1) Putting license key schemes in place on their OS's, this will get a marginal revenue increase by eliminating the bulk of casual piracy for the OS
That's a brilliant idea! Maybe they should require, I don't know, a 25-digit alphanumeric code. They could include it on the back of the CD case. That would *completely* get rid of piracy!
Even better, if they wanted to be *absolutely certain* it was impossible to pirate software, they could have their operating system connect over the Internet to a central server for authorization. They could use some sort of a hash of the hardware to make sure it was the same computer.
Yes, I think it's a pretty sure thing that those two ideas together would squash piracy once and for all. You should suggest them to Microsoft. They'd probably hire you on the spot.
"Isn't this pretty?" "Yeah, but why did the planets stop turning?" "Er . . . um . .."
And I know for a fact that there's a PS2 game out there that crashes on the highest (secret) difficulty with one character class on a specific level. Runs out of RAM. No way to get past.
As software gets more complex, it crashes more often. Live with it.:P
No idea if anyone would be interested in the least on this, but I'm ranked #6 in Topcoder, one of the longest-competing and highest-ranked members. I'm actually ranked above dgarthur, but I have horrible luck in the onsites and aren't currently in college anyway, so I wasn't eligable for the 2003 Collegiate (though I went to the 2002 Invitational - dgarthur's way too good at Super Smash Bros, and SnapDragon's even better.) So if somebody (I was thinking Slashdot-related, but otherwise would be fine also) wants to interview me, I'm up for it - toss me an email at zorbathut at uswest dot net, and use a subject that doesn't look like spam, since otherwise it will probably get deleted unread:P
Everybody in the TopCoder top 10 has done extremely well on some or all of the ACM, the IOI, the Putnam, and the IMO
As much as I agree with everything else you said, you got that one wrong - I've never done any of those, and right now I'm ranked #6:P
On the other hand, looking at the people, I think I'm the only exception in the top ten, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if I was the only exception in the top twenty or more.
Hi. I'm one of the aforementioned top competitors;) I use C++ because I like it better, but I've had no interest in Java because it doesn't do what I need in the contest - namely, it doesn't have any equivalent to the STL. The usual example I give for why STL rocks (and Java can't cut it) is "make an associative array from a string to an int, and make it default to 0". In C++, it's already provided - std::map does it. Java can't do it. You can't even put primitives into containers!
And I use big containers *all* the time.
Incidentally, I'm just going back to college - as an undergrad sophmore, so it's not like I'm an old fogie.:P
Todays music sucks donkey ass through a crazy straw
You know, you're right! And it's ironic, too, in a way. See, when I was a kid, my parents told me that my music was terrible. They said it was loud and pointless. But guess what - it was really good music, and it's *today's* music that's terrible, loud, and pointless!
Isn't it strange how every generation but your own has bad taste in music?
I'm just glad you're around to prove me right. I mean, without you, I might actually have started thinking maybe my opinion *wasn't* indisputable fact.
. . . okay, enough sarcasm. My CD folder contains T.A.T.U, Eve 6, Beach Boys, They Might Be Giants, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Beethoven, The Beatles, Tears for Fears, Paul Oakenfold, and Linkin Park. I like all of it, mostly for different reasons. Just because you don't like it, however, does not mean it's bad music. It merely means you don't like it.
I've heard a lot of independent artists. Some of them are great, and I buy their CDs. Some of them are not. On the other hand, I realize that this is just my opinion, not cosmic law. Please do the same.
So now that I'm generating 5gb of logs every day, how am I supposed to check them?
I, personally, have generally found that logs are great for tracking down how they got in in the first place, but if you have enough logs to do that, you have way too much to read them manually. As nice as it is to log everything the computer does it gets rather impossible to read by a human.
Which logs do you actually read over, and which do you just let accumulate?
Depends, how much data is actually useful? Just making the storage system larger doesn't mean you'll have more data.
At my work (a games company) we recently got rid of our old 120gb drive in favor of a RAID system - about 1.2tb total space. We had some trouble with it and kicked it down to 850gb to add another two hot spares. As of this writing, we're using 200gb of it, and at least three quarters of that is redundant intermediate data.
We're using a backup module with two hard drives to do weekly backups. 80gb hard drives.
