Reprocessing also increases the amount of waste there is to dispose of.
Complete and utter nonsense caused by a misreading of early safety reports. Allow me to inject some real information:
Rather, waste management [from reprocessing] is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste--the fission products--to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.
Are you even aware that the uranium used in reactors isn't bomb grade?
Are you aware that reprocessed Plutonium isn't bomb grade?*
Both would require significant reprocessing to be made into weapons. If you must do it, it's much easier to reprocess Uranium. At least then you'll be ready to build your bomb. With Plutonium, you're not even half-way there.
So is burning coal, operating a steel plant, manufacturing dangerous chemicals, and driving a race car. Yet we do all those things on a regular basis!
That's why nuclear power plants are considered terrorist targets.
That's why there are 3 columns of stealth troopers protecting each plant from invasion by the Slitheen.
Or in other words, [Citation Needed].
do you recall what caused Three Mile Island or what the consequences might have been had the hydrogen bubble ignited?
Um... it DID ignite. Several times. Ignition of hydrogen in the reactor core only complicated a difficult situation. However, the reactor operated more or less as intended in that situation and the risk to the surrounding area was minimal. Certainly not anywhere near Chernobyl levels. (Chernobyl ran into a lack of shielding against a boiler explosion. So all those materials were spread around surrounding areas rather than being contained by three feet of concrete.)
And the bigger problem is the cost and various issues with properly sequestering the waste. Using nuclear power is basically like borrowing to run the country - we get the immediate benefit and our children have to pay the price.
That's a terrible analogy. Nuclear power is just fine. Most of the hot stuff is gone within days to months. That's why reactors can be serviced and/or dismantled within a few months to a few years of being shut down. If anything, we're leaving our kids a nasty power crisis and dirty air because we refuse to build more nuclear plants!
Any idea how much it will cost to pay just for the guards to monitor a waste site for 100,000 years or so?
I am being completely serious here. Any materials that last that long are more than safe enough. Heck, anything with a nuclear lifetime that long is safer than the Potassium stored in your body*.
Think about it. Radiation is a process whereby mass is converted into energetic particles. Thus the mass itself is the fuel for the radioactivity. The more radiation produced, the faster the mass is converted into that radiation. In result, the mass will burn itself out in a short period of time. Materials with 10,000 year lifespans convert their mass to radiation so slowly that you can count each particle as it is produced. Compared to cosmic radiation, that's a zero risk.
Furthermore, there are different types of radiation. A great deal of radiation (e.g. alpha and beta) can't even penetrate the dead layer of cells on our skin!
In effect, the situation with nuclear radiation has been overblown. Read up on radioactivity if you want to understand the true dangers of working with the material. Once you understand things better, you may start demanding that your local coal plant be replaced with a nuclear plant! (Did you know that coal plants disperse more radioactive material into the environment than any other power-producing technology?)
* In a human body of 70 kg mass, about 4,400 nuclei of 40K decay per second.
Does it really make sense to have to guard and watch over nuclear waste for thousands of years because we as a society couldn't be bothered to minimize our energy use?
Not really. That's why we SHOULD be reprocessing that stuff and burning it in reactors. Yet the powers that be feel reprocessing increases the risk of nameless Bad Guys(TM) getting their hands on fissionable materials. Never mind that the Uranium slugs used in regular reactors are far more useful to Bad Guys(TM) than reprocessed Plutonium. (If you have limited resources, a gun-type bomb is infinitely easier to create than an implosion device.)
The thing is, the nuclear waste issue has been incredibly overblown by environmentalists and government alike. We have solutions. It's just a matter of getting this regulatory ship realigned to meet the modern world.
"Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity -- a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games"
Sounds pretty cool, eh? Expect that it's wrong. Nintendo announced a solution to DOWNLOAD games to the SD Card. At no point did they confirm an executable solution. (In fact, they seemed intent on steering away from such an announcement.)
But Slashdot's reporting was not the worst. The worst was GameSpot, a site that SHOULD by all rights be authoritative. Yet here they are putting words into Reggie's mouth:
9:23] "Iwata is addressing the problem of Wii storage," he says. "Soon you will be able to download and store virtual console and WiiWare titles directly on your SD card, and play them off your SD card. This will make the Wii download experience much easier."
I emailed a more reputable editor who was at the event and confirmed for a fact that those words were never spoken. Yet many, many people quoted GameSpot's poor journalism as proof positive that Nintendo announced a solution to execute games off of SD Cards.
