This is obviously a ploy aimed squarely at turning the online Half-life community into a pay-for-play revenue stream, at least over the long haul. The 'shack article alludes slightly to this, although Gabe Newell makes it sound a little more palatable, and wants to be our friend. He promises not to charge us twice for the same product. All who believe him, raise your hand.
While the features mentioned (automatic patches, etc.) are very cool, they're also merely the bullet points needed to sell the software to developers and clients.
Gamers are likely eager to jump on the technology if they can get the latest patches and maps without having to take an active role in the proces by going out and downloading them proactively.
Developers are likely to use it because then they don't have to worry about producing media, documentation, or those other annoying things that soften the pain of paying $50 a pop to most gamers.
Valve wins 2 ways: First, they can move all of the userbase over to a subscription model and start making little hats out of money. Second, they can get a piece of each sale from other developers' work that hits their content distribution system, and make little money shirts to match the hats.
Think about it. Half-Life came out 5 years ago. A lot of us have plunked down our $50 and have been playing away happily ever since at Counterstrike, DOD, Existence, and many other wonderful mods without giving Valve a penny.
Now, the case can easily be made that Valve DESERVES more cash. They've continued to pump money into the Half-life community, making Counterstrike into a commercial product, releasing the classic quake and team fortress classic mods, releasing patches and feature upgrades these many years, and constantly improving the product.
This works fine while your game is in the top seller lists through constant re-release. It breaks down when you hit market saturation. Who does Valve turn to when Half-Life isn't in the top 20 anymore, and Team Fortress II is no longer even a twinkle in Gabe Newell's eye?
It turns to you, the purchaser of the original product, who is brazenly continuing to enjoy the it long after anyone thought you would still pay attention to it. Your brazen audacity shown by not becoming a consistent revenue stream will be corrected once and for all!
In fact, if you buy a game over Steam, who's to say that the content provider can't just turn it off a few years down the road when the sequel's released? With constant enforcement of new patch downloads, what happens to purists who might enjoy the gameplay of an earlier revision? What if I want to install a custom hack such as a Tribes 2 HUD or build my own decal in Half-Life, only to have these changes constantly overwritten by the autoupdater?
Control over how I can execute my software should be left in my hands, not in the hands of a subscription service or remote authentication server. The current system isn't broken, and steam doesn't really address any significant problems except Valve's diminishing bottom line.
Re:The Real Deal
on
Hack in Space
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Don't be ridiculous. I can tell you that in IT, this line of thinking will get you fired quickly.
Most often, if a system breaks in a production environment, it's imperative to get a it working again as fast as possible. Treating the symptom is paramount in a high availability situation, and while finding and resolving the cause is of course important, it takes an immediate back seat to getting the system back into production. If you can do both at once then that's grand. If not, then you restart the daemons or reboot the server once you've deemed it safe to do so.
Then, armed with log files and information gathered while the system was on error, you can go back through and trace the cause. Even better, you can duplicate the issue on a staging server. What you do NOT do is leave the system down for any reason one second longer than you have to, no matter how much the urge to tinker grabs you.
On the other side of the coin, diagnosing a problem on trivial or near-trivial system is a waste of your valuable time. Why the hell, except for fun, would you diagnose a BSOD issue on a secretary's computer when you could just back up her home directory, restore an image, then restore her personal files?
Obviously, every situation is different, but there are times when inexperienced techs will spend a day searching for the cause of a trivial problem instead of getting back to work.
Taking the time to root out a deep problem instead of just hitting the reset button is most often a luxury.
The ESRB and MPAA ratings and the enforcement of their ratings are not currently mandated by law. They're self-regulated, ultimately voluntary systems.
Enforcement of the MPAA ratings is done mostly through economic means and trade association pressure, and not by law.
There's a big step between a voluntary, self-censorship system and a legislated restriction on access to speech.
I work for a software company. Now, my employer (and many other companies such as Veritas, 3COM, and others) has two different revenue streams. The first is from license sales. The second (bigger, dependable, easily forecasted) chunk of our revenue comes from yearly renewable support contracts, which happen to include access to the latest version of our software. This is fairly common practice.
