I'd guess you're thinking of unprotected wireless networks, which is a separate issue.
A webserver isn't your desktop computer. A webserver is a specific computer whose use is to give files to people who ask for them. If you put files on the webserver, you're making them public.
Someone noticed that there was a speeches directory, asked the webserver what was in it. The webserver cheerfully replied. The person asked "oh, that file looks good. Can I look at that?" The webserver cheerfully said "sure" and handed over the file.
That's not hacking. That's not even a script attack. That's functionality built in to the internet.
No game that has been hyped up this much can survive. There is no way that Spore can live up to the expectations. If it's not the most fun anyone has ever had in their lives instantly upon turning it on, it will be a "noble failure" or an "interesting experiment." Or "crap."
It's a game. There is a 9 out of 10 chance that it will be an fun little game that doesn't shatter people's minds. And there is nothing wrong with that. And if it does really well, that's great too. But by hyping it up to the point that "we know that EA is going to port it to every platform known to man," we're dooming that not to happen.
It's not the second coming. It's not even the second Halo. It's a dollhouse game that's so big the average person might not be able to wrap their minds around. It also violates a lot of the basic tenets of game design, and nobody knows if that issue has been solved satisfactorily.
So again, we'll see. Don't hype it up too much, or you'll kill it.
There are support calls and e-mails. You'll get a lot for those for simple "features" that are as simple as calling "yourapp.exe -fksd ntfs C:/Windows/YourApp/ dD33145".
It will cost the recieving company money in training, lost productivity, and generally making acquiring and retaining good employees that much more difficult.
It will cost you in maintenence, as a poorly thought out UI is difficult to maintain in the future, and a poorly laid-out feature set is difficult to reverse engineer.
Explain to your company that good UI is not necessarily adding flashy graphics or sound effects, but structuring the application logically in such a way that people with less training (and therefore, cheaper employees) can use it easily. Good UI is the difference between a well thought-out business report and a link to an excel spreadsheet with thousands of pieces of useless, unstructured data. Good UI is really expensive to tack on at the end, but can take as little as two days of planning ahead of time.
Good UI is not flash. Good UI makes employees more productive and easier to support, and isn't as expensive as people might fear it to be.
My credit looks like shite because I've been too busy obsessing over work and have reduced the priority of paying my personal bills on time. How does that factor into my work ethic again? Or my likelyness to betray my colleagues?
Let's not use the military as a paragon for intelligent employee management. This is the group that thinks you're unfit to be an employee if you're gay.
1. Buy a Compact Flash adapter for the GBA slot. (Compact Flash happens to use the same pins as regular hard drives, but in a smaller connector and with more power.) 2. Solder little wires from the smaller CF connector to a larger Hard Disk connector. 3. Add a 5v line for power to the laptop HDD (12v if you're using a desktop drive) 4. Done!
Don't forget, Christmas 05 was the Nano launch craze... and those things sold insanely well as they burst onto the scene.
Of course the market is going to cool from that feeding frenzy. But let's not forget: the market is cooling from an insane buying orgy to simpy being the #1 seller with 25% year-over-year growth. It went from being doubly stupidly profitable to simply singly stupidly profitable.
With luck and a lot of norwegian designers, the next iPod launch will show correspondingly silly numbers (whenever that may be).
The stock market was a bubble because everyone that bought stock inflated the price of stock for everyone else, making it look like a better growth opportunity for investment. The housing market was a bubble because everyone that bought houses inflated the prices of housing and the resultant appearance of investment opportunity similarly. And when both of which become too big, the bubble burst as there was nothing quite supporting the inflated prices and value plummetted.
The iPod does not exhibit bubble-like qualities. The iPod is a thing. Someone buying an iPod does not inflate the price for everyone else. As a thing with utility, the iPod cannot instantly decline in usefulness like a stock can.
The bubble is a useful analogy in certain investment situations. But let's not go pretexting it into conversation inappropriately.
CompactFlash is no longer the only standard, but it is still by far the dominant standard in professional recording equipment, and is by far the most forward-compatible.
You can plug a CF card straight into your IDE chain and it will read as a drive just fine.
Not to take too much away from your commentary, which seemed otherwise dead on, but Myst is the third best selling PC game of all time. In sales, it only trails The Sims and Counter...err... Half-Life 1.
It was truly, insanely, ridiculously profitable in the way that only a very few games have managed. The mechanics did not hinder sales numbers.
Most of the gaming companies I know hire writers specifically. The problem isn't that writers aren't involved, the problem is that writing for games is very different than writing for other mediums.
