In piracy articles, other people's work is free to trade. In GPL articles, other people's work suddenly should be protected.
There is no conflict, both are done to maximize the users freedom.
In reality, without copyright, the GPL would have no power, because it's a copyright license!
And that would be quite fine, as it would allows the reuse and recycling of other peoples work. It would however get a little messy, as reverse engineering and decompilation might often be needed. In practice however most people don't argue the abandonment of all copyright anyway, just a drastic shortening of it and extended fair use.
There are millions of firearms owned and billions of rounds fired annually.
That doesn't change their original design goal, which for most guns clearly is based on military, police or self defense work. If guns would be designed for making holes in paper they would look like this and if they would be designed to make holes over long distances for sports they would look more like this, yet your average gun doesn't look much like either of those.
Any recreational tool that kills as many people as guns do would already have disappeared from the market long long ago.
Points are not achievements. An achievements allows the implementation of a meta-game on top of the core game, giving you something to play when you are already done with the game itself that goes beyond the normal rules of the game. You simple can't do that with high scores. On top of that points are basically impossible to balance correctly in todays games where you don't have clear level boundaries, unlimited lives, save games and checkpoints.
The one thing that could replace part of achievements are statistics, I don't really need an achievements for "50 enemies killed" and then another for "100 enemies killed", a simple "X enemies killed" counter would server the purpose just as well and would be more informative.
The one big issue I have with achievements is that they are not transparent, more often then not the rules are simply not clear or not clearly communicated. If you have an achievements that says you should travel from point A to point B in time X, I would like to see a counter on the screen, but I don't, the game handles that all internally and doesn't give any feedback when you miss the achievement and doesn't tell you where exactly A and B are. Same with things like "finish the game by only using weapon X", do I have to finish it in one sitting? Can I load a safe when I accidentally used another weapon? And stuff like that.
I don't mind the achievements that keep track of how much of a game one has completed, but I certainly could do without the popup messages on those.
While not every game needs the latest and greatest 3D graphics, I find every game should at least work towards at least the graphics of a Zelda1 or Boulderdash, as no matter how good the game is, a few proper tiles can always make the game not only look better, but also make it easier to understand. In Xong for example the way the way trails are represented as - and | without proper tiles for curves is confusing. Another example would be nethack, where in most clients you can't tell the difference between a wall and unexplored terrain. And of course looking worse then a C64 game is just a little irritating.
"Gameplay" is simply a word for the experience one has when playing a game. The more technical term for what forms that experience would be "game mechanic", "plot", "level structure", "controls", etc.
If a device is bricked, _no one_ can reactivate it - it is dead
If you throw enough money at a thing you can revive even a dead hunk of clay. By your definition nothing is ever bricked, since there is always some way to revive something. The only useful definition of "bricked" is the one where a bricked device needs special tools for recovery that weren't needed for installing the modification in the first place, aka your path of recovery is blocked. One can probably make a few exception if the special tools aren't so special, but common household items, but once it involved soldering or replacing chips on the board, thats a brick.
Particularly since the game you played on their system was 1280×720(with some compression artefacts; which more or less add up to the equivalent of playing on "low" or "medium", depending on the specific game's settings system)...
Compression artifacts add a bit of blurriness, but you still have all the benefits of HDR rendering, shadows, post-processing and stuff that you won't get on low settings.
The interesting part however is that not all OnLive games run at high quality, its only some games that seem to get the high quality settings, while others such as Red Faction run on rather low settings, lacking bloom and shadows.
How about Online pay me $15/month and I'll maybe allow some of my time to play a demo or two. After all, the only outcomes for me are - I play a game and it's shite, so I waste my time - I play a game and it's great, so I buy it
Or you might actually care about games and simply have a desire to check them all out and OnLive allows you to do exactly that. No other game distribution allows you to basically zap through games like you zap through TV channels. This of course might not be all that exciting right now with a small number of games, but if OnLive ever gets successful and has a long back catalogue, I would absolutely love it to zap myself through years and years of gaming, without long downloads and installs. And of course the service is still new, who knows, maybe they'll offer a "play as much as you want" deal in the future, they already have rentals when you don't care to buy a game, but want to play the full version.
