Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.
It's not orthogonal to capitalism nor to any other politico-economic system, because if it were, it would have no direct effect on their operation, by definition of "orthogonal".
FOSS directly affects centralist socialist systems quite drastically --- it undermines any attempt at centrally managed software development, by its very nature. FOSS would in theory not affect pure distributed communist systems made up of cooperating communes much at all, but no such systems exist in practice. (Israel's farming communes don't really qualify, because they are actually companies and would be affected by FOSS if their product were software.)
In the capitalist world, FOSS directly affects both the market pricing and company control of software products, as we know full well. As an example, the market for C/C++ compilers would be very different today if there were no gcc. The effect is very wide ranging, to the extent of forcing entire business plans to change from product to support, and determining the viability of some types of software products in the market.
So, no, FOSS is not at all orthogonal in this area. And in my view at least, that is a very good thing.
It's one of the few examples of techies directly transforming the politico-economic landscape in ways not planned and indeed strongly resisted at first by the powers that be, on both sides of the (largely false) cap/com divide. The other big example is of course the Internet.
Re:Ouch, CrystalSpace not 64-bit clean like blende
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Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 1
Crystal Space is 100% 64-bit clean (at least the latest CVS, the latest stable 0.98 has problems).
That's excellent news about the latest CS, Jorrit. Thank you.
However, my post was 100% factual, for the current state of CS in Gentoo and for the source release that I tried to build by hand (a few months old now) in the absence of an ebuild. Here are the details:
Gentoo Portage on Athlon 64 (x86_64 arch), sync'd today (note both ebuilds "Masked", owing to build problems):
* dev-games/crystalspace [ Masked ]
Latest version available: 0.99_pre20050823
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 23,850 kB
Homepage: http://crystal.sourceforge.net/
Description: Portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++
License: LGPL-2
* dev-games/crystalspace-cvs [ Masked ]
Latest version available: 0.99
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 0 kB
Homepage: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/
Description: portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++
License: LGPL-2
461 compile-time warnings (almost all pointer/integer size problems) and 121 fatal link errors does qualify as "disaster area" in my book.
I am *very* glad to hear that the build portability problems of 0.98 and 0.99 on x86_64 have now been addressed. I'm looking forward hugely to retrying with new sources.
Ouch, CrystalSpace not 64-bit clean like blender
on
Blender 2.40 Released
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· Score: 1
Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine
Ouch, that would appear to be very bad news for many Blender fans.
Crystal Space is in a terrible state in respect of its portability to 64-bit platforms, whereas Blender is clean. Some distributions don't even carry 64-bit CS builds because of the mess (eg. Gentoo), and trying to build it by hand shows exactly why --- it's not just a localized hiccup but a disaster area.
If you base Blender's new engine on CS, please factor out the subset that you need and make it 64-bit clean (or work with CS people to that end), because otherwise those of us with x86_64 machines will be unable to use it without major hacking.
In graphics, performance matters, so any setback to the 64-bit community by adding a dependency on CS until they can make it build without hiccups on x86_64 would be most unfortunate.
I dare you to take a 360 and hook it up to ANY tv with a native resolution of 720p, 1080i, or 1080p
You're right on the first two resolutions, but not on the third.
The Xbox 360 hardware doesn't support 1080p --- its highest progressive mode is 720, whereas at 1080 it supports interlaced only. In contrast, the PS3 is categorically stated as supporting 1080p in its hardware. [<but insert vapourware alert here>]
Of course, this doesn't currently mean much in practice, except to those interested in spec wars. And it's also somewhat relevant to those who want their future A/V equipment to display computer data in the more rock-stable progressive format to which we've become accustomed in the computer world.
This looks really interesting, and no doubt a lot of people would like to try their hand at some WoW-based machinima, rather than just looking at the work of others. The very widespread use of customized UIs in WoW certainly suggests that the platform is quite flexible.
Does anyone have any useful links to development tools and procedures for using the WoW engine in this way? Can the director's camera be driven through the Lua interface? And is there a way to move entities programmatically, rather than by using live players operating their clients through storyboarded actions?
why the new acts can't all sound like Lionel Richie or Billy Ocean.
I think that you missed the poster's point, since you mention old pop chart stars. The problem isn't that today's pop charts don't feature yesterday's pop chart music nor soundalikes --- expecting that would be totally dumb.
The problem is that today the music scene is ruled 99% by the pop charts as a result of the ruthless efficiency of the Big Business side of the music industry, to the extent that almost all other musical styles are marginalized to near extinction. Musicians no longer come out of art school wanting to do something novel for their own niche audience; greed has overcome artistic integrity.
