The author makes a good point- users see the time cost of missing assignments as more damaging to their career than the benefits of following security protocol to the letter. They're probably right.
What's interesting, I believe, is that the security employee is being fairly rational by implementing every possible security mechanism, eg CYA-type behavior. Security people tend to get a lot of stick-motivation when there's a problem but very little carrot-motivation for minimizing the intrusiveness/timewasting of their protocols. If you're only ever getting feedback when something goes wrong, it's pretty rational as an individual to employ every defense mechanism possible.
The little girl had obviously spent a lot of time playing with an iPhone or iPod Touch. While cute, I don't think it really qualifies as much of a First-Encounter-type UI experiment.
A fair response, but my point still stands. While you mock the idea for being one extreme (100% optimistic), you assert the opposite extreme (100% pessimistic) as truth. Distilled, your argument is that because a system has failure modes, it cannot be used period. Obviously this cannot be the answer, because every system has failure modes (e.g. the Criminal Justice System as I mentioned). Every day we place trust in what we know to be flawed systems (mechanical, software, and government) because we decide that the benefits outweigh the dangers of doing nothing.
We shouldn't automatically reject any proposal simply because abuse and mistakes are possible.
If I used your exact same methodology/argument to evaluate the criminal justice system, I would have to decide that it doesn't make sense to prosecute criminals because we could make a mistake and send a guilty person to jail. Society has decided that it is OK to prosecute criminals as long as the rate of false convictions is low because the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
IF it is indeed technically possible that one can "hash" DNA into a one-way encoding, then the concerns for abuse drop dramatically while the benefits (identification) still stay roughly the same.
The more rational argument is to compare this proposal to our existing system of criminal investigation, flaws and all, where cops intimidate/interrogate everyone they suspect they get their man/woman.
It's been a while, but I read 'Cool It' and recall that the premise was (generally) "Scientists have proven climate change is real. It's now up to ECONOMISTS to determine which would be worse for humanity- to allow the climate to continue changing or to restructure our economy to prevent climate change."
IIRC, his general premise is that the ball shouldn't be in the court of climate scientists any more. That is indeed a scary thought for folks who earn their livings studying climate change. If we all bought into Lomborg's work, they'd have a bit tougher time getting grant money.
Whether it's an accurate argument or not, I can't imagine any climate scientist out there agreeing that their research is no longer valuable.
I know we debate this ad nauseum, but I'm not sure that particular graph would show anything. So few people care about DRM that it probably cancels out with the extra sales they'll get from the 10 people who decided not to pirate because of the DRM. I personally game from a desktop that's always connected to the internet, and I'm not willing to forsake a game I'm interested in for the potentially 1-2 hours a month that my internet connection might be malfunctioning. I don't like this concept, but I'm not willing to change my behavior for somebody else's crusade...
Perhaps, but I don't think archaeology really qualifies as science any more than forensics. Both use scientific apparatus to figure out what happened in the past rather than using the scientific method to uncover the secrets of life and the universe.
Everyone here is going to agree that, put simply, "bad DRM is bad." As in, game-breaking/OS-breaking DRM is bad.
This discussion is more about "Is well-executed DRM bad (and for whom)"?
As far as I can tell, publishers can't really prove or disprove that well-executed DRM either increases or decreases their sales. After all this discussion and heartbreak, it really does seem that the theoretical increased sales from preventing some piracy pretty much washes out with the lost sales from the zealots/pragmatists (you decide) who refuse to buy DRM-laden products on principle. In my experience, if you spend all this time thinking about a problem and can't prove a measurable result, it's probably time to move on to something else and quit wasting managerial time worrying about it. Medical professionals like to distinguish between "statistically significant" and "clinically significant." It's pretty obvious that this whole DRM effort on non-networked games does not lead to a "clinically significant" increase in sales and should probably be scrapped.
What's your rationale for that assertion? I don't exactly or agree disagree, but you don't exactly make a compelling argument.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 1
Hmm... I dunno if I can possibly convince you otherwise, but essentially what you've done is textbook begging the question / circular reasoning. Let me paraphrase what I think you're trying to say.
