disagree.
While what you say is right for the current crop of games, you are neglecting the improvments that game developers could implement if our customers had more speed. To put it another way, a higher-speed connection won't improve your Counterstrike game (much), since, as you say, that mostly depends on latency. However, if more people had more speed, there are many things developers could do to take advantage of that. Just being able to trim the amount of time we spend optimizing our net code would be a big help, allowing more time for bug-fixing, and preventing many bugs outright, as highly-optimized code usually means brittle code, which over time becomes buggy code.
So, everyone, take Gandhi's advice, be the change you want to see in the world, and always push for faster connections. If you don't do it for yourself, please, think of the developers.
While I agree with you completely, I think you misunderstand the source of the common attitude here. I think we would all agree that lyrics are entitled to as much copyright protection as any other part of the song, I, at least, feel that by buying the song I have also (implicitly) bought a license to the lyrics. Since this app was written as a plug-in for iTunes, one great use was to get the lyrics for songs you had purchased online, and therefore had no booklet for.
So, while it would (could) be a copyright violation for me to get the lyrics to a song I don't own, purchasing the song should give me as much right to the lyrics as to the melody, performance, etc. This is another case of a major industry taking out a tool because of its potential copyright-breaking uses, with no regard to its non-infringing uses. As the law has shown, a tool that is capable of non-infringing uses is a non-infringing tool. Though the users might exceed their rights, the tool is still very much within the rights.
I own a Tivo, and like many of you say, I really enjoy skipping the adds. Being able to watch a 30-min show in 23 minutes is a great timesaver, but it does have some downsides. I miss several jokes around the office, because they start with "Oh man, have you seen the new FooCorp add?" I have a very poor idea of what movies are coming out, because I don't see any of the trailers on TV. So, I can see several uses for this service. I'd love to be able to tell my Tivo: "Show me all the movie trailers for movies coming out Friday." Or something similar. I've thought for a while that PVRs should allow ad recording and ad sharing. You know that there are lots of people who would send that really funny ad to all their friends, and it would get the advertiser's off your back a bit. They usually have a set of ads they're featuring on the main page as well. You have to deliberatley select to watch them, but often I do. For LOTR they had behind the scenes interviews and several extended trailers. Ditto for most any other geek-friendly movie. They also showcased the BMW films when those were running. This new system just sounds like a beefed-up version of that, which is no bad thing.
Sure, most commercials are annoying and deserve to be skipped, but some are actually entertaining, interesting, and (rarely) even informative. Can't say I see a problem with providing me another way to get information, as long as it's opt-in.
There's a key difference between controlling cigaretts, alcohol, etc. and controlling M and AO games. The former are clearly defined: does this product contain tobacco? Then it's not for kids. With video games (and movies, music, etc.) the question is much murkier. Does this game contain violence? And how do you rate that violence? These are very subjective decisions. That kind of subjectivity is fine for a self-policed rating system (like game or movie ratings), but bad for a governmental standard. (It is important to point out in these discussion that there is no legal weight behind MPAA ratings. Individual theater chains are solely respoinsible for ensuring that only those 17 and older go to see R-rated movies.)
Consider the position of power that this would give the ESRB (the board who rates games) if their ratings became enshrined in law. They suddenly become the sole arbitrator of what games are freely available and which are restricted. Even if they don't use this power in overtly controlling ways ("It's looking like an M to me, but maybe a little "fiscal persuasion" could fix that."), the ESRB can be difficult to work with. They have no set guidelines for what constitutes a T or M game, and apply double standards all the time. I recall on one FPS title I worked on we were told flat-out that if there was any blood when peole got shot, that made the game an M. However, there are numerous examples of similar titles that have blood but were rated T (orig. Call of Duty comes to mind). In another title I worked on we were trying to build an FPS for kids, and getting an E rating was imperative. We would contact the ESRB frequently, asking if this or that feature would violate the rules for an E game, but were always unable to get an answer. "Well, we just need to look at everything in context and then decide." That's a fair position to take if the rating is just a guideline for parents, but if gains legal weight that kind of process is completely unworkable. Do some research on what the Hayes Comission did to movies in the forties and fifties. This is the textbook case of chilling effect. Game creators, finding it impossible to toe a line that is both invisible and in constan flux, would be forced to create games that were absolutely uncontroversial, which makes this very much a first-amendment issue.
