Don't we already have tons of resources devoted to verifying the accuracy of a computing environment? If we verify the logic and accuracy of the computer, much like the axioms of mathematics, cannot we then say that the resulting proof must be valid?
Of course, if it can't be understood by humans, it doesn't really help anything, as one of the main points of proving things is to gain insight into how to prove other things. But wouldn't building the system to proove proofs be itself a different but valuable tool?
including places thought of as "liberal" such as New York city and the entire state of California.
I'd submit that neither California nor New York is "liberal," but "progressive." Both California and New York are known for trying new things, which may be gay marriage or it may be the broken window theory of crime prevention. Much of what aligned with "liberal" thought for a long time could also be considered "progressive," but as (dropping the quotes) certain pieces of liberal thought have become mainstream, California and New York then necessarily have to experiment with thing more traditionally associated with conservative thought... Such as sex-segregated schooling.
What defines California is an odd way of latching onto new ideas. That usually puts them in line with "Liberals" but sometimes it doesn't.
What, you don't remember the infamous Chex Quest? It used the Doom engine, but really looked like something Wolfenstein would be ashamed of. It even had two sequels.
I guess it is weird enough to escape a "worst of all time" label. But it should garner a "best of so-bad-it's-good." Sometimes you can find them online.
It has a touchscreen, which guarantees it is one of those Multiple parlor game / card game type machines. You know, the ones that don't count as videogames but they put them in bars so that people without enough money to actually gamble can pretend to do so.
Well, that would be assuming you had recharging stations along the way. As you don't the limited battery capacity is really the limiter of the distance an electric car can go. Hybrid cars, on the other hand, recharge and exhaust batteries repeatedly in any given drive. The ability to absorb a large amount of energy and return it at will would be ideal.
Does anybody else find it creepy that this article is posted at Yahoo?
I don't want to jump on the SlashThink wagon, but does anyone storing e-mails on a free remote server have an expectation of privacy about automated searches and indexing? After all, your e-mail has to be read by machine at some point or another, or it isn't an e-mail. And is should be backed up. The only thing I can see about this is Google stuck their foot firmly in their mouth about basically accepted industry practices.
But can you teach someone how to be creative? No, you can't. People that have absolutely no artistic aptitude will still suck after 4 years of art school. At some point you have to have some innate ability.
My previous college, the University of California, Irvine, was considering offering a degree in Video Game Design* in the school of the humanities, next to the department which handled Film Studies. This degree, which had wide support on campus, would mark one the first long-term collaboration between the arts, humanities, and programming departments, and received the necessary approval, was personally terminated by the chancellor due to the "inappropriateness" of the material.
Apparently Video Games are an inappropriate field of study for a system which gives out degrees in "Film Studies" "Television Studies" and "The 70's." Currently the only non-technical college in California offering a degree in Video Games is USC, a college in the heart of Los Angeles known for catering to the job market. It is also one of a very few in the nation.
How are we to educate upcoming designers about what works and doesn't work if we can't even have basic investigation into the problem through remedial college courses? Why is this major part of the human condition not worthy of study? Until such a time as we have departments of video games in the school of humanities, we won't be preparing people properly for lives as game designers and we won't be preparing people to be intelligent consumers of games. I may not have become a movie critic, but film studies was a valuable course to take to become an educated member of this society. Every time I have to explain a reference to a "magic mushroom," "respan point," "100 coins," or other things that are accepted videogame shorthand, I wonder how people can successfully avoid this very large part of their society. When I have to explain to people what Pac Man was and why it is relevant to our consumerist society, I really want to reach out and slap that Chancellor.
We're never going to be able to educate people until we have a little basic pure research to work from. We're never going to get our pure research until the stigma of gaming is erased.
BTW, while most gaming companies say on job boards that they're looking for 5+ years of experience and 2 shipped titles, most positions are filled either from inside or from word-of-mouth from known developers and their friends with much, much less experience. But even if you don't meet the requirements, if you have something to show that is "really cool," you will get the job. If anything the gaming industry is suffering from too little experience related to too fast of an expansion, not too much. The inexperienced designers I've worked with have tended to roll over when bad ideas were suggested by their colleagues or good ideas were shot down. The experienced developers tended to stand their ground more, and more wisely.
*I had already graduated when this went down, so my information is primarily second hand and the little bits that were reported in the larger news media. If anyone knows something more up-to-date, please let us know.
