Bill Gates is still chief software architect and non-executive chairman of Microsoft and I'm sure he has some saying over things. He only stepped down from the chief executive officer position and maybe day to day activities and left those for Ballmer.
Regardless of your name calling, aren't you kind of agreeing with me? Look at what the GP said - that you can just recompile programs designed for Unix systems. I said it doesn't work like that, just like you.
You're overestimating the importance of that. All the other aspects of marketing work too. For example, theres one store that imports all kinds of hot and exotic spices, chili, and anything related you don't find on normal stores. I never really search for them on Google and most other people have heard about them by word of mouth, and they seem to be doing just fine. Sure they do have their sites indexed in Google which most likely brings them extra customers, but it's not like it's really needed for a successful company. Only time a company would fail if they were dropped from a search index would be if they were a shit company to begin with.
Exactly, it's never good to have only one company having monopoly.
Another thing is that Bing does actually have something new to offer. More than Google they have a lot of information displayed on the search results page, from travel info, weather, shopping to wolfram alpha results. I still personally use Google as Bing doesn't find the long tail keywords as good (because Google gets so much more usage data, and what Bing team admits too) but the difference is that if searching in Bing, you can a lot of times get the results on the search page. With Google you have to look for a relevant result (and try to skip all the spammy links), then click it and hope it contains what you're searching for.
Bing hasn't 'failed'. Not taking the top spot is not 'failure'.
Microsoft's internet division is currently losing about $2 billion a year. Sure looks like failure to me.
Yeah and MS internet division == Bing? Even if MS is burning money on Bing and their other online products, they're thinking long term. You sound like one of these investors who are only interested in quick short term product, after which the company is ran to ground. MS sure has the money to be thinking years afterwards.
Unless of course the DRM is imported from a closed source part (or third party DRM system), like a.dll file.
So? There is not really a difference between "disabling code" and "disabling a call to code".
And then you're unable to play the DRM content. I suspect the parent meant you could start playing DRM'd files like that, since you can modify the DRM system in the code.
But it's one codebase for the developer and that's what counts. Adobe takes care of the app working in every environment, you can just write your app once.
Unix can be quite much put into one group. Also, once you get to more complicated system calls or other levels, you're going to hit incompatibility issues. Otherwise you could just release binary (32 and 64 bit versions) and it would work in every UNIX, BSD and Linux distro. But it never does. AIR applications however do.
What do you not get? It's not C and the code is interpreted in runtime. The runtime environment separates you from the OS and instead handles the OS specific things like drawing windows, user input and hardware calls itself.
Also if you're going to demonstrate multi-platform app/game in 2010, it most likely doesn't mean a console application.
So what do you do if you want to make a call to the system API? Or if you want to use something like OpenGL/OpenCL?
I've seen these before and they're more of a novelty than something robust enough for anything other than technology demos.
Then you don't use it. Theres own place for both languages closely tied to the OS you're developing for and languages meant for cross-platform usage. It's your own responsibility to pick the one that suits you best.
But thats the reason you don't need to do exactly what the GP suggested with #ifdef's. The same code works everywhere. Of course you can't have native GUI elements in that case as it needs to support every platform. The GUI is handled by the runtime environment, just like with Java and other cross-platform languages.
meh. another slashvertisement about a shitty adobe product which is 20 years behind java. when will adobe ever catch up ? probably never. after HTML5 obsoletes flash adobe is sunk.
Java? It's really sluggish and non-elegant compared to AIR. I'm still not sure how the Java interpreter performs so badly on UI elements. While technically probably OK (it's been losing to.NET though), the mere fact that all Java apps feel sluggish creates a bad image for Java. That combined with the fact that.NET has been constantly instructing new features and tens of languages support it (C#, Basic, Object Pascal, ASP..)
That combined with the fact that you can develop AIR applications with the great Adobe tools using Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax.
Not only nothing indicates the inclusion of DRM, has the sibling post has mentioned, but implementing DRM in an OSS application is even more pointless than with a binary-only app.
If Songbird implements DRM, anyone can simply take the source, disable the DRM, recompile and distribute.
Unless of course the DRM is imported from a closed source part (or third party DRM system), like a.dll file.
