The primary motivation to buy the game was to PLAY it. If you pirated it, you could still PLAY it with your friends via several methods. The difference was that you couldn't use their "official" matchmaker service. The existence of BnetD had, at most, a negligible impact on the level of piracy.
They also didn't demand the key checker; they OFFERED to use whatever keychecker Blizzard was willing to give them access to.
It was a valid fair use case, killed off by venue-shopping.
The issue with bnetd had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with piracy. bnetd didn't enable piracy of any kind. It was a SERVER. It didn't copy games. It didn't crack serialz. It didn't distribute anything. It competed against a FREE service, so there was ZERO money lost as a result of it being used over battle.net.
In its defense, it did say it was a "primer", targeted at beginners. Chances are, it was lifted from the SL book itself.
LSL has a lot of limitations, some of which can be gotten around. However, the biggest issue is that LL is constantly breaking crap in their futile effort to scale their unscalable grid design to support the "millions of new residents" brought in from all the hype.
If someone gets something out of any project, be it useful function, useful knowledge, or even simple amusement, then it is a winner. The article is attempting to discern POPULARITY of projects as the criteria of each being a winner/loser. Personally, I don't give a damn about how popular something is. If it is the right tool for the job, and works, it's golden to me.
Even open-source BrainFuck programs are winners as far as I am concerned, because they amuse me.:)
It's the same shit that has been happening about every week on average since the game was in beta 3 years ago. The one reported on wasn't even that big a deal. How about the rash of them a few months back that took the game out for the better part of a DAY repeatedly for a week?
Actually, each simulation/region is running on one CPU of a multi-cpu server box (of which most of their servers are now "Class IVs" which are quad-processor boxen). So you have four sims sharing everything else in a single server, but having a single CPU dedicated to each one.
As for the rest of SL, the concept is wonderful; the problem is they are trying to turn it into something silly which is not only unsupported by their core design, it goes against the whole point of being in SL. It's a social game. They want to turn it into a decentralized 3D web platform for the most superficial of interactions between people. The whole concept of "building a community" around a theme is being turned upside down and pretty much thrown out by their aim to mass-commercialize it.
Oh, wow, so NOW someone patents something that pinches lawyers, and it's "ZOMG! WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT!!!" from the lawyers, and all this business method patenting bullshit that has been going on for decades gets nary a finger wave all this time?
I'm shocked. Truly.
Even beyond the fact that patenting something has to do with obeying the laws of the land, the whole notion of patenting business methods (and many forms of software patents as well) was and has always been absurd and self-destructive.
It not only has a Linux and a Mac client, but the simulations (servers) and the asset cluster run on Linux systems. They probably only do Windows client development on Windows boxen.
Linden Lab has been trying to position SL as the next "evolutionary step" in web communications and interaction. Before their latest round of funding came in, it was just a free-format massively-multiplayer "game". Since then, they have created open registration (no verification required), opening the floodgates to TONS of griefers who create anywhere from 2 to 100 alternate accounts, and then just burn through them. Some regions in the world are very hard-hit, and they have yet to provide the players and managers of regions the capability to effectively deal with the large influx of griefing any better than verified registrations.
Also, that "800,000" number is bogus; that's simply the count of records in their user database. It doesn't take into account alts, and it doesn't shed any light on real player numbers (which vary between 5000 and 12000 online at the same time currently.
They do NOT have a handle on their development process, with the developers pretty much being given free rein to work on whatever they want, and leave HUGE bugs and performance-sapping code for months on end in favor of adding crap people don't want which makes the game even less stable and less appealing to the existing users.
There are constant region crashes, "grey goo" grid attacks, lost assets and resources, and quite a few pissed off folks. They seem to have adopted the "worst practices in running a MMOG" book, as well as completely shifting their focus away from their core concern, which is making a nice, player-created world to something which interests no one.
I've only played it for about 7 months myself, and the degradation in even that short of time had gotten me to the point where I don't hardly want to log in on patch days (or even for several days thereafter from the grid attacks). The constant downtime means no one is buying the stuff you make, and you can't make anything.