Back in the day, the studios and labels were comparatively amateurish and ineffective, so public tastes were strongly influenced by radio station jockeys, through student union gigs/concerts, and by music tabloid reviews of live acts. These have almost no effect today. The image makers and immense marketting machine hold the scene in a vice-like grip.
So it's not old age, only. It's also that musical horizons have been slammed down tight all around us, with only a few wonderful exceptions to the rule offering a temporary escape.
No cheating possible if designed properly
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Build Your Own MMOG
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· Score: 1
This will probably make it easy to have client side cheats run across your "Multiverse" too.
Not if the designers understand the two golden rules:
- Everything client-side belongs to the owner of the client machine. - Everything that protects the integrity of the game resides on the game server.
In particular, all game-resource management and player capabilities control, and all cheat detection and prevention, must reside on the server end, and NEVER NEVER NEVER on the client.
Under that 2-part strategy, it doesn't matter what anyone does to their client, good luck to them. And people with disabilities will be grateful for that. By definition it cannot be cheating, because anything is allowable client-side, as all the essential controls are on the server.
The only reason why client-based cheats are often a problem is because game designers put sensitive data on the client to improve performance and do not provide adequate cheat detection on the server end of the link. Thus are born the seeds of cheating.
Our own game in beta-testing, Kothuria, is available on Windows only right now, but you can be sure that we'll be testing any new client tech with that game first.
You are heading towards your product becoming completely non-portable, in practice. This is because it will cost you money to port it later, which you won't spend.
If you are genuine about multi-platform availability, there is only one approach that works. Compile, build, and test across all the major platforms as part of your standard development cycle, automatically, so that non-portable design and coding is caught during daily development. *DO NOT LET* any code be run on one platform only.
There is no "do it later" approach that works, in practice. The bean counters make sure of that.
so how should writers be compesated for the books they write?
How about, by being the only ones allowed to publish their material for profit?
It's not the act of private copying or private downloading that is inherently unfair for authors --- after all, each copy taken makes them better known, which is what all upcoming authors want. It's the act of taking their material and then selling it for your own personal gain without having done the work that the authors did that is inherently unfair. This applies to all media.
The problem is REPUBLICATION FOR PROFIT, not copying.
Very true. After "completing" two conventional grind-based MMOGs to max level over several years of pain, I now adore the Guild Wars approach. Its designers completely threw out the MMOG rulebook, and created an amazing breath of fresh air amid the tedium of traditional MMOGs.
The "emptiness" of zones that you speak of is the challange: it's you and your friends against the whole zone, without any of the annoyances of shared zones. It also means no dying to trains created by inept or uncaring players, no waiting for spawns, no camping, no kill stealing, etc etc etc. All of the fun, none of the pain. Just you and your chosen colleagues, which can of course be AI henchmen, against the whole world. It's excellent.
But as you say, tastes vary, and some people like the pain of old MMOGs, the drudgery of waiting, and being at the mercy of others.
There's not a shadow of doubt that 8-figure-and-rising development costs per game are utterly unsustainable. The question is, what can be done about it?
The market volume is there, the demand for games is unquenchable, the platforms are in very good shape and gettting better, so the only problem is actually MAKING the products without spending gazillions. And that problem boils down to one (and ONLY one) issue: manpower.
People will immediately object that game assets and development infrastructure cost a lot more than manpower, but my point here is that those things are only *symptoms* of the current problem and not central. You see, game assets only have astronomic price tags when you're licensing a blockbuster title from its blood-sucking owner (and we don't need any more of those), otherwise the cost of assets is simply that of the manpower and computer time needed to create them.
So, here's the most obvious and straightforward solution to the malaise in the gaming industry: knock down the cathedrals of the current games producers, and put game component and game asset development out to tender in the bazaar of the worldwide development community.
Manpower costs would then fall drastically owing to the huge supply of computing skills in the world, and even the machinery costs would plummet since much of it would be personally owned by the distributed developers. Furthermore, this addresses the other two contributory issues that I didn't mention above, lack of reuse in the industry and very little standing on the shoulders of giants. FOSS has a proven track record in that area.
Of course, this doesn't tackle the whole problem, but it certainly rips out its rotting heart. And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again. There is no shortage of amazing ideas in the world.
Wasn't the web invented in the first place by scientists so they could more easily share information?
Indeed, and it can go a lot further too.
In addition to information sharing, the net could easily support moderated peer review by the very same experts who review papers submitted to the top journals. All that's needed is for a group of experts on a topic to get together and decide to do it. After all, the costs are miniscule, except for their time. And publication of a paper accepted by such a review body as an online PDF is a lot more useful than dead tree publication anyway.
