Of course, in-house resources can screw things up badly too, but high-dollar consulting/contracting deals seem to have a special knack for it. Some places have great results with outsourcing/contracting, but others make it impossible to get high-quality work done in a reasonable time.
I'd be interested in hearing from an MBA-type about what the actual rationale for hiring third party IT help is. I know it's usually driven by raw costs and the fact that "IT's not strategic." But what is it that's actually taught in business school that has every executive that drives the whole outsourcing push? Or is it really just "my golf buddy is doing it at his company."?
Disclaimer: In the government case, I can definitely see the need for contract help. Projects would probably have a really hard time surviving administration changes, internal squabbles, etc.
I'm not an MBA type, but I have a pretty good idea about these issues. 1) High-dollar consulting/contracting deals are usually made to handle things that have the in-house people scratching their heads, or that appear to be harder to do and are usually ill-defined in the first place. Usually it's the combination of a moving target and trying to do something that may actually be difficult that screws up these types of projects, but there's also the chance that the consultant or contractor was less competent than they let the client believe.
2) Generally the idea for outsourcing is that you go to a fairly reputable consultant firm that says they can get you the expertise you need to get the job done, without having to hire someone that you don't think you'll need after the job is finished. One of the big problems here, though, is that someone usually has to maintain these systems after the consultant is gone, and no one understands it if it was setup by an outside entity.
3) In the case of government work, these problems are just as bad when they contract the work out, because the government often expects to be able to change what they're asking for after the contract is signed. The terms are usually vague enough that they can get away with it, but if their feet are held to the fire and someone managed to get a contract that works in their favor when holding the government to it, the government ends up with something that doesn't do what they had originally wanted because no one bothered to do the analysis necessary to determine what needed to be done. Of course, if it were left up to the government workers themselves, there's a good chance nothing would ever change, which is part of the reason government contractors have such a hard time in the first place (since they're an outside entity bringing unwanted change, there will be little or no cooperation from the people that could help things go smoothly).
Most of the "holes" have been evolved out of the language, rather than there being any significant chance of it evolving to fill them. Almost every language that's had an influence on the English language had one or more of the missing features, and many of them even made it into English, but have long since been deprecated, as someone mentioned below with "thou", "thee", and "thine". Another instance would be the insistence on the part of some people to call certain objects "she" or "he" instead of "it", despite English having dropped the feminine and masculine references for objects.
Some people will address an individual as "y'all", though, despite most of us wanting to use "y'all" as a plural of "you".
In that sense, "all y'all" would be a plural of "y'all", though I generally concur that it's more common to here it used for emphasis rather than as a plural form, similar to the way people might use "all of you" as opposed to just "you" when asking a group of people to do something.
Actually, one of the problems is that it's non-trivial for most users to even discover that the security of their system has been compromised, on any operating system, until it's far too late (or has been compromised in so many different ways that the system succumbs and fails to function in the expected manner).
If someone comes along and steals your car, it's not there when you get back. If they steal the car stereo, there's probably glass all over the place and the stereo's gone. Even if the take it for a joy ride and return it there may be clues, like the position of the seat and mirrors, the odometer reading, the amount of gas in the car, or a change in the position in which it is parked.
If your computer becomes part of a botnet, the best thing for the controlling interests to do is make sure that it's very hard to tell that your computer is infected. A virus or worm might sit on the machine for months infecting other systems before finally unleashing a destructive payload, for the simple reason that this makes it more effective. Tracking malware will hide itself in order to have more time on the system to gain more information for the advertisers that bought the information.
So the most effective, and damaging for the overall security of the network, forms of malware are those that are hardest to find. If the system doesn't tell you that there's suspicious behavior going on, and most users don't know how to see what processes are running on their system (and don't know what processes should be running on their system), then all of the security looks like hand waving, because they don't see a difference between the compromised and secure systems.
Half of the functionality in security products is alerting the user to potentially harmful activity taking place on their computer or network. Of course end users hate when these alerts get in their face and require action on their part, so if they're given a chance to disable them, they do so. The trick is alerting the user without annoying the user, and making it easier to disable a security warning when it's being overly paranoid than it is to disable the entire security system.
