So how if an infection is more virulent than x, it's not a freedom issue? This seems quite selective.
I've got two dead women in my family from cervical cancer. If there had been a vaccine around when they were young and their parents had chosen not to get them inoculated over moral concerns, then those folks would definitely have hell to pay now.
The fact is, most females are sexually active before they have a right to make a decision like getting protected against such things on their own and are stuck dealing with the consequences their parents chose for them. For the vast majority, 18 years old is a bit too late to be effective and even then, it becomes an issue of embarrassment for many when they elect to get such a thing. Mandating it makes a few companies a little richer and would save many, many lives in the long run.
It's also difficult to gauge how much impact the money spent on AIDS and HIV research has caused globally. Lives saved are much more difficult to count than lives lost.
Kinda scary when people consider forcing people to inject themselves with chemicals "the right thing." Whatever happened to freedom? Silly question.. How is protecting public health, just like we've been doing for many generations via required immunizations an issue of freedom? This only got brought up and repeated constantly on outlets, such as Fox News, once it was found most cervical cancers were caused by a virus that could be spread via sexual contact.
This line of thinking reminds me of when conservatives didn't want to fund AIDS research because they thought only fags got AIDS and it was punishment from a god for an evil act. Now look at the state of the AIDS/HIV problem globally.
It's always a public burden to do research on health issues, or take care of people, that is, until the problems hit your immediate community. Just as with war, people come off their high horses and get down to the reality of a situation when it affects them directly.
Dark Void is still said to be at least a year off, with plenty of room for improvement and development beyond the brief portion we saw at Captivate. The team at Airtight have already ruled out multiplayer, something that may not sit well with gamers expecting that feature as a givenâ"especially after they see the UFO combat and skyjacking gameplay. Being a big fan of the Crimson Skies series, all I needed to see was the above paragraph and stopped reading the article.
With map generation being a rapid process, the availability of multi-player shooter source to look at and the hordes of people who won't buy a single-player game out there, it seems like a bad idea to skip it.
While I am aware of how hacking was destroying the multi-player experience in Crimson Skies, it seems like they could have learned from this instead of just giving up.
Plus, the game is over a year away. The "impressions" are not going to be much of a gauge of the final product by any stretch of the imagination. The article could have just been named "I spent a few hours with game developers looking at the early stages of a project" and been a bit more accurate, as it is very uncommon for a retail game to represent something in this stage of development.
What you don't understand is that I've understood this for years and is WHY I gave up PC gaming a couple of years ago. If I didn't understand it, I'd still be buying the latest gadgets, video cards, and adding more drives to my RAID0 to get that level to load a bit quicker.:)
I've been aware forever that a framerate of 70-80 fps gets way more kills than a machine running 30 fps on the majority of shooter engines. I just don't think the type of mice have very much to do with it, nor have I ever been bound to a particular PC due to being used to playing on a shitty one at work, then a nice one at home, so I could adjust well to a shitty one at a friend's house easily. Can't get 70 fps on a box? I'd run 640x480 if I had to.
Well, the PC came with a mouse and ever since Wolf3d, you could turn with a mouse. DPI increases never really did a great deal for me. I have always kept my settings to max sensitivity for maximum pinpoint speed while not wearing my hand out after hours of play. For instance, I went from an old MS wired mouse w/ LED optical up to a Logitech MX1000 and had no change in my frag output. The 1000 is more comfortable, but the battery running down got annoying so it's really more of a drawback than benefit in my eyes, as we'd often play for 6-10 hours straight during our LAN gatherings up until a couple of years ago.
The idea of players running around with a virtual third hand in a game is just more reason to not play games on the PC anymore. There's no "people are gonna have to deal with it." there's viable alternatives to using a PC to get online and play the same level of play as always, just a forced level playing field when it comes to input-- with exception to custom built arcade-style sticks in fighting games.
