Before the world of MMOs, when the web was young and IRC/ICQ was still dominant for chatting, I frequented a strange little website with an early (and in retrospect, fairly painful) fantasy virtual world. Parts of this site (though not all of it) were sexual, and people could be/do anything they wanted. What did we see?
Time and time again, people dragged their real-life baggage into the fantasy world. In a completely fantastical setting, where being a puppy dog or a goldfish was possible, straight white homophobic slightly racist males would create the completely unique persona of...lesbian white androphobic slightly racist females. Ultimately, most 'fantasy worlds' ended up being pastiches of the contributors' real lives.
People can't easily let go of their own issues, and tend to recreate them in the absence of roadblocks. Furthermore, in MMORPGs at least I've noticed that the racial and sexual separation is played up quite heavily. Play a burly knight, and in a lot of games a few of the female NPCs come onto you. In games with realm-vs-realm play, the "us vs. them" attitude is generated by the NPC scripts, and carried into the playing fields. "Filthy elves/orcs/humans must be destroyed." Of course, the worst is always a half-, because that means that someone of your race is a traitor!
Racism in games isn't necessarily white vs. black vs. brown. It can be white vs. blue, skin vs. scales, or whatever. People create it, games encourage it, and nobody is willing to let go of it and live purely in a fantasy setting.
OK, I've installed Ubuntu for a few friends who want to escape MS-land. They all like the OS, the features, the ease-of-use. The name, however, is a source of embarassment. "I'm running WHAT??!!!" "Don't worry, just call it...6.10."
Seriously, the naming was arguably a cute idea at the beginning, but it's become a little cult of "what will the next goofy name be?" It's time to drop it.
(Yeah, I know I'm a curmudgeon. You should hear what I sound like when I'm NOT being polite)
When I got my new computer, the first thing I did was look for a good price on Bioshock. However, the sites with prices also had reviews, and the reviews all said SecureROM was included. Since this wasn't the case in all countries, I emailed the publisher to ask about Canada. When they replied and said that yes, in fact SecureROM was included on the Canadian release, I let them know (quite politely) that I could not support a company that assumed I was a criminal, and would not be buying this game or any others they published. The guy I talked to was very nice, and said he'd make absolutely sure my comments got escalated to People Who Matter.
Spore looks interesting--reminds me of SimEarth, which was fun but flawed. However, the same thing holds true. Not buying it, not supporting the company. Also, it's worth mentioning that I'm not pirating it either--that would just give them more justification for DRM.
It's very simple--I'm voting with my wallet not to support them. If enough people did that, then it would change their policy.
Unless of course, you're a talentless, brainless, lying, two-faced, pony-tailed bastard with no future. Then you stay on until you get named CEO.
Oops, was that my outside voice again?
Wow, seems like a lifetime ago
on
Google Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Informative
November of 1998 I was doing some y2k testing for the phone company, and one of the long-timers ("the guru" of Unix there) told me about a new search engine he had been using for a few weeks, that rocked his world. Over Christmas I started playing with Google(beta), and eventually quit using anything else.
It's still the best search engine out there, but that's because everyone else has given up. It's nowhere as useful now as it was when it first came out, unfortunately.
...both had fantastic sound: Grim Fandango and System Shock.
Grim had such a brilliant soundtrack that I tried to buy a copy of it from Lucasarts. They said "the soundtrack promotion is over--that item is no longer available" so I downloaded it. I put it on in the car quite often, and even as standalone music, it's STILL great!
The original System Shock is well known for being a legendarily scary, immersive, atmospheric thriller. One of the things that made it so good was the sound: The sound of monsters around the corners, Shodan insanely taunting you (check out the sound bite on wikipedia), the startlingly friendly 'new email' notice, and then the hilariously banal elevator music as you go between levels.
True enough--the publishers are the ones who generally add the final layer of slime. The developers are somewhat caught in the middle, but maybe it's time they fought a bit harder on the contracts, before starting to write code.
Also, I'm still a bit bitter over EA. I remember when they announced themselves to the world, and were a brave new way of getting great games to market. Games like M.U.L.E., Pinball construction set, Hard Hat Mac, and Seven Cities of Gold were proof that the Electronic Arts name was a gold stamp of quality. Then it all went horribly wrong, and they turned into the craptastic 800kg monster we know and despise today. Sigh.
Hmm. Which government is this, bound to follow their own laws? The police state is spreading through the western world, and I'm not seeing many governments willing to be constrained anymore.
Nope. You and I are apparently thinking of different games, because I _definitely_ remember red/red, where the only way to see it was with a strong light at an oblique angle. I think it was on my old Atari 400, but I can't remember what game.