My simple analogy is not for a car, but rather my house: if I had to use the older style of home alarm system where I keyed in a security code and then attempted to exit the house while it armed itself, or come into the house and key in the code before the alarm went off, I would never use it. I'd rather depend on the keys that are only effective against those that would probably be stopped just as easily by the fact the door is closed. However, since my house's alarm has a keychain remote like most cars do, it's a simple matter of locking up the house and arming or disarming from outside. Additionally, the alarm is obnoxiously obvious when someone opens/breaks a window, trips a motion sensor, or opens a door. There's simply no chance of someone getting into the house without me knowing it unless they find a way to bypass the system.
Bypassing the system may turn out to be fairly easy for someone that knows how to do so, I really don't know. However, the system is there to handle a higher percentage of possible intruders than the simple lock that my wife can bypass in 30 seconds or less.
Make it easier for the user to understand what is really going on behind the scenes on their machines. Let them see the network traffic, where it's going, and what processes are using it. Make it easy for them to figure out what is supposed to be running on their system and what is not.
Re:Most people simply don't think about security
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The Myths of Security
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· Score: 1
It's not quite the same as trying to educate a whole office full of users with different ideas and levels of knowledge about computer security, but my wife has taken quite well to basic home user computer security in a way I never really expected to see from someone that didn't grow up with it. She still needs a little work in regards to browser use (Firefox vs. IE) and the sites she visits (coupon sites are evil), but the basics of dealing with email and attachments, clicking on suspicious links, and keeping reasonable passwords on most of her accounts have set in pretty well.
Of course, she also doesn't have to spend much time on a completely open internet connection, either.
I don't work for EA, I'm just going on the fact that people still buy their garbage. Why do people keep buying the crap they produce if they're unhappy with the product? The easiest way to get the message across to them is to stop giving them money. Sure, they'll blame it on piracy, but if you're not buying and not pirating their games, let them play the blame game until they find themselves being bought up by someone else.
Teach your kid that it's important to maintain a high degree of accuracy when typing and you won't have these problems. FOaD and ESaD were favorites when I was in Jr. high, and we certainly didn't have texting or IM.
Of course, my handwriting is terrible, and though I used computers most of my life I didn't learn to type quickly (and with more than 2 fingers per hand) until I was in my twenties. Both my handwriting and my typing are better than my father's, though.
Looking at how my daughter handles things vs. how my youngest brother-in-law (a teenager) handles things, or even how I believe I handled things as a kid, I think most of it comes down to teaching a kid to treasure the things they have. My brother-in-law breaks or loses something, and he ends up with a new one that's better than what he had before. He's almost better off breaking stuff than taking care of it. My daughter asks for something, if it's of any significant cost and/or value, it could be a while before she gets it, and she may have to give something up for it. If she breaks it, it could be a long while before she sees a replacement. She seems to value things much better than her uncle, and she's 12 years younger than he is.
On the other hand, there are some people, like my wife, that simply don't value physical things. In a lot of ways, it's a gift, because she doesn't miss it when it's gone, and she doesn't really want much. In other ways, though, not valuing something means not caring enough to think about the way things should be treated, and generally putting more value in what she can get for something than in what she paid for it, or would have to pay to replace it.
Frankly, I'm surprised a kid in West Virginia knows which side they were on. Then again, maybe they actually teach the state's history to kids that go to school there.
That's why the games industry has been working to effectively sew up the digital distribution channels before smaller companies can come in and take over. In a lot of ways on the PC side Valve already has done this, though there are a lot of other companies making a name for themselves in this realm. Consoles aren't likely to escape the big publisher mentality, though, as someone generally steps up to risk the cost of developing and marketing the hardware in order to get a cut of the game sales from everyone that develops for the system. Homebrew games and applications are bigger than ever on the handheld consoles, but the manufacturers still get a cut from the majority of the games running on their systems.
But adding more people to content development can lead to less cohesive results. Therefore adding more people in that department also requires better skills in the management of those types of people, which are inherently hard to manage and have high communication costs. That and you have to spend more time in the design stages developing a cohesive plan for the game that can be passed on to the content developers so that they understand the overall vision to which they are expected to adhere (and which they will ignore on a whim).
EA has been closing up shops left and right, just like most other large publishers (though really there aren't many large publishers these days, it's basically EA and Blizzard/Activision for PC games).
I think the main issue is that EA specifically, and the industry in general, has spent a lot of time in the last decade complaining about the rising costs of producing games, especially in the console and PC realms, yet EA is willing to spend 3x their development budget on marketing, the cost of which is pretty well within their control.