And the obvious difference is that with an ISP you don't have dozens or hundreds of people trying new ways to game the system. With fail over, live backup servers and cron jobs aplenty, you just swap out/swap in and you are good to go. With MMORPGs, someone hacks the system and you have to shut it down deliberately, pour yourself a double-shot and let out a loud WTF. Then study the hack, if you can, then engineer a work-around, then test it, then deploy it. Then bring the system back up. Yeah, these are very comparable systems alright. You apparently don't know what you are talking about when it comes to an ISP having totally redundant hardware that just requires a flip of the switch when something happens. ISPs are rather big, easy targets for someone with some skills. This is primarily due to them being just like any other organization with a large network. Upper level management decides they want more openness to stream-line things because one director fell for an engineer's gripe about how they should have access to port whatever from anywhere on the Internet, resulting in a VP thinking it's a good idea while all of Operations and Information Security are advising against it, looking "difficult" and start being shit upon when more requests come down the pipe. The next thing you know, you've not slept in four days because the entire enterprise has been "pwned" and you've got thousands of machines to audit. All while a CNN van and local news truck are sitting in the parking lot, hassling employees as they leave work.
In other instances, many machines that are "critical" in at least two major ISPs I've worked for are not redundant. Again, if a Master Nerd was in charge of the company, this wouldn't be an issue, but that's not been the case since probably 1996 at any big provider. There's too many layers of people in charge of the money that don't understand what they are dealing with, and due to internal politics, will base their decisions on who had the more eloquent argument.
Regardless, the description of job you are describing is a different type of engineering than the Network Operations Center. The issue you cite is more of a SysAdmin or Developer's responsibility.
Even if my view is skewed, I don't think it's nearly the priority to get machines back online as it is with the actual pipe connecting you to the game. Like I said, you don't have thousands of customers actually calling and demanding a month's free service because something failed for a couple of hours. It's just the way MMO's go, almost an expectation that the crack servers be down, lagged out, or having some random issue 10% of the time.
Yeah, I remember the old days of Netcom being this way. Forgot to log out one night and got the surprise $80 bill in the mail a couple of weeks later.
I am sort of mixed on my feelings about limited bandwidth access. Sure, you know how much you've got, but the last time I've gotten a service suspended for over-usage was with Charter in 2001 for downloading precisely 4.6GB in 15 days. I simply dropped them and got DSL and Satellite, as I wasn't going to give them any money after the unexpected cut off. Since then, I've increased usage many-fold and never had trouble.
I really don't see these plans really working here in the US. Even the little old ladies I know tend to chew a lot of bandwidth. The little kids with their Xbox 360s getting multiple GB game demos and movies, and so on. I figure there'd be a lot of outcry occur when lots of people suddenly get gigantic Internet bills and, when that happens, other companies advertising how nice "unlimited" access would draw angry customers away from the metered guys.
Kind of like what happened in the 90's the last time "unlimited" access gained market share.
You make this whole thing sound like it's a 99.999% uptime venture, when I've seen EQ, WoW and Planetside servers go down for days at a time.
Having spent much of my grown life as a NOC monkey, I can assure you heads would roll at the ISPs I've worked at if we had nearly the number and lengths of outages experienced in the gaming world.
I don't see how this is more "involved" as far as the end user is concerned. What's going to happen on an MMORPG? People will post in forums and not ever see a response. That's not involvement. Involvement is when you've got three call centers with a two hour hold time, the random crazy person finding your NOC number, and directors having emergency meetings over even minor outages because these particular millions of customers have stocks to purchase, games to play, and email to check and they have a nice 1-800 number to dial instead of hitting a forum that's likely going to be down if your game servers are having trouble.
I think Sony is just doing a little self-appreciation in the article, as I don't really expect anyone at any company to say the guy monitoring the network at night is playing Q3 on his workstation or about the guy who shows up on meth sometimes.
Oh, I forgot to mention. People like this don't make the PC gaming community any more attractive. At least on a paid network you have the option to put people on an "avoided player list" so you don't have to hear their ignorant banter.
There's nothing like playing a game and having a griefer follow you around, from server to server, demonstrating his willingness to piss in your salad.
I am all for freedom from keyboard hunch I would hope this would not be permitted in current multi-player games, as spending more money or running additional software to be a "better" player is one of the things killing the PC gaming market.
I cite the farming bots in WoW as a nice example. Bots running 24/7/365, generating gold for resale ramped up auction prices for some items and completely destroyed prices for others. I, at least, did not wish to go buy gold from a Chinese sweat-shop, nor did I wish to sit at my computer for weeks manually farming, so I just canceled my account after seeing Blizzard wasn't doing much to stop these things. This was a long while back, but I wasn't going to pay $12/mo to sit around, waiting for months and months for things to eventually change.