Depends, the Geforce 7800GT was a top of the line card back then, not exactly the average junk that you get when you buy an average PC. A current card that can compete with the 7800GT such as the Geforce GT220 still cost you like 70€.
For comparison, my PC is three years old and an average PC, not a special gaming machine, fall into the 800€ price range back then, and it has a Geforce 7600LE in it. That card is barely able to handle Crysis or Mass Effect 2 at the lowest possible detail level in the lowest resolution.
So while it is true that a gaming capable PC isn't all that expensive today, one that can play games for years to come still is. A cheap gaming PC will outdate quickly. Thanks to console ports however a good bit less quickly then some years ago, after all Xbox360 or PS3 have something similar to a 7800GT in them. But this console generation probably won't last another five years.
No, I just don't like people declaring "absolute failure" when the service by all accounts is actually completly usable and far surpasses anything else in that area. See for example Playstation Remote Play, that gets sluggish and unplayable when you are a meter away from the machine. That OnLive manages relative low latency over the Internet is truly impressive and might change the way we do computing in the future. Oh, and obvious xkcd reference.
Anyone who cares enough about games to subscribe to this service will already own either a PC or a gaming console.
Yes, there is a market saturation issue and the success of the service in the end I think really depends on how much better then a console they can get. The biggest issue right now is probably the lack of exclusive titles, just having a console game, that you already played, at a higher detail level isn't all that great for $15. Having games like Crysis on the other side running at max detail would be rather impressive, but there just aren't all that many high end games like that around these days. But even with that given, there are probably laptops, mobile phones and other devices around on which that service could be interesting, as even when a console is cheaper, it might not be at hand when you want to use it. And of course OnLive might one day be the solution to gaming on Linux.
Excessive bandwidth costs and poor video quality will solve itself over time, its called technological progress, it happens. The bad latency argument has already been debunked. Price, yes, its an issue and $15 is to much, $10 or $5 would be more fitting. The probably biggest issue right now however is market saturation, those who don't have time or money for PC gaming, already have a console and while OnLive seems to be able to keep up with consoles, it doesn't outpace them, as you end up with the choice between compressed good graphics and uncompressed bad graphics. Of course OnLive might also be to early, but then so was stuff like Steam, first everybody hated it and today its basically a core part of every PC gamers life. The interesting part will be to see if OnLive has enough money to keep going till bandwidth is easy enough available that they can market to the average person, not just the 20mbit/s heavy Internet user.
But in the end I wouldn't be surprised if in five or ten years OnLive or a similar service like it, would be a core piece of the gaming landscape.
They said they came close, they didn't say they met them.
In my book "close" means "close", not "utter failure". Utter failure would be if all or most of their games would be unplayable and they are nowhere near that. And its not like they are the first one to overestimate their technical capabilities, remember claims how PS3 would be 1080p or Xbox360 wouldn't allow games below 720p? Yet lots of games miss that mark, often by a lot.
I know all those pennies they're throwing your way is blinding you but give it another go over.
False claims of astroturfing don't make your argument any better.
Give me a solid reason why OnLive can't successed and I might listen, but so far I neither have seen or heard any.
So yes, it does sound like a complete and utter failure.
You are moving the goalpost. The review utterly busted your claims that its technically not workable, since it actually works. And no, that it can't do 720p@60 doesn't change that, its not even much of a deal, since neither Xbox360 not PS3 will give you that on an average game and they sell just fine. Price and licensing, sure, they are an issue, but that's stuff they will have to adjust to market forces. The core point is simply, after all those "Its impossible!" claims, they have shown that it actually works.
Almost 18 months ago now we came up with several good reasons why OnLive couldn't possibly work, at least in relation to the specs and claims being made by the company itself. Now we've been hands-on with the final product, the company needs to be congratulated on just how close it has got to sorting out the latency issues which were one of the key concerns. Out of controlled conditions, OnLive has managed to get within spitting distance of console response times and that's a clear technological achievement worthy of recognition.
Yeah, that totally reads like a complete and utter failure.
There is a very large market between hardcore PC people and Solitaire playing casual gamers, namely all the people that own a gaming console. Now if OnLive is good enough to compete with a game console, I don't know, but it seems to get close and offers a bunch of features that no other device has (30min demos of the full game for example). And when it comes to lag, see Killzone 2, that game has more lag then anything I have seen from OnLive so far, yet it got high reviews almost everywhere, most people just don't make a big deal of lag as long as the game is playable and you get used to it.
