Your ad hominem attack means I'm not going to bother to even read the rest of what came after that. Thanks for perpetuating the stereotype of the forum poster made willing to insult other people because of internet anonymity.
Sometimes it's not anonymity. Sometimes either they are really ascorbic in real life or you just said something stupid. Pick which ever one you want to beleive.
That leaves Windows. Apple has the solution but refuses to bend over and pick it up. Linux might have it someday, but right now most people lack the technical knowledge to use it...
It's apples own fault that more people don't pick it up. If Dell were able to sell a PC and offer the users the choice of OSX or Windows...I bet with Apple's marketing you'd get LOADS of people adopting it for the first time. This is most likely because apply is a hardware company that happens to sell a nice look OS. Most mac user have bought into the idea that macs are premium products. Should they open it up they would then also have to open up what hardware is supported. This in itself would undermine one of their key sellign points: Stability. Bad drivers cause more crashes then almost anything aside form spyware. I think their nice machines but dont' suit my purpose. namely games and web design.
Indeed, and let's also note that a sample size of 2 is rather small to support the conclusion that licensing a DRM system doesn't make it less secure. From a purely statistical standpoint, isn't it obvious that the more people who know about a secret, the less likely it is to stay a secret? You can't license a DRM system without telling more people exactly how it works.
And to get conspiratorial for a moment, what if a competitor of Apple's decided to sabotage iTunes by releasing its secrets? That would be easier if there were licensees to target for espionage. Or what if the major labels set up an iTunes competitor, licensed FairPlay, then "accidentally" leaked the secret? They could then pull their music from iTunes, leaving themselves as the only legal source for the music.
I don't think those scenarios are likely, but I tend to believe Jobs when he says he doesn't want to take the extra risk. Security by obscurity hasn't worked that well through out history. for instance germany didn't fair so hot in WWII with their enigma encryption. When releasing any type of encryption you must assume yoru enemies will be aware of the method and to ensure the method is hard to crack despite this. DVD encryption made the assuption they wouldn't and it was cracked easily. With this in mind if Jobs had wanted a strong DRM I think they would have done a better job. They only made "good enough" drm. The whole subject of no sub licencing it is basically hardware lock in. Their Ipods are too profitable.
It's a bit early to call the race won or done. From all reports the PS3 sold more then the 360 at the same point in it's life span. The Wii is kicking ass and taking names but it remains to be seen how long this will last. It's an amazing party machien and for non gamer it's the best thing since sliced bread. But the trade off is the games are mostly shallow (zelda exempted) and they need to broaden their genre choices. Success breeds success. So if the Wii can steal a few major serieis (MGS/FF/GTA/DQ/etc...) then they might "win" this round. If Sony loses those then they are truly dead. Sony must prevent this at almost any cost. The 360 is interesting but appealed to exactly the same group the xbox did. Halo 3 will help. Aside from that they have very little exclusive series that pull peopel in. They may be 2nd again or 3rd depending on how much sony screws up but it seems unlikely they will stay #1 for long.
Cell has a Power chip as the main processing unit. Xbox 360 has 3, and there are already optimizing compilers for those. For a single core. There is not a compiler that will spread the work around for you. That still takes some skill. As time goes by they will develope tools that help automate this optimization.
What killed them was when there were so many games that didn't use "logic" but resorted to random puzzles to cram into them. We remember the well made ones like grim fandango and sam and max but how about the other wretched sierra tittles liek space quest 6 and their lot. Thats what killed them. they may come back but in hybrid form. For instance didn't Planescape feel a lot like a poitn and click? you had to get X item to advance Y plot and repeat. It did it well but it was a lot of fetch and kill quests that made it feel very poitn and clicky.
If you level enough, you can beat sephiroth in about 12 min. and thats almost entirely watching 3 knights of the rounds do 120,000+ dmg to him. you can also solo omnislash/mimic/auto pheonix him in about 3 min. summon, mimic, mimic. doen game. I had max str with slash all so 9999 each hit with each char to every enemy. end game is boring if you munchkin like a mad man.
So they're fucking up the UI in order to hide gameplay deficiencies? In any properly balanced RTS a monoculture of units will result in a quick death because your opponent only needs to exploit that unit's weakness.
