Any idiot can say "I want to run my household electricity using water alone". It takes a bit of thinking, planning, grafting, testing, theorising and researching to realise if it's possible and feasible, and the best method. And it takes effort, testing, remaking and engineering to actually make it happen. Few people are able to do all those steps on their own and few teams can work coherently enough to get it all to work as originally envisaged.
The problem is those idiots who say the first step and then ask for funding for the rest. That's not how it works. Get close to the third step, and people *will* dig in and help to get to the end.
Specifically, every single gamer on the planet has had an idea along the lines of "A game like X but with this feature from Y and this screen from Z", etc. And, yes, in your head, it works and would be fabulous. The idea is 0.1%, though, because LITERALLY every gamer in the world has lots of those ideas. Making anything even vaguely close and then getting it to the point where others would play it is actually 99.9% of the work.
Go on a programming forum. You'll see hundreds of people who want to "make my own sort-of Facebook/Instagram/whatever" and who've never coded a line in their life. They think that getting a coder, and an artist and a sound engineer and a web developer etc. together is easy and that their "idea" is what will make the project successful. What they don't realise is IF those people ever did get together, they could come up with a thousand better ideas that would all be more feasible and popular anyway.
Tell me that next time you're arrested for crossing a perfectly ordinary road (even with zero traffic on it), or "failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign", or any of a thousand and one ridiculous notions of what adults shouldn't be allowed to do.
The US is really no better or worse than Europe. The biggest problem with the US is that they DON'T REALISE THIS.
"How is Project X coming along anyway? To a cynic, that 'donate' button doesn't look all that tempting."
When I have anything vaguely worth other people's time or investment, they will see. Until then, I intend to get it to the point where it's obvious that I'm not just trying to scam money from people but have actually put years of back-breaking into making something they might actually want to BUY rather than speculatively invest in. If someone'd given me $30,000 (or, hell, $3000) a few years ago, it might even have been in that state or finished by now. Fact is that I've spent several THOUSAND hours on it, and quite a bit of money on things like art assets from independent artists, etc. All in my spare time and from my own money.
Hence the word "Donate" - and not "Pre-Order" or "Kickstart" or "Invest". The Paypal button is actually just pulled forward from sites I used to run for the Freesco project - mirrored multiple times for their usefulness - and the code I wrote for applications for it back then, and some of my GP2X work in porting apps. I get occasional donations, not much, but I make it clear that it's a retrospective donation - you pay me IF I've already done you a favour, and you want to. That's the only way I do business, outside of explicit contracts.
(And if you want an actual status update on Project X - hell, I don't even get people's hopes up by telling them what it is - I've hit limits because I do far too much expensive pathfinding and have to refactor the code. A quick test says it's perfectly feasible. In the meantime, I'm hunting down another artist. But put those comments on a blog that mentions what the project is and I'd be swamped in people expecting me to perform on their schedule, and be disappointed by the "coding stall" of the last few weeks).
You paid money to a project that's going to make a torch (flashlight to you Americans)? And one that has a "programmable" bulb (because on and off are so complicated for a computer to do and humans always want flashy-lights)?
Even the FAQ is so vague when it comes to what the hell you'd ever do with it. And it costs as much as a decent Maglite.
A fool and his money... No wonder the bank intervened.
I said: "As soon as someone says "We need X amount of money to do Y", you have to look into exactly who they are and why they need it and what they'll do with it."
You said: "Look at the project, determine if it *is* possible based on it's merits and the current technology available, investigate the people involved as much as possible and treat it like a high risk investment that might just get you a t-shirt and a nifty piece of software."
So we basically agree. When you specify what the project is doing and for EXPLICITLY and you've thought it through, I don't have a problem. And investing them in a question of "Do I trust that this is accurate and this person will do it?". It's the *REST* that annoy me, including things like my example - "let's make an indie game with us somewhat-heard-of coding people and famous voice actors!". That's NOT a project description, and it gets through Kickstarter's "filters" all the time. That's where I find it dubious.
If the link between "I'd like something that does this" and "I have one of these in my hands" is full of holes, gaps, guesses and thoughtless babble, a project is doomed to fail and you should steer clear.
It couldn't have been made before 2003 - Konami still had the rights and no interest in making a sequel.
These same people owned the rights from then on and even as far as 2007, work and progress was being reported on it. Nothing happened. That's four years of actual work seemingly wasted. They could have been coding, or looking for funding, or just sitting on their bottoms. We don't know.
And, let's not forget, there's NOTHING yet. Nothing at all. Not a dickie-bird.
And what's the Kickstarter done? Maybe found them a more ordinary publisher / investor who will work on it and take a cut. You could have done that just by proving interest in the game in the first place - not by ACTUALLY removing money from people's accounts. If the interest was there, the same developers and publishers and investors would have been interested.
And this is a sequel to a 1988 game, we're talking about. You're telling me that in 24 years nobody's thought "I'll make a game, like this really cool RPG I saw when I was younger"? Anybody could have written that game in-between, and if it were good enough and sold enough, they could have vied with Konami to sell it as a Wasteland sequel. They didn't. That's not because of lack of funding, that's because of lack of interest. Nobody could even be bothered to make a semi-rip-off of it at home.
And how much resemblance is a sequel going to have to what made the original special? Basically nothing, from what I can see.