Also don't forget Mac, Linux, iPads and what not. This service isn't limited to Windows, it can in theory run everywhere where you get enough bandwidth. And heck if it actually ends up being somewhat successful and they do a Linux port it could single handedly remove the "There are no games on Linux, thats why I use Windows" excuse.
And your single game anecdote invalidates his argument exactly how? Just because some games might work doesn't mean that they can guarantee that for each single game on their service will continue to work and when it fails and the publishers doesn't care to fix it, they simply might be out of luck, that's why they have that disclaimer:
Full: Provides unlimited access to the selected game throughout its supported lifetime on the OnLive service. We expect to keep all games supported for as long as people continue to play them, but at a minimum, all current games will be supported for 3 years after their release on the OnLive Service.
Note, it doesn't they "after three years your games will stop working", it says that will work for three years at minimum, they might work much longer. I much prefer them being upfront about the limitations their service, then doing it like Sega who shut down their Chromehound XboxLive multiplayer servers after just 3.5 years, something I don't think many people had in mind when they subscribed to the XboxLive service.
And your FUD is based on exactly what? From all I have seen and read they come pretty close to their announced target performance. Yeah, hardcore twitch PC gamer that isn't happy with anything less then Full-HD and 120fps won't be happy, but he never was the target audience to begin with.
Why do you have to set a limit on a license for a fully purchased game?
Maybe because they are actually honest and tell you the limitations of their system upfront instead of pretending that the system will run forever and there never ever will be a problem with it? You know, pretending that a service will run forever simply doesn't make it so.
While I agree that the game shouldn't be splintered, isn't Mass Effect 2 extremely long and in-depth on its own?
It is, but that doesn't stop the "What am I missing?" question from popping up and to find the answer you download all that stuff and install it. Of course, afterwards its easy to say that one could have just ignored it and it would have been fine anyway, but thats a question that isn't easily answered when you haven't yet played the game.
The whole DLC mess simply distracts from the overall experience, instead of having a single well balance experience, you have one with a whole bunch of optional bells and whistles. And finding out how good or bad each whistle is takes time and effort that I would prefer not to waste time on. Having games like Dragon Age: Origins constantly reminding you of the DLC you haven't yet bought of course makes things even worse.
Except for that little difference that shareware was free. Paying full price and getting half a game is something very different then paying nothing and getting the third of the game as in the case of Doom.
The one thing I don't really get is why there is so much focus on tons of tiny pieces of DLC. I don't want a game to be splintered into a dozen pieces that I then have to buy each on its own. For Mass Effect 2 for example I have no less then seven DLC things that I have to download and install manually on the PC and that is just the free bonus stuff, not even counting the pay DLC. How am I supposed to keep track of all that stuff? Not only have I to know that it is released, how to get it and how good it is, I also have to figure out how to access it in the games and then even figure out if it is game braking or not (bonus armors or items can screw up the games balance, so one might want to avoid them on first play through). What happened to those things we called add-ons? Where you would buy one big additional piece of content and then be done with it, instead of so many tiny little and often badly integrated pieces. I never had much problems with the quality of add-ons, but some of the DLC that BioWare has put out is of rather questionable quality, that you are wondering if anything of the core team was even involved in that or if it was created by an untrained intern.
Having a good gaming experience matters and that certainly doesn't improve by all management overhead that you get with DLC.
A swarm of solar sail powered gravity tugs might work, it might take a long long while and you'd be limited to arrangement thats are gravitationally stable (i.e. no smiley face drawings) and you better pick something that looks interesting from all directions, but I don't think the laws of nature make it impossible, just really really difficult. Not sure however if you reach your target before the star burns out.
The chance to detect radio waves that leaked out from an alien civilization are rather slim, as technology moves forward and thus accidental radio broadcasts quickly become undetectable (lower power, better compression, etc.). So its really about intentionally send signals and for those radio waves are simply the best bet, as they are much easier to produce then any stellar size constructions, they are also easy to detect and they also allow you to actually submit real information. Arranging a few stars tells you that aliens are real, but nothing more and you probably spend a few million or billion years moving them around.
