I'm the parent poster and I'm one of them. I was a kid when HL1 was release and in Uni by HL2. Now I've got a job, family and less of an interest in gaming than I used to. The time-frame for when the franchise might have mattered has passed a lot of us now.
Valve couldn't obtain a trademark as a "placeholder". A trademark has to be used on something within a year or so for it to be defensible in a court of law. Hence, if they're specifically getting the trademark now, they're confident they'll have something which it can be applied to reasonable soon.
Of course, getting die-hard Half-Life fans out of the woodwork and interested after all this time might be difficult.
Well sure. We don't pushing companies for acting in scummy ways, either because
(1) People aren't aware of things such as this, which demonstrate a certain corporate attitude (2) People are aware, but don't care (3) People are aware, but aren't surprised, because they expect this to be par for the course with most companies and if you were to boycott every single company which has done something scummy, dodgy or immoral at some point, you'd basically have to step away from most forms of technology and products.
There is absolutely nothing to stop companies from being dicks in this manner.
Go and say that to the nearly 1 million federal workers who are going to be on unpaid leave because of this shit. Not to mention those who live on their benefits. As always, it's the little guys who get shit on.
Shooting people in the head as a source of fantasy amusement is not particularly easy to defend compared to other interests though. Having said that, most FPS games consist of precisely this so what does that make most games?
These days... the majority of people are content to watch Youtube videos of cats, and try not to see any potential beyond immediate gratification and entertainment.
Sorry for being direct, but SO THE FUCK WHAT. Does it really bother you that people spend their time on YouTube watching cats (which are cute, big deal) or enjoying the benefits of immediate gratification and entertainment? Humans have enough bullshit to deal with in the world - it's folly to criticize people for not want to hack once they come home from a hard day at work and would instead prefer more immediate forms of gratification.
I make stuff at work. I like my work. But I don't bring my work home much at all (if at all) because downtime is so, so damn important. The hacker ethic is almost gone because there's no reward for personal hacking anymore. Do it at a job you enjoy and get paid for it.
Piracy has it's own set of problems obviously. If we're going list what could theoretically go wrong with DRM and hold piracy up as the alternative, you should list what could theoretically go wrong with piracy. 1: developers use piracy as an excuse to skip the PC market, a much bigger problem to me than call of duty 3 not being accessible in a decade. And 2. viruses and other malware.
Certainly, and I completely understand where you're coming from. Piracy is definitely not as convenient to the general computer user as something like Steam - at least as far as getting the game is concerned. People will pay for convenience, clearly.
If you're honestly having a hard time understanding it, realize that not everyone values things like you do. When considering a 5 or even 60 dollar game, I don't exactly need to buy it for life. If Valve dissapears in 10 years, the games I play now will still be experiences that are worth it. Faith has little to do with it. I buy games I want to play in the near future.
Sorry for thinking about long-term ramifications about the industry and the way things are going with DRM-locked software. People only seem to care about the here and now these days. I DO still play games from over 10 years ago - sometimes it's due to nostalgia, but other times it's because they were just plain better than what's pumped out these days (possibly because they were more PC-centric, hard to say). Sometimes I use things like source ports to make them look better graphically and run on modern systems (ScummVM, Darkplaces and KMQuakeII come to mind).
Nowadays I always think long-term about anything software or media that I buy. I don't want to get fucked later due to changing circumstances, even if said products are perhaps not as interesting later on down the track. I won't know that until later after all.
There's always someone who wants to ruin the party.:)
OK. Without any hard evidence and going totally with anecdotal evidence and a certain "feeling", I can say with almost 100% certainty that the trend of coding these days is that it's just not as well built as code designed for systems with fewer resources, and hence requiring better quality coding to make use of said limited resources. Is that better? If not, bugger off - I want my old fogies moment!
OK, you're an exception. There's probably others (many others?) who think like you, and that's perfectly reasonable. Just not enough for these companies to care, unfortunately.
Flat-out wrong. I distinctly recall changes made during some newer updates of GRUB that notified me that my grub files were different from upstream and whether to copy over, skip the copy or show a diff.
I accept that it's hard to know everything there is to know about a subject, but to assert ignorance as fact and then berate someone for telling something which is actually correct, is fucking disgraceful behavior.
I just knew the moment someone noticed the msdn part of the link, that they'd go off at Microsoft rather than the actual content presented in the talk.
Whatever happened to C++ and fast reliable software?
The path of least resistance. Given the amount of computing power available these days, there's little effort in writing clean, efficient, snappy code requiring little in the way of dependencies, if it results in longer development times. Heck, what are people gonna do, not buy an AMD/NVIDIA card just because of its control panel? That doesn't happen - people grit their teeth, install the.NET dependencies and live with it because no-one's gonna boycott cards because of it - and the companies know this. So there's no motivation to code better.
