If this level of piracy continues, development will stop.
Please do so. With this level of behavior, please get the hell out of the software development business. Not only do we not need you, you're suddenly greatly unwanted.
Most software shouldn't be trusted to know its ass from it's head. Don't give it the functional equivalent of a loaded gun pointed at the user and then promise that it won't go off.
Perhaps they were going for the "investment" effect. If you invest money in something, you're more likely to stay invested in it for longer. By making people go out and buy a box, maybe they're banking on people feeling more emotionally invested in the game and therefore more likely to stick around for another year instead of another three months.
I'd still consider it part of the subscription myself, but then I'm not a moneymaker like Blizzard.
Now that there are 2 consoles out there with HD as their focus, the state-of-the-art in terms of graphics is HD resolutions.... its pretty hard to imagine them passing up two systems with superior graphical power for the Wii.
The thing is, that High Density resolution comes with a pretty steep price in terms of graphics processing. Ignoring the interlaced vs de-interlaced things (all games render de-interlaced under the hood anyway to prevent hideous tearing problems), you're ultimately pushing at least 4x the pixels. With that much more to draw, your available CPU and GPU times are going to drop, let's say by roughly 4x (oversimplification, yadda yadda)
So if you have a pair of "High-Def" systems that are 8 times the power of the previous generation, and a low-def system that's 2 times the power of the previous generation... if you spend 4x that power pushing more pixels you're actually back to about the same overall level.
So really what you've bought with all that extra power is a higher resolution look at the otherwise same image. On standard-def TV's, this translates to really, really good anti-aliasing.
This is why the look of Zelda holds up. The other systems may be a lot more powerful than the Wii, but their committment to High Definition comes at a steep price.
I randomly came across a Wii in an EB this past week, and that was out by MIT / Harvard / Tech geek central.
I've heard from other people as well, they're just creeping around the corner of being availble. Getting one these days seems to involve using your legs rather than your butt.
They might, he says, not even agree with his conclusion that a global platform would be a good idea.
You think?
Clearly there needs to be a standards body pushing forth the advancement of video game hardware, as over the past 10 years we've seen little more than....
Personally, I always feel like these should either be unplayable or of alternative goals. Getting overwhelmed by a Zerg swarm in the beginning of Starcraft still felt like your side was losing ground, even though you "won" the battle by surviving for just long enough to retreat before getting swarmed all to heck. Your character committing suicide in Final Fantasy III was dramatic even while you had achieved the fishy goal set out for you.
I know many gamers who have managed to "beat" unbeatable creatures. Online games are notorious for this, but even in single-player console games you can frequently find a way that you can or should be able to defeat bosses that otherwise would be undefeatable. Either standing in the right place while defending, or finding a weakness in the pattern, or stocking up on 999 health potions before you leave town... Players will find a way to beat challenges that you put in front of them. That's what they do. If you don't intend the challenge to be achieveable, don't tell them to do it. Or make it achieveable with a very tough battle for a tweaked plot arc and a better ending.
Ben's stuff is usually very good in this respect, in that he makes it damned clear that "something not normal" is going on. But there are other ways to do this (and other ways he has done this in the past).
This is your example of good DRM ? Yes, yes it is. And in a previous version of this response, I went through the points and refuted them one by one with the reality of the system and game development in general.
But that's not the point.
The point is, and I can't emphasize this enough, if you refuse to enter the discussion about what DRM should be, you're not going to get any input into what it will be.
Actual digital movie piracy is about 4 years old. Actual music piracy is about 7 years old. Those are babies. Gaming piracy is about 26. Sure, the MPAA may never have tried other copyprotection methods, but in gaming we've tried everything from that Starforce slime to serial dongles to physical police dossiers to manuals with scratch-n-sniff symbols. And it has been painfully obvious, and tried again and again, that shipping without any form of copy protection at all will hurt your sales. I've seen many many numbers throughout the years, and they're pretty iron clad.