You'd be surprised how adversity on the battlefield can draw people together.
The individualistic Multiplayer is quickly becoming the rarity, not the norm. Savage is an excellent team game, with an official hierarchy and a wide division of labor. Battlefield 1942, Counter Strike, Battlefield Vietnam, Rainbow 6, and many other modern FPS games are also squad-based. Most MMPORPG's like Everquest emphasize squad tactics. Halo's multiplayer is cooperative.
If you think all multiplayer games are about anonymously "running around... Shooting shit," then you need to get out there and play something recent.
For example, how many of you have bosses who don't want to use Linux because it's known as the "hacker's OS", and as such see it as being dangerous because it's used by hackers/crackers?
I never understood this logic. In the same way that spies are likely to have the best hidden cameras and tiny guns, Hackers are likely to have the strongest systems and the most flexible OS. Just because you don't like what they do doesn't make their equipment inferior.
Most people assume a homeowner's association is banal. I can't find the exact statistic offhand, but I believe something like %50 of America is now covered by a homeowner's association. Essentially, if you need to move anywhere you will sign with a homeowner's association. Where I used to live, the Lakewood area in Sunnyvale, California, the homeowner's association was singled out on CNN for publically shaming someone over her lawn. She had just lost both her husband and her job, and the homeowner's association was sending threatening letters because her bushes were dead, and posting a picture of her house to the front page of their newsletter (which was sent out to all residents). Other homeowner associations get involved in more egregious abuses of power... A famous case involved an Irvine, California man who was taken to court by the homeowner's association because he painted his house shell and not white. The court sided with the homeowner's association, and ordered him to repaint. He spent the money and time and repainted bright, gaudy pink, and the homeowner's association backed down. Still others have done much worse. There was the case in California of the man who was fined by the homeowner's association for hiding his garbage can behind the bushes by the side of the house instead of inside of his garage. Refusing to pay, his house was promptly repossessed and sold for 10,000 dollars to a friend of the director of the association. People lose their houses over this kind thing. Homeowner's associations wield far more power than most people imagine. Usually it is banal, but then again people usually assume that a house is their castle, and that owning a piece of property entitles them to certain inalienable rights.
If you violate a contract, generally punitive measures take effect that are in relation to the violation. Homeowners associations have no such mandate.
And even where homeowner's associations don't exist, people have been successfully sued for "lowering the property value" of their neighbors. Need to put an old car that you bought on blocks that you bought on the land that you bought? Not so fast, sparky, that will reduce the value of your neighbor's land. Better not keep anything like that around, or your neighbor's will be able to claim some pretty unreasonable damages.
It's always tinged with the idea that since-I'm-a-techie-I'm-smarter-than-the-average-pe rson smarminess. Fuck that. We're no brighter than the rest of the populace.
I have a 50% chance of being smarter than average. I like those odds.
I wasn't arguing that AAC wasn't a standard, but AAC+FairPlay is no more a standard than Ogg+Fairplay would be. Grandparent poster argued that Apple's DRMed AAC and Microsoft's DRMed WMA are not standards. I'd personally rather see an Ogg+DRM implementation, as the sound fidelity would be slightly better and it would give Ogg a huge validation in the market. But neither OggPlay nor AACPlay would be open standards. But Ogg Vorbis is.
Most game developers don't target demographics when conceptualizing games. They may decide to move a level from Syria to Iraq based on feedback from their target demographic, but when coming up with the overall concept that drives the game they generally do what pleases themselves. This is then presented to the publisher, who decides what they think will be the great games and demographics depending upon how they feel.
Women are sorely underrepresented in game development. While other people may have more accurate figures, I would estimate that only one in twenty is female. There are many debates on why women are as rare as they are, but the result is that games are made to satisfy their largely male creators.
This isn't always a bad thing, or a necessarily sexist thing. The two designers most responsible for bringing women into gaming, Alexey Pajitnov and Will Wright, are both men, and both enjoyed great financial success. That's not to say Roberta Williams and other women in dame development don't exist too, or that Game Gal and Game Girl Advance haven't had a tremendously positive influence, but games that are successful in drawing in women are successful in drawing in men too.
Companies would like to sell to the female gamer... As far back as 83 debates have raged as to how to do that. Just about the only rules of thumb that have come out of this debate are "make a great game" and "no blatant negative sexism."
