Yes, because an IT Admin that can't find the problem in the technology is TOTALLY demonstrating why he continues to be worth his salary.
NEVER PLAY DUMB. EVER. Unless you want your boss to think you are dumb.
Let me repeat: NEVER PLAY DUMB. Especially in an area that within which it is your responsibility to be knowledgeable.
DO be proactive and professional. Do your cost benefit analysis and present it. A file server has enough advantages here that it will easily be worth the money. If cost/benefit doesn't justify it and it's instead a personal gripe, get over it and move on.
Boss is a tightwad that won't spend the cash when it's of obvious benefit (and will make him more in the long run?) You need a new boss who has a more business-like mind. Until then, you can count on not seeing further raises once he feels like you get "enough".
This is good advice from a good professional. However, you can have bad bosses who don't process information on the same level (for whom this will not work). Ideally you get a new job, but that can take time, now more than ever. Sometimes you have to work with a highly dysfunctional work environment, and fending for yourself (e.g. giving local access resource priority over remote access) can sometimes get you through it.
AC is dead on. You'll look good for making everything "easier to manage" and you'll get this tool off your back. Of course, if that's not an option (let's face it, if it's a small shop spending money isn't a high priority), then use toolbox's system as the central repository until you can get it justified.
Based on your summary here - You're not terribly fond of the boss and the director either. Are you looking at moving elsewhere in or out of the company?
In my experience with PHBs in small company environments, the "easy to manage" aspect of file servers and version control is appealing, but adding steps (no matter how basic) to their work flow doesn't end up being popular. Why check something in and out when he can just edit it? (So goes the thought process, I suppose.)
You can try it, but if it doesn't work out, forget responsible solutions like central repository and find a way that lets him muck about but keeps your system responsive. Rsync your files to his computer every morning and tell him he's got the current version, then just rsync the next day again, with your work overwriting his if you happened to work on the same files (which won't necessarily be the case). How that stuff happens is a mystery, you know.
If boss kid has a technical nature to some degree i doubt he would argue against a technical solution. Just tell him you need bigger, faster storage that's network-connected, etc. and i think the OP would be fine. Boss kid wouldn't necessarily see it as a challenge.
Great idea! Bosses and boss kids often can't get enough of bigger/faster. Present it as something that would help him primarily (an especially easy task if you lightly "hinder" his current habits), and you'll get your freedom in the guise of a "more efficient office" soon enough.
Disable file shares on workstations. Use a file server.
Well, that's the correct technical solution, but the real, supreme, correct decision is: Find a new job, and fast. Nothing good has ever come from challenging a coworker who enjoys immunity, especially when it's familial.
I'd say start looking for a new job, but the occasional butting of heads over this sort of stupidity can be fun and rewarding.
It is only more convenient until two or more people working on the same document try to save their own edits. I know using CVS each person can use their own copies while they're editing it but it sounds like the employer knows nothing about that. Best would be a file server with CVS.
That depends on the editor used, as some keep track of open copies being saved, and either lock the file or indicate discrepancies. Personally I'd overwrite the encroaching "director's" edits and feign innocence pointing to his choice of access methods, but that's just me.
Personally I think an even better product, which would give Mozilla a serious inroad into the enterprise market, would be an "Enterprise SeaMonkey" with Sunbird calendar support built in, and maybe a good tie in to Exchange and Scalix groupware. This would give enterprise customers a "one stop shop" to replace IE and Outlook, and by allowing an easy hookup to Exchange and Scalix you would have an easy way to run any desktop you want or any backend you desire. Just set it to allow GPO on Windows and all would be golden.
Just thinking out-loud from the perspective of a frequent Iceweasel & Chromium user, but would the exact product you describe be unappealing to potential enterprise consumers simply because it lacks the Mozilla branding? As you say, it would be trivial to produce, it just couldn't be branded Mozilla or have the any Mozilla-owned logos. When I consider the strengths of open source software in a corporate environment, I see one of the major advantages being the ability to have a solution just like this customisable for your business.
It is very debatable if monoculture (everything must be from Microsoft) is more secure than a rich software diversity.
Bosses certainly like them, in any case. Everyone using the same thing means everything will work the same, and therefore run smoothly (or so goes the business logic). At the last little dev shop I worked for, we had everyone working on Macs, with instructions to use the same text editor, sftp program, word processor, and so on. We even all had the same mouse (Logitech MX1000, so no complaints there). The idea was efficiency, since code and documents would all look the same (no worries with tab interpretations, etc). Of course, aside from OS, word processor, and bash terminal, the software wasn't all Apple, but from a couple different, well-reputed companies (Panic, Barebones, etc). I suppose then one can argue there was richer software diversity at work, and we certainly didn't have to stand up to draconian regulations about most of it. Still, estimating the cost of the workstation hardware alone made it feel like monoculture when glancing around the room. We used Debian servers (two of them) for internal testing, and each of them was cheaper than either a workstation or cinema display.