My bet is this is nothing more than some silly grandstanding, probably in an attempt to woo the investors so they don't start getting cold feet. SL is DEFINITELY not the platform for this kind of thing right now.
As for Open-Source versions of SL, there are a couple projects out there which are trying to do SL better, and stay focused on the core concepts. LL has said that they may open the source in 2010, but they also have been trying to integrate a new physics engine since forever, and the Mono implementation for scripting is also at least a year behind schedule.
Well, no one is going to "stop" pirates/piracy. My point is that I won't waste my time/money/customer goodwill trying to stop it. If someone wants my products for free badly enough, I'm not going to even worry about their existence. Hopefully, I'll get some free advertising and distribution out of it and get a few more customers as a result. If not, I certainly am not going to let it keep me awake at night worrying "OMG! Someone out there didn't pay for my product!!!".
Copy protection schemes do little to nothing to stop real piracy. At best, they slow down some of the Average Joes who don't have the savvy to circumvent it themselves. Instead, they slow down all the legitimate purchasers
As a matter of policy, I eschew copy protection schemes on all software I write with plans to distribute to the general public. I don't see the point in punishing people who paid for my work just so I can toss a spitwad into the hurricane of software piracy. Instead, I use a registration-for-bonuses policy. Legitimate customers get support, discounts on future purchases, and various other individual perks.
Sometimes, the carrot DOES work better than the stick.
I was a subscriber to the MMORPG Horizons, which used to use iBill as their payment processor (they use iPay now; not much of a difference, really). I used new mail accounts I set up specifically for the game, and all of a sudden, about a month ago, I started getting tons of spam on them.
I figured my email addresses had been sold by one of those sleazebag payment processors. Turns out they aren't evil, they're just STUPID.
Irrelevant. You don't need to hate Bush or feel entitled to your job to see the fallacy in such trade. It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to realize that when companies can pay someone a third of what they are paying you for the same job, they will do it. Sure, it is competitive, but here's the catch: Standard of Living. The reason people pay more in some areas rather than others is because the standard of living is higher for some people than others. Now, you can say that when people are used to a standard of living and that is threatened, they should adjust their lives accordingly, but it is hardly that simple.
Now, I am all for seeing Indians, Chinese, Pakistanis, et cetera achieve a standard of living in their own countries on par with ours here in America (assuming their government permits it / wants it), however, completely free trade in employment isn't the best way to achieve it. It's like breaking a dam; those on the lower level from the dam will raise up, and those on the higher level will fall down. Basically, the standards of living will attain equilibrium via bolstering one side while diminishing the other.
Now, what happens when YOUR job is outsourced to India? What happens when your whole CLASS of job is outsourced to China? You'll do what? Go back to school and change your career? Start over? What are you going to do in the meantime to pay the bills? Flip burgers? If you're in IT with an otherwise secure, good-paying job, you probably live fairly comfortably with a mortgage, family, credit cards, bills, etc. Losing your job sure has a way of upsetting the applecart of life. It further gets interesting when you find that the skillset that you put down on your resume nets you 30-40% less in salary when you are out job-hunting. Oh, don't miss that mortgage payment in the meantime, though! Also, a lot of people probably think "this can't happen to me or my job!" the "day" before they get their pink slip.
So, sure, let's make it "survival of the fittest". Sell that house, sell all your valuables to survive, take the lower-paying job while you retrain for -- whatever hasn't been outsourced -- yet.
There's a reason we don't fear the wolves in the night anymore; let's not regress back to that level of subsistence if we don't absolutely HAVE to.
Who's he kidding? The vast majority of innovation in games has come from "small indies". Remember Apogee/id software and Doom/Quake? Remember Valve and Half-Life? As someone else already mentioned, Will Wright and Simcity?
Then, let's look at the other side of the spectrum: Blizzard/Vivendi and World of Warcraft. Innovation? I don't see it. Sony and Star Wars Galaxies? Yeah, real innovative there. EA sports and the endless rehash of yearly pro sports games? Astounding! (not)
Big companies with big investors do the forumlaic thing because that is what they do best. They execute well in an area already explored and declared "safe" and "profitable" by the small guys who already took the chance and risked it all on "innovation". Why? Because they didn't have near as much to lose as "The Man".