So we're backing up 8 180gb hard drives onto two 80gb hard drives, because the live intermediate data we have is so much larger than what we'd actually need to reconstruct everything over a period of about a week, and we're not talking manpower, just CPU power - five minutes to start the process. (It happened once, and once we started the rebuild, we just sat back and kept working. In about two hours the game would run, and then after a day all the levels were available - it just took a week to finish all the compression again.)
My point: Just because you can build something like this for regular storage doesn't mean you'll fill it, and just because you fill it doesn't mean you have to back it all up.
I've however pointed out that any idiot who was gonna do something in the dorms would do what everyone else does, and that is follow someone who swiped before you, and not swipe themselves.
People are really quite stupid. At my college about two years ago they caught someone who'd gone in for the sole purpose of beating someone up, who had indeed swiped his card . . . at 4am, so there was *very* little traffic . . . and gone straight to the person's room, assaulted him, then returned directly to his dorm.
End result was that you could duplicate the timing precisely by swiping your card at the door, walking up to the person's room, waiting five minutes, then walking back to the attacker's dorm and swiping your card there. Like, to the minute.
That, combined with motive, was pretty damning evidence. He confessed pretty quickly.
Unless, of course, you don't particularly care if it gets hacked. I don't know about EA, but most people I know don't really care if someone can hack their save files to make unexpected things happen - it's just not one of those issues that comes up often.
Thanks for proving you're not at all a developer in any way. Nobody just decides "Hey I should rewrite all this past year of work just for fun!"
Actually, they do - they decide it's not worth trying to fix the problems that exist and that an entire new codebase would magically be bugfree. They are almost invariably wrong. Take a look at this for someone who's written this up far better than I could.
I'm currently in the middle of rewriting a server app from scratch, and I hate it, because I'm spending two weeks implementing the stuff I already implemented once. Unfortunately I need to rip it apart almost entirely because the original one was a hack that got out of control and is utterly unmaintainable.
Personally, I'd start a cellphone trading ring at school - every few days, everyone puts their cellphone in a big pile and then picks out a random one . ..
Works best if they all look the same, of course.
An international ring would be a great idea, but it'd be a bit pricey for most kids. (At least, most that I know:P)
I honestly can't figure out which sarcastic comment I want to reply to this with:P
For a while I cut class. For a long while, in fact. I was having severe depression and trust problems. Having my mom looming over me to this extent might very well have driven me to kill myself (no, I'm not being overly dramatic, I was extremely close even as it was.) What I needed was some time off - and I got it. A few years of it, in fact, thanks to a very lax high school and a mom who, at least slightly, understood.
Now I'll admit that I'm not the best-adjusted person in the world. I've dropped out of college. On the other hand, I'm making more money than most of my friends at a job I love, and I'm planning to go *back* to college next year. This, in my mind, is success.
I wouldn't have what I have now if I'd been effectively forced into school. I've also totally lost the point I was trying to make.
The point I was trying to make is that knowing what your kid is doing "every minute of the day" *isn't necessarily a good thing*. Kids want freedom. Parents want freedom. Sheesh, everyone wants freedom. And if you've got a tracking device that you're forced to carry around, you don't have freedom.
(And then there's the whole freedom-leads-to-responsibility thing too - my years of minor juvenile delinquency gave me a very sharp sense of consequence, and I've seen people who don't have one. But that's another matter entirely.)
Personally, I just crack the game at that point. Hey, I bought it, I own it, I want to play it.
In fact, most of the games on my computer (most of which are legal - yes, I have a few that aren't, I'll admit it) are cracked. Why? Because I don't want to dig out the CD every time I want to play the game, because I don't want to deal with the occasional odd compatibility problem, because I don't want to have to remember which drive I installed it from. (I have two CD drives - one burner, one DVD - and I've found that many copy-protected game expect the right CD to be in the right drive. It's just too annoying.)
. . . is, yes, basically what a lot of people are saying. It forces others to make their software GPL if they should use any of my libraries. But what bugs me about this isn't any concept of "forced sharing" - it's that there are people out there where that just isn't an option. Perhaps they need to make money off this, or they don't have the ability to share the source for one reason or another (company issues, for example). And for that, the GPL won't work.
Case in point: SDL. For those who don't know, I quote from the website: "Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device."
Go to the games page. Note Civilization: Call to Power. Yeah, that's right, it'll run on your Linux box. Is it free? No. That's a company. They can't *afford* to give it out for free. Would they have made the Linux version without an easy way to port it? I honestly have no idea. I can easily see them saying "well, we'd have to write our own libraries since all the other libraries out there are GPL, and we just can't afford it. So much for that."
