Once the three-strikes law comes into effect and they become able to legally blackmail people, all kinds of slease-bags (lawyers or not) will be coming out of the woodwork.
In fact, the smart sleasy lawyers will be making a killing by selling "Kits" and giving "Courses" on "Using the 3-Strikes Legislation to protect your IP": - Considering that everybody is an IP producer and it's easy to publish your IP on the Net (in fact, this post is an example of both), everybody can go around accusing everybody else of stealing their IP, collect the "settlements" (or "drop the case" when confronted with with somebody that actually fights back) without spending a cent in courts and lawyers beyond the standard notice templates and such from the "Kits".
There being no punishment for wrongfully accusing somebody of IP "theft" and no due process before somebody's connection is cut, a whole new class of easy, cheap and profitable scams will be born.
People are naturally lazy - they usually follow the path of least resistance without consideration for others.
I've seen this working in IT almost since I began - some people would just rather "ask somebody to fix this" than "try and figure out how to do it myself".
On the side of those being asked for help, being nice and polite and just giving them the answer doesn't help - it rewards and perpetuates that kind of behaviour: if one can easilly fix one's problems by asking somebody else to do it for them, then one will keep on "solving problems" by asking for help... all the time.
After a while, if you keep being nice and solving everybody's else's problems, you notice that you're (literally) spending half of your time helping people who could've helped themselves.
At this point people become unpolite, even rude if they perceive the other side as asking questions because they're lazy. The best ones will try to teach the requester how to find the answers for themselves but that's it.
While for those asking the questions this might feel like unwarranted unpleasentness - after all, answering a single small question doesn't take all that much time - this is in fact a natural consequence of there being hundreds, even thousands, of lazy people out there who will happilly waste other people's time with questions they could find the answers for themselves if they tried a little harder.
Of course, most of us just stop answering the questions of strangers altogether.
The risk to him is the loss of his job, which is lower in both value and likelihood than the event itself. However, spending money on security is a 100% loss of profit which will impact the bottom line, profit, quarterly report, etc. with a very high probability of negative impact on his bonus or raise.
This is in fact the exact same behaviour pattern that was behind the recent financial meltdown.
People got bonuses for knowingly doing something for short-term profit which many of them knew lead to long-term disaster, then they got their bonuses on those short term "successes" and, at worst, lost their jobs after some years of making oversized bonuses.
The giving of rewards based on short-term gains and an unbalanced Reward-Punishment ratio are the essential problems with Managemement practices nowadays in publicly traded companies and that does not seem to be changing in any way, recession or not.
You my friend are an example of the "self-deluded" consumer I mentioned at the end of my post above.
Just because Steam can make it so that I can in fact freely enjoy the producty I bought doesn't mean a thing.
They started by technically limiting my rights to freely enjoy the product I bought by purposefull creating an infrastruture and a set of technical measures that allowed them to take away control of those rights from me. Then they say: "Well, as long as we want to, you can enjoy your game freely, so it's not really taking your rights away."
If you can't see what's wrong with this set of actions versus not creating a technical infrastructure to take your rights away in the first place, then you are either a fool or purpusefully self deluded.
No refunds on PC games (though they might reluctantly exchange a damaged disc)
Actually they do refund non-functional games - I've gotten refunds myself from Game, twice. They will try to squirm out of it but all you have to say is that the game does not work in your system and is thus "Not fit for purpose" (this expression has a special meaning as per UK-consumer laws).
Their hole deceitfull approach to making people believe that they can get no refunds at all is say that they will "Refund within 30 days if not open" making the buyer think that (that's the deceitfull part) they cannot get a refund at all if the package is open. In fact, as per UK consumer laws, you can get a refund at any time if the product is "Not fit for purpose" (i.e. does not work, does not do what it says it does, does not work as a "reasonable" person would expect) - what Game is offering is the possibility of getting a refund within 30 days without specific reason if unopened in addition to any refund you might be entitled under your consumer rights for a defective, non-functional or misrepresented product.
I suggest you check the Trading Standards website to learn more about your rights as a consumer. You'll find that there are a lot of rights that you have as a buyer, which of course, sellers will never tell you about.
PS: I learned all of this because at some point I had my own company selling products online - so I read all about the rights my customers had... and about the rights I had as a seller.
No, publishers are finding new innovative revenue streams that cater to the customer. The only reason it's a 'monster' is because you perceive it to be a threat to your business model and, surprise surprise, you're not a part of that revenue stream so it's the devil. And you don't understand it, that is painfully evident by the 'stop using Steam in their games' part of your statement. They don't use Steam in their games anymore than they use Wal-Mart in their games.
WTF?