Slashdot Mirror
In piracy articles, other people's work is free to trade. In GPL articles, other people's work suddenly should be protected.
There is no conflict, both are done to maximize the users freedom.
In reality, without copyright, the GPL would have no power, because it's a copyright license!
And that would be quite fine, as it would allows the reuse and recycling of other peoples work. It would however get a little messy, as reverse engineering and decompilation might often be needed. In practice however most people don't argue the abandonment of all copyright anyway, just a drastic shortening of it and extended fair use.
There are millions of firearms owned and billions of rounds fired annually.
That doesn't change their original design goal, which for most guns clearly is based on military, police or self defense work. If guns would be designed for making holes in paper they would look like this and if they would be designed to make holes over long distances for sports they would look more like this, yet your average gun doesn't look much like either of those.
Any recreational tool that kills as many people as guns do would already have disappeared from the market long long ago.
What's wrong with the arcade-ish points system?
Points are not achievements. An achievements allows the implementation of a meta-game on top of the core game, giving you something to play when you are already done with the game itself that goes beyond the normal rules of the game. You simple can't do that with high scores. On top of that points are basically impossible to balance correctly in todays games where you don't have clear level boundaries, unlimited lives, save games and checkpoints.
The one thing that could replace part of achievements are statistics, I don't really need an achievements for "50 enemies killed" and then another for "100 enemies killed", a simple "X enemies killed" counter would server the purpose just as well and would be more informative.
The one big issue I have with achievements is that they are not transparent, more often then not the rules are simply not clear or not clearly communicated. If you have an achievements that says you should travel from point A to point B in time X, I would like to see a counter on the screen, but I don't, the game handles that all internally and doesn't give any feedback when you miss the achievement and doesn't tell you where exactly A and B are. Same with things like "finish the game by only using weapon X", do I have to finish it in one sitting? Can I load a safe when I accidentally used another weapon? And stuff like that.
I don't mind the achievements that keep track of how much of a game one has completed, but I certainly could do without the popup messages on those.
While not every game needs the latest and greatest 3D graphics, I find every game should at least work towards at least the graphics of a Zelda1 or Boulderdash, as no matter how good the game is, a few proper tiles can always make the game not only look better, but also make it easier to understand. In Xong for example the way the way trails are represented as - and | without proper tiles for curves is confusing. Another example would be nethack, where in most clients you can't tell the difference between a wall and unexplored terrain. And of course looking worse then a C64 game is just a little irritating.
"Gameplay" is simply a word for the experience one has when playing a game. The more technical term for what forms that experience would be "game mechanic", "plot", "level structure", "controls", etc.
If a device is bricked, _no one_ can reactivate it - it is dead
If you throw enough money at a thing you can revive even a dead hunk of clay. By your definition nothing is ever bricked, since there is always some way to revive something. The only useful definition of "bricked" is the one where a bricked device needs special tools for recovery that weren't needed for installing the modification in the first place, aka your path of recovery is blocked. One can probably make a few exception if the special tools aren't so special, but common household items, but once it involved soldering or replacing chips on the board, thats a brick.
Particularly since the game you played on their system was 1280×720(with some compression artefacts; which more or less add up to the equivalent of playing on "low" or "medium", depending on the specific game's settings system)...
Compression artifacts add a bit of blurriness, but you still have all the benefits of HDR rendering, shadows, post-processing and stuff that you won't get on low settings.
The interesting part however is that not all OnLive games run at high quality, its only some games that seem to get the high quality settings, while others such as Red Faction run on rather low settings, lacking bloom and shadows.
How about Online pay me $15/month and I'll maybe allow some of my time to play a demo or two. After all, the only outcomes for me are
- I play a game and it's shite, so I waste my time
- I play a game and it's great, so I buy it
Or you might actually care about games and simply have a desire to check them all out and OnLive allows you to do exactly that. No other game distribution allows you to basically zap through games like you zap through TV channels. This of course might not be all that exciting right now with a small number of games, but if OnLive ever gets successful and has a long back catalogue, I would absolutely love it to zap myself through years and years of gaming, without long downloads and installs. And of course the service is still new, who knows, maybe they'll offer a "play as much as you want" deal in the future, they already have rentals when you don't care to buy a game, but want to play the full version.