The 90 unit cap and the limited build queing contribute to smaller tactical scrimages and to ensure heroes are relavant late game without being monstrously over powered (ie. TA's commander), they also contribute making swarming with mid games units ineffective. There is a limit of queing for actions but the number is fairly high. Have you played war3? fucked up UI? war 3 is the model for UI's that all games after used. SC as well. Monoculture hasn't been an issue in war 3. Balance isnt' either since War 3, and SC are the paragons of balance with significantly different sides.
All your points are moot because outside of the TA fanbase everyone acknowledges SC to be more fun, better balanced and varied, and ridicously more popular. War 3 as well. It's a non arguement. TA was interesting but a little more then a side note in RTS history.
War 3 and SC also focus on unit control. not because of AI limitations. Making a better AI is trivial in the context of the skills the units use. they have autocast for a lot of them. But their fanbase is heavy into micromangement. It conveys a certain learning curve. Say what ever you like but history has already put your game into the "interesting but insignificant" catagory.
10 years ago, TA let me select every unit on the map and move them all at once. Why does warcraft 3 still limit the number of units I can select?
It was a design decision to prevent swarming tactics. It enourages unit variety. They found if you let people mass move like in C7C: tiberian sun, people tended to mass medium tanks and send them. Making the game excessively shallow.
Sony's king actually. Still. Since it'll take a while for the Wii to catch up to the Ps2. This might change later when the ps2 market declines. But the ps2 is still very strong.
It had 3d before it's time and an interesting resource model. Other then that it was a pretty plain, RTS paint by numbers. Two identical side with different graphics. Over powered defene and a swarming monoculture mentality. It's C&C in 3d. The expansion helped a bit to differentiate the sides but it's much more about "hey, 3d is neat" then "best game ever!!!!111!1". A few years later War 3 does every thing except resource innovation better. Everything. Even custom units is easier and better.
This is all a matter of taste. I never found UT to be all that different from Q2. It was a FPS that garnered a following, that rivaled the quake series. It looked good. Played well and had some innovations like alt-fire weapons. More like slight edge over a half year old game, innovations wise. Arguably Half life is really the one that blew Quake away and thats mostly because of counter strike. It soundly thumped Quake sales wise while UT is matched Quake 2.
The people responsible at sony have been demoted or sacked. Sony now owe 7.50 per rootkit + 1 free album or 3 downloade dalmbums. The cash fine is about 4.5 mil (a pitance for sure, but the damage wasn't that widespread. they put it on really crappy CD's). Fine for criminal activities tend to be a single amount. Not per machine. Criminal convictions rarely ask for a fine. I'd estimate the fine to be 1000-2000, but IANAL. I am aware the max fine is 500,000 and 4 years in jail for the cyber crimes in general. Although Myspace is free to lay a civil suit related to this.
It comes down to how good your lawyers are. The law is the same but the two bodies mentioned did seperate things. One was a mean spirited DRM attempt the other was a mean spirited prank. Myself and yourself can see the parralells but Sony's lawyers managed to convince the judge it wasn't cyber crime while the Myspace hacker could not.
I mean consider an appropriate physical analogy for what this kid did. It would be like if he walked into a bookstore that looked to be open but turned out that the staff had taken the day off and gone home but forgot to lock up but then instead of stealing anything rearranged all the books so they spelled out funny comments and left a little note on the cash register suggesting they lock the store next time. Now obviously it would be a bad idea to do this as it would be a bad idea to run this myspace worm, however, because the prosecutors, judges and juries would correctly see this as a mere youthful prank rather than a serious threat to public order and give him community service. This to a large part is how a good legal system operates, having strong punishments for behavior that can be used maliciously but showing mercy when used more innocently.
It's be Criminal tresspass and vandalism. Also it's more like he spelled out his name and address on the floor in books and didn't leave a note.
I'd like to think that if someone managed to release a script onto/. that added everyone as their friend the admins would brush it off and take it as a joke. I don't think such a script would "harm" me. (I use FF's NoScript [noscript.net] anyway, but that's besides the point..)
Lets pretend your a sysadmin. Some prankster just inserted a worm that makes the screensaver go on aftee 10s and says "Josh Smith is awesome". It takes you and your team 3 days to fix it and for the next weak your whole network is a little slow as a side effect. Now tell me you'd brush it off. It's all "harmless" unless it's you cleaning it up.
by this logic, doesn't my computer use the internet, and I just tell it what to do? (i do get the point though, just being contentious)
Then all he has to do is convince the judge of this. But the judge might be more spitefully inclide to then to also ban ATMs, Phones ect.. except for business purposes.