Experts in a scientific field don't need the backing of a Society or of a respected scientific journal in order to perform peer review. They're acknowledged experts in their own right, and everyone working in a field inherently knows who they are.
I've never understood why tech companies locate to areas of extreme congestion and high prices like central London, when their personnel would gain so many benefits from just a small shift outwards from the centre by 10-15 miles or so.
It's an online business, for crying out loud. Why submit your people to the torture of daily commuting into a sardine can, and the costs that go with it?
This doesn't apply just to Google of course, but Google is an excellent example of the problem.
And no, it's not because that's where the fat pipes are, not anymore.
It's been coming our way for a while now, and this book is very much in tune with the times.
We've had our renaissance and our golden ages of reason and intellectualism and humanistic idealism that gave rise to pro-people icons like the Constitution of the United States.
Now instead we have the encroaching 1984 of Blair, the religious fundamentalism of Bush, and a corporate-driven media culture which farms the brainless masses like cattle and teaches them the new values of disconnected speech. Who needs Voltaire when your mind can find fulfillment in Snoop Dog?
The book of TFA is mainstream in this new world of post-intellectualism. Welcome to the new Dark Age.
I'm pleasently surprised at the number of games already available.
Actually, there is a very interesting point behind the fact that *NOT ALL* Xbox games are immediately runnable on the 360's emulator. There are two issues here.
- Firstly, if not all Xbox games run under the emulator, this clearly implies that the Xbox emulation is incomplete. If it were complete, then any Xbox title wouldn't even know that it's running under emulation, and all games would run by default. So, it's not complete, currently.
- Secondly, since the interview says that the emulator can be downloaded for burning to CD and loading into the 360 from media, this means that the emulator is pretty much fixed. Since the set of compatible games is most definitely not fixed, but growing all the time, this implies that the Xbox 360 must be connected online for it to validate that a particular game is compatible.
In other words, Microsoft seems to be identifying "compatibility" with "authorization by us" for a game to run on the 360 console. I guess it's what one would expect, given their desire for control, although it certainly isn't helpful to players who own minority-interest games.
The US is heading rapidly towards becoming a police state. It's as simple as that.
Other countries are no better --- for example the UK is a nanny state gone mad, and is rapidly turning into a police state too. New mandatory IDs, new CCTV everywhere, new 3-month detention without process, etc etc.
How we've allowed our politicians to do this to us I don't know. But something is going to have to change, or things will get very ugly.
Lawyers do have a duty, to the Court, to uphold the integrity of the legal process above all other interests.
In the UK, that's called being a "Jobsworth" --- a person who does something because "It's more than my job's worth" not to. It equates to doing highly unethical and unfair things because "the system" says that they have to, orders unquestioned.
And that's the problem here too. Lawyers are oiling the wheels of something that's pretty close to being an extortion racket, and yet are happily claiming that no mud sticks to them.
I know that you are not directly condoning the MPAA/RIAA excesses, but somehow your words read like a defence of what your professional colleagues are doing anyway.
The train wouldn't run if the boilerman weren't stoking it.
It's high-time that someone high up in the judiciary pointed a finger at the MPAA/RIAA legal departments and said "What you're doing is legal but is not fair. Be fair. Be ethical." But elephants will fly before that happens, because there's just too much money flowing into people's pockets from the racket, and that includes lawyer's pockets.
It's pretty damn sad, and indefensible professionally... unless you're a "Jobsworth".
It's not just extremely hard to synchronize the various tasks - it's INCREDIBLY hard!
I know where you're coming from, and yes, it can be incredibly hard. However, this applies only when people use the WRONG methodology, ie. the one that they learned for single-task programming. Unfortunately, that's 99% of programmers, and therein lies the problem.
Let me give you a trivial little example to show that the difficulty is not inherent: any newbie programmer can create a long pipeline of Unix filters and run it with total success on a multi-CPU and hyperthreaded big-iron box with not a hint of race conditions, deadlocks, or data corruption. It's not because they're highly competent, but because the framework of Unix pipes hides all the necessary synchronization.
And it's just the same with multi-core games consoles. Of course, a simple pipe abstraction won't be enough there. The programming framework will require client-safe job queues, free process pools, task schedulers with variable policies, a routed and prioritized messaging system, and a whole host of internally-synchronized communication methods. And all of this infrastructure must hide the complexities of concurrency and multiprocessing behind opaque interfaces, so that people without a PhD in concurrency nor equivalent experience can still use them safely.
