I thought that the chip in my ass was supposed to protect me from pr0n0graphy
Indirectly. Over the course of your lifetime, you and everyone you know will be caught committing some horrendous crime, like tax evasion, pedalling kiddie porn, trading drugs, or even - gasp! - sharing content. Eventually, everyone will be a criminal.
When that happens, Gubmint will tailor crime simply by searching their database, coming up with a couple of names, and having a few show trials. That'll scare me and thee and many other people enough to curtail our nefarious activities. Don't worry, they don't want to actually put taxpayers in jail - that's too expensive. They just want to scare us into behaving ourselves and paying our taxes, both governmental and corporate.
Think I'm being overly cynical? Go and actually read the DMCA. The only purpose of that act was to turn you and me into criminals. Commercial pirates are already breaking existing copyright laws - why not just toughen them up?
the alternative, to even give the slightest suggestion that they are interested what their fanatical following sends them, would give a tremendous amount of false hope to the many people who are heavily invested emotionally in their intellectual property
Yerrrrs. Are you taking onboard that a MUD (replace with your favourite buzzword acronym) is defined by its community? EverQuest have gone psychotic with dictating how people are expected to play EQ - who you can play as, how you should play, what you can say. They're like the worst, most pig ignorant, egotistic GM you ever tabletopped with. I'd hate to see Star Wars go that way too.
Which canon? They'll be no more canon as the system allows, and only as canon as the players want them to be. They're already got Everquestish naming conventions; you can't play as a named canon character (not one that the moderators know about, anyway), and you can't play with a name that could corrupt (ha) the 8 year old Phantom Menace market. No C-3PO, and no 4-SK1n either.
It'll be intesting to see how this pans out, and whether they try and enforce something as pathetic as Everquest's "You must have a genre name, but not a trademarked one". Considering that (as with swords and sorcery fantasy) the Star Wars genre naming is defined by the character names, that means we might end up with a lot of "Han Skywalker" and "Luke Solo" type bastardisations.
I'm sure Bill will not do public demo for XBus as he has already learn his lesson last time [USB crash in a Win98 demo]
Funny, but the lesson he really learned is that people bought it anyway, because they didn't see that they had a choice. Likewise, they'll buy Xbox because hald the TV's/radio/cinema/billboard/bus ads in the country will be telling them that if they don't, they'll be strange and different.
it would be news if a E3 demo of a game which is six months or more away from release never crashed during a demonstration
Xbox launches on the 8th of November. That's five and a bit months, less the time to press and distribute it, less the time to test it on Xbox hardware, less the time to actually get the hardware to developers, less the time to actually make the damn hardware. To my mind, they're already cutting it close.
What they had going to pretty much a super powered PC running an xbox emulator
I'm seeing a lot of assumptions here that this was an X-box "emulator". Because X-box hardware doesn't exist yet, all development has to be to the Dx8 API rather than to the silicon (which frankly I wouldn't risk anyway, given M$'s propensity for last minute changes of mind). What we're most likely seeing are games written for Dx8 on a PC, running on a Dx8 P4 GeForce3 PC. M$ need to get real hardware shipping to developers now if they want optimised, stable games on day 1.
Consoles are not PCs, and the software developement process is not the same
Unfortunatly X-boxen don't exist yet, so developers are having to develop to DX8 GeForce PCs. It's just an IMHO, but I think X-Box is going to be a big old mess on launch. It's coming with a hard drive - I wonder if they'll do the unthinkable and release game patches?
you're saying that the inclusion of any female in any action show is sensationalist and that all female action stars are there merely as sex objects
Counter examples then? Xena? Good role and character, but the outfit is pure eye candy. Note that her sidekick's kit got increasingly skimpier as well.
Janeway? Good role and outfit, but no character to speak of. And when the ratings plunged, what happened? Jeri Ryan's spandex clad udders appeared, and Janeway was relegated to a bit part.
Scully? Perhaps initially, but haven't we been seeing her sweating in slips and thin vests a lot recently?
Delenn and perhaps Ivanova are the only characters that I can think of who provide sound counter examples.
They have intentionally allowed the SDMI spec, once heralded as the way the big five would play online, to wither and die with little direction
Bang on. Here's the sequence of events as I see it:
RIAA: Hey, Gubmint, evil child abusing commie pirates are stealing our music! That's bad for the US economy and democracy and such.
Gubmint: Well OK, we'll pass some emergency legislation to criminalise any practical implementation of fair use, but that won't hold up for ever when Joe Sixpack realises he's been screwed. You need to come up with a legal way to distribute this stuff and stop humping everyone on CD prices. We can't make everyone a criminal, not even in California.
RIAA: OK, we'll work on SDMI. In the meantime, lean on the courts to ignore precedent and constituion and scare the crap out of people with some insane decisions.