What is a site like Wikipedia supposed to do?
Thankfully, this is a case where a mountain of solid reporting existed to counteract the poor reporting. So Wikipedia reports the correct information. But what if this was more obscure information? How would Wikipedia know who to trust? How would they be able to check again bad reporting?
Answer: They can't. Reporters must be help accountable for the factual nature of their statements. (In the case of GameSpot, that means they should have issued a retraction.) If they cannot maintain a reasonable level of journalistic standards, the industry as a whole should start advertising them as an unreliable source.
[B]ut there is a problem with appealing to the authority of other people's written words: many publications don't do any fact checking at all, and many of those that do simply call up the subject of the article and ask if the writer got the facts wrong or right.
Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture? What if the solution isn't to berate Wikipedia for that which they cannot fix, but rather to ensure the foundations upon which the system is based are fixed?
Failures in authority are of far greater reach than just Wikipedia. That's why academia seeks to correct itself on a regular basis. But the rigid standards of academia (standards which have weakened over time) are not applied to all fields that Wikipedia reports on. Using the case of Jaron Lanier, how is an impartial observer supposed to distinguish between a failure in authoritative reporting vs. an attempt to rewrite history for personal benefit? The only way to prove one over the other is to find evidence. In the case of Wikipedia, it must find another authortative party to dispute the original because doing detective work is beyond what is reasonable for an encyclopedia.
Usually Microsoft's anti-piracy initiatives are aimed at businesses without any licenses at all.
Oh, that's right. I forgot that Microsoft's licensing practices consider an OEM license to not count as a business license for their software. So if you want to ghost the machine to meet your business's needs, you need to re-purchase Windows at a higher rate and thus pay for it twice. Sucker!
And if you don't pay twice? Well, Microsoft will sick the BSA dogs on you for not bleeding money like a good little company.
To be serious for a moment, does anyone else feel that Microsoft's crusade on software piracy is simply insensitive in the recent wake of high seas piracy? A lot of good men and women are out there getting killed just so companies like Microsoft can deliver their product around the world. Rather than displaying their global conscience and supporting the cause of defeating real piracy, they're worried about a bunch of 12 year olds who harmlessly steal software for kicks! Meanwhile, the vast majority of consumers who use Windows have actually paid for Windows. Repeatedly.
But that's not good enough for Microsoft, is it? They want to squeeze blood from a stone. Get every last nickel out of those horrible people who miscounted their licenses by one, or the people who load Linux/BSD/Solaris/Plan9 on their machines. (Because, obviously, anyone using Linux is ACTUALLY pirating Windows!)
You know what? I can't bring myself to care, Microsoft. In fact, I hope your company BURNS for those practices.
...invest heavily in warships to help protect our shipping lanes. Nothing could be a better use of their money than helping stop the violence inherent in piracy on the high-seas. Already, many American warships are in stand-off confrontations with merchies taken over by pirates. I--
Sorry, what? This is about software? How Microsoft is concerned about companies who are missing one or two licenses out of 5,000 or 12 year old kids bragging that they got XP off of I13|<p1R4Cy.com? Pfff. In that case, screw 'em.
1. It was a rib at Javascript. Don't take it so seriously.:-)
2. Are you talking about JS or PHP? Because in JS, != is less restrictive than !==. != will attempt to coerce the types prior to comparison. Thus you almost always want to use !== to prevent automatic casting of types.
e.g. ('12' != 12) would evaluate to false while ('12' !== 12) would evaluate to true.
When is the press going to realize that Java != Javascript? (Or Java !== Javascript, even!) Comparing "Java" performance between browsers is meaningless. (And isn't what SunSpider does anyway.) Comparing JavaScript performance has a very real impact on the users.
Parent is correct. Ground transportation at the destination is the EXACT purpose of this form of machine. That's why they're not advertising it as a flying car. Because it's not. It's an airplane that can legally drive on roads to get you to your hotel or a cheap parking garage. (Hanger fees are exorbitant.)
In many ways, the PS3 is even worse. Several of their patches had to be rolled back due to unexpected system failures.:-(
Hopefully, Microsoft and Sony will pay attention to Nintendo's quality control and get their patching issues back under control. If it doesn't work out of the box, it shouldn't be shipping for a console. (It's almost criminal, the poor state that PC games ship in.) That's my take, anyway.:-)
That's better than when your small business email server blows a RAID controller* and it takes all day to build a new one from backups. In that case you're looking at additional costs as opposed to a refund.