For a short run-down: Dialog needs to be very, very short in games. It needs to be visual. You need to define characters in ways that don't conflict with player initiated actions. You need to integrate real gameplay sequences (which would normally be terrible writing). You need to establish and stick to a palette of expressive animations. You need to write your plot for all of the possible ways that the player can traverse through that plot, and ensure that conflicting information and worldstate is never achieved. It needs to be paced for 20 - 40 hours. It needs to be technically possible to implement on a budget, which means paradoxically that flying through space is OK but fabric falling to the floor is not. It needs to be modular enough that when you cut two sections for time from the final game, the plot still makes sense. And it needs to "feel" right when you've moved your sequence from ten lines on a page to eight months later when you have a character running and jumping and dying.
A friend of mine just finished a project which had hired a big-name and well skilled author to write scripts for his game, and the results were functionally unusable. He just didn't get the structure of gaming, the non-linearity of it, and the types of things which can be effectively communicated or done in the digital realm.
Game writers need to have strong backgrounds in game design, and more than a little programming, art knowledge, and production. Oh, and they have to be amazing writers. That's a pretty rare overlap of skills. They had to dump him, hire a lesser known hollywood writer, dump him, then hire a game designer with a writing background to finish up.
Most gaming companies that I've seen "get" that they need writers. They just have a terrible time finding the right ones.
According to the article, they've most likely licensed GameBryo. That largely takes care of the 3D rendering part (though not any game-specific effects) but has no gameplay component.
And yes, these are all great businessmen in entertainment industries and a baseball player (sorry Schilling). They have a much better chance than most startups.
When you're developing a game, you rely upon certain techniques to create emotion, a sense of forboding, etc. These techniques can be as simple as "your robot pal dies here" or as complicated as having multilayered reactive music enter and drop out as conditions change. But they're all techniques. A well-scheduled plot twist here, a stat-driven character building dungeon there... all thought about down to the moment, all heavily planned, and all relying upon a simple batch of techniques that the devleopment team picked up over the years.
Of course you switch up your pacing between puzzles, vistas, combat arenas, and story-focused areas. If you were attempting to tell a story while gravity gunning a stack of laundry machines to flip a swith and police were swarming in to shoot you, you'd be at a loss for what to do. Sure, you want intense action sequences followed by relaxation points, a rollercoaster of tension and release. And of course these have to be scripted out in painstaking detail in a completely non-spontaneous way.
As I like to tell the incoming QA: "You have to give up the illusion of magic to become a magician."
On games I've worked on in the past, we had a global strategizing algorithm that ran once every few seconds (over the course of a bunch of frames), more localized map sectional AI that ran slightly more frequently, per-unit pathfinding that ran (incompletely) every second, and moment-to-moment movement that ran every frame.
Now, if we could run all of those AI routines every frame, the game would appear a bit smarter. It wouldn't have a delay upon reacting to stimulous, the pathfinding could run a character intelligently across the map without bumping into dead ends, New units would path immediately instead of waiting for the next global strategy cycle, etc.
Patents are required to be non-obvious to someone skilled in that art. For example, using an electrically sensitive dual polarized filter system to make light spots and dark spots for a display was not obvious, and therefore LCD's were patentable.
On the other hand, if you were to plop the problem of semi-automatic translation software down in front of someone, they system they would immediately describe would be exactly like that which MS describes in the patent. In fact, no matter how you're handling the system or the actual work-filled intracacies of really making the thing, it will behave almost exactly like the patent describes because the language is so tremendously broad and vague.
It's an "on a computer" patent. You know, like patenting playing back music "on a computer" or patenting shopping "on a computer." Having read the patent, it's clear they're patenting a multilingual verb conjugation book "on a computer." I happen to have about four of those things on the shelf behind me, all of which should serve as prior art... Though they don't need to, as computer-based language systems already exist.
Just because it could be useful doesn't mean it isn't obvious.
For a while after college I worked a job that required bouncing between locations. The computers in these locations included a 486 Win95, a P2 Debian, a P3 WinME, a P4 XP, and a 386 Win3.1.
A DOS boot disk turned out to be the perfect solution. "Screw your OS, I'm going back to DOS." The old but surprisingly robust word processor worked like a charm, and I got a lot of writing done, despite disparate environments and a wide hardware gap.
A lot of people don't even know that wireless is insecure. Telling someone "this wireless network is insecure until you set a WPA password. See manual for details." would go a long way to letting average people know there is even something to know about.
You'll never get a full, detailed knowledge of the facts from a one-line sticker. But hopefully you will spread the knowledge to the point that people say "why would you need a sticker for something so obvious?" Simply put, it's the sticker that makes it obvious to a lot of people.
