Developer hostile and closed. System is designed for complete control by Microsoft and function as a revenue source for them alone. See the six month to year delay Epic is going through having to rewrite UT to work around the problems with Microsoft online service and mods.
Microsoft bashing is all well and good when it's true, but I'm afraid I've got to call bullshit on this one as Xbox is the only reasonably open "next-gen" gaming platform out there. That's right, for a paltry fee ANY programmer can sign up for the Creator's Club and develop 360 games with an off the shelf system.
You let me know when $100 a year will get you a dev kit for the PS3/Wii to play around with to your heart's content. Sure, XNA isn't the ideal environment for high level game development by a long shot (.NET simply isn't suitable for the problem space, for a lot of reasons I could get into), but it's really an unprecedented level of official open development support for hobbyists in the console world.
So, to recap, with $100 and a high quality free IDE you can make your own games for a current generation console. Don't even try to tell me this is developer hostile, because it's one of the most egalitarian things the industry has yet to see. Not saying they couldn't go further in this direction, but it's a good step in the right direction if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a fan of Microsoft. I despise them. In fact, about a year ago I got so disgusted with them I reformatted my hard drive to go open source and really haven't looked back. I give them credit where credit is due though.
Glutinous had me scratching my head until I figured out it was a misspelling. Didn't know being extra sticky was a sin...:P (they're pronounced quite differently which honestly made it not immediately apparent to me)
How big an entry do you want it to have in Wikipedia? Should the entire article now read, "GERSTMAN FIRED, GO ELSEWHERE?" Clearly there is a section which outlines the controversy, in generally the same area of the article as controversies always seem to appear. In fact, for it to appear at all on the Wikipedia entry for any length of time is a clear indicator of its level of importance.
As for the effect of this whole deal on the company, I think you're being a trifle naive. The majority of Gamespot's traffic is from this "handful of geeks," although I'd say a great many more than anything that could be called a handful are aware of this. If Gamespot takes the same attitude as you, they'd be thumbing their noses at the very people who ultimately make them a profitable venture. Not very bright.
Though I thoroughly enjoy it, I'm not sure I would describe Zero Punctuation as "literary" in any normal sense of the word. Perhaps more so than most of the dross out there though...
A lot of it is also just a matter of looking around. Some people try to pawn off some awful crap for a lot of money in the housing market around here, regardless of location. I always recommend using a paid for apartment searching service (usually about $100 with a refund if you don't find an apartment), as they've always turned up apartments that are both nice and cheap for me.
It seems fairly straightforward to me. He has a mechanical advantage, due to strength and low weight of materials it seems, that is impossible for other athletes to compete against. I think it becomes more straightforward if you turn it around a bit. If I were to intentionally replace my legs with superior artificial constructs, with the specific intention of being a superior athletic competitor as such, I think everybody would be screaming and crying that I shouldn't be allowed to compete.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that this guy has been able to overcome such a tremendous disadvantage so effectively, but in the end it would unfortunately be both unfair and set a bad precedent to allow him to compete. Now, if he wants to handicap (oh the irony) himself by adding weight (?) to his artificial limbs and such to make them more closely approximate the mechanical characteristics of natural limbs, then I think it'd be fair game:P
As an addendum to my previous thought, perhaps this says something about the disposability of American television programming. It's just not worth the plastic to burn it on:P
I think they serve different purposes really. DVD burners give you a permanent copy, allowing you to watch the show repeatedly, show it to friends, take it with you, etc... Tivo, at least from the people I talk to who have such a thing (I don't watch TV), seems to be primarily used to time shift programming--you can save it up and then watch it at times that are convenient for you rather than the networks. Most people I know who use Tivo delete almost everything after they get around to watching it. For this specific purpose, I think it's fair to say that Tivo is absolutely superior.
Your argument is certainly valid, but unsound. If it were the case that he's rejecting any conclusions in the cited article, your point would stand. As the case is, however, he specifically states that, due to their use of an ad hominem argument that he found offensive, he does not intend to return to their site for news. In short, they used a fallacy, and in the process lost his trust. On the other hand, it could be that I misunderstand what you are saying. Admittedly, it's all academic and somewhat pointless to argue, but I do enjoy a technical debate about logical analysis;)
P.S. "Argumentum ad logicum," the fallacy that a proposition is false because it is the conclusion of a false argument.