Of course, Video game magazines achieve a degree of sexism only matched by their tremendously poor use of the language. I can't even flip through a "Game Pro" without cringing. That is a boys-only locker room, and that does need to change As Soon As Possible.
I'm not saying these are wrong, I've just decided to go down your list to come up with counterarguments people can use when attacked with these.
* Anti-social (With sports, you are pretty much forced to play with someone else)
Quake, Halo, Everquest, Savage, Street Fighter, and many other games are multiplayer. Snowboarding, Rock-Climbing, Mountain Biking, and many other sports are solo. Multiplayer gaming should be encouraged at all times, but it generally doesn't need to be. People flock to multiplayer games.
* Waste of money (Kicking a football once you have bought it costs nothing, but arcade machines eat coins)
Having a full set of sparring pads, a baseball outfit, and a membership at a rock gym I'd argue the opposite.
* Lack of exercise (Sitting around the house all day)
As opposed to the 5 hours of television (average) Americans watch each day? I'd rather they were doing something at least interactive with that time, than watching another episode of Survivor.
I'd point out Dance Dance Revolution, but would it help? Americans aren't active. While we should be outside doing exercise, the largest portion of our non-sleeping day is spent watching television. Videogames compete with television, not sports. In that comparison, Videogames win hands down. I'd rather people be playing tennis with a group of friends than playing Counterstrike with them, but realistically one does not preclude the other. I'd much rather people were playing Counterstrike with their friends than watching Friends alone.
* No chance of professional achievement (as, say, with popular sports)
Nice bit of sarcasm there (which is why I think you shouldn't be modded troll). There are a lot more game developers than professional athletes. Not all of us drive ferraris, but the career path for an athlete is very limited.
* Addiction (I've never heard of someone who played/survived an 8 hour match of soccer, and still wanted more)
True, but at least videogames come and go. A Football hooligan at 6 will be a football hooligan at 45. An evercrack addict at 15 will probably be a Diablo III addict at 21. And when the time comes, they will be much more ready to give up having an addiction than that football hooligan.
Of course, you do get some sports addicts in High School, primarily anorexics who are insecure about their appearance and who want to buff up/slim down. They enjoy the high of running and they do it until they have severe health problems. It happens in most high schools at least once per year.
* Viewed as being "mindless" (Chess, and other boardgames aren't - but even then they have a social element, professional rankings, etc.)
Games aren't mindless. Games are, at heart, puzzles. Do you move your six units in to attack now, while getting pincered or do you pull them back to affect a more defensive position? How do you topple the pole into the wall, letting the water break through to push the crate onto the switch opening the door? If three enemies from the other team just walked by, is their fourth teammate scouting ahead or hanging back with a sniper rifle? Can you say that about prime-time television?
* Violence (Contact sports are violent too... but not in the deliberate blood-splatting way some video games are)
*cough*Movies*cough*. Ahem, where was I?
* The loser sub-culture stigma (Anyone here old enough to remember the 1981 film "Joysticks" ?)
There's not much we can do to counter the loser sub-culture stigma, except to not be losers ourselves. As it stands, most guys my age (25) play videogames. Other people in other age ranges don't understand videogames, and consider it a weird, sub-culturey thing. Until we become the dominant culture, I we are by definition a subculture. And of course while "losers" will be caught playing videogames, so too will "winners." People will just say that people were losers because of games, and winners were so in spite of them.
I would actually encourage an open-source DRM implementation, perhaps as part of OGG media. If a free alternative were available to publishers, that fixed the fair-use problems, I can certainly see that it might be adopted.
I feel this way too, but there is an inherent problem. There has been no cryptography-like breakthrough for protected content. The idea with cryptography is that there is some information which is critical to making sense of other information, and that information is withheld. That is why you can have a block of data encrypted with one key and decrypted with another, because the data required to encrypt something is insufficient to decrypt it. At least, it is incredibly mathematically difficult to do so.
With DRM, you have to have essentially all of the data available, or the program won't be able to decrypt the file. The encryption keys, etc, all must be stored locally, or at least transferred locally for the data to be decrypted. The only place where data can be obfuscated, though not lost, is the application that does the actual decryption. So obfuscation of the application becomes very important.
