I didn't knew that when people were not R[ing]TFA (or actually RTFPaper), it was worth a repost when someone who actually read the paper would talk about it.
"fantastic gameplay" : err, it seems we didn't play the same game. The license and the physic engine are indeed marvelous. But the camera system is a nightmare : it is alway pointing to the wrong direction and jedis are now ridiculously powerful, like some cheap manga when a single guy is able to break a whole planet.
The sequel (SW:TFU2) is worse because you can finish it in less than 6 hours (for 70$).
I would personally have talked about :
* RED DEAD REDEMPTION : GTA for grown up. The same as GTA but no more gangsta storyline but a good-old-west lonesome cowboy story. * Assassin's Creed 2 : a strong story, a beautiful execution and a great gameplay
First, your ISP knows AT LEAST your home address, the place where they provide ADSL/cable connection. Second, your ISP generally provides you with an email address. At last, your ISP might also request you to provide an alternate email address (personnal, work, ) where they can contact you. This address is generally used to warn you of billing issue and give you a chance to fix the situation before they cut the connection.
So basically copyright holders in France have free reign to find out who any IP address belonged to.
Technically, copyright holders don't know who the IP belongs to. They provide a list of IP to HADOPI, a state run service. HADOPI request the IDs and execute the 3 strikes process (e-mail, snail-mail, disconnection).
With such volumes of request, there's no way their validity will be questioned in any way.
Everything have been crafted that way. There are application notes from the gov discouraging the justice to run additional investigation and proceed to the disconnection solely from the "proofs" provided by copyright holders.
Likely the whole system will soon be automated.
Currently, there is one little glitch : the connection between ISP and HADOPI has not been formally defined. Gov does not want to draft it because the ISP will have the right to define the fees they'll ask to process this id request.
So one ISP sent back the identification printed on paper since the format the id should be sent is not specifically defined.
They provide the IP to an intermediary state run service (named HADOPI). This service requests the ID and send the warnings and ask to close the connection at the 3rd occurence.
Actually, I first answered from what I recalled and submitted the 1st comment. THEN I went in YouTube and the official website to retrieve the video. I thought I would be able to edit my initial post but couldn't find any edit button.
Now this current post is clearly offtopic and a troll. I won't hide the fact that I'm rather proud to have both my comments mod at +5 informative. But can you just believe that I made those comments because I found that the dev diary was awesome and the fact that they mixed together 3 physic engines was a real achievement ?
Check the dev diaries video from the 1st game : they mixed together 3 physics engine targeting different situations.
Havok is the general physic engine were everything takes place.
Digital Molecular Matter is a "material" physic engine. With it, glass shatters, metal bends and cloth floats in the air. It determines the behavior of objects from their mater and the result is fed back to Havok.
Euphoria is a physic engine specialized in body motion. Take it like "advanced ragdoll". Once again, the result is fed back to Havok for final composition.
Those were the 2 most annoying issues with this game : being unable to see what's happening and being unable to select the trooper you want to eviscerate.
And here Blizzard has a trick : WoW requires a monthly fee. So used games resell aren't a "threat" to its income. StarCraft 2 would essentially be played online thru its battle.net servers and there you will need to have a valid account and register your game, as you would need to with Ubisoft. No one plays offline and alone.
Ubisoft's AssassinCreed2 is a game you can play only alone. So the "phoning home" from the DRM is artificial while it is "hidden" in games with a naturally online gameplay.
So you need a quadcore 8-threaded 2.66GHz CPU to dev applications targetting a single threaded 600MHz device with a 480x320 screen ? This tells a lot about your integrated development environment.
Yeah sure, Steve Ballmer will very likely speak about VisualStudio 2010 on June the 7th. But this will be at Microsoft Tech-Ed, developper and IT professionnal conference.
How a miss-informed analyst can shake the web by spitting improbable rumours.
(I won't talk about the fact that VS10 is deeply oriented towards the introduction of.NET 4.0 and corresponding C# evolutions, that VS has currently no ObjC parser — and will never include GCC even if it is Apple reference compiler — and that VS GUI editors are built for WinForms and WPF/SilverLight, not Cocoa, so this just ends leveraging their syntax highlighting text editor)
Pressing a BluRay disc costs less than 3$ per disc (price for just 1000). Such a disc can hold 25 to 50 GB. A DVD is around 1$ and holds 5 to 9 GB. A 16GB USB key is at 30$ and 8GB is 15$ on Amazon. I know this is rewritable but a ROM version won't cut its cost by 90%.
So we won't see SSD replacing discs on data heavy console games anytime soon.
That would be great to have just a "Interaction Unit" (screen + joystick/ok/cancel + antenna) that can be plugged in GPS boxes from multiple vendors so you can pay for the integration while keeping your freedom to upgrade for the GPS unit of your choice.
The only motivation to buy such an expensive integrated DVD player is... because it's integrated.
