Today, when an airplane crashes, the human has failed. Pretty much always.
Blaming a failure on human cause is by far the easiest way to avoid having to fix anything. It also happens to be wrong in by far most cases, as when you look a little deeper you will almost always find issues such as lack of proper training, lack of sleep, horrible UI design, lack of warning signals, lack of communication and plenty of other issues. None of which are in the control of the human that is flying the plane.
Humans simply make mistakes and any robust systems has to be designed in such a way to handle those small mistakes, if it can't, it is the system that is at fault, not the human.
the servers are maintained by the publishers and they can pull the plug any time, leaving games without the online component.
That can happen on XboxLive too. Sega pulled the plug on ChromeHounds and EA is regularly pulling the plug on their sport games and of course the whole Xbox1 live support disappeared.
Even with the PC things are starting to get more troublesome with more and more developers moving to solutions that require their servers to be involved instead of user hosted stuff.
I hate to be the one to defend Microsoft here. $60 may seem like a big number,
Because it is. $50 or $60 over the lifetime of a console means an additional $300 or more you have to pay, it is basically doubling the price of the console and just because that cost is spread out over a few years doesn't make it go away.
The real joke of course is that people pay that money in expectation of good service, but yet you still see Sega pulling the plug on Chromehounds or EA pulling it on all their not-current sport games or heck even Microsoft itself pulling it on the whole Xbox1 network.
The PSP sold 60million units, for reference, that is more units then either Xbox360(~42mil), PS3(~37mil) or iPhone (~50mil). It of course is still just second place behind the NintendoDS(~133mil) and its game offering can be rather lacking, but in terms of raw sales I would call it quite a huge success.
What they really need is good games that people want to play.
Exactly. The problem with the PSP is that there is almost nothing interesting. There are a ton of solid ports/sequels of PS2 titles, but quality alone doesn't matter when it is just another reincarnation of Tekken, WipeOut, RidgeRager and whatever. I just don't care about playing a downscaled version of games I already played.
The amount of proper new games on the PSP is vanishingly small and that is rather depressing given that the hardware should be perfectly fine for games like Braid, Limbo, Shadow Complex or whatever interesting stuff makes it to XBL/PSN. It is those types of games the PSP could need more of, good solid 2D/2.5D stuff that is easy enough to play on the get go, but complex enough to feel like a proper game and not some casual mini game.
I like the PSP hardware, but without games to play, that is worth nothing and in terms of dust collecting the PSP beats even the Wii by a mile.
A slide projector makes a much better picture then your 1975 TV and even today it probably still makes a better picture then your HD-TV or if not better (dirt on the slide) it at least makes a much bigger picture.
If they would have released the thing, it would have probably meant recording things analog with the VCR and those things can't exactly match the quality of film.
Digital only really makes sense when you have the computers to process the images and they get at least near classic film in terms of quality, in 1975 that was still a long long way off.
How would you feel about eating at a restaurant that has a big policy statement on the wall, indicating the tip is included in the bill, then getting shouted at by the waitress because you didn't leave her a tip, or not big enough of a tip?
Except that is not the case with Open StreetMap, instead they have a nice big "Make a Donation" button right on their front page.
And an additional throw in: Does anybody know of gigapixel images that capture mundane stuff? Cars, people, etc. instead of those large scale panoramas (recreation of the Bladerunner picture would be perfect of course)? The closed gigapixel images I could find that are not city panoramas are www.gigamacro.com/, i.e. extreme closeups of money, insects and other stuff.
Hmm, with that resolution we could do the science fiction standard nonsense:
The fascinating part of that scene is that it actually is extremely close to reality. We already have tons of gigapixel images floating around on the net and in terms of resolution they seem to be quite up on par with the Bladerunner image (i.e. 10 gigapixel or so). The Bladerunner image gets a bit further in that it is not only 2D, but actually a bit 3D, but even that is possible with lightfield photography. Now today those gigapixel images are produced by cameras mounted on robots, but when you look at Sweep Panorama it is not hard to imagine that in a few years down the road we will be shooting those images with regular consumer gear. The final issue one might complain about is that he scans what looks like an actual analog photo for all that, but it is not hard to imagine that the picture itself might not contain all that data, but instead contain it on an embedded chip (see MicroSD) or the printed picture could just act as key to the full-res picture stored on the cloud. Or of course, maybe print resolution just got better, after all a 10 gigabyte image should fit nicely on a BluRay and thats about the same size as a photo.
The proper solution is to make programmers aware of leap seconds.
That hasn't worked all that great in the last 40 years, what makes you think it would work better in the future?