Kickstarter isn't doing anything "special" here. Those developers could have sourced expressions of interest from gamers, started coding, got to a publisher, etc. in the meantime. They didn't get that far. They couldn't even be bothered to knock up some code and get something working until someone paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars, with all the established and open game engines that are out there today. And still all you have now are a few pieces of concept art (read: Someone knocked up something in Photoshop that will probably never be actually achievable).
Your example doesn't convince me in the slightest. You're a month in and nothing significant has happened on a two-million-dollar project, that could have been made at any time in the last 5 years and CERTAINLY in the last 24 years.
Call me when it's released, when you have PRODUCT, when you have a $2.4m game sitting on your hands. All you've done is provide a developer that had no interest in a 24-year-old "franchise", and did nothing for 4 years when they got it, with a few million dollars on the basis of a promise.
It seems to me that a lot of people looking on Kickstarter weren't around in the 80's, when software companies went under left, right and centre after making fabulous promises, and then the coders would miraculously pop up from nowhere with another company working on something completely different, while the company went bankrupt with no product and the directors were in comfortable retirement in the Bahamas.
"If you can't afford reps to handle customer relations then a techies last resort would possibly be to delete posts. The alternative would be to spend time to deal with potential customers instead of building the damn thing. Any engineer will tell you what he'd rather do. It's clumsy, it's not wise, but if you don't have the time..."
Sorry, this is the sort of excuse that lots of projects hide behind.
You know, it takes NOTHING to put up a small update at the end of your working day saying what you've done that day on the project. Literally seconds in some cases, for a fast typist. Sure, you can work all hours, and be doing it outside a job, and have a family, etc.
But if have any sort of smartphone or computer, it takes SECONDS to post a "Still struggling with X. Mr Y says it will be another week." or similar post onto a project page each day. If it's nothing to do it each day, then each week or each month is EVEN EASIER.
Those people PAID for you to be there, working. At least have the decency to keep them up to date and in the loop and LOOK busy (the same as you would if your boss was getting frustrated by your lack of feedback). They (and others looking at that page) are also CUSTOMERS. If you disappear for weeks or months at a time with no word, there's no reason to believe that in the future you WON'T do that one second after I place my order and I won't see product for months.
In the time it took you to read through the posts, you could have done it ten times, and you could ignore replying to the ones that your post answered. If you took the time to DELETE posts, that means you're conscious that the project looks bad with those posts and you don't have an answer. Instead of DELETING them, answer them. Even if the answer is "We're not sure yet".
If you're on a large project and you honestly can't take 5 minutes out of EVERY WORKING DAY you work on it in order to post an update (sod individual replies, that's just pointless with Internet-scale projects without a large team), then you're going to cause yourself ten times more problems - it means you aren't checking paperwork, aren't sitting and thinking things through, aren't considering exactly HOW you're going to deliver something the customers want, etc.
It's not a hardship to write a status update and forgo replying to a thousand people, and actually works BETTER. It's not a hardship to reply to recurring-themes of comments specifically. If it is, then you're trying to hide something, or just setting yourself up for future failure.
Fund established indie developers. They have the skill to do it, the flair to do something new, the proven ability to bring to market, and the flexibility to take risks.
I don't touch big-name games and haven't for years because of the lack of originality and huge expense on wasteful games. And I don't even own a Sony product and have never bought one, for similar reasons.
The other alternative is, of course, something called INVESTMENT. Go to people who *don't* have ties to EA, etc. and want to get into the market and negotiate the percentages with them. Like any other business would have to. It's not rocket science, people won't throw money at you unless you try and can PROVE your worth. You can prove your worth at your own expense the first time round, like most people do.
"Someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists" shouldn't be giving their money to random people on Kickstarter without some sort of contract or reputation. Full stop.
Which is why I don't touch Kickstarter. Sure, it'd be nice to get a few "crowdsourced" ideas up and running but, you know what? Those that *CAN* make sense, end up getting made anyway, and often making money anyway.
As soon as someone says "We need X amount of money to do Y", you have to look into exactly who they are and why they need it and what they'll do with it. Those Kickstarter projects that are basically "We'd like to make an indie game that does X" really annoy me. You do? Bugger off and do it then! One of the "big" ones a while ago had signed up a famous voice artist before the project had even been funded - sorry, but that's the LAST thing to worry about and probably the LAST thing I'd ever want added to a game I was funding (no matter how small) - the bloody janitor probably has a good enough voice that you'd never notice the difference.
Save your cash. Give it to established developers, those who have written games you've enjoyed, and those with proven results. Like indie developers in the Humble bundles, or things like Altitude, or whatever. Don't give it on the basis of promises of what they *think* they *could* do until they've actually done it.
Now, if we were talking about things like hardware manufacturing costs, etc. of something that someone has designed in order to get into mass production, then that's a different matter but the same principles apply. Too many "crowdfunded" projects (OpenPandora, etc.) fail miserably even when they have the best will in the world, purely because they've never done certain parts of it, or only handled smaller projects, etc. Where's my "Open Graphics Card" that was being designed / manufactured what? Ten years ago? Hell, it had AGP as an "option" last I looked, so it's already dead in the water for any commercial backer.
Making a video card work is far from easy - but you have to consider your investment like any other. If you don't trust the people involved to follow through, or you just think that throwing money at these sorts of problems is what's lacking, then you're going to be doomed to failure.
There are cryptographically secure versions. But you've missed the point.