Also, showing up to raids for the first time and learning I needed to have all these macros and mods installed to be viable, which, in essence, made my character much more potent in PVP and PVE. This seemed REALLY cheap, as in the default HUD the extra steps/clicks were there for a reason and when I ran into another character of the same class and level in PVP land-- they had best have the same, or better, macros or they'll be making a corpse run in a few seconds.
The same goes for FPS games on the PC. There's such a variety of hardware, mods, cheats, etc that give some players an advantage over others. This isn't fun if you just want to sit down and play a game and get honest-to-god good at it. Just look at the old TFC where you primed grenades and the advantage of a 5 second.WAV file that chirps every.5 seconds and gets played when you hold the 'prime grenade' button. My friends and I used this and we'd pity the folks who didn't, as grenades would always go off by the opponents head due to incredible timing given by having audible indicators.
This is why I only play multi-player on the 360 now. I know when I sit down for a game of Halo3, it's very likely the persons I am playing with are using the same type of clunky controller I've got and they aren't running several applications or macros to assist in mowing me over. Even if someone figures out how to do a cheat, no bother, as their Xbox SN will get banned from Live and they won't be back until buying a new system. As a result, hardly anyone tries anything that falls under the shroud of cheating or exploiting.
I'd love one of these devices, but again, I'd like it in a game designed around it's implementation as opposed to one it's hacked into and just used as part of the "hardware arms race" that goes on so often.
Another nice thing about the console, you eliminate the "hunch" because you can lay back on your sofa or recliner.
Oh come on, how is this flamebait? It would be more efficient to have air pulled across the cards with a fan than just letting it sit out in the open. Try it with your PC if you don't believe me.
After seeing this article, I hit Netflix to see if they changed it to allow something other than Windows boxes to stream movies and still get the same stupid page:
Instant Watching System Compatibility Watching instantly on your computer
Sorry, your computer's operating system is not compatible with watching instantly.
You can watch instantly using your Netflix account from any computer meeting the system requirements given below. And, your computer is fully compatible with adding titles to the Instant Queue for later watching on compatible devices. Complete System Requirements
To watch instantly on your computer, you'll need a PC meeting the following minimum requirements:
* Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, or Windows Vista
* Internet Explorer version 6 or higher
* Windows Media Player version 11 (DRM version 5145) or later
* An active broadband connection to the Internet
* 1.0 GHz processor
* 512 MB RAM
* 3 GB free hard disk drive space
For the best experience, we recommend:
* An active broadband Internet connection of at least 1.5 Mbps
* 1.5 GHz processor
* 1 GB RAM
So they made a Linux-based player but won't let folks with Linux boxes stream. I would like to know just how I can modify my Linux to achieve such a service. They had best get to posting that source!
It's also funny that the excuse for having the side off the case is "to keep the temperature down", when they could have simply put a couple of exhaust fans on the side.
It's more likely they keep the case door off so people can gawk at all the nVidia cards.
In other news, I am going to attach 8 network cards to my PC and have an article published about how it is better than a high-end firewall solution because it can play Quake. Seems about as relevant as comparing 8 nV cores to 400 intels.
This guy really thinks highly of himself. He claims the iPhone's "secrecy" or Apple's inattention to the "privacy flaws" have hurt the product. I am with you on your opinions, my friend. According to this fellow's logic, T-mobile and RIM would have been gone long ago. So would Microsoft.
If I took investment advice from hackers, I would be one broke Piggy.
Slashdot Mirror
So how if an infection is more virulent than x, it's not a freedom issue? This seems quite selective.
I've got two dead women in my family from cervical cancer. If there had been a vaccine around when they were young and their parents had chosen not to get them inoculated over moral concerns, then those folks would definitely have hell to pay now.
The fact is, most females are sexually active before they have a right to make a decision like getting protected against such things on their own and are stuck dealing with the consequences their parents chose for them. For the vast majority, 18 years old is a bit too late to be effective and even then, it becomes an issue of embarrassment for many when they elect to get such a thing. Mandating it makes a few companies a little richer and would save many, many lives in the long run.
It's also difficult to gauge how much impact the money spent on AIDS and HIV research has caused globally. Lives saved are much more difficult to count than lives lost.
Are you certain the English interpretation of this passage doesn't mean "before me" as "in my presence"?
It seems a lot of the original meaning was lost in translation, omission, and whatever was popular in a given period of time of these acts.
This line of thinking reminds me of when conservatives didn't want to fund AIDS research because they thought only fags got AIDS and it was punishment from a god for an evil act. Now look at the state of the AIDS/HIV problem globally.