If the solution creates more problems then the original problems itself, it is probably better to just drop the solution, then trying to play around further with what is not working.
After that, the DRM requirements might change, but most stuff will continue to work.
Just as XboxLive on the Xbox1... oh, wait... Getting rid of old junk that doesn't make them money anymore is among the first things you can expect to see happen when a company get bought.
Actually consoles are close to 0% DRM at least as far as disc based games are concerned. As what consoles do is not DRM, but copy-protection. Nothing stops you from reselling a console game, nothing stops you from lending it to a friend and your console game will continue to work just fine if your Internet connection stops working.
With PSN/XBL/WiiWare games it is of course a bit more tricky, as DRM or at least DRM-like things come into play. A WiiWare game still won't phone home, but it will only work on your Wii, not your friends Wii.
When people mean "death of PC" they generally don't mean "no new games ever", but "death of genres they cared about". And WOW in this context isn't a sign of life, but a sign of death. If a single game can dominate the market so much it just shows that there is not all that much interesting happening elsewhere. And as somebody who doesn't care about either MMORPGs nor this eSports stuff, yeah, PC gaming doesn't look to be in the best conditions. To many PC games are just console ports, instead of games actually being targeted on the PC.
Today I can basically get my gaming fix with just a console, 10 or 15 years ago that was basically impossible, as there was to much interesting PC stuff floating around.
Not really, it was mostly just decoration around the puzzles, that neither made all that much sense nor had any real meaning for the game.
The one thing in Braid however that might be worth some analysis is the end sequence. It is not exactly deep story telling either, but the twist it pulls on the player is quite amazing and unique.
More importantly Google gave it not even three month in public, how exactly did they expect it to take on in that time frame? Also the software was slow and unfinished, with rather important features still missing (no public wave).
Wasn't there talk about integrating Wave into your Blog and stuff like that? Did any of that ever happen?
And for calculations, what makes powers of two worse than powers of ten?
Our whole number system is based in power of ten, not power of two, thus calculating in power of ten is a lot easier and feels more natural. Most importantly however going from MB to GB in power of ten is a magnitude change, you move a comma and you are done, in power of two it is a unit conversion. Thus simple questions like: Will this 700MB file fit on my drive with 0.68GB free? Become rather problematic, even more so when you cross multiple units at once (i.e. going from MB to TB).
And for drive sizes, have you ever looked at filesystem internals?
The only advantage power of two notation has there is that it allows you to have a shorthand notation. It is easier and more exact to write 2GiB then ~2.147GB. But as soon as you want to do actual math with arbitrary numbers you are back at square one and the power of two doesn't help you at all.
Then you lose in large part the deliberate design to keep people hooked for hundreds or thousands of hours. You also lose the fact of having precise data on users behavior (my TV doesn't talk back to the creator of a TV show, a MMORPG does). MMORPGs are designed to be time sinks and for some people that turns into addiction.
If I'm an adult, what I do with MY time should be my own responsibility. That is my argument.
So you are saying that it is totally ok for a company to abuse the addiction of people, because its all the peoples fault anyway? Companies have no responsibilities?
To repeat myself: Just because you are an adult doesn't make you immune to mental issues such as addiction.
For me responsibility works both ways. If companies are making billions with MMORPGs, it is their responsibility to at least keep an eye on potential addiction issues.
How about the fact that it's not their responsibility?
They are the ones offering the servers, they are the ones making money with it and very likely they are designing their games specifically so that people will waste more time in them. I'd say they have at least a bit of responsibility.
What If it's the middle of summer, I'm on vacation (or I'm not an adult and don't have a job yet), and I want to play Lineage for 16 hours a day? Shouldn't that be my own personal choice?
Is it so hard to understand that 11 hours a day for five years is something different then spending a week with a game? A little common sense would hurt...
Do we really want a world where we can't choose how long to enjoy our own hobbies?
You obviously didn't bother to even read my posts.
If this lawsuit succeeds all mmorpgs, and hell, all video games can have their creators sued.
So what? If they break the law, they should. Thing is, just because you like video games doesn't mean that their creators might be involved in potential negligent behavior.
You didn't bring a single argument on what would be so awful about having MMORPG producers monitor their users usage a bit, they are doing it already anyway and it wouldn't cost them much to actually do something useful with that data.
No, 1024GB. It's only drive makers and a committee that try to redefine that.
The 1024 scale is completly stupid. The only area where it makes a little bit of sense is RAM, everything else, HD storage, bandwidth, etc. it is completly meaningless and useless, as size doesn't increase by power of two in those areas.
