That depends on what the game does with the server. If it's just minor stuff, sure, you might be able to fake that. When on the other side you have substantial parts of the game logic running on the server you have a problem. In the most extreme cases you are dealing with stuff like OnLive where the client send input events and the server returns a video stream, you can't break that unless you plan on rewriting the whole game from scratch.
Also the big issue with all of this is always with the lesser known games. For something high profile like WoW, people actually wrote server emulators, for a random lesser known game people won't go through all the trouble. Those will just disappear or become non-functional once the server go offline.
Acer T230h for example has a touch screen or PHILIPS 247E3LPHSU/00 or Iiyama ProLite T2250MTS. It's not like it's the norm right now on all monitors, but it's not exactly hard or expensive to get a monitor with a build in touchscreen either, those things can be had for 130€. If those things become more trendy with Windows8, we might see them becoming the norm and be simply a standard part for all display in the not so distant future.
My point is that it's largely a legal issue, not a practical one. Working around DRM is often easy, while completely DRM-free stuff can give you a lot of trouble. The only difference is the legality.
While I agree that the Steam client is purely written, often unresponsive and sometimes unintuitive, it's actually extremely functional. Steam is the only client I know that doesn't need to install games, that can verify local disk content and fix it without redownloading the whole game, that downloads the latest version of a game without needing manual patches later, that supports well working backup and restore of games and that offers you multiple languages per game. Most other clients fail at most or all of this. Uplay and Origin might seem a little more polished on the outside, but their internals are all fucked up.
I don't know if I can really pinpoint why I don't consider Steam to be the kick to the dick that almost all other DRM is.
Easy, because Steam drastically improves your experience. PC gaming has always been a mess, requiring discs in the drive even so the game is already installed, hour long install and extraction routines, typing in long CD-keys, long hunts and installs for the latest patches and all that mess. With Steam it's click & play. It's essentially the apt-get of gaming. And even when Steam fails for some reason, the support forum is only a click away and often already has the workaround you need.
Of course Steam still has it's problems, the complete lack of any kind of game sharing, is probably the biggest one caused by the DRM. But compared to other services its still lightyears ahead. Most of the others still haven't even figured out how to do game downloads correctly, instead of actually downloading the game, they download an installer, once that is downloaded you can't play, you first have to go through a lengthy install procedure, once that is done, you still can't play, you have to download numerous patches in succession and install each of them seperatly by clicking through dozens of dialogs. Then an hour or two after you downloaded the game you might be able to play it and if not, well, they won't give you an easily accessible support forum.
It's about control. You give up control over your own games and your own computer and hand it to a third party.
That's however not much different then using apt-get on Ubuntu. If Ubuntu decides to remove some software from their repositories, you are still fucked. It might all be DRM-free and Open Source, but you still need a lot of knowledge and work to get it back into working order, which isn't really a whole lot different from DRM, which oftentimes is rather easy to get rid of as well.
Will Valves servers be around in 30 years? Perhaps? Is it guaranteed? Nope.
True, but it's not like that will be very different with all other modern games. Games these days, even when single player, are filled with online integration and frequently need patches after the release to work properly. None of that will work in 30 years or even 5 years. My disc copy of Bioshock for example is unusable because the patch servers are down, without the patch servers however the game can't be installed, the installation will abort and the game will uninstall itself. That's not even DRM, that's simply shitty installer design, but the effects are pretty much the same. Even worse is the situation for a game like Little Big Planet, without the level sharing community the game will run into serious issues. I have even seen indie games proclaiming to be DRM-free that won't work unless you log into their servers.
When it comes to game archival, regular good old DRM is really a minor issue, some cracker will disable it in a day anyway. The whole online integration is a far bigger problem, as you never get your fingers on the server code to begin with and without that you have nothing to crack or archive.
LGPL won't allow you to statically link either, unless you like to distribute your object files. And anyway, you do not ever need to statically link, you can just put the.so into your tarball, works just the same.
Are you sure it was the same entry in their catalog? Amazon is full of duplicate entries for the same product and many of them have different prices. That seems however more an error on their side then ill intend. Other then that, Amazon also frequently changes prices, for some products it can happen multiple times a day, so it's easy to see the same product with different price or even change the price while browsing their site. It might even go so far that viewing or placing the item in your shopping cart can change the price, but if that was just coincidence or actually is how their algorithm works is just speculation.