Ever tried to return a digital download game in the UK? You can't. Even if the game doesn't work at all in your PC and you are per-UK consumer regulations entitled to a refund (since it's not "fit for purpose"). The digital download company is based in a location with little or no consumer rights (*cough* US *cough*) and they'll basically laugh in your face.
Ever tried to return a store bought game in the UK? They sometimes bitch and moan a bit, then you say the magic words ("Not fit for purpose" and "Trading Standards") and lo-and-behold - you get your money back.
I for one am pretty damn scared of the rise of Digital Downloads for games and it's associated importing of minimum common-denominator consumer protection laws and do want the option of returning non-functional games that a bricks-and-mortar store gives me. From my point of view, anything that allows those stores to survive is a good thing.
In fact I have been boycotting all games that use Steam for that reason (and because they cannot be given, lent, traded or resold; because they do not work on machines without an Internet connection; because I would like the option to install them in 10 years time if I feel like it; because I do not want that the distributor of the game has the option to remotelly disable my game at will). It's just too bad that most game buyers out there are more than willing to bend-over and pull their pants down in exchange for prettier graphics.
The way I see it, in this sea of ignorant, self-deluded and low IQ consumers, the only chance that the few of us with more than 2 neurons have of, in 20 years time, still being able to return faulty games is if bricks-and-mortars manage to survive.
I'm actually surprised she was flying on a normal airliner - had she been flying on a charter flight she wouldn't have to go through the pointless hassle of security theater in the airport.
Maybe an unintended side-effect of the recession and the UK government having to cut custs will be that, now that most public officials can't easilly justify the cost of charter flights, they'll be subjected to the same humiliations as us plebes have been facing in UK airports thus coming to the conclusion that (now that they have to go through it) the current security practices are excessive and unjustified.
It seems to me that the most obnoxious, in-your-face form of screwing customers up is when a game is released at the same time (or very close to) the first DLC pack. That's pretty much a statement of "We could have it in the game but we we're charging extra for it instead". In fact, given the track record of the major Game Publishers I suspect that the first DLC pack is in fact content that was purposefully removed from the main release for selling later for extra.
More in general the evilness (or not) of DLC should be determined by looking at two things:
Would what is being released as DLC come in as part of a normal (free) update in the past
Is having the DLC pack required to actually play the game? For example a pack that ties-in and completes unfinished plot/quest-lines in an RPG or a competitiveness increasing pack in an online FPS/RTS
If a DLC pack is essentially a set of bug-fixes, the finishing content for the base-game that should've been part of the main release or tilts the competive space on an online game, then it's Evil DLC and gamers should punish the publisher for that by blacklisting their products.
The same thing also applies to game expansions - even before DLC, some game publishers already screwed customers by releasing game expansions which did all those things described above. Sony Entertainment for example completelly turned me off of buying any Sony product when they released a "game expansion" for Battlefield 2 which was required to fix bugs in the base game and tilted the competitive playing field in favour of those with the expansion (in an Online FPS it added more powerfull weapons for those with the expansion).
Personally I vote with me wallet and will not buy any game with DLC. Maybe I'm missing the one or two games where DLC actually adds real value above that which would've never been added under the normal post-release update cycle but I don't have the time and the patience to find the possible one or two jewels in a pile of broken glass.
This being the UK, if you find such a hole in a government website and report it you're likelly to end up in prison accused of terrorism.
Seriously, they've used the Anti-Terrorism legislation to detain a pensioner who shouted "nonsense" at the labour party conference: do you really think they would not do whatever it took to shut somebody that found such a hole up to avoid the embarassment? The whole purpose of these without-court-order-laws is exactly to be unrestrained tools of state power...
Nah, your're better off anonymously outing this hole or keeping your mouth shut while foreign powers get to exploit whatever they can from it at will.
In my experience plenty of teams "do Agile" without understanding what it's supposed to achieve. People just cherry-pick and adopt well known bits of some Agile methodology or other (for example the stand-up meeting) but then don't do it properly or miss the feed-in practices that are necessary to make it work.
It's all about "Being Agile" (i.e. fashionable) instead of "Having a way of developing software that can consistently cope with fast-changing requirements minimizing wastage, chaos and cross-team overhead".
Just as an example, in the last 7 or 8 years since Agile became fashionable, having been in and out of multiple teams/companies that use Agile to a smaller or greater degree (I'm a freelancer), I have yet to see a proper Use Case which describes in a consistent and well defined way a feature that the system being designed must provide, including handling of error conditions. In fact, 9 out of 10 times, people forget to account for errors (even user errors). Use Cases are the basis for each development cycle, the point of communications with those defining the requirements and the basis for prioritization of work and yet most teams can't even get those right.
