So who pays for it? Perhaps a rich benefactor pays for the development of a game for their personal use, then decides to release it to the public free of charge. That seems unlikely though.
Tell that to the de' Medici family as well as the rest of Renaissance Europe. That used to just be how things were done. In a lot of ways this abject modern capitalism where everything is art-as-product--some means to a financial end--has really perverted the artistic process. Or perhaps changed rather than perverted? Are things better this way? I dunno...
I'm really going to have to disagree with you and say that this is not the fallacy you seem to think it is.
First off, one of the fundamental tenets of (Western at least) ethics is that you can only be held accountable for your actions, and your intentions, only insofar as they can be shown to relate to your actions. What you are proposing is essentially a thought police, which is *generally* held to be a moral abomination.
You seem to be under the (I would argue very mistaken) impression that our military does not realize that they would potentially be hitting civilians in a lot of their strikes. If you have NO reason whatsoever to believe there might be a civilian presence somewhere, and every reason to believe there to be a military one, only to discover after the fact that you were mistaken in a way you couldn't have known about, then you can not be held morally accountable. Unfortunately, that very much does not seem to be the case. I have a hard time believing a lot of these civilian casualties are anything other than our military deciding to shoot first and ask questions later. "But it really looked kinda like a military target," just doesn't cut it when you end up bombing a wedding--that's CLEARLY an example of a profound lack of proper diligence in choosing your targets. When you take it upon yourself to take military action in a civilian area, you have an absolute moral obligation to make AS SURE AS YOU CAN that you are only striking military targets, and sadly our military doesn't seem to be taking that obligation very seriously.
To put it another way, if you drop a nuke on a military installation that happens to be right next to a civilian city, you didn't (as you seem to define it) intentionally target that city. That doesn't mean those in charge aren't morally responsible for the civilian death. Then again, I am of the, seemingly unpopular, opinion that protecting civilians of any nationality is more important than protecting soldiers of any nationality, and also more important that achieving any military goal. Obviously exceptions can be made for absolutely dire situations, but we aren't in any such situation as far as I'm concerned.
You're absolutely right. Clearly no large companies should ever be punished for malfeasance when so many jobs will be lost as a result. It is obviously entirely inappropriate to hold companies responsible for ensuring that the activities pursued by said companies are carried out in a legal and ethical manner. That would be absurd. I mean, let's not even get in to even more ridiculous things like letting major companies sporting failed business models actually fail when we can just go in there and prop those models up with tax monies!
P.S. Won't somebody please think of the janitors?
P.P.S. It's easy to conveniently "overlook" blatantly unethical practices without realizing the post-anarchy of such an action. (i.e. You're tracing the blame to the wrong end here)
Maybe I'm misreading your options here, but I think you're leaving out an important (and in my opinion the most likely) one. That is, stolen, imaged, and then replaced where it originally came from. This whole thing smells of inside job to me.
This statement is absurd. Starting your own independent company and business acumen are not mutually exclusive. Have you ever worked at a large developer? Sure, their titles bring in an order of magnitude more money, but they also COST an order of magnitude more money to make. Any indie developer who makes a one, two, three man project that becomes reasonably popular, even in a niche, is going to be making some very nice profit. At a big developer you're working paycheck to paycheck. It's solid work, but not what I would call "business acumen." And I have a VERY hard time imagining a big developer that would be able to provide more pleasure and freedom than being able to control your entire own project making exactly what you want to make. I honestly have no idea where you're coming from.
The issue with botting is that it allows a player with a bot to gain game resources at a rate orders of magnitude faster than other players (Literal orders of magnitude, I'm not using it to mean 'a little more' here). At the max character level of an MMO, the players are in direct competition with each other. Not necessarily PVP (though it is a choice) but the game at that point becomes a matter of being 'better' than other players through items, gold, dungeon/raid progression, etc. Botting allows a huge advantage in this.
I'm a little late with this, but here goes. Please, tell me what resources can be acquired faster by a bot in MMOs than by a real person playing. Because it's not gold, it's not experience, and it's not items. Real people are, believe it or not, much more efficient at playing the game, even grinding, than any AI yet to be created. Why else do you think there are real people behind all the for-profit gold farming characters?