1) A turn is any action taken in a game. 2) A game is a series of actions.
Therefore: 3) A game is a series of turns.
Nevermind that you're the only one on the planet that defines turn this way, you've also defined turn in such a broad way that anyone doing anything in any context is taking a turn. Via your definition and logic, it's impossible to make a non-turn based game making your categorization a sort of "0 equals 0" trivial solution.
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I dunno man. Your argument kind of falls into "deconstruction ad absurdum" territory of finding something that's probably not there. The whole concept of "turn" is that I take an action, you take an action, till the game is over. Typically, the "turn" involves a significant amount of pause as I think about my action.
I hardly see how FPS, Simulators, or RTS fall into this turn thing. Turn-based vs. realtime in gaming these days pretty much falls into whether the time elements are discrete vs. indiscrete, and it really is pushing things to claim that everything is discrete.
Warnings are an interesting idea, but I wonder how they would play out in the real life? If people are aware they get 1, 2, 3 "Get out of jail free" cards, they do adjust their behavior accordingly. If you tell folks that mods are not permitted, and then allow them to get away with it, are you just pushing the problem further down the road? They're still going to raise hell when they get banned after a warning. Perhaps warnings just give folks more incentive to experiment with signatures that won't be detected?
Some of the issue comes down to technical feasibility which I can't really speak to. If I detect a mod on a box, give them an ultimatum, and see the mod go away, can I be confident that the box is back within the terms of service?
The most interesting factor in all of this is that I keep seeing this story pop up over and over, and every time the folks pushing the story seem to be misgauging the community reaction. I think the writers think this will spark a real outcry against MS, but most of the response I have seen boils down to "you should have known better."
It would have been nice if there were a discussion of the "demonizing" of Russians from a site in English- to hell with site translators. I haven't played the game and don't really know if the game portrays all Russians as terrorists. I'm fairly sure they would have been content to depict Muslim Chechens as all being terrorists though. A Russian guy once told me about how Russian police(?) wrapped Chechen terrorists' corpses in pigskins to prevent their souls from escaping their bodies.
I was surprised to find ERP on this list. Sure, it's a huge effort and always oversold, but there's hardly a large manufacturing company out there that could survive without some sort of basic ERP implementation.
It's an interesting analogy and a pretty fair one, but I think it only applies in a functional, hierarchical structure. If you are a general manager with finance, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, etc. reporting to you, you're constantly trying to balance their individual requests. The engineering guys may truly believe in a design, the manufacturing guys may truly believe it's not possible to assemble with good quality, and the marketing/sales guys may say that the feature set is not right for the customer. The general manager hopefully has a broad enough experience base to resolve these disputes and keep morale high, rather than simply "route packets."
Don't you think it was just his lawyer or union representative asking for the documents? I don't know how demotion hearings work, but I would imagine you get a little help from an expert.
I meant zero retail distribution as in "can't be found in stores." Having bizarre pricing schemes is bound to cause channel conflict, so this model would presumably make no sense to typical publishers who have their product in Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.
There's all sorts of interesting pricing models an indie developer with zero retail distribution could try if they're controlling the sales.
I think an interesting experiment would be to auction say X copies a day, with the price being set at the lowest winning bid. Folks who MUST have the product on day one can pay more, those who wait can pay less. Obviously there are some challenges, but it's at least an interesting intellectual exercise.
It would be fascinating to see what folks would pay for, say, a week of exclusive access to WoW: Cataclysm. Sort of ruins the spirit of the game, but interesting nonetheless.
Slashdot Mirror
No kidding... Physicians aren't qualified to treat sheep.
The author makes a good point- users see the time cost of missing assignments as more damaging to their career than the benefits of following security protocol to the letter. They're probably right.
What's interesting, I believe, is that the security employee is being fairly rational by implementing every possible security mechanism, eg CYA-type behavior. Security people tend to get a lot of stick-motivation when there's a problem but very little carrot-motivation for minimizing the intrusiveness/timewasting of their protocols. If you're only ever getting feedback when something goes wrong, it's pretty rational as an individual to employ every defense mechanism possible.