But we've gone overboard. And if you've ever gone through the experience of fighting against your game getting wrapped up in that macrovision crap, only to watch it become this unusable vector for slime, you'll know how far we've gone overboard. And if you've ever gone through that experience, you'll know that you'd better have a good answer when the director of your company asks "what should we use instead?" He's seen the numbers on non-protected games. He knows the numbers aren't good. He knows exactly how much of a percentage revenues increase to expect from going from donationware to nagware to timed demos. He knows exactly how many hundreds of thousands of dollars sales will drop off if you strip off the layer of copyprotection from the retal "product." He's translating that into a number of artists and programmers he won't be able to hire on the next project, because we didn't get that windfall from this one.
He wants an answer. And I want to be able to give him a good answer when I'm going on one of my frequent crusades against overly restrictive copy protection. Saying "all copy protection is bad" just ensures that he's going to go with the company with the most restrictivs, slimy, and buggy stuff, because they offered him the only real answer.
So please, give me an answer. Assuming "no DRM" is not going to fly in practice, what is the least objectionable copyprotection scheme? What should we do?
It hurts the family-mother wanting to make copies of the overused childrens-DVD to avoid having to buy it anew next time it gets scratched. Resurfacing disks is cheap and easy.
It hurts the non-technical customer who just wants to listen to his music bougth for player-X 5 years later after player-X broke and he bougth player-Y. This is a problem with the overbearingness of current implementations. With a "deterrent" implementation, this shouldn't be an issue.
It harms the fully legal customer who wants to listen to his music-CD in the computer at work. Again, shouldn't be an issue. You should never have to pair a physical media with a playback device.
It harms the tourist that wants to buy some Japanese DVDs as souvenirs from his travels in Japan. Now you're talking about regional lockout, the arguably illegal practice of artifically subdividing a market. Again, shouldn't be there.
It harms the customer who for whatever reason needs to get a new computer. (yes, I know, there are ways -- but it's extra hassle) I don't know... I've brought steam over from machine to machine, and that's pretty easy. Just log in.
Meanwhile: It has no effect whatsoever on those that get their music from p2p. So? They weren't going to buy it anyway.
It has no effect whatsoever on the large professional comercial pirates. (those that copy and *sell* copyrigthed material) So? A: that's what law enforcement is for and B: that's a pretty damned tiny group in the west anyway.
It has no effect whatsoever on the cracker-team that get a kick out of being the first to "release" whatever new music or movie to various p2p-networks. It may even *add* to their prestige. Again, so what? Let them wag their things.
Look, most existing implementations of DRM are completely screwed. But the concept is valid. The best implementation of this I've seen has to be Steam (now that it doesn't crash every few minutes). Sure, it manages to a degree what you can and can't do with your games. But it also improves the end-user experience by removing trips to the store and allowing you to take your games with you to whatever PC you happen to be on. Assuming your network connection is reasonable, that's actually really nice. Or the gamecube's alternative disk format... which was just different enough that the physical media was unduplicatable. Or how you are free to duplicate VHS tapes, but the quality degrades with each subsequent generation... you can make a great copy for your friends, and they might even make an OK copy for their friends, but it won't go much beyond that.
I get the feeling that most people get an intrinsic sense that we should have SOME system in place to discourage casual copyright violations. By refusing to engage in the discussion about exactly what form that discouragement should take, we're letting Macrovision, Sony, and the RIAA set that standard for us.
As an athiest, the part that I find insulting is the thought that Eugenics were carried out because the people were athiests. It's not, and they weren't. Eugenics and genocide weren't carried out in the name of athiesm. Rather, the genocides your sig brushes upon were committed because the people involved were amoral selfish bastards. But nowhwere did Hitler, for example, say "my non-god told me to do this." Nor did Saddam Hussein gas the kurds to prove his nongodlyness. But we did go to war in Iraq because God told Bush to (his words). In one case, the person was a fundamental nationalist. In the other, he was fundamentally self-centered. (The third, history will decide.) But in neither of the cases was their belief in god or not a factor in the behavior.