Now, one can pick apart how the application works on disk or at runtime. Either of these attack methodologies will probably work. An uncrackable DRM application would need to do two things. 1, it would need to be abstruse enough on disk that one cannot know how it is going to achieve it's ends before runtime. Judicious use of Chaos theory may be involved. 2. It would have to be such that either one could not figure out what it was doing while it was doing it (good luck), or that if one figured out what was going on, it would only apply to one set of data and not all sets of data. I don't have the slightest idea how either of these would be achieved.
Already that is a pretty tall order. A truly uncrackable OpenSource DRM would have to go one step further, and make it so that what the DRM is doing would be obscure even if you had the source directly in front of you. This, of course, defeats the purpose of having open source code.
So until there is another "Aha!" moment for DRM, there can be no Open Source DRM.
1. vandal One who willfully or maliciously defaces or destroys public or private property. 2. A member of a Germanic people that overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and sacked Rome in 455.
As these people obviously have not maliciously defaced or destroyed public or private property, I can only assume, then, that the repeated references to them as "vandals" means that the FBI has identified the coders as coming from an obscure Germanic sect, whose culture was believed lost.
Which leads to a conundrum. If we don't arrest these people, then we are validating the viewpoint that the DMCA is far overreaching. If we do arrest these people, then we are destroying the remnants of a lost civilization important to our shared cultural heritage.
Declare a law overly broad, or destroy a valuable culture? What is Ashcroft to do?
I would argue that OggVorbis is also a standard, if not for market acceptance than because the format is well documented: anyone can make an OggVorbis ripper or player. WMA and FairPlay, like DOC files are not standards, but products. You couldn't create a product that creates or plays these files, as you don't have access to data defining the files. Hence, by definition, neither can be considered "standards."
(note, this is not from the above poster, but someone else)
You say that you find his/her sig offensive, but you don't say why. Please don't let that be the only thing you say on the matter, because I genuinely don't know why pointing out the connection between government sponsored religious activities of the present and government sponsored religious atrocities of the past would be offensive. Is it that the 9/11 tragedies are too recent? Is it that church groups disown any possibility of a holy war, jihad, or crusade in their name? Are muslim fundamentalists so different from Christian fundamentalists that the comparison of the two is unsound?
I apologize if I sound like a jerk, but being on the outside of the issue emotionally I really don't know why it is offensive.
BTW, my sig has to do with female (and human, in general) empowerment, not regicide. I apologize to all those that might have lost a prince or princess in their lives.
Because what Real offers is a codec. Real offers a way to play back video streams encoded in their format. By forcing people to use their player they are trying to overstep the boundaries of the product they are offering, akin to making people put their General Motors (tm) car into a General Motors garage. It's unnecessary, and we shouldn't put up with it.
And there is a huge difference between pirated software and reverse-engineered software. Piracy is illegal and immoral, reverse-engineering is generally admirable and is afforded the protection of the law. This gives Real competition inside of their own product line. If there had been an alternative like this in 1997, they would have started cleaning up their act a lot sooner.
If it "hurts" real because they don't receive my e-mail address to spam, my computer to infect (still has a launcher), and my eyeballs to sell on a proprietary music service incompatible with everything else, then good. They should stick to making money by selling the video streaming solutions they are so good at / make so much more money doing.
How are we supposed to become a proper evil empire without an earth destroying superweapon in space? Just like Noah, we need to cleanse the planet of the terrorists, so that we can repopulate in our own image. Is that so wrong?
Starscape is a fun game... I played it last year when the demo was first released. It is, basically, a very pretty 2D overhead space trader / space shemup, with a bit more asteroid collecting than I would enjoy. But is it "selling like hotcakes" by industry standards? Not at all. They're probably sitting quit pretty, but would a publisher look at those figures and think that they should bankroll these types of projects?
That's not to say that indy studios have no place in gaming... Pretty much every genre has started in one way or another at an indy studio. But rhe cost of developing a full retail box versus the cost of a pure shareware title is as different as the outcome.
When read as a genuine desire for funding, it's clear that your statement was not intended to be insulting. I wouldn't mind 600k to develop a pet project of mine into a full shareware title.
Slashdot Mirror
"You know, ever since I upgraded to Windows XP I haven't had a single Blue Screen of Death."
"Does it randomly reboot?"
"Sometimes."
"You have automatic reboot on. It's like a Blue Screen of Death, but without the pretty colors."