Sure, indie developers do a lot of rehash, too; often it is because they are cutting their teeth and playing it "safe" for their first title or two before they jump in and start work on that "dream game" they have always wanted. They also do a lot of niche games. Nothing wrong with that. Indies are often small, and do smaller projects because that's what they can do to fill out their portfolio. However, that doesn't and shouldn't paint the rest of the independents out there currently working on cool, unique games that ARE truly innovative as being without the very quality they are (and have always been) providing to the industry.
Maybe he is referring to something a little more grandiose, like maybe coming up with a completely new genre. Even still, the vast majority of innovation in that regard has come from independents, not mass corporate powerhouses. There are always exceptions, and I won't say that no megastudio has ever done anything innovative, but it certainly is not the rule.
Sorry, but this indie game developer isn't buying it.
I don't buy second-hand games, but I do buy games usually at discount sales (like at the recent closing of Media Play), or a year or three after they have come out when the price has dropped into the $20-30 range. Why? Because few games nowadays are WORTH more than that to me. Many games are the same rehashed formulaic crap, just like what Hollywood has been regurgitating on the audiences for years (and in some cases, the games are made from those franchises.. serious double-plus-ungood karma there). Eye candy alone does not impress me at all, as I still can go back and play DOS CGA games and have a blast playing them, because the GAME is good, regardless of how it is rendered. I know not everyone is like that, but that's what gets *my* hard-earned cash.
I think the biggest problem facing the industry is that it is industry a dearth of design creativity, and is substituting high-dollar glitz and glamour. Also, most game companies are notoriously and horribly mis-managed, wasting $5 million dollars on an idea which doesn't even rate a B title.
What will revive the industry is a resurgence of small, fast, smart, and creative independents, some of who will eventually become tomorrow's giants, and the cycle will repeat itself. The very best of them will remember what made their games and companies great, and carry that wisdom forward to be a dominant player in the industry for a long time to come.
In the meantime, we as gamers will have to live with the winter of our discontent. For me, that doesn't include paying US$60-$100 for an average game.
The key point is that the king can NOT manipulate the message in any way he sees fit - he's limited to at most k bit manipulations, which is why a code able to detect and correct a certain amount of bit manipulations is needed. The king can do a number of things besides just flipping bits, of course - he can also insert bits into the stream by manipulating the chalice and the order in which the prisoners are summoned -, but he can't do so as often as he might like to.
So, let's say he wants Prisoner 0 to always receive a "chalice down" state, just for argument's sake. He calls on a prisoner (doesn't matter which one). Assuming a "chalice up" state when the prisoner is called, if the prisoner leaves the chalice up, then the king can/will turn it down. If the prisoner turns it down, so much the better, he leaves it down. Then he calls Prisoner 0. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Given that he can ALWAYS send Prisoner 0 a "chalice up" state, he can send Prisoner 0 ANY other message he wishes to. He can completely block communication, he can substitute his own messages, impostering other prisoners, etc. He could even send spoofed messages that are valid within your O(k) or O(k^2) code.
As for your further refutation of the two points listed, it does matter who sent what bit because you cannot guarantee what bits of the SAME message you are getting each time you get a bit. Unless the message is a single bit, you can't tell what bits go with what message, because they could be randomly interleaved not only with other bits from other messages, but also with noise or spoof bits introduced by the king himself.
It is also not a true broadcast medium, because not everyone receives each and every bit of information sent. Even a comparison to Ethernet is not correct, because each and every Ethernet packet has both source and destination addresses encoded in the packet header, even though the receiver hardware of everyone on a non-switched segment sees the packet data.
Lastly, the source/destination knowledge was a requirement of the scheme *I* was talking about using a PKI technique, not necessarily your scheme.
So, I remain unconvinced that any code of any kind could work as a solution, simply because the king has complete control of the message at all times.
If the King has effectively unlimited flips, he simply ensures the chalice is upright every time he calls a prisoner, there is no communication stream, and therefore no way for the chalice to signal anything to the others.