While not provided by Mozilla, the tools are there.
FrontMotion make Firefox Packager [frontmotion.com]. You can use choose a Firefox version, a language and up to ten extensions. Press a button and in a few minutes you can download your customized MSI package ready for deployment.
FirefoxADM [sourceforge.net] is a way of allowing centrally managed locked and/or default settings in Firefox via Group Policy and Administrative Templates in Active Directory.
A poster above pointed out that while these tools are available, 3rd party deployment tools can make it a harder sell.
One of the largest points of moving business applications to web interfaces is that the interface is standardized. That is, your web apps should run in IE, Firefox, Opera, etc. etc., because all these apps follow the same published standards.
Bang on, this doesn't ever seem to be stressed enough. Web applications that users access via a browser have the benefit of standardised UI through multiple browsers and/or OSes. If this isn't the case for a company / public org, one of the largest advantages to such software is being ignored (meaning lost value). The major concerns with browsers should be things other than applications, such as stability, malware protection, and many other things the non-IE browsers gained market share by emphasising.
Sadly you are wrong. Those that work in corps have been complaining for years about lack of GPO support, and have been repeatedly ignored by Mozilla. It is bad enough that a third party has hacked together GPO support, but since most orgs don't want to deal with third party hacks it don't help much.
For the sake of those of us who have completely missed the Windows corporate experience, can you clarify your acronym? I have search abilities, but Group Policy Object as in "GPO Application" just seems to be the likely answer. I see it deals with various things I'd assume are the essence of enterprise-level application deployment, but I'm also quite curious as to what exactly is most important? That is, what enterprise features does Mozilla lack in it's releases that stand out as the greatest obstacles?
The reasoning has been according to Moz developers they want the same Firefox experience across OSes. But we don't use.deb or.dmg on Windows Firefox, do we? It would be trivial for Mozilla to release "Firefox Enterprise" but they won't. Hell they could just bring the Frontmotion guys onboard and have the product ready to go.
An interesting point you bring up, as Firefox has done quite well at providing the same experience across OSes (i.e. user experience), but how can they expect the install experience to be the same, even ignoring enterprise deployment? As you point out, the OSes handle software installs differently, period. If it were my call, I'd want the "same experience" to mean "an installer best suited to the platform one is installing to" which would include "Firefox Enterprise" for enterprise environments.
It's entirely possible that your hospital signed a deal with Microsoft...by exclusively using their products, they would get a discount.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time...
Ignoring the general ramification and ethics of what's happened, in terms of just your choice of software (browser, etc), you still have some wiggle room. As a member of the IT department, you can remind any PHB who complains at seeing Firefox on your terminal that you provide your own support automatically, and have the expertise to choose the tools that enable you to do your job most efficiently (and then throw in some lip service to adhering to the guidelines as laid out for the "non-techies".
As for cost savings licensing MS products vs cost of Linux support (I doubt everyone in the IT dept is as exposed to OSS), the argument can be made. However, when the costs of licensing MS products has already been incurred, putting you at the start of the license period, I'm pretty sure you're SOL with appeals to management. I'm sure open source source advocacy groups put together studies and appeal to public funded orgs like yours, so perhaps you can respond by contributing to one of those.
Google datamines everywhere on the Internet. They gather as much as detailed data as they can on their search engine. They datamine what links people click on the results (via background javascript http request). This gives huge advantage for Google with less common search queries, as they see what results people think are relevant to their search. Their competitors don't get even closely the same amount of data.
Don't forget Google Analytics. Offering that service freely has lead to it's widespread use across the Internet, on a whole range of different sites. A tremendously detailed "opt-in" datamine of sorts.
Perhaps you should actually take the time to read about what this system DOES
You must be new here;)
The whole point is that it is not just an authorization system.
I'm just saying that the important part, as far as cracking the DRM goes, is what the altered game thinks, and this can be something very different from the DRM mechanism (I was "off-topic" apparently).
Actually reading Vogel's post, though, it seems indeed likely this set up will delay cracking the game long enough for initial sales. Of course, people rushing out to buy the game seem to be planning on paying for it anyway, whereas those not planning on paying for it seem content to wait (as their not planning on paying for it).