I fully agree. 11hz is after all below the threshold of human hearing (if of course any reasonable speaker system could produce it, and one lived in a place large enough for more than a tiny fraction of the wave to fit in a room), so you wouldn't get any apparent sound at all, whereas a 44Hz MP3 would at least be able to produce some dull thuds.
wooops. But then again, I meant sample rate. 11hz would be a hardly telligible mess.
I'm sure that the lady learned her lesson, and that it's time for the manager to learn his. Cause ultimately, this is going to cost the company, both by fleeing customers, potential customers being more wary of the service, and advertisers not wanting to be associated with a company that condones rudeness towards the advertisers' potential customers. It doesn't reflect well on Lycos, no matter who is wrong or who is right.
Well, at this point it just brought lycos more attention then their entire networth could have bought.
I had a similar experience with our local cable modem internet provider. They are a large multi-state cable company. I had been a loyal customer paying their exhoribitant fees for many years, so definately not free. Their mail server for our city crashed overnight and the next morning 4 years worth of saved email was gone, but not just for me, for the whole city. I at first figured it was temporary, so I started by emailing and then phoning after I got more concerned. There answer was that they only keep a nightly disk backup and that got corrupted also and that they had no tape backup whatsoever. Being a sysadmin myself I was completely aghast. But they basically told me no amount of complaining could ever bring it back and all they offered was a free month of service. On top of that, they also told me that I should not even be leaving my mail on their server. I use their IMAP service so I can have access to my mail from several home and work computers, but they told me I should only be using POP and saving it on my own computer. The worst part is since they are the only decent network provider in the area, I still use them as an ISP, but not for any important email. I think you got adaquete but not great service. Things happen. Never trust someone else when it comes to data back up. If I lost all my mail. I'd be okay, because of a streak of paranoia I keep local back up and off site backups of anything of any significant value to me. I'm sure you've learned your lesson. And while the failure to get your mail back is somewhat bad, they compensated you to a reasonable degree. If you think your mail is worth more then 1 mo of your inet service.. then you really should have back it up. I can see their response was reasonable although their data integrity processes seem to be lacking.
Working in customer service, I can attest there are some customers that you should fire. These are the low to no profit customers who demands time and vastly over estimate their importance in the world. The ones who demand to speak to your VP or assume the media is interested in hearing of how the evil phone company cut their phone service just because they're 6 months behind on their bills.
At some point a customer demands more then their current and future business is worth and you have to set your foot down. I suspect Ms. Whitney is one of these, and the lycos rep put his foot down. It happens fairly often but with more diplomatic language in every company. There is simply a certain class of person who such a hassle to deal with that you want to direct them to yoru compitition.
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Your ad hominem attack means I'm not going to bother to even read the rest of what came after that. Thanks for perpetuating the stereotype of the forum poster made willing to insult other people because of internet anonymity.
Sometimes it's not anonymity. Sometimes either they are really ascorbic in real life or you just said something stupid. Pick which ever one you want to beleive.
It's apples own fault that more people don't pick it up. If Dell were able to sell a PC and offer the users the choice of OSX or Windows...I bet with Apple's marketing you'd get LOADS of people adopting it for the first time. This is most likely because apply is a hardware company that happens to sell a nice look OS. Most mac user have bought into the idea that macs are premium products. Should they open it up they would then also have to open up what hardware is supported. This in itself would undermine one of their key sellign points: Stability. Bad drivers cause more crashes then almost anything aside form spyware. I think their nice machines but dont' suit my purpose. namely games and web design.
And to get conspiratorial for a moment, what if a competitor of Apple's decided to sabotage iTunes by releasing its secrets? That would be easier if there were licensees to target for espionage. Or what if the major labels set up an iTunes competitor, licensed FairPlay, then "accidentally" leaked the secret? They could then pull their music from iTunes, leaving themselves as the only legal source for the music.
I don't think those scenarios are likely, but I tend to believe Jobs when he says he doesn't want to take the extra risk. Security by obscurity hasn't worked that well through out history. for instance germany didn't fair so hot in WWII with their enigma encryption. When releasing any type of encryption you must assume yoru enemies will be aware of the method and to ensure the method is hard to crack despite this. DVD encryption made the assuption they wouldn't and it was cracked easily. With this in mind if Jobs had wanted a strong DRM I think they would have done a better job. They only made "good enough" drm. The whole subject of no sub licencing it is basically hardware lock in. Their Ipods are too profitable.