Gubmint: Done. Now, how's that SDMI coming along?
RIAA: Well darn, wouldn't you know it, some whacko evil genious has gone and cracked it! Ah well, back to the drawing board. Hey, got any campaigns you want bankrolled?
It's just gotta suck when your business model goes *poof*
The irony is that it hasn't gone *poof*, it's gone *whoosh*. Both the RIAA and MPAA have the tiny problem that their members' revenues have gone up in the past few years. When they talk about "losing money" to content sharing, they actually mean "failing to make even more money".
The ball's in their court. When there's a one click solution that lets me credit the artist (not the hard-copy distributor) small amounts per track (not per play, or time limited), I'll happily use it.
There is no ways they can stop people recording stuff
Sure, but they don't want to actually stop me and thee, they want to stop millions of Joe Sixpacks by criminalising and prosecuting a couple of us to intimidate Joe into paying his WWF Bitchslap! tax.
Oh, I think they'll always let you time shift programs.
Er, forgive my UK ignorance, but our digital movie channels over here are already encrypted to stop time shifting. It's only a short hop and a skip to stopping it for everything. Justification? How about "Hey, they show'll be around again in a couple of weeks if enough Joe Sixpacks liked it, right?".
I beleive that the ultimate goal is [...] the retention of ownership and all rights in perpetuity
Over here in the UK, we have a channel, Carlton Cinema, that shows old movies and generally comes bundled in basic cable/satellite packages. They've been quietely buying up TV rights to movies as the main movie channels tire of them. It looks like a low cost, low risk, low reward policy, but it's since transpired that it's Carlton's goal to eventually own everything, in (as you say) perpetuity.
With the exception of the few dozen most recent films, Carlton will eventually own the back catalogue to everything. I'm finding it hard to get worked up about that right now, but I can't believe it's a good thing for one (or a few) organisations to own the rights to everything, forever. What do we think?
I'm a pretty nifty UT player, and I *often* get accused of cheating cuz I can run up the walls with the teleporter (and other stunts). You try to calm people down by saying you're not cheating,
It's sad, isn't it? Back in the day, I used to be a fairly nifty netrek player. Whenever I found myself smacking an Ensign Bozo around too much, I would take the time to take him aside and show him how to do what I'd just done to him. I made a friend, he learned how to not suck as much, and we both got more out of the game.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I now find myself totally turned off by Quake clones. The lame network model allows cheating, the time to reach your performance peak is days rather than months (then it's just down to learning maps), and there seems to only be three kinds of players:
Long time clued players.
Cheating lamers.
Clueless fodder who're just passing through.
There seems to be very little encouragement or education, just frantic frag fests and irritating boasting. By making these games too easy to play, and too easy to hack, we're effectively throwing our doors open and hanging out a sign saying "Bozos welcome!"
cheating in any form in a multiplayer game is not only rude and unfair, but you _will_ be found out
Not in my experience. Plus, play well enough, and you get accused of borging anyway. There is very little trust in Quakish games, and that comes down to them not being aggressive enough in culling network data and fixing the problem at the server. A PPK binary authentication scheme wouldn't go amiss either. See Netrek for an example of how to do it right.
Actually, this will do nothing more than eventually kill your network because of lack of bandwidth. Just think for a second...
Try the other way around. You're reducing the amount of info you have to send, not the other way around. Sending one "object hidden" packet is a lot cheaper than sending updates on every player who's anywhere near you.
All the games need to do is perform more computation on the server, to avoid sending "forbidden knowledge" to the clients
Absolultely. I'm constantly surprised by how lame the network models are for commercial games. It's not as though they're breaking new ground: netrek had a rock solid model close to fifteen years ago. The server pared the sent information down to the absolute minimum, so there was very little that a hacked client could do to gain any kind of advantage.
For example, cloaked ships appeared on the strategic display as "??"; you could hack the client to show their actual designation and to draw them on the tactical display, but the server would still only be sending (incorrect) position information very infrequently, with no heading or speed info, so all you really got was a vague idea of where they were.
, allowing employees to buy workstations and software with no central standard practically guarantees that a lot of hardware and software will be wasted if the employee leaves
My employer reckons that the cost to replace a trained engineer (who'd be likely to be making such choices) is in excess of $40k (i.e. they want me to retain my cadre of geeks). You'd be as well to let them take their boxen with them when they leave, for all the difference it'd make. Of course, in the real world, I have to fill in a huge loss form for every pissy little $20 mobile phone charger that disappears.:(
MS wants people to use a PC even though the designer could've done the work more quickly and efficiently on a Mac.