Now, I know that *someone*'s gonna say they should just give it away for free. But this isn't reasonable. Somebody - many somebodies - spent each day for a year or more making this game. If they gave it away for free, they'd have to get another job that pays. Which they would, and these games wouldn't show up.
So what's the solution here? What I'm doing with my libraries is using a much less restrictive license. I believe in open-source and all, yes, but even more than that I believe in providing good-quality software. If X company needs to spend large manhours writing a library that they *could* have just used off the 'net, their product costs will go up. They'll sell it for more money, or will put less features in, or will do less bug-testing. Come on, deny it - even if Microsoft decided to use my library, would everything else stay the same? No, they'd do *something* extra because they have extra time/money. Or maybe they'd shift the release date back. But it *does* increase the overall value of software, and it *doesn't* restrict its uses. I'll probably GPL games after a while - once I've made what I can off people who are willing to pay money, I'll GPL it and let the open-source community have at it. But there's no consistent way - especially with games! - to make money off free software. I mean, what am I gonna do, take the Redhat tactic and offer support to paying customers?:P
I remember an old Interplay (I think it was Interplay) turn-based strategy game called MAX. Wonderful game. I got great at figuring out the weak points in a base - there was a massive amount of interconnection, so that if the base wasn't very well designed, you could often cause an entire base to grind to a halt with just a few good shots. And of course you could sit there for hours figuring out the precise right points to hit.
Unfortunately, MAX 2 was real-time, and sucked. So much for that . ..
From what I saw of it, Fallout: Tactics suffered from its realtime mode (note: I only played the demo. This may have changed.) Opportunity fire just wasn't reliable enough for turnbased, yet realtime offered no "pause" key. If they'd just chosen to do one, it would have been far better.
. . . once again rears its ugly head on Slashdot. This is an oft-repeated aspect . .."but alas it just looked like a photo album on my M$ player" - is this really necessary? I mean, yes, it's a complaint and a valid one, but do you really need to call Microsoft M$? MS is fine, but Linux is not the Ultimate OS. And Slashdot claims to be "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." not "News for Linux users. Stuff that Matters to Them."
I suppose if I wanted to do the same thing in reverse, I could say "but alas it wasn't viewable on my Linux box, since it doesn't have good drivers for my video card and I don't feel like tangling with dozens of packages to try to install a full windowing system in a restricted amount of hard drive space". But I don't, because my Linux box isn't built for that, because I don't use Linux for that. Whereas if you think Microsoft's mpeg viewer is slow, there's a real simple solution, folks - DON'T USE IT. Even if you're stuck on Windows, there *are* other mpeg viewers - I avoid Media Player also.
Bah. Enough rant for a situation that's been rehashed over and over:/
Something a friend pointed out to me on the official Rijndael site - if you go to the "Vincent Rijmen" link on the main page with Internet Explorer, it redirects you here, for no reason I can figure out from browsing the source. Also note the banner at the top of the page. Is this really the sentiment we want from the cocreator of an international standard? I realize yes, in some ways it doesn't matter because it's not part of the main page, it's part of his personal page (in theory), but still - it's linked *straight* from the official page, and is unviewable with IE.
(And I suppose I must mention this for the sake of the people who'll reply with "well, of course, IE sucks so it shouldn't be used" - how would you like it if that page redirected you to "This page is ONLY viewable with Internet Explorer" instead?)
I have an incredible amount of faith in capitalism's ability to find profit in any situation. Those big corporations will find *something* (quite possibly something that none of us are even thinking of) - and they'll mass-produce rocket parts, and we'll get a space station. And at any rate, the price will go down, like it always does with mass-production. (For those who want a quick example - blank CDs can now be bought for 35c each, CDRWs for $1 each. Or less. Compare to a few years ago . ..) That's my prediction. Of course, it might be called AOL Alpha, but that's just a risk we'll have to take:)
Hmmm. I wonder . . . could Microsoft avoid the DOJ verdict by moving into space and proclaiming themselves an independent entity?