It's not actually hard at all given the right framework. But it's pretty close to impossible to build a reliably working product when concurrent programming is done in an ad hoc fashion.
It seems like a lot of the things dealing with the Xbox360 have been rushed.
That's no coincidence though, because MS knows full well that it's only the Xbox 360's 4-5 month launch lead over PS3 that might even up the odds a little. Remember that PS2 is so far ahead of Xbox1 in market share and in game count that Sony can pretty much ignore MS in this generation.
MS doesn't want that to continue in the next generation, obviously, so I think they're right to bring out the new machine ASAP regardless of its state. People will complain a little, but they'll still buy it, especially over Xmas.
Why not just evaluate the issue technically?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
... an article possibly designed to sink Open Office
Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But what I find odd is that a simple, easily-measureable property like speed is treated as a religious issue and/or examined for conflicts of interest at all. Why not just measure it in a series of comparative tests as scientifically as possible?
And then, if Open Office is found to be lacking in speed, fine, no problem! The result simply becomes very valuable input to OO's design and development team, and in all probability will get dealt with very seriously and rapidly and to the benefit of its users.
There really shouldn't be an issue of contention here, if we're truly techies.
or hell, even sodium with water. But the cost of refining these metals in the first place is very high.
There are many places in the world where intense sunlight is available pretty much every day, all year round, and which also possess a coastline. Many countries already run water or salt extraction plants in such locations. (I've seen one myself.)
In principle, such sites can provide an inexhaustable supply of sodium from salt-water, and a "free" source of energy from the sun to power the extraction. (And salt-free water as a byproduct is often highly valuable too.)
So, what you say needn't be true in the general case. What's missing though is the right combination of technologies to harness this, especially a sodium-based fuel technology. However, despite saying that, I think that all such fuel-based ideas miss the point.
If solar energy is free in the sense of supply cost, then forget the intermediate fuels and just store electricity directly. We "simply" need better batteries, or indeed flywheels or other energy storage mechanisms. That's the future, in my opinion, whereas transporting physical fuels is not.
I'm speechless. Don't they realize that this is an absolute gift for criminals?
The most obvious direct application of these hidden markings is to frame somebody else for your crimes (ransom notes, etc), or to keep the authorities off your scent through misdirection.
Organized crime must absolutely love this.
A lot of innocent people are going to find their homes raided, while the actual perpetrators sip their dry martinis on the Cote d'Azur. Another "brilliant" idea by the morons in power.
Your example is spot on. There are many places in the survey where their coverage of alternatives is threadbare, and simply doesn't cover existing gaming options.
For example, Guild Wars fans will find the wording about team vs solo play at odds with how their game works, because the solo player can create teams not only with other human players but also with up to 7 "henchmen", so you're "teamed but solo". And the henchmen AI is quite often superior to the natural intelligence shown by humans, so it is extremely common in GW to choose to team with henchies by preference over human players.
Also, the wording in the survey suggests that they have preconceived notions of good and bad with respect to gamers. For example, "escaping from the real world" is inherently an aspersion against gamers, as are the many questions about "trying to cut down", etc. None of their questions pose gaming as a passtime along with other leisure activities which don't get negative fingers pointed at them. It seems that the "researchers" actually have a hidden agenda here.
And finally, there is almost nothing in the survey about challange and tactics! I find this quite incredible, since "good gameplay" is generally regarded as being all about challange and tactics. They like to focus on negative issues, and avoid all the positive ones. Very poor indeed.
It's a pretty wierd survey, and in my opinion, it's slanted to play into the hands of sociologists with axes to grind. It's also crystal clear that it was not put together with much input from gamers, since it addresses almost none of the issues typically regarded as important in gaming.
Try again folks. And tell the sociologists in the team to put away their PC agendas, and hire some gamers. And find out about Guild Wars to understand the solo/team issue... currently GW isn't even in your games list.:-)
I'm not averse to personal responsibility in computing.
But if politicians are going to foist this upon us, then the same must apply to them. For each and every failure of policy and implementation and leadership and foresight, they must pay the price of what their failure has cost the nation. They'd better have deep pockets.
Likewise for professionals in the police and judicial systems: for each and every failure to provide actual and verifiable justice, judges and magistrates and lawyers should pay and suffer personally. Especially the lawyers. (:-) And for each burglary and killing that they have not prevented or solved, the police must bear personal responsibility and be prosecuted accordingly.
Can this fly? Of course not. And nor can developer responsibility for correct software operation in a mathematically intractible world.
Slashdot Mirror
Open-source software is not the opposite of capitalism. It's an orthogonal concept.
