I think the best copy protection mechanism is one that turns a pirate copy into a game demo. You can play enough to get hooked, then the copy protection system kicks in and waggles its finger at you like that fat guy in Jurassic Park.
If you really like the game by then, you'll go out and buy a copy. If you don't like it by then, or if you're a penniless thief, the developer never lost a sale to you anyway.
But this system makes a game slowly degrade over time. If it introduces bugs or other flakiness, the pirates who might be prepared to buy the game would think that the game is buggy, and forego buying the original because they think it'll be just as bad. There are people out there who will play pirate versions and then buy the original if they really like the game. Why would the developer want to ruin their reputation for quality with these people by using such a system?
But in this case they're not necessarily trying to market to you, they're trying to figure out the where people are coming and going and what methods they use. That data can be used to improve train and bus timetables, which benefits *you*. Say that they notice that 100,000 people per day enter at a City tube and exit at Euston, that could be used to justify an express City->Euston service. I know this is Slashdot paranoid, but sometimes there are useful applications for this kind of data.:)
If it's spam you're worried about, London Underground has known where I've lived for years (because buying anything longer than a weekly travelcard requires registration) and they haven't spammed me at all.
PGP is hard to use for an average user. Before you even touch the program, you have to understand the concepts surrounding private and public keys, passphrases, signatures, key expiry, key servers, revocation certificates, etc. It's just too much for most people. Hell, many people who DO use it still don't fully understand all that stuff.
Saying that "if they really need it, they'd figure it out" is like saying "If your car is broken, go get some mechanic books and fix it yourself." No thanks, I'll get a mechanic.
Some may take your post to imply that the leaks are from the game developers themselves. Since it's in their interest to keep it secure, the leaks probably aren't from them. They're also unlikely to come from QA houses, where security is tight, and test discs are tallied and accounted for nightly.
The real leaks come from journalists who are sent preview discs, and this claim is backed up by the many not-quite-bugfixed versions out on the Net that were sent to journalists.
How to stop it? Well, Nintendo tried a strong-arm tactic with one game, having a security guard stand behind the journalist while he was playing it. With audio CDs, Sony once sent the preview CD sealed inside a CD walkman. Neither worked, because journalists felt they were being treated like criminals. Unfortunately, some of them are.
People who want to run Linux on their PS2? No - they can buy PS2 Linux.
People who want to play backups? Unless you treat your discs like shit, you don't need backups.
People who pirate games? Yup. Stiff shit, thieves.
People who want to import games from overseas? Yup - and out of the millions of console owners out there, they probably make up less than 1%.
Average Joe will never even know about this ruling, because it will not affect him. MOST people buy games only from their region. MOST people do not want to homebrew software or run 'backups'. And therefore MOST people are not affected.
Is this decision 'right'? Depends who you ask, because it seems what's 'right' depends on who gets the advantage, the console manufacturers or a small handful of consumers.
Region locks exist to increase the value of the exclusive rights sold to a publisher for a region.
If you were the publisher for a game in Europe, you'd sure as hell want to make sure that the Japan/US versions of the game (which might be out months before yours due to localization delay) can't be bulk imported by retailers and sold - cos that money won't go to you, it'll go to the overseas publisher.
Likewise, the original publishers that sell the rights to overseas publishers want region locks so that they can inflate the cost of the rights. It's more money for them to sell truly exclusive rights to a region (due to region locks), than some half-assed rights because overseas retailers can just import from overseas.
That's one reason, there are other more minor ones too, like limiting marketing to one region so they can see how well it does, and apply those stats to the budgets for other regions.
Women have different gaming needs to men. Of course, that's a generalization about 3 billion people, so there's bound to be exceptions.
Mostly, they like games they can pick up and put down easily (Tetris, Solitaire, DDR), aren't ridiculously competitive, and they don't want to spend (read: "waste") time learning all the details necessary to play games like Starcraft where you need to understand the system to play effectively.
This goes a long way to explaining why your girlfriend will play DDR, but hates it when you try to teach her Warcraft III. From their perspective, DDR is a short, fun, self-contained activity, whereas Warcraft III is just a waste of time. "Why would you want to spend all that time filling up your brain with this useless stuff?"
If you keep those two things in mind, your game will appeal to a lot more women. Colouring it pink will not.
and sometimes these uses [...] have increased sales of the item.
