If you haven't noticed already, every console company _INCLUDING_ Nintendo is trying to turn their system into an Internet hub.
Of course the console makers want that to be true, because they all want an internet connected device to be a gold mine of revenue.
But, ask yourself, if it was successful and profitable, would Nintendo be closing this service?
This to me sounds like either usage of the Wii is declining so much nobody uses it on the internet, or the actual usage of the Wii us just as good as ever, but people don't care about the on-line stuff. But the take-away is that apparently the on-line stuff for the Wii isn't currently popular enough to keep it going.
Of course, if I knew the answer to those questions, I wouldn't be telling Slashdot for free -- I'd be collecting huge consulting fees from the game industry.
Are these "other devices" connected to displays the size of a living room TV
Several of them can display onto my 55" HDTV, some of them have their own display. There's shockingly little on YouTube or anywhere else I'd need on something bigger than my 24" computer screen, but if I need to I can.
If I wanted to, I could probably buy a long HDMI cable and display my computer to that screen as well.
I'm told there aren't a lot of people willing to hook a PC up to a TV. Or has this changed recently?
I have no idea what "a lot of people" are doing, and I'd venture to guess that probably 50% of the world population ("A lot of people") owns neither a PC nor a TV and couldn't possibly care about this.
I haven't yet found a good enough reason to buy a 30' HDMI cable to hook my PC up to my TV, and from arms length, my computer monitor fills most of my field of view anyway.
None the less your point is an antiquated view of the current state and direction of consoles
Not antiquated, just different from yours.
I won't connect a game console to the internet, because that brings absolutely no benefit to me that I've been able to discover.
The XBox and EA have shown me the future of network connected gaming consoles, and it involves advertisements and DRM.
I don't play any on-line games because I don't want to, because I have no need to have my ass handed to me by a 9 year old, and because I only game a little.
You can feel free to provide an advertising platform, an opportunity to monetize all aspects of game play, and have EA tell you how and when you can use your video game, not to mention the trove of personal information they probably tie to your online account.
But they've already demonstrated that networking quickly turns into a negative feature. I'm not paying full price for a game and paying for my internet connection so they can put ads into the game console. I value my privacy and peace a little more than that. MS and EA already showed me that it's all about them and maximizing revenues, not giving me the best gaming experience.
In fact, I don't believe a single one of my friends has their XBox of PS3 connected to their network. Either because they've got modded consoles, don't want to see ads, or don't play games online.
Well, the contrary point is the Wii is now 6+ years old, which means they're starting to wind it down.
Nintendo is hardly the first company to do that.
Apple dropped support for the original iPad after barely 2 years (much to my nuisance), people find themselves with phones that don't get updates any more, the Sega and Amiga platforms don't really exist any more, and I'm sure lots of video games have stopped working when the company pulls the servers.
Technology ages, companies decide they don't want to spend the money on the infrastructure any more. I just can't see these network services either being revenue streams or being overly popular/critical.
At a certain point, this kind of thing is pretty much expected. If they were giving up revenue, I'd be surprised, but it sounds more like what happens as the technology ages.
Somehow, I bet if you'd looked at usage for these services, they've probably been flat or declining, at which point why should Nintendo keep it running in perpetuity?
I'll handle my own digital files without help from Sony thanks, because Sony won't have been interested in what I want, just what they want. And I don't care what Sony wants, not even a little.
And when XBox 360 started to put ads in games and the home screen -- my XBox got disconnected from the internet and will never be connected again. It sounds like I won't be buying an XBox 720 at all because of the networking requirements.
Networking on these devices eventually becomes either a marketing tool, or a way to restrict how you use your console. If I want to watch YouTube, I have other devices which still connect to my network.
Since nobody actually uses these things, we're turning them off.
Back when I had a Wii, in order to get these network services, you essentially had to set the device to never turn off. And that was something I deemed as pointless and a waste of power.
And, really, who needs to get the weather and news on the Wii?
But, somehow everybody seems to keep acting as if the game console is going to become your internet hub.
Microsoft has more or less relied on Office and upgrades of Windows for years for revenue, and have for the most part kept it as a Windows-only piece.
As other office suites come along, and other OSes as well, Microsoft seems to be now finding themselves trying to remain relevant.