It's a bit early to call the race won or done. From all reports the PS3 sold more then the 360 at the same point in it's life span. The Wii is kicking ass and taking names but it remains to be seen how long this will last. It's an amazing party machien and for non gamer it's the best thing since sliced bread. But the trade off is the games are mostly shallow (zelda exempted) and they need to broaden their genre choices. Success breeds success. So if the Wii can steal a few major serieis (MGS/FF/GTA/DQ/etc...) then they might "win" this round. If Sony loses those then they are truly dead. Sony must prevent this at almost any cost. The 360 is interesting but appealed to exactly the same group the xbox did. Halo 3 will help. Aside from that they have very little exclusive series that pull peopel in. They may be 2nd again or 3rd depending on how much sony screws up but it seems unlikely they will stay #1 for long.
What killed them was when there were so many games that didn't use "logic" but resorted to random puzzles to cram into them. We remember the well made ones like grim fandango and sam and max but how about the other wretched sierra tittles liek space quest 6 and their lot. Thats what killed them. they may come back but in hybrid form. For instance didn't Planescape feel a lot like a poitn and click? you had to get X item to advance Y plot and repeat. It did it well but it was a lot of fetch and kill quests that made it feel very poitn and clicky.
The first 400,000 PS3 units came with a coupon for a free movie (ricky bobby.) The FA even alludes to this fact:
The HD DVD for the Xbox had a similiar pack in for a movie.
If you level enough, you can beat sephiroth in about 12 min. and thats almost entirely watching 3 knights of the rounds do 120,000+ dmg to him. you can also solo omnislash/mimic/auto pheonix him in about 3 min. summon, mimic, mimic. doen game. I had max str with slash all so 9999 each hit with each char to every enemy. end game is boring if you munchkin like a mad man.
So they're fucking up the UI in order to hide gameplay deficiencies? In any properly balanced RTS a monoculture of units will result in a quick death because your opponent only needs to exploit that unit's weakness.
The 90 unit cap and the limited build queing contribute to smaller tactical scrimages and to ensure heroes are relavant late game without being monstrously over powered (ie. TA's commander), they also contribute making swarming with mid games units ineffective. There is a limit of queing for actions but the number is fairly high. Have you played war3? fucked up UI? war 3 is the model for UI's that all games after used. SC as well. Monoculture hasn't been an issue in war 3. Balance isnt' either since War 3, and SC are the paragons of balance with significantly different sides.
All your points are moot because outside of the TA fanbase everyone acknowledges SC to be more fun, better balanced and varied, and ridicously more popular. War 3 as well. It's a non arguement. TA was interesting but a little more then a side note in RTS history.
War 3 and SC also focus on unit control. not because of AI limitations. Making a better AI is trivial in the context of the skills the units use. they have autocast for a lot of them. But their fanbase is heavy into micromangement. It conveys a certain learning curve. Say what ever you like but history has already put your game into the "interesting but insignificant" catagory.
10 years ago, TA let me select every unit on the map and move them all at once. Why does warcraft 3 still limit the number of units I can select?
It was a design decision to prevent swarming tactics. It enourages unit variety. They found if you let people mass move like in C7C: tiberian sun, people tended to mass medium tanks and send them. Making the game excessively shallow.
Sony's king actually. Still. Since it'll take a while for the Wii to catch up to the Ps2. This might change later when the ps2 market declines. But the ps2 is still very strong.
Best... RTS... Game... Ever... :-)
It had 3d before it's time and an interesting resource model. Other then that it was a pretty plain, RTS paint by numbers. Two identical side with different graphics. Over powered defene and a swarming monoculture mentality. It's C&C in 3d. The expansion helped a bit to differentiate the sides but it's much more about "hey, 3d is neat" then "best game ever!!!!111!1". A few years later War 3 does every thing except resource innovation better. Everything. Even custom units is easier and better.
Sorry, Unreal blows Quake away.