This stops random port-spam, random brute-force attacks, and casual access. If you want something secure, you should SECURE it (e.g. by restricting access to the bare minimum necessary and provide only public-key authentication ONLY). You can do that AND add port-knocking, if you want.
But the spam on port 22 on an unsecured machine will flood your logs the second you put it on the net. Port-knocking stops that without having to touch a SINGLE configuration for all your services. And, if you want it to, it can be cryptographically secure in itself too, no matter what application sits behind it.
It's quite literally another level and a DIFFERENT level of security, above and beyond what you might usually deploy.
knockd on Linux. Apt-get should find it for you. It will execute a specified shell script when it receives a specified knock (default one is specified). That shell script can be passed the IP that knocked (so you can include it in an iptables opening within the script).
There are also implementations for Windows, should you need that.
I have a portknocking setup. All your packets bounce when you touch my port 22 until you have touched a "magic sequence" of port numbers first. That sequence can be cryptographically strong, time-dependent, etc. but even a simple one-port knock is enough to stop all this random SSH spam and has been for years.
And if you do "get lucky" and find the right ports and then detect that port 22 is open and then start a brute-force on that? Public-key-only authentication and no root logins allowed.
Impact on me? Another line in a shell script that I use to connect (and hell, even Android has free port-knocking apps, not to mention them being standard-enough to be in Ubuntu/Debian). Impact on server? Greatly reduced number of fake connections bouncing off iptables and a tiny little daemon that does nothing but listen on the ports I need (and can ONLY open the SSH port even if compromised). Impact on brute-forcers? They might as well give up and go home.
Even those remote companies that we do allow to port-forward direct to their device on my work network (e.g. telecoms providers, etc.) understand it and "knock" before they come in (which tells us exactly when they are about to log in), while everyone else in the world sees closed ports.
Why everyone doesn't use it, I have no idea. Even our VPN users have an automated script that just knocks to open the VPN ports (and only the VPN ports) before they connect. Transparent to them, invisible to everyone else, no different if "compromised".
Fine. Now do a Euro symbol in ASCII. So it's not actually ASCII. It's not HTML either, even if that has symbols for a lot of other things and has to be parsed to be safe. So UTF-8, especially seeing as it opens up EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE too, and lots of weird and useful mathematical symbols, is the best and easiest option to support.
The patent infringement would not extend - the user did not knowingly infringe the patent - you can't infringe as a software USER (otherwise I'd be personally responsible for every patent that MS, Linux, whatever, infringes).
The person responsible (and whom the legal system WOULD crush instead of RandomJoe), is the copyright (and thus knowing patent too) infringement made by CrackerB in in stripping the EULA.
Now, if you'd picked PURELY copyright infringement, you'd have had a more convincing example (i.e. just because I get the White Album from a friend that took off the EULA does not mean I can distribute it willy-nilly).
The guy who bought the seed from a third-party was not party to ANY contract.
The guy who sold them, and the company that produced them - possibly they DID have a contract. Possibly that contract IS breached. But that's a *contract* dispute between those two parties. You can try to sue that seller for the perceived loss of value of Monsanto assets due to their breach of contract, if you like.
But trying to sue the guy who bought them (who at worst has been conned into buying something "illegal") is like trying to sue the guy who bought your TV from a pawn shop, not knowing it was stolen. Except there is no theft, in this instance, only an "unauthorised copy", so no intention to permanently deprive, and no case of handling stolen goods either.
What you're trying to say is that you own ANY plant that, by natural process, has acquired genes that were originally obtained from a Monsanto plant. That's like suing because your dog has acquired a specific colour because his parents had bred with a dog that come from a "company-owned" stock. It's like suing because someone's horse has acquired Red Rum's genes from somewhere. And just as fecking ludicrous to try to defend.
Only if you're the sort of idiot that thinks you should throw something away because something new has come out, or thinks that they shouldn't resell devices they aren't using (resale value depends on the quality of the initial build, don't forget) or, worse, thinks that 1 year is a long time for a commercial product costing more than my car to last.
The "annual upgrade cycle" is the realm of the idiot. It means that no device you buy has EVER had more than a year or so of testing, or expected to last more than a year. Hell, I nearly peed myself when I heard about Apple STILL not being able to get clock-changes correct throughout Europe. I think this the first year they've ever managed it, after several highly-public gaffes in previous years.
When I pay for a product, I expect it to be built to a certain quality - not be part of an enforced obsolescence scheme. If you want to buy a product that somehow magically degrades after a year (either because something new has come out or because the manufacturing was diabolical), you do that. Personally, I know that the chip inside the machine will run at the same speed next year as it does this year AND that every piece of electrical/electronic equipment I own has lasted at least 2 years (and some up to 20!).
"Apple made to comply with existing laws that are quite reasonable, everyone else complies with and which aid the consumer."
So I don't really see what the fuss is about. If you're building expensive devices and putting them into people's hands, expecting them to last two years isn't a hardship, unless your business is BUILT upon their obsolescence. In which case, this is a win for the consumer is stopping you doing things like that.
"Apple FORCED to make devices that last more than a year on average". Gosh. The horror.
And every other electronics manufacturer trading in the EU has to do the same and has done for a while now. Hell, I can get CARS with a five year warranty, and there's no end of things that could go wrong on them and it costs the manufacturer 10 times as much if they do go wrong or they have a design flaw.
"Apple THREATENED WITH LAWSUIT if they don't give consumers a good deal"
PC97 PC's? Seriously? Barely anybody had a network connection when that was out, let alone remote-access. And how would remote access to that microphone work through your firewall and without you noticing the traffic?