Would most people with an Android tablet even *want* Microsoft Office for it? It seems that if you wanted the full Microsoft experience, you'd have bought one of their tablets. And if you didn't want the Microsoft experience, you won't be looking for this software.
I don't really see Microsoft as a company who really innovates -- I'm hard pressed to think of a single product which Microsoft invented/pioneered, and which is what people want.
The OS took years to catch up to what others were already doing. Office is certainly a feature rich mature piece of software, but many of us don't find ourselves needing Excel and PowerPoint in our non-work lives. Moving the Start button or some of the changes lately have been mostly decorative and not revolutionary.
The Kinect is neat, but like so many products someone else innovated and Microsoft purchased.
A late delayed release of Office for Android? I suspect there's an awful lot of yawns which accompany that news.
As to innovating anything new and groundbreaking, we'll see if Microsoft ever does that. I'm hard pressed to come up with any examples, current or past, of stuff that they've released which was truly 'new' and lasting -- mostly it's been clones of products other companies have already been shipping, and many of them weren't exactly huge successes (like the Zune for instance).
I've variously called myself or been called a software developer, programmer, coder, code monkey, C monkey, software architect, software engineer (not my doing since I'm not an engineer per se) and several other things not fit to print.
It's like hacker v cracker -- I've always used hacker in a way which covers both usages, and occasionally use cracker but not as much.
In fact, hacker was in use first before cracker came along, at least for many of us, and people on Slashdot got all whiny and butt hurt that the media still uses the word hacker instead of their chosen preference. But I certainly heard hacker used interchangeably for at least a decade before someone came along later and added cracker to try to differentiate -- and I've been listening to people whining since that the media misuses the word hacker, when the reality is many of us in the industry still use it that way.
At the end of the day, usage of these terms is usually pretty dependent on where you first heard it, how old you are. They can be as much slang as self appointed badges of honor, descriptive, or colloquial. But from what I've seen, in many different contexts, those words can convey many different things.
My official job title and duties notwithstanding (job titles are cheap, which is why we have 'domestic engineers' and 'coffee technicians'), in casual conversation or among people in the industry, many of those words will get used interchangeably.
And, in the entire time I've been in the industry, I do not believe I've ever met a single one of these mythical 'coders' you refer to which is a person who gets piecemeal jobs they only write to spec. They may exist somewhere, but in my experience everyone on the development team is more than just someone who writes a component to spec.
Admittedly, I've mostly worked in smaller teams, where everyone was actually part of the design process.
That 10X management agency can't even differentiate the two
Or, they're selling to people who have been in the industry long enough to understand what is being conveyed.
Sadly, it doesn't even need to be maliciously abused... just incompetently written and ineptly applied.
Like all laws applying to technology, the people writing them are usually incapable of understanding all of the side effects. So they get passed, and applied as written, which has the unfortunate effect of breaking lots of legitimate things.
If there's 1200 sites sharing that IP address, but they block all of them based on a single complaint, these fall into the category of collateral damage.
Sadly, I'm betting someone made an effort to point this potential out to them and got ignored.
So, you don't trust the company (which is a given), but somehow we're supposed to trust that opting-out actually does anything or causes them to delete anything?
If anything, it sounds like the fact that you opted out gave them more information about you and more reason to find more.
Opting out of this kind of shit is like "click here to unsubscribe" which comes with spam to make it look compliant -- they're not going to do it.
I mean, he's talking about logging into his account on their server to see what information they have about him -- I sure wouldn't sign up for this in the first place.
Laws need to change so the default position isn't "company can do whatever it wants without telling you". Of course, they'd scream and howl that it was cutting into their "freedom of speech" or corporate profits, but I don't see why it should be something which they decide how it gets used.
And if the attitude is that "well, if you haven't got a decent internet connection and are willing to leave it on for is, we don't give a shit about your business" then the sooner people say "fine, fuck you" the better.
This is just more corporate ass-hattery saying they don't actually give a damn about their customers, and are willing to put their developers and marketing interests ahead of the customer.
Since Microsoft is discovering people apparently interested in Windows 8, they can't exactly afford to be hastening the same decision on their gaming platform. If they want to take their customers for granted, they might find out their customers are willing to leave.