That assumes that Microsoft is following a simple business model where selling more is better for them, just like almost every other product on the planet.
But it's not like that.
Firstly, they LOSE money on every Xbox sold because the hardware is more expensive to make/distribute than its tag price. So selling more is financially harmful.
"Ah", you say, "but then they can brag that they have a larger market share." But what's the use of saying "We have x million consoles out there" if people know that a lot of them are being used to run Linux instead of games? It's like a glue company saying "Our glue sells millions a year! It must be good, it's incredibly popular!" when everyone knows that most of the sales of that brand are due to glue sniffers.
"It is a shame that Microsoft appears to not share our concerns about protecting the intellectual rights of those who develop software for their console".
It's shame that Free-X appears not to give a flying pig's arse about the intellectual rights of those who develop software for Xbox. Sorry guys, information wants to be free, it's more important that we can run Linux on our toaster than it is for you to run a business making games.
Oh, and thanks Free-X, for making Linux zealots look like a bunch of whiny criminals.
especially for expatriates. I've lived a few countries and I'm always miffed that I'm missing out on some TV shows I grew attached to in those countries. Now I'm moving from the US soon and so I'll miss out on HBO's The Wire. I'll have to wait for the season to end and for it to come out on DVD before I can see what happens!
The alternative is to get friends to tape the shows and send them over/digitise them (an imposition on them) or waste hours of time trying to get net copies. And neither of those options are helpful if the show you like is esoteric.
I had thought about setting up a Tivo (esp. now that you can manage Tivo via the web) and pulling the data off it, but you need a big upstream link for that, plus a 'co-lo' in a friend's house. But at least it's not so much of an imposition.
The USA and Europe have many many places where you can import Japanese games, because that's where many of the best games are made. But I've spent a lot of time in Japan, and I've never seen a place that sold games imported from the west.
If there's no demand, they'll only sell to a minority of hardcore gamers.
I don't get very much spam in my inbox, so I don't hate spam because of the volume. I hate it because it's insulting. They think I'm an idiot who'll open a mail because the subject line says "Re: your message" or "Did we meet last week?", or click on a banner ad that says I'm this week's winner.
If spam was just offers for stuff I didn't want, I wouldn't mind it so much. I don't get this mad with junk mail to my home. But the fact that the spammer s have tried to trick me just makes me angry. I support any effort to kill spam.
Your brain interprets the signals it gets from your nerves, but compression of those nerves can trigger pain in an apparently different place. If your nerves were a computer network, it'd be kind of like a 'man-in-the-middle' attack.
If you're getting pain in your little finger, it may be due to compression further up the arm, so get rid of the armrests. If you have pain in your hands, it may be due to compression near your neck, where the nerves enter the spine.
All the advice I've seen indicates that different things work for different people. If you're experiencing hand/wrist/arm pain, get it checked out, but don't expect there to be a magic cure that works for everybody. What fixed your co-worker's pain may not fix yours.
The orthopaedic surgeon I consulted with told me that actual bona-fide CTS is actually very rare, but the symptoms are more common. If you have true CTS, it will probably be waking you up at night (the fluid in your body redistributes itself when you lie down, increasing the compression and pain). So don't freak out and think you have CTS (like I did) when there may be other factors involved.
Check posture, ensure you've got circulation, and periodically take breaks. Ensure your monitor is at eye level, so your neck is cricked down looking at it (not easy for regular laptop users - get a plug-in monitor if you use a laptop at your desk regularly).
I guess my point is, yell at the game developers. They are the ones who made it possible to cheat, they are the one responsible.
This is incorrect. It is not possible to prevent all manner of cheating by fixing the code. Any fix on the client can be circumvented without some sort of DRM.
The problem could be fixed with DRM, it could be reduced with an eBay-style 'online reputation'. But the fact remains:
People grief others because they can get away with it.
There will always be griefers. Even if they don't run cheat software, they can grief by (for example) disconnecting before the match is over, nullifying the result to maintain their league status.
But if you make it so they are accountable for their actions, you will reduce a lot of cheating. Make online play associated with a credit card number, and charge it $100 if there's hard evidence of cheating. Will little Johnny install that cheat if his dad's credit card might get charged $100? I doubt it.
