It's not the medium, it's the physical process of writing. With a keyboard, every character is a single button press (excluding any funny characters), with a pen it's a series of motions. I often often misspell 'nn' as 'm' when writing with a pen, and it's not a case of unclear handwriting (I write characters well separated), it's a case of motor memory confusing two similar motions. I'd never make that mistake when writing with a keyboard. I sometimes press the wrong key, don't press the key hard enough for it to register, or press a key twice when writing on a keyboard. Mistakes I'd never make with a pen. Like your "a properly phrases sentence".
I understand perfectly well that they're overused, almost always abused, and in general a bad idea. Personally, I never use them. But I also understand perfectly well why very a large amount of people simply wouldn't give a shit about that, even if they knew... which would make you the one not able to understand or even consider terribly simple concepts that do not align with your opinions.
A "short" url that isn't short enough would simply be put through an url shortener, meaning that you'd end up with an unintelligible short url pointing to an unintelligible "short" url pointing to the long url. Hardly progress.
But the reason why I didn't do that here is because I detest stating the obvious and repeating things. The reason why url shorteners are used has been explained in this discussion by others, probably better than I would have. You, apparently, have not grasped this, and it is preventing you from understanding why a long domain name is detrimental to the proposed mechanism, why the domain name does not have to be even near 70 characters long in order to be considered too long for this purpose, and why copypaste is not an option.
If you're unwilling to learn, my explanation will not make a difference.
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash?
Because joysticks aren't commonplace? Just because they aren't doesn't mean they are:
1. not available
2. not in use
3. not configurable for most games
the strawman is burning.....
Yes, PCs are good for everything given enough peripherals. But seriously, the vast majority of PC do not have joysticks, therefore the vast majority of PCs suck for single screen MP.
I don't play many of this genre, but wal-mart's site says there are a few "fighting & shooting" games for pc, just take a look here
Walmart (the ultimate authority on all video gaming) doesn't know the difference between a fighting game and an FPS. I'm guessing you don't either.
Or it could just be that pirating is a real issue and nobody wants to admit it. It's killing PC gaming. You want PC gaming to be #1? Stop the pirates.
Piracy has been "killing" PC gaming for, what, 10, 15 years now? The only difference I can see is game companies complaining about it, and stronger DRM. PC gaming will die of old age before piracy kills it.
The game got high reviews and is in a lot of places. However, we need game sales in order to have money to advertise to get more sales.
The money does not necessarily have to come from sales. Also, as the Hollywood people can tell you, good reviews do not directly translate to money, and that's not just because of piracy. I don't have any numbers, but I'd bet the amount of movies that had high reviews yet didn't do well at the box office didn't increase significantly along with P2P.
Many of the people I know now making iPhone apps? One made a cool program that used his servers for something. The game has been pirated so much that he might have to shut down his servers because all the pirated copies are costing him too much money to host the media files vs legit users. As in, there are thousands of pirates and maybe 50 legit users.
"Not using DRM" doesn't mean you have to serve the pirates. There's nothing wrong with controlling who has access to your servers as long as you can do it unobtrusively.
Once again, I'll restate:
If people want to see PC gaming become relevant again, stop piracy.
Hey, I'll restate stuff too: stopping piracy will not translate to increased sales. It depends on a lot of factors, and unfortunately many indie games are the type which people are happy to play several hours a day if they get it for free, but will also happily not play at all if they'd have to pay.
Indy devs are trying to meet you halfway by not using DRM, meet us halfway by reporting and taking down torrents of non-DRM'd games.
You're expecting me to work for you, for free, just because you're not a dick?
The single-screen multiplayer case is not even something the PC "can't handle". The PC handled it very nicely when it last made sense, which was with split-screen games about 15 years ago.
Yes, it worked 15 years ago, but 15 years ago is when mice became the standard game controllers instead of joysticks. Multiple mice don't work well together and modern keyboards don't support many simultaneous keypresses; mice and keyboards simply suck for single-screen MP. Joysticks don't have either of those problems, but they're pretty rare nowadays. No, modern PCs can't handle single-screen multiplayer.