He made a valid point. Living in places without good internet access is like choosing to eat at a restaurant with bad food.
Oh, horseshit. People have all sorts of reasons for living in rural areas (cost of living, lower crime, because they want to, because that's where their job is). Are you suggesting everyone should move out of every rural area for the cities and leave the rest deserted just so they can have access to the internet?
The internet isn't the be all and end all of the world, and lots of people still want to be able to play games without the need for an internet connection.
My XBox no longer connects to the network, because once they started putting ads into both the home screen and the games they crossed the line into "absolutely not". I don't play games on-line, I have no interest in playing games on-line, and it's none of their fscking business when I play, what games I play, or for how long. And I'm certainly not giving them a platform to show me ads.
Always-on internet and DRM is meant to give them control over the consumer, as well as making sure to get some extra revenue from ads, and maybe garner information about your gaming habits.
Being required to do this is more like choosing to eat at a restaurant which serves bad food, because you're being told "eat shit, if you want to play you have no choice".
Well, there is a choice, and that's to simply not buy the next XBox. If they require always-on internet, that's the choice I'll be exercising.
If people showed their disapproval with money rather than vitriol on social media, EA would have been a completely different company... or out of business.
Sadly, in the modern context, they'd go to lawmakers and say that piracy is killing their business, and then concoct some scheme to make someone else pay them. They'd produce fake statistics and graphs to support their position. Kind of what the *AAs did.
Companies are incapable of thinking "Gee, have we pissed off our customers", and go straight to lobbying to make sure their revenue stream is untouchable.
I'm just not confident that a modern corporation would be capable of recognizing and responding to an actual boycott of their products.
Ads showing up in EA games on my XBox is what made me disconnect it from the network, and why it sounds like I won't be buying an XBox 720 because of the always on internet requirement.
I seriously doubt they'd be able to arrive at the conclusion that the reason their product is not selling is because of their own behavior.
I can pretty much tell you right now, XBox 720 has already lost any chance of a sale from me, and by extension, so has EA. Which is a shame, because Tiger Woods is one of the few video games I actually play. Many of us don't play on-line games, and see no value for us in having a gaming console connect to the internet.
Well, then go with "reconfigured" instead of getting mired in the definition of "programmed".
The end result was they broadcast something which caused his card to report his whereabouts, and gets into the realm of things that the FBI + Verizon may or may not be able to do without some proper authorization.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who have filed an amicus brief in support of Rigmaiden's motion, maintain that the order does not qualify as a warrant and that the government withheld crucial information from the magistrate -- such as identifying that the tracking device they planned to use was a stingray and that its use involved intrusive measures -- thus preventing the court from properly fulfilling its oversight function.
So did an error of omission lead to an error of commission?
It's TFA which says "In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI"
Clarification: in this case they had a "court order signed by a magistrate". I don't know how that differs from a "warrant"
Well, except that:
The government has conceded, however, that it needed a warrant in his case alone â" because the stingray reached into his apartment remotely to locate the air card â" and that the activities performed by Verizon and the FBI to locate Rigmaiden were all authorized by a court order signed by a magistrate
They didn't have the appropriate level of oversight, they had some oversight, but not to the standard they required.
I have no reason to believe this was a 'rogue' agent, I fear it's become SOP at the FBI, and the entire agency is skirting the law when it's convenient.
Is this even legal? Did they have warrants for this? Did they take any precautions to make sure other people weren't pulled into this?
When telecom companies are re-programming such things to serve law enforcement, I should hope there's some actual legal oversight instead of "because we need to".
I'd like to see some clear rulings which define how they can and can't use this stuff, because they seem to just go ahead and do it without caring much for the legalities.
Why should less popular channels by subsidized? Why should anything ever be subsidized (as far as entertainment)?
Spread around the costs, maximize profits.
Cable companies are against bundling because there's channels that only a small subset of viewers wants. They're not going to pay for those individually, so the strategy is to bundle, and if you want something that only comes in a bundle, you help pay for the other channels you don't want.
The cable companies want to make sure that the money losing stuff gets paid for by as many people as possible.
Basically they want to prop up an aging business model, and since they lost the court case about getting paid, they're looking for another way to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the console makers want that to be true, because they all want an internet connected device to be a gold mine of revenue.