As long has you have a malicious interception and corruption of the information medium, the King can manipulate the message any way he sees fit, including sending his own "I've seen it" messages from any prisoner(s) that he never has to call to any prisoner(s) he wishes to fool.
Now, you can say that they use some form of encryption/signature scheme, except that all of those schemes in existence require that some part of the encryption be private. If there is anything that a prisoner can keep from the king, then it theoretically could work. IE, if each of the prisoners generated a public/private assymetric key pair in their heads, and gave their public key to each one of the other prisoners to encrypt and send messages, then maybe this might work, under very special conditions.
However, the communication medium is shared. IE, when called to come get your bit of information, you don't know whom the bit is from, nor do you know if you were the intended recipient. However, there is no chance that you will ever say "yes" incorrectly. Assuming enough calls, eventually, you will get all the bits of each prisoner's message, in the right order, unmolested. However, I would tend to think that it would take far longer than the predicted lifespan of this universe to complete.
I worked as a contractor to a large soft drink company some years back, and their corporate culture made it hard to fire most employees. However, they took improper computer / network use seriously and included it in their corporate code of conduct. Violating the CoC was about the only way you as an employee there could get fired, and they followed it. They even had security walk an upper management person out the door the day his little escapades took down a large segment of the network in his building.
Thus, as far as I have seen, it is all about not only having a good IT department, but having good company policies and proper enforcement to support it.
I have never, nor will I ever buy ANYTHING from Amazon. I tell my friends and family not to buy anything from them, either, and am happy to find them alternative sources for the things they would otherwise buy from that "place". I won't accept gifts that I know were purchased from Amazon, and I am happy to tell anyone at every turn to stay the hell away from them.
However, most people who claim to hate/dislike stupid patents like this aren't willing to suffer a little and give up their Amazon habit, nor take up the mantle of doing all they can to send a message, the ONLY message people like Bezos will understand: a dent in his wallet.
To me, that is the same as complicity; hypocrisy at its worst. It's like being a politician. Rail about it in public, but enjoy the coosh of it in private.
If you buy from Amazon or do nothing to discourage others from buying from them, then don't bother telling me how much you dislike stupid patents. I won't believe you, because it is hypocritical BS.
Lastly, don't give me that "it's defensive patenting" crap, either. That's the most disingenuos pile of dung ever to hit the stall floor. Abuse of a system to prevent abuse of said system is about the lamest thing imaginable. Ever heard of "two wrongs don't make a right"? Using a lame patent to try and beat back a suit over another lame patent is not a deterrent and, as Amazon has already demonstrated, they intend to use their portfolio for more than simple deterrence anyway.
You can harvest pumpkins from a single pumpkin patch, carve them, and build jack o'lanterns with them, as well as scarecrows/skeletons on your plot.
Jacques Allantyrn is supposed to make a reappearance (same one from beta) with something about a short-term portal to the Realm of Bounty, from whence the harvest supposedly comes. Oh, the moon is blood red with evil smilling skull visages in it.
Also in the "Halloween" patch came a world-wide plague. Well, it wasn't SUPPOSED to be world-wide, but it ended up that way from lack of testing. Another patch and some downtime later, it was contained.
Last year we had masks, and trick-or-treating, collecting candy to be traded for masks. Of course, Dragons were left out of the fun with the masks, but that's a common theme in HZ. After all, they can fly, what else could they want?
"I went up to Doolittle in the hall today..." *snickers* *guffaws* *points and laughs* "..and I said '[expletive deleted], Doolittle?'" "He said, '[expletive deleted]'" *laughs* "..and I said 'Well, [expletive deleted] [gesture deleted]', and he didn't get it!" *more guffaws* *BOOP*
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It was about control.
The primary motivation to buy the game was to PLAY it. If you pirated it, you could still PLAY it with your friends via several methods. The difference was that you couldn't use their "official" matchmaker service. The existence of BnetD had, at most, a negligible impact on the level of piracy.
They also didn't demand the key checker; they OFFERED to use whatever keychecker Blizzard was willing to give them access to.
It was a valid fair use case, killed off by venue-shopping.