But that's not the point. The point is that even you seem to agree with me. People want to PvP or fight raid bosses. The rest of the "filler fluff" is only ever done for the sake of being able to PvP better and fight tougher raid bosses. Nobody spends 10 hours of grinding out gold, honor, and crafting materials because they like doing so. So my point is this: why exactly would you have a game designed such that the majority of time is spent doing something people don't want to do, in order to spend some more time doing what they actually enjoy? If there's an explanation for how this can qualify as good game design, I'd like to hear it.
I think you kinda missed the point. There are some very enjoyable aspects of WoW, and I myself was an addict for quite a while. I'm not denying that they've made, in many ways, a great product. What I am saying is that they've committed what I consider a horrible game design "sin," and it's one that every MMO these days is guilty of, so I'm not picking on Blizzard.
What is that sin? Well, their game has a lot of enjoyable elements, but those in and of themselves would not be sufficient to sustain their profit model. So what do they do? They pad it with a bunch of uninteresting repetitive elements. It speaks volumes that the good part is so good that people are willing to suffer through sometimes hundreds of hours of "grinding" in order to enjoy the parts that are actually enjoyable.
Anyway, my point is that MMO designers seem stuck in this rut, where it seems they can't even imagine designing a game that is both as time consuming as something like WoW, but actually thoroughly enjoyable the entire time (I honestly have never met someone who likes spending hours simply grinding levels/money/gear/etc...). I am absolutely confident it will happen eventually though, and that, I think may well be the end of society:) Sure, I might be totally wrong about all of this, but I really don't think so.
People is hardly a weasel word because Blizzard is suing of a product that "people" clearly use enough for it to be a problem. So I think you're demonstrably wrong there.
Which is just immature bullshit trolling. Easy to spew, far more difficult to put your money where your rant is - what you have you made? Living in the basement yet? Their product has millions of devoted subscribers and the money is pouring in.
Hyperbole, yes, I'll admit to that. Perhaps it's unfair to pick on Blizzard because it's a sin that ALL modern MMO developers are guilty of. There is, in my opinion (and many others I know) no real excuse for "the grind" as a gameplay mechanic. It's the lazy answer to padding out the gameplay hours of your product--simple as that.
I cite to you Nethack as an example of a game that you could easily spend as much time playing as anybody does with WoW, but manages to remain enjoyable even to experts, and even though it essentially involves doing the exact same thing over and over again. Is it repetitive? Yes. But in a very enjoyable way which no modern MMOs have come even close to capturing.
Or perhaps the people with the most money are going to be the rude asses talking nonstop of their cell phones, and your suggestion lets market forces prevail over common decency. I'd rather not take my chances!
Except then you've defeated the whole damn point of benchmarking, which is to determine how fast various processors are at running the same code. Writing a custom code path optimized for specific processors may be academically interesting, but at that point your results really stop being a meaningful practical comparison (not like benchmarks are that great in this department in the first place). And that's only the beginning of the problems with doing what you suggest (unless you think PCMark is going to be able to hire someone like Michael Abrash to write every one of their benchmarks).
The real problem is the fact that World of Warcraft (and every MMO released to date) is designed with such shoddy gameplay mechanics that people would rather have a computer play most of the game for them. The problem isn't that some people automate their characters, the problem is that a large percentage of the game is so mind-numbingly boring and repetitive that people would go to any length to avoid it and just play the good stuff. Is there anything wrong with this? Absolutely not, these developers (again, this applies to ALL MMOs) need to learn to design games that are fun the entire time you're playing them.
Put it another way, consider what would be the case if WoW were a single player game. The immediate conclusion everybody would draw was that the gameplay is substandard, because they are so tempted to automate it. Make it multiplayer and all of a sudden this is different? No. What's really going on here? Blizzard puts as many artificual, tedious roadblocks as they can get away with into the game, and the reason they do so is to extend the duration of their subscriptions as long as possible. When somebody decides to automate the process, Blizzard isn't protecting their player base, they're protecting their profit margins. They're saying, "You'll play this game OUR way so we can milk you for as much money as possible." So I say to Blizzard, cure the disease, not the symptom. Make a game that people don't want to have a computer play most of it for them and you won't have these problems.