* The whole point of RAID is to make machines more reliable, right? So how come RAID controllers have become such unreliable parts? Yay for Dell-quality equipment, I guess.
Google Apps is a suite of hosted collaboration and communication software and services designed for workplace use. Its Premier edition costs US$50 per user per year and includes a 99.9% uptime guarantee for the Gmail service.
In August, Gmail had three significant outages that affected not only individual consumers of the free Webmail service but also paying Google Apps Premier customers. As a result, Google decided to extend a credit to all Apps Premier customers and vowed to improve its problem-notification methods.
$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
I have a Wii. There are no game patches. System patches are slightly annoying, I'll give you that. But on the Wii they work every time, so I don't worry.
So for the record, how many examples of people having difficulties with Spore in particular have your personally encountered?
Interestingly, I do not know anyone who has purchased Spore in particular. Despite the media blitz, there is very little interest among the gamers I know. (Many of whom are far more "hard core" than myself.) The problems I have seen are indeed past problems, but they deal with the SecuROM software. SecuROM has been around for some time now, and is nothing new with the release of Spore.
If we follow your logic of incidents to date with Spore based on support calls, then you may be correct. However, that number is meaningless. EA has already lost customers due to DRM problems and will likely lose more. Singling out the statistics for Spore is exactly the type of statistical abuse I was railing against in my post. It's like saying, "For the 20% of people who have not been previously burned by SecuROM or StarForce, 99.8% don't have any problems." Which means (in effect) that 99.8% of the customers happen to be the people that the game works for.
The messed up part is that in the original Gamasutra interview, he claimed that about half of that 0.2% were pirates and that the other half were innocent folks caught up in an anti-marketing blitz! Never mind that (according to the Telegraph and other news sources) the pirated versions of the game are available without DRM. Why would pirates complain when they have such an easy time cracking these titles?
The truth is that the DRM is ineffective and punishes legitimate users. Take one example from the Amazon reviews of Spore. A serviceman obtained the game without realizing that it required Internet activation. He is unable to activate it and is thus not able to play the game. Another user got burned by the downloads. Both these examples are outside the canvasing of Amazon, yet they have been punished by EA's heavy handed tactics.
The end result of all this is that EA is implementing DRM because they believe that PC gaming sales are down because of piracy. Yet piracy continues unabated while EA exasperates the very issue they were trying to solve!
So, no acknowledgment that (whether intentionally or unintentionally) you told lies? You still stand by your easily proven disinformation? And you then accuse me of "not agreeing" with you?
Here's a hint, old chap: Lies are lies are lies. Facts are not a matter of opinion. They are facts. And you are not in possession of them.
Until you can understand the difference, you are a troll and possibly a shill. Which is really too bad. I had a lot of respect for you after you published your article where you found that DRM was standing between you and your customers. Apparently, those lessons have not sunk in, because it sounds like you are blaming your customers for being greedy pirates rather than considering whether or not you are competitive in the market.
I'd explain why your games are not doing well (nothing to do with piracy, I can assure you), but I fear it would be pearls before swine. When you're ready to understand a thing or two about your market, hopefully someone will be there to educate you.
Since you failed to catch what i said, he didn't claim that 99.8% didn't care, he said 99.8% shouldn't be affected,
^THIS. IS. WRONG! (And not SPARTA!:-P)
If this were correct, most of the people I know SHOULD NOT BE AFFECTED BY DRM ISSUES. Nothing to do with whether they care or not. Specifically, to the point, on topic, right on the button, THE GAME DOES NOT FUNCTION FOR THEM.
M'kay? I hope that finally sorts it for you.
In the real world things don't always work correctly 100% of the time
Which was one of the points I made in my original post. (Second paragraph, last sentence.)
Apologies for the SHOUTING, but the key points seem to be blowing by you.
I understood what he's saying. And I'm saying the exact opposite. 99.8% sounds like a bullshit, made up number based on my own experiences and the experiences of those I know. While anecdotal evidence is not usually statistically significant, it can be when we're talking about a vanishingly small statistic. In the case of 0.2% of gamers, I should not know anyone who has run into DRM problems. Yet I know many other people besides myself who have had these problems. Ergo, the statistic is likely bullshit.