The issue with bnetd had ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with piracy. bnetd didn't enable piracy of any kind. It was a SERVER. It didn't copy games. It didn't crack serialz. It didn't distribute anything. It competed against a FREE service, so there was ZERO money lost as a result of it being used over battle.net.
I mean, it's probably great for someone in the industry to know, so I read it, but as a game player, I just don't care.
Blizzard lost all credibility as far as I am concerned with bnetd.
The LSL Wiki http://www.lslwiki.com/ went down permanently in mid-January when a new, more stable wiki was started as a part of the official Linden Lab Wiki http://wiki.secondlife.com/.
In its defense, it did say it was a "primer", targeted at beginners. Chances are, it was lifted from the SL book itself.
LSL has a lot of limitations, some of which can be gotten around. However, the biggest issue is that LL is constantly breaking crap in their futile effort to scale their unscalable grid design to support the "millions of new residents" brought in from all the hype.
If someone gets something out of any project, be it useful function, useful knowledge, or even simple amusement, then it is a winner. The article is attempting to discern POPULARITY of projects as the criteria of each being a winner/loser. Personally, I don't give a damn about how popular something is. If it is the right tool for the job, and works, it's golden to me.
:)
Even open-source BrainFuck programs are winners as far as I am concerned, because they amuse me.
Remember, kids, when you download movies (or music), you're downloading COMMUNISM!!
Someone set the alarm.. I'm going to sleep off another 20 years of this stupidity.
It's the same shit that has been happening about every week on average since the game was in beta 3 years ago. The one reported on wasn't even that big a deal. How about the rash of them a few months back that took the game out for the better part of a DAY repeatedly for a week?
Jeez.. what passes for "news" these days...
Actually, each simulation/region is running on one CPU of a multi-cpu server box (of which most of their servers are now "Class IVs" which are quad-processor boxen). So you have four sims sharing everything else in a single server, but having a single CPU dedicated to each one.
As for the rest of SL, the concept is wonderful; the problem is they are trying to turn it into something silly which is not only unsupported by their core design, it goes against the whole point of being in SL. It's a social game. They want to turn it into a decentralized 3D web platform for the most superficial of interactions between people. The whole concept of "building a community" around a theme is being turned upside down and pretty much thrown out by their aim to mass-commercialize it.
Oh, wow, so NOW someone patents something that pinches lawyers, and it's "ZOMG! WE GOTTA DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT!!!" from the lawyers, and all this business method patenting bullshit that has been going on for decades gets nary a finger wave all this time?
I'm shocked. Truly.
Even beyond the fact that patenting something has to do with obeying the laws of the land, the whole notion of patenting business methods (and many forms of software patents as well) was and has always been absurd and self-destructive.
It not only has a Linux and a Mac client, but the simulations (servers) and the asset cluster run on Linux systems. They probably only do Windows client development on Windows boxen.
Linden Lab has been trying to position SL as the next "evolutionary step" in web communications and interaction. Before their latest round of funding came in, it was just a free-format massively-multiplayer "game". Since then, they have created open registration (no verification required), opening the floodgates to TONS of griefers who create anywhere from 2 to 100 alternate accounts, and then just burn through them. Some regions in the world are very hard-hit, and they have yet to provide the players and managers of regions the capability to effectively deal with the large influx of griefing any better than verified registrations.
Also, that "800,000" number is bogus; that's simply the count of records in their user database. It doesn't take into account alts, and it doesn't shed any light on real player numbers (which vary between 5000 and 12000 online at the same time currently.
They do NOT have a handle on their development process, with the developers pretty much being given free rein to work on whatever they want, and leave HUGE bugs and performance-sapping code for months on end in favor of adding crap people don't want which makes the game even less stable and less appealing to the existing users.
There are constant region crashes, "grey goo" grid attacks, lost assets and resources, and quite a few pissed off folks. They seem to have adopted the "worst practices in running a MMOG" book, as well as completely shifting their focus away from their core concern, which is making a nice, player-created world to something which interests no one.
I've only played it for about 7 months myself, and the degradation in even that short of time had gotten me to the point where I don't hardly want to log in on patch days (or even for several days thereafter from the grid attacks). The constant downtime means no one is buying the stuff you make, and you can't make anything.