Every time you come up with (or reiterate) a crap conspiracy theory, I mentally filter everything you say as if I was talking to the local nutter on the bus.
Just goes to show that nobody can predict the future with any accuracy, eh? Which makes you wonder why companies would listen to them in the first place.
Who would have guessed that a cheap, ad-supported Worms rip-off (which itself was a Scorched-Earth rip-off, etc.) would get 10m downloads in the first day of the release of its... what... fifth title? And make an awful lot of money. While the Worms sequels tended towards the dire themselves?
Who would have thought that the idea of a Linux smartphone would be a success? Who would have thought that just indexing the web and running statistics on the whole damn thing would make a better search engine than anyone else had ever made and create one of the most powerful companies in the world? Who would have thought that tablets wouldn't be successful until, well, Windows Tablet Edition's were dead and buried?
Who would have thought that IBM would be sued by a dead shell of a company and it get drawn out to a multi-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit? Who would have though that just changing the screen type could make people buy MILLIONS of a popular e-book device?
Things happen. And the WORST people to listen to are a) critics, b) "industry experts" that post popular columns in papers and journals and c) potential competitors about how those things would never happen.
Microsoft keep trying to tell me that the cloud is the next thing I should buy into. Car manufacturers keep telling me that they'll make a fast, practical, environmentally-friendly car that I can afford. Solar / wind / wave power enthusiasts keep telling me that we'll all be running the country off them soon.
The shock here is not that Red Hat made $1bn (and some of those comments were made only in 2010, which I would have considered stupid and short-sighted back then), but that people still think that their opinion matters when they are talking about a competitor, or that people base decisions on what Gartner and similar tell them as if they were the Oracle.
The BIGGEST companies and successes in the world come about by surprise to even their owners. Who would have thought that the richest man in the world would be the one who wrote a BASIC interpreter?
You cannot make predictions like that, and trying just makes you look stupid.
When was the last time a standard wheelchair did 80mph when the user pressed a button/pedal? When was the last time a crutch was fitted with ABS to help it stop in time because it went so fast?
There's progress, and there's fecking ignorance of the scale of the problem.
Did they think of the possibility of driving over a cliff-edge while out of GPS reception?
Or what happens if a bridge collapses? Does the car detect the void underneath it and stop, or just think it's a steep hill and plummet over the edge?
Does it detect ice, snow, oil, sand before the wheels are there? What about fire? What about an accident happening to the tanker in front of you and you ploughing through the spilled petroleum because the car doesn't "see" it? What about kids throwing stones off the top of a bridge onto the passing cars (common problem in the UK - someone died just the other month from this)? Is the car looking UP too and determining their intent?
There are a BILLION and one problems, that only happen once in a lifetime. But if that causes you (OR ANYONE ELSE - sod the blind person, I would complain to the highest authority if a blind person was driving a car around my area, with or without a permit, and risking pedestrians and other driver's lives) to die early, or be at raised risk of injury, there's a lot more things to consider than you can EVER detect with sensors OR ever account for in programming and testing.
This is why even a jumbo jet - so of the most highly automated and tested machines in the world - has TWO HUMAN OPERATORS. And even there, they have TWO because the first can't be trusted on their own (proven by that recent thing with the pilot).
If you honestly, seriously, think that you can reliably determine the outcome of a machine complex enough to obtain all that data, you're an idiot. You *CAN* verify a system like an airbag control, or ABS, because it's isolated and has the tiniest amount of actual code running the thing that you can (and DO) mathematically verify.
You can't verify a system on this scale. It's like trying to verify a Kinect. You just cannot guarantee what it will detect something as just by a simple test of something similar. And this is orders-of-magnitude more complex, more important and more deadly than a stupid games console.
In all the years I've been coming to slashdot, not one single article has required video.
I saw the tsunami video. Not on Slashdot. If I wanted to see it, Slashdot is neither where I would go, nor where I would first find out about it (by a long shot).
Because what matters is NOT your bandwidth to Comcast but THEIR bandwidth to the outside world. The more people using a Comcast connection to access NON-Comcast services, the more it costs them, because they need more external access and peering, which is "expensive".
What you do on your own network and (in theory) between two Comcast customers costs them virtually nothing. The capacity is already there.
More interesting - if they don't count this Comcast service, why do they count internal traffic (Comcast->Comcast subscribers) and can, say, Google get a box put into their network to cache Google requests and get "not counted" towards their subscriber's limits?
Just like idle.slashdot.org (whose sarcastic "Waste of your time. Don't ever go there" I feel is the best advice I've heard).
Whenever there's been a video post, I've been quite quick to complain about it (and I'm not the only one), so yeah, shove them off into tv.slashdot.org so I can ignore it totally.
Sorry, but I (used to) come on here for information and news. It takes HUNDREDS of times longer to convey that information in a video than it does on a text page, which is why I don't watch TV News, and why I came to Slashdot for some techy/geeky news that other online outfits were lacking in.
Separate it off, but don't be shocked that nobody goes on there. And I'd have preferred your developer time and bandwidth to have been put to some better use all along, if I'm honest.
Slashdot Mirror
Any idiot can say "I want to run my household electricity using water alone". It takes a bit of thinking, planning, grafting, testing, theorising and researching to realise if it's possible and feasible, and the best method. And it takes effort, testing, remaking and engineering to actually make it happen. Few people are able to do all those steps on their own and few teams can work coherently enough to get it all to work as originally envisaged.