There is nothing special about the hardware
Depends, the Geforce 7800GT was a top of the line card back then, not exactly the average junk that you get when you buy an average PC. A current card that can compete with the 7800GT such as the Geforce GT220 still cost you like 70€.
For comparison, my PC is three years old and an average PC, not a special gaming machine, fall into the 800€ price range back then, and it has a Geforce 7600LE in it. That card is barely able to handle Crysis or Mass Effect 2 at the lowest possible detail level in the lowest resolution.
So while it is true that a gaming capable PC isn't all that expensive today, one that can play games for years to come still is. A cheap gaming PC will outdate quickly. Thanks to console ports however a good bit less quickly then some years ago, after all Xbox360 or PS3 have something similar to a 7800GT in them. But this console generation probably won't last another five years.
Do you work for OnLive?
No, I just don't like people declaring "absolute failure" when the service by all accounts is actually completly usable and far surpasses anything else in that area. See for example Playstation Remote Play, that gets sluggish and unplayable when you are a meter away from the machine. That OnLive manages relative low latency over the Internet is truly impressive and might change the way we do computing in the future. Oh, and obvious xkcd reference.
Anyone who cares enough about games to subscribe to this service will already own either a PC or a gaming console.
Yes, there is a market saturation issue and the success of the service in the end I think really depends on how much better then a console they can get. The biggest issue right now is probably the lack of exclusive titles, just having a console game, that you already played, at a higher detail level isn't all that great for $15. Having games like Crysis on the other side running at max detail would be rather impressive, but there just aren't all that many high end games like that around these days. But even with that given, there are probably laptops, mobile phones and other devices around on which that service could be interesting, as even when a console is cheaper, it might not be at hand when you want to use it. And of course OnLive might one day be the solution to gaming on Linux.
Excessive bandwidth costs and poor video quality will solve itself over time, its called technological progress, it happens. The bad latency argument has already been debunked. Price, yes, its an issue and $15 is to much, $10 or $5 would be more fitting. The probably biggest issue right now however is market saturation, those who don't have time or money for PC gaming, already have a console and while OnLive seems to be able to keep up with consoles, it doesn't outpace them, as you end up with the choice between compressed good graphics and uncompressed bad graphics. Of course OnLive might also be to early, but then so was stuff like Steam, first everybody hated it and today its basically a core part of every PC gamers life. The interesting part will be to see if OnLive has enough money to keep going till bandwidth is easy enough available that they can market to the average person, not just the 20mbit/s heavy Internet user.
But in the end I wouldn't be surprised if in five or ten years OnLive or a similar service like it, would be a core piece of the gaming landscape.
They said they came close, they didn't say they met them.
In my book "close" means "close", not "utter failure". Utter failure would be if all or most of their games would be unplayable and they are nowhere near that. And its not like they are the first one to overestimate their technical capabilities, remember claims how PS3 would be 1080p or Xbox360 wouldn't allow games below 720p? Yet lots of games miss that mark, often by a lot.
I know all those pennies they're throwing your way is blinding you but give it another go over.
False claims of astroturfing don't make your argument any better.
Give me a solid reason why OnLive can't successed and I might listen, but so far I neither have seen or heard any.
So yes, it does sound like a complete and utter failure.
You are moving the goalpost. The review utterly busted your claims that its technically not workable, since it actually works. And no, that it can't do 720p@60 doesn't change that, its not even much of a deal, since neither Xbox360 not PS3 will give you that on an average game and they sell just fine. Price and licensing, sure, they are an issue, but that's stuff they will have to adjust to market forces. The core point is simply, after all those "Its impossible!" claims, they have shown that it actually works.
The quality is suboptimal as was shown with the review.
This one?
Yeah, that totally reads like a complete and utter failure.
its a good idea but done wrong. paying a fee and buying the games just isn't gonna attract people.
Which is why nobody is using XboxLive, right? The 30min demo feature that OnLive has alone seems to be worth the fee.
There is a very large market between hardcore PC people and Solitaire playing casual gamers, namely all the people that own a gaming console. Now if OnLive is good enough to compete with a game console, I don't know, but it seems to get close and offers a bunch of features that no other device has (30min demos of the full game for example). And when it comes to lag, see Killzone 2, that game has more lag then anything I have seen from OnLive so far, yet it got high reviews almost everywhere, most people just don't make a big deal of lag as long as the game is playable and you get used to it.