Then there's the flaws in analysing the requirements to do make sure the system has all the data that it needs (if for example one Use Case says "The user will select one value out of a list of options for field X" you need to have those options coming from somewhere, potentially ending up with a whole bunch of other Use Cases dealing with maintaining those options).
Agile doesn't solve the essential problem in IT which is a lack of understanding of the software development process, lack of preparation and lack of method - it just provides cover for those developers which do everything in an ad-hoc, reactive way and will then excuse themselves as being "Agile".
There are simply not enough people around that try to understand the process by which people create a software system or application from a "not so well defined set of needs from the users" but lots of people focusing on the quasi-aestetic details of some language or other - too many people asking "How?" not enough asking "Why?"
I've often watched my brother who is a multitasking jedi play WoW, SC2, etc and I've often asked him why he does not go into day trading. The skill sets of managing a quickly changing massive amount of information and evaluating probabilistic results for gain is EXACTLY what real time traders do.
The psychological effects of risking your own money strongly affect most people's performance when day trading: the hard part in daytrading is to be able to come out while you're winning (instead if remaining in play in the hope of winning more) or accepting a loss and exiting that "play" before loosing too much.
However when trading other people's money that's not as big a problem and traders (of the investment bank kind) are in a large part massive multitaskers (also a bit salespersons and people-networkers).
It's perfectly possibly that the future of cheap, clean and geostrategically independent energy passes trough new and improved engines, maybe together with things like biofuels.
Then again it's perfectly possible that electric cars are the way of the future.
Who knows?
No reason to limited ourselves to only one or the other approach though.
That said, this specific gentleman would much rather that more money is invested in "his way" since he stands to make a lot of money if lots of people throw money at it, even if it doesn't work out all that well in the end.
... until one of your neighbours turns his or her microwave on.... or browses to Youtube on WiFi... or get's a call on their cordless phone.
Then your wireless media center will just be a multi-thousand dollars pile of junk that you really, really want to trash with a sledgehammer and you will yearn back to the days when you connected your TV to your media player using a 50 cent SCART cable.
By the way, what about just using the powerline to pass the bytes around? My (outdated, 1/4 of the speed of current mainstream systems) ethernet-over-powerline home setup is perfectly good at connecting everything to everything else at my place and letting me watch video files from my PC on my TV without any interference from my neighbours (the signal won't cross over any transformers). What exactly is the attraction of using a physical transport medium that is highly prone to interference to connect multiple devices that are fixed and plugged to the wall for power anyway?
Three points: - There is more to the world than the US. Partnering with 7-Eleven does nothing to sell their stuff outside North America. The US is only 24% of the world economy and EA sells their games everywhere. - 7-Eleven will give loads of space to anything if their comissions are big enough. If for example they got a 50% cut on the action from Zynga while Blizzard would only give them 5% on WoW top-up cards, guess who they would give more space to? All things considered, if their profit is 10x as much per-sale, even if they only sell 1/4 as much, they're still coming out ahead. - Web 2.0 might very well, like Web 1.0, be all about selling stocks to the suckers of companies with valuations way beyond anything that can be justified by their cashflows, now or ever. Ten years have past since the pinacle of the Internet bubble, but some of us have a long enough memory to still remember how back then lots of worthless "Internet" companies were worth more than "Bricks & Mortar" ones just because they were doing business "on the Internet". Many of the same brokers that made millions back selling all kinds of shit in IPOs to ignorant fund managers are still around yearning for the old days.
I really hate EA with a vengance and would loved to see them crash and burn so that more space opens up for indie companies, but I seriously doubt that a "social gaming" company with 3 successfull games in a market space limited to 150 million users is worth more than a traditional game publisher with multiple successful games in a market space with more than 1.9 billion people (the number of people connected to the Internet, the real number is probably bigger)
As a non-US resident I've been avoiding the US ever since they started with their extreme measures after 9/11.
Not only will I not go to the US as a turist (which I did before that) and thus not spend a single cent in US goods and services but I also purposelly avoid even flights that have a stop-over in US soil (so all US airlines are excluded from my long haul flights).
It's just not worth the humiliation, the risk of seeing my notebook or mobile phone legally stolen "for examination" or the risk of having my vacations ruined when I'm detained and interrogated because they're on high alert for muslim terrorists with Portuguese passports or something silly like that.
There's a lot of great places to go to on vacations outside the US and flight options where I live (UK) for me to have take shit from the TSA.
I wouldn't include the UK in the "they've developed reasonably sane ways of handling it" - in fact after 9/11 they copied a lot of things from the US and their airport security leans toward the excessive and the ridiculous.