The problem is those idiots who say the first step and then ask for funding for the rest. That's not how it works. Get close to the third step, and people *will* dig in and help to get to the end.
Specifically, every single gamer on the planet has had an idea along the lines of "A game like X but with this feature from Y and this screen from Z", etc. And, yes, in your head, it works and would be fabulous. The idea is 0.1%, though, because LITERALLY every gamer in the world has lots of those ideas. Making anything even vaguely close and then getting it to the point where others would play it is actually 99.9% of the work.
Go on a programming forum. You'll see hundreds of people who want to "make my own sort-of Facebook/Instagram/whatever" and who've never coded a line in their life. They think that getting a coder, and an artist and a sound engineer and a web developer etc. together is easy and that their "idea" is what will make the project successful. What they don't realise is IF those people ever did get together, they could come up with a thousand better ideas that would all be more feasible and popular anyway.
Tell me that next time you're arrested for crossing a perfectly ordinary road (even with zero traffic on it), or "failing to come to a complete stop at a stop sign", or any of a thousand and one ridiculous notions of what adults shouldn't be allowed to do.
The US is really no better or worse than Europe. The biggest problem with the US is that they DON'T REALISE THIS.
"How is Project X coming along anyway? To a cynic, that 'donate' button doesn't look all that tempting."
When I have anything vaguely worth other people's time or investment, they will see. Until then, I intend to get it to the point where it's obvious that I'm not just trying to scam money from people but have actually put years of back-breaking into making something they might actually want to BUY rather than speculatively invest in. If someone'd given me $30,000 (or, hell, $3000) a few years ago, it might even have been in that state or finished by now. Fact is that I've spent several THOUSAND hours on it, and quite a bit of money on things like art assets from independent artists, etc. All in my spare time and from my own money.
Hence the word "Donate" - and not "Pre-Order" or "Kickstart" or "Invest". The Paypal button is actually just pulled forward from sites I used to run for the Freesco project - mirrored multiple times for their usefulness - and the code I wrote for applications for it back then, and some of my GP2X work in porting apps. I get occasional donations, not much, but I make it clear that it's a retrospective donation - you pay me IF I've already done you a favour, and you want to. That's the only way I do business, outside of explicit contracts.
(And if you want an actual status update on Project X - hell, I don't even get people's hopes up by telling them what it is - I've hit limits because I do far too much expensive pathfinding and have to refactor the code. A quick test says it's perfectly feasible. In the meantime, I'm hunting down another artist. But put those comments on a blog that mentions what the project is and I'd be swamped in people expecting me to perform on their schedule, and be disappointed by the "coding stall" of the last few weeks).
I'm a cynic, yes, but not a hypocrite. :-)
Seriously?
You paid money to a project that's going to make a torch (flashlight to you Americans)? And one that has a "programmable" bulb (because on and off are so complicated for a computer to do and humans always want flashy-lights)?
Even the FAQ is so vague when it comes to what the hell you'd ever do with it. And it costs as much as a decent Maglite.
A fool and his money... No wonder the bank intervened.
I said: "As soon as someone says "We need X amount of money to do Y", you have to look into exactly who they are and why they need it and what they'll do with it."
You said: "Look at the project, determine if it *is* possible based on it's merits and the current technology available, investigate the people involved as much as possible and treat it like a high risk investment that might just get you a t-shirt and a nifty piece of software."
So we basically agree. When you specify what the project is doing and for EXPLICITLY and you've thought it through, I don't have a problem. And investing them in a question of "Do I trust that this is accurate and this person will do it?". It's the *REST* that annoy me, including things like my example - "let's make an indie game with us somewhat-heard-of coding people and famous voice actors!". That's NOT a project description, and it gets through Kickstarter's "filters" all the time. That's where I find it dubious.
If the link between "I'd like something that does this" and "I have one of these in my hands" is full of holes, gaps, guesses and thoughtless babble, a project is doomed to fail and you should steer clear.
It couldn't have been made before 2003 - Konami still had the rights and no interest in making a sequel.
These same people owned the rights from then on and even as far as 2007, work and progress was being reported on it. Nothing happened. That's four years of actual work seemingly wasted. They could have been coding, or looking for funding, or just sitting on their bottoms. We don't know.
And, let's not forget, there's NOTHING yet. Nothing at all. Not a dickie-bird.
And what's the Kickstarter done? Maybe found them a more ordinary publisher / investor who will work on it and take a cut. You could have done that just by proving interest in the game in the first place - not by ACTUALLY removing money from people's accounts. If the interest was there, the same developers and publishers and investors would have been interested.
And this is a sequel to a 1988 game, we're talking about. You're telling me that in 24 years nobody's thought "I'll make a game, like this really cool RPG I saw when I was younger"? Anybody could have written that game in-between, and if it were good enough and sold enough, they could have vied with Konami to sell it as a Wasteland sequel. They didn't. That's not because of lack of funding, that's because of lack of interest. Nobody could even be bothered to make a semi-rip-off of it at home.
And how much resemblance is a sequel going to have to what made the original special? Basically nothing, from what I can see.
Kickstarter isn't doing anything "special" here. Those developers could have sourced expressions of interest from gamers, started coding, got to a publisher, etc. in the meantime. They didn't get that far. They couldn't even be bothered to knock up some code and get something working until someone paid them hundreds of thousands of dollars, with all the established and open game engines that are out there today. And still all you have now are a few pieces of concept art (read: Someone knocked up something in Photoshop that will probably never be actually achievable).