It's always a public burden to do research on health issues, or take care of people, that is, until the problems hit your immediate community. Just as with war, people come off their high horses and get down to the reality of a situation when it affects them directly.
With map generation being a rapid process, the availability of multi-player shooter source to look at and the hordes of people who won't buy a single-player game out there, it seems like a bad idea to skip it.
While I am aware of how hacking was destroying the multi-player experience in Crimson Skies, it seems like they could have learned from this instead of just giving up.
Plus, the game is over a year away. The "impressions" are not going to be much of a gauge of the final product by any stretch of the imagination. The article could have just been named "I spent a few hours with game developers looking at the early stages of a project" and been a bit more accurate, as it is very uncommon for a retail game to represent something in this stage of development.
What you don't understand is that I've understood this for years and is WHY I gave up PC gaming a couple of years ago. If I didn't understand it, I'd still be buying the latest gadgets, video cards, and adding more drives to my RAID0 to get that level to load a bit quicker. :)
I've been aware forever that a framerate of 70-80 fps gets way more kills than a machine running 30 fps on the majority of shooter engines. I just don't think the type of mice have very much to do with it, nor have I ever been bound to a particular PC due to being used to playing on a shitty one at work, then a nice one at home, so I could adjust well to a shitty one at a friend's house easily. Can't get 70 fps on a box? I'd run 640x480 if I had to.
Well, the PC came with a mouse and ever since Wolf3d, you could turn with a mouse. DPI increases never really did a great deal for me. I have always kept my settings to max sensitivity for maximum pinpoint speed while not wearing my hand out after hours of play. For instance, I went from an old MS wired mouse w/ LED optical up to a Logitech MX1000 and had no change in my frag output. The 1000 is more comfortable, but the battery running down got annoying so it's really more of a drawback than benefit in my eyes, as we'd often play for 6-10 hours straight during our LAN gatherings up until a couple of years ago.
The idea of players running around with a virtual third hand in a game is just more reason to not play games on the PC anymore. There's no "people are gonna have to deal with it." there's viable alternatives to using a PC to get online and play the same level of play as always, just a forced level playing field when it comes to input-- with exception to custom built arcade-style sticks in fighting games.
In other instances, many machines that are "critical" in at least two major ISPs I've worked for are not redundant. Again, if a Master Nerd was in charge of the company, this wouldn't be an issue, but that's not been the case since probably 1996 at any big provider. There's too many layers of people in charge of the money that don't understand what they are dealing with, and due to internal politics, will base their decisions on who had the more eloquent argument.
Regardless, the description of job you are describing is a different type of engineering than the Network Operations Center. The issue you cite is more of a SysAdmin or Developer's responsibility.
Even if my view is skewed, I don't think it's nearly the priority to get machines back online as it is with the actual pipe connecting you to the game. Like I said, you don't have thousands of customers actually calling and demanding a month's free service because something failed for a couple of hours. It's just the way MMO's go, almost an expectation that the crack servers be down, lagged out, or having some random issue 10% of the time.
Are you speaking of AOHell? If so, those were good times!
For the new-comers (get off my lawn!!):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOHell
Yeah, I remember the old days of Netcom being this way. Forgot to log out one night and got the surprise $80 bill in the mail a couple of weeks later.
I am sort of mixed on my feelings about limited bandwidth access. Sure, you know how much you've got, but the last time I've gotten a service suspended for over-usage was with Charter in 2001 for downloading precisely 4.6GB in 15 days. I simply dropped them and got DSL and Satellite, as I wasn't going to give them any money after the unexpected cut off. Since then, I've increased usage many-fold and never had trouble.
I really don't see these plans really working here in the US. Even the little old ladies I know tend to chew a lot of bandwidth. The little kids with their Xbox 360s getting multiple GB game demos and movies, and so on. I figure there'd be a lot of outcry occur when lots of people suddenly get gigantic Internet bills and, when that happens, other companies advertising how nice "unlimited" access would draw angry customers away from the metered guys.
Kind of like what happened in the 90's the last time "unlimited" access gained market share.
You make this whole thing sound like it's a 99.999% uptime venture, when I've seen EQ, WoW and Planetside servers go down for days at a time.
Having spent much of my grown life as a NOC monkey, I can assure you heads would roll at the ISPs I've worked at if we had nearly the number and lengths of outages experienced in the gaming world.
