I don't quite understand your concerns. Consider some solid single player RPG, say Final Fantasy 12 but any is ok. Is this a story driven game? Yes, it is. Does it somehow bother me that anybody can buy this game and replay any part of the game? No. Not at all. The game is still driven by the story and I cannot see how that a few million other people playing the same game changes this.
Say the same game had a cooperative mode and instead of AI controlling other characters in the player's party other people did with additional controllers - what would have changed? Probably something would but I don't see anything changing in the story aspect of the game. Now say those people controlling other characters were doing this through network - would have this somehow turned everything around and disabled all the story-driven business? Again, I don't see how.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I really have a hard time seeing how story can meaningfully be integrated into an MMO.
Have a look at FF11 - it has a plot similar to single player FFs complete with long cutscenes and ominous dialogues (actually several plots - three in the original and one in each of the expansion packs). You don't need story events to include whole server, each group or an individual player can go through them without affecting the rest of the players.
DRM getting broken at the end is not an issue. The weakness of the modern DRM products is the speed at which they are getting cracked. A DRM system able to withstand for a couple of weeks would be as good as a perfectly uncrackable one in the game business. Few fanatics would still wait for the pirate releases but you would not get sales from them anyways the rest of people who pirate today would not be waiting for their peers to finish the game before they got their hands on the "free" version weeks later and bought it instead.
This is the way they finance production. Making a movie may cost tens of millions as same as making a software product or recording a music album etc. If you paid their expenses plus profit right away they would be happy to give it to you together with the rights to do anything you want, just like a farmer gives you produce because you are paying its cost plus farmer's profit right away. Since it's unlikely a lot of people would have been paying millions per movie or hundreds of thousands per a CD the media companies instead license you some rights for a much smaller amount of money betting on the product being popular enough for license fees to cover production cost and assured by the government that they can do this.
If you don't like this scheme you have two choices: either buy out the product, paying in full the cost and profit, or just don't buy a license at all.
The point is, anyone who wants a pirated copy of almost any popular game just has to haul their ass over to the pirate bay, look for a popular torrent of it and download. The DRM will have been stripped and everything will work just perfectly.
You are mistaken about "everyone", some people can but not everyone. Most people will try to copy a DVD, see it does not work and go buy the game. When (and if) online piracy become big enough DRM will be improved to counter that as well. Have a look at the game consoles, you were able to download game images, burn and play on Dreamcast - not any more, you need to modify your hardware to play pirated games on any system after that.
Sorry I don't see any connection between number of games sold on consoles and porting issues. In fact it was my whole point that consoles are using their proprietary APIs and thus your open "cross-platform" APIs are either unavailable or inefficient there.
It's not as silly as you think - uneducated and unskilled immigrants will vote DNC most likely, religious groups will vote what they told by their leaders. H1Bs when become citizens will probably have somewhat different political views than preferred immigrants.
If we're going to have immigrant workers, why can't they use the usual immigration process and not H-1B non-immigrant guest worker policies?
There is no "usual immigration process", there are few ways to become a US citizen but they are usually unavailable for a professional (marriage, asylum, DV lottery).
Don't work in IT.
If you want to code or do stuff with computers there are plenty of jobs in businesses selling actual software. Pay may not be as good but definitely better than collecting unemployment checks or what else do you do when your job goes to India. This industry is outsourcing-proof. If outsources could compete they would be pushing their own software instead of giving it to their US clients so those could sell at take most of the profit. Your skills don't become obsolete - if you knew C++ 20 years ago it's still the same old C++ (with a lot of new stuff you could learn and use for another 20 years). Algorithms, math - still all the same, we might be able to use more of them but the old knowledge has not gone away. You won't be in a hurry to learn the newest and bestest technology every few months - we have new C++ standard coming sometimes in next 2-3 years and it will probably take another couple of years for compilers to catch up and even then nobody will fire you for not knowing it.
The only catch is that you need to be able to actually engineer some software, fancy certifications and knowledge of most recent buzzwords won't make you any money. Nowadays we see people trying to come in from IT and they look really pitiful on the interviews knowing less about programming than a bright first year CS student. As the things going now business people will eventually realize that it's still cheaper to pay $20K to Indian guys who can learn all the needed buzzwords just as well as you and $50K to an Indian manager who speaks fine English and translates for 30 buzzword guys than to pay for their own IT division with 50 people at $150K a piece.