Your example doesn't convince me in the slightest. You're a month in and nothing significant has happened on a two-million-dollar project, that could have been made at any time in the last 5 years and CERTAINLY in the last 24 years.
Call me when it's released, when you have PRODUCT, when you have a $2.4m game sitting on your hands. All you've done is provide a developer that had no interest in a 24-year-old "franchise", and did nothing for 4 years when they got it, with a few million dollars on the basis of a promise.
It seems to me that a lot of people looking on Kickstarter weren't around in the 80's, when software companies went under left, right and centre after making fabulous promises, and then the coders would miraculously pop up from nowhere with another company working on something completely different, while the company went bankrupt with no product and the directors were in comfortable retirement in the Bahamas.
"If you can't afford reps to handle customer relations then a techies last resort would possibly be to delete posts. The alternative would be to spend time to deal with potential customers instead of building the damn thing. Any engineer will tell you what he'd rather do. It's clumsy, it's not wise, but if you don't have the time..."
Sorry, this is the sort of excuse that lots of projects hide behind.
You know, it takes NOTHING to put up a small update at the end of your working day saying what you've done that day on the project. Literally seconds in some cases, for a fast typist. Sure, you can work all hours, and be doing it outside a job, and have a family, etc.
But if have any sort of smartphone or computer, it takes SECONDS to post a "Still struggling with X. Mr Y says it will be another week." or similar post onto a project page each day. If it's nothing to do it each day, then each week or each month is EVEN EASIER.
Those people PAID for you to be there, working. At least have the decency to keep them up to date and in the loop and LOOK busy (the same as you would if your boss was getting frustrated by your lack of feedback). They (and others looking at that page) are also CUSTOMERS. If you disappear for weeks or months at a time with no word, there's no reason to believe that in the future you WON'T do that one second after I place my order and I won't see product for months.
In the time it took you to read through the posts, you could have done it ten times, and you could ignore replying to the ones that your post answered. If you took the time to DELETE posts, that means you're conscious that the project looks bad with those posts and you don't have an answer. Instead of DELETING them, answer them. Even if the answer is "We're not sure yet".
If you're on a large project and you honestly can't take 5 minutes out of EVERY WORKING DAY you work on it in order to post an update (sod individual replies, that's just pointless with Internet-scale projects without a large team), then you're going to cause yourself ten times more problems - it means you aren't checking paperwork, aren't sitting and thinking things through, aren't considering exactly HOW you're going to deliver something the customers want, etc.
It's not a hardship to write a status update and forgo replying to a thousand people, and actually works BETTER. It's not a hardship to reply to recurring-themes of comments specifically. If it is, then you're trying to hide something, or just setting yourself up for future failure.
It's already in my post.
Fund established indie developers. They have the skill to do it, the flair to do something new, the proven ability to bring to market, and the flexibility to take risks.
I don't touch big-name games and haven't for years because of the lack of originality and huge expense on wasteful games. And I don't even own a Sony product and have never bought one, for similar reasons.
The other alternative is, of course, something called INVESTMENT. Go to people who *don't* have ties to EA, etc. and want to get into the market and negotiate the percentages with them. Like any other business would have to. It's not rocket science, people won't throw money at you unless you try and can PROVE your worth. You can prove your worth at your own expense the first time round, like most people do.
"Someone who is averse to giving their money to scam artists" shouldn't be giving their money to random people on Kickstarter without some sort of contract or reputation. Full stop.
Which is why I don't touch Kickstarter. Sure, it'd be nice to get a few "crowdsourced" ideas up and running but, you know what? Those that *CAN* make sense, end up getting made anyway, and often making money anyway.
As soon as someone says "We need X amount of money to do Y", you have to look into exactly who they are and why they need it and what they'll do with it. Those Kickstarter projects that are basically "We'd like to make an indie game that does X" really annoy me. You do? Bugger off and do it then! One of the "big" ones a while ago had signed up a famous voice artist before the project had even been funded - sorry, but that's the LAST thing to worry about and probably the LAST thing I'd ever want added to a game I was funding (no matter how small) - the bloody janitor probably has a good enough voice that you'd never notice the difference.
Save your cash. Give it to established developers, those who have written games you've enjoyed, and those with proven results. Like indie developers in the Humble bundles, or things like Altitude, or whatever. Don't give it on the basis of promises of what they *think* they *could* do until they've actually done it.
Now, if we were talking about things like hardware manufacturing costs, etc. of something that someone has designed in order to get into mass production, then that's a different matter but the same principles apply. Too many "crowdfunded" projects (OpenPandora, etc.) fail miserably even when they have the best will in the world, purely because they've never done certain parts of it, or only handled smaller projects, etc. Where's my "Open Graphics Card" that was being designed / manufactured what? Ten years ago? Hell, it had AGP as an "option" last I looked, so it's already dead in the water for any commercial backer.
Making a video card work is far from easy - but you have to consider your investment like any other. If you don't trust the people involved to follow through, or you just think that throwing money at these sorts of problems is what's lacking, then you're going to be doomed to failure.
The last part is not true unless you're still expecting your visitors to use IE6 or Firefox 2.
Google "Server Name Indication".
There are cryptographically secure versions. But you've missed the point.