And to the fuctard who thought that cheat-coders had 'legitimate' uses like creating unauthorized servers, go to next year's E3 and meet some of the game developers whose paycheck you're stealing.
Read the manual. The low sound is deliberate, so that if you're using DTS or Dolby 5.1 then the TV sound doesn't interfere with the 5.1 sound. To get a regular volume curve, go into the DVD player and play a movie, go into the options and turn off Optical Output.
Although it's almost impossible to stop cheating in general, it is possible to stop some types of cheating. And developers can do this by reducing the amount of trust in the client to the bare minimum. Whereever possible, keep as much of the decision making on the server side, where it can be kept away from prying eyes, and fixed easily after the game's release.
If someone is shooting through walls, then the server can detect this simply by replicating the action (player A in position X shoots player B in position Y) in its own trusted space. If A couldn't possibly have shot B from X, then A must be cheating. If server performance is a concern, then this check doesn't have to be done immediately or on the server. The server could spool all shots to a trusted peer which tries to replicate the action and detects cheaters.
This won't be able to stop certain cheats like those which change the texture of players to bright green or enable wall transparency. You'd need a trusted client for that, and that's not feasible unless (until?) PCs can run signed software that cannot be altered by the user, which isn't going to happen anytime soon (but may be possible on future consoles, as they may have hardware checks).
One thing you can't patch is the human condition. There will always be griefers who just want to ruin everyone else's fun. The best way to stop them isn't to lecture them on proper game etiquette or make them see the error of their ways, it's to make them accountable for their actions by de-anonymising them. Make them sign up with a credit card to get their name and address. If there is a clause that says your credit card will be charged $100 if undisputable proof is found that you're cheating...
Nice idea, but it wouldn't work. If the server says to the client "here are 4 players in your field of view, but please don't draw the first 2" then the aimbot will know they're invisibots and disable aiming for them.
I think it's essential to know how to program games before you think about hardware design. Get a PS2-Linux kit so you can see the intricacies of a real-world console, make a few programs for it, and think about why they designed it that way.
To sum up the PS2 in short, they were going for high performance, high throughput, and most importantly (to Sony anyway), low cost. If you're going to make 40 million of these things, you've got to make it so that it'll be cheap eventually!
With that in mind, think about why they chose the type of RAM they did (Rambus) and its characteristics (long-ish latency but high throughput for contiguous addresses, nice for DMA), why they chose what today is considered a ridiculously small cache (8KB!), why they've got scratchpad RAM, why DMA is so important, why they chose ridiculous bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, why they chose embedded RAM on the GPU... the list goes on.
If you don't understand what game programmers find important about an architecture, you won't be able to create something adapted to games. And I'm not saying PS2 is necessarily the best example, it's just probably the most accessible modern console. I've heard many say that the PS2 is difficult to program (mostly due to its parallelism which is hard to get your head around at first), but once they 'get it' (i.e. the designers idea of how it should be used) then getting good performance is not a problem.
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I think the best copy protection mechanism is one that turns a pirate copy into a game demo. You can play enough to get hooked, then the copy protection system kicks in and waggles its finger at you like that fat guy in Jurassic Park.
If you really like the game by then, you'll go out and buy a copy. If you don't like it by then, or if you're a penniless thief, the developer never lost a sale to you anyway.
But this system makes a game slowly degrade over time. If it introduces bugs or other flakiness, the pirates who might be prepared to buy the game would think that the game is buggy, and forego buying the original because they think it'll be just as bad. There are people out there who will play pirate versions and then buy the original if they really like the game. Why would the developer want to ruin their reputation for quality with these people by using such a system?
SunComm: We won! We won the case against the student! Let's see, what did we get...
1) The shirt off his back (unwashed).
2) A Jimi Hendrix poster
3) A stolen traffic cone
Yay, that'll easily cover the $10 million in stock value we lost!
But in this case they're not necessarily trying to market to you, they're trying to figure out the where people are coming and going and what methods they use. That data can be used to improve train and bus timetables, which benefits *you*. Say that they notice that 100,000 people per day enter at a City tube and exit at Euston, that could be used to justify an express City->Euston service. I know this is Slashdot paranoid, but sometimes there are useful applications for this kind of data. :)
If it's spam you're worried about, London Underground has known where I've lived for years (because buying anything longer than a weekly travelcard requires registration) and they haven't spammed me at all.