X11 has almost nothing to do with managing the display for video games in Linux, just like Windows API has almost nothing to do with managing the display for video games in Windows. Aside from an extremely limited amount of basic window setup code (we're talking an amount of code on the order of hundreds of lines--almost nothing in projects of this scale), all video functions are handled by DirectX or OpenGL. Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of open libraries (SDL for example) that remove the need for even that little amount of platform specific code. I'm only a hobbyist game developer, but that's my experience with it all.
The real problem with Comcast isn't that they were throttling traffic, it's that they were completely blocking it. As I understand the issue, they were caught introducing commands to reset the connection into packets as if they had come from the genuine sender. So, not only were they taking it a step further than throttling, but they were, in essence, subversively forging a communication in order to do it.
To be fair, his complaint is about being called "loopy," which isn't a contradictory opinion, it's an ad hominem attack. Otherwise known as a fallacy of argument. Now, I haven't read this article, but that is certainly a perfectly valid reason for disregarding the source if you ask me.
Well, you could easily flip that around and say that the effect of the Electoral College is to make some peoples' votes more meaningful than others because they live in sparsely populated areas. Should a person in the middle of a sparse state such as Montana naturally have more say (admittedly only more to a very small degree) than a person in Los Angeles?
The tyranny of the majority is ALWAYS an inherent problem in democracy--probably the greatest flaw in this system of elections. All the Electoral College does is shift around how you define the majority by weighting the value of some peoples votes more highly than others. It'll still always be "mob rule," just with a different mob.
There certainly IS a popular vote. It just isn't counted for anything meaningful, and that is exactly the problem a lot of people have with the system. If 53% of people vote for Person A, and Person B gets elected, many would argue that something very wrong has happened somewhere along the line. Whether you agree with that are not, what you seem to want to say is that results are not decided by the popular vote, which is precisely what so many people have a problem with. "Popular vote" is nothing more than a way of describing the vote of the numerical majority, which obviously is a real thing and bears discussion.
As for the reasons people vote the way they do, that has no bearing on what is done with those votes after they are cast.
I actually could not disagree with you more. Now, I've played MMOs since the days of MUDs, but this is of course only my own experience. I would say, however, that people cheat almost exclusively because of the grind. When a game is actually actively fun, cheating generally detracts from that fun--makes it less so. I've found that most gamers recognize this, and when they are genuinely enjoying the play experience of a game will actively try to avoid anything that could be considered cheating or even cheap.
The difference with grind-centric MMOs is that the focus stops being on having fun playing the game, and starts being about achieving some end goal or another. Most people enjoyed running Molten Core that first time, not knowing what to expect, learning how to do things the hard way. That's great. The 50th time you're forced to do it though, when you've long since worn it down to a practiced science, it becomes nothing more than a chore. You seem to be implying that people actually want to continue doing this chore for its own sake, but in my experience this could not be further from the truth.
In fact, I think you are misrepresenting what it is to have a "grind" in a game. In Geometry Wars and Guitar Hero, you perform the actions that constitute game play because you enjoy them. I don't know anybody who would play Geometry Wars exclusively in order to get a new top score. I'm sure there are such people, but they're few and far between. What makes it different is that the game play you participate in while on your way to a new high score in Geometry Wars is inherently fun. In MMOs, the grind is not, and is performed only in order to achieve the end result.
"But nobody would continue playing if they weren't having fun!" you might say. Well, the draw in MMOs is more than game play. They're actually social outlets, and I've found that most people who stick to it through the grind do so for the friends and community they've found in the game, and not because they enjoy the grind. There's the reward at the end of the grind, there's the community, there's a lot of things to keep you coming back, but the grind is not one of them.
Sorry for being long winded, but it kinda annoys me when people treat the obnoxious grind as some sort of pinnacle of game design. Also, as for the claim that, "the best designers in the world are working on these games," I'd strongly disagree with that as well, for the reasons outlined above and a number of others (can you name many MMO designers? I can't, although I can name other respected game designers)... but I feel I've already outstayed my welcome with this post:P
That depends on what you want to call "shady." He's certainly not done anything illegal from the looks of it. Mind you, it's not illegal (correct me if I'm wrong) to cheat at online games. From what I gathered reading the article, it deals exclusively with client-side hacks/bots and such--feeding incorrect data back to the server, disabling cheat monitoring software that comes with the game, that kind of stuff. Certainly it's in violation of the Terms of Service of the games, but that really doesn't make it "shady" in any meaningful way.