Another great indie game from countries with a lot less standard living costs is Mount&Blade from a Turkish developer and his wife. I love open sandbox games and had a lot of fun playing it back in 2008, and it seems like they have now published a multiplayer expansion pack. The great thing for the developers in these countries is that they can make significantly more than with an usual job in the country, and it's easier to fund their life as an independent game developer. It doesn't work the same way for those in the US or other countries where living costs are a lot higher.
In case of smaller studios or indies it's almost always directly off from the developers. Also, even many big developer names do give a share of the revenue to their employees and they usually consider that while making a contract. It gives a good incentive to work better on the game.
Which is actually somewhat hard to do for wiki articles. You really need to go through the history pretty carefully to find not only the authors who contributed directly but also the authors whose work was copied and pasted around with only a vauge reference to the source in the edit history to put together a proper atribution for a wiki article.
But doesn't that make the original Wikipedia writers liable if they copied someone else work? I've seen many occasions when newspapers have copied each other and just attributed the original source for the info when it later turned out to be false. But as it was attributed, the liability kind of went to the original writer. In either case, it would also make Wikipedia in serious danger if any of their writers would be held liable if they were just copying or attributing other sources.
What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those? I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents. If someone is legitly offering that (by the creative commons sharealike license), why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.
Creative Commons Deed This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.
You are free: - to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and - to Remix—to adapt the work
Under the following conditions: - Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.) - Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
With the understanding that: - Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. - Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license: -- your fair dealing or fair use rights; -- the author's moral rights; and -- rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights. - Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
As it is, they fit all of these. They attribute the original writers in their books. They are fully legit.
If you make content under Creative Commons or other licenses that allow paid redistribution, you also agree for someone else making money out of it in a suitable way. That is the real freedom and the basis of Creative Commons ShareAlike license - everyone is free to use it as they please, as long as the original author is attributed. If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.
Anyone can write a new server (accompliced with all the quests, npc's, items, and everything else that is handled server side). But it's a crazy amount of work, a lot more than just cracking the exe to bypass the copy protection. This is almost like saying "anyone can write that game" including all the aspects of art and everything else that goes into development. It just doesn't work like that and while everyone has broken your arguments about, you still can't see how WoW and DRM is different..
Besides all of these facts, Blizzard has served cease&desist letters to the larger private server owners and they have all complied and shut down their servers. Even while it doesn't really hurt their business.
I did too, but I got really interested on Settlers 7 after reading the reviews and seeing some gameplay videos. It seems they have went more for the economy and all of those aspects that made Settlers 2 great.
As you can see, new Tweets are glorifying UBISoft DRM which has so far been successful against PC game pirates. But is it the best future protection? We don’t think so. “It withstood all the efforts to get cracked.” All? Not all. Several folks in a well known Russian underground community (CS.RIN.RU) are working on a server emulation patch – and they’ve been partially successful so far and have apparently got the game to work until sequence 5. Their method involves playing a legit copy of the game, logging all responses that come from UBISoft servers and building a complete server emulator. However to make the emulator complete, they will have to explore the game 100% which is a time consuming process. Be that as it may, this clearly shows that UBI’s DRM is not as invincible as it is claimed to be.
It has taken them over a month now. And all that is needed from Ubisoft part is to make their games more open sandbox like with even more server-side stuff and you cannot ever get a complete working version.
You ignored most of my points. WoW is only a superior product because by design their game is closed. It doesn't need DRM on executables or game data as nobody has a direct access to their server-side assets. In a way this is exactly what Ubisoft is doing - are you saying that their DRM laden product is superior one?
I'm sure I saw this idea somewhere. It means you will be able to play better games on worse computer, true, but I'd rather play on my computer with no need for net.
OnLive. They even do explicit distribution contracts with developers so that their games are only playable via their streaming platform, like you describe.
Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates is still chief software architect and non-executive chairman of Microsoft and I'm sure he has some saying over things. He only stepped down from the chief executive officer position and maybe day to day activities and left those for Ballmer.
Regardless of your name calling, aren't you kind of agreeing with me? Look at what the GP said - that you can just recompile programs designed for Unix systems. I said it doesn't work like that, just like you.