Since you failed to catch it, I will repeat the key point of my post: How many people have already left PC gaming because DRM caused their games to NOT work?
My belief is that the answer to that question poses a statistically HIGH number of users. Even if those users cannot identify the problem as DRM. A survey of those users would report technical issues, but few would be able to identify those issues as a problem with the DRM.
Of course, the industry would have you believe that PC gaming is dying because of piracy. As I consumer who pays money for games, I know that's simply untrue. For reasons why, refer back to my original post.
This hasn't even a grain of truth. Thief sold well and, according to Tim Stellmach (Gamespy interview), Looking Glass made millions of dollars from it. If Thief had failed to be a hit, Looking Glass would have died. Instead, Thief kept the company going.
If his post acts like a troll, sounds like a troll, and smells like a troll, it's a troll.
YOU DON'T. You pander to your market. The PC market is not about multiplayer gaming in front of a TV. So don't treat it as such. Work your game so that you provide a good single-player experience. Similarly, when you program for the Wii, work your game to provide a good multiplayer experience in front of the TV.
If you look at WiiWare titles that have been ported from the PC, nearly every title has been modified to make it more appealing on the Wii platform. Defend Your Castle is the quintessential example as it went from a 1 player flash game with crudely drawn graphics and gore to a fun, four player game with a nifty look and cool particle engine.
I'm actually in your position. The standard practice for obtaining a WiiWare license appears to be:
1. Create a title that runs on the computer. Even if it's just a demo, it should convince Nintendo that you can create games for their system.
2. OBTAIN COMMERCIAL OFFICE SPACE! I can't stress this one enough. Even if you get 200 square feet of office space that costs $200/mo., this step is critical to getting Nintendo to trust you. (Nintendo is concerned about secure access to the development kit.)
3. Apply for a WiiWare license. 2D games don't matter. DYC, World of Goo, Mega Man 9, Gradius Rebirth, Cave Story, and many other games have already paved that road for you.
At least, that's the strategy my little cadre expects to pursue. If we can ever finish pulling a team together, that is. Having a part time game designer and part time programmer does us no good if we can't get one of our artist friends to sign up. At least we have some seriously recognized brands lined up.
Anyway, feel free to email me if you need any more info. I'm far from a fountain of information on the process, but I may be able to point you in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Complete and utter nonsense caused by a misreading of early safety reports. Allow me to inject some real information:
Rather, waste management [from reprocessing] is made very much easier. The decree that Yucca Mountain must isolate the waste for more than 10,000 years is due primarily to the presence of long-lived transuranic elements. Appropriate reprocessing will allow those troublemakers to be consumed in fast reactors, leaving only the real waste--the fission products--to be disposed of, and their radioactive toxicity fall below that of the original uranium ore after less than 500 years. Effective waste management becomes a slam dunk.
Are you aware that reprocessed Plutonium isn't bomb grade?*
Both would require significant reprocessing to be made into weapons. If you must do it, it's much easier to reprocess Uranium. At least then you'll be ready to build your bomb. With Plutonium, you're not even half-way there.
* http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/2006/april/article2.html
Will you stop spreading FUD?
So is burning coal, operating a steel plant, manufacturing dangerous chemicals, and driving a race car. Yet we do all those things on a regular basis!
That's why there are 3 columns of stealth troopers protecting each plant from invasion by the Slitheen.
Or in other words, [Citation Needed].
Um... it DID ignite. Several times. Ignition of hydrogen in the reactor core only complicated a difficult situation. However, the reactor operated more or less as intended in that situation and the risk to the surrounding area was minimal. Certainly not anywhere near Chernobyl levels. (Chernobyl ran into a lack of shielding against a boiler explosion. So all those materials were spread around surrounding areas rather than being contained by three feet of concrete.)
That's a terrible analogy. Nuclear power is just fine. Most of the hot stuff is gone within days to months. That's why reactors can be serviced and/or dismantled within a few months to a few years of being shut down. If anything, we're leaving our kids a nasty power crisis and dirty air because we refuse to build more nuclear plants!
I am being completely serious here. Any materials that last that long are more than safe enough. Heck, anything with a nuclear lifetime that long is safer than the Potassium stored in your body*.