I've been thinking about the same sort of thing - adventure games with multiple solutions for puzzles, some of which the designers don't figure out - and while it sounds like a great idea, there are problems involved. Give the player too much freedom, and you can't figure out what the player's going to do, which hurts your ability to be cool and cinematic. Example: Player learns of the Sword of Armageddon, the Ultimate Weapon, the only thing that can be used to kill the Really Big Bad Guy. In a standard adventure game (and most RPGs) it'll be structured so that you *have* to get the Sword of Armageddon before you go fight the Really Big Bad Guy, or at least so that you can't survive unless you have it. So the designer can put some beautiful FMV or plotline stuff in, showing the Really Big Bad Guy getting beaten down by the Sword of Armageddon, and giving the player that tingly feeling of "now that rocked."
On the other hand . . .
If the player has a huge amount of freedom, the game designer might not be able to make that assumption. Or might make the Really Big Bad Guy invulnerable to anything except the Sword of Armageddon. Now wouldn't that suck? A player doing the entire game as a sneak-around-and-chat, suddenly having to don platemail and go beat things up hand-to-hand (okay, sword-to-hand). And alternatively, the game designer couldn't make the assumption that said player owns the Sword of Armageddon. There goes the pretty FMV, there goes the "now that rocked" moment. You could do it with in-engine graphics since those will take up less space - but still, the game designer gets to write many multiple endings. Not easy - voice acting would become near-impossible (though I'm not complaining about that, I never much liked voices anyway, heh).
You also might start losing plot. Say that on the way to the quest for the Sword of Armageddon, the player finds information on the Really Big Bad Guy and his underlying motivations (i.e. the King killed his father). Well, guess what - now you won't! I realize an obvious argument is that the game designer shouldn't link things like that. But those kinds of links can be fun and can help move the plot along. We're trying to tell a story here, remember, and how many really good books are completely predictable from beginning to end?
grrr. Now what was my point?:P oh yeah. Multiple paths are a good thing, but don't take it to extremes. The only way you could create an infinitely branching plotline would be with dynamic plot generation - with an algorithm that understood things like suspense and coolness factor. And that ain't happening anytime soon - we'll have a computerized Isaac Asimov *long* before then (after all, it only needs text, and it doesn't have to happen in realtime . ..)
So, for conclusion . . . DON'T GO OVERBOARD. I'd rather be funneled into a plotline than be floundering around without anything interesting to do.
Oh, one example of a mistake (possible spoiler! awooga! awooga!): In a game called Lufia, you discover an ancient weapon called the Twin Blades (or the Twin Sword, I forget). It is presumably the most powerful weapon in the world and the only one that can kill the big bad guy. Well, at one point, you can get a weapon called the Buster Sword . . . which, statistically, is better than the Twin Blades. Doh. And you can use it to kill the big bad guy. So, why did you bother going to get the Twin Blades in the first place? This particular glitch is just the designers making a mistake - but I can see this sort of thing happening far more often when it's not linear. Even in a recent game, Septerra Core, there's a tower that contains some incredibly powerful weapons - many of which suck by the time you can actually get to them:P (The sword, for example, is useless - in order to get it, you *have* to get the Twin Demon Swords of Marduk, which *are* the most powerful swords. One sword per character that uses a sword . . . so why did I bother with the tower?)
Okay, I've rambled on enough. Hope someone can extract something meaningful out of this.
Exactly - I didn't have *any* problem with that. Before seeing the movie, my entire X-Men knowledge pretty much came down to "Cyclops shoots laser beams, or something, and Wolverine has claws." Even if I hadn't known that, it does a great job of introducing those aspects.
First scene with Cyclops: BOOM! Look, he shoots lasers from his visor! In the training facility: He wears red glasses. Either he has an extremely dumb-looking costume, or he needs those for some reason. Maybe . . . because of the lasers? In the train station: Well, now we know why he needs the glasses.
From there, I mean . . . it's OBVIOUS. This movie did have a weakness or two (the jet takeoff sucked, and Magneto didn't lose his powers when he should have). But the only bit I can think of that confused me was Storm getting choked - I thought the special effects on the eyes were her dying, not her about to shoot off some lightning:) But that one I figured out the next time she went, uh, electrical.
Here's an interesting (and probably terrible) idea - have domain costs increase based on the number of domains you own. Say, standard rates for the first ten or so, then start raising the prices . . . Can anyone here think of a legit business that needs more than ten domain names? And it'd slow down the "domain shotgunning" a LOT, when the 100th domain costs upwards of $30K, and rising:)
BREAKING NEWS: We have just been informed that the Rosetta Disk writer was hacked moments before the final disk was written. This last disk, which was originally planned to contain a summary of the world's law systems translated into one thousand languages, now contains "Y3W h4vE b3EN h4X0r3D!!!!!!!! 1 0wN Y3w!!!!!!!" in approximately ten thousand varieties of "leetspeek".