Wow, is that so? If that's their position, then why did the kids' parents let them play such a game?
Get out of that. YOU CAN'T.
Now all the goddamn spammers are going to use this technique to get past word filters.
Saying that "if they really need it, they'd figure it out" is like saying "If your car is broken, go get some mechanic books and fix it yourself." No thanks, I'll get a mechanic.
The real leaks come from journalists who are sent preview discs, and this claim is backed up by the many not-quite-bugfixed versions out on the Net that were sent to journalists.
How to stop it? Well, Nintendo tried a strong-arm tactic with one game, having a security guard stand behind the journalist while he was playing it. With audio CDs, Sony once sent the preview CD sealed inside a CD walkman. Neither worked, because journalists felt they were being treated like criminals. Unfortunately, some of them are.
It is me, or does that sound like the name of the next Bond villain?
They asked the makers "Why did you call it NUON?"
They replied "Because NUON will buy it!"
People who want to run Linux on their PS2? No - they can buy PS2 Linux.
People who want to play backups? Unless you treat your discs like shit, you don't need backups.
People who pirate games? Yup. Stiff shit, thieves.
People who want to import games from overseas? Yup - and out of the millions of console owners out there, they probably make up less than 1%.
Average Joe will never even know about this ruling, because it will not affect him. MOST people buy games only from their region. MOST people do not want to homebrew software or run 'backups'. And therefore MOST people are not affected.
Is this decision 'right'? Depends who you ask, because it seems what's 'right' depends on who gets the advantage, the console manufacturers or a small handful of consumers.
If you were the publisher for a game in Europe, you'd sure as hell want to make sure that the Japan/US versions of the game (which might be out months before yours due to localization delay) can't be bulk imported by retailers and sold - cos that money won't go to you, it'll go to the overseas publisher.
Likewise, the original publishers that sell the rights to overseas publishers want region locks so that they can inflate the cost of the rights. It's more money for them to sell truly exclusive rights to a region (due to region locks), than some half-assed rights because overseas retailers can just import from overseas.
That's one reason, there are other more minor ones too, like limiting marketing to one region so they can see how well it does, and apply those stats to the budgets for other regions.
Same deal with DVD regions too.
Mostly, they like games they can pick up and put down easily (Tetris, Solitaire, DDR), aren't ridiculously competitive, and they don't want to spend (read: "waste") time learning all the details necessary to play games like Starcraft where you need to understand the system to play effectively.
This goes a long way to explaining why your girlfriend will play DDR, but hates it when you try to teach her Warcraft III. From their perspective, DDR is a short, fun, self-contained activity, whereas Warcraft III is just a waste of time. "Why would you want to spend all that time filling up your brain with this useless stuff?"
If you keep those two things in mind, your game will appeal to a lot more women. Colouring it pink will not.
As George found to his chagrin in the Seinfeld episode "The Frogger".
That assumes that Microsoft is following a simple business model where selling more is better for them, just like almost every other product on the planet.
But it's not like that.
Firstly, they LOSE money on every Xbox sold because the hardware is more expensive to make/distribute than its tag price. So selling more is financially harmful.
"Ah", you say, "but then they can brag that they have a larger market share." But what's the use of saying "We have x million consoles out there" if people know that a lot of them are being used to run Linux instead of games? It's like a glue company saying "Our glue sells millions a year! It must be good, it's incredibly popular!" when everyone knows that most of the sales of that brand are due to glue sniffers.
It's shame that Free-X appears not to give a flying pig's arse about the intellectual rights of those who develop software for Xbox. Sorry guys, information wants to be free, it's more important that we can run Linux on our toaster than it is for you to run a business making games.
Oh, and thanks Free-X, for making Linux zealots look like a bunch of whiny criminals.
The alternative is to get friends to tape the shows and send them over/digitise them (an imposition on them) or waste hours of time trying to get net copies. And neither of those options are helpful if the show you like is esoteric.
I had thought about setting up a Tivo (esp. now that you can manage Tivo via the web) and pulling the data off it, but you need a big upstream link for that, plus a 'co-lo' in a friend's house. But at least it's not so much of an imposition.