My bet is this is nothing more than some silly grandstanding, probably in an attempt to woo the investors so they don't start getting cold feet. SL is DEFINITELY not the platform for this kind of thing right now.
As for Open-Source versions of SL, there are a couple projects out there which are trying to do SL better, and stay focused on the core concepts. LL has said that they may open the source in 2010, but they also have been trying to integrate a new physics engine since forever, and the Mono implementation for scripting is also at least a year behind schedule.
Well, no one is going to "stop" pirates/piracy. My point is that I won't waste my time/money/customer goodwill trying to stop it. If someone wants my products for free badly enough, I'm not going to even worry about their existence. Hopefully, I'll get some free advertising and distribution out of it and get a few more customers as a result. If not, I certainly am not going to let it keep me awake at night worrying "OMG! Someone out there didn't pay for my product!!!".
Copy protection schemes do little to nothing to stop real piracy. At best, they slow down some of the Average Joes who don't have the savvy to circumvent it themselves. Instead, they slow down all the legitimate purchasers
As a matter of policy, I eschew copy protection schemes on all software I write with plans to distribute to the general public. I don't see the point in punishing people who paid for my work just so I can toss a spitwad into the hurricane of software piracy. Instead, I use a registration-for-bonuses policy. Legitimate customers get support, discounts on future purchases, and various other individual perks.
Sometimes, the carrot DOES work better than the stick.
I was a subscriber to the MMORPG Horizons, which used to use iBill as their payment processor (they use iPay now; not much of a difference, really). I used new mail accounts I set up specifically for the game, and all of a sudden, about a month ago, I started getting tons of spam on them.
I figured my email addresses had been sold by one of those sleazebag payment processors. Turns out they aren't evil, they're just STUPID.
Irrelevant. You don't need to hate Bush or feel entitled to your job to see the fallacy in such trade. It doesn't take a degree in rocket science to realize that when companies can pay someone a third of what they are paying you for the same job, they will do it. Sure, it is competitive, but here's the catch: Standard of Living. The reason people pay more in some areas rather than others is because the standard of living is higher for some people than others. Now, you can say that when people are used to a standard of living and that is threatened, they should adjust their lives accordingly, but it is hardly that simple.
Now, I am all for seeing Indians, Chinese, Pakistanis, et cetera achieve a standard of living in their own countries on par with ours here in America (assuming their government permits it / wants it), however, completely free trade in employment isn't the best way to achieve it. It's like breaking a dam; those on the lower level from the dam will raise up, and those on the higher level will fall down. Basically, the standards of living will attain equilibrium via bolstering one side while diminishing the other.
Now, what happens when YOUR job is outsourced to India? What happens when your whole CLASS of job is outsourced to China? You'll do what? Go back to school and change your career? Start over? What are you going to do in the meantime to pay the bills? Flip burgers? If you're in IT with an otherwise secure, good-paying job, you probably live fairly comfortably with a mortgage, family, credit cards, bills, etc. Losing your job sure has a way of upsetting the applecart of life. It further gets interesting when you find that the skillset that you put down on your resume nets you 30-40% less in salary when you are out job-hunting. Oh, don't miss that mortgage payment in the meantime, though! Also, a lot of people probably think "this can't happen to me or my job!" the "day" before they get their pink slip.
So, sure, let's make it "survival of the fittest". Sell that house, sell all your valuables to survive, take the lower-paying job while you retrain for -- whatever hasn't been outsourced -- yet.
There's a reason we don't fear the wolves in the night anymore; let's not regress back to that level of subsistence if we don't absolutely HAVE to.
Who's he kidding? The vast majority of innovation in games has come from "small indies". Remember Apogee/id software and Doom/Quake? Remember Valve and Half-Life? As someone else already mentioned, Will Wright and Simcity?
Then, let's look at the other side of the spectrum: Blizzard/Vivendi and World of Warcraft. Innovation? I don't see it. Sony and Star Wars Galaxies? Yeah, real innovative there. EA sports and the endless rehash of yearly pro sports games? Astounding! (not)
Big companies with big investors do the forumlaic thing because that is what they do best. They execute well in an area already explored and declared "safe" and "profitable" by the small guys who already took the chance and risked it all on "innovation". Why? Because they didn't have near as much to lose as "The Man".