This stops random port-spam, random brute-force attacks, and casual access. If you want something secure, you should SECURE it (e.g. by restricting access to the bare minimum necessary and provide only public-key authentication ONLY). You can do that AND add port-knocking, if you want.
But the spam on port 22 on an unsecured machine will flood your logs the second you put it on the net. Port-knocking stops that without having to touch a SINGLE configuration for all your services. And, if you want it to, it can be cryptographically secure in itself too, no matter what application sits behind it.
It's quite literally another level and a DIFFERENT level of security, above and beyond what you might usually deploy.
knockd on Linux. Apt-get should find it for you. It will execute a specified shell script when it receives a specified knock (default one is specified). That shell script can be passed the IP that knocked (so you can include it in an iptables opening within the script).
There are also implementations for Windows, should you need that.
I have a portknocking setup. All your packets bounce when you touch my port 22 until you have touched a "magic sequence" of port numbers first. That sequence can be cryptographically strong, time-dependent, etc. but even a simple one-port knock is enough to stop all this random SSH spam and has been for years.
And if you do "get lucky" and find the right ports and then detect that port 22 is open and then start a brute-force on that? Public-key-only authentication and no root logins allowed.
Impact on me? Another line in a shell script that I use to connect (and hell, even Android has free port-knocking apps, not to mention them being standard-enough to be in Ubuntu/Debian). Impact on server? Greatly reduced number of fake connections bouncing off iptables and a tiny little daemon that does nothing but listen on the ports I need (and can ONLY open the SSH port even if compromised). Impact on brute-forcers? They might as well give up and go home.
Even those remote companies that we do allow to port-forward direct to their device on my work network (e.g. telecoms providers, etc.) understand it and "knock" before they come in (which tells us exactly when they are about to log in), while everyone else in the world sees closed ports.
Why everyone doesn't use it, I have no idea. Even our VPN users have an automated script that just knocks to open the VPN ports (and only the VPN ports) before they connect. Transparent to them, invisible to everyone else, no different if "compromised".
Fine. Now do a Euro symbol in ASCII. So it's not actually ASCII. It's not HTML either, even if that has symbols for a lot of other things and has to be parsed to be safe. So UTF-8, especially seeing as it opens up EVERY OTHER LANGUAGE too, and lots of weird and useful mathematical symbols, is the best and easiest option to support.
The patent infringement would not extend - the user did not knowingly infringe the patent - you can't infringe as a software USER (otherwise I'd be personally responsible for every patent that MS, Linux, whatever, infringes).
The person responsible (and whom the legal system WOULD crush instead of RandomJoe), is the copyright (and thus knowing patent too) infringement made by CrackerB in in stripping the EULA.
Now, if you'd picked PURELY copyright infringement, you'd have had a more convincing example (i.e. just because I get the White Album from a friend that took off the EULA does not mean I can distribute it willy-nilly).
The guy who bought the seed from a third-party was not party to ANY contract.
The guy who sold them, and the company that produced them - possibly they DID have a contract. Possibly that contract IS breached. But that's a *contract* dispute between those two parties. You can try to sue that seller for the perceived loss of value of Monsanto assets due to their breach of contract, if you like.
But trying to sue the guy who bought them (who at worst has been conned into buying something "illegal") is like trying to sue the guy who bought your TV from a pawn shop, not knowing it was stolen. Except there is no theft, in this instance, only an "unauthorised copy", so no intention to permanently deprive, and no case of handling stolen goods either.
What you're trying to say is that you own ANY plant that, by natural process, has acquired genes that were originally obtained from a Monsanto plant. That's like suing because your dog has acquired a specific colour because his parents had bred with a dog that come from a "company-owned" stock. It's like suing because someone's horse has acquired Red Rum's genes from somewhere. And just as fecking ludicrous to try to defend.
Only if you're the sort of idiot that thinks you should throw something away because something new has come out, or thinks that they shouldn't resell devices they aren't using (resale value depends on the quality of the initial build, don't forget) or, worse, thinks that 1 year is a long time for a commercial product costing more than my car to last.
The "annual upgrade cycle" is the realm of the idiot. It means that no device you buy has EVER had more than a year or so of testing, or expected to last more than a year. Hell, I nearly peed myself when I heard about Apple STILL not being able to get clock-changes correct throughout Europe. I think this the first year they've ever managed it, after several highly-public gaffes in previous years.
When I pay for a product, I expect it to be built to a certain quality - not be part of an enforced obsolescence scheme. If you want to buy a product that somehow magically degrades after a year (either because something new has come out or because the manufacturing was diabolical), you do that. Personally, I know that the chip inside the machine will run at the same speed next year as it does this year AND that every piece of electrical/electronic equipment I own has lasted at least 2 years (and some up to 20!).
An alternative title would be:
"Apple made to comply with existing laws that are quite reasonable, everyone else complies with and which aid the consumer."
So I don't really see what the fuss is about. If you're building expensive devices and putting them into people's hands, expecting them to last two years isn't a hardship, unless your business is BUILT upon their obsolescence. In which case, this is a win for the consumer is stopping you doing things like that.
"Apple FORCED to make devices that last more than a year on average". Gosh. The horror.
And every other electronics manufacturer trading in the EU has to do the same and has done for a while now. Hell, I can get CARS with a five year warranty, and there's no end of things that could go wrong on them and it costs the manufacturer 10 times as much if they do go wrong or they have a design flaw.