Ironically, the officials in charge of the project decided to use the disk anyway.
The one large problem with this that I see is that some companies feel it is necessary to add some form of copy-protection. And copy-protection can't survive at all in an open-source environment (at least, I can't think of any way - correct me if I'm wrong). Anything added to the source could be removed by someone just looking through and deleting the call to "verify_license()" or the equivalent. You could build pretty complex attempts at open-source copy protection, but I can't think of *any* that would be guaranteed to work.
On the other hand, I can't think of any fully functional copy-protection techniques in the closed-source world either, so I'm not sure how much that argument holds water. A lot of my friends are W4r3Z d00dZ, and they tell me the only software they know of that really seems to be uncrackable is Bulletproof FTP, and that only because the owner literally rewrites the encryption system every week and reposts the file without making it a new version number . . . so out of the dozens of cracks out there, the chances of getting the one that matches up with the version of the program you've got is slim at best. Though I'm not sure how true this is:)
Personally, my standard licensing technique is to LGPL all the algorithms involved and GPL the program itself. That way anyone who wants to can build a clone of my program. If it's better, they deserve to do anything they want with it, even sell it commercially. If it's not any better, they won't be able to sell it commercially. However, they won't be able to take my work and make money off it without doing some serious work of their own (i.e. building a GUI, or at the very least, a good CLI).
Slashdot Mirror
1) Putting license key schemes in place on their OS's, this will get a marginal revenue increase by eliminating the bulk of casual piracy for the OS
That's a brilliant idea! Maybe they should require, I don't know, a 25-digit alphanumeric code. They could include it on the back of the CD case. That would *completely* get rid of piracy!
Even better, if they wanted to be *absolutely certain* it was impossible to pirate software, they could have their operating system connect over the Internet to a central server for authorization. They could use some sort of a hash of the hardware to make sure it was the same computer.
Yes, I think it's a pretty sure thing that those two ideas together would squash piracy once and for all. You should suggest them to Microsoft. They'd probably hire you on the spot.
First time I saw an N64, it crashed.
."
:P
"Isn't this pretty?"
"Yeah, but why did the planets stop turning?"
"Er . . . um . .
And I know for a fact that there's a PS2 game out there that crashes on the highest (secret) difficulty with one character class on a specific level. Runs out of RAM. No way to get past.
As software gets more complex, it crashes more often. Live with it.
No idea if anyone would be interested in the least on this, but I'm ranked #6 in Topcoder, one of the longest-competing and highest-ranked members. I'm actually ranked above dgarthur, but I have horrible luck in the onsites and aren't currently in college anyway, so I wasn't eligable for the 2003 Collegiate (though I went to the 2002 Invitational - dgarthur's way too good at Super Smash Bros, and SnapDragon's even better.) So if somebody (I was thinking Slashdot-related, but otherwise would be fine also) wants to interview me, I'm up for it - toss me an email at zorbathut at uswest dot net, and use a subject that doesn't look like spam, since otherwise it will probably get deleted unread :P
Everybody in the TopCoder top 10 has done extremely well on some or all of the ACM, the IOI, the Putnam, and the IMO
:P
As much as I agree with everything else you said, you got that one wrong - I've never done any of those, and right now I'm ranked #6
On the other hand, looking at the people, I think I'm the only exception in the top ten, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if I was the only exception in the top twenty or more.
Hi. I'm one of the aforementioned top competitors ;) I use C++ because I like it better, but I've had no interest in Java because it doesn't do what I need in the contest - namely, it doesn't have any equivalent to the STL. The usual example I give for why STL rocks (and Java can't cut it) is "make an associative array from a string to an int, and make it default to 0". In C++, it's already provided - std::map does it. Java can't do it. You can't even put primitives into containers!
:P
And I use big containers *all* the time.
Incidentally, I'm just going back to college - as an undergrad sophmore, so it's not like I'm an old fogie.
Todays music sucks donkey ass through a crazy straw
You know, you're right! And it's ironic, too, in a way. See, when I was a kid, my parents told me that my music was terrible. They said it was loud and pointless. But guess what - it was really good music, and it's *today's* music that's terrible, loud, and pointless!