But, ask yourself, if it was successful and profitable, would Nintendo be closing this service?
This to me sounds like either usage of the Wii is declining so much nobody uses it on the internet, or the actual usage of the Wii us just as good as ever, but people don't care about the on-line stuff. But the take-away is that apparently the on-line stuff for the Wii isn't currently popular enough to keep it going.
Of course, if I knew the answer to those questions, I wouldn't be telling Slashdot for free -- I'd be collecting huge consulting fees from the game industry.
Go to an average mall nowadays and ask yourself it that's true. ;-)
Several of them can display onto my 55" HDTV, some of them have their own display. There's shockingly little on YouTube or anywhere else I'd need on something bigger than my 24" computer screen, but if I need to I can.
If I wanted to, I could probably buy a long HDMI cable and display my computer to that screen as well.
I have no idea what "a lot of people" are doing, and I'd venture to guess that probably 50% of the world population ("A lot of people") owns neither a PC nor a TV and couldn't possibly care about this.
I haven't yet found a good enough reason to buy a 30' HDMI cable to hook my PC up to my TV, and from arms length, my computer monitor fills most of my field of view anyway.
Not antiquated, just different from yours.
I won't connect a game console to the internet, because that brings absolutely no benefit to me that I've been able to discover.
The XBox and EA have shown me the future of network connected gaming consoles, and it involves advertisements and DRM.
I don't play any on-line games because I don't want to, because I have no need to have my ass handed to me by a 9 year old, and because I only game a little.
You can feel free to provide an advertising platform, an opportunity to monetize all aspects of game play, and have EA tell you how and when you can use your video game, not to mention the trove of personal information they probably tie to your online account.
But they've already demonstrated that networking quickly turns into a negative feature. I'm not paying full price for a game and paying for my internet connection so they can put ads into the game console. I value my privacy and peace a little more than that. MS and EA already showed me that it's all about them and maximizing revenues, not giving me the best gaming experience.
In fact, I don't believe a single one of my friends has their XBox of PS3 connected to their network. Either because they've got modded consoles, don't want to see ads, or don't play games online.
Well, the contrary point is the Wii is now 6+ years old, which means they're starting to wind it down.
Nintendo is hardly the first company to do that.
Apple dropped support for the original iPad after barely 2 years (much to my nuisance), people find themselves with phones that don't get updates any more, the Sega and Amiga platforms don't really exist any more, and I'm sure lots of video games have stopped working when the company pulls the servers.
Technology ages, companies decide they don't want to spend the money on the infrastructure any more. I just can't see these network services either being revenue streams or being overly popular/critical.
At a certain point, this kind of thing is pretty much expected. If they were giving up revenue, I'd be surprised, but it sounds more like what happens as the technology ages.
Somehow, I bet if you'd looked at usage for these services, they've probably been flat or declining, at which point why should Nintendo keep it running in perpetuity?
Or, you know, people could still use it to, oh let's see ... play games?
I doubt that the networking features are the most used aspects of these consoles.
Hmmm, if this is DLNA, then I'm not interested.
I'll handle my own digital files without help from Sony thanks, because Sony won't have been interested in what I want, just what they want. And I don't care what Sony wants, not even a little.
And when XBox 360 started to put ads in games and the home screen -- my XBox got disconnected from the internet and will never be connected again. It sounds like I won't be buying an XBox 720 at all because of the networking requirements.
Networking on these devices eventually becomes either a marketing tool, or a way to restrict how you use your console. If I want to watch YouTube, I have other devices which still connect to my network.
It's Slashdot -- there's always trolls, it doesn't matter what the article is. :-P
Since nobody actually uses these things, we're turning them off.
Back when I had a Wii, in order to get these network services, you essentially had to set the device to never turn off. And that was something I deemed as pointless and a waste of power.
And, really, who needs to get the weather and news on the Wii?
But, somehow everybody seems to keep acting as if the game console is going to become your internet hub.
Microsoft has more or less relied on Office and upgrades of Windows for years for revenue, and have for the most part kept it as a Windows-only piece.
As other office suites come along, and other OSes as well, Microsoft seems to be now finding themselves trying to remain relevant.