Can't figure out how to make a game that's both fun and takes a long time to get tired of? Hire some actually talented game designers. We know you can take a design somebody else came up with and polish the mechanics to to a shiny gleam (see: every Blizzard game to date). Now's the time to innovate.
When they get rid of the bottled water and put in one of those big coolers with the 20-gallon bottle, it's time to leave.
Either that, or it's time to be grateful that your company decided not to contribute to one of the most absurdly wasteful excesses of modern society. My workplace is great, but we ditched those water bottles a while ago. I only wish every company would.
The point of the patent system is not to benefit the inventor, but to benefit society. Often these activities are functionally equivalent, as rewarding inventors for genuinely innovative and clever inventions encourages similar activity in the future. Unfortunately, and the point you seem to be missing, is that under the current this is increasingly not the case. Granting a long term monopoly on a basic application of existing technology or processes in a newly developed field, or applied to a newly developed technology, (read: software patents) provides absolutely no benefit to society as a whole and as such is in direct opposition to the spirit, if not the letter, that the patent system was founded on.
You are obviously unfamiliar with the software installation process in Linux, and how vastly superior it is to anything you'll find in common use in Windows. I recommend consulting the interwebs.
This post seems internally inconsistent. Word uses the same algorithm, but people like TeX because it looks totally different? Perhaps we have different definitions of what it is to use the same algorithm.
The algorithm isn't just bad, it's horrible. I guess it's halfway decent for popular news items and such, but with the first technical term I tried ("Gödel's incompleteness theorem", in this case), well, the results are not looking so great. Compare:
I mean, you don't even have to know what the theorem is to see how much better Google's results are for someone who'd be searching for basic information on it. I mean, for Chrissake, Cuil returned a bunch of garbage from what looks like a Christian theology forum on its first page. NOT RELEVANT
That's fine. Except the process of physical transformation you are talking about, in this case most likely the process of writing data to a magnetic storage medium, is a hardware issue that is long settled and not in dispute. Unless you really think somebody is going to try to take out a new patent on the hard disk...
Of course the process outlines, in general, how PageRank works. It has to, even with the shoddy examination process we've had for years it would never have been allowed if it didn't at least do a little on that front. The specific algorithm isn't explained either, because, oddly enough, it's unlikely the patent would have been granted if they had explained the details. Why? Algorithms are unpatentable. "Business methods" are what they can patent, so they try very hard to make it look less like an algorithm and more like a "business method."
All that being said, I find it difficult to believe there's something so genuinely innovative and unprecedented going on behind the scenes for Google's rankings. I think it's much more likely that they just developed by trial and error the proper coefficients and variables to use in a ranking algorithm. That is, the sort of thing that can easily be duplicated, just with a little time to figure out the details. Then again, I've never seen the exact algorithms they use, so maybe there is something unbelievably brilliant and unusual going on.
Putting on my pedantichat, I feel I should point out that he never said anything about whether his pun was intended. In fact, he seemed to be apologizing for it.
They could always just start selling the computers with the OSX installation disc included, but not unpackaged or used, no? They can't be in violation of any bullshit EULA clause if they've never done anything to presumptively agree to it. It's not like OSX is hard to install--they can just include a printed step by step guide anyway.
You do realize that I'm complaining about the attitude of the shareholders themselves, right? I know it's really easy with the degree of separation public ownership gives you to stop being able to think beyond your own pocketbook--it's just oh so fashionable, I know--but it's irresponsible, unethical, and not even necessarily a good thing for the long term health of the companies they own. I honestly couldn't give two shits about Jerry Yang and what he may or may not want, or the reasons for it. My accusation is leveled squarely at shareholders themselves, and their generally shortsighted behavior.
Is tethering not something that could be implemented with the SDK? I honestly don't know, not having a Mac (which as far as I'm aware is needed to make proper use of the SDK), I haven't investigated.
That said, tethering HAS been implemented by third parties, for quite some time now. Unfortunately, it's so far required a jailbroken iPhone and some fairly low level hackery that I don't think the average user would feel comfortable doing.
From talking to people in the industry, the innovation with the iPhone isn't so much with the device itself, it's with the kind of deal Apple was able to cut.