Isn't it strange how every generation but your own has bad taste in music?
I'm just glad you're around to prove me right. I mean, without you, I might actually have started thinking maybe my opinion *wasn't* indisputable fact.
. . . okay, enough sarcasm. My CD folder contains T.A.T.U, Eve 6, Beach Boys, They Might Be Giants, Toad the Wet Sprocket, Beethoven, The Beatles, Tears for Fears, Paul Oakenfold, and Linkin Park. I like all of it, mostly for different reasons. Just because you don't like it, however, does not mean it's bad music. It merely means you don't like it.
I've heard a lot of independent artists. Some of them are great, and I buy their CDs. Some of them are not. On the other hand, I realize that this is just my opinion, not cosmic law. Please do the same.
CHECK YOUR LOGS . . . LOG EVERYTHING YOU CAN
So now that I'm generating 5gb of logs every day, how am I supposed to check them?
I, personally, have generally found that logs are great for tracking down how they got in in the first place, but if you have enough logs to do that, you have way too much to read them manually. As nice as it is to log everything the computer does it gets rather impossible to read by a human.
Which logs do you actually read over, and which do you just let accumulate?
Depends, how much data is actually useful? Just making the storage system larger doesn't mean you'll have more data.
At my work (a games company) we recently got rid of our old 120gb drive in favor of a RAID system - about 1.2tb total space. We had some trouble with it and kicked it down to 850gb to add another two hot spares. As of this writing, we're using 200gb of it, and at least three quarters of that is redundant intermediate data.
We're using a backup module with two hard drives to do weekly backups. 80gb hard drives.
So we're backing up 8 180gb hard drives onto two 80gb hard drives, because the live intermediate data we have is so much larger than what we'd actually need to reconstruct everything over a period of about a week, and we're not talking manpower, just CPU power - five minutes to start the process. (It happened once, and once we started the rebuild, we just sat back and kept working. In about two hours the game would run, and then after a day all the levels were available - it just took a week to finish all the compression again.)
My point: Just because you can build something like this for regular storage doesn't mean you'll fill it, and just because you fill it doesn't mean you have to back it all up.
I've however pointed out that any idiot who was gonna do something in the dorms would do what everyone else does, and that is follow someone who swiped before you, and not swipe themselves.
People are really quite stupid. At my college about two years ago they caught someone who'd gone in for the sole purpose of beating someone up, who had indeed swiped his card . . . at 4am, so there was *very* little traffic . . . and gone straight to the person's room, assaulted him, then returned directly to his dorm.
End result was that you could duplicate the timing precisely by swiping your card at the door, walking up to the person's room, waiting five minutes, then walking back to the attacker's dorm and swiping your card there. Like, to the minute.
That, combined with motive, was pretty damning evidence. He confessed pretty quickly.
Unless, of course, you don't particularly care if it gets hacked. I don't know about EA, but most people I know don't really care if someone can hack their save files to make unexpected things happen - it's just not one of those issues that comes up often.
Actually, they do - they decide it's not worth trying to fix the problems that exist and that an entire new codebase would magically be bugfree. They are almost invariably wrong. Take a look at this for someone who's written this up far better than I could.
I'm currently in the middle of rewriting a server app from scratch, and I hate it, because I'm spending two weeks implementing the stuff I already implemented once. Unfortunately I need to rip it apart almost entirely because the original one was a hack that got out of control and is utterly unmaintainable.
I'm probably making a mistake also, though.
Personally, I'd start a cellphone trading ring at school - every few days, everyone puts their cellphone in a big pile and then picks out a random one . . .
:P)
Works best if they all look the same, of course.
An international ring would be a great idea, but it'd be a bit pricey for most kids. (At least, most that I know
I honestly can't figure out which sarcastic comment I want to reply to this with :P
For a while I cut class. For a long while, in fact. I was having severe depression and trust problems. Having my mom looming over me to this extent might very well have driven me to kill myself (no, I'm not being overly dramatic, I was extremely close even as it was.) What I needed was some time off - and I got it. A few years of it, in fact, thanks to a very lax high school and a mom who, at least slightly, understood.
Now I'll admit that I'm not the best-adjusted person in the world. I've dropped out of college. On the other hand, I'm making more money than most of my friends at a job I love, and I'm planning to go *back* to college next year. This, in my mind, is success.
I wouldn't have what I have now if I'd been effectively forced into school. I've also totally lost the point I was trying to make.