You don't have LCDs loosely attached to the back of your seat, sliding slowly from the head rest to the floor, with ugly and cumbersome straps. You don't have dangling wires going from the player to the screen, with the kids feet in between. You don't have the DVD player resting on the middle seat or on the floor, sliding from far right to far left every time you change direction. You don't have a 12ft power cable going the nearest power jack to the DVD player, running all around your car. And you don't have to lean back and grab the player itself to skip/pause/navigate the DVD.
So, YES, this is VERY expensive but they are people who give a price to simplicity and ease of use.
PS : I've custom build a headrest fixture in which I can bolt (1/4" camera thread) the screens of my Philips PET712. Now I need to find a solution for the cables. But I would gladly have paid 2 or 3 times more to get it integrated. The problem is that it's much closer from 10x times.
Even if the results are real, there are a few shortcoming.
Mainly, the performance issue, especially on MacOS, is not limited to video. Even plain simple Flash with animated clip art is a CPU hog. This is what REALLY needs to be benchmarked and documented.
Then, all videos are not equal. For the same bandwith, when comparing H264 in HTML5 and Flash codec in Flash player, we need to compare the CPU usage AND the final quality.
Finally, the test should be performed on the same hardware for both MacOS and Windows.
You all missed the point : this new DRM target was to lock every game to a single account. With such an association, you can not resell your game anymore. As such, they don't even care if the DRM is cracked in 10 years or 10 millisec : you can not legally resell a game that was legally purchased.
In France, 40% of purchased games are used games. I guess that the figure should be more or less the same in other western countries.
So, let's say 100 people are buying the game and 200 are stealing it. Only 60 of them are giving money to the editor, the 40 others are giving money to the reseller shop (fees) and lowering the acquisition cost of a portion of the 60 ones. The 200 pirates do not pay anything and the editors have given up on them.
Now, with this "no more used game" DRM, honest people might not all buy the game : a few because they dont like DRM but most of them won't buy the game because they won't be able to lower their acquisition price buy reselling it. For the editor, as long as there are still 61 people paying the full price for the game, they win. You now have +39 pirates but you have +1 giving money to the editor.
To me, the real target is to kill used video games.
In France, 40% of video games sold are used games. For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO. But video games recyclers get a important commission and every time a customer gets it their shop to resell his game, it's the occasion to sell him goodies, accessories and useless insurances.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't knew that when people were not R[ing]TFA (or actually RTFPaper), it was worth a repost when someone who actually read the paper would talk about it.
"fantastic gameplay" : err, it seems we didn't play the same game.
The license and the physic engine are indeed marvelous. But the camera system is a nightmare : it is alway pointing to the wrong direction and jedis are now ridiculously powerful, like some cheap manga when a single guy is able to break a whole planet.
The sequel (SW:TFU2) is worse because you can finish it in less than 6 hours (for 70$).
I would personally have talked about :
* RED DEAD REDEMPTION : GTA for grown up. The same as GTA but no more gangsta storyline but a good-old-west lonesome cowboy story.
* Assassin's Creed 2 : a strong story, a beautiful execution and a great gameplay
First, your ISP knows AT LEAST your home address, the place where they provide ADSL/cable connection.
Second, your ISP generally provides you with an email address.
At last, your ISP might also request you to provide an alternate email address (personnal, work, ) where they can contact you. This address is generally used to warn you of billing issue and give you a chance to fix the situation before they cut the connection.
You could send an audio file with the IP and the identification read aloud by voice synthesis.
The file itself could sent printed in hexa using 16 different dingbat characters for each possible value to prevent OCR.
So basically copyright holders in France have free reign to find out who any IP address belonged to.
Technically, copyright holders don't know who the IP belongs to. They provide a list of IP to HADOPI, a state run service. HADOPI request the IDs and execute the 3 strikes process (e-mail, snail-mail, disconnection).
With such volumes of request, there's no way their validity will be questioned in any way.
Everything have been crafted that way. There are application notes from the gov discouraging the justice to run additional investigation and proceed to the disconnection solely from the "proofs" provided by copyright holders.
Likely the whole system will soon be automated.
Currently, there is one little glitch : the connection between ISP and HADOPI has not been formally defined. Gov does not want to draft it because the ISP will have the right to define the fees they'll ask to process this id request.
So one ISP sent back the identification printed on paper since the format the id should be sent is not specifically defined.
They provide the IP to an intermediary state run service (named HADOPI). This service requests the ID and send the warnings and ask to close the connection at the 3rd occurence.
So media cartel don't get the final user iD.
Actually, I first answered from what I recalled and submitted the 1st comment. THEN I went in YouTube and the official website to retrieve the video. I thought I would be able to edit my initial post but couldn't find any edit button.
Now this current post is clearly offtopic and a troll. I won't hide the fact that I'm rather proud to have both my comments mod at +5 informative. But can you just believe that I made those comments because I found that the dev diary was awesome and the fact that they mixed together 3 physic engines was a real achievement ?
Media Gallery -> WebDocs / Video -> Unleashing The Tech
Check the dev diaries video from the 1st game : they mixed together 3 physics engine targeting different situations.