Athiesm isn't a philosophy, and it certainly isn't a neitzschean philosophy of evolutionary eugenics. All that stuff is other things one can believe, but has no relationship to whether or not someone believes in god. It's like saying that someone doesn't believe that a pure democratic society is the best form of government, therefore they must be a socialist.
Really, the problem is fundamentalism in any form. Sure, fundamentalism gives you the strength to wake up again in the morning and fight, but it also can make you blind to the humanity of those you define as "the other." Fundamentalism isn't about the conclusions you reach, but about how you percieve the world around you. You don't strike me as a fundamentalist, simply because you've put some degree of rational thought into your opinions and you seem like you'd be swayed by compelling arguments. A real fundamentalist would continue to believe in the face of counter evidence, and generally gets violent about it.
And yes, I've come across fundamentalist Atheists. It's not a pretty sight, but at least it's rare.
Oh, and if you think you're oppressed as a christian on a largely open-source web board, try explaining to every other person you meet that being an atheist doesn't mean being amoral, but rather that your morality structure is based on the less grounded concepts of intrinsic human morality patterns and your personal idealized behavior schema. It's like a regularly scheduled forced hour of navel-gazing.
I won't pick up a piece of home electronic gear unless it handles RCA, for this very reason.
Sure, component is slightly better than S-video. Or was it the other way around? Either way, it's time for a single next standard. That's why they call it a standard. The cabling really isn't the limiting factor in image quality, but it seems to cause the most annoyance.
Re:He might be on to something here
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
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· Score: 1
I believe that Slashdot is actually written by a bunch of SCO haters.
That must be the first sane thought Darl has had in years. Of course, at this point, he could have thought the same about people from Sourceforge, MacWorld, the FAA, the Nebraska Pipe Fitter's Union, The Girl Scouts...
I'm guessing he doesn't get many christmas cards these days.
Not to sound too pedantic, but DRM of some form still has a place. DRM should be there to discourage casual copying by non-geek people. For example, the DRM on DVD's is functionally useless against anyone who has spent an hour looking things up on the internet. But my sister still doesn't know how to burn duplicate DVD's for her friends... it's just not worth the effort to her to find out.
And maybe I have some not-so selfless interest in the subject, but old PS1 games had a light degree of copyprotection that ensured players who weren't savvy with a soldering iron couldn't copy games, and the ones who really wanted to, could. But those are the ones who still can anyway, despite massive expenditures and the closure of many legitimate retailers / gamers / hobbyists.
DRM needs to be put into proper perspective... it's a deterrent, not a lock. It's a mild annoyance like those old "register your shareware now" messages that keep ordinary people from slipping into bad habits. It's not an excuse to install a backdoor on everyone's machine, it's not a reason to throw kids in jail, it's not a good use of 20 million dollars of RnD. It's a mild deterrent.
In proper position in the overall ecosystem, DRM can be quite useful. Just keep it light, and you'll get 90% of the goodness for just 5% of the annoyance.
True, but correct me if I'm wrong... aren't what you're mostly talking about is basically an MPEG2 / H.264 decoder that can handle 4x the data flow of a DVD? That's not exactly a huge flow. With the custom decoder chips out, it was probably possible to put out a 300 dollar HD-DVD player this past christmas... though it wouldn't make sense not to get back some of your tooling costs from early adopters.
What defines a "casual" game? All arcade games from their heyday would be considered "casual" games. Anything you can pick up and play, then put down, seems to be defined as casual.
I, personally, love casual games. And I really couldn't be considered a casual gamer.
What if that's what it is? What if this time it's just a badass phone? Most carriers have games these days, and the per MB cost of network transmission has plummetted. What if your next phone might have an n-gage compiant chipset and control stick built in, and that let you download more moderately developed n-gage games from your network provider?
The phone gaming industry is pretty profitable right now for bright companies (and primarily the network operators). What if n-gage was just an extension of that model?
It probably won't be, but a unified next-gen phone gaming platform, that was like the last gen without the spaghetti of standards, might have a real shot.