Microsoft has found itself in a position enviable to most software companies. The biggest competition it faces is from older versions of its own software. So they're doing the obvious thing and removing themselves from the competition.
The advantages to Microsoft are obvious. Immediate cash gain, better sustainable revenue, faster phase-out of old product.
Do I like it? In the short term, no. It's expensive as hell and my budget as a partially microsoft shop has taken a huge hit. But in the long term, it removes one of my great annoyances.
It's a complete pain in the ass to have to check the license trail on a typical windows system. Say a computer shipped with Windows '95. I took that '95 license, applied it against another computer when I replaced the windows '95 box (assume non-OEM license), then appied an NT4 upgrade license, followed by a Win2k upgrade license.
That leaves me with 3 different pieces of paper to be accountable for on a moment's notice. Under the new system, I simply need to have the original operating system license, and a software assurance certificate. The advantage to me from a clerical standpoint is obvious.
This doesn't make it all better in the short term, but as a shop that frequently upgrades to the latest and greatest, it will save me lots of time in the long haul.
The sad truth is that patches to protect yourself from these worms were released well ahead of the worms themselves. Getting hit by it is irresponsible, but Microsoft's current patching procedures are such a mishmash that getting the right information ahead of time is a total bitch.
Those who are forced by circumstance to be responsible for administering IIS and other microsoft software should look at St. Bernard Software's UpdateExpert. It's a little pricey, but it doesn't cost nearly as much as even one full day of nimda / CodeRed / etc. infection.
It simply keeps a list of all patches released on the Microsoft support site, and lets you roll them out to machines on your network without the users knowing about it. It's saved my bacon a few times now.
The idea of one network to meet the needs and interests of the public, the academic community, and the commercial sector doesn't really work, and is bound to provide only marginally satisfactory performance to all three.
The academic community needs a place to exchange ideas and information as freely as possible. The public needs a place from which it can get the latest music video, maybe play some Counterstrike, read some e-mail, and check the news. The business sector needs a place in which it can provide a reliable service that has 100% uptime for every person who wants to use it, while providing secure storage and protection of important corporate data.
Academia becomes frustrated by the arcane and circuitous security and business practices that have become commonplace in the explosion of the internet.
Commercial entities are frustrated by their lack of control over whom they can reach with their services, and the relative ease of information access, authorized or un-authorized.
The public becomes frustrated because they can't browse their favorite sites, can't reliably rely on e-mail, and even with DSL, they're still HPB's.
The academics, at least, understand this. Thus, Internet 2.
As other posters have pointed out, the whole idea of the internet is to share information. But things evolve, and change. As long as business interests are the large players in the internet, control over information flow will naturally continue to tighten. In an economy based on information, secrets become crucial, and facilitating the relatively unrestricted flow of data and information that makes up today's internet is not only counterproductive, but questionable due diligence.
So the needs of the academic and research communities will still be served, even if they have to build their own playground. The needs of business will be served because they have the money necessary to remodel our playground.
Private users will probably just have to carve out the best niche they can. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in the Compuserve / AOL private network strategy in the coming years. While private users may make up the bulk of internet traffic, there's no real way to coordinate them to the point of building their own network in any reasonable way. Things like this cost money, and nobody's willing to pay for it.
But what I really need when I'm driving late night stretches is a virtual backseat driver.
"You're going too fast! Stop tailgating that semi truck! Shouldn't we pull over? I have to pee! Why did you buy that expensive CD player instead of upgrading my CPU?"
After reading the article, it sounds to me like they're cruising around, looking for wireless LAN's that identify themselves.
By default, a wireless base station will broadcast the SSID of the wireless network of which it is part, and wireless LAN cards can join the network without already knowing the SSID of the network.
One of the simplest security practices is to turn off SSID identification broadcast at the base station. Then the wireless user has to know the name of the network in order to connect. Unfortunately, this quickly becomes a gigantic pain in the ass for the admins of the network, because who wants to go through and change the SSID every time you add a new wireless base? It's really practical only for small organizations.
Mind you, I'm sure this could be fairly easily intercepted from traffic between a user and a base station, but it's a start down the road towards hiding your wireless LAN.