Obviously, if he had broken into their secured servers, that would be another matter entirely, but from what it seems he did nothing of the sort.
Gentoo definitely has that problem, but with Arch there is a separate testing repository that must be manually enabled. Packages only make it into the main Arch repositories after having gone through sufficient testing. Although its main repository is definitely smaller than some, its quite stable. To be honest, I've found the latest release of Ubuntu to be more troublesome than I've ever found an equivalent Arch install to be. For other distrios that move new packages straight out into the wild though, yeah you've definitely got a point.
Yet another reason I prefer to use a distro that doesn't use a scheduled release cycle, and doesn't need to. Or this for those of you with more free time on your hands than is strictly healthy:P
The real difference, to me at least, is that your car didn't cost me any money. That protected digital content I just bought did. Really, that's what sorta breaks any physical analogy I can think of--the fact that only with DRM are people forced to legitimately* break into their own possessions.
* The law might debate this, but basic ethics, at least in my opinion, does not.
To further your analogy, when it becomes a problem is when when your dashboard stops working because you decide to only use a third party CD player. That, I think, is makes the analogy a little more accurate.
I don't think he misunderstands it at all. The problem, precisely, is that windows needing IE, as he wrote, effectively forces distributors to bundle it. The fact that a number of Windows features simply refuse to work without it (as opposed to any other browser) is the real problem I think most people complain about. I don't think anybody would complain if your browser of course could work as a complete drop-in replacement for IE, but, in Windows, it can't.
What sort of memory management would you prefer to have? Garbage collected? There are good garbage collection libraries available. "Smart" pointers? There are more libraries for minutely varying shades of that than I think I could count. That's what I, for one, like about the language.
For example, I do a lot of graphics/game programming as a hobby. For that, Garbage collected memory is really inappropriate (for a number of reasons, but most of all the need to release memory immediately with graphics hardware). On the other hand, sometimes I will code up a quick utility for home/work, and can just link in a garbage collection library to make things easy on me. I like the flexibility without having to constantly switch languages.
For reference: Garbage Collector that I like. Smart Pointer implementation that's good and general purpose. Roll your own if you want something more specific.
Slashdot Mirror
You let me know when $100 a year will get you a dev kit for the PS3/Wii to play around with to your heart's content. Sure, XNA isn't the ideal environment for high level game development by a long shot (.NET simply isn't suitable for the problem space, for a lot of reasons I could get into), but it's really an unprecedented level of official open development support for hobbyists in the console world.
So, to recap, with $100 and a high quality free IDE you can make your own games for a current generation console. Don't even try to tell me this is developer hostile, because it's one of the most egalitarian things the industry has yet to see. Not saying they couldn't go further in this direction, but it's a good step in the right direction if you ask me.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a fan of Microsoft. I despise them. In fact, about a year ago I got so disgusted with them I reformatted my hard drive to go open source and really haven't looked back. I give them credit where credit is due though.
Let it never be said that Microsoft doesn't take good care of its loyal customers!
Glutinous had me scratching my head until I figured out it was a misspelling. Didn't know being extra sticky was a sin... :P (they're pronounced quite differently which honestly made it not immediately apparent to me)
How big an entry do you want it to have in Wikipedia? Should the entire article now read, "GERSTMAN FIRED, GO ELSEWHERE?" Clearly there is a section which outlines the controversy, in generally the same area of the article as controversies always seem to appear. In fact, for it to appear at all on the Wikipedia entry for any length of time is a clear indicator of its level of importance.
As for the effect of this whole deal on the company, I think you're being a trifle naive. The majority of Gamespot's traffic is from this "handful of geeks," although I'd say a great many more than anything that could be called a handful are aware of this. If Gamespot takes the same attitude as you, they'd be thumbing their noses at the very people who ultimately make them a profitable venture. Not very bright.
Though I thoroughly enjoy it, I'm not sure I would describe Zero Punctuation as "literary" in any normal sense of the word. Perhaps more so than most of the dross out there though...
A lot of it is also just a matter of looking around. Some people try to pawn off some awful crap for a lot of money in the housing market around here, regardless of location. I always recommend using a paid for apartment searching service (usually about $100 with a refund if you don't find an apartment), as they've always turned up apartments that are both nice and cheap for me.