Remote saves are the real kicker: both in a good anti-piracy-tool way, and in a why-would-I-ever-want-to-buy-a-game-that-does-this way. I feel a certain (perhaps illogical) level of partial ownership in my saved games. Sure they're a product of someone else's software, in their format, but I was instrumental to creating their precise state. They aren't the game as much as their a saved state of the choices and actions I've made in a game. Having them stored and accessible only on Ubisoft's servers does not sit well with me.
This whole story is about how and why the DRM will work. It's kind of funny someone always comes along with "it will be cracked" without understanding any of the fundamentals behind how the game copy protections work.
I'm just waiting them to take this one little step further - stream parts of the game code, textures or other data from server (something not used often). Spread it randomly around the game and it becomes almost impossible to build a working crack.
As with basic authorisations, one never has to send fake info to be authorised, or make a fake server to do the authorising. The most direct path is making the game believe that it's already authorised. In this case, it would be modifying the game to always return a positive whenever it does a "remote authorisation check" without it actually doing it. If that's a constant feature in this DRM, then the crack just constantly gives a positive instead of connecting. It sounds like just another soon-to-be cracked DRM to me.
It's not just whether the game works with a controller (or the fact that I don't own such a controller and have no desire to buy one) it's the fact that PC games are frankly just more fun to play.
I'd say it depends on the game; some games are more fun as PC games, some more fun as console games. The big issue is that consoles are becoming a larger platform and taking on roles where the PC set up is the better option (IMO). To put it differently, none of the console games I own and love would I ever want to have on a PC. At the same time, I have games for the PC that were obviously influenced by console design.
This means there is (and must) always a working PC build on the go. Yep, all console games start life as PC games, you don't code directly on the console, your in Visual studio.
In your experience, is this stage of development done then with Direct3D? What graphics library does an early console game developed in Windows tend to use? I'd expect a Microsoft product if intended for the xbox360, but does the same go for, say, PS3 games? I'm wondering why so many games/game ports come out for PC with Windows technology (vs OpenGL/etc, and companies like Id Software that have produced multi-platform games at launch). Is it the toolset, or perhaps the capabilities/limitations of the tech?
The hardware requirements of most games are pretty moderate, I have yet to play one game except Crysis which does not run perfectly fluid on my PC with a 80$ NVidia GT, the problem is that most people have shoddy intel integrated graphics controllers in their games, while the consoles have processors 5 times as slow as intels normal above atom offerings, the graphics controllers are 5 times as fast as the ones Intel provides but still way slower than the current bunch of low range cards from ATI and NVidia.
The problem I have is not getting a game to run fluidly, it's the irresistible temptation to get it to run fluidly at the highest quality possible on the PC, something that gets complicated when one is dealing with large monitors with high resolution, and many more graphic configuration options than is apparent in the game's UI. Some may consider pushing graphics quality AND fps "wanting it all", but with most games I play, immersion is the most important quality, and certain graphics elements contribute highly to it.
Taking Fallout 3 as an example, it runs without any problem at full resolution, but not smoothly in every situation with all the graphic options maxed out. Still, using sniper scopes to check for baddies at maximum distance, watching the shadows in a flickering cave, or having the sun come up over the hill in front of me (ruining my strategic position) are all things I aspire to have happen as beautifully as possible -- not to mention working well with various mods of my choice that keep the game playable pretty much indefinitely. From increased numbers of baddies to areas being completely retextured with HQ replacements, it's easy to suddenly find oneself faced with MUCH higher graphics requirements than the console version (by choice, I admit, and as a trade off for getting more).
You're right that most games will play fluidly with sub-$100 graphics cards, but I don't think that's as true if we consider playing to potential.
I'll take Ubisoft over Rockstar any day, as they at least produce some games that I want to play, unlike Rockstar, where the novelty runs out during gameplay and one is left wondering how on earth did I get suckered in to such a horrible story. My opinion, I know, but my point is some short comings can be forgiven if the rest of the game does enough to be enjoyable.
(Well, my point might actually be how much I hate games where you can kill a drug lord and take over his mansion that has it's own island, then be told by some two-bit thug to make a delivery to the ghetto, and have the game's progress contingent on you taking orders from people who should have long been beneath your attention. That would just be complaining, though.)
Halo was released on PC many years after its Xbox debut and despite the very dated and blocky graphics the performance was incredibly poor. The frame rate was so low that many PC gaming magazines used it to benchmark PCs and video cards alongside much more attractive games like FEAR and Quake 3. Amusing, considering the game was a PC-only title for a while.
I remember getting the performance and graphics I expected out of Halo with my Mac Games port, played on a PPC Mac Mini. I don't know if a Mac port of a PC port of a Console game is any different.
Despite the fact Halo is to xbox that Mario is to Nintendo, the pc port was very good. I only played the game on a pc, and although it needed a much more poweful pc than the xbox's 733mhz it never felt like a port. Controls worked well with keyboard and mouse IMHO.