The same goes for movies and eventually it will be so cheap to produce a movie
While that will happen one day, it will take quite a while. Some good indie movies for example do currently exist, but they frequently piggyback ride on the success of the classic Hollywood industry. None of the Star Wars or Star Trek fan projects would exist when there wouldn't have been a Star Wars or Star Trek in the first place. It's much easier to make a movie when you can recycle costumes, sets and 3D models, then when you have to develop everything from scratch. And even with that recycling, those movies are still far away from matching the production quality of actual Hollywood movies or even the 50 year old original Star Trek series.
If things go all digital one day and people can just hop in front of a Kinect and get results that look as shiny as the latest Star Wars, things might change, but that won't happen overnight. Another thing worth to consider is the artistic talent involved, most indie movies don't fall flat for technology reasons, the space battles always look quite pretty, it's everything else that isn't good. If the stories are boring and the acting is flat, then no amount of CGI can save the movie. We can bitch about Hollywood all day long and they certainly screw up a lot, but that doesn't change the fact that they have tons of extremely talented people working there.
And finally, even if everything goes smooth and people can do their own movies, there will still be gatekeepers that control content distribution. Look at games and Steam. Yes, everybody can create their own indie games, but it's really hard to get noticed when you do. Being on the Steam front page is what brings in the money. The number of people that find your game via Google will be rather minuscule. The current industry might die, but that will simply mean that another will rise. Getting rid of the middle man is far from easy.
Tablets are not here to replace PCs, they are here to replace the book and books aren't exactly known for being tools for productive work, they are things to consume and that is exactly what tablets excel at as well. As for Netbooks, they were essentially the precursor to tablets, so it's not so much that the Netbook fad is over, but that it has evolved into devices that are much better suited for the intended use. Tablets won't go away anytime soon. The PC won't either, but it's not the device of choice when you want to consume text content.
Back when I was a kid, some 25 years ago I never had an "open-ended" box of bricks, it was always sets of some fire station, police stuff, space ships, pirates or whatever with detailed instructions and all that. No different then what you have today. Some sets came with instructions to build different things from the same set, but that's about it as far as open-ended is concerned. Of course all those sets ended up being disassembled after they got boring and turned into something else, ultimately ending up in an open-ended box of bricks, but all those bricks started out as sets. And while you could just buy plain boxes of bricks back then, just as you can now, those didn't seem to be very widespread, I don't think I ever seen one in a regular store.
Just being trivial to port does not mean that anybody will actually bother to do the port. Also the porting is in the hands of the publisher who owns the games, not Valve, thus when the publisher doesn't see interest, it won't happen. Also see GoG a lot of their catalog would run fine in Dosbox or Wine, yet they haven't bothered to offer Linux support, it being not very hard and somebody actually doing it are two very different things.
- The largest number of deaths by gun by far are suicides - ban makes no difference - Second larges are guns used illegally by felons - ban makes no difference
Easy access to guns makes a a hell of a lot of difference in both of those.
The number of cases of legally held guns being used in committing a murder is relatively small.
Almost every illegally owned gun used to be once a legal one. If you cut down the legal supply, the illegal will dry out as well, it just will take a while.
confusing UI that should be re-engineered from scratch.
They have done exactly that while going from 2.4 to 2.5 (or something, don't remember the exact version numbers). The GUI of current Blender is completely new and reorganized and has very little resemblance with what was there before.
I have seen the userlevel ZFS crash multiple times, it's also slow as hell. It's still worth it if you are short on storage and want to reduce the size of your backup, but I wouldn't exactly call it ready for production.
I don't think the law is at fault in this case. The law forbids it to sell age 18 games to minors, but it does not force a time limit on sales, so as long as you verified your age in some manner, that should be enough. I think Origin actually allows you to verify your age via your person id and thus work around the time limit.
People buy consoles buy for the convenience that a PC can't provide. If a Steam Box could offer the same convenience of a console for PC gaming then quite a few people might think about switching over. So it's not just about the users Steam currently has, but about all those that they could attract with a Steam Box.
I just have to ask why Nintendo does anything like this.
Nintendo isn't the only one. Ubisoft's UPlay and EA's Origin don't allow you to buy age 18 content outside of 23:00-6:00 either, even age 16 is locked between 22:00-6:00.