You're overestimating the importance of that. All the other aspects of marketing work too. For example, theres one store that imports all kinds of hot and exotic spices, chili, and anything related you don't find on normal stores. I never really search for them on Google and most other people have heard about them by word of mouth, and they seem to be doing just fine. Sure they do have their sites indexed in Google which most likely brings them extra customers, but it's not like it's really needed for a successful company. Only time a company would fail if they were dropped from a search index would be if they were a shit company to begin with.
Exactly, it's never good to have only one company having monopoly.
Another thing is that Bing does actually have something new to offer. More than Google they have a lot of information displayed on the search results page, from travel info, weather, shopping to wolfram alpha results. I still personally use Google as Bing doesn't find the long tail keywords as good (because Google gets so much more usage data, and what Bing team admits too) but the difference is that if searching in Bing, you can a lot of times get the results on the search page. With Google you have to look for a relevant result (and try to skip all the spammy links), then click it and hope it contains what you're searching for.
Microsoft's internet division is currently losing about $2 billion a year. Sure looks like failure to me.
Yeah and MS internet division == Bing? Even if MS is burning money on Bing and their other online products, they're thinking long term. You sound like one of these investors who are only interested in quick short term product, after which the company is ran to ground. MS sure has the money to be thinking years afterwards.
So? There is not really a difference between "disabling code" and "disabling a call to code".
And then you're unable to play the DRM content. I suspect the parent meant you could start playing DRM'd files like that, since you can modify the DRM system in the code.
But it's one codebase for the developer and that's what counts. Adobe takes care of the app working in every environment, you can just write your app once.
Unix can be quite much put into one group. Also, once you get to more complicated system calls or other levels, you're going to hit incompatibility issues. Otherwise you could just release binary (32 and 64 bit versions) and it would work in every UNIX, BSD and Linux distro. But it never does. AIR applications however do.
What do you not get? It's not C and the code is interpreted in runtime. The runtime environment separates you from the OS and instead handles the OS specific things like drawing windows, user input and hardware calls itself.
Also if you're going to demonstrate multi-platform app/game in 2010, it most likely doesn't mean a console application.
So what do you do if you want to make a call to the system API? Or if you want to use something like OpenGL/OpenCL?
I've seen these before and they're more of a novelty than something robust enough for anything other than technology demos.
Then you don't use it. Theres own place for both languages closely tied to the OS you're developing for and languages meant for cross-platform usage. It's your own responsibility to pick the one that suits you best.
But thats the reason you don't need to do exactly what the GP suggested with #ifdef's. The same code works everywhere. Of course you can't have native GUI elements in that case as it needs to support every platform. The GUI is handled by the runtime environment, just like with Java and other cross-platform languages.
except Java.
meh. another slashvertisement about a shitty adobe product which is 20 years behind java. when will adobe ever catch up ? probably never. after HTML5 obsoletes flash adobe is sunk.
Java? It's really sluggish and non-elegant compared to AIR. I'm still not sure how the Java interpreter performs so badly on UI elements. While technically probably OK (it's been losing to .NET though), the mere fact that all Java apps feel sluggish creates a bad image for Java. That combined with the fact that .NET has been constantly instructing new features and tens of languages support it (C#, Basic, Object Pascal, ASP..)
That combined with the fact that you can develop AIR applications with the great Adobe tools using Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax.
I want one that looks like my ex-girlfriend!
FTFY
Not only nothing indicates the inclusion of DRM, has the sibling post has mentioned, but implementing DRM in an OSS application is even more pointless than with a binary-only app.
If Songbird implements DRM, anyone can simply take the source, disable the DRM, recompile and distribute.
Unless of course the DRM is imported from a closed source part (or third party DRM system), like a .dll file.
But C&C 4 doesn't even use the same copy protection. It uses something similar by EA, but they probably just didn't made it as good as Ubisoft.
Another great indie game from countries with a lot less standard living costs is Mount&Blade from a Turkish developer and his wife. I love open sandbox games and had a lot of fun playing it back in 2008, and it seems like they have now published a multiplayer expansion pack. The great thing for the developers in these countries is that they can make significantly more than with an usual job in the country, and it's easier to fund their life as an independent game developer. It doesn't work the same way for those in the US or other countries where living costs are a lot higher.
In case of smaller studios or indies it's almost always directly off from the developers. Also, even many big developer names do give a share of the revenue to their employees and they usually consider that while making a contract. It gives a good incentive to work better on the game.