Here is a thing: Just because you have grown up with something doesn't make it right or a good solution. All the 1024 scale does is cause lots of unneeded confusion, because it makes calculating between TB, GB, MB, KB extremely hard, instead of completly trivial as it would be with the SI scale.
Being an adult doesn't stop you from running into issues with addiction.
You might as well blame the ISP because they also knew he was using the internet for long periods of time.
It is not uncommon to have the Internet always on in the background without actually using it.
Or why not just blame the PC manufacturer, for not having an automatic shutdown on the PC after it's been on for 3 hours.
I never argued for a hard time limit.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE THESE DAYS ?
Well, yeah, I could ask the same thing. Pretending that addiction problems aren't real, that ones your are an adult all mental problems are your own fault and all that, reminds me of Scientology's war on psychiatry. How far have we fallen?
It's funny but I've been smoking and drinking since I was 14, so that's about 28 years now... strangely enough I've not received ANY calls from Marlboro or San Miguel Corporation about MY "addiction".
There have been quite a few multi billion dollar lawsuits against cigarettes. So while they still can sell their stuff, it is not that they didn't run into issues with the law.
When you actually want to fix a problem instead of just applying a non working solutions, you need to look for cause, not just for somebody to blame.
"Someone else made me do it" is just as wrong as the free will talk that puts all the blame on the individual, because it is never that simple with complex cases. Peoples behavior depends on there environment just as it depends on their own genetics and their upbringing.
Anyway, back to the lawsuit. I don't even see the cause for Craig's behavior as important. The important part is if NCsoft knowingly let somebody play for 11 hours a day over five years without ever getting into direct contact with him to talk about that issue. If they didn't, I'd call that negligence.
What's to stop someone from dividing their time between two MMOs, which is probably what the heavily addicted people would do if they can't find a single game to play?
Nothing. If people are deliberately avoiding the help they get, you can't force them. That however is absolutely no argument for not trying to offering them help in the first place.
I think I answered that already with "You don't "chose" addiction."
Anyway, the point never was that playing should be outlawed, the point was that companies should take care of their customers. If the customer would be totally fine with playing for so long, he wouldn't go out and sue (assuming of course his case is legit and not fraudulent).
Slashdot Mirror
Today, when an airplane crashes, the human has failed. Pretty much always.
Blaming a failure on human cause is by far the easiest way to avoid having to fix anything. It also happens to be wrong in by far most cases, as when you look a little deeper you will almost always find issues such as lack of proper training, lack of sleep, horrible UI design, lack of warning signals, lack of communication and plenty of other issues. None of which are in the control of the human that is flying the plane.
Humans simply make mistakes and any robust systems has to be designed in such a way to handle those small mistakes, if it can't, it is the system that is at fault, not the human.
the servers are maintained by the publishers and they can pull the plug any time, leaving games without the online component.
That can happen on XboxLive too. Sega pulled the plug on ChromeHounds and EA is regularly pulling the plug on their sport games and of course the whole Xbox1 live support disappeared.
Even with the PC things are starting to get more troublesome with more and more developers moving to solutions that require their servers to be involved instead of user hosted stuff.
I hate to be the one to defend Microsoft here. $60 may seem like a big number,
Because it is. $50 or $60 over the lifetime of a console means an additional $300 or more you have to pay, it is basically doubling the price of the console and just because that cost is spread out over a few years doesn't make it go away.
The real joke of course is that people pay that money in expectation of good service, but yet you still see Sega pulling the plug on Chromehounds or EA pulling it on all their not-current sport games or heck even Microsoft itself pulling it on the whole Xbox1 network.
The PSP sold 60million units, for reference, that is more units then either Xbox360(~42mil), PS3(~37mil) or iPhone (~50mil). It of course is still just second place behind the NintendoDS(~133mil) and its game offering can be rather lacking, but in terms of raw sales I would call it quite a huge success.
What they really need is good games that people want to play.
Exactly. The problem with the PSP is that there is almost nothing interesting. There are a ton of solid ports/sequels of PS2 titles, but quality alone doesn't matter when it is just another reincarnation of Tekken, WipeOut, RidgeRager and whatever. I just don't care about playing a downscaled version of games I already played.
The amount of proper new games on the PSP is vanishingly small and that is rather depressing given that the hardware should be perfectly fine for games like Braid, Limbo, Shadow Complex or whatever interesting stuff makes it to XBL/PSN. It is those types of games the PSP could need more of, good solid 2D/2.5D stuff that is easy enough to play on the get go, but complex enough to feel like a proper game and not some casual mini game.
I like the PSP hardware, but without games to play, that is worth nothing and in terms of dust collecting the PSP beats even the Wii by a mile.