It's not orthogonal to capitalism nor to any other politico-economic system, because if it were, it would have no direct effect on their operation, by definition of "orthogonal".
FOSS directly affects centralist socialist systems quite drastically --- it undermines any attempt at centrally managed software development, by its very nature. FOSS would in theory not affect pure distributed communist systems made up of cooperating communes much at all, but no such systems exist in practice. (Israel's farming communes don't really qualify, because they are actually companies and would be affected by FOSS if their product were software.)
In the capitalist world, FOSS directly affects both the market pricing and company control of software products, as we know full well. As an example, the market for C/C++ compilers would be very different today if there were no gcc. The effect is very wide ranging, to the extent of forcing entire business plans to change from product to support, and determining the viability of some types of software products in the market.
So, no, FOSS is not at all orthogonal in this area. And in my view at least, that is a very good thing.
It's one of the few examples of techies directly transforming the politico-economic landscape in ways not planned and indeed strongly resisted at first by the powers that be, on both sides of the (largely false) cap/com divide. The other big example is of course the Internet.
That's excellent news about the latest CS, Jorrit. Thank you.
However, my post was 100% factual, for the current state of CS in Gentoo and for the source release that I tried to build by hand (a few months old now) in the absence of an ebuild. Here are the details:
Gentoo Portage on Athlon 64 (x86_64 arch), sync'd today (note both ebuilds "Masked", owing to build problems):
* dev-games/crystalspace [ Masked ]
Latest version available: 0.99_pre20050823
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 23,850 kB
Homepage: http://crystal.sourceforge.net/
Description: Portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++
License: LGPL-2
* dev-games/crystalspace-cvs [ Masked ]
Latest version available: 0.99
Latest version installed: [ Not Installed ]
Size of downloaded files: 0 kB
Homepage: http://www.crystalspace3d.org/
Description: portable 3D Game Development Kit written in C++
License: LGPL-2
Source build, July 13, from cs98_004.tar.gz:
grep warning Log.make | wc -l
461
grep 'returned 1 exit status' Log.make | wc -l
121
461 compile-time warnings (almost all pointer/integer size problems) and 121 fatal link errors does qualify as "disaster area" in my book.
I am *very* glad to hear that the build portability problems of 0.98 and 0.99 on x86_64 have now been addressed. I'm looking forward hugely to retrying with new sources.
Some of you may already know but we are aiming to make a new GameEngine for Blender using the Crystal Space 3D Engine
Ouch, that would appear to be very bad news for many Blender fans.
Crystal Space is in a terrible state in respect of its portability to 64-bit platforms, whereas Blender is clean. Some distributions don't even carry 64-bit CS builds because of the mess (eg. Gentoo), and trying to build it by hand shows exactly why --- it's not just a localized hiccup but a disaster area.
If you base Blender's new engine on CS, please factor out the subset that you need and make it 64-bit clean (or work with CS people to that end), because otherwise those of us with x86_64 machines will be unable to use it without major hacking.
In graphics, performance matters, so any setback to the 64-bit community by adding a dependency on CS until they can make it build without hiccups on x86_64 would be most unfortunate.
I dare you to take a 360 and hook it up to ANY tv with a native resolution of 720p, 1080i, or 1080p
You're right on the first two resolutions, but not on the third.
The Xbox 360 hardware doesn't support 1080p --- its highest progressive mode is 720, whereas at 1080 it supports interlaced only. In contrast, the PS3 is categorically stated as supporting 1080p in its hardware. [<but insert vapourware alert here>]
Of course, this doesn't currently mean much in practice, except to those interested in spec wars. And it's also somewhat relevant to those who want their future A/V equipment to display computer data in the more rock-stable progressive format to which we've become accustomed in the computer world.
This looks really interesting, and no doubt a lot of people would like to try their hand at some WoW-based machinima, rather than just looking at the work of others. The very widespread use of customized UIs in WoW certainly suggests that the platform is quite flexible.
Does anyone have any useful links to development tools and procedures for using the WoW engine in this way? Can the director's camera be driven through the Lua interface? And is there a way to move entities programmatically, rather than by using live players operating their clients through storyboarded actions?
why the new acts can't all sound like Lionel Richie or Billy Ocean.
I think that you missed the poster's point, since you mention old pop chart stars. The problem isn't that today's pop charts don't feature yesterday's pop chart music nor soundalikes --- expecting that would be totally dumb.
The problem is that today the music scene is ruled 99% by the pop charts as a result of the ruthless efficiency of the Big Business side of the music industry, to the extent that almost all other musical styles are marginalized to near extinction. Musicians no longer come out of art school wanting to do something novel for their own niche audience; greed has overcome artistic integrity.