But beyond a certain level, execs are free to ignore such petty inconveniences - some of the Word documentation that comes out of M$ has MacOS Word stamps in the metadata. That's why I suspect that the AOL-TW execs who could actually make a difference won't bother their arses changing over to using AOL.
This means that people actually in the position to have their opinion heard will be able to give input to the development of AOL products
True only if the actual strategic decision makers at AOL-TW read their own mail and manage their own calendars. Beyond a certain level in some large companies, Stacey Secretary handles all that for you. Anyone know for a fact that the top brass at AOL-TW handle their own communications?
I believe I said greedy corporate entities. Napster was started by a college dropout with the explicit purpose to let We the People rip music from the five companies that currently screw us over. If you'd been following the Napster story, you'd know that this statement has been used against Napster by the RIAA in court. If Napster had a vision statement of "Milk the big 5 for our own greedy benefit," they'd actually be in a better position than they're currently in.
would you worry about what a bunch of suits in Washington thought about things on paper that you couldn't see
True, but every time a government gets away with making a decision that benefits a few CEO's to the detriment of We the People, they get the message that it's OK to take kickbacks in preference to caring about you, or your electric bill or healthcare. After we're properly screwed on the circusses, then they'll start on the bread.
Slashdot Mirror
Indirectly. Over the course of your lifetime, you and everyone you know will be caught committing some horrendous crime, like tax evasion, pedalling kiddie porn, trading drugs, or even - gasp! - sharing content. Eventually, everyone will be a criminal.
When that happens, Gubmint will tailor crime simply by searching their database, coming up with a couple of names, and having a few show trials. That'll scare me and thee and many other people enough to curtail our nefarious activities. Don't worry, they don't want to actually put taxpayers in jail - that's too expensive. They just want to scare us into behaving ourselves and paying our taxes, both governmental and corporate.
Think I'm being overly cynical? Go and actually read the DMCA. The only purpose of that act was to turn you and me into criminals. Commercial pirates are already breaking existing copyright laws - why not just toughen them up?
Rant over, normal service has now been resumed. ;)
Yerrrrs. Are you taking onboard that a MUD (replace with your favourite buzzword acronym) is defined by its community? EverQuest have gone psychotic with dictating how people are expected to play EQ - who you can play as, how you should play, what you can say. They're like the worst, most pig ignorant, egotistic GM you ever tabletopped with. I'd hate to see Star Wars go that way too.
Which canon? They'll be no more canon as the system allows, and only as canon as the players want them to be. They're already got Everquestish naming conventions; you can't play as a named canon character (not one that the moderators know about, anyway), and you can't play with a name that could corrupt (ha) the 8 year old Phantom Menace market. No C-3PO, and no 4-SK1n either.
It'll be intesting to see how this pans out, and whether they try and enforce something as pathetic as Everquest's "You must have a genre name, but not a trademarked one". Considering that (as with swords and sorcery fantasy) the Star Wars genre naming is defined by the character names, that means we might end up with a lot of "Han Skywalker" and "Luke Solo" type bastardisations.
Funny, but the lesson he really learned is that people bought it anyway, because they didn't see that they had a choice. Likewise, they'll buy Xbox because hald the TV's/radio/cinema/billboard/bus ads in the country will be telling them that if they don't, they'll be strange and different.
Xbox launches on the 8th of November. That's five and a bit months, less the time to press and distribute it, less the time to test it on Xbox hardware, less the time to actually get the hardware to developers, less the time to actually make the damn hardware. To my mind, they're already cutting it close.
I'm seeing a lot of assumptions here that this was an X-box "emulator". Because X-box hardware doesn't exist yet, all development has to be to the Dx8 API rather than to the silicon (which frankly I wouldn't risk anyway, given M$'s propensity for last minute changes of mind). What we're most likely seeing are games written for Dx8 on a PC, running on a Dx8 P4 GeForce3 PC. M$ need to get real hardware shipping to developers now if they want optimised, stable games on day 1.
Unfortunatly X-boxen don't exist yet, so developers are having to develop to DX8 GeForce PCs. It's just an IMHO, but I think X-Box is going to be a big old mess on launch. It's coming with a hard drive - I wonder if they'll do the unthinkable and release game patches?
Counter examples then? Xena? Good role and character, but the outfit is pure eye candy. Note that her sidekick's kit got increasingly skimpier as well.
Janeway? Good role and outfit, but no character to speak of. And when the ratings plunged, what happened? Jeri Ryan's spandex clad udders appeared, and Janeway was relegated to a bit part.
Scully? Perhaps initially, but haven't we been seeing her sweating in slips and thin vests a lot recently?
Delenn and perhaps Ivanova are the only characters that I can think of who provide sound counter examples.
Bang on. Here's the sequence of events as I see it:
Your move, Gubmint.