Sure, indie developers do a lot of rehash, too; often it is because they are cutting their teeth and playing it "safe" for their first title or two before they jump in and start work on that "dream game" they have always wanted. They also do a lot of niche games. Nothing wrong with that. Indies are often small, and do smaller projects because that's what they can do to fill out their portfolio. However, that doesn't and shouldn't paint the rest of the independents out there currently working on cool, unique games that ARE truly innovative as being without the very quality they are (and have always been) providing to the industry.
Maybe he is referring to something a little more grandiose, like maybe coming up with a completely new genre. Even still, the vast majority of innovation in that regard has come from independents, not mass corporate powerhouses. There are always exceptions, and I won't say that no megastudio has ever done anything innovative, but it certainly is not the rule.
Sorry, but this indie game developer isn't buying it.
Amen to that!
I don't buy second-hand games, but I do buy games usually at discount sales (like at the recent closing of Media Play), or a year or three after they have come out when the price has dropped into the $20-30 range. Why? Because few games nowadays are WORTH more than that to me. Many games are the same rehashed formulaic crap, just like what Hollywood has been regurgitating on the audiences for years (and in some cases, the games are made from those franchises.. serious double-plus-ungood karma there). Eye candy alone does not impress me at all, as I still can go back and play DOS CGA games and have a blast playing them, because the GAME is good, regardless of how it is rendered. I know not everyone is like that, but that's what gets *my* hard-earned cash.
I think the biggest problem facing the industry is that it is industry a dearth of design creativity, and is substituting high-dollar glitz and glamour. Also, most game companies are notoriously and horribly mis-managed, wasting $5 million dollars on an idea which doesn't even rate a B title.
What will revive the industry is a resurgence of small, fast, smart, and creative independents, some of who will eventually become tomorrow's giants, and the cycle will repeat itself. The very best of them will remember what made their games and companies great, and carry that wisdom forward to be a dominant player in the industry for a long time to come.
In the meantime, we as gamers will have to live with the winter of our discontent. For me, that doesn't include paying US$60-$100 for an average game.
This coming from someone named "BobTheWonderMonkey".
:P
Yes, serious indeed.
You're not quite right.
Oh? OK, let's test the theory and see.
The key point is that the king can NOT manipulate the message in any way he sees fit - he's limited to at most k bit manipulations, which is why a code able to detect and correct a certain amount of bit manipulations is needed. The king can do a number of things besides just flipping bits, of course - he can also insert bits into the stream by manipulating the chalice and the order in which the prisoners are summoned -, but he can't do so as often as he might like to.
So, let's say he wants Prisoner 0 to always receive a "chalice down" state, just for argument's sake. He calls on a prisoner (doesn't matter which one). Assuming a "chalice up" state when the prisoner is called, if the prisoner leaves the chalice up, then the king can/will turn it down. If the prisoner turns it down, so much the better, he leaves it down. Then he calls Prisoner 0. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Given that he can ALWAYS send Prisoner 0 a "chalice up" state, he can send Prisoner 0 ANY other message he wishes to. He can completely block communication, he can substitute his own messages, impostering other prisoners, etc. He could even send spoofed messages that are valid within your O(k) or O(k^2) code.
As for your further refutation of the two points listed, it does matter who sent what bit because you cannot guarantee what bits of the SAME message you are getting each time you get a bit. Unless the message is a single bit, you can't tell what bits go with what message, because they could be randomly interleaved not only with other bits from other messages, but also with noise or spoof bits introduced by the king himself.
It is also not a true broadcast medium, because not everyone receives each and every bit of information sent. Even a comparison to Ethernet is not correct, because each and every Ethernet packet has both source and destination addresses encoded in the packet header, even though the receiver hardware of everyone on a non-switched segment sees the packet data.
Lastly, the source/destination knowledge was a requirement of the scheme *I* was talking about using a PKI technique, not necessarily your scheme.