Back in the day, the studios and labels were comparatively amateurish and ineffective, so public tastes were strongly influenced by radio station jockeys, through student union gigs/concerts, and by music tabloid reviews of live acts. These have almost no effect today. The image makers and immense marketting machine hold the scene in a vice-like grip.
So it's not old age, only. It's also that musical horizons have been slammed down tight all around us, with only a few wonderful exceptions to the rule offering a temporary escape.
This will probably make it easy to have client side cheats run across your "Multiverse" too.
Not if the designers understand the two golden rules:
- Everything client-side belongs to the owner of the client machine.
- Everything that protects the integrity of the game resides on the game server.
In particular, all game-resource management and player capabilities control, and all cheat detection and prevention, must reside on the server end, and NEVER NEVER NEVER on the client.
Under that 2-part strategy, it doesn't matter what anyone does to their client, good luck to them. And people with disabilities will be grateful for that. By definition it cannot be cheating, because anything is allowable client-side, as all the essential controls are on the server.
The only reason why client-based cheats are often a problem is because game designers put sensitive data on the client to improve performance and do not provide adequate cheat detection on the server end of the link. Thus are born the seeds of cheating.
Our own game in beta-testing, Kothuria, is available on Windows only right now, but you can be sure that we'll be testing any new client tech with that game first.
You are heading towards your product becoming completely non-portable, in practice. This is because it will cost you money to port it later, which you won't spend.
If you are genuine about multi-platform availability, there is only one approach that works. Compile, build, and test across all the major platforms as part of your standard development cycle, automatically, so that non-portable design and coding is caught during daily development. *DO NOT LET* any code be run on one platform only.
There is no "do it later" approach that works, in practice. The bean counters make sure of that.
so how should writers be compesated for the books they write?
How about, by being the only ones allowed to publish their material for profit?
It's not the act of private copying or private downloading that is inherently unfair for authors --- after all, each copy taken makes them better known, which is what all upcoming authors want. It's the act of taking their material and then selling it for your own personal gain without having done the work that the authors did that is inherently unfair. This applies to all media.
The problem is REPUBLICATION FOR PROFIT, not copying.
Different balances for different tastes.
Very true. After "completing" two conventional grind-based MMOGs to max level over several years of pain, I now adore the Guild Wars approach. Its designers completely threw out the MMOG rulebook, and created an amazing breath of fresh air amid the tedium of traditional MMOGs.
The "emptiness" of zones that you speak of is the challange: it's you and your friends against the whole zone, without any of the annoyances of shared zones. It also means no dying to trains created by inept or uncaring players, no waiting for spawns, no camping, no kill stealing, etc etc etc. All of the fun, none of the pain. Just you and your chosen colleagues, which can of course be AI henchmen, against the whole world. It's excellent.
But as you say, tastes vary, and some people like the pain of old MMOGs, the drudgery of waiting, and being at the mercy of others.
There's not a shadow of doubt that 8-figure-and-rising development costs per game are utterly unsustainable. The question is, what can be done about it?
The market volume is there, the demand for games is unquenchable, the platforms are in very good shape and gettting better, so the only problem is actually MAKING the products without spending gazillions. And that problem boils down to one (and ONLY one) issue: manpower.
People will immediately object that game assets and development infrastructure cost a lot more than manpower, but my point here is that those things are only *symptoms* of the current problem and not central. You see, game assets only have astronomic price tags when you're licensing a blockbuster title from its blood-sucking owner (and we don't need any more of those), otherwise the cost of assets is simply that of the manpower and computer time needed to create them.
So, here's the most obvious and straightforward solution to the malaise in the gaming industry: knock down the cathedrals of the current games producers, and put game component and game asset development out to tender in the bazaar of the worldwide development community.
Manpower costs would then fall drastically owing to the huge supply of computing skills in the world, and even the machinery costs would plummet since much of it would be personally owned by the distributed developers. Furthermore, this addresses the other two contributory issues that I didn't mention above, lack of reuse in the industry and very little standing on the shoulders of giants. FOSS has a proven track record in that area.
Of course, this doesn't tackle the whole problem, but it certainly rips out its rotting heart. And freed from the shackles of megabuck production costs and the time-to-market issues that they create, I have no doubt that novelty in games will start to flourish again. There is no shortage of amazing ideas in the world.
Wasn't the web invented in the first place by scientists so they could more easily share information?
Indeed, and it can go a lot further too.
In addition to information sharing, the net could easily support moderated peer review by the very same experts who review papers submitted to the top journals. All that's needed is for a group of experts on a topic to get together and decide to do it. After all, the costs are miniscule, except for their time. And publication of a paper accepted by such a review body as an online PDF is a lot more useful than dead tree publication anyway.