"Apple THREATENED WITH LAWSUIT if they don't give consumers a good deal"
Well.... bloody good job!
Paranoid much?
PC97 PC's? Seriously? Barely anybody had a network connection when that was out, let alone remote-access. And how would remote access to that microphone work through your firewall and without you noticing the traffic?
Every time you come up with (or reiterate) a crap conspiracy theory, I mentally filter everything you say as if I was talking to the local nutter on the bus.
Just goes to show that nobody can predict the future with any accuracy, eh? Which makes you wonder why companies would listen to them in the first place.
Who would have guessed that a cheap, ad-supported Worms rip-off (which itself was a Scorched-Earth rip-off, etc.) would get 10m downloads in the first day of the release of its... what... fifth title? And make an awful lot of money. While the Worms sequels tended towards the dire themselves?
Who would have thought that the idea of a Linux smartphone would be a success? Who would have thought that just indexing the web and running statistics on the whole damn thing would make a better search engine than anyone else had ever made and create one of the most powerful companies in the world? Who would have thought that tablets wouldn't be successful until, well, Windows Tablet Edition's were dead and buried?
Who would have thought that IBM would be sued by a dead shell of a company and it get drawn out to a multi-year, multi-million dollar lawsuit? Who would have though that just changing the screen type could make people buy MILLIONS of a popular e-book device?
Things happen. And the WORST people to listen to are a) critics, b) "industry experts" that post popular columns in papers and journals and c) potential competitors about how those things would never happen.
Microsoft keep trying to tell me that the cloud is the next thing I should buy into. Car manufacturers keep telling me that they'll make a fast, practical, environmentally-friendly car that I can afford. Solar / wind / wave power enthusiasts keep telling me that we'll all be running the country off them soon.
The shock here is not that Red Hat made $1bn (and some of those comments were made only in 2010, which I would have considered stupid and short-sighted back then), but that people still think that their opinion matters when they are talking about a competitor, or that people base decisions on what Gartner and similar tell them as if they were the Oracle.
The BIGGEST companies and successes in the world come about by surprise to even their owners. Who would have thought that the richest man in the world would be the one who wrote a BASIC interpreter?
You cannot make predictions like that, and trying just makes you look stupid.
When was the last time a standard wheelchair did 80mph when the user pressed a button/pedal? When was the last time a crutch was fitted with ABS to help it stop in time because it went so fast?
There's progress, and there's fecking ignorance of the scale of the problem.
Did they think of the possibility of driving over a cliff-edge while out of GPS reception?
Or what happens if a bridge collapses? Does the car detect the void underneath it and stop, or just think it's a steep hill and plummet over the edge?
Does it detect ice, snow, oil, sand before the wheels are there? What about fire? What about an accident happening to the tanker in front of you and you ploughing through the spilled petroleum because the car doesn't "see" it? What about kids throwing stones off the top of a bridge onto the passing cars (common problem in the UK - someone died just the other month from this)? Is the car looking UP too and determining their intent?
There are a BILLION and one problems, that only happen once in a lifetime. But if that causes you (OR ANYONE ELSE - sod the blind person, I would complain to the highest authority if a blind person was driving a car around my area, with or without a permit, and risking pedestrians and other driver's lives) to die early, or be at raised risk of injury, there's a lot more things to consider than you can EVER detect with sensors OR ever account for in programming and testing.
This is why even a jumbo jet - so of the most highly automated and tested machines in the world - has TWO HUMAN OPERATORS. And even there, they have TWO because the first can't be trusted on their own (proven by that recent thing with the pilot).
If you honestly, seriously, think that you can reliably determine the outcome of a machine complex enough to obtain all that data, you're an idiot. You *CAN* verify a system like an airbag control, or ABS, because it's isolated and has the tiniest amount of actual code running the thing that you can (and DO) mathematically verify.
You can't verify a system on this scale. It's like trying to verify a Kinect. You just cannot guarantee what it will detect something as just by a simple test of something similar. And this is orders-of-magnitude more complex, more important and more deadly than a stupid games console.
In all the years I've been coming to slashdot, not one single article has required video.
I saw the tsunami video. Not on Slashdot. If I wanted to see it, Slashdot is neither where I would go, nor where I would first find out about it (by a long shot).
Because what matters is NOT your bandwidth to Comcast but THEIR bandwidth to the outside world. The more people using a Comcast connection to access NON-Comcast services, the more it costs them, because they need more external access and peering, which is "expensive".
What you do on your own network and (in theory) between two Comcast customers costs them virtually nothing. The capacity is already there.
More interesting - if they don't count this Comcast service, why do they count internal traffic (Comcast->Comcast subscribers) and can, say, Google get a box put into their network to cache Google requests and get "not counted" towards their subscriber's limits?
Will never visit.
Just like idle.slashdot.org (whose sarcastic "Waste of your time. Don't ever go there" I feel is the best advice I've heard).
Whenever there's been a video post, I've been quite quick to complain about it (and I'm not the only one), so yeah, shove them off into tv.slashdot.org so I can ignore it totally.
Sorry, but I (used to) come on here for information and news. It takes HUNDREDS of times longer to convey that information in a video than it does on a text page, which is why I don't watch TV News, and why I came to Slashdot for some techy/geeky news that other online outfits were lacking in.
Separate it off, but don't be shocked that nobody goes on there. And I'd have preferred your developer time and bandwidth to have been put to some better use all along, if I'm honest.