If you never try anything you don't fully understand, you'll never grow as an engineer or as a person.
Now now, he may have exploited Australian stereotypes, but we were all laughing at you looooong before he came along, and will be long after his death:
You can't be Yahoo Serious. It was years ago that we were Dundee with that.
DRM is saying that the whims of companies get to determine what you can do with the things you own, not the law or common sense. And furthermore, thanks to some clever lobbying a few years back, the company's whims have the full force of the law behind them.
DRM is saying that if you have the legal right to do something, but Sony or Disney or AOL decided that you shouldn't, you can be arrested for doing it.
And I should have clarified, I don't use the expensive applications at home. Getting the Cu-Base demo to work on my home computer was a nightmare of epic proportions, so I searched out and found viable alternatives, like Audacity and others for my more straightforward at-home needs.
But I refuse to buy anything, especially anything expensive, when I would look over at the version the pirates are using with envy.
It's at the point where I automatically crack all of my games. I just can't be bothered to keep the CD's around, nor would I be likely to find them if I did. I pick up maybe a modest game or two a month, but over the plast 20 years this has added up to well over 300 titles in my collection.
Furthermore, my PC purchasing has dropped precipitously, as I can only play roughly two out of three purchased games. The rest generally refuse to run, usually due to buggy copy protection. Which means I have to bring it back in, explain the situation, maybe get a refund, maybe get moral support to go download the illegal version. I'd rather not deal with headaches in my hobby, thank you, and I'd certainly rather not be driven to piracy to get something I paid for.
Don't get me started on the more expensive programs out there. The whole authorization schemes are so ornery / buggy / crash prone that the illegal versions are simply far superior.
Imagine a bookstore that has all the books you could ever want. Now imagine that when you buy a book, it remains forever chained to a desk in that bookstore. You can come back and visit it, but you can never take it out of the bookstore. If the bookstore closes or moves, your books go away with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd guess you're thinking of unprotected wireless networks, which is a separate issue.
A webserver isn't your desktop computer. A webserver is a specific computer whose use is to give files to people who ask for them. If you put files on the webserver, you're making them public.
Someone noticed that there was a speeches directory, asked the webserver what was in it. The webserver cheerfully replied. The person asked "oh, that file looks good. Can I look at that?" The webserver cheerfully said "sure" and handed over the file.
That's not hacking. That's not even a script attack. That's functionality built in to the internet.
No game that has been hyped up this much can survive. There is no way that Spore can live up to the expectations. If it's not the most fun anyone has ever had in their lives instantly upon turning it on, it will be a "noble failure" or an "interesting experiment." Or "crap."
It's a game. There is a 9 out of 10 chance that it will be an fun little game that doesn't shatter people's minds. And there is nothing wrong with that. And if it does really well, that's great too. But by hyping it up to the point that "we know that EA is going to port it to every platform known to man," we're dooming that not to happen.
It's not the second coming. It's not even the second Halo. It's a dollhouse game that's so big the average person might not be able to wrap their minds around. It also violates a lot of the basic tenets of game design, and nobody knows if that issue has been solved satisfactorily.
So again, we'll see. Don't hype it up too much, or you'll kill it.
Oh, good catch. Finally, my love of Ore no Ryoori can be fulfilled in a handheld system.
Poor UI costs.
There are support calls and e-mails. You'll get a lot for those for simple "features" that are as simple as calling "yourapp.exe -fksd ntfs C:/Windows/YourApp/ dD33145".
It will cost the recieving company money in training, lost productivity, and generally making acquiring and retaining good employees that much more difficult.
It will cost you in maintenence, as a poorly thought out UI is difficult to maintain in the future, and a poorly laid-out feature set is difficult to reverse engineer.
Explain to your company that good UI is not necessarily adding flashy graphics or sound effects, but structuring the application logically in such a way that people with less training (and therefore, cheaper employees) can use it easily. Good UI is the difference between a well thought-out business report and a link to an excel spreadsheet with thousands of pieces of useless, unstructured data. Good UI is really expensive to tack on at the end, but can take as little as two days of planning ahead of time.
Good UI is not flash. Good UI makes employees more productive and easier to support, and isn't as expensive as people might fear it to be.
My credit looks like shite because I've been too busy obsessing over work and have reduced the priority of paying my personal bills on time. How does that factor into my work ethic again? Or my likelyness to betray my colleagues?
Let's not use the military as a paragon for intelligent employee management. This is the group that thinks you're unfit to be an employee if you're gay.
1. Trauma Center
2. Kirby
3. Nintendogs
4. The New Super Mario Brothers
5. Brain Age
6. Elite Beat Agents
Some might even apply to your tastes.