Experts in a scientific field don't need the backing of a Society or of a respected scientific journal in order to perform peer review. They're acknowledged experts in their own right, and everyone working in a field inherently knows who they are.
I've never understood why tech companies locate to areas of extreme congestion and high prices like central London, when their personnel would gain so many benefits from just a small shift outwards from the centre by 10-15 miles or so.
It's an online business, for crying out loud. Why submit your people to the torture of daily commuting into a sardine can, and the costs that go with it?
This doesn't apply just to Google of course, but Google is an excellent example of the problem.
And no, it's not because that's where the fat pipes are, not anymore.
It's been coming our way for a while now, and this book is very much in tune with the times.
We've had our renaissance and our golden ages of reason and intellectualism and humanistic idealism that gave rise to pro-people icons like the Constitution of the United States.
Now instead we have the encroaching 1984 of Blair, the religious fundamentalism of Bush, and a corporate-driven media culture which farms the brainless masses like cattle and teaches them the new values of disconnected speech. Who needs Voltaire when your mind can find fulfillment in Snoop Dog?
The book of TFA is mainstream in this new world of post-intellectualism. Welcome to the new Dark Age.
I'm pleasently surprised at the number of games already available.
Actually, there is a very interesting point behind the fact that *NOT ALL* Xbox games are immediately runnable on the 360's emulator. There are two issues here.
- Firstly, if not all Xbox games run under the emulator, this clearly implies that the Xbox emulation is incomplete. If it were complete, then any Xbox title wouldn't even know that it's running under emulation, and all games would run by default. So, it's not complete, currently.
- Secondly, since the interview says that the emulator can be downloaded for burning to CD and loading into the 360 from media, this means that the emulator is pretty much fixed. Since the set of compatible games is most definitely not fixed, but growing all the time, this implies that the Xbox 360 must be connected online for it to validate that a particular game is compatible.
In other words, Microsoft seems to be identifying "compatibility" with "authorization by us" for a game to run on the 360 console. I guess it's what one would expect, given their desire for control, although it certainly isn't helpful to players who own minority-interest games.
The US is heading rapidly towards becoming a police state. It's as simple as that.
Other countries are no better --- for example the UK is a nanny state gone mad, and is rapidly turning into a police state too. New mandatory IDs, new CCTV everywhere, new 3-month detention without process, etc etc.
How we've allowed our politicians to do this to us I don't know. But something is going to have to change, or things will get very ugly.
Lawyers do have a duty, to the Court, to uphold the integrity of the legal process above all other interests.
... unless you're a "Jobsworth".
In the UK, that's called being a "Jobsworth" --- a person who does something because "It's more than my job's worth" not to. It equates to doing highly unethical and unfair things because "the system" says that they have to, orders unquestioned.
And that's the problem here too. Lawyers are oiling the wheels of something that's pretty close to being an extortion racket, and yet are happily claiming that no mud sticks to them.
I know that you are not directly condoning the MPAA/RIAA excesses, but somehow your words read like a defence of what your professional colleagues are doing anyway.
The train wouldn't run if the boilerman weren't stoking it.
It's high-time that someone high up in the judiciary pointed a finger at the MPAA/RIAA legal departments and said "What you're doing is legal but is not fair. Be fair. Be ethical." But elephants will fly before that happens, because there's just too much money flowing into people's pockets from the racket, and that includes lawyer's pockets.
It's pretty damn sad, and indefensible professionally
It's not just extremely hard to synchronize the various tasks - it's INCREDIBLY hard!
I know where you're coming from, and yes, it can be incredibly hard. However, this applies only when people use the WRONG methodology, ie. the one that they learned for single-task programming. Unfortunately, that's 99% of programmers, and therein lies the problem.
Let me give you a trivial little example to show that the difficulty is not inherent: any newbie programmer can create a long pipeline of Unix filters and run it with total success on a multi-CPU and hyperthreaded big-iron box with not a hint of race conditions, deadlocks, or data corruption. It's not because they're highly competent, but because the framework of Unix pipes hides all the necessary synchronization.
And it's just the same with multi-core games consoles. Of course, a simple pipe abstraction won't be enough there. The programming framework will require client-safe job queues, free process pools, task schedulers with variable policies, a routed and prioritized messaging system, and a whole host of internally-synchronized communication methods. And all of this infrastructure must hide the complexities of concurrency and multiprocessing behind opaque interfaces, so that people without a PhD in concurrency nor equivalent experience can still use them safely.