So, I remain unconvinced that any code of any kind could work as a solution, simply because the king has complete control of the message at all times.
Quoting Lynx-Effect above:
If the King has effectively unlimited flips, he simply ensures the chalice is upright every time he calls a prisoner, there is no communication stream, and therefore no way for the chalice to signal anything to the others.
As long has you have a malicious interception and corruption of the information medium, the King can manipulate the message any way he sees fit, including sending his own "I've seen it" messages from any prisoner(s) that he never has to call to any prisoner(s) he wishes to fool.
Now, you can say that they use some form of encryption/signature scheme, except that all of those schemes in existence require that some part of the encryption be private. If there is anything that a prisoner can keep from the king, then it theoretically could work. IE, if each of the prisoners generated a public/private assymetric key pair in their heads, and gave their public key to each one of the other prisoners to encrypt and send messages, then maybe this might work, under very special conditions.
However, the communication medium is shared. IE, when called to come get your bit of information, you don't know whom the bit is from, nor do you know if you were the intended recipient. However, there is no chance that you will ever say "yes" incorrectly. Assuming enough calls, eventually, you will get all the bits of each prisoner's message, in the right order, unmolested. However, I would tend to think that it would take far longer than the predicted lifespan of this universe to complete.
I worked as a contractor to a large soft drink company some years back, and their corporate culture made it hard to fire most employees. However, they took improper computer / network use seriously and included it in their corporate code of conduct. Violating the CoC was about the only way you as an employee there could get fired, and they followed it. They even had security walk an upper management person out the door the day his little escapades took down a large segment of the network in his building.
Thus, as far as I have seen, it is all about not only having a good IT department, but having good company policies and proper enforcement to support it.
Sadly, they will never learn.
I have never, nor will I ever buy ANYTHING from Amazon. I tell my friends and family not to buy anything from them, either, and am happy to find them alternative sources for the things they would otherwise buy from that "place". I won't accept gifts that I know were purchased from Amazon, and I am happy to tell anyone at every turn to stay the hell away from them.
However, most people who claim to hate/dislike stupid patents like this aren't willing to suffer a little and give up their Amazon habit, nor take up the mantle of doing all they can to send a message, the ONLY message people like Bezos will understand: a dent in his wallet.
To me, that is the same as complicity; hypocrisy at its worst. It's like being a politician. Rail about it in public, but enjoy the coosh of it in private.
If you buy from Amazon or do nothing to discourage others from buying from them, then don't bother telling me how much you dislike stupid patents. I won't believe you, because it is hypocritical BS.
Lastly, don't give me that "it's defensive patenting" crap, either. That's the most disingenuos pile of dung ever to hit the stall floor. Abuse of a system to prevent abuse of said system is about the lamest thing imaginable. Ever heard of "two wrongs don't make a right"? Using a lame patent to try and beat back a suit over another lame patent is not a deterrent and, as Amazon has already demonstrated, they intend to use their portfolio for more than simple deterrence anyway.
Well, we don't know much about it yet.
You can harvest pumpkins from a single pumpkin patch, carve them, and build jack o'lanterns with them, as well as scarecrows/skeletons on your plot.
Jacques Allantyrn is supposed to make a reappearance (same one from beta) with something about a short-term portal to the Realm of Bounty, from whence the harvest supposedly comes. Oh, the moon is blood red with evil smilling skull visages in it.
Also in the "Halloween" patch came a world-wide plague. Well, it wasn't SUPPOSED to be world-wide, but it ended up that way from lack of testing. Another patch and some downtime later, it was contained.
Last year we had masks, and trick-or-treating, collecting candy to be traded for masks. Of course, Dragons were left out of the fun with the masks, but that's a common theme in HZ. After all, they can fly, what else could they want?
Once more, with feeling. :P
"I went up to Doolittle in the hall today..." *snickers* *guffaws* *points and laughs*
"..and I said '[expletive deleted], Doolittle?'"
"He said, '[expletive deleted]'" *laughs*
"..and I said 'Well, [expletive deleted] [gesture deleted]', and he didn't get it!" *more guffaws* *BOOP*