Clearly bombers who are Muslim extremists have some kind of large terroristic advantage over those from Northern Ireland 'cause all this crap (and not just the airport security stuff) wasn't needed for the later but seems to be needed for the first. Maybe there's some hidden chapter in the Koran about execution of terrorist attacks in the 20th century or something... or maybe all the lessons that the UK security services learned during the years of "The Troubles" were thrown away by populist, power hungry politicians happilly supported by politically nominated chiefs of the security forces looking for expanding their reach (and pay) and following the lead of the US.
Nah, clearly the Prophet had visions of the future and wrote down a terrorist guide - that's the only logical explanation...
This is something I've been asking for again and again for online games: - Get us age segregated servers where only people above a certain age can join.
Dealing with hormone-pumped teenagers empowered by a cover of anonimity is not fun and often ruins the game.
If I wanted to be randomly insulted I could to it myself in front of a mirror and it would be a lot more varied and imaginative than what your average teenager can come up with.
I work all day and when I come home tired at the end of the day I just want to be entertained, not to have to deal with feeble attempts at humiliating me.
In fact, I might even be willing to pay a little extra for it.
Enterprise Edition Java (J2EE) is an enormous amount of libraries, frameworks and standards which are designed for large Enterprise Systems and deal with things like Messaging, Distributed Transactions, Clustering and more (much more). Websphere and JBoss are two implementations of a J2EE application server which is a container server within which J2EE applications run. It takes several years of on-the-job experience to be proeficient with J2EE in addition to the time it takes to learn standard Java.
J2EE is to standard Java like Windows MFC is to standard C - a huge bucketload of libraries/frameworks which sit on top of the standard language and are only usefull in a specific context.
Java for Android on the other hand is a subset of the standard Java plus the Android specific libraries and is not at all designed for enterprise computing.
Saying that people that learn Java because of Android will be capable of doing Websphere/JBoss is like saying that people that learn C to code batch programs in Unix are capable of doing full blown Windows GUI applications, only the distance is much greater.
Oracle is know for their excellent database and for crap everything else. This has been so for the last 15 years - all their tools, from the time of Oracle Forms till today are unstable, bug-filled POSes.
Anything Oracle aquires just withers and dies - just recently Oracle bought BEA, makers of BEA Weblogic a top Java J2EE Application Server, and proceeded to kill the golden eggs goose by steeply increasing fees (now charged Oracle style, per-CPU-core), resulting in all large companies rushing to get rid of or replace Weblogic (I myself saved 1/2 million dollars per year to the company I was working for).
We're not talking about IDEs here or a new variant of AWK, these are big ecosystems which often take years to master and until you do your productivity is crap.
Sure, you can force your developers to learn it and use it... at the cost of loosing the better ones over time and having trouble getting new ones because nobody wants to go down a career dead end. This is not the 1950s anymore, people don't work in a single company for their whole lives and anybody with 1/2 a brain pays attention to their future employability.
When finding experts on a specific set of tools costs you twice as much as for another, even managers start getting a clue.
That said, these kinds of effects take years to appear and in the meawhile I'm sure Larry will cash-off on the suck....err investors.
Actually IP law grants monopolies for specific works to people/companies. To put thing in perspective, if J. K. Rowling doesn't want to have Harry Potter published as an eBook, then it will never happen.
Market theory requires a free market to work and that's exactly what IP law forbids: in a free market, if people wanted a Harry Poter eBook and J. K. Rowling didn't provide it, then somebody else would.
For example there is no significant market in players of digitally stored video (i.e. video files from HDs) and yet the single most easy way of storing and managing your movies/tv-series collection is to have them as files in a big fat HD (instead of juggling shinny disks). Yet, videos are not sold as just files and instead are sold in shinny disks with all sorts of technical measures (and even laws like the DMCA) put in place to restrict people from copying the videos into files.
If we had a true market market economy, wouldn't there be people selling movies in USB flash disks and web enabled digital video players which let you download a video and store it locally!?
And how exactly will country X enforce it's law on something flying in space if the owners and users of said something are not living in country X and country X does not have any anti-satellite weapons?
Not to mention that plenty of launch sites are in countries that don't care about it (http://www.spacetoday.org/Rockets/Spaceports/LaunchSites.html).
Newspapers need News to survive: They need their people to be at the press conferences, get interviews from officials and get a non-offical-but-still-sanctioned leak once in a while.
This means that the Pentagon has leverage over the Newspapers by denying them access to their press conferences and their people (also media ownership is concentrated, so doing favors for a small number of people and getting favors in return is another way of avoiding that certain things come out in the news).