Would most people with an Android tablet even *want* Microsoft Office for it? It seems that if you wanted the full Microsoft experience, you'd have bought one of their tablets. And if you didn't want the Microsoft experience, you won't be looking for this software.
I don't really see Microsoft as a company who really innovates -- I'm hard pressed to think of a single product which Microsoft invented/pioneered, and which is what people want.
The OS took years to catch up to what others were already doing. Office is certainly a feature rich mature piece of software, but many of us don't find ourselves needing Excel and PowerPoint in our non-work lives. Moving the Start button or some of the changes lately have been mostly decorative and not revolutionary.
The Kinect is neat, but like so many products someone else innovated and Microsoft purchased.
A late delayed release of Office for Android? I suspect there's an awful lot of yawns which accompany that news.
As to innovating anything new and groundbreaking, we'll see if Microsoft ever does that. I'm hard pressed to come up with any examples, current or past, of stuff that they've released which was truly 'new' and lasting -- mostly it's been clones of products other companies have already been shipping, and many of them weren't exactly huge successes (like the Zune for instance).
That's your opinion, but it isn't fact.
I've variously called myself or been called a software developer, programmer, coder, code monkey, C monkey, software architect, software engineer (not my doing since I'm not an engineer per se) and several other things not fit to print.
It's like hacker v cracker -- I've always used hacker in a way which covers both usages, and occasionally use cracker but not as much.
In fact, hacker was in use first before cracker came along, at least for many of us, and people on Slashdot got all whiny and butt hurt that the media still uses the word hacker instead of their chosen preference. But I certainly heard hacker used interchangeably for at least a decade before someone came along later and added cracker to try to differentiate -- and I've been listening to people whining since that the media misuses the word hacker, when the reality is many of us in the industry still use it that way.
At the end of the day, usage of these terms is usually pretty dependent on where you first heard it, how old you are. They can be as much slang as self appointed badges of honor, descriptive, or colloquial. But from what I've seen, in many different contexts, those words can convey many different things.
My official job title and duties notwithstanding (job titles are cheap, which is why we have 'domestic engineers' and 'coffee technicians'), in casual conversation or among people in the industry, many of those words will get used interchangeably.
And, in the entire time I've been in the industry, I do not believe I've ever met a single one of these mythical 'coders' you refer to which is a person who gets piecemeal jobs they only write to spec. They may exist somewhere, but in my experience everyone on the development team is more than just someone who writes a component to spec.
Admittedly, I've mostly worked in smaller teams, where everyone was actually part of the design process.
Or, they're selling to people who have been in the industry long enough to understand what is being conveyed.
Sadly, it doesn't even need to be maliciously abused ... just incompetently written and ineptly applied.
Like all laws applying to technology, the people writing them are usually incapable of understanding all of the side effects. So they get passed, and applied as written, which has the unfortunate effect of breaking lots of legitimate things.
If there's 1200 sites sharing that IP address, but they block all of them based on a single complaint, these fall into the category of collateral damage.
Sadly, I'm betting someone made an effort to point this potential out to them and got ignored.
So, you don't trust the company (which is a given), but somehow we're supposed to trust that opting-out actually does anything or causes them to delete anything?
If anything, it sounds like the fact that you opted out gave them more information about you and more reason to find more.
Opting out of this kind of shit is like "click here to unsubscribe" which comes with spam to make it look compliant -- they're not going to do it.
I mean, he's talking about logging into his account on their server to see what information they have about him -- I sure wouldn't sign up for this in the first place.
Laws need to change so the default position isn't "company can do whatever it wants without telling you". Of course, they'd scream and howl that it was cutting into their "freedom of speech" or corporate profits, but I don't see why it should be something which they decide how it gets used.
LOL, gotta love Slashdot ... if the joke is geeky enough, someone will respond to it seriously. ;-)
And if the attitude is that "well, if you haven't got a decent internet connection and are willing to leave it on for is, we don't give a shit about your business" then the sooner people say "fine, fuck you" the better.
This is just more corporate ass-hattery saying they don't actually give a damn about their customers, and are willing to put their developers and marketing interests ahead of the customer.
Since Microsoft is discovering people apparently interested in Windows 8, they can't exactly afford to be hastening the same decision on their gaming platform. If they want to take their customers for granted, they might find out their customers are willing to leave.