The point I was trying to make is that knowing what your kid is doing "every minute of the day" *isn't necessarily a good thing*. Kids want freedom. Parents want freedom. Sheesh, everyone wants freedom. And if you've got a tracking device that you're forced to carry around, you don't have freedom.
(And then there's the whole freedom-leads-to-responsibility thing too - my years of minor juvenile delinquency gave me a very sharp sense of consequence, and I've seen people who don't have one. But that's another matter entirely.)
Personally, I just crack the game at that point. Hey, I bought it, I own it, I want to play it.
In fact, most of the games on my computer (most of which are legal - yes, I have a few that aren't, I'll admit it) are cracked. Why? Because I don't want to dig out the CD every time I want to play the game, because I don't want to deal with the occasional odd compatibility problem, because I don't want to have to remember which drive I installed it from. (I have two CD drives - one burner, one DVD - and I've found that many copy-protected game expect the right CD to be in the right drive. It's just too annoying.)
What about the CueCat? :)
. . . is, yes, basically what a lot of people are saying. It forces others to make their software GPL if they should use any of my libraries. But what bugs me about this isn't any concept of "forced sharing" - it's that there are people out there where that just isn't an option. Perhaps they need to make money off this, or they don't have the ability to share the source for one reason or another (company issues, for example). And for that, the GPL won't work.
:P
Case in point: SDL. For those who don't know, I quote from the website: "Simple DirectMedia Layer is a cross-platform multimedia library designed to provide fast access to the graphics framebuffer and audio device."
Go to the games page. Note Civilization: Call to Power. Yeah, that's right, it'll run on your Linux box. Is it free? No. That's a company. They can't *afford* to give it out for free. Would they have made the Linux version without an easy way to port it? I honestly have no idea. I can easily see them saying "well, we'd have to write our own libraries since all the other libraries out there are GPL, and we just can't afford it. So much for that."
Now, I know that *someone*'s gonna say they should just give it away for free. But this isn't reasonable. Somebody - many somebodies - spent each day for a year or more making this game. If they gave it away for free, they'd have to get another job that pays. Which they would, and these games wouldn't show up.
So what's the solution here? What I'm doing with my libraries is using a much less restrictive license. I believe in open-source and all, yes, but even more than that I believe in providing good-quality software. If X company needs to spend large manhours writing a library that they *could* have just used off the 'net, their product costs will go up. They'll sell it for more money, or will put less features in, or will do less bug-testing. Come on, deny it - even if Microsoft decided to use my library, would everything else stay the same? No, they'd do *something* extra because they have extra time/money. Or maybe they'd shift the release date back. But it *does* increase the overall value of software, and it *doesn't* restrict its uses. I'll probably GPL games after a while - once I've made what I can off people who are willing to pay money, I'll GPL it and let the open-source community have at it. But there's no consistent way - especially with games! - to make money off free software. I mean, what am I gonna do, take the Redhat tactic and offer support to paying customers?
I've ranted on this long enough, I think . . .
Unfortunately, MAX 2 was real-time, and sucked. So much for that . . .
From what I saw of it, Fallout: Tactics suffered from its realtime mode (note: I only played the demo. This may have changed.) Opportunity fire just wasn't reliable enough for turnbased, yet realtime offered no "pause" key. If they'd just chosen to do one, it would have been far better.
I suppose if I wanted to do the same thing in reverse, I could say "but alas it wasn't viewable on my Linux box, since it doesn't have good drivers for my video card and I don't feel like tangling with dozens of packages to try to install a full windowing system in a restricted amount of hard drive space". But I don't, because my Linux box isn't built for that, because I don't use Linux for that. Whereas if you think Microsoft's mpeg viewer is slow, there's a real simple solution, folks - DON'T USE IT. Even if you're stuck on Windows, there *are* other mpeg viewers - I avoid Media Player also.
Bah. Enough rant for a situation that's been rehashed over and over :/
(And I suppose I must mention this for the sake of the people who'll reply with "well, of course, IE sucks so it shouldn't be used" - how would you like it if that page redirected you to "This page is ONLY viewable with Internet Explorer" instead?)
Discussions? Flames? :P
Hmmm. I wonder . . . could Microsoft avoid the DOJ verdict by moving into space and proclaiming themselves an independent entity?
On the other hand . . .