Anyone who says that The SIMS is smut that is destroying our children is simply adding noise to the discussion. It's the same thing as saying that marajuana is as bad as meth. Loud, uninformed shouting that everything is a problem does nothing to recognize or deal with the real issues.
Jack Thompson's noise being silenced would be a great thing for the debate at large. More mature and reasoned voices can now (hopefully) be heard.
Clearly. Especially when you disclose a vulnerability by bringing a popular service to it's knees through a self-propogating script and shut it down for extended periods of time while they try to repair the problem. And for that, he doesn't get any jail time, and has to spend some weekends picking up trash by the side of the road. The raging injustice.
This does not do justice to those security researchers who actually disclose vulnerabilities and are arrested for it. This is simply a bright script kiddie who steped over a line, and was slapped on the wrist.
Actually the most effective thing to do is to ensure that as many people as possible carry guns and can shoot straight. The stupidest thing is to declare somewhere a "gun free zone". It's a lot easier for someone to carry out a Dunblane or Columbine type attack if they know that they will be better armed than their intended victims.
Really? The columbine kids didn't seem to care if they died or not. Certainly the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and Oklahoma were attacking people who had guns and could shoot straight. Nobody has survived going postal. The people know they're going to die. They want to die. Arming everyone in the area doesn't preclude that.
The distinguishing feature of a bomb is that it's intended to go bang. Rather than what it looks like.
Right. Which usually requires more than a paper-thin sheet of plastic attached to some lights.
On my PDA I can carry literally thousands of different books, from Tolstoy to Japanese folk tales. It can automatically scroll pages, and search for text (for those fun foreign names). You can read it when it's a lot darker than with a standard book, and the text is as nice as reading from a laptop screen... which is not to say great, but definitely passable. Size fonts to your liking, not the publisher's. Never lose your place. Doesn't actually take up room in your pocket (if you were already carrying the PDA anyway). Did I mention search? I really miss search when reading traditional books.
Which is not to say that books are nice. But once we get a screen that is as nice as it should be... there really won't be a lot of reason to stick with the dead tree edition.
You wouldn't believe how often developers get this wrong. Why do movies know to start you off with the most gripping scene they can, but videogames start you as a weakling slashing at moving gobs of slime and, if you're lucky, bugs.
God of War 1 kicked things off right with an amazing battle against a gigantic hydra on a sinking ship. Metroid gives you most of the weapons in the game to play with, before breaking them all. NFS: Most Wanted gave you the best car in the game.
Give the players a big bang to start things off right. You can do the whole "buildup" thing once you've got their attention.
I had a light tree in college by one of my doors. Unfortunately, if you apply shock to a traditional filament bulb while hot, the filament breaks. I kept going through bulbs until I replaced the traditional bulbs with Compact Flourescent. CF bulbs can be shocked, dropped, etc while hot without major problem. Once switching over, I didn't have to change any more.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with some bulbs, but in my experienct it isn't representative.
That's odd, one of the things I'm fond of saying is that you can be creative in certain areas, but you have to make a connection to your audience. Nintendogs brought something everyone wants to do, and did so in a really creative and original way. Most games bring really creative and original settings, but do so in a traditional and off-the-rack way. And necessarily so, as if you have a creative setting and creative gameplay, there is really nothing to latch onto emotionally.
It probably isn't a co-incidence that some of the biggest hits in the past few years have had creative gameplay hidden behind mundane activities.
Exactly. The best thing we can do to stop people from bombing us, is to not give them incentive to do so. But other than that, there is an inherent risk of this which we just can't get rid of. If someone wants to hide a gun in their pocket and randomly start shooting people, there is really nothing we can do about it. If someone wants to blow up a room full of people, and has the chemicals knowledge (or access to the internet) to do so, there really is nothing we can do about it.
I'm embarassed to be in Boston right now. Those things look nothing like a bomb.
Slashdot Mirror
If this level of piracy continues, development will stop.
Please do so. With this level of behavior, please get the hell out of the software development business. Not only do we not need you, you're suddenly greatly unwanted.