There's another key issue here as well: no study has shown a link between games and real-world violence. None. There are studies that get frequently cited, but to quote from TFA: In other words, the science doesn't even back up the claims of harm, again a clear distinction from other controlled substances. (Hey you. Yeah you with the hemp backpack. Shutup.)
Believe me, I and everyone I've ever talked to in the industry don't want children playing M-rated games, but we *do* want to be able to make them for adults. If you remember Kingpin, a game very violent for it time, when you installed it the first thing you saw was a big letter from the publisher, saying basically "I have kids. I love kids. Whatever you do, DON'T LET YOUR KIDS PLAY THIS GAME." We in the industry really do care about feeding violence to kids, but with the kind of stiff penalties that this law introduces, many stores may simple stop carrying M-rated titles. (AO games are exceedingly rare and are usually only thrown into the mix to raise the rhetoric. Sony, MS, and Nintendo all disallow AO titles on their consoles anyway.) Protecting the children is certainly a noble goal, but laws like this chill expression for adults as well, and there's not even good evidence that the content is harmful
Sure, and Warcraft wasn't the first RTS, Everquest wasn't the first MMORPG, and, hell, Tolkein wasn't the first author to talk about elves. All of those still "laid down many of the rules" that their respective genres continue to follow. I've logged thousands of hours in ZAngband, so I know where you're coming from, but Dungeon Siege (and the rest of the post-Diablo hack-and-slash explosion) aren't ripping off Roguelikes, they're ripping off Diablo.
I've been working in the game industry for 5+ years. My current title is Lead
Programmer/Designer. I've put out 6 titles, all mass-market crap. I know what
I'm talking about, and I know what Greg's talking about. And frankly, I'm tired
of hearing it. Don't misunderstand me: he is right about the absolutely sorry
state of the industry, but wrong about its *relatively* sorry state.
Consider the movie industry: I'm sure that most people reading this didn't go
see War of the Worlds because Tom Cruise is, like, ya know, so cool and all,
but there's millions of people who did. Most of the problems Greg's pointing
out aren't truly problems with the industry, but problems with mainstream
consumers. Yes, all of us in game development would *love* a return to the days
when only the hardcore bought our titles, and we were communicating directly
with a horde of fans who grokked what we were doing. But now things have gone
big budget, and you can't make a game with a few guys, a vision, and a garage.
You can't count on your players grokking your vision anymore. You can't even
count on them knowing what grok means.
Video games have surged in popularity like no other medium. It took centuries
for the novel to achieve its current form, and decades even for relative
newcomers like film and comics. Games, as a medium, aren't ready for the
mainstream. In these other media, the early creators had a long time to develop
and tune techniques of expression free from the constraints of profitability.
(Of course, most of them were also quite poor; more on this later.) Video games
haven't had this time. The entire medium is just barely alpha-quality, and yet
the money drove it mainstream. And, like any other medium, the majority of
casually-interested consumers don't prize the same things that hardcore fans
do. That majority has the money. They don't care about gameplay any more than
they care about a good script, but they love pretty graphics the same way they
love Tom Cruise.
This leaves developers with a choice. (Yes, Virginia, we do have a choice.) In
fact, there are 3 choices:
1) Side with the mainstream and the money. This is what almost everyone is
doing, and what Greg is railing against.
2) Fuck the mainstream. Make good games. "But what will we eat? How will we
pay rent?" Yeah, those are problems. Deal with it. No one is going to make
realizing your personal vision easy for you. You're going to have to go out on
a limb to do it. Is it uncomfortable? Yes, horribly, but it's utterly
ridiculous for someone to claim that the industry is unfair because you have to
sell 100,000 titles to be profitable and there are only 10,000 people who want
to play the game you're making. That leads us to option number 3.
3) Get better. The best creators, in any medium, appeal to both the mainstream
and the hardcore. Shakespeare was popular in his day, across many strata of
sophistication. So is Katamari Damacy. So is Animal Crossing. Find a way to hit
both crowds. Is it easy? Hell no; it's next to impossible. But it's what you
have to do to be great.