Then the internet made split screen look very silly. It's only very recently that the growth in popularity of party games has given shared-screen multiplayer a new purpose.
Sure, Internet play works for the games that have to be played on a split screen (FPSes for example), but there are types of games that are naturally shared screen, most notably fighting games. Even if playing online, both players will see the same view. These are pretty much exclusive to consoles now.
If we had been able to release it as an XBLA title or similiar, we would have made much more money. As it is, every pirated copy IS a lost sale and if all the pirates that stole the game (while using our server bandwidth and space) would have paid the measly price for it, we would have had the money to make more games. As it stands, we're barely solvent.
Bullshit. The only reason you might have gotten more money from making it an XBLA title is the different audience. Being unable to pirate a game largely just lowers the amount of people who pirate the game, it doesn't raise the sales much. The ratio would look nicer, but you wouldn't be making more money. Your problem is most likely in the price, the marketing, or the game itself.
Then all we need is a pressure sensitive mouse. Or do they already exist? I'm not talking about tablets, a simple mouse with pressure sensitive buttons would be a lot cheaper than any tablet of reasonable size.
Slashdot Mirror
The sunspot cycle is about 11 years.
It's not the medium, it's the physical process of writing. With a keyboard, every character is a single button press (excluding any funny characters), with a pen it's a series of motions. I often often misspell 'nn' as 'm' when writing with a pen, and it's not a case of unclear handwriting (I write characters well separated), it's a case of motor memory confusing two similar motions. I'd never make that mistake when writing with a keyboard. I sometimes press the wrong key, don't press the key hard enough for it to register, or press a key twice when writing on a keyboard. Mistakes I'd never make with a pen. Like your "a properly phrases sentence".
I understand perfectly well that they're overused, almost always abused, and in general a bad idea. Personally, I never use them. But I also understand perfectly well why very a large amount of people simply wouldn't give a shit about that, even if they knew... which would make you the one not able to understand or even consider terribly simple concepts that do not align with your opinions.
A "short" url that isn't short enough would simply be put through an url shortener, meaning that you'd end up with an unintelligible short url pointing to an unintelligible "short" url pointing to the long url. Hardly progress.
Indeed I do.
But the reason why I didn't do that here is because I detest stating the obvious and repeating things. The reason why url shorteners are used has been explained in this discussion by others, probably better than I would have. You, apparently, have not grasped this, and it is preventing you from understanding why a long domain name is detrimental to the proposed mechanism, why the domain name does not have to be even near 70 characters long in order to be considered too long for this purpose, and why copypaste is not an option.
If you're unwilling to learn, my explanation will not make a difference.
I fail to see why, in absense of a 70 char (or otherwise absurdly long) URL, why it would be worth the effort and worth the obsfucation to use one.
You really don't know how to copypaste, do you?
I rest my case.
A domain name doesn't need to be >70 characters in order to be long when compared to 5 characters.
You really have no idea what url shorteners are used for, do you?
OK, you got me. It won't work with that 0.01% of Internet users.
begin its migration into the public domain
Though I can't see why they need an intermediate step at "open source" between "proprietary" and "public domain".
Have you ever tried to tell someone, in a conversation, to go to "tech dot slashdot dot org slash story slash zero nine slash zero eight slash nineteen slash one two zero two zero six slash u-r-l dash shortener dash trim dash to dash go dash community dash owned dash open dash source slash?
"I'll e-mail you the address."
Like most social networking websites, it's because other people are already using the site.
For their next attention-getting trick, they are going to open source Hello World.
No need.
Doesn't work if your domain name is long. There's no way to compete with something like tr.im.
FUD
Because joysticks aren't commonplace? Just because they aren't doesn't mean they are: 1. not available 2. not in use 3. not configurable for most games the strawman is burning.....