Don't we already have tons of resources devoted to verifying the accuracy of a computing environment? If we verify the logic and accuracy of the computer, much like the axioms of mathematics, cannot we then say that the resulting proof must be valid?
Of course, if it can't be understood by humans, it doesn't really help anything, as one of the main points of proving things is to gain insight into how to prove other things. But wouldn't building the system to proove proofs be itself a different but valuable tool?
including places thought of as "liberal" such as New York city and the entire state of California.
I'd submit that neither California nor New York is "liberal," but "progressive." Both California and New York are known for trying new things, which may be gay marriage or it may be the broken window theory of crime prevention. Much of what aligned with "liberal" thought for a long time could also be considered "progressive," but as (dropping the quotes) certain pieces of liberal thought have become mainstream, California and New York then necessarily have to experiment with thing more traditionally associated with conservative thought... Such as sex-segregated schooling.
What defines California is an odd way of latching onto new ideas. That usually puts them in line with "Liberals" but sometimes it doesn't.
What, you don't remember the infamous Chex Quest? It used the Doom engine, but really looked like something Wolfenstein would be ashamed of. It even had two sequels.
I guess it is weird enough to escape a "worst of all time" label. But it should garner a "best of so-bad-it's-good." Sometimes you can find them online.
It has a touchscreen, which guarantees it is one of those Multiple parlor game / card game type machines. You know, the ones that don't count as videogames but they put them in bars so that people without enough money to actually gamble can pretend to do so.
Well, that would be assuming you had recharging stations along the way. As you don't the limited battery capacity is really the limiter of the distance an electric car can go. Hybrid cars, on the other hand, recharge and exhaust batteries repeatedly in any given drive. The ability to absorb a large amount of energy and return it at will would be ideal.
Does anybody else find it creepy that this article is posted at Yahoo?
I don't want to jump on the SlashThink wagon, but does anyone storing e-mails on a free remote server have an expectation of privacy about automated searches and indexing? After all, your e-mail has to be read by machine at some point or another, or it isn't an e-mail. And is should be backed up. The only thing I can see about this is Google stuck their foot firmly in their mouth about basically accepted industry practices.
But can you teach someone how to be creative? No, you can't. People that have absolutely no artistic aptitude will still suck after 4 years of art school. At some point you have to have some innate ability.
My previous college, the University of California, Irvine, was considering offering a degree in Video Game Design* in the school of the humanities, next to the department which handled Film Studies. This degree, which had wide support on campus, would mark one the first long-term collaboration between the arts, humanities, and programming departments, and received the necessary approval, was personally terminated by the chancellor due to the "inappropriateness" of the material.
Apparently Video Games are an inappropriate field of study for a system which gives out degrees in "Film Studies" "Television Studies" and "The 70's." Currently the only non-technical college in California offering a degree in Video Games is USC, a college in the heart of Los Angeles known for catering to the job market. It is also one of a very few in the nation.
How are we to educate upcoming designers about what works and doesn't work if we can't even have basic investigation into the problem through remedial college courses? Why is this major part of the human condition not worthy of study? Until such a time as we have departments of video games in the school of humanities, we won't be preparing people properly for lives as game designers and we won't be preparing people to be intelligent consumers of games. I may not have become a movie critic, but film studies was a valuable course to take to become an educated member of this society. Every time I have to explain a reference to a "magic mushroom," "respan point," "100 coins," or other things that are accepted videogame shorthand, I wonder how people can successfully avoid this very large part of their society. When I have to explain to people what Pac Man was and why it is relevant to our consumerist society, I really want to reach out and slap that Chancellor.
We're never going to be able to educate people until we have a little basic pure research to work from. We're never going to get our pure research until the stigma of gaming is erased.
BTW, while most gaming companies say on job boards that they're looking for 5+ years of experience and 2 shipped titles, most positions are filled either from inside or from word-of-mouth from known developers and their friends with much, much less experience. But even if you don't meet the requirements, if you have something to show that is "really cool," you will get the job. If anything the gaming industry is suffering from too little experience related to too fast of an expansion, not too much. The inexperienced designers I've worked with have tended to roll over when bad ideas were suggested by their colleagues or good ideas were shot down. The experienced developers tended to stand their ground more, and more wisely.
*I had already graduated when this went down, so my information is primarily second hand and the little bits that were reported in the larger news media. If anyone knows something more up-to-date, please let us know.