"However in the real world I have urges that need to be satisfied."
Hmm. A friend of mine is trying to teach her daughter the difference between need and want. Personally, I deal with that line by flopping between alcoholism and buddhism.:-)
"...when it come to how I spend my free time I not going to stand on principle."
I am. I won't spend money on ANYTHING from Sony, and that includes all of their record labels and subdivisions (a tough task to track 'em all down, believe me!). BUT, all that means is that you and I have drawn different lines in the sand. I have no problems with that, as long as you're consciously making decisions, instead of acting because, "um...Idunno."
So it's OK if you and I have different points of view--as long as we both have them.
"I would say, don't boycott all DRM. Instead, boycott the truly damaging DRM in favor of stuff you can live with."
Y'know, there was a time when I would have agreed with this statement. But I'm old and bitter, and tired of this crap.
DRM hurts sales. DRM annoys people. DRM treats customers like criminals. DRM usually does NOT prevent anyone from pirating your game, but even if it does, it's only the people who wouldn't have paid for it in the first place.
I remember reading matte red codes on glossy red paper, and entering a random one each time I started a game. I remember floppies with a bad sector, which would only run if the drive returned an error 'sector not found' on that part. (and it usually had to grind for 30-60 seconds to timeout). They're all ways of protecting...something. Not sales, not profit, just...something.
Sell me a game with no DRM, and I'll happily buy it. Insist I'm probably a criminal and have to prove otherwise--ANY way at all--and I won't bother. I don't need your game that badly.
"However if the game looks good enough I will either buy it..."
As soon as you say this, you have just rewarded the publisher for trying to screw you over and harm your computer. If there is no harm to companies for harming us, they'll keep doing it.
PUNISH the companies who consider your computer to be their property, and we might get somewhere. REWARD them, and we won't.
I really want this game. I've wanted it since before release, I've played the demo on an old machine, and it reminds me enough of System Shock (I and II both) that I really really want it!
However, it uses SecureROM. I contacted the company to see if this bug had been fixed yet, and they confirmed that no, it hadn't. As such, they're not getting my money. I can live without this game, if they're going to infect my computer in order to let me play it.
It's very simple: If you're going to harm my computer, you don't get my money. If you're going to require internet access/activation for a standalone game, you don't get my money. If you're going to treat me like a criminal, you don't get my money.
My point is that addiction has a definition. It's a scientific term with a precise meaning, and it's getting frustrating to see people toss around their own definitions to suit their own arguments.
Furthermore, by trying to treat mental disorders as chemical addiction, you're confusing and delaying the treatment.
1) Physical dependence (body chemistry changes to require the substance) 2) Tolerance (body develops an ability to deal with the substance) 3) Increasing dose (body requires MORE substance for the same effect) 4) Withdrawal (body goes through clinical recovery before it can function without the substance)
Games fulfill NONE of these requirements, because it's not a substance that enters the body!!!
It's not fucking addiction--it's a psychological dependency which mimics addiction. Got it?
CPU manufacture has become the most expensive part of computing. The cost of designing, prototyping, and then fabricating CPUs is INSANE! Worse, the price grows fantastically as the trace-size shrinks. It's been suggested that one of the reasons Intel moved so aggressively from 65nm to 45nm is to push AMD to the sidelines.
nVidia is roughly five percent the size of Intel. Trying to enter a market outside of their core competence against a behemoth like that is suicide.
The key, I think, is that the Apples aren't special hardware anymore--they're pretty much generic commodity hardware cobbled together (very carefully) from third-party suppliers. There's nothing _that_ special about the hardware in a Mac, other than it has been carefully chosen from available parts.
...Cliff Stoll recognised the thing we're struggling with here. They didn't have a name for it then, but now we call it data mining.
The problem is that your name, address, and birthday aren't that important to keep secret by themselves. Uniquely identifying you with that information isn't a big deal in isolation either, but using that identity to cross reference you as the person who entered this contest with something else you've done allows people to draw connections in your behaviour. It used to be that connecting the dots involved hours of research, footwork, and digging through stacks in the library. Now it's available online, and can be sorted and filtered.
It's a personal version of "sensitive but unclassified" information.
I've been doing security work as part of my admin job for a decade or so now. I'm getting depressed enough with it that I'm ready to give up and pass it off to someone else, despite the fact that it fascinates me.
Why? Because it's a losing battle. Ten years ago (or 20, right back to RTM), if there was a security breach you could track down the source with the help of admins at other sites, and then do something about it. Nowadays, if there's a security breach your job is strictly limited to patching the hole and rebuilding the machine. "Security" has become a euphemism for building bigger walls, and hiding inside. When someone takes a swing at you, you cower even deeper.