Most software shouldn't be trusted to know its ass from it's head. Don't give it the functional equivalent of a loaded gun pointed at the user and then promise that it won't go off.
Perhaps they were going for the "investment" effect. If you invest money in something, you're more likely to stay invested in it for longer. By making people go out and buy a box, maybe they're banking on people feeling more emotionally invested in the game and therefore more likely to stick around for another year instead of another three months.
I'd still consider it part of the subscription myself, but then I'm not a moneymaker like Blizzard.
If it didn't start out as one, certainly WoW is a mainstream casual friendly game now and they've simply acknowledged that.
You're kidding, right? Unless the mainstream audience sits and stares at a screen all...
Oh. That can't be healthy.
Now that there are 2 consoles out there with HD as their focus, the state-of-the-art in terms of graphics is HD resolutions.... its pretty hard to imagine them passing up two systems with superior graphical power for the Wii.
The thing is, that High Density resolution comes with a pretty steep price in terms of graphics processing. Ignoring the interlaced vs de-interlaced things (all games render de-interlaced under the hood anyway to prevent hideous tearing problems), you're ultimately pushing at least 4x the pixels. With that much more to draw, your available CPU and GPU times are going to drop, let's say by roughly 4x (oversimplification, yadda yadda)
So if you have a pair of "High-Def" systems that are 8 times the power of the previous generation, and a low-def system that's 2 times the power of the previous generation... if you spend 4x that power pushing more pixels you're actually back to about the same overall level.
So really what you've bought with all that extra power is a higher resolution look at the otherwise same image. On standard-def TV's, this translates to really, really good anti-aliasing.
This is why the look of Zelda holds up. The other systems may be a lot more powerful than the Wii, but their committment to High Definition comes at a steep price.
I randomly came across a Wii in an EB this past week, and that was out by MIT / Harvard / Tech geek central.
I've heard from other people as well, they're just creeping around the corner of being availble. Getting one these days seems to involve using your legs rather than your butt.
They might, he says, not even agree with his conclusion that a global platform would be a good idea.
You think?
Clearly there needs to be a standards body pushing forth the advancement of video game hardware, as over the past 10 years we've seen little more than....
Oh. Nevermind.
Personally, I always feel like these should either be unplayable or of alternative goals. Getting overwhelmed by a Zerg swarm in the beginning of Starcraft still felt like your side was losing ground, even though you "won" the battle by surviving for just long enough to retreat before getting swarmed all to heck. Your character committing suicide in Final Fantasy III was dramatic even while you had achieved the fishy goal set out for you.
I know many gamers who have managed to "beat" unbeatable creatures. Online games are notorious for this, but even in single-player console games you can frequently find a way that you can or should be able to defeat bosses that otherwise would be undefeatable. Either standing in the right place while defending, or finding a weakness in the pattern, or stocking up on 999 health potions before you leave town... Players will find a way to beat challenges that you put in front of them. That's what they do. If you don't intend the challenge to be achieveable, don't tell them to do it. Or make it achieveable with a very tough battle for a tweaked plot arc and a better ending.
Ben's stuff is usually very good in this respect, in that he makes it damned clear that "something not normal" is going on. But there are other ways to do this (and other ways he has done this in the past).
This is your example of good DRM ?
Yes, yes it is. And in a previous version of this response, I went through the points and refuted them one by one with the reality of the system and game development in general.
But that's not the point.
The point is, and I can't emphasize this enough, if you refuse to enter the discussion about what DRM should be, you're not going to get any input into what it will be.
Actual digital movie piracy is about 4 years old. Actual music piracy is about 7 years old. Those are babies. Gaming piracy is about 26. Sure, the MPAA may never have tried other copyprotection methods, but in gaming we've tried everything from that Starforce slime to serial dongles to physical police dossiers to manuals with scratch-n-sniff symbols. And it has been painfully obvious, and tried again and again, that shipping without any form of copy protection at all will hurt your sales. I've seen many many numbers throughout the years, and they're pretty iron clad.