It lacks polish and doesn't produce up to date stable versions, which means you have to use testing. Last time I gave Debian a try was when Ubuntu pulled of that Unity thing. Well, didn't take long for me to turn around and go back to (X)Ubuntu. Not only did Debian pull of the same stunt of removing Gnome2 and replacing it with Gnome3, it also lacked Wine and Blender in it's testing repositories. They also still ask far to many questions when installing software. Now you might say it's not that difficult to install Wine and Blender manually and the questions on install can be switched of via some dpkg setting, but it exactly this kind of little things make Debian so frustrating to use and make Ubuntu so friendly. With Ubuntu I never run such glitches and they do chose the right settings by default, with Debian I run into those problems time, stuff missing, stuff broken, stuff with bad defaults and whatever, just little things, but lots and lots of them, far to many when you just want to use your computer and not play distri patch guy. Those kinds of little problems were the reason why I moved from Debian to Ubuntu some six years ago and they still exist far to many of them.
Of course Ubuntu is by no means perfect, but at least they give a solid try at actually polishing their distribution so that it's actually end user ready, something Debian has never managed to do. Debian feels like it's in an ethernal beta (which is actually kind of is, as stable is always to old and testing always to broken).
Quality of the distribution itself aside, Ubuntu also has the better community tools, the PPA autobuilder, forums and such all feel a lot better managed then what you find on the Debian side.
Seriously. If threading seems that hard, you need to go do some studying.
I very much disagree. Spawning a few worker threads is easy, however when you want to write an application that essentially puts everything asynchronously into the background (not just for speed, but also interactive responsiveness) then things get really complicated really fast, doubly so when programming in a language with no build in support for parallel programming.
The core problem with parallel programming is that it bloats your code a lot, things that were trivial in sequential code turn into code that is five times the size and a nightmare of callback chaining.
What everybody seems to be ignoring is the target demographic for the wii U which is NOT the hardcore shooter crowd.
What exactly is their target audience? It's certainly not the casual crowd that they attracted with the Wii either, as Nintendo has shown basically nothing new in terms of motion controls, they don't even include a Wiimote in the Wii U package. So if it's neither the hardcore or the casual, who is it? All the hardcore Nintendo fans that haven't jumped ship yet?
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That depends on what the game does with the server. If it's just minor stuff, sure, you might be able to fake that. When on the other side you have substantial parts of the game logic running on the server you have a problem. In the most extreme cases you are dealing with stuff like OnLive where the client send input events and the server returns a video stream, you can't break that unless you plan on rewriting the whole game from scratch.
Also the big issue with all of this is always with the lesser known games. For something high profile like WoW, people actually wrote server emulators, for a random lesser known game people won't go through all the trouble. Those will just disappear or become non-functional once the server go offline.
Acer T230h for example has a touch screen or PHILIPS 247E3LPHSU/00 or Iiyama ProLite T2250MTS. It's not like it's the norm right now on all monitors, but it's not exactly hard or expensive to get a monitor with a build in touchscreen either, those things can be had for 130€. If those things become more trendy with Windows8, we might see them becoming the norm and be simply a standard part for all display in the not so distant future.
If a game is even remotely popular, somebody will crack it and put up a torrent.
My point is that it's largely a legal issue, not a practical one. Working around DRM is often easy, while completely DRM-free stuff can give you a lot of trouble. The only difference is the legality.
While I agree that the Steam client is purely written, often unresponsive and sometimes unintuitive, it's actually extremely functional. Steam is the only client I know that doesn't need to install games, that can verify local disk content and fix it without redownloading the whole game, that downloads the latest version of a game without needing manual patches later, that supports well working backup and restore of games and that offers you multiple languages per game. Most other clients fail at most or all of this. Uplay and Origin might seem a little more polished on the outside, but their internals are all fucked up.
I don't know if I can really pinpoint why I don't consider Steam to be the kick to the dick that almost all other DRM is.
Easy, because Steam drastically improves your experience. PC gaming has always been a mess, requiring discs in the drive even so the game is already installed, hour long install and extraction routines, typing in long CD-keys, long hunts and installs for the latest patches and all that mess. With Steam it's click & play. It's essentially the apt-get of gaming. And even when Steam fails for some reason, the support forum is only a click away and often already has the workaround you need.
Of course Steam still has it's problems, the complete lack of any kind of game sharing, is probably the biggest one caused by the DRM. But compared to other services its still lightyears ahead. Most of the others still haven't even figured out how to do game downloads correctly, instead of actually downloading the game, they download an installer, once that is downloaded you can't play, you first have to go through a lengthy install procedure, once that is done, you still can't play, you have to download numerous patches in succession and install each of them seperatly by clicking through dozens of dialogs. Then an hour or two after you downloaded the game you might be able to play it and if not, well, they won't give you an easily accessible support forum.