I work for a major ISP (>$9B market cap), and am on a security planning task force. Someone is currently sending out UDP spam with the source address spoofed to be a range of IPs that we own. Victims (and in fact, other ISPs) routinely phone us and ask why we're spamming them. Now despite the fact that criminals in this country (and our neighbors) are paying organised crime to spam people, our official solution is to rewrite our canned response letter! Do we prosecute? No. Do we investigate? No. Do we get the lawyers involved? No. Why? It's because the prevailing attitude is that trying to stop spammers (and other online criminals) in any useful way is futile; and that the only solution is to buy more defenses.
The computer industry doesn't like spam or hackers, but they also know that it drives a significant part of their business, so they don't want to work _too_ hard at changing the attitude. Unfortunately, now that the Russian mafia is involved, they're probably right.
Security is a losing game. You will never get ahead. You will never make your systems secure. You may make your systems sufficiently less of a target than the next guy to prevent random attacks, but that's it. There is no security, there is no safe place, and (worst of all) there is no recourse.
A happy exception to this: Buying from the artist.
Most of the small musicians I know of sell their music for $10-$12, and make a few dollars (!!!!!) profit on them. At a local festival I go to every year, CDs are mostly priced at $20 (some higher), and the artists are guaranteed 80% of that price. That's the sort of 'high price' I like to pay.
Hmm. Some may have been--maybe even most of them. However, it didn't last very long. In winter of 1984/1985 (right around Christmas or New Year), my dad bought a cheap piece of crap CD player. Thing was plasticy, floppy, and had a 14-bit DAC. Yes, that's right--it actually dropped the two least-significant bits!
There are some nice CD players still to be had--but they're pricy units. Denon is probably the cheapest decent player out there, and beyond that you get into Rotel, and then into the truly silly range.
Slashdot Mirror
Before the world of MMOs, when the web was young and IRC/ICQ was still dominant for chatting, I frequented a strange little website with an early (and in retrospect, fairly painful) fantasy virtual world. Parts of this site (though not all of it) were sexual, and people could be/do anything they wanted. What did we see?
Time and time again, people dragged their real-life baggage into the fantasy world. In a completely fantastical setting, where being a puppy dog or a goldfish was possible, straight white homophobic slightly racist males would create the completely unique persona of...lesbian white androphobic slightly racist females. Ultimately, most 'fantasy worlds' ended up being pastiches of the contributors' real lives.
People can't easily let go of their own issues, and tend to recreate them in the absence of roadblocks. Furthermore, in MMORPGs at least I've noticed that the racial and sexual separation is played up quite heavily. Play a burly knight, and in a lot of games a few of the female NPCs come onto you. In games with realm-vs-realm play, the "us vs. them" attitude is generated by the NPC scripts, and carried into the playing fields. "Filthy elves/orcs/humans must be destroyed." Of course, the worst is always a half-, because that means that someone of your race is a traitor!
Racism in games isn't necessarily white vs. black vs. brown. It can be white vs. blue, skin vs. scales, or whatever. People create it, games encourage it, and nobody is willing to let go of it and live purely in a fantasy setting.
OK, I've installed Ubuntu for a few friends who want to escape MS-land. They all like the OS, the features, the ease-of-use. The name, however, is a source of embarassment. "I'm running WHAT??!!!" "Don't worry, just call it...6.10."
Seriously, the naming was arguably a cute idea at the beginning, but it's become a little cult of "what will the next goofy name be?" It's time to drop it.
(Yeah, I know I'm a curmudgeon. You should hear what I sound like when I'm NOT being polite)
Amen.
When I got my new computer, the first thing I did was look for a good price on Bioshock. However, the sites with prices also had reviews, and the reviews all said SecureROM was included. Since this wasn't the case in all countries, I emailed the publisher to ask about Canada. When they replied and said that yes, in fact SecureROM was included on the Canadian release, I let them know (quite politely) that I could not support a company that assumed I was a criminal, and would not be buying this game or any others they published. The guy I talked to was very nice, and said he'd make absolutely sure my comments got escalated to People Who Matter.
Spore looks interesting--reminds me of SimEarth, which was fun but flawed. However, the same thing holds true. Not buying it, not supporting the company. Also, it's worth mentioning that I'm not pirating it either--that would just give them more justification for DRM.
It's very simple--I'm voting with my wallet not to support them. If enough people did that, then it would change their policy.
Um...no it's not.
Try 1010.