I have no problem with modern toolkits and IDEs making it easier to product something quickly compared to traditional programming tools. But it also makes it much easier to write rubbish, but quickly-developed rubbish that does the essentials with a lot of overhead. Such is the nature of this industry.
You've forgetting the third option (there's always a third option) - pirating. It's DRM-free, which will continue to run despite the DRM vendor disappearing or there's a fault in the backend or network connectivity or your account is disabled due to any number of issues.
I don't tolerate DRM, but I'm not an open-source zealot either. I love me some closed-source software that's nicer to use and more functional than some of the FOSS stuff out there. But I just can't accept DRM. You say we accept DRM on movies. Who's we? I pirate movies because I don't want DRM, but if I stick with a DRM-free diet I basically miss out on everything that's part of modern society culture. Companies HAVE to compete with DRM-free media since pirates will happy provide it if they don't.
It's amazing how many people seem to think Valve will be around forever. I don't have that level of faith, so I want to know that the software I buy can be run without having a mandatory requirement to access (either continuously or very occasionally) some server somewhere to verify I'm able to use the software I paid for. If I can't pay money for something that I can control access to myself, then I don't pay. I've read too many cases of people not being able to play anything because their Steam client's fucked up and offline mode doesn't work during a network disconnectivity, whereas with DRM-free content, it would. AND WE ACCEPT THIS AS NORMAL?!?
We've fallen too far I think in accepting this as reasonable.
DRM, even Steam DRM, effectively enforces a limited timeline of an arbitrary length of what is purchased. If we truly want to see games being considered a form of art, why do we put up with DRM on art? It doesn't make sense to hobble something in such a way.
I honestly don't care about the lack of resale value with games purchased on Steam. What I can about is whether I can play something for nostalgic reasons in, say, 10-20 years without having to worry about a vendor existing or needing to use cracks (which may or may not exist, nevermind the extra issues associated with this). The ONLY reason I can see DRM still being present on games is because people have given up and don't want to miss out on the big titles.
Funny how people seem to much prefer living in a virtual world and doing all the things you describe rather than perform them in the real world. I wonder if escapism has gone too far...
Myst was a breakout game for its level of atmosphere, immersiveness and pre-rendered graphics. I still enjoy it and boot up ScummVM (development build) every so often to get a hit of nostalgia. Riven's even better in that regard, since it's fun to see if I can finish both games (particualryl the latter) without referring to a walkthrough.
But wtf is this article going on about? New worlds and open-ended gameplay? We have tons of sandbox games now such as GTA, Saints Row and Skyrim. The article doesn't make it clear what it's suggesting we don't have. Myst was a bit unusual in that violence wasn't a focal point of the game (you don't kill things to accomplish tasks), but apart from that they were atmosphere-full games with some interesting puzzles. They weren't out to change the world.
I would really like the entire computer industry to be based on open formats, source and standards but that is a crack dream that will never happen. Something needs to give.
Ah, but the problem is that once you give in a little, then you give in a little more, then over time it becomes easier and easier for things to transform into the wishes of various corporations such that sometime down the track, things have becomes closed, proprietary and the landscape has changed completely (and not necessarily for the better) simply because compromises were made on a continual basis.
I don't really expect this to be the case for Linux, but it has certainly become the case for gaming. DRM and vendor control over the games you buy (Steam being a perpetual rental system after all) is so common and accepted, that anyone who criticizes the concept of having to ask a vendor for access to play or reinstall a game they bought is considered a loony because of all the "cool features" a platform additionally provides.
I don't trust Valve. They've behaved reasonably well so far, but there's no guarantee they'll continue to do so in the future. They're not my friend - I have no personal relationship with them. I'd much prefer DRM-free installers or archives that I can buy and keep backed up on my drives so that they aren't dependent at all on a vendor and can be safely assured to run for years to come (in virtual machines if necessary). With very few exceptions that aren't well documented, you can't do that with Steam.
Presentation is highly important in this business. Like it or not, an attractive web site does wonders for the opinion of those who might stumble upon it. It does not have to be laden with graphics and other whiz-bang features that slow down the browser, but a boring page suggests a lack of bother and care by the company, which might translate into related opinions from those who browse the page.
Geeks continually misunderstand and downplay the significance of image. Humans are visual creatures - ignore this facet at your peril.