There is no draft.
The little girl had obviously spent a lot of time playing with an iPhone or iPod Touch. While cute, I don't think it really qualifies as much of a First-Encounter-type UI experiment.
I predict this goes away pretty quickly- as in a unanimous resolution to cut the project's funding.
A fair response, but my point still stands. While you mock the idea for being one extreme (100% optimistic), you assert the opposite extreme (100% pessimistic) as truth. Distilled, your argument is that because a system has failure modes, it cannot be used period. Obviously this cannot be the answer, because every system has failure modes (e.g. the Criminal Justice System as I mentioned). Every day we place trust in what we know to be flawed systems (mechanical, software, and government) because we decide that the benefits outweigh the dangers of doing nothing.
We shouldn't automatically reject any proposal simply because abuse and mistakes are possible.
If I used your exact same methodology/argument to evaluate the criminal justice system, I would have to decide that it doesn't make sense to prosecute criminals because we could make a mistake and send a guilty person to jail. Society has decided that it is OK to prosecute criminals as long as the rate of false convictions is low because the benefits outweigh the disadvantages.
IF it is indeed technically possible that one can "hash" DNA into a one-way encoding, then the concerns for abuse drop dramatically while the benefits (identification) still stay roughly the same.
The more rational argument is to compare this proposal to our existing system of criminal investigation, flaws and all, where cops intimidate/interrogate everyone they suspect they get their man/woman.
It's been a while, but I read 'Cool It' and recall that the premise was (generally) "Scientists have proven climate change is real. It's now up to ECONOMISTS to determine which would be worse for humanity- to allow the climate to continue changing or to restructure our economy to prevent climate change."
IIRC, his general premise is that the ball shouldn't be in the court of climate scientists any more. That is indeed a scary thought for folks who earn their livings studying climate change. If we all bought into Lomborg's work, they'd have a bit tougher time getting grant money.
Whether it's an accurate argument or not, I can't imagine any climate scientist out there agreeing that their research is no longer valuable.
Point of odor: Miseph stinks.
I know we debate this ad nauseum, but I'm not sure that particular graph would show anything. So few people care about DRM that it probably cancels out with the extra sales they'll get from the 10 people who decided not to pirate because of the DRM. I personally game from a desktop that's always connected to the internet, and I'm not willing to forsake a game I'm interested in for the potentially 1-2 hours a month that my internet connection might be malfunctioning. I don't like this concept, but I'm not willing to change my behavior for somebody else's crusade...
Perhaps, but I don't think archaeology really qualifies as science any more than forensics. Both use scientific apparatus to figure out what happened in the past rather than using the scientific method to uncover the secrets of life and the universe.
Everyone here is going to agree that, put simply, "bad DRM is bad." As in, game-breaking/OS-breaking DRM is bad.
This discussion is more about "Is well-executed DRM bad (and for whom)"?
As far as I can tell, publishers can't really prove or disprove that well-executed DRM either increases or decreases their sales. After all this discussion and heartbreak, it really does seem that the theoretical increased sales from preventing some piracy pretty much washes out with the lost sales from the zealots/pragmatists (you decide) who refuse to buy DRM-laden products on principle. In my experience, if you spend all this time thinking about a problem and can't prove a measurable result, it's probably time to move on to something else and quit wasting managerial time worrying about it. Medical professionals like to distinguish between "statistically significant" and "clinically significant." It's pretty obvious that this whole DRM effort on non-networked games does not lead to a "clinically significant" increase in sales and should probably be scrapped.
What's your rationale for that assertion? I don't exactly or agree disagree, but you don't exactly make a compelling argument.
Hmm... I dunno if I can possibly convince you otherwise, but essentially what you've done is textbook begging the question / circular reasoning. Let me paraphrase what I think you're trying to say.
1) A turn is any action taken in a game.
2) A game is a series of actions.