Wikileaks does not need any of this - in fact their one reason for existing is to bring out those things that entities such as the Pentagon do not want to see out in the press. The only way to get at Wikileaks is to vilify it in the hope of making people believe it to be an unreliable source and/or dry out it's funds and/or dry out it's sources of volunteers.
Slashdot Mirror
Once the three-strikes law comes into effect and they become able to legally blackmail people, all kinds of slease-bags (lawyers or not) will be coming out of the woodwork.
In fact, the smart sleasy lawyers will be making a killing by selling "Kits" and giving "Courses" on "Using the 3-Strikes Legislation to protect your IP":
- Considering that everybody is an IP producer and it's easy to publish your IP on the Net (in fact, this post is an example of both), everybody can go around accusing everybody else of stealing their IP, collect the "settlements" (or "drop the case" when confronted with with somebody that actually fights back) without spending a cent in courts and lawyers beyond the standard notice templates and such from the "Kits".
There being no punishment for wrongfully accusing somebody of IP "theft" and no due process before somebody's connection is cut, a whole new class of easy, cheap and profitable scams will be born.
People are naturally lazy - they usually follow the path of least resistance without consideration for others.
I've seen this working in IT almost since I began - some people would just rather "ask somebody to fix this" than "try and figure out how to do it myself".
On the side of those being asked for help, being nice and polite and just giving them the answer doesn't help - it rewards and perpetuates that kind of behaviour: if one can easilly fix one's problems by asking somebody else to do it for them, then one will keep on "solving problems" by asking for help ... all the time.
After a while, if you keep being nice and solving everybody's else's problems, you notice that you're (literally) spending half of your time helping people who could've helped themselves.
At this point people become unpolite, even rude if they perceive the other side as asking questions because they're lazy. The best ones will try to teach the requester how to find the answers for themselves but that's it.
While for those asking the questions this might feel like unwarranted unpleasentness - after all, answering a single small question doesn't take all that much time - this is in fact a natural consequence of there being hundreds, even thousands, of lazy people out there who will happilly waste other people's time with questions they could find the answers for themselves if they tried a little harder.
Of course, most of us just stop answering the questions of strangers altogether.
The risk to him is the loss of his job, which is lower in both value and likelihood than the event itself. However, spending money on security is a 100% loss of profit which will impact the bottom line, profit, quarterly report, etc. with a very high probability of negative impact on his bonus or raise.
This is in fact the exact same behaviour pattern that was behind the recent financial meltdown.
People got bonuses for knowingly doing something for short-term profit which many of them knew lead to long-term disaster, then they got their bonuses on those short term "successes" and, at worst, lost their jobs after some years of making oversized bonuses.
The giving of rewards based on short-term gains and an unbalanced Reward-Punishment ratio are the essential problems with Managemement practices nowadays in publicly traded companies and that does not seem to be changing in any way, recession or not.
You my friend are an example of the "self-deluded" consumer I mentioned at the end of my post above.
Just because Steam can make it so that I can in fact freely enjoy the producty I bought doesn't mean a thing.
They started by technically limiting my rights to freely enjoy the product I bought by purposefull creating an infrastruture and a set of technical measures that allowed them to take away control of those rights from me. Then they say: "Well, as long as we want to, you can enjoy your game freely, so it's not really taking your rights away."
If you can't see what's wrong with this set of actions versus not creating a technical infrastructure to take your rights away in the first place, then you are either a fool or purpusefully self deluded.
Actually they do refund non-functional games - I've gotten refunds myself from Game, twice. They will try to squirm out of it but all you have to say is that the game does not work in your system and is thus "Not fit for purpose" (this expression has a special meaning as per UK-consumer laws).
Their hole deceitfull approach to making people believe that they can get no refunds at all is say that they will "Refund within 30 days if not open" making the buyer think that (that's the deceitfull part) they cannot get a refund at all if the package is open. In fact, as per UK consumer laws, you can get a refund at any time if the product is "Not fit for purpose" (i.e. does not work, does not do what it says it does, does not work as a "reasonable" person would expect) - what Game is offering is the possibility of getting a refund within 30 days without specific reason if unopened in addition to any refund you might be entitled under your consumer rights for a defective, non-functional or misrepresented product.
I suggest you check the Trading Standards website to learn more about your rights as a consumer. You'll find that there are a lot of rights that you have as a buyer, which of course, sellers will never tell you about.
PS: I learned all of this because at some point I had my own company selling products online - so I read all about the rights my customers had ... and about the rights I had as a seller.
WTF?
Ever tried to return a digital download game in the UK?
You can't. Even if the game doesn't work at all in your PC and you are per-UK consumer regulations entitled to a refund (since it's not "fit for purpose"). The digital download company is based in a location with little or no consumer rights (*cough* US *cough*) and they'll basically laugh in your face.