This is all a matter of taste. I never found UT to be all that different from Q2. It was a FPS that garnered a following, that rivaled the quake series. It looked good. Played well and had some innovations like alt-fire weapons. More like slight edge over a half year old game, innovations wise. Arguably Half life is really the one that blew Quake away and thats mostly because of counter strike. It soundly thumped Quake sales wise while UT is matched Quake 2.
The people responsible at sony have been demoted or sacked. Sony now owe 7.50 per rootkit + 1 free album or 3 downloade dalmbums. The cash fine is about 4.5 mil (a pitance for sure, but the damage wasn't that widespread. they put it on really crappy CD's). Fine for criminal activities tend to be a single amount. Not per machine. Criminal convictions rarely ask for a fine. I'd estimate the fine to be 1000-2000, but IANAL. I am aware the max fine is 500,000 and 4 years in jail for the cyber crimes in general. Although Myspace is free to lay a civil suit related to this.
It comes down to how good your lawyers are. The law is the same but the two bodies mentioned did seperate things. One was a mean spirited DRM attempt the other was a mean spirited prank. Myself and yourself can see the parralells but Sony's lawyers managed to convince the judge it wasn't cyber crime while the Myspace hacker could not.
I mean consider an appropriate physical analogy for what this kid did. It would be like if he walked into a bookstore that looked to be open but turned out that the staff had taken the day off and gone home but forgot to lock up but then instead of stealing anything rearranged all the books so they spelled out funny comments and left a little note on the cash register suggesting they lock the store next time. Now obviously it would be a bad idea to do this as it would be a bad idea to run this myspace worm, however, because the prosecutors, judges and juries would correctly see this as a mere youthful prank rather than a serious threat to public order and give him community service. This to a large part is how a good legal system operates, having strong punishments for behavior that can be used maliciously but showing mercy when used more innocently.
It's be Criminal tresspass and vandalism. Also it's more like he spelled out his name and address on the floor in books and didn't leave a note.
I'd like to think that if someone managed to release a script onto /. that added everyone as their friend the admins would brush it off and take it as a joke. I don't think such a script would "harm" me. (I use FF's NoScript [noscript.net] anyway, but that's besides the point..)
Lets pretend your a sysadmin. Some prankster just inserted a worm that makes the screensaver go on aftee 10s and says "Josh Smith is awesome". It takes you and your team 3 days to fix it and for the next weak your whole network is a little slow as a side effect. Now tell me you'd brush it off. It's all "harmless" unless it's you cleaning it up.
by this logic, doesn't my computer use the internet, and I just tell it what to do? (i do get the point though, just being contentious)
Then all he has to do is convince the judge of this. But the judge might be more spitefully inclide to then to also ban ATMs, Phones ect.. except for business purposes.
Sony had to pay too in civil litigation.
Over here in canada I have 2 friends with PSPs and I have never seen it on a subway or even int he hands of anyone but these two friends.
I fully agree. 11hz is after all below the threshold of human hearing (if of course any reasonable speaker system could produce it, and one lived in a place large enough for more than a tiny fraction of the wave to fit in a room), so you wouldn't get any apparent sound at all, whereas a 44Hz MP3 would at least be able to produce some dull thuds.
wooops. But then again, I meant sample rate. 11hz would be a hardly telligible mess.
I don't frequently check. I just assume redundancy will save me :D most I can lose is 1 mo. I backup when I pay my bills.
My PS2 is first run. still works well. My PS1 had to be replaced, but I fault myself for modding it... to play imports.. yes imports.
I'm sure that the lady learned her lesson, and that it's time for the manager to learn his.
Cause ultimately, this is going to cost the company, both by fleeing customers, potential customers being more wary of the service, and advertisers not wanting to be associated with a company that condones rudeness towards the advertisers' potential customers. It doesn't reflect well on Lycos, no matter who is wrong or who is right.
Well, at this point it just brought lycos more attention then their entire networth could have bought.
Working in customer service, I can attest there are some customers that you should fire. These are the low to no profit customers who demands time and vastly over estimate their importance in the world. The ones who demand to speak to your VP or assume the media is interested in hearing of how the evil phone company cut their phone service just because they're 6 months behind on their bills.
At some point a customer demands more then their current and future business is worth and you have to set your foot down. I suspect Ms. Whitney is one of these, and the lycos rep put his foot down. It happens fairly often but with more diplomatic language in every company. There is simply a certain class of person who such a hassle to deal with that you want to direct them to yoru compitition.