Those were the 2 most annoying issues with this game : being unable to see what's happening and being unable to select the trooper you want to eviscerate.
And here Blizzard has a trick : WoW requires a monthly fee. So used games resell aren't a "threat" to its income.
StarCraft 2 would essentially be played online thru its battle.net servers and there you will need to have a valid account and register your game, as you would need to with Ubisoft. No one plays offline and alone.
Ubisoft's AssassinCreed2 is a game you can play only alone. So the "phoning home" from the DRM is artificial while it is "hidden" in games with a naturally online gameplay.
Sorry for "only" 2.66 but that the lowest speed for the i7 and I didn't know which one you had.
So you need a quadcore 8-threaded 2.66GHz CPU to dev applications targetting a single threaded 600MHz device with a 480x320 screen ?
This tells a lot about your integrated development environment.
Do i need to say more ?
"This becomes even worse if the third party is supplying a cross platform development tool."
now explain me how this fits with "VS10 for iPad/iPhone dev".
Yeah sure, Steve Ballmer will very likely speak about VisualStudio 2010 on June the 7th. But this will be at Microsoft Tech-Ed, developper and IT professionnal conference.
How a miss-informed analyst can shake the web by spitting improbable rumours.
(I won't talk about the fact that VS10 is deeply oriented towards the introduction of .NET 4.0 and corresponding C# evolutions, that VS has currently no ObjC parser — and will never include GCC even if it is Apple reference compiler — and that VS GUI editors are built for WinForms and WPF/SilverLight, not Cocoa, so this just ends leveraging their syntax highlighting text editor)
Pressing a BluRay disc costs less than 3$ per disc (price for just 1000). Such a disc can hold 25 to 50 GB. A DVD is around 1$ and holds 5 to 9 GB.
A 16GB USB key is at 30$ and 8GB is 15$ on Amazon. I know this is rewritable but a ROM version won't cut its cost by 90%.
So we won't see SSD replacing discs on data heavy console games anytime soon.
Especially the model you can slip in your pocket and make phone call with.
That would be great to have just a "Interaction Unit" (screen + joystick/ok/cancel + antenna) that can be plugged in GPS boxes from multiple vendors so you can pay for the integration while keeping your freedom to upgrade for the GPS unit of your choice.
The only motivation to buy such an expensive integrated DVD player is ... because it's integrated.
You don't have LCDs loosely attached to the back of your seat, sliding slowly from the head rest to the floor, with ugly and cumbersome straps. You don't have dangling wires going from the player to the screen, with the kids feet in between. You don't have the DVD player resting on the middle seat or on the floor, sliding from far right to far left every time you change direction. You don't have a 12ft power cable going the nearest power jack to the DVD player, running all around your car. And you don't have to lean back and grab the player itself to skip/pause/navigate the DVD.
So, YES, this is VERY expensive but they are people who give a price to simplicity and ease of use.
PS : I've custom build a headrest fixture in which I can bolt (1/4" camera thread) the screens of my Philips PET712. Now I need to find a solution for the cables. But I would gladly have paid 2 or 3 times more to get it integrated. The problem is that it's much closer from 10x times.
Convert it to HTML5
(you can mod me troll)
Windows : 90% market share
iPhone : 25% market share
RIM : 43% market share
Anti-trust laws requires a trust to apply.
Even if the results are real, there are a few shortcoming.
Mainly, the performance issue, especially on MacOS, is
not limited to video. Even plain simple Flash with animated
clip art is a CPU hog. This is what REALLY needs to
be benchmarked and documented.
Then, all videos are not equal. For the same bandwith, when comparing H264 in HTML5 and Flash codec in Flash player, we need to compare the CPU usage AND the final
quality.
Finally, the test should be performed on the same hardware for both MacOS and Windows.
You all missed the point : this new DRM target was to lock every game to a single account. With such an association, you can not resell your game anymore. As such, they don't even care if the DRM is cracked in 10 years or 10 millisec : you can not legally resell a game that was legally purchased.
In France, 40% of purchased games are used games. I guess that the figure should be more or less the same in other western countries.
So, let's say 100 people are buying the game and 200 are stealing it. Only 60 of them are giving money to the editor, the 40 others are giving money to the reseller shop (fees) and lowering the acquisition cost of a portion of the 60 ones. The 200 pirates do not pay anything and the editors have given up on them.
Now, with this "no more used game" DRM, honest people might not all buy the game : a few because they dont like DRM but most of them won't buy the game because they won't be able to lower their acquisition price buy reselling it. For the editor, as long as there are still 61 people paying the full price for the game, they win. You now have +39 pirates but you have +1 giving money to the editor.
To me, the real target is to kill used video games. In France, 40% of video games sold are used games. For every used game sold, the game editor gets ZERO. But video games recyclers get a important commission and every time a customer gets it their shop to resell his game, it's the occasion to sell him goodies, accessories and useless insurances.