I was going to counter this by complaining about Halo's multiplayer on the PC, but I think that's more a game complaint than a port complaint. Instead I'm going to second this, and say that Halo played just fine on a mouse and keyboard (if we assume that vehicle driving is never exactly right with a keyboard to steer). It didn't feel like a port, but it did feel a little "console-ified" as an FPS. Well, I was a Quake 2/3 deathmatch guy at the time, so that's likely a matter of biased opinion.
Mass Effect 2 has horrible PC interface issues. The main problem is the menu screens. You have to mouse-click EVERYTHING, the buttons you have to click are spread out as far as possible all over the screen, and there is no support for arrow keys and selecting stuff in the menus. The buttons on the menu screens are all placed exactly the same places and look exactly the same, so it's hard to figure out what screen you're on.
ME2 surprised me by being the first modern game I can think of that has all their interface screens, like codex, squad and equipment management, accessible through the ESC game menu, right next to save/load/quit. ME1 had this too, as far as I remember, but you could access each menu with a key press. I for inventory, U for squad, or whatever they were. ME2 surprised me by not having this, because why wouldn't it? It's a keybinding to a single screen? What technical difficulty arose that required it be removed?
Well, you only need "reduce all to omnigel" once you've maxed out your credits.;)
This because a major hassle when out on a mission in one's third or later play through. Loads of drops, but no option not to take everything from dead baddies or a container once you open it. Also, when opening a container and going over the limit, you could only "drop" (reduce to omnigel) the items in that container (no access to your inventory from that screen), potentially forcing you to scrap a good drop.
Of course, after a couple play-throughs you have all the gear you need, so scrapping items wasn't as much an issue as having to do it individually every time. A "reduce all to omnigel" button makes enormous amounts of sense in a game designed to be played through more than once (and it seems like one of those things that would have taken almost no time to implement).
Then that's a general complaint about the game, not a problem with the porting as you were complaining about
Mass Effect 1s UI was extremely console-centric, very large text, only list a few items, no way to group items together, and with the abundance of drops in that game, it was just horrible and annoying.
I'm a PC gamer and I love the Xbox 360 controller for Windows. So much, that I'll seek out games and buy them over others simply because they have controller support.
Actually, the new POP was the reason I got the controller in the first place. The quick-time button mashes were just too difficult using the keyboard. I was more than happy to play this game once I had the 360 controller.
I played the X-Wing style games with a joystick back in the day, and I see nothing wrong with the idea of playing certain games with a controller. I think it's a mistake to list a PC game as unplayable if the issue is just with a mouse and keyboard set up. If they work fine with a Microsoft controller on the PC, how is that a bad port? Perhaps they should label the game as "best played with controller" or something along those lines.
I'm really shocked Borderlands wasn't included in the original article.
My first thought was Alone in the Dark, however I never saw it played on the xbox360. All I know is the demo videos looked impressive in terms of lighting and creative use of items, and after deciding not to buy it for $20 at Fry's, I knew something was wrong when I bought it for $7 at Target. The article's author uses the term "borderline unplayable", and so I thought of Alone in the Dark. I know it wasn't highly rated for the xbox either, but I've held out an expectation that on the xbox one could actually move your character and look around without going to ridiculous amounts of effort (and it still not responding properly). Combined with the "realism" of easy deaths, and I ended up with having to do 20 reloads just to walk past something. A game that bad, from a company with money and resources, doesn't make sense to me, so I attributed to the PC version. If movement was as broken in the xbox360 release also, I guess they just didn't do any user testing at all.
Borderlands really jumped out as a console port, but for my (single-player) purposes it's worked well enough, aside from some poorly chosen default key bindings. Mass Effect 1&2 were both absolutely acceptable to play on the PC (I hear there is a bigger issue with ME2 on consoles connected to standard def tvs than with PC play). Bethesda's games are PC friendly enough also. For me the main issue isn't "When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong", it's more the increase in PC ports of console games, and the effect that it's having in general. FPS games in the manner of Quake 3 just don't work on a console: there isn't enough speed and precision to pull off a 3/4 spin, rotate up 80 degrees and make that pin point rail shot, carefully adjusting for the 300ms lag. Such games all but don't exist now, supplanted by the Gears of War generation (or perhaps MW2 generation) of FPS, as these games can work both on consoles and PCs.
The games I listed as working perfectly well on both PC and console do just that, but I can't shake the feeling that the appeal of releasing a game on multiple platforms results in game play that is either watered down or increasingly generic.
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Yes, because an IT Admin that can't find the problem in the technology is TOTALLY demonstrating why he continues to be worth his salary.