Zeitgeist, Mono, Amazon monitoring, Unity, UEFI, MIR
Some of those features are genuinely useful though, particularly for a desktop-orientated distro:
Zeitgeist - it's the basis for being able to launch any program from a prompt just by typing in a few letters of its name, in addition to any files you have, including indexing said files to allow you to find those which have certain key words you're interested in. Although it's mostly used for Unity, I use an alternative launcher called Synapse which also requires Zeitguest and find it invaluable. It could be considered a security issue, but the problem is that all the useful features that are considered standard of any user-focused system (traditional computer AND mobile) kinda require full indexing support. It's what people are used to now, because it's very useful.
Mono - Microsoft might be bastards, but if they really were going to clamp down on the.NET framework for non Windows system, they would have done so by now. I have yet to be convinced there's any threat to Mono - there are enough useful programs out there now which use Mono, that it's better to have it than not.
UEFI - we're moving away from the traditional BIOS. It's inevitable as UEFI becomes the standard. Why berate Canonical for supporting it? Do you want Linux to be unable to run on UEFI-only systems? Or are you confusing it for SecureBoot, which is a different concept altogether? Wouldn't be the first Linux user to not know the difference.
I'm still not happy with the direct Canonical's gone, but they've still done some good and it's wrong to berate them for all of their choices.
You're the once who started with the personal attacks, accusing me of being unable to read. As for being Australia, I Iove it. Our country is far less fucked up than yours and far less hated.:)
As for TPB, Adblock avoids dodgy ads being a vector for infection.
Seriously though, this back and forth has been fun but I think we need to stop.
I see we're ramping up the cuss words. Always a sign of a good argument.:)
In Australia we don't basements. We also don't have RedBox, Hulu or even Netflix. Businesses don't see to want to try to stem piracy here by giving people good, legal options.
As for a good website, ThePirateBay is good enough. It's what's hosted within said site that's the skill.
I've thought about using my Arduino/Raspberry Pi to make a cool project, but honestly once you come home from a long day at work, the last thing you want to do is more work. On the weekend I end up taking care of housework and lose interest in said devices because, like everyone, we need downtime. Movies/games are a good form of downtime. Even if you have the house to yourself, that just means you can work on your movie/game backlog.
I've long stopped judging people about what they do in their spare time. I'd LIKE to be more proactive and build things like you suggest, but I've come to realize that such activities are not as fun as immediate forms of entertainment.
Oh shut the fuck up already. Sounds like you got burnt by not having the knowledge about how to obtain good torrents - that's fine, happens to everyone occasionally. But knowing how to obtain quality torrents is something of a skill, and learning what to look for as signs of a good or bad torrent. Very much like knowing how to not get infected by viruses/trojans/popups - once you know, you wonder how everyone else seems to always have problems.
Who the fuck downloads CAMs anymore? You seriously telling me you can't wait a few months before the DVD/Blu-Rays are released/leaked and the 720p/1080p releases arrive?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm the parent poster and I'm one of them. I was a kid when HL1 was release and in Uni by HL2. Now I've got a job, family and less of an interest in gaming than I used to. The time-frame for when the franchise might have mattered has passed a lot of us now.
Valve couldn't obtain a trademark as a "placeholder". A trademark has to be used on something within a year or so for it to be defensible in a court of law. Hence, if they're specifically getting the trademark now, they're confident they'll have something which it can be applied to reasonable soon.
Of course, getting die-hard Half-Life fans out of the woodwork and interested after all this time might be difficult.
Well sure. We don't pushing companies for acting in scummy ways, either because
(1) People aren't aware of things such as this, which demonstrate a certain corporate attitude
(2) People are aware, but don't care
(3) People are aware, but aren't surprised, because they expect this to be par for the course with most companies and if you were to boycott every single company which has done something scummy, dodgy or immoral at some point, you'd basically have to step away from most forms of technology and products.
There is absolutely nothing to stop companies from being dicks in this manner.
Go and say that to the nearly 1 million federal workers who are going to be on unpaid leave because of this shit. Not to mention those who live on their benefits. As always, it's the little guys who get shit on.
Shooting people in the head as a source of fantasy amusement is not particularly easy to defend compared to other interests though. Having said that, most FPS games consist of precisely this so what does that make most games?
Sorry for being direct, but SO THE FUCK WHAT. Does it really bother you that people spend their time on YouTube watching cats (which are cute, big deal) or enjoying the benefits of immediate gratification and entertainment? Humans have enough bullshit to deal with in the world - it's folly to criticize people for not want to hack once they come home from a hard day at work and would instead prefer more immediate forms of gratification.
I make stuff at work. I like my work. But I don't bring my work home much at all (if at all) because downtime is so, so damn important. The hacker ethic is almost gone because there's no reward for personal hacking anymore. Do it at a job you enjoy and get paid for it.