Oh, horseshit. People have all sorts of reasons for living in rural areas (cost of living, lower crime, because they want to, because that's where their job is). Are you suggesting everyone should move out of every rural area for the cities and leave the rest deserted just so they can have access to the internet?
The internet isn't the be all and end all of the world, and lots of people still want to be able to play games without the need for an internet connection.
My XBox no longer connects to the network, because once they started putting ads into both the home screen and the games they crossed the line into "absolutely not". I don't play games on-line, I have no interest in playing games on-line, and it's none of their fscking business when I play, what games I play, or for how long. And I'm certainly not giving them a platform to show me ads.
Always-on internet and DRM is meant to give them control over the consumer, as well as making sure to get some extra revenue from ads, and maybe garner information about your gaming habits.
Being required to do this is more like choosing to eat at a restaurant which serves bad food, because you're being told "eat shit, if you want to play you have no choice".
Well, there is a choice, and that's to simply not buy the next XBox. If they require always-on internet, that's the choice I'll be exercising.
Good. Because his response to criticism about always-on requirements amounted to "let them eat cake".
If that's how you feel about your customers, don't be surprised when they decide you suck and don't want your product.
An always-on internet requirement makes this next XBox a complete non-starter for me, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
#dealwithit
Except they've construed 'papers' so narrowly that unless it's actual paper in a file cabinet, it's fair game.
Your phone, computer, email, and everything else is somehow excluded from this.
I was hoping I could make a Ring of Ionospheric Quenching in Skyrim, but I'm not sure what it would do. ;-)
Well, Rings of Quenching the Ionosphere at least, not sure that translates into 'power' in the sense you mean. ;-)
Sadly, in the modern context, they'd go to lawmakers and say that piracy is killing their business, and then concoct some scheme to make someone else pay them. They'd produce fake statistics and graphs to support their position. Kind of what the *AAs did.
Companies are incapable of thinking "Gee, have we pissed off our customers", and go straight to lobbying to make sure their revenue stream is untouchable.
I'm just not confident that a modern corporation would be capable of recognizing and responding to an actual boycott of their products.
Ads showing up in EA games on my XBox is what made me disconnect it from the network, and why it sounds like I won't be buying an XBox 720 because of the always on internet requirement.
I seriously doubt they'd be able to arrive at the conclusion that the reason their product is not selling is because of their own behavior.
I can pretty much tell you right now, XBox 720 has already lost any chance of a sale from me, and by extension, so has EA. Which is a shame, because Tiger Woods is one of the few video games I actually play. Many of us don't play on-line games, and see no value for us in having a gaming console connect to the internet.
Well, then go with "reconfigured" instead of getting mired in the definition of "programmed".
The end result was they broadcast something which caused his card to report his whereabouts, and gets into the realm of things that the FBI + Verizon may or may not be able to do without some proper authorization.
So did an error of omission lead to an error of commission?
It's TFA which says "In order to do this, Verizon reprogrammed the device so that when an incoming voice call arrived, the card would disconnect from any legitimate cell tower to which it was already connected, and send real-time cell-site location data to Verizon, which forwarded the data to the FBI"
Well, except that:
They didn't have the appropriate level of oversight, they had some oversight, but not to the standard they required.
I have no reason to believe this was a 'rogue' agent, I fear it's become SOP at the FBI, and the entire agency is skirting the law when it's convenient.
Is this even legal? Did they have warrants for this? Did they take any precautions to make sure other people weren't pulled into this?
When telecom companies are re-programming such things to serve law enforcement, I should hope there's some actual legal oversight instead of "because we need to".
I'd like to see some clear rulings which define how they can and can't use this stuff, because they seem to just go ahead and do it without caring much for the legalities.
Spread around the costs, maximize profits.
Cable companies are against bundling because there's channels that only a small subset of viewers wants. They're not going to pay for those individually, so the strategy is to bundle, and if you want something that only comes in a bundle, you help pay for the other channels you don't want.
The cable companies want to make sure that the money losing stuff gets paid for by as many people as possible.
Basically they want to prop up an aging business model, and since they lost the court case about getting paid, they're looking for another way to do it.