It's about control. You give up control over your own games and your own computer and hand it to a third party.
That's however not much different then using apt-get on Ubuntu. If Ubuntu decides to remove some software from their repositories, you are still fucked. It might all be DRM-free and Open Source, but you still need a lot of knowledge and work to get it back into working order, which isn't really a whole lot different from DRM, which oftentimes is rather easy to get rid of as well.
Will Valves servers be around in 30 years? Perhaps? Is it guaranteed? Nope.
True, but it's not like that will be very different with all other modern games. Games these days, even when single player, are filled with online integration and frequently need patches after the release to work properly. None of that will work in 30 years or even 5 years. My disc copy of Bioshock for example is unusable because the patch servers are down, without the patch servers however the game can't be installed, the installation will abort and the game will uninstall itself. That's not even DRM, that's simply shitty installer design, but the effects are pretty much the same. Even worse is the situation for a game like Little Big Planet, without the level sharing community the game will run into serious issues. I have even seen indie games proclaiming to be DRM-free that won't work unless you log into their servers.
When it comes to game archival, regular good old DRM is really a minor issue, some cracker will disable it in a day anyway. The whole online integration is a far bigger problem, as you never get your fingers on the server code to begin with and without that you have nothing to crack or archive.
LGPL won't allow you to statically link either, unless you like to distribute your object files. And anyway, you do not ever need to statically link, you can just put the .so into your tarball, works just the same.
I saw two prices on Amazon for the same thing
Are you sure it was the same entry in their catalog? Amazon is full of duplicate entries for the same product and many of them have different prices. That seems however more an error on their side then ill intend. Other then that, Amazon also frequently changes prices, for some products it can happen multiple times a day, so it's easy to see the same product with different price or even change the price while browsing their site. It might even go so far that viewing or placing the item in your shopping cart can change the price, but if that was just coincidence or actually is how their algorithm works is just speculation.
The same goes for movies and eventually it will be so cheap to produce a movie
While that will happen one day, it will take quite a while. Some good indie movies for example do currently exist, but they frequently piggyback ride on the success of the classic Hollywood industry. None of the Star Wars or Star Trek fan projects would exist when there wouldn't have been a Star Wars or Star Trek in the first place. It's much easier to make a movie when you can recycle costumes, sets and 3D models, then when you have to develop everything from scratch. And even with that recycling, those movies are still far away from matching the production quality of actual Hollywood movies or even the 50 year old original Star Trek series.
If things go all digital one day and people can just hop in front of a Kinect and get results that look as shiny as the latest Star Wars, things might change, but that won't happen overnight. Another thing worth to consider is the artistic talent involved, most indie movies don't fall flat for technology reasons, the space battles always look quite pretty, it's everything else that isn't good. If the stories are boring and the acting is flat, then no amount of CGI can save the movie. We can bitch about Hollywood all day long and they certainly screw up a lot, but that doesn't change the fact that they have tons of extremely talented people working there.
And finally, even if everything goes smooth and people can do their own movies, there will still be gatekeepers that control content distribution. Look at games and Steam. Yes, everybody can create their own indie games, but it's really hard to get noticed when you do. Being on the Steam front page is what brings in the money. The number of people that find your game via Google will be rather minuscule. The current industry might die, but that will simply mean that another will rise. Getting rid of the middle man is far from easy.
Tablets are not here to replace PCs, they are here to replace the book and books aren't exactly known for being tools for productive work, they are things to consume and that is exactly what tablets excel at as well. As for Netbooks, they were essentially the precursor to tablets, so it's not so much that the Netbook fad is over, but that it has evolved into devices that are much better suited for the intended use. Tablets won't go away anytime soon. The PC won't either, but it's not the device of choice when you want to consume text content.
Back when I was a kid, some 25 years ago I never had an "open-ended" box of bricks, it was always sets of some fire station, police stuff, space ships, pirates or whatever with detailed instructions and all that. No different then what you have today. Some sets came with instructions to build different things from the same set, but that's about it as far as open-ended is concerned. Of course all those sets ended up being disassembled after they got boring and turned into something else, ultimately ending up in an open-ended box of bricks, but all those bricks started out as sets. And while you could just buy plain boxes of bricks back then, just as you can now, those didn't seem to be very widespread, I don't think I ever seen one in a regular store.