But we've gone overboard. And if you've ever gone through the experience of fighting against your game getting wrapped up in that macrovision crap, only to watch it become this unusable vector for slime, you'll know how far we've gone overboard. And if you've ever gone through that experience, you'll know that you'd better have a good answer when the director of your company asks "what should we use instead?" He's seen the numbers on non-protected games. He knows the numbers aren't good. He knows exactly how much of a percentage revenues increase to expect from going from donationware to nagware to timed demos. He knows exactly how many hundreds of thousands of dollars sales will drop off if you strip off the layer of copyprotection from the retal "product." He's translating that into a number of artists and programmers he won't be able to hire on the next project, because we didn't get that windfall from this one.
He wants an answer. And I want to be able to give him a good answer when I'm going on one of my frequent crusades against overly restrictive copy protection. Saying "all copy protection is bad" just ensures that he's going to go with the company with the most restrictivs, slimy, and buggy stuff, because they offered him the only real answer.
So please, give me an answer. Assuming "no DRM" is not going to fly in practice, what is the least objectionable copyprotection scheme? What should we do?
It hurts the family-mother wanting to make copies of the overused childrens-DVD to avoid having to buy it anew next time it gets scratched.
Resurfacing disks is cheap and easy.
It hurts the non-technical customer who just wants to listen to his music bougth for player-X 5 years later after player-X broke and he bougth player-Y.
This is a problem with the overbearingness of current implementations. With a "deterrent" implementation, this shouldn't be an issue.
It harms the fully legal customer who wants to listen to his music-CD in the computer at work.
Again, shouldn't be an issue. You should never have to pair a physical media with a playback device.
It harms the tourist that wants to buy some Japanese DVDs as souvenirs from his travels in Japan.
Now you're talking about regional lockout, the arguably illegal practice of artifically subdividing a market. Again, shouldn't be there.
It harms the customer who for whatever reason needs to get a new computer. (yes, I know, there are ways -- but it's extra hassle)
I don't know... I've brought steam over from machine to machine, and that's pretty easy. Just log in.
Meanwhile:
It has no effect whatsoever on those that get their music from p2p.
So? They weren't going to buy it anyway.
It has no effect whatsoever on the large professional comercial pirates. (those that copy and *sell* copyrigthed material)
So? A: that's what law enforcement is for and B: that's a pretty damned tiny group in the west anyway.
It has no effect whatsoever on the cracker-team that get a kick out of being the first to "release" whatever new music or movie to various p2p-networks. It may even *add* to their prestige.
Again, so what? Let them wag their things.
Look, most existing implementations of DRM are completely screwed. But the concept is valid. The best implementation of this I've seen has to be Steam (now that it doesn't crash every few minutes). Sure, it manages to a degree what you can and can't do with your games. But it also improves the end-user experience by removing trips to the store and allowing you to take your games with you to whatever PC you happen to be on. Assuming your network connection is reasonable, that's actually really nice. Or the gamecube's alternative disk format... which was just different enough that the physical media was unduplicatable. Or how you are free to duplicate VHS tapes, but the quality degrades with each subsequent generation... you can make a great copy for your friends, and they might even make an OK copy for their friends, but it won't go much beyond that.
I get the feeling that most people get an intrinsic sense that we should have SOME system in place to discourage casual copyright violations. By refusing to engage in the discussion about exactly what form that discouragement should take, we're letting Macrovision, Sony, and the RIAA set that standard for us.
As an athiest, the part that I find insulting is the thought that Eugenics were carried out because the people were athiests. It's not, and they weren't. Eugenics and genocide weren't carried out in the name of athiesm. Rather, the genocides your sig brushes upon were committed because the people involved were amoral selfish bastards. But nowhwere did Hitler, for example, say "my non-god told me to do this." Nor did Saddam Hussein gas the kurds to prove his nongodlyness. But we did go to war in Iraq because God told Bush to (his words). In one case, the person was a fundamental nationalist. In the other, he was fundamentally self-centered. (The third, history will decide.) But in neither of the cases was their belief in god or not a factor in the behavior.