And this, my friends, is exactly why none of the other clueless companies have managed to put out a similar product that can even come CLOSE to competing with the iPhone on its own terms. The innovation was in the software and to a lesser extend the hardware. The deal with AT&T was because AT&T saw the innovation and said to themselves, "Oshit, we best get ourselves in on this shit." Even having something of a dislike for Apple (honestly, I'd rather have Microsoft in a position of power than them), real credit is due to how slick their software on the iPhone is.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to the de' Medici family as well as the rest of Renaissance Europe. That used to just be how things were done. In a lot of ways this abject modern capitalism where everything is art-as-product--some means to a financial end--has really perverted the artistic process. Or perhaps changed rather than perverted? Are things better this way? I dunno...
I'm really going to have to disagree with you and say that this is not the fallacy you seem to think it is.
First off, one of the fundamental tenets of (Western at least) ethics is that you can only be held accountable for your actions, and your intentions, only insofar as they can be shown to relate to your actions. What you are proposing is essentially a thought police, which is *generally* held to be a moral abomination.
You seem to be under the (I would argue very mistaken) impression that our military does not realize that they would potentially be hitting civilians in a lot of their strikes. If you have NO reason whatsoever to believe there might be a civilian presence somewhere, and every reason to believe there to be a military one, only to discover after the fact that you were mistaken in a way you couldn't have known about, then you can not be held morally accountable. Unfortunately, that very much does not seem to be the case. I have a hard time believing a lot of these civilian casualties are anything other than our military deciding to shoot first and ask questions later. "But it really looked kinda like a military target," just doesn't cut it when you end up bombing a wedding--that's CLEARLY an example of a profound lack of proper diligence in choosing your targets. When you take it upon yourself to take military action in a civilian area, you have an absolute moral obligation to make AS SURE AS YOU CAN that you are only striking military targets, and sadly our military doesn't seem to be taking that obligation very seriously.
To put it another way, if you drop a nuke on a military installation that happens to be right next to a civilian city, you didn't (as you seem to define it) intentionally target that city. That doesn't mean those in charge aren't morally responsible for the civilian death. Then again, I am of the, seemingly unpopular, opinion that protecting civilians of any nationality is more important than protecting soldiers of any nationality, and also more important that achieving any military goal. Obviously exceptions can be made for absolutely dire situations, but we aren't in any such situation as far as I'm concerned.
You're absolutely right. Clearly no large companies should ever be punished for malfeasance when so many jobs will be lost as a result. It is obviously entirely inappropriate to hold companies responsible for ensuring that the activities pursued by said companies are carried out in a legal and ethical manner. That would be absurd. I mean, let's not even get in to even more ridiculous things like letting major companies sporting failed business models actually fail when we can just go in there and prop those models up with tax monies!
P.S. Won't somebody please think of the janitors?
P.P.S. It's easy to conveniently "overlook" blatantly unethical practices without realizing the post-anarchy of such an action. (i.e. You're tracing the blame to the wrong end here)
Maybe I'm misreading your options here, but I think you're leaving out an important (and in my opinion the most likely) one. That is, stolen, imaged, and then replaced where it originally came from. This whole thing smells of inside job to me.
This statement is absurd. Starting your own independent company and business acumen are not mutually exclusive. Have you ever worked at a large developer? Sure, their titles bring in an order of magnitude more money, but they also COST an order of magnitude more money to make. Any indie developer who makes a one, two, three man project that becomes reasonably popular, even in a niche, is going to be making some very nice profit. At a big developer you're working paycheck to paycheck. It's solid work, but not what I would call "business acumen." And I have a VERY hard time imagining a big developer that would be able to provide more pleasure and freedom than being able to control your entire own project making exactly what you want to make. I honestly have no idea where you're coming from.
I'm a little late with this, but here goes. Please, tell me what resources can be acquired faster by a bot in MMOs than by a real person playing. Because it's not gold, it's not experience, and it's not items. Real people are, believe it or not, much more efficient at playing the game, even grinding, than any AI yet to be created. Why else do you think there are real people behind all the for-profit gold farming characters?