Just being trivial to port does not mean that anybody will actually bother to do the port. Also the porting is in the hands of the publisher who owns the games, not Valve, thus when the publisher doesn't see interest, it won't happen. Also see GoG a lot of their catalog would run fine in Dosbox or Wine, yet they haven't bothered to offer Linux support, it being not very hard and somebody actually doing it are two very different things.
- The largest number of deaths by gun by far are suicides - ban makes no difference
- Second larges are guns used illegally by felons - ban makes no difference
Easy access to guns makes a a hell of a lot of difference in both of those.
The number of cases of legally held guns being used in committing a murder is relatively small.
Almost every illegally owned gun used to be once a legal one. If you cut down the legal supply, the illegal will dry out as well, it just will take a while.
confusing UI that should be re-engineered from scratch.
They have done exactly that while going from 2.4 to 2.5 (or something, don't remember the exact version numbers). The GUI of current Blender is completely new and reorganized and has very little resemblance with what was there before.
I have seen the userlevel ZFS crash multiple times, it's also slow as hell. It's still worth it if you are short on storage and want to reduce the size of your backup, but I wouldn't exactly call it ready for production.
I don't think the law is at fault in this case. The law forbids it to sell age 18 games to minors, but it does not force a time limit on sales, so as long as you verified your age in some manner, that should be enough. I think Origin actually allows you to verify your age via your person id and thus work around the time limit.
People buy consoles buy for the convenience that a PC can't provide. If a Steam Box could offer the same convenience of a console for PC gaming then quite a few people might think about switching over. So it's not just about the users Steam currently has, but about all those that they could attract with a Steam Box.
...or we need to grow the economy.
The problem is that once you have flexible enough robots, all the new jobs created by a growing economy will be done by robots.
I just have to ask why Nintendo does anything like this.
Nintendo isn't the only one. Ubisoft's UPlay and EA's Origin don't allow you to buy age 18 content outside of 23:00-6:00 either, even age 16 is locked between 22:00-6:00.
What's so difficult about using Debian directly?
It lacks polish and doesn't produce up to date stable versions, which means you have to use testing. Last time I gave Debian a try was when Ubuntu pulled of that Unity thing. Well, didn't take long for me to turn around and go back to (X)Ubuntu. Not only did Debian pull of the same stunt of removing Gnome2 and replacing it with Gnome3, it also lacked Wine and Blender in it's testing repositories. They also still ask far to many questions when installing software. Now you might say it's not that difficult to install Wine and Blender manually and the questions on install can be switched of via some dpkg setting, but it exactly this kind of little things make Debian so frustrating to use and make Ubuntu so friendly. With Ubuntu I never run such glitches and they do chose the right settings by default, with Debian I run into those problems time, stuff missing, stuff broken, stuff with bad defaults and whatever, just little things, but lots and lots of them, far to many when you just want to use your computer and not play distri patch guy. Those kinds of little problems were the reason why I moved from Debian to Ubuntu some six years ago and they still exist far to many of them.
Of course Ubuntu is by no means perfect, but at least they give a solid try at actually polishing their distribution so that it's actually end user ready, something Debian has never managed to do. Debian feels like it's in an ethernal beta (which is actually kind of is, as stable is always to old and testing always to broken).
Quality of the distribution itself aside, Ubuntu also has the better community tools, the PPA autobuilder, forums and such all feel a lot better managed then what you find on the Debian side.
Seriously. If threading seems that hard, you need to go do some studying.
I very much disagree. Spawning a few worker threads is easy, however when you want to write an application that essentially puts everything asynchronously into the background (not just for speed, but also interactive responsiveness) then things get really complicated really fast, doubly so when programming in a language with no build in support for parallel programming.
The core problem with parallel programming is that it bloats your code a lot, things that were trivial in sequential code turn into code that is five times the size and a nightmare of callback chaining.
I always thought, playing was about fun and not horsepower.
Have you upgraded your pong machine yet? 'cause horsepower can make quite a bit of difference in the kind of fun games you can produce.
What everybody seems to be ignoring is the target demographic for the wii U which is NOT the hardcore shooter crowd.
What exactly is their target audience? It's certainly not the casual crowd that they attracted with the Wii either, as Nintendo has shown basically nothing new in terms of motion controls, they don't even include a Wiimote in the Wii U package. So if it's neither the hardcore or the casual, who is it? All the hardcore Nintendo fans that haven't jumped ship yet?