I cannot speak about Wii since I have not even looked into SDK, from what I've heard it's a fixed pipeline hardware so it would not be able to run even OpenGL 2.0 because of the shader language. On PS3 though all your graphics code does is writing data into memory to be later sent to GPU over DMA. It has a library that looks like OpenGL but that library is not sticking to any specific ARB standard and the functions are actually macros writing into a DMA packet. Even if it had been fully compatible with some real OpenGL spec and you could have compiled PC OpenGL code to run on PS3 you could not compete with native PS3 titles utilizing multiple processors. For example a PS3 game would store geometry in a heavily compressed format, unpack and do other vertex computations on the fly then push already processed vertices into GPU while on PC you'd have to keep vertices in the hardware-supported format and process them via a vertex shader. Performance wise PC code would be several times slower and use much more memory so there is no point in porting it to PS3.
In game development OpenGL has been relevant only for few years when DirectX was not available on all Windows platforms so you had to use OpenGL if you wanted to run on 9x and NT. It's not like somebody has been seriously targeting WinNT users as their game's audience but development was much easier under NT. With W2K supporting DirectX in NT environment there was no reason to use OpenGL in commercial mainstream development any more. These "furious developers" are probably some hobbyists, professional developers still using OpenGL are working on Macs or mobile devices and don't care about cutting-edge features since their target hardware would not support them anyways.
Unfortunately, since we have taken Iraq unilaterally, Russia is free to take Georgia unilaterally, and any other province they can get away with. All they have to do is claim that their national security is threatened, which is a more grounded claim. Georgia is on the Russian border, not thousands of miles away, and they are dealing with their own problems in Chechnya.
It is time to give real power to the UN and the ICC in order to avoid more death and destruction. Unless states submit themselves to a common rule of international law, there will never be a chance for peace.
Iraq is a bit different - in 1990 it has invaded a US ally, Kuwait, and the US among other countries fought it off obliged by the treaties with Kuwait. As the result of these events a cease-fire agreement has been signed between Iraq and retaliation forces. After multiple violations of this agreement and countless warnings allies have resumed their offensive. It's nothing like Georgia being attacked out of the blue without even declaration of war (I won't break the Goodwin's law and tell you who also did this:)).
Afghanistan could be a better example and even there nothing like in Georgia has happened. An overthrown government (recognized by UN) called for US forces to help them to re-take the country.
Russian actions in Georgia are unprecedented since the WW2 (oh no, he did it!) if the world will let this slide it won't take long till the title of this./ item will become a reality.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't quite understand your concerns. Consider some solid single player RPG, say Final Fantasy 12 but any is ok. Is this a story driven game? Yes, it is. Does it somehow bother me that anybody can buy this game and replay any part of the game? No. Not at all. The game is still driven by the story and I cannot see how that a few million other people playing the same game changes this. Say the same game had a cooperative mode and instead of AI controlling other characters in the player's party other people did with additional controllers - what would have changed? Probably something would but I don't see anything changing in the story aspect of the game. Now say those people controlling other characters were doing this through network - would have this somehow turned everything around and disabled all the story-driven business? Again, I don't see how.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I really have a hard time seeing how story can meaningfully be integrated into an MMO.
Have a look at FF11 - it has a plot similar to single player FFs complete with long cutscenes and ominous dialogues (actually several plots - three in the original and one in each of the expansion packs). You don't need story events to include whole server, each group or an individual player can go through them without affecting the rest of the players.
DRM getting broken at the end is not an issue. The weakness of the modern DRM products is the speed at which they are getting cracked. A DRM system able to withstand for a couple of weeks would be as good as a perfectly uncrackable one in the game business. Few fanatics would still wait for the pirate releases but you would not get sales from them anyways the rest of people who pirate today would not be waiting for their peers to finish the game before they got their hands on the "free" version weeks later and bought it instead.
This is the way they finance production. Making a movie may cost tens of millions as same as making a software product or recording a music album etc. If you paid their expenses plus profit right away they would be happy to give it to you together with the rights to do anything you want, just like a farmer gives you produce because you are paying its cost plus farmer's profit right away. Since it's unlikely a lot of people would have been paying millions per movie or hundreds of thousands per a CD the media companies instead license you some rights for a much smaller amount of money betting on the product being popular enough for license fees to cover production cost and assured by the government that they can do this. If you don't like this scheme you have two choices: either buy out the product, paying in full the cost and profit, or just don't buy a license at all.
The point is, anyone who wants a pirated copy of almost any popular game just has to haul their ass over to the pirate bay, look for a popular torrent of it and download. The DRM will have been stripped and everything will work just perfectly.
You are mistaken about "everyone", some people can but not everyone. Most people will try to copy a DVD, see it does not work and go buy the game. When (and if) online piracy become big enough DRM will be improved to counter that as well. Have a look at the game consoles, you were able to download game images, burn and play on Dreamcast - not any more, you need to modify your hardware to play pirated games on any system after that.