That having been said, Go GP2X!
1. Buy a Compact Flash adapter for the GBA slot.
(Compact Flash happens to use the same pins as regular hard drives, but in a smaller connector and with more power.)
2. Solder little wires from the smaller CF connector to a larger Hard Disk connector.
3. Add a 5v line for power to the laptop HDD (12v if you're using a desktop drive)
4. Done!
Don't forget, Christmas 05 was the Nano launch craze... and those things sold insanely well as they burst onto the scene.
Of course the market is going to cool from that feeding frenzy. But let's not forget: the market is cooling from an insane buying orgy to simpy being the #1 seller with 25% year-over-year growth. It went from being doubly stupidly profitable to simply singly stupidly profitable.
With luck and a lot of norwegian designers, the next iPod launch will show correspondingly silly numbers (whenever that may be).
That's funny. I always felt that Carly was cut a lot more slack than she should have been, simply because she was a woman.
Anyone underperformaning that much for that long with a plan clearly doomed to even more failures should have been canned within the first 12 months.
Somehow I don't think running Firefox qualifies as a disability.
Must everything be a bubble now?
The stock market was a bubble because everyone that bought stock inflated the price of stock for everyone else, making it look like a better growth opportunity for investment. The housing market was a bubble because everyone that bought houses inflated the prices of housing and the resultant appearance of investment opportunity similarly. And when both of which become too big, the bubble burst as there was nothing quite supporting the inflated prices and value plummetted.
The iPod does not exhibit bubble-like qualities. The iPod is a thing. Someone buying an iPod does not inflate the price for everyone else. As a thing with utility, the iPod cannot instantly decline in usefulness like a stock can.
The bubble is a useful analogy in certain investment situations. But let's not go pretexting it into conversation inappropriately.
Even Compactflash is not that common anymore.
CompactFlash is no longer the only standard, but it is still by far the dominant standard in professional recording equipment, and is by far the most forward-compatible.
You can plug a CF card straight into your IDE chain and it will read as a drive just fine.
Not to take too much away from your commentary, which seemed otherwise dead on, but Myst is the third best selling PC game of all time. In sales, it only trails The Sims and Counter...err... Half-Life 1.
It was truly, insanely, ridiculously profitable in the way that only a very few games have managed. The mechanics did not hinder sales numbers.
Most of the gaming companies I know hire writers specifically. The problem isn't that writers aren't involved, the problem is that writing for games is very different than writing for other mediums.
For a short run-down: Dialog needs to be very, very short in games. It needs to be visual. You need to define characters in ways that don't conflict with player initiated actions. You need to integrate real gameplay sequences (which would normally be terrible writing). You need to establish and stick to a palette of expressive animations. You need to write your plot for all of the possible ways that the player can traverse through that plot, and ensure that conflicting information and worldstate is never achieved. It needs to be paced for 20 - 40 hours. It needs to be technically possible to implement on a budget, which means paradoxically that flying through space is OK but fabric falling to the floor is not. It needs to be modular enough that when you cut two sections for time from the final game, the plot still makes sense. And it needs to "feel" right when you've moved your sequence from ten lines on a page to eight months later when you have a character running and jumping and dying.
A friend of mine just finished a project which had hired a big-name and well skilled author to write scripts for his game, and the results were functionally unusable. He just didn't get the structure of gaming, the non-linearity of it, and the types of things which can be effectively communicated or done in the digital realm.
Game writers need to have strong backgrounds in game design, and more than a little programming, art knowledge, and production. Oh, and they have to be amazing writers. That's a pretty rare overlap of skills. They had to dump him, hire a lesser known hollywood writer, dump him, then hire a game designer with a writing background to finish up.
Most gaming companies that I've seen "get" that they need writers. They just have a terrible time finding the right ones.
According to the article, they've most likely licensed GameBryo. That largely takes care of the 3D rendering part (though not any game-specific effects) but has no gameplay component.
And yes, these are all great businessmen in entertainment industries and a baseball player (sorry Schilling). They have a much better chance than most startups.
When you're developing a game, you rely upon certain techniques to create emotion, a sense of forboding, etc. These techniques can be as simple as "your robot pal dies here" or as complicated as having multilayered reactive music enter and drop out as conditions change. But they're all techniques. A well-scheduled plot twist here, a stat-driven character building dungeon there... all thought about down to the moment, all heavily planned, and all relying upon a simple batch of techniques that the devleopment team picked up over the years.