Think about it. Radiation is a process whereby mass is converted into energetic particles. Thus the mass itself is the fuel for the radioactivity. The more radiation produced, the faster the mass is converted into that radiation. In result, the mass will burn itself out in a short period of time. Materials with 10,000 year lifespans convert their mass to radiation so slowly that you can count each particle as it is produced. Compared to cosmic radiation, that's a zero risk.
Furthermore, there are different types of radiation. A great deal of radiation (e.g. alpha and beta) can't even penetrate the dead layer of cells on our skin!
In effect, the situation with nuclear radiation has been overblown. Read up on radioactivity if you want to understand the true dangers of working with the material. Once you understand things better, you may start demanding that your local coal plant be replaced with a nuclear plant! (Did you know that coal plants disperse more radioactive material into the environment than any other power-producing technology?)
* In a human body of 70 kg mass, about 4,400 nuclei of 40K decay per second.
Not really. That's why we SHOULD be reprocessing that stuff and burning it in reactors. Yet the powers that be feel reprocessing increases the risk of nameless Bad Guys(TM) getting their hands on fissionable materials. Never mind that the Uranium slugs used in regular reactors are far more useful to Bad Guys(TM) than reprocessed Plutonium. (If you have limited resources, a gun-type bomb is infinitely easier to create than an implosion device.)
The thing is, the nuclear waste issue has been incredibly overblown by environmentalists and government alike. We have solutions. It's just a matter of getting this regulatory ship realigned to meet the modern world.
...who's takeaway from the article is that we need to build more nuclear plants?
Must have been a stack overflow somewhere. /BOFH reference
To add to my point, the Nintendo DSi announcement is a perfect example. Take a gander at the Slashdot story:
http://games.slashdot.org/games/08/10/02/2116202.shtml
"Nintendo finally came out with a solution to the Wii's lack of storage capacity -- a 2GB SD card from which users can execute games"
Sounds pretty cool, eh? Expect that it's wrong. Nintendo announced a solution to DOWNLOAD games to the SD Card. At no point did they confirm an executable solution. (In fact, they seemed intent on steering away from such an announcement.)
But Slashdot's reporting was not the worst. The worst was GameSpot, a site that SHOULD by all rights be authoritative. Yet here they are putting words into Reggie's mouth:
9:23] "Iwata is addressing the problem of Wii storage," he says. "Soon you will be able to download and store virtual console and WiiWare titles directly on your SD card, and play them off your SD card. This will make the Wii download experience much easier."
I emailed a more reputable editor who was at the event and confirmed for a fact that those words were never spoken. Yet many, many people quoted GameSpot's poor journalism as proof positive that Nintendo announced a solution to execute games off of SD Cards.
What is a site like Wikipedia supposed to do?
Thankfully, this is a case where a mountain of solid reporting existed to counteract the poor reporting. So Wikipedia reports the correct information. But what if this was more obscure information? How would Wikipedia know who to trust? How would they be able to check again bad reporting?
Answer: They can't. Reporters must be help accountable for the factual nature of their statements. (In the case of GameSpot, that means they should have issued a retraction.) If they cannot maintain a reasonable level of journalistic standards, the industry as a whole should start advertising them as an unreliable source.
Which raises an interesting question that no one seems to be asking: What if the problem is not Wikipedia at all? What if Wikipedia is a symptom of a much larger problem in our culture? What if the solution isn't to berate Wikipedia for that which they cannot fix, but rather to ensure the foundations upon which the system is based are fixed?
Failures in authority are of far greater reach than just Wikipedia. That's why academia seeks to correct itself on a regular basis. But the rigid standards of academia (standards which have weakened over time) are not applied to all fields that Wikipedia reports on. Using the case of Jaron Lanier, how is an impartial observer supposed to distinguish between a failure in authoritative reporting vs. an attempt to rewrite history for personal benefit? The only way to prove one over the other is to find evidence. In the case of Wikipedia, it must find another authortative party to dispute the original because doing detective work is beyond what is reasonable for an encyclopedia.
Oh, that's right. I forgot that Microsoft's licensing practices consider an OEM license to not count as a business license for their software. So if you want to ghost the machine to meet your business's needs, you need to re-purchase Windows at a higher rate and thus pay for it twice. Sucker!
And if you don't pay twice? Well, Microsoft will sick the BSA dogs on you for not bleeding money like a good little company.
Damn you. You beat me to it!