Now, I'm being a bit hard on Greg. Some of this is made harder by the way
publishers (and retailers, etc.) treat creativity. (i.e. they hate and fear
it.) They've fed people pabulum until the masses believe it's ambrosia, and
that's a crime against a medium I love with all my heart, and I will never
forgive them for it. But it's *our* responsibility as creators to show the
masses there's a better way. Is it easy? No. Is it profitable? Not likely. Is
there an alternative? No.
I'll fall back on a favorite quote: "Neither individuals nor corporations have
any right to come into court and ask that the clock of history be stopped, or
turned back, for their private benefit." - Robert A. Heinlein, "Life-Line"
That holds the same for the legal courts and the court of public opinion. It
holds even if the clock of history is moving in in the
At GDC 2003 or 2004 (can't quite recall) Fred Brooks (author of The Mythical Man Month, in case you're here by mistake) gave the programming keynote, and one of his suggestions was exactly this: to give your employees 20% of their time to work on whatever they want. He mentioned the benefits to morale, retention, etc., but he said the main benefit was the freedom to find new methods and new technologies. Pounding away on the day-to-day coding will only give you incremental benefits, but these 20% projects could provide the germ for an entire new product or business model. It's basically making everyone part of the R&D department.
Also, if you have the chance, I highly recommend seeing him speak. In addition to being obviously brilliant, he's also a very entertaining and amusing speaker.
In case you're a cat lover with allergies (like me) and not entirely fond of genetic engineering (also like me), there are a few breeds of cats that are naturally hypo-allergenic. We had a devon rex (http://www.cfainc.org/breeds/profiles/devon.html) that never gave me any allergy problems. They look a little odd until you get used to them, but now all other cats just look strange to me. I believe there are other breeds as well (the cornish rex, for one) that play nice with your allergies.
And the $3500 price tag on one of these makes the $600 I spent look a lot more reasonable.
Actualy, the DS stands for "developer system", as in, it's the system that developers want.
And, speaking as a game developer, it is.
We (and others) don't typically self-publish titles because it's too expensive and you would be largely limited to electronic distribution. Modern games can easily cost 5-10 million to make, and most game developers don't have that kind of cash lying around. As for the e-distribution, it might sound effective to this crowd, but most games are sold through walmart and it's kin right now, and their cutomers are not likely to search out for themselves what's available and then download it.
(Disclaimer: I don't work for id and don't know the details of their situation, but I do work in the game industry and am familiar with the practices in general.)
In many cases, copy protection like this is forced on developers by the publishers. The devs usually have absolutely nothing to do with it, never even touching (or knowing) the copy protection software used. For all of us, it's very frustrating because we try to provide users with as bug-free an experience as we can get, and then publishers slap a buggy-as-hell copy protection system on and we take the flak. They're the ones who are all paranoid about pirates, while we mostly just want people to have fun playing our game.
Disclaimer: IAAGPDFXAPC (I am a game programmer developing for Xbox and PC)
Most of this is just hype. It's all well and good to have a common base on mulitple platforms (which, as many have pointed out, is exactly what DirectX currently provides), but the dream of writing it once and having it work great on Xbox and PC is foolish.
I'll cite just a few reasons. The UI needs to be completely different, and once you start bringing "Xbox Live style functionality" into the mix, UI becomes a very big deal indeed. Also, we all know the classic tradeoffs of speed vs memory. On the PC you're probably looking at 256-512 megs of sys ram, plus 64 of vram, and if you go over that, things get a bit choppy. On the Xbox you get 64 total, and if you go over that you crash and can't ship. Those tradeoffs need to be completely different. I can only imagine the changes once you extend this to mobile phone gaming.
It sounds, though, like this is more about making middleware and tools common on both platforms, which would be pretty nice. Not having to re-write XACT for the PC build would be helpful, and PIX is one of the most amazing graphics analyzers I've seen.
In the end, mostly hype since they need a big GDC push, but there are some nice things burried in there.
There's a case near Seattle right now where several people bought homes near a power line without knowing that it was slated to carry a lot more power than it was currently. When the change was made, it created an audible and annoying hum. ( link)
Moral of the story: Check with whomever owns and operates those lines and see if there are any changes scheduled.