NEVER PLAY DUMB. EVER. Unless you want your boss to think you are dumb.
Let me repeat: NEVER PLAY DUMB. Especially in an area that within which it is your responsibility to be knowledgeable.
DO be proactive and professional. Do your cost benefit analysis and present it. A file server has enough advantages here that it will easily be worth the money. If cost/benefit doesn't justify it and it's instead a personal gripe, get over it and move on.
Boss is a tightwad that won't spend the cash when it's of obvious benefit (and will make him more in the long run?) You need a new boss who has a more business-like mind. Until then, you can count on not seeing further raises once he feels like you get "enough".
This is good advice from a good professional. However, you can have bad bosses who don't process information on the same level (for whom this will not work). Ideally you get a new job, but that can take time, now more than ever. Sometimes you have to work with a highly dysfunctional work environment, and fending for yourself (e.g. giving local access resource priority over remote access) can sometimes get you through it.
AC is dead on. You'll look good for making everything "easier to manage" and you'll get this tool off your back. Of course, if that's not an option (let's face it, if it's a small shop spending money isn't a high priority), then use toolbox's system as the central repository until you can get it justified.
Based on your summary here - You're not terribly fond of the boss and the director either. Are you looking at moving elsewhere in or out of the company?
In my experience with PHBs in small company environments, the "easy to manage" aspect of file servers and version control is appealing, but adding steps (no matter how basic) to their work flow doesn't end up being popular. Why check something in and out when he can just edit it? (So goes the thought process, I suppose.)
You can try it, but if it doesn't work out, forget responsible solutions like central repository and find a way that lets him muck about but keeps your system responsive. Rsync your files to his computer every morning and tell him he's got the current version, then just rsync the next day again, with your work overwriting his if you happened to work on the same files (which won't necessarily be the case). How that stuff happens is a mystery, you know.
If boss kid has a technical nature to some degree i doubt he would argue against a technical solution. Just tell him you need bigger, faster storage that's network-connected, etc. and i think the OP would be fine. Boss kid wouldn't necessarily see it as a challenge.
Great idea! Bosses and boss kids often can't get enough of bigger/faster. Present it as something that would help him primarily (an especially easy task if you lightly "hinder" his current habits), and you'll get your freedom in the guise of a "more efficient office" soon enough.
Disable file shares on workstations. Use a file server.
Well, that's the correct technical solution, but the real, supreme, correct decision is: Find a new job, and fast. Nothing good has ever come from challenging a coworker who enjoys immunity, especially when it's familial.
I'd say start looking for a new job, but the occasional butting of heads over this sort of stupidity can be fun and rewarding.
It is only more convenient until two or more people working on the same document try to save their own edits. I know using CVS each person can use their own copies while they're editing it but it sounds like the employer knows nothing about that. Best would be a file server with CVS.
That depends on the editor used, as some keep track of open copies being saved, and either lock the file or indicate discrepancies. Personally I'd overwrite the encroaching "director's" edits and feign innocence pointing to his choice of access methods, but that's just me.
Personally I think an even better product, which would give Mozilla a serious inroad into the enterprise market, would be an "Enterprise SeaMonkey" with Sunbird calendar support built in, and maybe a good tie in to Exchange and Scalix groupware. This would give enterprise customers a "one stop shop" to replace IE and Outlook, and by allowing an easy hookup to Exchange and Scalix you would have an easy way to run any desktop you want or any backend you desire. Just set it to allow GPO on Windows and all would be golden.
Just thinking out-loud from the perspective of a frequent Iceweasel & Chromium user, but would the exact product you describe be unappealing to potential enterprise consumers simply because it lacks the Mozilla branding? As you say, it would be trivial to produce, it just couldn't be branded Mozilla or have the any Mozilla-owned logos. When I consider the strengths of open source software in a corporate environment, I see one of the major advantages being the ability to have a solution just like this customisable for your business.
It is very debatable if monoculture (everything must be from Microsoft) is more secure than a rich software diversity.
Bosses certainly like them, in any case. Everyone using the same thing means everything will work the same, and therefore run smoothly (or so goes the business logic). At the last little dev shop I worked for, we had everyone working on Macs, with instructions to use the same text editor, sftp program, word processor, and so on. We even all had the same mouse (Logitech MX1000, so no complaints there). The idea was efficiency, since code and documents would all look the same (no worries with tab interpretations, etc). Of course, aside from OS, word processor, and bash terminal, the software wasn't all Apple, but from a couple different, well-reputed companies (Panic, Barebones, etc). I suppose then one can argue there was richer software diversity at work, and we certainly didn't have to stand up to draconian regulations about most of it. Still, estimating the cost of the workstation hardware alone made it feel like monoculture when glancing around the room. We used Debian servers (two of them) for internal testing, and each of them was cheaper than either a workstation or cinema display.