Certainly, and I completely understand where you're coming from. Piracy is definitely not as convenient to the general computer user as something like Steam - at least as far as getting the game is concerned. People will pay for convenience, clearly.
Sorry for thinking about long-term ramifications about the industry and the way things are going with DRM-locked software. People only seem to care about the here and now these days. I DO still play games from over 10 years ago - sometimes it's due to nostalgia, but other times it's because they were just plain better than what's pumped out these days (possibly because they were more PC-centric, hard to say). Sometimes I use things like source ports to make them look better graphically and run on modern systems (ScummVM, Darkplaces and KMQuakeII come to mind).
Nowadays I always think long-term about anything software or media that I buy. I don't want to get fucked later due to changing circumstances, even if said products are perhaps not as interesting later on down the track. I won't know that until later after all.
There's always someone who wants to ruin the party. :)
OK. Without any hard evidence and going totally with anecdotal evidence and a certain "feeling", I can say with almost 100% certainty that the trend of coding these days is that it's just not as well built as code designed for systems with fewer resources, and hence requiring better quality coding to make use of said limited resources. Is that better? If not, bugger off - I want my old fogies moment!
OK, you're an exception. There's probably others (many others?) who think like you, and that's perfectly reasonable. Just not enough for these companies to care, unfortunately.
Flat-out wrong. I distinctly recall changes made during some newer updates of GRUB that notified me that my grub files were different from upstream and whether to copy over, skip the copy or show a diff.
I accept that it's hard to know everything there is to know about a subject, but to assert ignorance as fact and then berate someone for telling something which is actually correct, is fucking disgraceful behavior.
I just knew the moment someone noticed the msdn part of the link, that they'd go off at Microsoft rather than the actual content presented in the talk.
The path of least resistance. Given the amount of computing power available these days, there's little effort in writing clean, efficient, snappy code requiring little in the way of dependencies, if it results in longer development times. Heck, what are people gonna do, not buy an AMD/NVIDIA card just because of its control panel? That doesn't happen - people grit their teeth, install the .NET dependencies and live with it because no-one's gonna boycott cards because of it - and the companies know this. So there's no motivation to code better.
I have no problem with modern toolkits and IDEs making it easier to product something quickly compared to traditional programming tools. But it also makes it much easier to write rubbish, but quickly-developed rubbish that does the essentials with a lot of overhead. Such is the nature of this industry.
You've forgetting the third option (there's always a third option) - pirating. It's DRM-free, which will continue to run despite the DRM vendor disappearing or there's a fault in the backend or network connectivity or your account is disabled due to any number of issues.
I don't tolerate DRM, but I'm not an open-source zealot either. I love me some closed-source software that's nicer to use and more functional than some of the FOSS stuff out there. But I just can't accept DRM. You say we accept DRM on movies. Who's we? I pirate movies because I don't want DRM, but if I stick with a DRM-free diet I basically miss out on everything that's part of modern society culture. Companies HAVE to compete with DRM-free media since pirates will happy provide it if they don't.
It's amazing how many people seem to think Valve will be around forever. I don't have that level of faith, so I want to know that the software I buy can be run without having a mandatory requirement to access (either continuously or very occasionally) some server somewhere to verify I'm able to use the software I paid for. If I can't pay money for something that I can control access to myself, then I don't pay. I've read too many cases of people not being able to play anything because their Steam client's fucked up and offline mode doesn't work during a network disconnectivity, whereas with DRM-free content, it would. AND WE ACCEPT THIS AS NORMAL?!?
We've fallen too far I think in accepting this as reasonable.
DRM, even Steam DRM, effectively enforces a limited timeline of an arbitrary length of what is purchased. If we truly want to see games being considered a form of art, why do we put up with DRM on art? It doesn't make sense to hobble something in such a way.
I honestly don't care about the lack of resale value with games purchased on Steam. What I can about is whether I can play something for nostalgic reasons in, say, 10-20 years without having to worry about a vendor existing or needing to use cracks (which may or may not exist, nevermind the extra issues associated with this). The ONLY reason I can see DRM still being present on games is because people have given up and don't want to miss out on the big titles.
Australia, actually. Is there something I should know?
Funny how people seem to much prefer living in a virtual world and doing all the things you describe rather than perform them in the real world. I wonder if escapism has gone too far...
Myst was a breakout game for its level of atmosphere, immersiveness and pre-rendered graphics. I still enjoy it and boot up ScummVM (development build) every so often to get a hit of nostalgia. Riven's even better in that regard, since it's fun to see if I can finish both games (particualryl the latter) without referring to a walkthrough.