But that's not the point. The point is that even you seem to agree with me. People want to PvP or fight raid bosses. The rest of the "filler fluff" is only ever done for the sake of being able to PvP better and fight tougher raid bosses. Nobody spends 10 hours of grinding out gold, honor, and crafting materials because they like doing so. So my point is this: why exactly would you have a game designed such that the majority of time is spent doing something people don't want to do, in order to spend some more time doing what they actually enjoy? If there's an explanation for how this can qualify as good game design, I'd like to hear it.
I think you kinda missed the point. There are some very enjoyable aspects of WoW, and I myself was an addict for quite a while. I'm not denying that they've made, in many ways, a great product. What I am saying is that they've committed what I consider a horrible game design "sin," and it's one that every MMO these days is guilty of, so I'm not picking on Blizzard.
What is that sin? Well, their game has a lot of enjoyable elements, but those in and of themselves would not be sufficient to sustain their profit model. So what do they do? They pad it with a bunch of uninteresting repetitive elements. It speaks volumes that the good part is so good that people are willing to suffer through sometimes hundreds of hours of "grinding" in order to enjoy the parts that are actually enjoyable.
Anyway, my point is that MMO designers seem stuck in this rut, where it seems they can't even imagine designing a game that is both as time consuming as something like WoW, but actually thoroughly enjoyable the entire time (I honestly have never met someone who likes spending hours simply grinding levels/money/gear/etc...). I am absolutely confident it will happen eventually though, and that, I think may well be the end of society :) Sure, I might be totally wrong about all of this, but I really don't think so.
Hyperbole, yes, I'll admit to that. Perhaps it's unfair to pick on Blizzard because it's a sin that ALL modern MMO developers are guilty of. There is, in my opinion (and many others I know) no real excuse for "the grind" as a gameplay mechanic. It's the lazy answer to padding out the gameplay hours of your product--simple as that.
I cite to you Nethack as an example of a game that you could easily spend as much time playing as anybody does with WoW, but manages to remain enjoyable even to experts, and even though it essentially involves doing the exact same thing over and over again. Is it repetitive? Yes. But in a very enjoyable way which no modern MMOs have come even close to capturing.
Or perhaps the people with the most money are going to be the rude asses talking nonstop of their cell phones, and your suggestion lets market forces prevail over common decency. I'd rather not take my chances!
Except then you've defeated the whole damn point of benchmarking, which is to determine how fast various processors are at running the same code. Writing a custom code path optimized for specific processors may be academically interesting, but at that point your results really stop being a meaningful practical comparison (not like benchmarks are that great in this department in the first place). And that's only the beginning of the problems with doing what you suggest (unless you think PCMark is going to be able to hire someone like Michael Abrash to write every one of their benchmarks).
The real problem is the fact that World of Warcraft (and every MMO released to date) is designed with such shoddy gameplay mechanics that people would rather have a computer play most of the game for them. The problem isn't that some people automate their characters, the problem is that a large percentage of the game is so mind-numbingly boring and repetitive that people would go to any length to avoid it and just play the good stuff. Is there anything wrong with this? Absolutely not, these developers (again, this applies to ALL MMOs) need to learn to design games that are fun the entire time you're playing them.
Put it another way, consider what would be the case if WoW were a single player game. The immediate conclusion everybody would draw was that the gameplay is substandard, because they are so tempted to automate it. Make it multiplayer and all of a sudden this is different? No. What's really going on here? Blizzard puts as many artificual, tedious roadblocks as they can get away with into the game, and the reason they do so is to extend the duration of their subscriptions as long as possible. When somebody decides to automate the process, Blizzard isn't protecting their player base, they're protecting their profit margins. They're saying, "You'll play this game OUR way so we can milk you for as much money as possible." So I say to Blizzard, cure the disease, not the symptom. Make a game that people don't want to have a computer play most of it for them and you won't have these problems.
Can't figure out how to make a game that's both fun and takes a long time to get tired of? Hire some actually talented game designers. We know you can take a design somebody else came up with and polish the mechanics to to a shiny gleam (see: every Blizzard game to date). Now's the time to innovate.
Either that, or it's time to be grateful that your company decided not to contribute to one of the most absurdly wasteful excesses of modern society. My workplace is great, but we ditched those water bottles a while ago. I only wish every company would.