WEP encryption has been proven to be an easily circumvented technology (as reported on/. once upon a time), as has this lack of SSID broadcast, but it's a start. The best bet for true security is to implement a VPN over your wireless LAN, or just treat your wireless zone as a DMZ.
Slashdot Mirror
This is obviously a ploy aimed squarely at turning the online Half-life community into a pay-for-play revenue stream, at least over the long haul. The 'shack article alludes slightly to this, although Gabe Newell makes it sound a little more palatable, and wants to be our friend. He promises not to charge us twice for the same product. All who believe him, raise your hand.
While the features mentioned (automatic patches, etc.) are very cool, they're also merely the bullet points needed to sell the software to developers and clients.
Gamers are likely eager to jump on the technology if they can get the latest patches and maps without having to take an active role in the proces by going out and downloading them proactively.
Developers are likely to use it because then they don't have to worry about producing media, documentation, or those other annoying things that soften the pain of paying $50 a pop to most gamers.
Valve wins 2 ways: First, they can move all of the userbase over to a subscription model and start making little hats out of money. Second, they can get a piece of each sale from other developers' work that hits their content distribution system, and make little money shirts to match the hats.
Think about it. Half-Life came out 5 years ago. A lot of us have plunked down our $50 and have been playing away happily ever since at Counterstrike, DOD, Existence, and many other wonderful mods without giving Valve a penny.
Now, the case can easily be made that Valve DESERVES more cash. They've continued to pump money into the Half-life community, making Counterstrike into a commercial product, releasing the classic quake and team fortress classic mods, releasing patches and feature upgrades these many years, and constantly improving the product.
This works fine while your game is in the top seller lists through constant re-release. It breaks down when you hit market saturation. Who does Valve turn to when Half-Life isn't in the top 20 anymore, and Team Fortress II is no longer even a twinkle in Gabe Newell's eye?
It turns to you, the purchaser of the original product, who is brazenly continuing to enjoy the it long after anyone thought you would still pay attention to it. Your brazen audacity shown by not becoming a consistent revenue stream will be corrected once and for all!
In fact, if you buy a game over Steam, who's to say that the content provider can't just turn it off a few years down the road when the sequel's released? With constant enforcement of new patch downloads, what happens to purists who might enjoy the gameplay of an earlier revision? What if I want to install a custom hack such as a Tribes 2 HUD or build my own decal in Half-Life, only to have these changes constantly overwritten by the autoupdater?
Control over how I can execute my software should be left in my hands, not in the hands of a subscription service or remote authentication server. The current system isn't broken, and steam doesn't really address any significant problems except Valve's diminishing bottom line.
Don't be ridiculous. I can tell you that in IT, this line of thinking will get you fired quickly.
Most often, if a system breaks in a production environment, it's imperative to get a it working again as fast as possible. Treating the symptom is paramount in a high availability situation, and while finding and resolving the cause is of course important, it takes an immediate back seat to getting the system back into production. If you can do both at once then that's grand. If not, then you restart the daemons or reboot the server once you've deemed it safe to do so.
Then, armed with log files and information gathered while the system was on error, you can go back through and trace the cause. Even better, you can duplicate the issue on a staging server. What you do NOT do is leave the system down for any reason one second longer than you have to, no matter how much the urge to tinker grabs you.
On the other side of the coin, diagnosing a problem on trivial or near-trivial system is a waste of your valuable time. Why the hell, except for fun, would you diagnose a BSOD issue on a secretary's computer when you could just back up her home directory, restore an image, then restore her personal files?
Obviously, every situation is different, but there are times when inexperienced techs will spend a day searching for the cause of a trivial problem instead of getting back to work.
Taking the time to root out a deep problem instead of just hitting the reset button is most often a luxury.
The ESRB and MPAA ratings and the enforcement of their ratings are not currently mandated by law. They're self-regulated, ultimately voluntary systems.
Enforcement of the MPAA ratings is done mostly through economic means and trade association pressure, and not by law.
There's a big step between a voluntary, self-censorship system and a legislated restriction on access to speech.
A war is everyday for ROBOT RON!!
I work for a software company. Now, my employer (and many other companies such as Veritas, 3COM, and others) has two different revenue streams. The first is from license sales. The second (bigger, dependable, easily forecasted) chunk of our revenue comes from yearly renewable support contracts, which happen to include access to the latest version of our software. This is fairly common practice.