Ever tried to return a store bought game in the UK?
They sometimes bitch and moan a bit, then you say the magic words ("Not fit for purpose" and "Trading Standards") and lo-and-behold - you get your money back.
I for one am pretty damn scared of the rise of Digital Downloads for games and it's associated importing of minimum common-denominator consumer protection laws and do want the option of returning non-functional games that a bricks-and-mortar store gives me. From my point of view, anything that allows those stores to survive is a good thing.
In fact I have been boycotting all games that use Steam for that reason (and because they cannot be given, lent, traded or resold; because they do not work on machines without an Internet connection; because I would like the option to install them in 10 years time if I feel like it; because I do not want that the distributor of the game has the option to remotelly disable my game at will). It's just too bad that most game buyers out there are more than willing to bend-over and pull their pants down in exchange for prettier graphics.
The way I see it, in this sea of ignorant, self-deluded and low IQ consumers, the only chance that the few of us with more than 2 neurons have of, in 20 years time, still being able to return faulty games is if bricks-and-mortars manage to survive.
I'm actually surprised she was flying on a normal airliner - had she been flying on a charter flight she wouldn't have to go through the pointless hassle of security theater in the airport.
Maybe an unintended side-effect of the recession and the UK government having to cut custs will be that, now that most public officials can't easilly justify the cost of charter flights, they'll be subjected to the same humiliations as us plebes have been facing in UK airports thus coming to the conclusion that (now that they have to go through it) the current security practices are excessive and unjustified.
It seems to me that the most obnoxious, in-your-face form of screwing customers up is when a game is released at the same time (or very close to) the first DLC pack. That's pretty much a statement of "We could have it in the game but we we're charging extra for it instead". In fact, given the track record of the major Game Publishers I suspect that the first DLC pack is in fact content that was purposefully removed from the main release for selling later for extra.
More in general the evilness (or not) of DLC should be determined by looking at two things:
If a DLC pack is essentially a set of bug-fixes, the finishing content for the base-game that should've been part of the main release or tilts the competive space on an online game, then it's Evil DLC and gamers should punish the publisher for that by blacklisting their products.
The same thing also applies to game expansions - even before DLC, some game publishers already screwed customers by releasing game expansions which did all those things described above. Sony Entertainment for example completelly turned me off of buying any Sony product when they released a "game expansion" for Battlefield 2 which was required to fix bugs in the base game and tilted the competitive playing field in favour of those with the expansion (in an Online FPS it added more powerfull weapons for those with the expansion).
Personally I vote with me wallet and will not buy any game with DLC. Maybe I'm missing the one or two games where DLC actually adds real value above that which would've never been added under the normal post-release update cycle but I don't have the time and the patience to find the possible one or two jewels in a pile of broken glass.
This being the UK, if you find such a hole in a government website and report it you're likelly to end up in prison accused of terrorism.
Seriously, they've used the Anti-Terrorism legislation to detain a pensioner who shouted "nonsense" at the labour party conference: do you really think they would not do whatever it took to shut somebody that found such a hole up to avoid the embarassment? The whole purpose of these without-court-order-laws is exactly to be unrestrained tools of state power ...
Nah, your're better off anonymously outing this hole or keeping your mouth shut while foreign powers get to exploit whatever they can from it at will.
In my experience plenty of teams "do Agile" without understanding what it's supposed to achieve. People just cherry-pick and adopt well known bits of some Agile methodology or other (for example the stand-up meeting) but then don't do it properly or miss the feed-in practices that are necessary to make it work.
It's all about "Being Agile" (i.e. fashionable) instead of "Having a way of developing software that can consistently cope with fast-changing requirements minimizing wastage, chaos and cross-team overhead".
Just as an example, in the last 7 or 8 years since Agile became fashionable, having been in and out of multiple teams/companies that use Agile to a smaller or greater degree (I'm a freelancer), I have yet to see a proper Use Case which describes in a consistent and well defined way a feature that the system being designed must provide, including handling of error conditions. In fact, 9 out of 10 times, people forget to account for errors (even user errors). Use Cases are the basis for each development cycle, the point of communications with those defining the requirements and the basis for prioritization of work and yet most teams can't even get those right.
Then there's the flaws in analysing the requirements to do make sure the system has all the data that it needs (if for example one Use Case says "The user will select one value out of a list of options for field X" you need to have those options coming from somewhere, potentially ending up with a whole bunch of other Use Cases dealing with maintaining those options).
Agile doesn't solve the essential problem in IT which is a lack of understanding of the software development process, lack of preparation and lack of method - it just provides cover for those developers which do everything in an ad-hoc, reactive way and will then excuse themselves as being "Agile".