Athiesm isn't a philosophy, and it certainly isn't a neitzschean philosophy of evolutionary eugenics. All that stuff is other things one can believe, but has no relationship to whether or not someone believes in god. It's like saying that someone doesn't believe that a pure democratic society is the best form of government, therefore they must be a socialist.
Really, the problem is fundamentalism in any form. Sure, fundamentalism gives you the strength to wake up again in the morning and fight, but it also can make you blind to the humanity of those you define as "the other." Fundamentalism isn't about the conclusions you reach, but about how you percieve the world around you. You don't strike me as a fundamentalist, simply because you've put some degree of rational thought into your opinions and you seem like you'd be swayed by compelling arguments. A real fundamentalist would continue to believe in the face of counter evidence, and generally gets violent about it.
And yes, I've come across fundamentalist Atheists. It's not a pretty sight, but at least it's rare.
Oh, and if you think you're oppressed as a christian on a largely open-source web board, try explaining to every other person you meet that being an atheist doesn't mean being amoral, but rather that your morality structure is based on the less grounded concepts of intrinsic human morality patterns and your personal idealized behavior schema. It's like a regularly scheduled forced hour of navel-gazing.
I won't pick up a piece of home electronic gear unless it handles RCA, for this very reason.
Sure, component is slightly better than S-video. Or was it the other way around? Either way, it's time for a single next standard. That's why they call it a standard. The cabling really isn't the limiting factor in image quality, but it seems to cause the most annoyance.
I believe that Slashdot is actually written by a bunch of SCO haters.
That must be the first sane thought Darl has had in years. Of course, at this point, he could have thought the same about people from Sourceforge, MacWorld, the FAA, the Nebraska Pipe Fitter's Union, The Girl Scouts...
I'm guessing he doesn't get many christmas cards these days.
Not to sound too pedantic, but DRM of some form still has a place. DRM should be there to discourage casual copying by non-geek people. For example, the DRM on DVD's is functionally useless against anyone who has spent an hour looking things up on the internet. But my sister still doesn't know how to burn duplicate DVD's for her friends... it's just not worth the effort to her to find out.
And maybe I have some not-so selfless interest in the subject, but old PS1 games had a light degree of copyprotection that ensured players who weren't savvy with a soldering iron couldn't copy games, and the ones who really wanted to, could. But those are the ones who still can anyway, despite massive expenditures and the closure of many legitimate retailers / gamers / hobbyists.
DRM needs to be put into proper perspective... it's a deterrent, not a lock. It's a mild annoyance like those old "register your shareware now" messages that keep ordinary people from slipping into bad habits. It's not an excuse to install a backdoor on everyone's machine, it's not a reason to throw kids in jail, it's not a good use of 20 million dollars of RnD. It's a mild deterrent.
In proper position in the overall ecosystem, DRM can be quite useful. Just keep it light, and you'll get 90% of the goodness for just 5% of the annoyance.
How many years before we're allowed to link to the old site without permission?
Wait, they "reserved" that right, yet no such right exists? Brilliant start for an educational program about rights.
True, but correct me if I'm wrong... aren't what you're mostly talking about is basically an MPEG2 / H.264 decoder that can handle 4x the data flow of a DVD? That's not exactly a huge flow. With the custom decoder chips out, it was probably possible to put out a 300 dollar HD-DVD player this past christmas... though it wouldn't make sense not to get back some of your tooling costs from early adopters.
What defines a "casual" game? All arcade games from their heyday would be considered "casual" games. Anything you can pick up and play, then put down, seems to be defined as casual.
I, personally, love casual games. And I really couldn't be considered a casual gamer.
What if that's what it is? What if this time it's just a badass phone? Most carriers have games these days, and the per MB cost of network transmission has plummetted. What if your next phone might have an n-gage compiant chipset and control stick built in, and that let you download more moderately developed n-gage games from your network provider?
The phone gaming industry is pretty profitable right now for bright companies (and primarily the network operators). What if n-gage was just an extension of that model?