I don't see how this is more "involved" as far as the end user is concerned. What's going to happen on an MMORPG? People will post in forums and not ever see a response. That's not involvement. Involvement is when you've got three call centers with a two hour hold time, the random crazy person finding your NOC number, and directors having emergency meetings over even minor outages because these particular millions of customers have stocks to purchase, games to play, and email to check and they have a nice 1-800 number to dial instead of hitting a forum that's likely going to be down if your game servers are having trouble.
I think Sony is just doing a little self-appreciation in the article, as I don't really expect anyone at any company to say the guy monitoring the network at night is playing Q3 on his workstation or about the guy who shows up on meth sometimes.
Oh, I forgot to mention. People like this don't make the PC gaming community any more attractive. At least on a paid network you have the option to put people on an "avoided player list" so you don't have to hear their ignorant banter.
There's nothing like playing a game and having a griefer follow you around, from server to server, demonstrating his willingness to piss in your salad.
I cite the farming bots in WoW as a nice example. Bots running 24/7/365, generating gold for resale ramped up auction prices for some items and completely destroyed prices for others. I, at least, did not wish to go buy gold from a Chinese sweat-shop, nor did I wish to sit at my computer for weeks manually farming, so I just canceled my account after seeing Blizzard wasn't doing much to stop these things. This was a long while back, but I wasn't going to pay $12/mo to sit around, waiting for months and months for things to eventually change.
Also, showing up to raids for the first time and learning I needed to have all these macros and mods installed to be viable, which, in essence, made my character much more potent in PVP and PVE. This seemed REALLY cheap, as in the default HUD the extra steps/clicks were there for a reason and when I ran into another character of the same class and level in PVP land-- they had best have the same, or better, macros or they'll be making a corpse run in a few seconds.
The same goes for FPS games on the PC. There's such a variety of hardware, mods, cheats, etc that give some players an advantage over others. This isn't fun if you just want to sit down and play a game and get honest-to-god good at it. Just look at the old TFC where you primed grenades and the advantage of a 5 second
This is why I only play multi-player on the 360 now. I know when I sit down for a game of Halo3, it's very likely the persons I am playing with are using the same type of clunky controller I've got and they aren't running several applications or macros to assist in mowing me over. Even if someone figures out how to do a cheat, no bother, as their Xbox SN will get banned from Live and they won't be back until buying a new system. As a result, hardly anyone tries anything that falls under the shroud of cheating or exploiting.
I'd love one of these devices, but again, I'd like it in a game designed around it's implementation as opposed to one it's hacked into and just used as part of the "hardware arms race" that goes on so often.
Another nice thing about the console, you eliminate the "hunch" because you can lay back on your sofa or recliner.
Oh come on, how is this flamebait? It would be more efficient to have air pulled across the cards with a fan than just letting it sit out in the open. Try it with your PC if you don't believe me.
After seeing this article, I hit Netflix to see if they changed it to allow something other than Windows boxes to stream movies and still get the same stupid page:
Instant Watching System Compatibility
Watching instantly on your computer
Sorry, your computer's operating system is not compatible with watching instantly.
You can watch instantly using your Netflix account from any computer meeting the system requirements given below. And, your computer is fully compatible with adding titles to the Instant Queue for later watching on compatible devices.
Complete System Requirements
To watch instantly on your computer, you'll need a PC meeting the following minimum requirements:
* Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or higher, or Windows Vista
* Internet Explorer version 6 or higher
* Windows Media Player version 11 (DRM version 5145) or later
* An active broadband connection to the Internet
* 1.0 GHz processor
* 512 MB RAM
* 3 GB free hard disk drive space
For the best experience, we recommend:
* An active broadband Internet connection of at least 1.5 Mbps
* 1.5 GHz processor
* 1 GB RAM
So they made a Linux-based player but won't let folks with Linux boxes stream. I would like to know just how I can modify my Linux to achieve such a service. They had best get to posting that source!
It's also funny that the excuse for having the side off the case is "to keep the temperature down", when they could have simply put a couple of exhaust fans on the side.
It's more likely they keep the case door off so people can gawk at all the nVidia cards.
In other news, I am going to attach 8 network cards to my PC and have an article published about how it is better than a high-end firewall solution because it can play Quake. Seems about as relevant as comparing 8 nV cores to 400 intels.
If I took investment advice from hackers, I would be one broke Piggy.