But wtf is this article going on about? New worlds and open-ended gameplay? We have tons of sandbox games now such as GTA, Saints Row and Skyrim. The article doesn't make it clear what it's suggesting we don't have. Myst was a bit unusual in that violence wasn't a focal point of the game (you don't kill things to accomplish tasks), but apart from that they were atmosphere-full games with some interesting puzzles. They weren't out to change the world.
Ah, but the problem is that once you give in a little, then you give in a little more, then over time it becomes easier and easier for things to transform into the wishes of various corporations such that sometime down the track, things have becomes closed, proprietary and the landscape has changed completely (and not necessarily for the better) simply because compromises were made on a continual basis.
I don't really expect this to be the case for Linux, but it has certainly become the case for gaming. DRM and vendor control over the games you buy (Steam being a perpetual rental system after all) is so common and accepted, that anyone who criticizes the concept of having to ask a vendor for access to play or reinstall a game they bought is considered a loony because of all the "cool features" a platform additionally provides.
I don't trust Valve. They've behaved reasonably well so far, but there's no guarantee they'll continue to do so in the future. They're not my friend - I have no personal relationship with them. I'd much prefer DRM-free installers or archives that I can buy and keep backed up on my drives so that they aren't dependent at all on a vendor and can be safely assured to run for years to come (in virtual machines if necessary). With very few exceptions that aren't well documented, you can't do that with Steam.
Presentation is highly important in this business. Like it or not, an attractive web site does wonders for the opinion of those who might stumble upon it. It does not have to be laden with graphics and other whiz-bang features that slow down the browser, but a boring page suggests a lack of bother and care by the company, which might translate into related opinions from those who browse the page.
Geeks continually misunderstand and downplay the significance of image. Humans are visual creatures - ignore this facet at your peril.
Some of those features are genuinely useful though, particularly for a desktop-orientated distro:
Zeitgeist - it's the basis for being able to launch any program from a prompt just by typing in a few letters of its name, in addition to any files you have, including indexing said files to allow you to find those which have certain key words you're interested in. Although it's mostly used for Unity, I use an alternative launcher called Synapse which also requires Zeitguest and find it invaluable. It could be considered a security issue, but the problem is that all the useful features that are considered standard of any user-focused system (traditional computer AND mobile) kinda require full indexing support. It's what people are used to now, because it's very useful.
Mono - Microsoft might be bastards, but if they really were going to clamp down on the .NET framework for non Windows system, they would have done so by now. I have yet to be convinced there's any threat to Mono - there are enough useful programs out there now which use Mono, that it's better to have it than not.
UEFI - we're moving away from the traditional BIOS. It's inevitable as UEFI becomes the standard. Why berate Canonical for supporting it? Do you want Linux to be unable to run on UEFI-only systems? Or are you confusing it for SecureBoot, which is a different concept altogether? Wouldn't be the first Linux user to not know the difference.
I'm still not happy with the direct Canonical's gone, but they've still done some good and it's wrong to berate them for all of their choices.
You're the once who started with the personal attacks, accusing me of being unable to read. As for being Australia, I Iove it. Our country is far less fucked up than yours and far less hated. :)
As for TPB, Adblock avoids dodgy ads being a vector for infection.
Seriously though, this back and forth has been fun but I think we need to stop.
I see we're ramping up the cuss words. Always a sign of a good argument. :)
In Australia we don't basements. We also don't have RedBox, Hulu or even Netflix. Businesses don't see to want to try to stem piracy here by giving people good, legal options.
As for a good website, ThePirateBay is good enough. It's what's hosted within said site that's the skill.
I've thought about using my Arduino/Raspberry Pi to make a cool project, but honestly once you come home from a long day at work, the last thing you want to do is more work. On the weekend I end up taking care of housework and lose interest in said devices because, like everyone, we need downtime. Movies/games are a good form of downtime. Even if you have the house to yourself, that just means you can work on your movie/game backlog.
I've long stopped judging people about what they do in their spare time. I'd LIKE to be more proactive and build things like you suggest, but I've come to realize that such activities are not as fun as immediate forms of entertainment.
Oh shut the fuck up already. Sounds like you got burnt by not having the knowledge about how to obtain good torrents - that's fine, happens to everyone occasionally. But knowing how to obtain quality torrents is something of a skill, and learning what to look for as signs of a good or bad torrent. Very much like knowing how to not get infected by viruses/trojans/popups - once you know, you wonder how everyone else seems to always have problems.
Who the fuck downloads CAMs anymore? You seriously telling me you can't wait a few months before the DVD/Blu-Rays are released/leaked and the 720p/1080p releases arrive?