If there's no demand, they'll only sell to a minority of hardcore gamers.
This whole think smacks of desperation.
If spam was just offers for stuff I didn't want, I wouldn't mind it so much. I don't get this mad with junk mail to my home. But the fact that the spammer s have tried to trick me just makes me angry. I support any effort to kill spam.
If you're getting pain in your little finger, it may be due to compression further up the arm, so get rid of the armrests. If you have pain in your hands, it may be due to compression near your neck, where the nerves enter the spine.
All the advice I've seen indicates that different things work for different people. If you're experiencing hand/wrist/arm pain, get it checked out, but don't expect there to be a magic cure that works for everybody. What fixed your co-worker's pain may not fix yours.
The orthopaedic surgeon I consulted with told me that actual bona-fide CTS is actually very rare, but the symptoms are more common. If you have true CTS, it will probably be waking you up at night (the fluid in your body redistributes itself when you lie down, increasing the compression and pain). So don't freak out and think you have CTS (like I did) when there may be other factors involved.
Check posture, ensure you've got circulation, and periodically take breaks. Ensure your monitor is at eye level, so your neck is cricked down looking at it (not easy for regular laptop users - get a plug-in monitor if you use a laptop at your desk regularly).
This is incorrect. It is not possible to prevent all manner of cheating by fixing the code. Any fix on the client can be circumvented without some sort of DRM.
People grief others because they can get away with it.
There will always be griefers. Even if they don't run cheat software, they can grief by (for example) disconnecting before the match is over, nullifying the result to maintain their league status.
But if you make it so they are accountable for their actions, you will reduce a lot of cheating. Make online play associated with a credit card number, and charge it $100 if there's hard evidence of cheating. Will little Johnny install that cheat if his dad's credit card might get charged $100? I doubt it.
And to the fuctard who thought that cheat-coders had 'legitimate' uses like creating unauthorized servers, go to next year's E3 and meet some of the game developers whose paycheck you're stealing.
Read the manual. The low sound is deliberate, so that if you're using DTS or Dolby 5.1 then the TV sound doesn't interfere with the 5.1 sound. To get a regular volume curve, go into the DVD player and play a movie, go into the options and turn off Optical Output.
If someone is shooting through walls, then the server can detect this simply by replicating the action (player A in position X shoots player B in position Y) in its own trusted space. If A couldn't possibly have shot B from X, then A must be cheating. If server performance is a concern, then this check doesn't have to be done immediately or on the server. The server could spool all shots to a trusted peer which tries to replicate the action and detects cheaters.
This won't be able to stop certain cheats like those which change the texture of players to bright green or enable wall transparency. You'd need a trusted client for that, and that's not feasible unless (until?) PCs can run signed software that cannot be altered by the user, which isn't going to happen anytime soon (but may be possible on future consoles, as they may have hardware checks).
One thing you can't patch is the human condition. There will always be griefers who just want to ruin everyone else's fun. The best way to stop them isn't to lecture them on proper game etiquette or make them see the error of their ways, it's to make them accountable for their actions by de-anonymising them. Make them sign up with a credit card to get their name and address. If there is a clause that says your credit card will be charged $100 if undisputable proof is found that you're cheating...
Nice idea, but it wouldn't work. If the server says to the client "here are 4 players in your field of view, but please don't draw the first 2" then the aimbot will know they're invisibots and disable aiming for them.
To sum up the PS2 in short, they were going for high performance, high throughput, and most importantly (to Sony anyway), low cost. If you're going to make 40 million of these things, you've got to make it so that it'll be cheap eventually!
With that in mind, think about why they chose the type of RAM they did (Rambus) and its characteristics (long-ish latency but high throughput for contiguous addresses, nice for DMA), why they chose what today is considered a ridiculously small cache (8KB!), why they've got scratchpad RAM, why DMA is so important, why they chose ridiculous bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, why they chose embedded RAM on the GPU... the list goes on.
If you don't understand what game programmers find important about an architecture, you won't be able to create something adapted to games. And I'm not saying PS2 is necessarily the best example, it's just probably the most accessible modern console. I've heard many say that the PS2 is difficult to program (mostly due to its parallelism which is hard to get your head around at first), but once they 'get it' (i.e. the designers idea of how it should be used) then getting good performance is not a problem.