You'd be surprised how adversity on the battlefield can draw people together.
The individualistic Multiplayer is quickly becoming the rarity, not the norm. Savage is an excellent team game, with an official hierarchy and a wide division of labor. Battlefield 1942, Counter Strike, Battlefield Vietnam, Rainbow 6, and many other modern FPS games are also squad-based. Most MMPORPG's like Everquest emphasize squad tactics. Halo's multiplayer is cooperative.
If you think all multiplayer games are about anonymously "running around... Shooting shit," then you need to get out there and play something recent.
For example, how many of you have bosses who don't want to use Linux because it's known as the "hacker's OS", and as such see it as being dangerous because it's used by hackers/crackers?
I never understood this logic. In the same way that spies are likely to have the best hidden cameras and tiny guns, Hackers are likely to have the strongest systems and the most flexible OS. Just because you don't like what they do doesn't make their equipment inferior.
Most people assume a homeowner's association is banal. I can't find the exact statistic offhand, but I believe something like %50 of America is now covered by a homeowner's association. Essentially, if you need to move anywhere you will sign with a homeowner's association. Where I used to live, the Lakewood area in Sunnyvale, California, the homeowner's association was singled out on CNN for publically shaming someone over her lawn. She had just lost both her husband and her job, and the homeowner's association was sending threatening letters because her bushes were dead, and posting a picture of her house to the front page of their newsletter (which was sent out to all residents). Other homeowner associations get involved in more egregious abuses of power... A famous case involved an Irvine, California man who was taken to court by the homeowner's association because he painted his house shell and not white. The court sided with the homeowner's association, and ordered him to repaint. He spent the money and time and repainted bright, gaudy pink, and the homeowner's association backed down. Still others have done much worse. There was the case in California of the man who was fined by the homeowner's association for hiding his garbage can behind the bushes by the side of the house instead of inside of his garage. Refusing to pay, his house was promptly repossessed and sold for 10,000 dollars to a friend of the director of the association. People lose their houses over this kind thing. Homeowner's associations wield far more power than most people imagine. Usually it is banal, but then again people usually assume that a house is their castle, and that owning a piece of property entitles them to certain inalienable rights.
If you violate a contract, generally punitive measures take effect that are in relation to the violation. Homeowners associations have no such mandate.
And even where homeowner's associations don't exist, people have been successfully sued for "lowering the property value" of their neighbors. Need to put an old car that you bought on blocks that you bought on the land that you bought? Not so fast, sparky, that will reduce the value of your neighbor's land. Better not keep anything like that around, or your neighbor's will be able to claim some pretty unreasonable damages.
It's always tinged with the idea that since-I'm-a-techie-I'm-smarter-than-the-average-pe rson smarminess. Fuck that. We're no brighter than the rest of the populace.
I have a 50% chance of being smarter than average. I like those odds.
You know, I know a guy who proved Santa doesn't exist.
I wasn't arguing that AAC wasn't a standard, but AAC+FairPlay is no more a standard than Ogg+Fairplay would be. Grandparent poster argued that Apple's DRMed AAC and Microsoft's DRMed WMA are not standards. I'd personally rather see an Ogg+DRM implementation, as the sound fidelity would be slightly better and it would give Ogg a huge validation in the market. But neither OggPlay nor AACPlay would be open standards. But Ogg Vorbis is.
Most game developers don't target demographics when conceptualizing games. They may decide to move a level from Syria to Iraq based on feedback from their target demographic, but when coming up with the overall concept that drives the game they generally do what pleases themselves. This is then presented to the publisher, who decides what they think will be the great games and demographics depending upon how they feel.
Women are sorely underrepresented in game development. While other people may have more accurate figures, I would estimate that only one in twenty is female. There are many debates on why women are as rare as they are, but the result is that games are made to satisfy their largely male creators.
This isn't always a bad thing, or a necessarily sexist thing. The two designers most responsible for bringing women into gaming, Alexey Pajitnov and Will Wright, are both men, and both enjoyed great financial success. That's not to say Roberta Williams and other women in dame development don't exist too, or that Game Gal and Game Girl Advance haven't had a tremendously positive influence, but games that are successful in drawing in women are successful in drawing in men too.
Companies would like to sell to the female gamer... As far back as 83 debates have raged as to how to do that. Just about the only rules of thumb that have come out of this debate are "make a great game" and "no blatant negative sexism."