There are simply not enough people around that try to understand the process by which people create a software system or application from a "not so well defined set of needs from the users" but lots of people focusing on the quasi-aestetic details of some language or other - too many people asking "How?" not enough asking "Why?"
The psychological effects of risking your own money strongly affect most people's performance when day trading: the hard part in daytrading is to be able to come out while you're winning (instead if remaining in play in the hope of winning more) or accepting a loss and exiting that "play" before loosing too much.
However when trading other people's money that's not as big a problem and traders (of the investment bank kind) are in a large part massive multitaskers (also a bit salespersons and people-networkers).
It's perfectly possibly that the future of cheap, clean and geostrategically independent energy passes trough new and improved engines, maybe together with things like biofuels.
Then again it's perfectly possible that electric cars are the way of the future.
Who knows?
No reason to limited ourselves to only one or the other approach though.
That said, this specific gentleman would much rather that more money is invested in "his way" since he stands to make a lot of money if lots of people throw money at it, even if it doesn't work out all that well in the end.
Ahh, nothing like associating your company's brand name with the unpleasant task of having to watch something, spot the captcha keyword and type it.
They've even went to the point of getting people to activelly participate in the event thus enhancing the effectiveness of the conditioning.
The genious of promoting a brand by creating negative Pavlovian associations to that brand's name is beyond my understanding ...
... until one of your neighbours turns his or her microwave on .... or browses to Youtube on WiFi ... or get's a call on their cordless phone.
Then your wireless media center will just be a multi-thousand dollars pile of junk that you really, really want to trash with a sledgehammer and you will yearn back to the days when you connected your TV to your media player using a 50 cent SCART cable.
By the way, what about just using the powerline to pass the bytes around? My (outdated, 1/4 of the speed of current mainstream systems) ethernet-over-powerline home setup is perfectly good at connecting everything to everything else at my place and letting me watch video files from my PC on my TV without any interference from my neighbours (the signal won't cross over any transformers). What exactly is the attraction of using a physical transport medium that is highly prone to interference to connect multiple devices that are fixed and plugged to the wall for power anyway?
Three points:
- There is more to the world than the US. Partnering with 7-Eleven does nothing to sell their stuff outside North America. The US is only 24% of the world economy and EA sells their games everywhere.
- 7-Eleven will give loads of space to anything if their comissions are big enough. If for example they got a 50% cut on the action from Zynga while Blizzard would only give them 5% on WoW top-up cards, guess who they would give more space to? All things considered, if their profit is 10x as much per-sale, even if they only sell 1/4 as much, they're still coming out ahead.
- Web 2.0 might very well, like Web 1.0, be all about selling stocks to the suckers of companies with valuations way beyond anything that can be justified by their cashflows, now or ever. Ten years have past since the pinacle of the Internet bubble, but some of us have a long enough memory to still remember how back then lots of worthless "Internet" companies were worth more than "Bricks & Mortar" ones just because they were doing business "on the Internet". Many of the same brokers that made millions back selling all kinds of shit in IPOs to ignorant fund managers are still around yearning for the old days.
I really hate EA with a vengance and would loved to see them crash and burn so that more space opens up for indie companies, but I seriously doubt that a "social gaming" company with 3 successfull games in a market space limited to 150 million users is worth more than a traditional game publisher with multiple successful games in a market space with more than 1.9 billion people (the number of people connected to the Internet, the real number is probably bigger)
As a non-US resident I've been avoiding the US ever since they started with their extreme measures after 9/11.
Not only will I not go to the US as a turist (which I did before that) and thus not spend a single cent in US goods and services but I also purposelly avoid even flights that have a stop-over in US soil (so all US airlines are excluded from my long haul flights).
It's just not worth the humiliation, the risk of seeing my notebook or mobile phone legally stolen "for examination" or the risk of having my vacations ruined when I'm detained and interrogated because they're on high alert for muslim terrorists with Portuguese passports or something silly like that.
There's a lot of great places to go to on vacations outside the US and flight options where I live (UK) for me to have take shit from the TSA.
Somehow I suspect I'm not the only one.
In the US, lawyers and nanny-state politicians are the problem
There, fixed that for you
I wouldn't include the UK in the "they've developed reasonably sane ways of handling it" - in fact after 9/11 they copied a lot of things from the US and their airport security leans toward the excessive and the ridiculous.
Clearly bombers who are Muslim extremists have some kind of large terroristic advantage over those from Northern Ireland 'cause all this crap (and not just the airport security stuff) wasn't needed for the later but seems to be needed for the first. Maybe there's some hidden chapter in the Koran about execution of terrorist attacks in the 20th century or something ... or maybe all the lessons that the UK security services learned during the years of "The Troubles" were thrown away by populist, power hungry politicians happilly supported by politically nominated chiefs of the security forces looking for expanding their reach (and pay) and following the lead of the US.