Therefore:
3) A game is a series of turns.
Nevermind that you're the only one on the planet that defines turn this way, you've also defined turn in such a broad way that anyone doing anything in any context is taking a turn. Via your definition and logic, it's impossible to make a non-turn based game making your categorization a sort of "0 equals 0" trivial solution.
I dunno man. Your argument kind of falls into "deconstruction ad absurdum" territory of finding something that's probably not there. The whole concept of "turn" is that I take an action, you take an action, till the game is over. Typically, the "turn" involves a significant amount of pause as I think about my action.
I hardly see how FPS, Simulators, or RTS fall into this turn thing. Turn-based vs. realtime in gaming these days pretty much falls into whether the time elements are discrete vs. indiscrete, and it really is pushing things to claim that everything is discrete.
Warnings are an interesting idea, but I wonder how they would play out in the real life? If people are aware they get 1, 2, 3 "Get out of jail free" cards, they do adjust their behavior accordingly. If you tell folks that mods are not permitted, and then allow them to get away with it, are you just pushing the problem further down the road? They're still going to raise hell when they get banned after a warning. Perhaps warnings just give folks more incentive to experiment with signatures that won't be detected?
Some of the issue comes down to technical feasibility which I can't really speak to. If I detect a mod on a box, give them an ultimatum, and see the mod go away, can I be confident that the box is back within the terms of service?
The most interesting factor in all of this is that I keep seeing this story pop up over and over, and every time the folks pushing the story seem to be misgauging the community reaction. I think the writers think this will spark a real outcry against MS, but most of the response I have seen boils down to "you should have known better."
It would have been nice if there were a discussion of the "demonizing" of Russians from a site in English- to hell with site translators. I haven't played the game and don't really know if the game portrays all Russians as terrorists. I'm fairly sure they would have been content to depict Muslim Chechens as all being terrorists though. A Russian guy once told me about how Russian police(?) wrapped Chechen terrorists' corpses in pigskins to prevent their souls from escaping their bodies.
I think it's pretty safe to say Cuban is a publicity slut... Not that there's anything wrong with it.
http://tvmedia.ign.com/tv/image/article/936/936352/the-simpsons-billionairesrule_1228751251.jpg
So, I'm curious. Did you cut and paste from your subject line or did you mistype China twice in a row?
The first seems really, really lazy to me, but the second seems statistically unlikely.
I was surprised to find ERP on this list. Sure, it's a huge effort and always oversold, but there's hardly a large manufacturing company out there that could survive without some sort of basic ERP implementation.
It's an interesting analogy and a pretty fair one, but I think it only applies in a functional, hierarchical structure. If you are a general manager with finance, marketing, engineering, manufacturing, etc. reporting to you, you're constantly trying to balance their individual requests. The engineering guys may truly believe in a design, the manufacturing guys may truly believe it's not possible to assemble with good quality, and the marketing/sales guys may say that the feature set is not right for the customer. The general manager hopefully has a broad enough experience base to resolve these disputes and keep morale high, rather than simply "route packets."
Don't you think it was just his lawyer or union representative asking for the documents? I don't know how demotion hearings work, but I would imagine you get a little help from an expert.
I meant zero retail distribution as in "can't be found in stores." Having bizarre pricing schemes is bound to cause channel conflict, so this model would presumably make no sense to typical publishers who have their product in Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, etc.
There's all sorts of interesting pricing models an indie developer with zero retail distribution could try if they're controlling the sales.
I think an interesting experiment would be to auction say X copies a day, with the price being set at the lowest winning bid. Folks who MUST have the product on day one can pay more, those who wait can pay less. Obviously there are some challenges, but it's at least an interesting intellectual exercise.
It would be fascinating to see what folks would pay for, say, a week of exclusive access to WoW: Cataclysm. Sort of ruins the spirit of the game, but interesting nonetheless.
Another lesser known factoid: the cost of ammunition always increases with the frequency of zombie outbreaks:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Cost+of+ammunition+increases+with+frequency+of+zombie+outbreaks