Of course, EA is also one of the companies that does pretty well controlling their development costs for their biggest selling games. They have a very limited time frame for development of their sports titles, and they do a fair job of deciding what improvements they can make year-to-year to still meet the time constraints and still keep most of their user base happy. They also figured out that it was worth more money to them to buy exclusive contracts with the leagues and player unions than to attempt to continue competing with other publishers and developers to make a better game in those time constraints.
You may also run into greater post-release costs due to incompatibilities between the various parts of the baby, or even outright rejection of the implanted parts.
Additionally, this would require specialized developer knowledge in assembling the parts properly to avoid these types of reactions. Therefore, you may have to pay the women more to do the same job in less time if you ever want the baby to come out right in the time constraints. As it goes: we can develop it quickly, we can make it good, and we can make it cheap, but you can only pick two, and you might still only get one.
On the other hand, Google Books is also a tool for librarians when the books are not available locally, as many libraries supply internet access to members of their community that can not afford to have it at home. That, and generally librarians are always concerned about privacy issues, whether they directly impact the libraries or not.
I recently looked into possibly going into the field myself, and found that my interest perhaps wasn't as unusual as I first thought, as there is a massive overlap with computer science and information systems, including a concentration in Informatics for people going for their Masters in Library Science.
Unfortunately, most of the work for a modern librarian is focused on acquiring and maintaining funding to maintain the library, and far too many communities face losing these resources.
Essentially American DVDs have always had previews like VHS did. Unlike VHS, though, most American DVD players can be told by the disc not to allow the user to fast forward or skip certain content, which of course if the feature is used is always used for the copyright notice and sometimes used for the previews.
Disney in particular was very bad about this practice, though they've gotten better more recently (and sorry, it's one thing I can't put my foot down on, I have to let my daughter have the occasional Disney Princess movie to keep my sanity intact).
They might delete their copy, but first they'll delete your copy, accidentally, of course, and somehow they'll manage to have a daily backup of everything else on the machine that they used to delete your data except for your data.
Fact is, it's very hard to get away with cheating at TF2 or any other Valve game. You might get away with it for a little while, because they deliberately don't ban cheaters immediately. But you will be losing that account.
Really? As someone that fought cheating in a Valve game in the first year or so they were implementing anti-cheat measures in their games, I have to say it's incredibly hard to detect cheating, and one of the major problems early on was that people released the source code for their cheats, making it incredibly easy to customize the cheats to the point that they were harder to detect. What he says should be more or less true, as long as he's not leveraging an obvious hack that ends up looking like a million other cheats when Valve scans his system. The people that get away with cheating the longest are the ones that hold back and don't leverage all of the advantage they gain from cheating, and don't release their hacks. Once a hack is public, it's only a matter of days before Valve can implement detection and possibly disable the hack by changing whatever the hack is manipulating in memory. If they delay banning of cheaters, it's only to allow them to detect more cheaters, because within days of the bans starting, the new version of the cheat is released, and the cycle starts again.
While I would generally not play an FPS on a console for a variety of reasons, I will say this as an argument for it: 1) You can connect a mouse + keyboard to a PS3, it's called USB, or bluetooth. 360 users should gripe to MS about the crap they've pulled with that console 2) Console games are usually tuned to run at a consistent framerate at the console's standard resolution options, all of which makes most of the processing advantages of a PC moot, unless the game gives an advantage to players with a higher framerate than what the console is capable of, and you're running it on a PC that is capable of maintaining an advantageous framerate at the resolution at which you are playing.
There are many examples of the latter, but the problems people have getting consistent framerates out of games are not exactly new (though with current hardware and the way developers have built the games to configure themselves to the hardware on install, they're not as big of a problem as they used to be).
EA games use their own servers, even on XBox Live. They wouldn't even go on XBox Live until MS changed that restriction, hence why the PS2 games got network support before the original XBox Live.
I think it is a code issue, if you have a look at games that promised cross 360/Windows play even, I don't think any of them had that feature left in
As for FF11, can someone confirm/deny that 360 players can play with PC and PS2 users of the game?
EA wanted lock-in on user data and the ability to decide whether or not people could access their services, which is why they refused to play nice with Microsoft until they changed the requirements. EA games don't necessarily run on their own servers on Xbox Live, but they have more access to the data on those servers than they would have under the original Xbox Live system. Originally there was speculation that EA might want to have additional charges to use their multiplayer, but there was a pretty massive backlash against that. They also saw a lot of pressure by not having online play on the Xbox, since it allowed Sega and MS themselves to compete very well on the platform vs. Madden for a year or two. In the end, they seem to have come to an agreement with MS that was somewhere between what the two had originally wanted for themselves, in part because the Xbox and 360 online services would have suffered without an NFL licensed online game.