Of course, Video game magazines achieve a degree of sexism only matched by their tremendously poor use of the language. I can't even flip through a "Game Pro" without cringing. That is a boys-only locker room, and that does need to change As Soon As Possible.
I'm not saying these are wrong, I've just decided to go down your list to come up with counterarguments people can use when attacked with these.
* Anti-social (With sports, you are pretty much forced to play with someone else)
Quake, Halo, Everquest, Savage, Street Fighter, and many other games are multiplayer. Snowboarding, Rock-Climbing, Mountain Biking, and many other sports are solo. Multiplayer gaming should be encouraged at all times, but it generally doesn't need to be. People flock to multiplayer games.
* Waste of money (Kicking a football once you have bought it costs nothing, but arcade machines eat coins)
Having a full set of sparring pads, a baseball outfit, and a membership at a rock gym I'd argue the opposite.
* Lack of exercise (Sitting around the house all day)
As opposed to the 5 hours of television (average) Americans watch each day? I'd rather they were doing something at least interactive with that time, than watching another episode of Survivor.
I'd point out Dance Dance Revolution, but would it help? Americans aren't active. While we should be outside doing exercise, the largest portion of our non-sleeping day is spent watching television. Videogames compete with television, not sports. In that comparison, Videogames win hands down. I'd rather people be playing tennis with a group of friends than playing Counterstrike with them, but realistically one does not preclude the other. I'd much rather people were playing Counterstrike with their friends than watching Friends alone.
* No chance of professional achievement (as, say, with popular sports)
Nice bit of sarcasm there (which is why I think you shouldn't be modded troll). There are a lot more game developers than professional athletes. Not all of us drive ferraris, but the career path for an athlete is very limited.
* Addiction (I've never heard of someone who played/survived an 8 hour match of soccer, and still wanted more)
True, but at least videogames come and go. A Football hooligan at 6 will be a football hooligan at 45. An evercrack addict at 15 will probably be a Diablo III addict at 21. And when the time comes, they will be much more ready to give up having an addiction than that football hooligan.
Of course, you do get some sports addicts in High School, primarily anorexics who are insecure about their appearance and who want to buff up/slim down. They enjoy the high of running and they do it until they have severe health problems. It happens in most high schools at least once per year.
* Viewed as being "mindless" (Chess, and other boardgames aren't - but even then they have a social element, professional rankings, etc.)
Games aren't mindless. Games are, at heart, puzzles. Do you move your six units in to attack now, while getting pincered or do you pull them back to affect a more defensive position? How do you topple the pole into the wall, letting the water break through to push the crate onto the switch opening the door? If three enemies from the other team just walked by, is their fourth teammate scouting ahead or hanging back with a sniper rifle? Can you say that about prime-time television?
* Violence (Contact sports are violent too... but not in the deliberate blood-splatting way some video games are)
*cough*Movies*cough*. Ahem, where was I?
* The loser sub-culture stigma (Anyone here old enough to remember the 1981 film "Joysticks" ?)
There's not much we can do to counter the loser sub-culture stigma, except to not be losers ourselves. As it stands, most guys my age (25) play videogames. Other people in other age ranges don't understand videogames, and consider it a weird, sub-culturey thing. Until we become the dominant culture, I we are by definition a subculture. And of course while "losers" will be caught playing videogames, so too will "winners." People will just say that people were losers because of games, and winners were so in spite of them.
* Fa
Put George Bush in Orbit? You oppose this plan?
I would actually encourage an open-source DRM implementation, perhaps as part of OGG media. If a free alternative were available to publishers, that fixed the fair-use problems, I can certainly see that it might be adopted.
I feel this way too, but there is an inherent problem. There has been no cryptography-like breakthrough for protected content. The idea with cryptography is that there is some information which is critical to making sense of other information, and that information is withheld. That is why you can have a block of data encrypted with one key and decrypted with another, because the data required to encrypt something is insufficient to decrypt it. At least, it is incredibly mathematically difficult to do so.
With DRM, you have to have essentially all of the data available, or the program won't be able to decrypt the file. The encryption keys, etc, all must be stored locally, or at least transferred locally for the data to be decrypted. The only place where data can be obfuscated, though not lost, is the application that does the actual decryption. So obfuscation of the application becomes very important.