To be serious for a moment, does anyone else feel that Microsoft's crusade on software piracy is simply insensitive in the recent wake of high seas piracy? A lot of good men and women are out there getting killed just so companies like Microsoft can deliver their product around the world. Rather than displaying their global conscience and supporting the cause of defeating real piracy, they're worried about a bunch of 12 year olds who harmlessly steal software for kicks! Meanwhile, the vast majority of consumers who use Windows have actually paid for Windows. Repeatedly.
But that's not good enough for Microsoft, is it? They want to squeeze blood from a stone. Get every last nickel out of those horrible people who miscounted their licenses by one, or the people who load Linux/BSD/Solaris/Plan9 on their machines. (Because, obviously, anyone using Linux is ACTUALLY pirating Windows!)
You know what? I can't bring myself to care, Microsoft. In fact, I hope your company BURNS for those practices.
...invest heavily in warships to help protect our shipping lanes. Nothing could be a better use of their money than helping stop the violence inherent in piracy on the high-seas. Already, many American warships are in stand-off confrontations with merchies taken over by pirates. I--
Sorry, what? This is about software? How Microsoft is concerned about companies who are missing one or two licenses out of 5,000 or 12 year old kids bragging that they got XP off of I13|<p1R4Cy.com? Pfff. In that case, screw 'em.
You sir, are my hero! ;-)
1. It was a rib at Javascript. Don't take it so seriously. :-)
2. Are you talking about JS or PHP? Because in JS, != is less restrictive than !==. != will attempt to coerce the types prior to comparison. Thus you almost always want to use !== to prevent automatic casting of types.
e.g. ('12' != 12) would evaluate to false while ('12' !== 12) would evaluate to true.
More info
When is the press going to realize that Java != Javascript? (Or Java !== Javascript, even!) Comparing "Java" performance between browsers is meaningless. (And isn't what SunSpider does anyway.) Comparing JavaScript performance has a very real impact on the users.
Parent is correct. Ground transportation at the destination is the EXACT purpose of this form of machine. That's why they're not advertising it as a flying car. Because it's not. It's an airplane that can legally drive on roads to get you to your hotel or a cheap parking garage. (Hanger fees are exorbitant.)
In many ways, the PS3 is even worse. Several of their patches had to be rolled back due to unexpected system failures. :-(
Hopefully, Microsoft and Sony will pay attention to Nintendo's quality control and get their patching issues back under control. If it doesn't work out of the box, it shouldn't be shipping for a console. (It's almost criminal, the poor state that PC games ship in.) That's my take, anyway. :-)
That's better than when your small business email server blows a RAID controller* and it takes all day to build a new one from backups. In that case you're looking at additional costs as opposed to a refund.
* The whole point of RAID is to make machines more reliable, right? So how come RAID controllers have become such unreliable parts? Yay for Dell-quality equipment, I guess.
Doesn't anyone RTFA?
$50/yr for each user is not "free". Nor is it in the domain of "you get what you pay for". $50 per user is actually a rather significant sum when we're talking about 100+ user companies.
I have a Wii. There are no game patches. System patches are slightly annoying, I'll give you that. But on the Wii they work every time, so I don't worry.
Interestingly, I do not know anyone who has purchased Spore in particular. Despite the media blitz, there is very little interest among the gamers I know. (Many of whom are far more "hard core" than myself.) The problems I have seen are indeed past problems, but they deal with the SecuROM software. SecuROM has been around for some time now, and is nothing new with the release of Spore.
If we follow your logic of incidents to date with Spore based on support calls, then you may be correct. However, that number is meaningless. EA has already lost customers due to DRM problems and will likely lose more. Singling out the statistics for Spore is exactly the type of statistical abuse I was railing against in my post. It's like saying, "For the 20% of people who have not been previously burned by SecuROM or StarForce, 99.8% don't have any problems." Which means (in effect) that 99.8% of the customers happen to be the people that the game works for.
The messed up part is that in the original Gamasutra interview, he claimed that about half of that 0.2% were pirates and that the other half were innocent folks caught up in an anti-marketing blitz! Never mind that (according to the Telegraph and other news sources) the pirated versions of the game are available without DRM. Why would pirates complain when they have such an easy time cracking these titles?
The truth is that the DRM is ineffective and punishes legitimate users. Take one example from the Amazon reviews of Spore. A serviceman obtained the game without realizing that it required Internet activation. He is unable to activate it and is thus not able to play the game. Another user got burned by the downloads. Both these examples are outside the canvasing of Amazon, yet they have been punished by EA's heavy handed tactics.