While not provided by Mozilla, the tools are there.
FrontMotion make Firefox Packager [frontmotion.com]. You can use choose a Firefox version, a language and up to ten extensions. Press a button and in a few minutes you can download your customized MSI package ready for deployment.
FirefoxADM [sourceforge.net] is a way of allowing centrally managed locked and/or default settings in Firefox via Group Policy and Administrative Templates in Active Directory.
A poster above pointed out that while these tools are available, 3rd party deployment tools can make it a harder sell.
One of the largest points of moving business applications to web interfaces is that the interface is standardized. That is, your web apps should run in IE, Firefox, Opera, etc. etc., because all these apps follow the same published standards.
Bang on, this doesn't ever seem to be stressed enough. Web applications that users access via a browser have the benefit of standardised UI through multiple browsers and/or OSes. If this isn't the case for a company / public org, one of the largest advantages to such software is being ignored (meaning lost value). The major concerns with browsers should be things other than applications, such as stability, malware protection, and many other things the non-IE browsers gained market share by emphasising.
Sadly you are wrong. Those that work in corps have been complaining for years about lack of GPO support, and have been repeatedly ignored by Mozilla. It is bad enough that a third party has hacked together GPO support, but since most orgs don't want to deal with third party hacks it don't help much.
For the sake of those of us who have completely missed the Windows corporate experience, can you clarify your acronym? I have search abilities, but Group Policy Object as in "GPO Application" just seems to be the likely answer. I see it deals with various things I'd assume are the essence of enterprise-level application deployment, but I'm also quite curious as to what exactly is most important? That is, what enterprise features does Mozilla lack in it's releases that stand out as the greatest obstacles?
The reasoning has been according to Moz developers they want the same Firefox experience across OSes. But we don't use .deb or .dmg on Windows Firefox, do we? It would be trivial for Mozilla to release "Firefox Enterprise" but they won't. Hell they could just bring the Frontmotion guys onboard and have the product ready to go.
An interesting point you bring up, as Firefox has done quite well at providing the same experience across OSes (i.e. user experience), but how can they expect the install experience to be the same, even ignoring enterprise deployment? As you point out, the OSes handle software installs differently, period. If it were my call, I'd want the "same experience" to mean "an installer best suited to the platform one is installing to" which would include "Firefox Enterprise" for enterprise environments.
It's entirely possible that your hospital signed a deal with Microsoft...by exclusively using their products, they would get a discount.
It certainly wouldn't be the first time...
Ignoring the general ramification and ethics of what's happened, in terms of just your choice of software (browser, etc), you still have some wiggle room. As a member of the IT department, you can remind any PHB who complains at seeing Firefox on your terminal that you provide your own support automatically, and have the expertise to choose the tools that enable you to do your job most efficiently (and then throw in some lip service to adhering to the guidelines as laid out for the "non-techies".
As for cost savings licensing MS products vs cost of Linux support (I doubt everyone in the IT dept is as exposed to OSS), the argument can be made. However, when the costs of licensing MS products has already been incurred, putting you at the start of the license period, I'm pretty sure you're SOL with appeals to management. I'm sure open source source advocacy groups put together studies and appeal to public funded orgs like yours, so perhaps you can respond by contributing to one of those.
Google datamines everywhere on the Internet. They gather as much as detailed data as they can on their search engine. They datamine what links people click on the results (via background javascript http request). This gives huge advantage for Google with less common search queries, as they see what results people think are relevant to their search. Their competitors don't get even closely the same amount of data.
Don't forget Google Analytics. Offering that service freely has lead to it's widespread use across the Internet, on a whole range of different sites. A tremendously detailed "opt-in" datamine of sorts.
Perhaps you should actually take the time to read about what this system DOES
You must be new here ;)
The whole point is that it is not just an authorization system.
I'm just saying that the important part, as far as cracking the DRM goes, is what the altered game thinks, and this can be something very different from the DRM mechanism (I was "off-topic" apparently).
Actually reading Vogel's post, though, it seems indeed likely this set up will delay cracking the game long enough for initial sales. Of course, people rushing out to buy the game seem to be planning on paying for it anyway, whereas those not planning on paying for it seem content to wait (as their not planning on paying for it).
Remote saves are the real kicker: both in a good anti-piracy-tool way, and in a why-would-I-ever-want-to-buy-a-game-that-does-this way. I feel a certain (perhaps illogical) level of partial ownership in my saved games. Sure they're a product of someone else's software, in their format, but I was instrumental to creating their precise state. They aren't the game as much as their a saved state of the choices and actions I've made in a game. Having them stored and accessible only on Ubisoft's servers does not sit well with me.