A slide projector makes a much better picture then your 1975 TV and even today it probably still makes a better picture then your HD-TV or if not better (dirt on the slide) it at least makes a much bigger picture.
If they would have released the thing, it would have probably meant recording things analog with the VCR and those things can't exactly match the quality of film.
Digital only really makes sense when you have the computers to process the images and they get at least near classic film in terms of quality, in 1975 that was still a long long way off.
How would you feel about eating at a restaurant that has a big policy statement on the wall, indicating the tip is included in the bill, then getting shouted at by the waitress because you didn't leave her a tip, or not big enough of a tip?
Except that is not the case with Open StreetMap, instead they have a nice big "Make a Donation" button right on their front page.
The thousands and more games for IPhone and soon for Android.
How many of those actually make real money? The top ten probably do, but what about the rest?
And an additional throw in: Does anybody know of gigapixel images that capture mundane stuff? Cars, people, etc. instead of those large scale panoramas (recreation of the Bladerunner picture would be perfect of course)? The closed gigapixel images I could find that are not city panoramas are www.gigamacro.com/, i.e. extreme closeups of money, insects and other stuff.
Hmm, with that resolution we could do the science fiction standard nonsense:
The fascinating part of that scene is that it actually is extremely close to reality. We already have tons of gigapixel images floating around on the net and in terms of resolution they seem to be quite up on par with the Bladerunner image (i.e. 10 gigapixel or so). The Bladerunner image gets a bit further in that it is not only 2D, but actually a bit 3D, but even that is possible with lightfield photography. Now today those gigapixel images are produced by cameras mounted on robots, but when you look at Sweep Panorama it is not hard to imagine that in a few years down the road we will be shooting those images with regular consumer gear. The final issue one might complain about is that he scans what looks like an actual analog photo for all that, but it is not hard to imagine that the picture itself might not contain all that data, but instead contain it on an embedded chip (see MicroSD) or the printed picture could just act as key to the full-res picture stored on the cloud. Or of course, maybe print resolution just got better, after all a 10 gigabyte image should fit nicely on a BluRay and thats about the same size as a photo.
The proper solution is to make programmers aware of leap seconds.
That hasn't worked all that great in the last 40 years, what makes you think it would work better in the future?
If the solution creates more problems then the original problems itself, it is probably better to just drop the solution, then trying to play around further with what is not working.
After that, the DRM requirements might change, but most stuff will continue to work.
Just as XboxLive on the Xbox1... oh, wait... Getting rid of old junk that doesn't make them money anymore is among the first things you can expect to see happen when a company get bought.
Consoles are 100% drm by design.
Actually consoles are close to 0% DRM at least as far as disc based games are concerned. As what consoles do is not DRM, but copy-protection. Nothing stops you from reselling a console game, nothing stops you from lending it to a friend and your console game will continue to work just fine if your Internet connection stops working.
With PSN/XBL/WiiWare games it is of course a bit more tricky, as DRM or at least DRM-like things come into play. A WiiWare game still won't phone home, but it will only work on your Wii, not your friends Wii.
When people mean "death of PC" they generally don't mean "no new games ever", but "death of genres they cared about". And WOW in this context isn't a sign of life, but a sign of death. If a single game can dominate the market so much it just shows that there is not all that much interesting happening elsewhere. And as somebody who doesn't care about either MMORPGs nor this eSports stuff, yeah, PC gaming doesn't look to be in the best conditions. To many PC games are just console ports, instead of games actually being targeted on the PC.
Today I can basically get my gaming fix with just a console, 10 or 15 years ago that was basically impossible, as there was to much interesting PC stuff floating around.
Not really, it was mostly just decoration around the puzzles, that neither made all that much sense nor had any real meaning for the game.
The one thing in Braid however that might be worth some analysis is the end sequence. It is not exactly deep story telling either, but the twist it pulls on the player is quite amazing and unique.
More importantly Google gave it not even three month in public, how exactly did they expect it to take on in that time frame? Also the software was slow and unfinished, with rather important features still missing (no public wave).
Wasn't there talk about integrating Wave into your Blog and stuff like that? Did any of that ever happen?
And for calculations, what makes powers of two worse than powers of ten?
Our whole number system is based in power of ten, not power of two, thus calculating in power of ten is a lot easier and feels more natural. Most importantly however going from MB to GB in power of ten is a magnitude change, you move a comma and you are done, in power of two it is a unit conversion. Thus simple questions like: Will this 700MB file fit on my drive with 0.68GB free? Become rather problematic, even more so when you cross multiple units at once (i.e. going from MB to TB).