It's not actually hard at all given the right framework. But it's pretty close to impossible to build a reliably working product when concurrent programming is done in an ad hoc fashion.
It seems like a lot of the things dealing with the Xbox360 have been rushed.
That's no coincidence though, because MS knows full well that it's only the Xbox 360's 4-5 month launch lead over PS3 that might even up the odds a little. Remember that PS2 is so far ahead of Xbox1 in market share and in game count that Sony can pretty much ignore MS in this generation.
MS doesn't want that to continue in the next generation, obviously, so I think they're right to bring out the new machine ASAP regardless of its state. People will complain a little, but they'll still buy it, especially over Xmas.
... an article possibly designed to sink Open Office
Maybe, maybe not, who knows. But what I find odd is that a simple, easily-measureable property like speed is treated as a religious issue and/or examined for conflicts of interest at all. Why not just measure it in a series of comparative tests as scientifically as possible?
And then, if Open Office is found to be lacking in speed, fine, no problem! The result simply becomes very valuable input to OO's design and development team, and in all probability will get dealt with very seriously and rapidly and to the benefit of its users.
There really shouldn't be an issue of contention here, if we're truly techies.
When article content is zero, then 2 * 0 == 0, so the editors can't be accused of posting dupes ever. :P
or hell, even sodium with water. But the cost of refining these metals in the first place is very high.
There are many places in the world where intense sunlight is available pretty much every day, all year round, and which also possess a coastline. Many countries already run water or salt extraction plants in such locations. (I've seen one myself.)
In principle, such sites can provide an inexhaustable supply of sodium from salt-water, and a "free" source of energy from the sun to power the extraction. (And salt-free water as a byproduct is often highly valuable too.)
So, what you say needn't be true in the general case. What's missing though is the right combination of technologies to harness this, especially a sodium-based fuel technology. However, despite saying that, I think that all such fuel-based ideas miss the point.
If solar energy is free in the sense of supply cost, then forget the intermediate fuels and just store electricity directly. We "simply" need better batteries, or indeed flywheels or other energy storage mechanisms. That's the future, in my opinion, whereas transporting physical fuels is not.
I'm speechless. Don't they realize that this is an absolute gift for criminals?
The most obvious direct application of these hidden markings is to frame somebody else for your crimes (ransom notes, etc), or to keep the authorities off your scent through misdirection.
Organized crime must absolutely love this.
A lot of innocent people are going to find their homes raided, while the actual perpetrators sip their dry martinis on the Cote d'Azur. Another "brilliant" idea by the morons in power.
Your example is spot on. There are many places in the survey where their coverage of alternatives is threadbare, and simply doesn't cover existing gaming options.
... currently GW isn't even in your games list. :-)
For example, Guild Wars fans will find the wording about team vs solo play at odds with how their game works, because the solo player can create teams not only with other human players but also with up to 7 "henchmen", so you're "teamed but solo". And the henchmen AI is quite often superior to the natural intelligence shown by humans, so it is extremely common in GW to choose to team with henchies by preference over human players.
Also, the wording in the survey suggests that they have preconceived notions of good and bad with respect to gamers. For example, "escaping from the real world" is inherently an aspersion against gamers, as are the many questions about "trying to cut down", etc. None of their questions pose gaming as a passtime along with other leisure activities which don't get negative fingers pointed at them. It seems that the "researchers" actually have a hidden agenda here.
And finally, there is almost nothing in the survey about challange and tactics! I find this quite incredible, since "good gameplay" is generally regarded as being all about challange and tactics. They like to focus on negative issues, and avoid all the positive ones. Very poor indeed.
It's a pretty wierd survey, and in my opinion, it's slanted to play into the hands of sociologists with axes to grind. It's also crystal clear that it was not put together with much input from gamers, since it addresses almost none of the issues typically regarded as important in gaming.
Try again folks. And tell the sociologists in the team to put away their PC agendas, and hire some gamers. And find out about Guild Wars to understand the solo/team issue
I'm not averse to personal responsibility in computing.
But if politicians are going to foist this upon us, then the same must apply to them. For each and every failure of policy and implementation and leadership and foresight, they must pay the price of what their failure has cost the nation. They'd better have deep pockets.
Likewise for professionals in the police and judicial systems: for each and every failure to provide actual and verifiable justice, judges and magistrates and lawyers should pay and suffer personally. Especially the lawyers. (:-) And for each burglary and killing that they have not prevented or solved, the police must bear personal responsibility and be prosecuted accordingly.
Can this fly? Of course not. And nor can developer responsibility for correct software operation in a mathematically intractible world.