You must have confused it with Poland, poor Germany even had to ask Russia (USSR at that time) to help them deal with the Polish aggressors.
Sorry I don't see any connection between number of games sold on consoles and porting issues. In fact it was my whole point that consoles are using their proprietary APIs and thus your open "cross-platform" APIs are either unavailable or inefficient there.
It's not as silly as you think - uneducated and unskilled immigrants will vote DNC most likely, religious groups will vote what they told by their leaders. H1Bs when become citizens will probably have somewhat different political views than preferred immigrants.
If we're going to have immigrant workers, why can't they use the usual immigration process and not H-1B non-immigrant guest worker policies?
There is no "usual immigration process", there are few ways to become a US citizen but they are usually unavailable for a professional (marriage, asylum, DV lottery).
Don't work in IT. If you want to code or do stuff with computers there are plenty of jobs in businesses selling actual software. Pay may not be as good but definitely better than collecting unemployment checks or what else do you do when your job goes to India. This industry is outsourcing-proof. If outsources could compete they would be pushing their own software instead of giving it to their US clients so those could sell at take most of the profit. Your skills don't become obsolete - if you knew C++ 20 years ago it's still the same old C++ (with a lot of new stuff you could learn and use for another 20 years). Algorithms, math - still all the same, we might be able to use more of them but the old knowledge has not gone away. You won't be in a hurry to learn the newest and bestest technology every few months - we have new C++ standard coming sometimes in next 2-3 years and it will probably take another couple of years for compilers to catch up and even then nobody will fire you for not knowing it. The only catch is that you need to be able to actually engineer some software, fancy certifications and knowledge of most recent buzzwords won't make you any money. Nowadays we see people trying to come in from IT and they look really pitiful on the interviews knowing less about programming than a bright first year CS student. As the things going now business people will eventually realize that it's still cheaper to pay $20K to Indian guys who can learn all the needed buzzwords just as well as you and $50K to an Indian manager who speaks fine English and translates for 30 buzzword guys than to pay for their own IT division with 50 people at $150K a piece.
I cannot speak about Wii since I have not even looked into SDK, from what I've heard it's a fixed pipeline hardware so it would not be able to run even OpenGL 2.0 because of the shader language. On PS3 though all your graphics code does is writing data into memory to be later sent to GPU over DMA. It has a library that looks like OpenGL but that library is not sticking to any specific ARB standard and the functions are actually macros writing into a DMA packet. Even if it had been fully compatible with some real OpenGL spec and you could have compiled PC OpenGL code to run on PS3 you could not compete with native PS3 titles utilizing multiple processors. For example a PS3 game would store geometry in a heavily compressed format, unpack and do other vertex computations on the fly then push already processed vertices into GPU while on PC you'd have to keep vertices in the hardware-supported format and process them via a vertex shader. Performance wise PC code would be several times slower and use much more memory so there is no point in porting it to PS3.
In game development OpenGL has been relevant only for few years when DirectX was not available on all Windows platforms so you had to use OpenGL if you wanted to run on 9x and NT. It's not like somebody has been seriously targeting WinNT users as their game's audience but development was much easier under NT. With W2K supporting DirectX in NT environment there was no reason to use OpenGL in commercial mainstream development any more. These "furious developers" are probably some hobbyists, professional developers still using OpenGL are working on Macs or mobile devices and don't care about cutting-edge features since their target hardware would not support them anyways.
Unfortunately, since we have taken Iraq unilaterally, Russia is free to take Georgia unilaterally, and any other province they can get away with. All they have to do is claim that their national security is threatened, which is a more grounded claim. Georgia is on the Russian border, not thousands of miles away, and they are dealing with their own problems in Chechnya.
It is time to give real power to the UN and the ICC in order to avoid more death and destruction. Unless states submit themselves to a common rule of international law, there will never be a chance for peace.
Iraq is a bit different - in 1990 it has invaded a US ally, Kuwait, and the US among other countries fought it off obliged by the treaties with Kuwait. As the result of these events a cease-fire agreement has been signed between Iraq and retaliation forces. After multiple violations of this agreement and countless warnings allies have resumed their offensive. It's nothing like Georgia being attacked out of the blue without even declaration of war (I won't break the Goodwin's law and tell you who also did this :)).
Afghanistan could be a better example and even there nothing like in Georgia has happened. An overthrown government (recognized by UN) called for US forces to help them to re-take the country.
Russian actions in Georgia are unprecedented since the WW2 (oh no, he did it!) if the world will let this slide it won't take long till the title of this ./ item will become a reality.