Yes, PCs are good for everything given enough peripherals. But seriously, the vast majority of PC do not have joysticks, therefore the vast majority of PCs suck for single screen MP.
I don't play many of this genre, but wal-mart's site says there are a few "fighting & shooting" games for pc, just take a look here
Walmart (the ultimate authority on all video gaming) doesn't know the difference between a fighting game and an FPS. I'm guessing you don't either.
Or it could just be that pirating is a real issue and nobody wants to admit it. It's killing PC gaming. You want PC gaming to be #1? Stop the pirates.
Piracy has been "killing" PC gaming for, what, 10, 15 years now? The only difference I can see is game companies complaining about it, and stronger DRM. PC gaming will die of old age before piracy kills it.
The game got high reviews and is in a lot of places. However, we need game sales in order to have money to advertise to get more sales.
The money does not necessarily have to come from sales. Also, as the Hollywood people can tell you, good reviews do not directly translate to money, and that's not just because of piracy. I don't have any numbers, but I'd bet the amount of movies that had high reviews yet didn't do well at the box office didn't increase significantly along with P2P.
Many of the people I know now making iPhone apps? One made a cool program that used his servers for something. The game has been pirated so much that he might have to shut down his servers because all the pirated copies are costing him too much money to host the media files vs legit users. As in, there are thousands of pirates and maybe 50 legit users.
"Not using DRM" doesn't mean you have to serve the pirates. There's nothing wrong with controlling who has access to your servers as long as you can do it unobtrusively.
Once again, I'll restate:
If people want to see PC gaming become relevant again, stop piracy.
Hey, I'll restate stuff too: stopping piracy will not translate to increased sales. It depends on a lot of factors, and unfortunately many indie games are the type which people are happy to play several hours a day if they get it for free, but will also happily not play at all if they'd have to pay.
Indy devs are trying to meet you halfway by not using DRM, meet us halfway by reporting and taking down torrents of non-DRM'd games.
You're expecting me to work for you, for free, just because you're not a dick?
The single-screen multiplayer case is not even something the PC "can't handle". The PC handled it very nicely when it last made sense, which was with split-screen games about 15 years ago.
Yes, it worked 15 years ago, but 15 years ago is when mice became the standard game controllers instead of joysticks. Multiple mice don't work well together and modern keyboards don't support many simultaneous keypresses; mice and keyboards simply suck for single-screen MP. Joysticks don't have either of those problems, but they're pretty rare nowadays. No, modern PCs can't handle single-screen multiplayer.
Then the internet made split screen look very silly. It's only very recently that the growth in popularity of party games has given shared-screen multiplayer a new purpose.
Sure, Internet play works for the games that have to be played on a split screen (FPSes for example), but there are types of games that are naturally shared screen, most notably fighting games. Even if playing online, both players will see the same view. These are pretty much exclusive to consoles now.
It's really quite simple. If you can't do the work you want to do where you are, you move. Or find something else to do.
If we had been able to release it as an XBLA title or similiar, we would have made much more money. As it is, every pirated copy IS a lost sale and if all the pirates that stole the game (while using our server bandwidth and space) would have paid the measly price for it, we would have had the money to make more games. As it stands, we're barely solvent.
Bullshit. The only reason you might have gotten more money from making it an XBLA title is the different audience. Being unable to pirate a game largely just lowers the amount of people who pirate the game, it doesn't raise the sales much. The ratio would look nicer, but you wouldn't be making more money. Your problem is most likely in the price, the marketing, or the game itself.
...until someone leaks or reverse-engineers the code running on the remote server.
Well, you go the first one right.
It would, but it can't, because the form isn't on the page before you click a button and the JS creates it.
Hmm... force feedback keyboard...
Then all we need is a pressure sensitive mouse. Or do they already exist? I'm not talking about tablets, a simple mouse with pressure sensitive buttons would be a lot cheaper than any tablet of reasonable size.
You see, that's an infinite loop. You should've use linux, it does infinite loops in five seconds.
Nah, I bet it's
/* seems to work faster without this */