It's definitely not a code issue in general, though it can be for specific games. Most of the games that promised 360/Windows play can be played together on those platforms. If FF11 users on the 360 can't play with PC and PS2 users, why exactly are they playing? It's not exactly massive if the only users are the ones on the 360. One could argue there were more challenges in getting the PS2 to play nice, since it had to have 2 optional hardware components (one of which is not available for the more recent versions of the console) and is a completely different architecture, rather than the 360, which is basically a PC running a different OS from the same developers as the PC OS on which the game runs. Strangely the PS2 was able to play nice all this time.
P.S - You would be forcing Microsoft and Sony to create a pretty complex system. Additional costs in merging those networks and deciding just how much of the financial responsibility lies with whom. It won't be a fifty/fifty deal. It's hard to justify forcing them to do that.
Not really. They had extra costs involved in building their own private little network that runs on top of the existing computer network we're using to access this site. They could have done it all without locking out other platforms at a lower cost, possibly even leveraging existing software to do so, such as Steam or any of a number of other matchmaking and digital download systems.
They invested the extra money to create their own system so they could control it, and then invested even more money so they could keep it to themselves. Microsoft goes one further and makes people pay for the system that keeps them from interacting with other platforms, while offering PC users access to the same network for free (because PC users already have access to so many other networks for free that they wouldn't pay for it).
The term is already a summarization of an abstract that is only really defined by whatever a court allows to occur. It's not a real law in the sense that it's written into a book in clear and definite terms, and this case is just one of many that help to define it better under certain circumstances.
That being said, your guess would more than likely be as accurate as anyone's summary could be. You go looking for something else with a legal right to search and instead find something you weren't looking for, but really weren't likely to have missed being a normal person with the normal senses. You don't go looking for a gun with a warrant and step over a dead body in the hallway as if it didn't exist because your warrant didn't specify that you were looking for corpses.
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Of course, in-house resources can screw things up badly too, but high-dollar consulting/contracting deals seem to have a special knack for it. Some places have great results with outsourcing/contracting, but others make it impossible to get high-quality work done in a reasonable time.
I'd be interested in hearing from an MBA-type about what the actual rationale for hiring third party IT help is. I know it's usually driven by raw costs and the fact that "IT's not strategic." But what is it that's actually taught in business school that has every executive that drives the whole outsourcing push? Or is it really just "my golf buddy is doing it at his company."?
Disclaimer: In the government case, I can definitely see the need for contract help. Projects would probably have a really hard time surviving administration changes, internal squabbles, etc.
I'm not an MBA type, but I have a pretty good idea about these issues.
1) High-dollar consulting/contracting deals are usually made to handle things that have the in-house people scratching their heads, or that appear to be harder to do and are usually ill-defined in the first place. Usually it's the combination of a moving target and trying to do something that may actually be difficult that screws up these types of projects, but there's also the chance that the consultant or contractor was less competent than they let the client believe.
2) Generally the idea for outsourcing is that you go to a fairly reputable consultant firm that says they can get you the expertise you need to get the job done, without having to hire someone that you don't think you'll need after the job is finished. One of the big problems here, though, is that someone usually has to maintain these systems after the consultant is gone, and no one understands it if it was setup by an outside entity.
3) In the case of government work, these problems are just as bad when they contract the work out, because the government often expects to be able to change what they're asking for after the contract is signed. The terms are usually vague enough that they can get away with it, but if their feet are held to the fire and someone managed to get a contract that works in their favor when holding the government to it, the government ends up with something that doesn't do what they had originally wanted because no one bothered to do the analysis necessary to determine what needed to be done. Of course, if it were left up to the government workers themselves, there's a good chance nothing would ever change, which is part of the reason government contractors have such a hard time in the first place (since they're an outside entity bringing unwanted change, there will be little or no cooperation from the people that could help things go smoothly).
I think he means that "you" would be written "ya", in which case there are no letters missing from the first word in the contraction.
Most of the "holes" have been evolved out of the language, rather than there being any significant chance of it evolving to fill them. Almost every language that's had an influence on the English language had one or more of the missing features, and many of them even made it into English, but have long since been deprecated, as someone mentioned below with "thou", "thee", and "thine". Another instance would be the insistence on the part of some people to call certain objects "she" or "he" instead of "it", despite English having dropped the feminine and masculine references for objects.
and I have no idea how I managed to use the wrong spelling for hear in the above post. WTF?