Now, one can pick apart how the application works on disk or at runtime. Either of these attack methodologies will probably work. An uncrackable DRM application would need to do two things. 1, it would need to be abstruse enough on disk that one cannot know how it is going to achieve it's ends before runtime. Judicious use of Chaos theory may be involved. 2. It would have to be such that either one could not figure out what it was doing while it was doing it (good luck), or that if one figured out what was going on, it would only apply to one set of data and not all sets of data. I don't have the slightest idea how either of these would be achieved.
Already that is a pretty tall order. A truly uncrackable OpenSource DRM would have to go one step further, and make it so that what the DRM is doing would be obscure even if you had the source directly in front of you. This, of course, defeats the purpose of having open source code.
So until there is another "Aha!" moment for DRM, there can be no Open Source DRM.
(from dictionary.com)
Vandal (van'dl)
1. vandal One who willfully or maliciously defaces or destroys public or private property.
2. A member of a Germanic people that overran Gaul, Spain, and northern Africa in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. and sacked Rome in 455.
As these people obviously have not maliciously defaced or destroyed public or private property, I can only assume, then, that the repeated references to them as "vandals" means that the FBI has identified the coders as coming from an obscure Germanic sect, whose culture was believed lost.
Which leads to a conundrum. If we don't arrest these people, then we are validating the viewpoint that the DMCA is far overreaching. If we do arrest these people, then we are destroying the remnants of a lost civilization important to our shared cultural heritage.
Declare a law overly broad, or destroy a valuable culture? What is Ashcroft to do?
I would argue that OggVorbis is also a standard, if not for market acceptance than because the format is well documented: anyone can make an OggVorbis ripper or player. WMA and FairPlay, like DOC files are not standards, but products. You couldn't create a product that creates or plays these files, as you don't have access to data defining the files. Hence, by definition, neither can be considered "standards."
It's Classic Gamer Magazine.
The pack-in is a floppy.img.
(note, this is not from the above poster, but someone else)
You say that you find his/her sig offensive, but you don't say why. Please don't let that be the only thing you say on the matter, because I genuinely don't know why pointing out the connection between government sponsored religious activities of the present and government sponsored religious atrocities of the past would be offensive. Is it that the 9/11 tragedies are too recent? Is it that church groups disown any possibility of a holy war, jihad, or crusade in their name? Are muslim fundamentalists so different from Christian fundamentalists that the comparison of the two is unsound?
I apologize if I sound like a jerk, but being on the outside of the issue emotionally I really don't know why it is offensive.
BTW, my sig has to do with female (and human, in general) empowerment, not regicide. I apologize to all those that might have lost a prince or princess in their lives.
Because what Real offers is a codec. Real offers a way to play back video streams encoded in their format. By forcing people to use their player they are trying to overstep the boundaries of the product they are offering, akin to making people put their General Motors (tm) car into a General Motors garage. It's unnecessary, and we shouldn't put up with it.
And there is a huge difference between pirated software and reverse-engineered software. Piracy is illegal and immoral, reverse-engineering is generally admirable and is afforded the protection of the law. This gives Real competition inside of their own product line. If there had been an alternative like this in 1997, they would have started cleaning up their act a lot sooner.
If it "hurts" real because they don't receive my e-mail address to spam, my computer to infect (still has a launcher), and my eyeballs to sell on a proprietary music service incompatible with everything else, then good. They should stick to making money by selling the video streaming solutions they are so good at / make so much more money doing.
How are we supposed to become a proper evil empire without an earth destroying superweapon in space?
Just like Noah, we need to cleanse the planet of the terrorists, so that we can repopulate in our own image. Is that so wrong?
Starscape is a fun game... I played it last year when the demo was first released. It is, basically, a very pretty 2D overhead space trader / space shemup, with a bit more asteroid collecting than I would enjoy. But is it "selling like hotcakes" by industry standards? Not at all. They're probably sitting quit pretty, but would a publisher look at those figures and think that they should bankroll these types of projects?
That's not to say that indy studios have no place in gaming... Pretty much every genre has started in one way or another at an indy studio. But rhe cost of developing a full retail box versus the cost of a pure shareware title is as different as the outcome.
When read as a genuine desire for funding, it's clear that your statement was not intended to be insulting. I wouldn't mind 600k to develop a pet project of mine into a full shareware title.