The irony is that it hasn't gone *poof*, it's gone *whoosh*. Both the RIAA and MPAA have the tiny problem that their members' revenues have gone up in the past few years. When they talk about "losing money" to content sharing, they actually mean "failing to make even more money".
The ball's in their court. When there's a one click solution that lets me credit the artist (not the hard-copy distributor) small amounts per track (not per play, or time limited), I'll happily use it.
Sure, but they don't want to actually stop me and thee, they want to stop millions of Joe Sixpacks by criminalising and prosecuting a couple of us to intimidate Joe into paying his WWF Bitchslap! tax.
Er, forgive my UK ignorance, but our digital movie channels over here are already encrypted to stop time shifting. It's only a short hop and a skip to stopping it for everything. Justification? How about "Hey, they show'll be around again in a couple of weeks if enough Joe Sixpacks liked it, right?".
Over here in the UK, we have a channel, Carlton Cinema, that shows old movies and generally comes bundled in basic cable/satellite packages. They've been quietely buying up TV rights to movies as the main movie channels tire of them. It looks like a low cost, low risk, low reward policy, but it's since transpired that it's Carlton's goal to eventually own everything, in (as you say) perpetuity.
With the exception of the few dozen most recent films, Carlton will eventually own the back catalogue to everything. I'm finding it hard to get worked up about that right now, but I can't believe it's a good thing for one (or a few) organisations to own the rights to everything, forever. What do we think?
It's sad, isn't it? Back in the day, I used to be a fairly nifty netrek player. Whenever I found myself smacking an Ensign Bozo around too much, I would take the time to take him aside and show him how to do what I'd just done to him. I made a friend, he learned how to not suck as much, and we both got more out of the game.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I now find myself totally turned off by Quake clones. The lame network model allows cheating, the time to reach your performance peak is days rather than months (then it's just down to learning maps), and there seems to only be three kinds of players:
There seems to be very little encouragement or education, just frantic frag fests and irritating boasting. By making these games too easy to play, and too easy to hack, we're effectively throwing our doors open and hanging out a sign saying "Bozos welcome!"
It's not that hard. The server just needs to be more aggressive in culling the network information that it's sending. All solved years ago.
Not in my experience. Plus, play well enough, and you get accused of borging anyway. There is very little trust in Quakish games, and that comes down to them not being aggressive enough in culling network data and fixing the problem at the server. A PPK binary authentication scheme wouldn't go amiss either. See Netrek for an example of how to do it right.
Try the other way around. You're reducing the amount of info you have to send, not the other way around. Sending one "object hidden" packet is a lot cheaper than sending updates on every player who's anywhere near you.
Absolultely. I'm constantly surprised by how lame the network models are for commercial games. It's not as though they're breaking new ground: netrek had a rock solid model close to fifteen years ago. The server pared the sent information down to the absolute minimum, so there was very little that a hacked client could do to gain any kind of advantage.
For example, cloaked ships appeared on the strategic display as "??"; you could hack the client to show their actual designation and to draw them on the tactical display, but the server would still only be sending (incorrect) position information very infrequently, with no heading or speed info, so all you really got was a vague idea of where they were.
My employer reckons that the cost to replace a trained engineer (who'd be likely to be making such choices) is in excess of $40k (i.e. they want me to retain my cadre of geeks). You'd be as well to let them take their boxen with them when they leave, for all the difference it'd make. Of course, in the real world, I have to fill in a huge loss form for every pissy little $20 mobile phone charger that disappears. :(
But beyond a certain level, execs are free to ignore such petty inconveniences - some of the Word documentation that comes out of M$ has MacOS Word stamps in the metadata. That's why I suspect that the AOL-TW execs who could actually make a difference won't bother their arses changing over to using AOL.
True only if the actual strategic decision makers at AOL-TW read their own mail and manage their own calendars. Beyond a certain level in some large companies, Stacey Secretary handles all that for you. Anyone know for a fact that the top brass at AOL-TW handle their own communications?
You're assuming that ChrmnSteve78 knows how to read email. More likely it'll be filtered and printed off by ScrtryStacey42. ;)
Really? I always thought WINDOWS was a recursive acroynm for "Windows Is Not Developed On Windows Systems". ;)
I believe I said greedy corporate entities. Napster was started by a college dropout with the explicit purpose to let We the People rip music from the five companies that currently screw us over. If you'd been following the Napster story, you'd know that this statement has been used against Napster by the RIAA in court. If Napster had a vision statement of "Milk the big 5 for our own greedy benefit," they'd actually be in a better position than they're currently in.
True, but every time a government gets away with making a decision that benefits a few CEO's to the detriment of We the People, they get the message that it's OK to take kickbacks in preference to caring about you, or your electric bill or healthcare. After we're properly screwed on the circusses, then they'll start on the bread.