It seems fairly straightforward to me. He has a mechanical advantage, due to strength and low weight of materials it seems, that is impossible for other athletes to compete against. I think it becomes more straightforward if you turn it around a bit. If I were to intentionally replace my legs with superior artificial constructs, with the specific intention of being a superior athletic competitor as such, I think everybody would be screaming and crying that I shouldn't be allowed to compete.
:P
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that this guy has been able to overcome such a tremendous disadvantage so effectively, but in the end it would unfortunately be both unfair and set a bad precedent to allow him to compete. Now, if he wants to handicap (oh the irony) himself by adding weight (?) to his artificial limbs and such to make them more closely approximate the mechanical characteristics of natural limbs, then I think it'd be fair game
As an addendum to my previous thought, perhaps this says something about the disposability of American television programming. It's just not worth the plastic to burn it on :P
I think they serve different purposes really. DVD burners give you a permanent copy, allowing you to watch the show repeatedly, show it to friends, take it with you, etc... Tivo, at least from the people I talk to who have such a thing (I don't watch TV), seems to be primarily used to time shift programming--you can save it up and then watch it at times that are convenient for you rather than the networks. Most people I know who use Tivo delete almost everything after they get around to watching it. For this specific purpose, I think it's fair to say that Tivo is absolutely superior.
Actually, sorry, I think it's spelled "logicam."
Your argument is certainly valid, but unsound. If it were the case that he's rejecting any conclusions in the cited article, your point would stand. As the case is, however, he specifically states that, due to their use of an ad hominem argument that he found offensive, he does not intend to return to their site for news. In short, they used a fallacy, and in the process lost his trust. On the other hand, it could be that I misunderstand what you are saying. Admittedly, it's all academic and somewhat pointless to argue, but I do enjoy a technical debate about logical analysis ;)
P.S. "Argumentum ad logicum," the fallacy that a proposition is false because it is the conclusion of a false argument.
X11 has almost nothing to do with managing the display for video games in Linux, just like Windows API has almost nothing to do with managing the display for video games in Windows. Aside from an extremely limited amount of basic window setup code (we're talking an amount of code on the order of hundreds of lines--almost nothing in projects of this scale), all video functions are handled by DirectX or OpenGL. Not to mention the fact that there are plenty of open libraries (SDL for example) that remove the need for even that little amount of platform specific code. I'm only a hobbyist game developer, but that's my experience with it all.
The real problem with Comcast isn't that they were throttling traffic, it's that they were completely blocking it. As I understand the issue, they were caught introducing commands to reset the connection into packets as if they had come from the genuine sender. So, not only were they taking it a step further than throttling, but they were, in essence, subversively forging a communication in order to do it.
To be fair, his complaint is about being called "loopy," which isn't a contradictory opinion, it's an ad hominem attack. Otherwise known as a fallacy of argument. Now, I haven't read this article, but that is certainly a perfectly valid reason for disregarding the source if you ask me.
Well, you could easily flip that around and say that the effect of the Electoral College is to make some peoples' votes more meaningful than others because they live in sparsely populated areas. Should a person in the middle of a sparse state such as Montana naturally have more say (admittedly only more to a very small degree) than a person in Los Angeles?
The tyranny of the majority is ALWAYS an inherent problem in democracy--probably the greatest flaw in this system of elections. All the Electoral College does is shift around how you define the majority by weighting the value of some peoples votes more highly than others. It'll still always be "mob rule," just with a different mob.
There certainly IS a popular vote. It just isn't counted for anything meaningful, and that is exactly the problem a lot of people have with the system. If 53% of people vote for Person A, and Person B gets elected, many would argue that something very wrong has happened somewhere along the line. Whether you agree with that are not, what you seem to want to say is that results are not decided by the popular vote, which is precisely what so many people have a problem with. "Popular vote" is nothing more than a way of describing the vote of the numerical majority, which obviously is a real thing and bears discussion.
As for the reasons people vote the way they do, that has no bearing on what is done with those votes after they are cast.
I actually could not disagree with you more. Now, I've played MMOs since the days of MUDs, but this is of course only my own experience. I would say, however, that people cheat almost exclusively because of the grind. When a game is actually actively fun, cheating generally detracts from that fun--makes it less so. I've found that most gamers recognize this, and when they are genuinely enjoying the play experience of a game will actively try to avoid anything that could be considered cheating or even cheap.