Which is actually somewhat hard to do for wiki articles. You really need to go through the history pretty carefully to find not only the authors who contributed directly but also the authors whose work was copied and pasted around with only a vauge reference to the source in the edit history to put together a proper atribution for a wiki article.
But doesn't that make the original Wikipedia writers liable if they copied someone else work? I've seen many occasions when newspapers have copied each other and just attributed the original source for the info when it later turned out to be false. But as it was attributed, the liability kind of went to the original writer. In either case, it would also make Wikipedia in serious danger if any of their writers would be held liable if they were just copying or attributing other sources.
What about if some people just want to get a paper version of those? I'm not sure if Wikipedia currently offers such, but if I wanted to get encyclopedia on my bookshelf I would want it to be Wikipedia and all of its contents. If someone is legitly offering that (by the creative commons sharealike license), why shouldn't they be allowed to do so?
I would buy a book that is based on for example all of the gaming articles on Wikipedia. Maybe it's not up to date, but so ain't any other encyclopedia, and Wikipedia has a lot of content that isn't found on others.
It's all about the license
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
Creative Commons Deed
This is a human-readable summary of the full license below.
You are free:
- to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
- to Remix—to adapt the work
Under the following conditions:
- Attribution—You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.)
- Share Alike—If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same, similar or a compatible license.
With the understanding that:
- Waiver—Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder.
- Other Rights—In no way are any of the following rights affected by the license:
-- your fair dealing or fair use rights;
-- the author's moral rights; and
-- rights other persons may have either in the work itself or in how the work is used, such as publicity or privacy rights.
- Notice—For any reuse or distribution, you must make clear to others the license terms of this work. The best way to do that is with a link to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
As it is, they fit all of these. They attribute the original writers in their books. They are fully legit.
If you make content under Creative Commons or other licenses that allow paid redistribution, you also agree for someone else making money out of it in a suitable way. That is the real freedom and the basis of Creative Commons ShareAlike license - everyone is free to use it as they please, as long as the original author is attributed. If you don't like that, then don't write to a site that releases your content under that license. Simple as that.
Anyone can write a new server (accompliced with all the quests, npc's, items, and everything else that is handled server side). But it's a crazy amount of work, a lot more than just cracking the exe to bypass the copy protection. This is almost like saying "anyone can write that game" including all the aspects of art and everything else that goes into development. It just doesn't work like that and while everyone has broken your arguments about, you still can't see how WoW and DRM is different..
Besides all of these facts, Blizzard has served cease&desist letters to the larger private server owners and they have all complied and shut down their servers. Even while it doesn't really hurt their business.
I thought the series ended with Settlers 2.
I did too, but I got really interested on Settlers 7 after reading the reviews and seeing some gameplay videos. It seems they have went more for the economy and all of those aspects that made Settlers 2 great.
It's false news. The crack doesn't actually work - just read this forum thread. You get all kinds of weird problems like cannot accept quests, cannot advance in the game, cant use items and so on... Or this: http://filenetworks.blogspot.com/2010/04/ipaki-group-aftermath.html
As you can see, new Tweets are glorifying UBISoft DRM which has so far been successful against PC game pirates. But is it the best future protection? We don’t think so. “It withstood all the efforts to get cracked.” All? Not all. Several folks in a well known Russian underground community (CS.RIN.RU) are working on a server emulation patch – and they’ve been partially successful so far and have apparently got the game to work until sequence 5. Their method involves playing a legit copy of the game, logging all responses that come from UBISoft servers and building a complete server emulator. However to make the emulator complete, they will have to explore the game 100% which is a time consuming process. Be that as it may, this clearly shows that UBI’s DRM is not as invincible as it is claimed to be.
It has taken them over a month now. And all that is needed from Ubisoft part is to make their games more open sandbox like with even more server-side stuff and you cannot ever get a complete working version.
You ignored most of my points. WoW is only a superior product because by design their game is closed. It doesn't need DRM on executables or game data as nobody has a direct access to their server-side assets. In a way this is exactly what Ubisoft is doing - are you saying that their DRM laden product is superior one?
I'm sure I saw this idea somewhere. It means you will be able to play better games on worse computer, true, but I'd rather play on my computer with no need for net.
OnLive. They even do explicit distribution contracts with developers so that their games are only playable via their streaming platform, like you describe.