Microsoft has found itself in a position enviable to most software companies. The biggest competition it faces is from older versions of its own software. So they're doing the obvious thing and removing themselves from the competition.
The advantages to Microsoft are obvious. Immediate cash gain, better sustainable revenue, faster phase-out of old product.
Do I like it? In the short term, no. It's expensive as hell and my budget as a partially microsoft shop has taken a huge hit. But in the long term, it removes one of my great annoyances.
It's a complete pain in the ass to have to check the license trail on a typical windows system. Say a computer shipped with Windows '95. I took that '95 license, applied it against another computer when I replaced the windows '95 box (assume non-OEM license), then appied an NT4 upgrade license, followed by a Win2k upgrade license.
That leaves me with 3 different pieces of paper to be accountable for on a moment's notice. Under the new system, I simply need to have the original operating system license, and a software assurance certificate. The advantage to me from a clerical standpoint is obvious.
This doesn't make it all better in the short term, but as a shop that frequently upgrades to the latest and greatest, it will save me lots of time in the long haul.
The sad truth is that patches to protect yourself from these worms were released well ahead of the worms themselves. Getting hit by it is irresponsible, but Microsoft's current patching procedures are such a mishmash that getting the right information ahead of time is a total bitch.
Those who are forced by circumstance to be responsible for administering IIS and other microsoft software should look at St. Bernard Software's UpdateExpert. It's a little pricey, but it doesn't cost nearly as much as even one full day of nimda / CodeRed / etc. infection.
It simply keeps a list of all patches released on the Microsoft support site, and lets you roll them out to machines on your network without the users knowing about it. It's saved my bacon a few times now.
The idea of one network to meet the needs and interests of the public, the academic community, and the commercial sector doesn't really work, and is bound to provide only marginally satisfactory performance to all three.
The academic community needs a place to exchange ideas and information as freely as possible. The public needs a place from which it can get the latest music video, maybe play some Counterstrike, read some e-mail, and check the news. The business sector needs a place in which it can provide a reliable service that has 100% uptime for every person who wants to use it, while providing secure storage and protection of important corporate data.
The academics, at least, understand this. Thus, Internet 2.
As other posters have pointed out, the whole idea of the internet is to share information. But things evolve, and change. As long as business interests are the large players in the internet, control over information flow will naturally continue to tighten. In an economy based on information, secrets become crucial, and facilitating the relatively unrestricted flow of data and information that makes up today's internet is not only counterproductive, but questionable due diligence.
So the needs of the academic and research communities will still be served, even if they have to build their own playground. The needs of business will be served because they have the money necessary to remodel our playground.
Private users will probably just have to carve out the best niche they can. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in the Compuserve / AOL private network strategy in the coming years. While private users may make up the bulk of internet traffic, there's no real way to coordinate them to the point of building their own network in any reasonable way. Things like this cost money, and nobody's willing to pay for it.
But what I really need when I'm driving late night stretches is a virtual backseat driver. "You're going too fast! Stop tailgating that semi truck! Shouldn't we pull over? I have to pee! Why did you buy that expensive CD player instead of upgrading my CPU?"
After reading the article, it sounds to me like they're cruising around, looking for wireless LAN's that identify themselves.
By default, a wireless base station will broadcast the SSID of the wireless network of which it is part, and wireless LAN cards can join the network without already knowing the SSID of the network.
One of the simplest security practices is to turn off SSID identification broadcast at the base station. Then the wireless user has to know the name of the network in order to connect. Unfortunately, this quickly becomes a gigantic pain in the ass for the admins of the network, because who wants to go through and change the SSID every time you add a new wireless base? It's really practical only for small organizations.
Mind you, I'm sure this could be fairly easily intercepted from traffic between a user and a base station, but it's a start down the road towards hiding your wireless LAN.
WEP encryption has been proven to be an easily circumvented technology (as reported on /. once upon a time), as has this lack of SSID broadcast, but it's a start. The best bet for true security is to implement a VPN over your wireless LAN, or just treat your wireless zone as a DMZ.