It probably won't be, but a unified next-gen phone gaming platform, that was like the last gen without the spaghetti of standards, might have a real shot.
Anyone who says that The SIMS is smut that is destroying our children is simply adding noise to the discussion. It's the same thing as saying that marajuana is as bad as meth. Loud, uninformed shouting that everything is a problem does nothing to recognize or deal with the real issues.
Jack Thompson's noise being silenced would be a great thing for the debate at large. More mature and reasoned voices can now (hopefully) be heard.
Clearly, disclosing security vulnerabilities doesn't pay.
Clearly. Especially when you disclose a vulnerability by bringing a popular service to it's knees through a self-propogating script and shut it down for extended periods of time while they try to repair the problem. And for that, he doesn't get any jail time, and has to spend some weekends picking up trash by the side of the road. The raging injustice.
This does not do justice to those security researchers who actually disclose vulnerabilities and are arrested for it. This is simply a bright script kiddie who steped over a line, and was slapped on the wrist.
Actually the most effective thing to do is to ensure that as many people as possible carry guns and can shoot straight. The stupidest thing is to declare somewhere a "gun free zone". It's a lot easier for someone to carry out a Dunblane or Columbine type attack if they know that they will be better armed than their intended victims.
Really? The columbine kids didn't seem to care if they died or not. Certainly the terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and Oklahoma were attacking people who had guns and could shoot straight. Nobody has survived going postal. The people know they're going to die. They want to die. Arming everyone in the area doesn't preclude that.
The distinguishing feature of a bomb is that it's intended to go bang. Rather than what it looks like.
Right. Which usually requires more than a paper-thin sheet of plastic attached to some lights.
On my PDA I can carry literally thousands of different books, from Tolstoy to Japanese folk tales. It can automatically scroll pages, and search for text (for those fun foreign names). You can read it when it's a lot darker than with a standard book, and the text is as nice as reading from a laptop screen... which is not to say great, but definitely passable. Size fonts to your liking, not the publisher's. Never lose your place. Doesn't actually take up room in your pocket (if you were already carrying the PDA anyway). Did I mention search? I really miss search when reading traditional books.
Which is not to say that books are nice. But once we get a screen that is as nice as it should be... there really won't be a lot of reason to stick with the dead tree edition.
You wouldn't believe how often developers get this wrong. Why do movies know to start you off with the most gripping scene they can, but videogames start you as a weakling slashing at moving gobs of slime and, if you're lucky, bugs.
God of War 1 kicked things off right with an amazing battle against a gigantic hydra on a sinking ship. Metroid gives you most of the weapons in the game to play with, before breaking them all. NFS: Most Wanted gave you the best car in the game.
Give the players a big bang to start things off right. You can do the whole "buildup" thing once you've got their attention.
I had a light tree in college by one of my doors. Unfortunately, if you apply shock to a traditional filament bulb while hot, the filament breaks. I kept going through bulbs until I replaced the traditional bulbs with Compact Flourescent. CF bulbs can be shocked, dropped, etc while hot without major problem. Once switching over, I didn't have to change any more.
I'm sorry you had a bad experience with some bulbs, but in my experienct it isn't representative.
That's odd, one of the things I'm fond of saying is that you can be creative in certain areas, but you have to make a connection to your audience. Nintendogs brought something everyone wants to do, and did so in a really creative and original way. Most games bring really creative and original settings, but do so in a traditional and off-the-rack way. And necessarily so, as if you have a creative setting and creative gameplay, there is really nothing to latch onto emotionally.
It probably isn't a co-incidence that some of the biggest hits in the past few years have had creative gameplay hidden behind mundane activities.
Exactly. The best thing we can do to stop people from bombing us, is to not give them incentive to do so. But other than that, there is an inherent risk of this which we just can't get rid of. If someone wants to hide a gun in their pocket and randomly start shooting people, there is really nothing we can do about it. If someone wants to blow up a room full of people, and has the chemicals knowledge (or access to the internet) to do so, there really is nothing we can do about it.
I'm embarassed to be in Boston right now. Those things look nothing like a bomb.