I'm sure you know that, but I just had to reply to a post with an Invader Zim quote in it.
Unless of course, you're a talentless, brainless, lying, two-faced, pony-tailed bastard with no future. Then you stay on until you get named CEO.
Oops, was that my outside voice again?
November of 1998 I was doing some y2k testing for the phone company, and one of the long-timers ("the guru" of Unix there) told me about a new search engine he had been using for a few weeks, that rocked his world. Over Christmas I started playing with Google(beta), and eventually quit using anything else.
It's still the best search engine out there, but that's because everyone else has given up. It's nowhere as useful now as it was when it first came out, unfortunately.
...both had fantastic sound: Grim Fandango and System Shock.
Grim had such a brilliant soundtrack that I tried to buy a copy of it from Lucasarts. They said "the soundtrack promotion is over--that item is no longer available" so I downloaded it. I put it on in the car quite often, and even as standalone music, it's STILL great!
The original System Shock is well known for being a legendarily scary, immersive, atmospheric thriller. One of the things that made it so good was the sound: The sound of monsters around the corners, Shodan insanely taunting you (check out the sound bite on wikipedia), the startlingly friendly 'new email' notice, and then the hilariously banal elevator music as you go between levels.
THAT was sound, my friends.
How did you avoid the other step:
2a) Programs and devices stop working as a result of 2).
Seriously, that's what SecureROM has done to my computer in the past, and thousands of other people's systems.
True enough--the publishers are the ones who generally add the final layer of slime. The developers are somewhat caught in the middle, but maybe it's time they fought a bit harder on the contracts, before starting to write code.
Also, I'm still a bit bitter over EA. I remember when they announced themselves to the world, and were a brave new way of getting great games to market. Games like M.U.L.E., Pinball construction set, Hard Hat Mac, and Seven Cities of Gold were proof that the Electronic Arts name was a gold stamp of quality. Then it all went horribly wrong, and they turned into the craptastic 800kg monster we know and despise today. Sigh.
Hmm. Which government is this, bound to follow their own laws? The police state is spreading through the western world, and I'm not seeing many governments willing to be constrained anymore.
Disabled CDROM drives.
Virtual DAEMON fails completely.
Unrequested software installed silently on your computer.
That's three of the symptoms.
Nope. You and I are apparently thinking of different games, because I _definitely_ remember red/red, where the only way to see it was with a strong light at an oblique angle. I think it was on my old Atari 400, but I can't remember what game.
"However in the real world I have urges that need to be satisfied."
Hmm. A friend of mine is trying to teach her daughter the difference between need and want. Personally, I deal with that line by flopping between alcoholism and buddhism. :-)
"...when it come to how I spend my free time I not going to stand on principle."
I am. I won't spend money on ANYTHING from Sony, and that includes all of their record labels and subdivisions (a tough task to track 'em all down, believe me!). BUT, all that means is that you and I have drawn different lines in the sand. I have no problems with that, as long as you're consciously making decisions, instead of acting because, "um...Idunno."
So it's OK if you and I have different points of view--as long as we both have them.
"I would say, don't boycott all DRM. Instead, boycott the truly damaging DRM in favor of stuff you can live with."
Y'know, there was a time when I would have agreed with this statement. But I'm old and bitter, and tired of this crap.
DRM hurts sales. DRM annoys people. DRM treats customers like criminals. DRM usually does NOT prevent anyone from pirating your game, but even if it does, it's only the people who wouldn't have paid for it in the first place.
I remember reading matte red codes on glossy red paper, and entering a random one each time I started a game. I remember floppies with a bad sector, which would only run if the drive returned an error 'sector not found' on that part. (and it usually had to grind for 30-60 seconds to timeout). They're all ways of protecting...something. Not sales, not profit, just...something.
Sell me a game with no DRM, and I'll happily buy it. Insist I'm probably a criminal and have to prove otherwise--ANY way at all--and I won't bother. I don't need your game that badly.
"However if the game looks good enough I will either buy it..."
As soon as you say this, you have just rewarded the publisher for trying to screw you over and harm your computer. If there is no harm to companies for harming us, they'll keep doing it.
PUNISH the companies who consider your computer to be their property, and we might get somewhere. REWARD them, and we won't.
Sure I am! I don't have nearly as high of an opinion of myself as you seem to think I do.
Incidentally, your .sig actually speaks volumes about my stance.
SecureROM.
I really want this game. I've wanted it since before release, I've played the demo on an old machine, and it reminds me enough of System Shock (I and II both) that I really really want it!