Some people will address an individual as "y'all", though, despite most of us wanting to use "y'all" as a plural of "you".
In that sense, "all y'all" would be a plural of "y'all", though I generally concur that it's more common to here it used for emphasis rather than as a plural form, similar to the way people might use "all of you" as opposed to just "you" when asking a group of people to do something.
Actually, one of the problems is that it's non-trivial for most users to even discover that the security of their system has been compromised, on any operating system, until it's far too late (or has been compromised in so many different ways that the system succumbs and fails to function in the expected manner).
If someone comes along and steals your car, it's not there when you get back. If they steal the car stereo, there's probably glass all over the place and the stereo's gone. Even if the take it for a joy ride and return it there may be clues, like the position of the seat and mirrors, the odometer reading, the amount of gas in the car, or a change in the position in which it is parked.
If your computer becomes part of a botnet, the best thing for the controlling interests to do is make sure that it's very hard to tell that your computer is infected. A virus or worm might sit on the machine for months infecting other systems before finally unleashing a destructive payload, for the simple reason that this makes it more effective. Tracking malware will hide itself in order to have more time on the system to gain more information for the advertisers that bought the information.
So the most effective, and damaging for the overall security of the network, forms of malware are those that are hardest to find. If the system doesn't tell you that there's suspicious behavior going on, and most users don't know how to see what processes are running on their system (and don't know what processes should be running on their system), then all of the security looks like hand waving, because they don't see a difference between the compromised and secure systems.
Half of the functionality in security products is alerting the user to potentially harmful activity taking place on their computer or network. Of course end users hate when these alerts get in their face and require action on their part, so if they're given a chance to disable them, they do so. The trick is alerting the user without annoying the user, and making it easier to disable a security warning when it's being overly paranoid than it is to disable the entire security system.
My simple analogy is not for a car, but rather my house: if I had to use the older style of home alarm system where I keyed in a security code and then attempted to exit the house while it armed itself, or come into the house and key in the code before the alarm went off, I would never use it. I'd rather depend on the keys that are only effective against those that would probably be stopped just as easily by the fact the door is closed. However, since my house's alarm has a keychain remote like most cars do, it's a simple matter of locking up the house and arming or disarming from outside. Additionally, the alarm is obnoxiously obvious when someone opens/breaks a window, trips a motion sensor, or opens a door. There's simply no chance of someone getting into the house without me knowing it unless they find a way to bypass the system.
Bypassing the system may turn out to be fairly easy for someone that knows how to do so, I really don't know. However, the system is there to handle a higher percentage of possible intruders than the simple lock that my wife can bypass in 30 seconds or less.
Make it easier for the user to understand what is really going on behind the scenes on their machines. Let them see the network traffic, where it's going, and what processes are using it. Make it easy for them to figure out what is supposed to be running on their system and what is not.
It's not quite the same as trying to educate a whole office full of users with different ideas and levels of knowledge about computer security, but my wife has taken quite well to basic home user computer security in a way I never really expected to see from someone that didn't grow up with it. She still needs a little work in regards to browser use (Firefox vs. IE) and the sites she visits (coupon sites are evil), but the basics of dealing with email and attachments, clicking on suspicious links, and keeping reasonable passwords on most of her accounts have set in pretty well.
Of course, she also doesn't have to spend much time on a completely open internet connection, either.
I don't work for EA, I'm just going on the fact that people still buy their garbage. Why do people keep buying the crap they produce if they're unhappy with the product? The easiest way to get the message across to them is to stop giving them money. Sure, they'll blame it on piracy, but if you're not buying and not pirating their games, let them play the blame game until they find themselves being bought up by someone else.
Teach your kid that it's important to maintain a high degree of accuracy when typing and you won't have these problems. FOaD and ESaD were favorites when I was in Jr. high, and we certainly didn't have texting or IM.
Of course, my handwriting is terrible, and though I used computers most of my life I didn't learn to type quickly (and with more than 2 fingers per hand) until I was in my twenties. Both my handwriting and my typing are better than my father's, though.