This whole story is about how and why the DRM will work. It's kind of funny someone always comes along with "it will be cracked" without understanding any of the fundamentals behind how the game copy protections work.
I'm just waiting them to take this one little step further - stream parts of the game code, textures or other data from server (something not used often). Spread it randomly around the game and it becomes almost impossible to build a working crack.
As with basic authorisations, one never has to send fake info to be authorised, or make a fake server to do the authorising. The most direct path is making the game believe that it's already authorised. In this case, it would be modifying the game to always return a positive whenever it does a "remote authorisation check" without it actually doing it. If that's a constant feature in this DRM, then the crack just constantly gives a positive instead of connecting. It sounds like just another soon-to-be cracked DRM to me.
It's not just whether the game works with a controller (or the fact that I don't own such a controller and have no desire to buy one) it's the fact that PC games are frankly just more fun to play.
I'd say it depends on the game; some games are more fun as PC games, some more fun as console games. The big issue is that consoles are becoming a larger platform and taking on roles where the PC set up is the better option (IMO). To put it differently, none of the console games I own and love would I ever want to have on a PC. At the same time, I have games for the PC that were obviously influenced by console design.
This means there is (and must) always a working PC build on the go. Yep, all console games start life as PC games, you don't code directly on the console, your in Visual studio.
In your experience, is this stage of development done then with Direct3D? What graphics library does an early console game developed in Windows tend to use? I'd expect a Microsoft product if intended for the xbox360, but does the same go for, say, PS3 games? I'm wondering why so many games/game ports come out for PC with Windows technology (vs OpenGL/etc, and companies like Id Software that have produced multi-platform games at launch). Is it the toolset, or perhaps the capabilities/limitations of the tech?
The hardware requirements of most games are pretty moderate, I have yet to play one game except Crysis which does not run perfectly fluid on my PC with a 80$ NVidia GT, the problem is that most people have shoddy intel integrated graphics controllers in their games, while the consoles have processors 5 times as slow as intels normal above atom offerings, the graphics controllers are 5 times as fast as the ones Intel provides but still way slower than the current bunch of low range cards from ATI and NVidia.
The problem I have is not getting a game to run fluidly, it's the irresistible temptation to get it to run fluidly at the highest quality possible on the PC, something that gets complicated when one is dealing with large monitors with high resolution, and many more graphic configuration options than is apparent in the game's UI. Some may consider pushing graphics quality AND fps "wanting it all", but with most games I play, immersion is the most important quality, and certain graphics elements contribute highly to it.
Taking Fallout 3 as an example, it runs without any problem at full resolution, but not smoothly in every situation with all the graphic options maxed out. Still, using sniper scopes to check for baddies at maximum distance, watching the shadows in a flickering cave, or having the sun come up over the hill in front of me (ruining my strategic position) are all things I aspire to have happen as beautifully as possible -- not to mention working well with various mods of my choice that keep the game playable pretty much indefinitely. From increased numbers of baddies to areas being completely retextured with HQ replacements, it's easy to suddenly find oneself faced with MUCH higher graphics requirements than the console version (by choice, I admit, and as a trade off for getting more).
You're right that most games will play fluidly with sub-$100 graphics cards, but I don't think that's as true if we consider playing to potential.
If Rockstar is better, who's worse?
Ubisoft.
I'll take Ubisoft over Rockstar any day, as they at least produce some games that I want to play, unlike Rockstar, where the novelty runs out during gameplay and one is left wondering how on earth did I get suckered in to such a horrible story. My opinion, I know, but my point is some short comings can be forgiven if the rest of the game does enough to be enjoyable.
(Well, my point might actually be how much I hate games where you can kill a drug lord and take over his mansion that has it's own island, then be told by some two-bit thug to make a delivery to the ghetto, and have the game's progress contingent on you taking orders from people who should have long been beneath your attention. That would just be complaining, though.)
Halo was released on PC many years after its Xbox debut and despite the very dated and blocky graphics the performance was incredibly poor. The frame rate was so low that many PC gaming magazines used it to benchmark PCs and video cards alongside much more attractive games like FEAR and Quake 3. Amusing, considering the game was a PC-only title for a while.
I remember getting the performance and graphics I expected out of Halo with my Mac Games port, played on a PPC Mac Mini. I don't know if a Mac port of a PC port of a Console game is any different.
Despite the fact Halo is to xbox that Mario is to Nintendo, the pc port was very good. I only played the game on a pc, and although it needed a much more poweful pc than the xbox's 733mhz it never felt like a port. Controls worked well with keyboard and mouse IMHO.