And for drive sizes, have you ever looked at filesystem internals?
The only advantage power of two notation has there is that it allows you to have a shorthand notation. It is easier and more exact to write 2GiB then ~2.147GB. But as soon as you want to do actual math with arbitrary numbers you are back at square one and the power of two doesn't help you at all.
If you replace mmorpgs with anything else,
Then you lose in large part the deliberate design to keep people hooked for hundreds or thousands of hours. You also lose the fact of having precise data on users behavior (my TV doesn't talk back to the creator of a TV show, a MMORPG does). MMORPGs are designed to be time sinks and for some people that turns into addiction.
If I'm an adult, what I do with MY time should be my own responsibility. That is my argument.
So you are saying that it is totally ok for a company to abuse the addiction of people, because its all the peoples fault anyway? Companies have no responsibilities?
To repeat myself: Just because you are an adult doesn't make you immune to mental issues such as addiction.
For me responsibility works both ways. If companies are making billions with MMORPGs, it is their responsibility to at least keep an eye on potential addiction issues.
How about the fact that it's not their responsibility?
They are the ones offering the servers, they are the ones making money with it and very likely they are designing their games specifically so that people will waste more time in them. I'd say they have at least a bit of responsibility.
What If it's the middle of summer, I'm on vacation (or I'm not an adult and don't have a job yet), and I want to play Lineage for 16 hours a day? Shouldn't that be my own personal choice?
Is it so hard to understand that 11 hours a day for five years is something different then spending a week with a game? A little common sense would hurt...
Do we really want a world where we can't choose how long to enjoy our own hobbies?
You obviously didn't bother to even read my posts.
If this lawsuit succeeds all mmorpgs, and hell, all video games can have their creators sued.
So what? If they break the law, they should. Thing is, just because you like video games doesn't mean that their creators might be involved in potential negligent behavior.
You didn't bring a single argument on what would be so awful about having MMORPG producers monitor their users usage a bit, they are doing it already anyway and it wouldn't cost them much to actually do something useful with that data.
No, 1024GB. It's only drive makers and a committee that try to redefine that.
The 1024 scale is completly stupid. The only area where it makes a little bit of sense is RAM, everything else, HD storage, bandwidth, etc. it is completly meaningless and useless, as size doesn't increase by power of two in those areas.
Here is a thing: Just because you have grown up with something doesn't make it right or a good solution. All the 1024 scale does is cause lots of unneeded confusion, because it makes calculating between TB, GB, MB, KB extremely hard, instead of completly trivial as it would be with the SI scale.
WHY THE FUCK SHOULD THEY ? HE'S A GROWN ADULT !!!
Being an adult doesn't stop you from running into issues with addiction.
You might as well blame the ISP because they also knew he was using the internet for long periods of time.
It is not uncommon to have the Internet always on in the background without actually using it.
Or why not just blame the PC manufacturer, for not having an automatic shutdown on the PC after it's been on for 3 hours.
I never argued for a hard time limit.
WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH PEOPLE THESE DAYS ?
Well, yeah, I could ask the same thing. Pretending that addiction problems aren't real, that ones your are an adult all mental problems are your own fault and all that, reminds me of Scientology's war on psychiatry. How far have we fallen?
It's funny but I've been smoking and drinking since I was 14, so that's about 28 years now ... strangely enough I've not received ANY calls from Marlboro or San Miguel Corporation about MY "addiction".
There have been quite a few multi billion dollar lawsuits against cigarettes. So while they still can sell their stuff, it is not that they didn't run into issues with the law.
When you actually want to fix a problem instead of just applying a non working solutions, you need to look for cause, not just for somebody to blame.
"Someone else made me do it" is just as wrong as the free will talk that puts all the blame on the individual, because it is never that simple with complex cases. Peoples behavior depends on there environment just as it depends on their own genetics and their upbringing.
Anyway, back to the lawsuit. I don't even see the cause for Craig's behavior as important. The important part is if NCsoft knowingly let somebody play for 11 hours a day over five years without ever getting into direct contact with him to talk about that issue. If they didn't, I'd call that negligence.
What's to stop someone from dividing their time between two MMOs, which is probably what the heavily addicted people would do if they can't find a single game to play?
Nothing. If people are deliberately avoiding the help they get, you can't force them. That however is absolutely no argument for not trying to offering them help in the first place.
I think I answered that already with "You don't "chose" addiction."
Anyway, the point never was that playing should be outlawed, the point was that companies should take care of their customers. If the customer would be totally fine with playing for so long, he wouldn't go out and sue (assuming of course his case is legit and not fraudulent).