However, it uses SecureROM. I contacted the company to see if this bug had been fixed yet, and they confirmed that no, it hadn't. As such, they're not getting my money. I can live without this game, if they're going to infect my computer in order to let me play it.
It's very simple:
If you're going to harm my computer, you don't get my money.
If you're going to require internet access/activation for a standalone game, you don't get my money.
If you're going to treat me like a criminal, you don't get my money.
Developers, it really is that simple.
My point is that addiction has a definition. It's a scientific term with a precise meaning, and it's getting frustrating to see people toss around their own definitions to suit their own arguments.
Furthermore, by trying to treat mental disorders as chemical addiction, you're confusing and delaying the treatment.
Addiction requires:
1) Physical dependence (body chemistry changes to require the substance)
2) Tolerance (body develops an ability to deal with the substance)
3) Increasing dose (body requires MORE substance for the same effect)
4) Withdrawal (body goes through clinical recovery before it can function without the substance)
Games fulfill NONE of these requirements, because it's not a substance that enters the body!!!
It's not fucking addiction--it's a psychological dependency which mimics addiction. Got it?
Nice idea, but no.
CPU manufacture has become the most expensive part of computing. The cost of designing, prototyping, and then fabricating CPUs is INSANE! Worse, the price grows fantastically as the trace-size shrinks. It's been suggested that one of the reasons Intel moved so aggressively from 65nm to 45nm is to push AMD to the sidelines.
nVidia is roughly five percent the size of Intel. Trying to enter a market outside of their core competence against a behemoth like that is suicide.
The key, I think, is that the Apples aren't special hardware anymore--they're pretty much generic commodity hardware cobbled together (very carefully) from third-party suppliers. There's nothing _that_ special about the hardware in a Mac, other than it has been carefully chosen from available parts.
...Cliff Stoll recognised the thing we're struggling with here. They didn't have a name for it then, but now we call it data mining.
The problem is that your name, address, and birthday aren't that important to keep secret by themselves. Uniquely identifying you with that information isn't a big deal in isolation either, but using that identity to cross reference you as the person who entered this contest with something else you've done allows people to draw connections in your behaviour. It used to be that connecting the dots involved hours of research, footwork, and digging through stacks in the library. Now it's available online, and can be sorted and filtered.
It's a personal version of "sensitive but unclassified" information.
I've been doing security work as part of my admin job for a decade or so now. I'm getting depressed enough with it that I'm ready to give up and pass it off to someone else, despite the fact that it fascinates me.
Why? Because it's a losing battle. Ten years ago (or 20, right back to RTM), if there was a security breach you could track down the source with the help of admins at other sites, and then do something about it. Nowadays, if there's a security breach your job is strictly limited to patching the hole and rebuilding the machine. "Security" has become a euphemism for building bigger walls, and hiding inside. When someone takes a swing at you, you cower even deeper.
I work for a major ISP (>$9B market cap), and am on a security planning task force. Someone is currently sending out UDP spam with the source address spoofed to be a range of IPs that we own. Victims (and in fact, other ISPs) routinely phone us and ask why we're spamming them. Now despite the fact that criminals in this country (and our neighbors) are paying organised crime to spam people, our official solution is to rewrite our canned response letter! Do we prosecute? No. Do we investigate? No. Do we get the lawyers involved? No. Why? It's because the prevailing attitude is that trying to stop spammers (and other online criminals) in any useful way is futile; and that the only solution is to buy more defenses.
The computer industry doesn't like spam or hackers, but they also know that it drives a significant part of their business, so they don't want to work _too_ hard at changing the attitude. Unfortunately, now that the Russian mafia is involved, they're probably right.
Security is a losing game. You will never get ahead. You will never make your systems secure. You may make your systems sufficiently less of a target than the next guy to prevent random attacks, but that's it. There is no security, there is no safe place, and (worst of all) there is no recourse.
Man, I've just depressed myself even further.
A happy exception to this: Buying from the artist.
Most of the small musicians I know of sell their music for $10-$12, and make a few dollars (!!!!!) profit on them. At a local festival I go to every year, CDs are mostly priced at $20 (some higher), and the artists are guaranteed 80% of that price. That's the sort of 'high price' I like to pay.
Hmm. Some may have been--maybe even most of them. However, it didn't last very long. In winter of 1984/1985 (right around Christmas or New Year), my dad bought a cheap piece of crap CD player. Thing was plasticy, floppy, and had a 14-bit DAC. Yes, that's right--it actually dropped the two least-significant bits!
There are some nice CD players still to be had--but they're pricy units. Denon is probably the cheapest decent player out there, and beyond that you get into Rotel, and then into the truly silly range.