:P
The difference with grind-centric MMOs is that the focus stops being on having fun playing the game, and starts being about achieving some end goal or another. Most people enjoyed running Molten Core that first time, not knowing what to expect, learning how to do things the hard way. That's great. The 50th time you're forced to do it though, when you've long since worn it down to a practiced science, it becomes nothing more than a chore. You seem to be implying that people actually want to continue doing this chore for its own sake, but in my experience this could not be further from the truth.
In fact, I think you are misrepresenting what it is to have a "grind" in a game. In Geometry Wars and Guitar Hero, you perform the actions that constitute game play because you enjoy them. I don't know anybody who would play Geometry Wars exclusively in order to get a new top score. I'm sure there are such people, but they're few and far between. What makes it different is that the game play you participate in while on your way to a new high score in Geometry Wars is inherently fun. In MMOs, the grind is not, and is performed only in order to achieve the end result.
"But nobody would continue playing if they weren't having fun!" you might say. Well, the draw in MMOs is more than game play. They're actually social outlets, and I've found that most people who stick to it through the grind do so for the friends and community they've found in the game, and not because they enjoy the grind. There's the reward at the end of the grind, there's the community, there's a lot of things to keep you coming back, but the grind is not one of them.
Sorry for being long winded, but it kinda annoys me when people treat the obnoxious grind as some sort of pinnacle of game design. Also, as for the claim that, "the best designers in the world are working on these games," I'd strongly disagree with that as well, for the reasons outlined above and a number of others (can you name many MMO designers? I can't, although I can name other respected game designers)... but I feel I've already outstayed my welcome with this post
That depends on what you want to call "shady." He's certainly not done anything illegal from the looks of it. Mind you, it's not illegal (correct me if I'm wrong) to cheat at online games. From what I gathered reading the article, it deals exclusively with client-side hacks/bots and such--feeding incorrect data back to the server, disabling cheat monitoring software that comes with the game, that kind of stuff. Certainly it's in violation of the Terms of Service of the games, but that really doesn't make it "shady" in any meaningful way.
Obviously, if he had broken into their secured servers, that would be another matter entirely, but from what it seems he did nothing of the sort.
Gentoo definitely has that problem, but with Arch there is a separate testing repository that must be manually enabled. Packages only make it into the main Arch repositories after having gone through sufficient testing. Although its main repository is definitely smaller than some, its quite stable. To be honest, I've found the latest release of Ubuntu to be more troublesome than I've ever found an equivalent Arch install to be. For other distrios that move new packages straight out into the wild though, yeah you've definitely got a point.
Yet another reason I prefer to use a distro that doesn't use a scheduled release cycle, and doesn't need to. Or this for those of you with more free time on your hands than is strictly healthy :P
The real difference, to me at least, is that your car didn't cost me any money. That protected digital content I just bought did. Really, that's what sorta breaks any physical analogy I can think of--the fact that only with DRM are people forced to legitimately* break into their own possessions.
* The law might debate this, but basic ethics, at least in my opinion, does not.
To further your analogy, when it becomes a problem is when when your dashboard stops working because you decide to only use a third party CD player. That, I think, is makes the analogy a little more accurate.
I don't think he misunderstands it at all. The problem, precisely, is that windows needing IE, as he wrote, effectively forces distributors to bundle it. The fact that a number of Windows features simply refuse to work without it (as opposed to any other browser) is the real problem I think most people complain about. I don't think anybody would complain if your browser of course could work as a complete drop-in replacement for IE, but, in Windows, it can't.
I'm not sure I would describe the person who ends up with all the money (and gets away with it) as a fool.
What sort of memory management would you prefer to have? Garbage collected? There are good garbage collection libraries available. "Smart" pointers? There are more libraries for minutely varying shades of that than I think I could count. That's what I, for one, like about the language.
For example, I do a lot of graphics/game programming as a hobby. For that, Garbage collected memory is really inappropriate (for a number of reasons, but most of all the need to release memory immediately with graphics hardware). On the other hand, sometimes I will code up a quick utility for home/work, and can just link in a garbage collection library to make things easy on me. I like the flexibility without having to constantly switch languages.
For reference:
Garbage Collector that I like.
Smart Pointer implementation that's good and general purpose. Roll your own if you want something more specific.