I was going to counter this by complaining about Halo's multiplayer on the PC, but I think that's more a game complaint than a port complaint. Instead I'm going to second this, and say that Halo played just fine on a mouse and keyboard (if we assume that vehicle driving is never exactly right with a keyboard to steer). It didn't feel like a port, but it did feel a little "console-ified" as an FPS. Well, I was a Quake 2/3 deathmatch guy at the time, so that's likely a matter of biased opinion.
Mass Effect 2 has horrible PC interface issues. The main problem is the menu screens. You have to mouse-click EVERYTHING, the buttons you have to click are spread out as far as possible all over the screen, and there is no support for arrow keys and selecting stuff in the menus. The buttons on the menu screens are all placed exactly the same places and look exactly the same, so it's hard to figure out what screen you're on.
ME2 surprised me by being the first modern game I can think of that has all their interface screens, like codex, squad and equipment management, accessible through the ESC game menu, right next to save/load/quit. ME1 had this too, as far as I remember, but you could access each menu with a key press. I for inventory, U for squad, or whatever they were. ME2 surprised me by not having this, because why wouldn't it? It's a keybinding to a single screen? What technical difficulty arose that required it be removed?
Well, you only need "reduce all to omnigel" once you've maxed out your credits. ;)
This because a major hassle when out on a mission in one's third or later play through. Loads of drops, but no option not to take everything from dead baddies or a container once you open it. Also, when opening a container and going over the limit, you could only "drop" (reduce to omnigel) the items in that container (no access to your inventory from that screen), potentially forcing you to scrap a good drop.
Of course, after a couple play-throughs you have all the gear you need, so scrapping items wasn't as much an issue as having to do it individually every time. A "reduce all to omnigel" button makes enormous amounts of sense in a game designed to be played through more than once (and it seems like one of those things that would have taken almost no time to implement).
Then that's a general complaint about the game, not a problem with the porting as you were complaining about
I suppose you're 100% right about that, however.
Mass Effect 1s UI was extremely console-centric, very large text, only list a few items, no way to group items together, and with the abundance of drops in that game, it was just horrible and annoying.
Not to mention so easy to love (as a game).
I'm a PC gamer and I love the Xbox 360 controller for Windows. So much, that I'll seek out games and buy them over others simply because they have controller support.
Actually, the new POP was the reason I got the controller in the first place. The quick-time button mashes were just too difficult using the keyboard. I was more than happy to play this game once I had the 360 controller.
I played the X-Wing style games with a joystick back in the day, and I see nothing wrong with the idea of playing certain games with a controller. I think it's a mistake to list a PC game as unplayable if the issue is just with a mouse and keyboard set up. If they work fine with a Microsoft controller on the PC, how is that a bad port? Perhaps they should label the game as "best played with controller" or something along those lines.
I'm really shocked Borderlands wasn't included in the original article.
My first thought was Alone in the Dark, however I never saw it played on the xbox360. All I know is the demo videos looked impressive in terms of lighting and creative use of items, and after deciding not to buy it for $20 at Fry's, I knew something was wrong when I bought it for $7 at Target. The article's author uses the term "borderline unplayable", and so I thought of Alone in the Dark. I know it wasn't highly rated for the xbox either, but I've held out an expectation that on the xbox one could actually move your character and look around without going to ridiculous amounts of effort (and it still not responding properly). Combined with the "realism" of easy deaths, and I ended up with having to do 20 reloads just to walk past something. A game that bad, from a company with money and resources, doesn't make sense to me, so I attributed to the PC version. If movement was as broken in the xbox360 release also, I guess they just didn't do any user testing at all.
Borderlands really jumped out as a console port, but for my (single-player) purposes it's worked well enough, aside from some poorly chosen default key bindings. Mass Effect 1&2 were both absolutely acceptable to play on the PC (I hear there is a bigger issue with ME2 on consoles connected to standard def tvs than with PC play). Bethesda's games are PC friendly enough also. For me the main issue isn't "When PC Ports of Console Games Go Wrong", it's more the increase in PC ports of console games, and the effect that it's having in general. FPS games in the manner of Quake 3 just don't work on a console: there isn't enough speed and precision to pull off a 3/4 spin, rotate up 80 degrees and make that pin point rail shot, carefully adjusting for the 300ms lag. Such games all but don't exist now, supplanted by the Gears of War generation (or perhaps MW2 generation) of FPS, as these games can work both on consoles and PCs.
The games I listed as working perfectly well on both PC and console do just that, but I can't shake the feeling that the appeal of releasing a game on multiple platforms results in game play that is either watered down or increasingly generic.