The end result of all this is that EA is implementing DRM because they believe that PC gaming sales are down because of piracy. Yet piracy continues unabated while EA exasperates the very issue they were trying to solve!
So, no acknowledgment that (whether intentionally or unintentionally) you told lies? You still stand by your easily proven disinformation? And you then accuse me of "not agreeing" with you?
Here's a hint, old chap: Lies are lies are lies. Facts are not a matter of opinion. They are facts. And you are not in possession of them.
Until you can understand the difference, you are a troll and possibly a shill. Which is really too bad. I had a lot of respect for you after you published your article where you found that DRM was standing between you and your customers. Apparently, those lessons have not sunk in, because it sounds like you are blaming your customers for being greedy pirates rather than considering whether or not you are competitive in the market.
I'd explain why your games are not doing well (nothing to do with piracy, I can assure you), but I fear it would be pearls before swine. When you're ready to understand a thing or two about your market, hopefully someone will be there to educate you.
Good day to you, sir.
Will you please PAY ATTENTION?
^THIS. IS. WRONG! (And not SPARTA! :-P)
If this were correct, most of the people I know SHOULD NOT BE AFFECTED BY DRM ISSUES. Nothing to do with whether they care or not. Specifically, to the point, on topic, right on the button, THE GAME DOES NOT FUNCTION FOR THEM.
M'kay? I hope that finally sorts it for you.
Which was one of the points I made in my original post. (Second paragraph, last sentence.)
Apologies for the SHOUTING, but the key points seem to be blowing by you.
I understood what he's saying. And I'm saying the exact opposite. 99.8% sounds like a bullshit, made up number based on my own experiences and the experiences of those I know. While anecdotal evidence is not usually statistically significant, it can be when we're talking about a vanishingly small statistic. In the case of 0.2% of gamers, I should not know anyone who has run into DRM problems. Yet I know many other people besides myself who have had these problems. Ergo, the statistic is likely bullshit.
Since you failed to catch it, I will repeat the key point of my post: How many people have already left PC gaming because DRM caused their games to NOT work?
My belief is that the answer to that question poses a statistically HIGH number of users. Even if those users cannot identify the problem as DRM. A survey of those users would report technical issues, but few would be able to identify those issues as a problem with the DRM.
Of course, the industry would have you believe that PC gaming is dying because of piracy. As I consumer who pays money for games, I know that's simply untrue. For reasons why, refer back to my original post.
Last I checked, spouting outright lies is a key feature of trolling. 2 seconds of research would have found out that Poor sales of Thief did not kill Looking Glass and that 2D Boy has had no serious piracy. In fact, the Looking Glass post-mortem explicitly says:
If his post acts like a troll, sounds like a troll, and smells like a troll, it's a troll.
YOU DON'T. You pander to your market. The PC market is not about multiplayer gaming in front of a TV. So don't treat it as such. Work your game so that you provide a good single-player experience. Similarly, when you program for the Wii, work your game to provide a good multiplayer experience in front of the TV.
If you look at WiiWare titles that have been ported from the PC, nearly every title has been modified to make it more appealing on the Wii platform. Defend Your Castle is the quintessential example as it went from a 1 player flash game with crudely drawn graphics and gore to a fun, four player game with a nifty look and cool particle engine.
Parent is not trolling. Would a friendly mod please undo the troll moderation?
I'm actually in your position. The standard practice for obtaining a WiiWare license appears to be:
1. Create a title that runs on the computer. Even if it's just a demo, it should convince Nintendo that you can create games for their system.
2. OBTAIN COMMERCIAL OFFICE SPACE! I can't stress this one enough. Even if you get 200 square feet of office space that costs $200/mo., this step is critical to getting Nintendo to trust you. (Nintendo is concerned about secure access to the development kit.)
3. Apply for a WiiWare license. 2D games don't matter. DYC, World of Goo, Mega Man 9, Gradius Rebirth, Cave Story, and many other games have already paved that road for you.
At least, that's the strategy my little cadre expects to pursue. If we can ever finish pulling a team together, that is. Having a part time game designer and part time programmer does us no good if we can't get one of our artist friends to sign up. At least we have some seriously recognized brands lined up.
Anyway, feel free to email me if you need any more info. I'm far from a fountain of information on the process, but I may be able to point you in the right direction.