Looking at how my daughter handles things vs. how my youngest brother-in-law (a teenager) handles things, or even how I believe I handled things as a kid, I think most of it comes down to teaching a kid to treasure the things they have. My brother-in-law breaks or loses something, and he ends up with a new one that's better than what he had before. He's almost better off breaking stuff than taking care of it. My daughter asks for something, if it's of any significant cost and/or value, it could be a while before she gets it, and she may have to give something up for it. If she breaks it, it could be a long while before she sees a replacement. She seems to value things much better than her uncle, and she's 12 years younger than he is.
On the other hand, there are some people, like my wife, that simply don't value physical things. In a lot of ways, it's a gift, because she doesn't miss it when it's gone, and she doesn't really want much. In other ways, though, not valuing something means not caring enough to think about the way things should be treated, and generally putting more value in what she can get for something than in what she paid for it, or would have to pay to replace it.
Frankly, I'm surprised a kid in West Virginia knows which side they were on. Then again, maybe they actually teach the state's history to kids that go to school there.
That's why the games industry has been working to effectively sew up the digital distribution channels before smaller companies can come in and take over. In a lot of ways on the PC side Valve already has done this, though there are a lot of other companies making a name for themselves in this realm. Consoles aren't likely to escape the big publisher mentality, though, as someone generally steps up to risk the cost of developing and marketing the hardware in order to get a cut of the game sales from everyone that develops for the system. Homebrew games and applications are bigger than ever on the handheld consoles, but the manufacturers still get a cut from the majority of the games running on their systems.
But adding more people to content development can lead to less cohesive results. Therefore adding more people in that department also requires better skills in the management of those types of people, which are inherently hard to manage and have high communication costs. That and you have to spend more time in the design stages developing a cohesive plan for the game that can be passed on to the content developers so that they understand the overall vision to which they are expected to adhere (and which they will ignore on a whim).
EA has been closing up shops left and right, just like most other large publishers (though really there aren't many large publishers these days, it's basically EA and Blizzard/Activision for PC games).
I think the main issue is that EA specifically, and the industry in general, has spent a lot of time in the last decade complaining about the rising costs of producing games, especially in the console and PC realms, yet EA is willing to spend 3x their development budget on marketing, the cost of which is pretty well within their control.
Of course, EA is also one of the companies that does pretty well controlling their development costs for their biggest selling games. They have a very limited time frame for development of their sports titles, and they do a fair job of deciding what improvements they can make year-to-year to still meet the time constraints and still keep most of their user base happy. They also figured out that it was worth more money to them to buy exclusive contracts with the leagues and player unions than to attempt to continue competing with other publishers and developers to make a better game in those time constraints.
You may also run into greater post-release costs due to incompatibilities between the various parts of the baby, or even outright rejection of the implanted parts.
Additionally, this would require specialized developer knowledge in assembling the parts properly to avoid these types of reactions. Therefore, you may have to pay the women more to do the same job in less time if you ever want the baby to come out right in the time constraints. As it goes: we can develop it quickly, we can make it good, and we can make it cheap, but you can only pick two, and you might still only get one.
On the other hand, Google Books is also a tool for librarians when the books are not available locally, as many libraries supply internet access to members of their community that can not afford to have it at home. That, and generally librarians are always concerned about privacy issues, whether they directly impact the libraries or not.
I recently looked into possibly going into the field myself, and found that my interest perhaps wasn't as unusual as I first thought, as there is a massive overlap with computer science and information systems, including a concentration in Informatics for people going for their Masters in Library Science.
Unfortunately, most of the work for a modern librarian is focused on acquiring and maintaining funding to maintain the library, and far too many communities face losing these resources.
Essentially American DVDs have always had previews like VHS did. Unlike VHS, though, most American DVD players can be told by the disc not to allow the user to fast forward or skip certain content, which of course if the feature is used is always used for the copyright notice and sometimes used for the previews.
Disney in particular was very bad about this practice, though they've gotten better more recently (and sorry, it's one thing I can't put my foot down on, I have to let my daughter have the occasional Disney Princess movie to keep my sanity intact).
You wouldn't be asking that if you could see the papercut on my thumb.
They might delete their copy, but first they'll delete your copy, accidentally, of course, and somehow they'll manage to have a daily backup of everything else on the machine that they used to delete your data except for your data.
Fact is, it's very hard to get away with cheating at TF2 or any other Valve game. You might get away with it for a little while, because they deliberately don't ban cheaters immediately. But you will be losing that account.