Nah, clearly the Prophet had visions of the future and wrote down a terrorist guide - that's the only logical explanation ...
This is something I've been asking for again and again for online games:
- Get us age segregated servers where only people above a certain age can join.
Dealing with hormone-pumped teenagers empowered by a cover of anonimity is not fun and often ruins the game.
If I wanted to be randomly insulted I could to it myself in front of a mirror and it would be a lot more varied and imaginative than what your average teenager can come up with.
I work all day and when I come home tired at the end of the day I just want to be entertained, not to have to deal with feeble attempts at humiliating me.
In fact, I might even be willing to pay a little extra for it.
Enterprise Edition Java (J2EE) is an enormous amount of libraries, frameworks and standards which are designed for large Enterprise Systems and deal with things like Messaging, Distributed Transactions, Clustering and more (much more). Websphere and JBoss are two implementations of a J2EE application server which is a container server within which J2EE applications run. It takes several years of on-the-job experience to be proeficient with J2EE in addition to the time it takes to learn standard Java.
J2EE is to standard Java like Windows MFC is to standard C - a huge bucketload of libraries/frameworks which sit on top of the standard language and are only usefull in a specific context.
Java for Android on the other hand is a subset of the standard Java plus the Android specific libraries and is not at all designed for enterprise computing.
Saying that people that learn Java because of Android will be capable of doing Websphere/JBoss is like saying that people that learn C to code batch programs in Unix are capable of doing full blown Windows GUI applications, only the distance is much greater.
PS: Sorry, no car metaphor.
Oracle is know for their excellent database and for crap everything else. This has been so for the last 15 years - all their tools, from the time of Oracle Forms till today are unstable, bug-filled POSes.
Anything Oracle aquires just withers and dies - just recently Oracle bought BEA, makers of BEA Weblogic a top Java J2EE Application Server, and proceeded to kill the golden eggs goose by steeply increasing fees (now charged Oracle style, per-CPU-core), resulting in all large companies rushing to get rid of or replace Weblogic (I myself saved 1/2 million dollars per year to the company I was working for).
Oracle is simply inept at anything but databases.
We're not talking about IDEs here or a new variant of AWK, these are big ecosystems which often take years to master and until you do your productivity is crap.
Sure, you can force your developers to learn it and use it ... at the cost of loosing the better ones over time and having trouble getting new ones because nobody wants to go down a career dead end. This is not the 1950s anymore, people don't work in a single company for their whole lives and anybody with 1/2 a brain pays attention to their future employability.
When finding experts on a specific set of tools costs you twice as much as for another, even managers start getting a clue.
That said, these kinds of effects take years to appear and in the meawhile I'm sure Larry will cash-off on the suck....err investors.
Actually IP law grants monopolies for specific works to people/companies. To put thing in perspective, if J. K. Rowling doesn't want to have Harry Potter published as an eBook, then it will never happen.
Market theory requires a free market to work and that's exactly what IP law forbids: in a free market, if people wanted a Harry Poter eBook and J. K. Rowling didn't provide it, then somebody else would.
For example there is no significant market in players of digitally stored video (i.e. video files from HDs) and yet the single most easy way of storing and managing your movies/tv-series collection is to have them as files in a big fat HD (instead of juggling shinny disks). Yet, videos are not sold as just files and instead are sold in shinny disks with all sorts of technical measures (and even laws like the DMCA) put in place to restrict people from copying the videos into files.
If we had a true market market economy, wouldn't there be people selling movies in USB flash disks and web enabled digital video players which let you download a video and store it locally!?
And how exactly will country X enforce it's law on something flying in space if the owners and users of said something are not living in country X and country X does not have any anti-satellite weapons?
Not to mention that plenty of launch sites are in countries that don't care about it (http://www.spacetoday.org/Rockets/Spaceports/LaunchSites.html).
Newspapers need News to survive: They need their people to be at the press conferences, get interviews from officials and get a non-offical-but-still-sanctioned leak once in a while.
This means that the Pentagon has leverage over the Newspapers by denying them access to their press conferences and their people (also media ownership is concentrated, so doing favors for a small number of people and getting favors in return is another way of avoiding that certain things come out in the news).
Wikileaks does not need any of this - in fact their one reason for existing is to bring out those things that entities such as the Pentagon do not want to see out in the press. The only way to get at Wikileaks is to vilify it in the hope of making people believe it to be an unreliable source and/or dry out it's funds and/or dry out it's sources of volunteers.