Of course you switch up your pacing between puzzles, vistas, combat arenas, and story-focused areas. If you were attempting to tell a story while gravity gunning a stack of laundry machines to flip a swith and police were swarming in to shoot you, you'd be at a loss for what to do. Sure, you want intense action sequences followed by relaxation points, a rollercoaster of tension and release. And of course these have to be scripted out in painstaking detail in a completely non-spontaneous way.
As I like to tell the incoming QA: "You have to give up the illusion of magic to become a magician."
Welcome to the wizard's guild, kid.
On games I've worked on in the past, we had a global strategizing algorithm that ran once every few seconds (over the course of a bunch of frames), more localized map sectional AI that ran slightly more frequently, per-unit pathfinding that ran (incompletely) every second, and moment-to-moment movement that ran every frame.
Now, if we could run all of those AI routines every frame, the game would appear a bit smarter. It wouldn't have a delay upon reacting to stimulous, the pathfinding could run a character intelligently across the map without bumping into dead ends, New units would path immediately instead of waiting for the next global strategy cycle, etc.
Not a major update, but a perfectly scalable one.
Patents are required to be non-obvious to someone skilled in that art. For example, using an electrically sensitive dual polarized filter system to make light spots and dark spots for a display was not obvious, and therefore LCD's were patentable.
On the other hand, if you were to plop the problem of semi-automatic translation software down in front of someone, they system they would immediately describe would be exactly like that which MS describes in the patent. In fact, no matter how you're handling the system or the actual work-filled intracacies of really making the thing, it will behave almost exactly like the patent describes because the language is so tremendously broad and vague.
It's an "on a computer" patent. You know, like patenting playing back music "on a computer" or patenting shopping "on a computer." Having read the patent, it's clear they're patenting a multilingual verb conjugation book "on a computer." I happen to have about four of those things on the shelf behind me, all of which should serve as prior art... Though they don't need to, as computer-based language systems already exist.
Just because it could be useful doesn't mean it isn't obvious.
For a while after college I worked a job that required bouncing between locations. The computers in these locations included a 486 Win95, a P2 Debian, a P3 WinME, a P4 XP, and a 386 Win3.1.
A DOS boot disk turned out to be the perfect solution. "Screw your OS, I'm going back to DOS." The old but surprisingly robust word processor worked like a charm, and I got a lot of writing done, despite disparate environments and a wide hardware gap.
Thanks, DOS!
A lot of people don't even know that wireless is insecure. Telling someone "this wireless network is insecure until you set a WPA password. See manual for details." would go a long way to letting average people know there is even something to know about.
You'll never get a full, detailed knowledge of the facts from a one-line sticker. But hopefully you will spread the knowledge to the point that people say "why would you need a sticker for something so obvious?" Simply put, it's the sticker that makes it obvious to a lot of people.
If you never try anything you don't fully understand, you'll never grow as an engineer or as a person.
- Chris
Now now, he may have exploited Australian stereotypes, but we were all laughing at you looooong before he came along, and will be long after his death:
You can't be Yahoo Serious. It was years ago that we were Dundee with that.
DRM is saying that the whims of companies get to determine what you can do with the things you own, not the law or common sense. And furthermore, thanks to some clever lobbying a few years back, the company's whims have the full force of the law behind them.
DRM is saying that if you have the legal right to do something, but Sony or Disney or AOL decided that you shouldn't, you can be arrested for doing it.
I meant download a crack, not crack a binary.
And I should have clarified, I don't use the expensive applications at home. Getting the Cu-Base demo to work on my home computer was a nightmare of epic proportions, so I searched out and found viable alternatives, like Audacity and others for my more straightforward at-home needs.
But I refuse to buy anything, especially anything expensive, when I would look over at the version the pirates are using with envy.
It's at the point where I automatically crack all of my games. I just can't be bothered to keep the CD's around, nor would I be likely to find them if I did. I pick up maybe a modest game or two a month, but over the plast 20 years this has added up to well over 300 titles in my collection.
Furthermore, my PC purchasing has dropped precipitously, as I can only play roughly two out of three purchased games. The rest generally refuse to run, usually due to buggy copy protection. Which means I have to bring it back in, explain the situation, maybe get a refund, maybe get moral support to go download the illegal version. I'd rather not deal with headaches in my hobby, thank you, and I'd certainly rather not be driven to piracy to get something I paid for.
Don't get me started on the more expensive programs out there. The whole authorization schemes are so ornery / buggy / crash prone that the illegal versions are simply far superior.
Imagine a bookstore that has all the books you could ever want. Now imagine that when you buy a book, it remains forever chained to a desk in that bookstore. You can come back and visit it, but you can never take it out of the bookstore. If the bookstore closes or moves, your books go away with it.