The point of the patent system is not to benefit the inventor, but to benefit society. Often these activities are functionally equivalent, as rewarding inventors for genuinely innovative and clever inventions encourages similar activity in the future. Unfortunately, and the point you seem to be missing, is that under the current this is increasingly not the case. Granting a long term monopoly on a basic application of existing technology or processes in a newly developed field, or applied to a newly developed technology, (read: software patents) provides absolutely no benefit to society as a whole and as such is in direct opposition to the spirit, if not the letter, that the patent system was founded on.
Congratulations on not understand how the U.S. patent system works. Here's a cookie.
You are obviously unfamiliar with the software installation process in Linux, and how vastly superior it is to anything you'll find in common use in Windows. I recommend consulting the interwebs.
This post seems internally inconsistent. Word uses the same algorithm, but people like TeX because it looks totally different? Perhaps we have different definitions of what it is to use the same algorithm.
The algorithm isn't just bad, it's horrible. I guess it's halfway decent for popular news items and such, but with the first technical term I tried ("Gödel's incompleteness theorem", in this case), well, the results are not looking so great. Compare:
Google vs. Cuil.
I mean, you don't even have to know what the theorem is to see how much better Google's results are for someone who'd be searching for basic information on it. I mean, for Chrissake, Cuil returned a bunch of garbage from what looks like a Christian theology forum on its first page. NOT RELEVANT
That's fine. Except the process of physical transformation you are talking about, in this case most likely the process of writing data to a magnetic storage medium, is a hardware issue that is long settled and not in dispute. Unless you really think somebody is going to try to take out a new patent on the hard disk...
Of course the process outlines, in general, how PageRank works. It has to, even with the shoddy examination process we've had for years it would never have been allowed if it didn't at least do a little on that front. The specific algorithm isn't explained either, because, oddly enough, it's unlikely the patent would have been granted if they had explained the details. Why? Algorithms are unpatentable. "Business methods" are what they can patent, so they try very hard to make it look less like an algorithm and more like a "business method."
All that being said, I find it difficult to believe there's something so genuinely innovative and unprecedented going on behind the scenes for Google's rankings. I think it's much more likely that they just developed by trial and error the proper coefficients and variables to use in a ranking algorithm. That is, the sort of thing that can easily be duplicated, just with a little time to figure out the details. Then again, I've never seen the exact algorithms they use, so maybe there is something unbelievably brilliant and unusual going on.
Putting on my pedantichat, I feel I should point out that he never said anything about whether his pun was intended. In fact, he seemed to be apologizing for it.
They could always just start selling the computers with the OSX installation disc included, but not unpackaged or used, no? They can't be in violation of any bullshit EULA clause if they've never done anything to presumptively agree to it. It's not like OSX is hard to install--they can just include a printed step by step guide anyway.
You do realize that I'm complaining about the attitude of the shareholders themselves, right? I know it's really easy with the degree of separation public ownership gives you to stop being able to think beyond your own pocketbook--it's just oh so fashionable, I know--but it's irresponsible, unethical, and not even necessarily a good thing for the long term health of the companies they own. I honestly couldn't give two shits about Jerry Yang and what he may or may not want, or the reasons for it. My accusation is leveled squarely at shareholders themselves, and their generally shortsighted behavior.
Is tethering not something that could be implemented with the SDK? I honestly don't know, not having a Mac (which as far as I'm aware is needed to make proper use of the SDK), I haven't investigated.
That said, tethering HAS been implemented by third parties, for quite some time now. Unfortunately, it's so far required a jailbroken iPhone and some fairly low level hackery that I don't think the average user would feel comfortable doing.
And this, my friends, is exactly why none of the other clueless companies have managed to put out a similar product that can even come CLOSE to competing with the iPhone on its own terms. The innovation was in the software and to a lesser extend the hardware. The deal with AT&T was because AT&T saw the innovation and said to themselves, "Oshit, we best get ourselves in on this shit." Even having something of a dislike for Apple (honestly, I'd rather have Microsoft in a position of power than them), real credit is due to how slick their software on the iPhone is.
Yes, good God, you can't really expect them to drop their six-thousand-percent markup can you? Think of the executives.