Also don't forget Mac, Linux, iPads and what not. This service isn't limited to Windows, it can in theory run everywhere where you get enough bandwidth. And heck if it actually ends up being somewhat successful and they do a Linux port it could single handedly remove the "There are no games on Linux, thats why I use Windows" excuse.
And your single game anecdote invalidates his argument exactly how? Just because some games might work doesn't mean that they can guarantee that for each single game on their service will continue to work and when it fails and the publishers doesn't care to fix it, they simply might be out of luck, that's why they have that disclaimer:
Note, it doesn't they "after three years your games will stop working", it says that will work for three years at minimum, they might work much longer. I much prefer them being upfront about the limitations their service, then doing it like Sega who shut down their Chromehound XboxLive multiplayer servers after just 3.5 years, something I don't think many people had in mind when they subscribed to the XboxLive service.
And your FUD is based on exactly what? From all I have seen and read they come pretty close to their announced target performance. Yeah, hardcore twitch PC gamer that isn't happy with anything less then Full-HD and 120fps won't be happy, but he never was the target audience to begin with.
Why do you have to set a limit on a license for a fully purchased game?
Maybe because they are actually honest and tell you the limitations of their system upfront instead of pretending that the system will run forever and there never ever will be a problem with it? You know, pretending that a service will run forever simply doesn't make it so.
While I agree that the game shouldn't be splintered, isn't Mass Effect 2 extremely long and in-depth on its own?
It is, but that doesn't stop the "What am I missing?" question from popping up and to find the answer you download all that stuff and install it. Of course, afterwards its easy to say that one could have just ignored it and it would have been fine anyway, but thats a question that isn't easily answered when you haven't yet played the game.
The whole DLC mess simply distracts from the overall experience, instead of having a single well balance experience, you have one with a whole bunch of optional bells and whistles. And finding out how good or bad each whistle is takes time and effort that I would prefer not to waste time on. Having games like Dragon Age: Origins constantly reminding you of the DLC you haven't yet bought of course makes things even worse.
Except for that little difference that shareware was free. Paying full price and getting half a game is something very different then paying nothing and getting the third of the game as in the case of Doom.
The one thing I don't really get is why there is so much focus on tons of tiny pieces of DLC. I don't want a game to be splintered into a dozen pieces that I then have to buy each on its own. For Mass Effect 2 for example I have no less then seven DLC things that I have to download and install manually on the PC and that is just the free bonus stuff, not even counting the pay DLC. How am I supposed to keep track of all that stuff? Not only have I to know that it is released, how to get it and how good it is, I also have to figure out how to access it in the games and then even figure out if it is game braking or not (bonus armors or items can screw up the games balance, so one might want to avoid them on first play through). What happened to those things we called add-ons? Where you would buy one big additional piece of content and then be done with it, instead of so many tiny little and often badly integrated pieces. I never had much problems with the quality of add-ons, but some of the DLC that BioWare has put out is of rather questionable quality, that you are wondering if anything of the core team was even involved in that or if it was created by an untrained intern.
Having a good gaming experience matters and that certainly doesn't improve by all management overhead that you get with DLC.
A swarm of solar sail powered gravity tugs might work, it might take a long long while and you'd be limited to arrangement thats are gravitationally stable (i.e. no smiley face drawings) and you better pick something that looks interesting from all directions, but I don't think the laws of nature make it impossible, just really really difficult. Not sure however if you reach your target before the star burns out.
The chance to detect radio waves that leaked out from an alien civilization are rather slim, as technology moves forward and thus accidental radio broadcasts quickly become undetectable (lower power, better compression, etc.). So its really about intentionally send signals and for those radio waves are simply the best bet, as they are much easier to produce then any stellar size constructions, they are also easy to detect and they also allow you to actually submit real information. Arranging a few stars tells you that aliens are real, but nothing more and you probably spend a few million or billion years moving them around.
Usenet doesn't have any concept of friends or social groups, it is all public for everybody.
Hiding the copy protection in obscure game behavior makes it much harder to verify that a crack was successful, thus slowing pirates down.
Of course, the downside is bad word of mouth, so it is questionable if it is worth it.