If the player has a huge amount of freedom, the game designer might not be able to make that assumption. Or might make the Really Big Bad Guy invulnerable to anything except the Sword of Armageddon. Now wouldn't that suck? A player doing the entire game as a sneak-around-and-chat, suddenly having to don platemail and go beat things up hand-to-hand (okay, sword-to-hand). And alternatively, the game designer couldn't make the assumption that said player owns the Sword of Armageddon. There goes the pretty FMV, there goes the "now that rocked" moment. You could do it with in-engine graphics since those will take up less space - but still, the game designer gets to write many multiple endings. Not easy - voice acting would become near-impossible (though I'm not complaining about that, I never much liked voices anyway, heh).
You also might start losing plot. Say that on the way to the quest for the Sword of Armageddon, the player finds information on the Really Big Bad Guy and his underlying motivations (i.e. the King killed his father). Well, guess what - now you won't! I realize an obvious argument is that the game designer shouldn't link things like that. But those kinds of links can be fun and can help move the plot along. We're trying to tell a story here, remember, and how many really good books are completely predictable from beginning to end?
grrr. Now what was my point? :P oh yeah. Multiple paths are a good thing, but don't take it to extremes. The only way you could create an infinitely branching plotline would be with dynamic plot generation - with an algorithm that understood things like suspense and coolness factor. And that ain't happening anytime soon - we'll have a computerized Isaac Asimov *long* before then (after all, it only needs text, and it doesn't have to happen in realtime . . .)
So, for conclusion . . . DON'T GO OVERBOARD. I'd rather be funneled into a plotline than be floundering around without anything interesting to do.
Oh, one example of a mistake (possible spoiler! awooga! awooga!): In a game called Lufia, you discover an ancient weapon called the Twin Blades (or the Twin Sword, I forget). It is presumably the most powerful weapon in the world and the only one that can kill the big bad guy. Well, at one point, you can get a weapon called the Buster Sword . . . which, statistically, is better than the Twin Blades. Doh. And you can use it to kill the big bad guy. So, why did you bother going to get the Twin Blades in the first place? This particular glitch is just the designers making a mistake - but I can see this sort of thing happening far more often when it's not linear. Even in a recent game, Septerra Core, there's a tower that contains some incredibly powerful weapons - many of which suck by the time you can actually get to them :P (The sword, for example, is useless - in order to get it, you *have* to get the Twin Demon Swords of Marduk, which *are* the most powerful swords. One sword per character that uses a sword . . . so why did I bother with the tower?)
Okay, I've rambled on enough. Hope someone can extract something meaningful out of this.
First scene with Cyclops: BOOM! Look, he shoots lasers from his visor!
In the training facility: He wears red glasses. Either he has an extremely dumb-looking costume, or he needs those for some reason. Maybe . . . because of the lasers?
In the train station: Well, now we know why he needs the glasses.
From there, I mean . . . it's OBVIOUS. This movie did have a weakness or two (the jet takeoff sucked, and Magneto didn't lose his powers when he should have). But the only bit I can think of that confused me was Storm getting choked - I thought the special effects on the eyes were her dying, not her about to shoot off some lightning :) But that one I figured out the next time she went, uh, electrical.
Anyway. End of rambling.
Here's an interesting (and probably terrible) idea - have domain costs increase based on the number of domains you own. Say, standard rates for the first ten or so, then start raising the prices . . . Can anyone here think of a legit business that needs more than ten domain names? And it'd slow down the "domain shotgunning" a LOT, when the 100th domain costs upwards of $30K, and rising :)
Ironically, the officials in charge of the project decided to use the disk anyway.
On the other hand, I can't think of any fully functional copy-protection techniques in the closed-source world either, so I'm not sure how much that argument holds water. A lot of my friends are W4r3Z d00dZ, and they tell me the only software they know of that really seems to be uncrackable is Bulletproof FTP, and that only because the owner literally rewrites the encryption system every week and reposts the file without making it a new version number . . . so out of the dozens of cracks out there, the chances of getting the one that matches up with the version of the program you've got is slim at best. Though I'm not sure how true this is :)
Personally, my standard licensing technique is to LGPL all the algorithms involved and GPL the program itself. That way anyone who wants to can build a clone of my program. If it's better, they deserve to do anything they want with it, even sell it commercially. If it's not any better, they won't be able to sell it commercially. However, they won't be able to take my work and make money off it without doing some serious work of their own (i.e. building a GUI, or at the very least, a good CLI).