Really? As someone that fought cheating in a Valve game in the first year or so they were implementing anti-cheat measures in their games, I have to say it's incredibly hard to detect cheating, and one of the major problems early on was that people released the source code for their cheats, making it incredibly easy to customize the cheats to the point that they were harder to detect. What he says should be more or less true, as long as he's not leveraging an obvious hack that ends up looking like a million other cheats when Valve scans his system. The people that get away with cheating the longest are the ones that hold back and don't leverage all of the advantage they gain from cheating, and don't release their hacks. Once a hack is public, it's only a matter of days before Valve can implement detection and possibly disable the hack by changing whatever the hack is manipulating in memory. If they delay banning of cheaters, it's only to allow them to detect more cheaters, because within days of the bans starting, the new version of the cheat is released, and the cycle starts again.
While I would generally not play an FPS on a console for a variety of reasons, I will say this as an argument for it:
1) You can connect a mouse + keyboard to a PS3, it's called USB, or bluetooth. 360 users should gripe to MS about the crap they've pulled with that console
2) Console games are usually tuned to run at a consistent framerate at the console's standard resolution options, all of which makes most of the processing advantages of a PC moot, unless the game gives an advantage to players with a higher framerate than what the console is capable of, and you're running it on a PC that is capable of maintaining an advantageous framerate at the resolution at which you are playing.
There are many examples of the latter, but the problems people have getting consistent framerates out of games are not exactly new (though with current hardware and the way developers have built the games to configure themselves to the hardware on install, they're not as big of a problem as they used to be).
EA games use their own servers, even on XBox Live. They wouldn't even go on XBox Live until MS changed that restriction, hence why the PS2 games got network support before the original XBox Live.
I think it is a code issue, if you have a look at games that promised cross 360/Windows play even, I don't think any of them had that feature left in
As for FF11, can someone confirm/deny that 360 players can play with PC and PS2 users of the game?
EA wanted lock-in on user data and the ability to decide whether or not people could access their services, which is why they refused to play nice with Microsoft until they changed the requirements. EA games don't necessarily run on their own servers on Xbox Live, but they have more access to the data on those servers than they would have under the original Xbox Live system. Originally there was speculation that EA might want to have additional charges to use their multiplayer, but there was a pretty massive backlash against that. They also saw a lot of pressure by not having online play on the Xbox, since it allowed Sega and MS themselves to compete very well on the platform vs. Madden for a year or two. In the end, they seem to have come to an agreement with MS that was somewhere between what the two had originally wanted for themselves, in part because the Xbox and 360 online services would have suffered without an NFL licensed online game.
It's definitely not a code issue in general, though it can be for specific games. Most of the games that promised 360/Windows play can be played together on those platforms. If FF11 users on the 360 can't play with PC and PS2 users, why exactly are they playing? It's not exactly massive if the only users are the ones on the 360. One could argue there were more challenges in getting the PS2 to play nice, since it had to have 2 optional hardware components (one of which is not available for the more recent versions of the console) and is a completely different architecture, rather than the 360, which is basically a PC running a different OS from the same developers as the PC OS on which the game runs. Strangely the PS2 was able to play nice all this time.
P.S - You would be forcing Microsoft and Sony to create a pretty complex system. Additional costs in merging those networks and deciding just how much of the financial responsibility lies with whom. It won't be a fifty/fifty deal. It's hard to justify forcing them to do that.
Not really. They had extra costs involved in building their own private little network that runs on top of the existing computer network we're using to access this site. They could have done it all without locking out other platforms at a lower cost, possibly even leveraging existing software to do so, such as Steam or any of a number of other matchmaking and digital download systems.
They invested the extra money to create their own system so they could control it, and then invested even more money so they could keep it to themselves. Microsoft goes one further and makes people pay for the system that keeps them from interacting with other platforms, while offering PC users access to the same network for free (because PC users already have access to so many other networks for free that they wouldn't pay for it).
There are a lot of cheaper alternatives than a 360 and an Xbox Live subscription for streaming Netflix to your television.
The term is already a summarization of an abstract that is only really defined by whatever a court allows to occur. It's not a real law in the sense that it's written into a book in clear and definite terms, and this case is just one of many that help to define it better under certain circumstances.
That being said, your guess would more than likely be as accurate as anyone's summary could be. You go looking for something else with a legal right to search and instead find something you weren't looking for, but really weren't likely to have missed being a normal person with the normal senses. You don't go looking for a gun with a warrant and step over a dead body in the hallway as if it didn't exist because your warrant didn't specify that you were looking for corpses.