You want to force people to get down on all fours to get their anal probe.
You'd think that instead of all this finger scanning, they'd just scan the inside of your ass when they do the anal probe and get it over with in one easy step.
It's fairly likely that this system will be similar to 5C content control, which is already in place on digital cable boxes' firewire ports. That is, the stream itself won't necessarily be encrypted, but the upstream devices will simply refuse to transmit if the downstream devices don't follow the protocol to verify that they are "secure".
Dole was also horribly stiff and unfriendly during the 1996 campaign, compared to the ultra-charismatic Bill Clinton as well as to himself in his numerous TV appearances after he lost the election. He probably still wouldn't have won, but he would at least have had a better showing if he'd just been himself a little more during the campaign.
1) Dean has no bearing on party policy. His job is to keep the grassroots liberals silent while making sure they're still donating their money to the party.
Actually, Dean's job now is to be as left-wing crackpot as possible (since it's fairly obvious after the 2004 primary that he's not going to be presidential material anytime soon), to make it easier for the also-very-liberal Hillary Clinton to seem centrist in time for 2008.
Except stock prices *anticipate* future earnings. If I'm the CFO of a company, and I release an earnings report that states that "We had record earnings this quarter, more than 20% over our previous estimates. Unfortunately, our guidance for the next fiscal year is a drop in earnings of 80%," you better believe that the price of my company's stock is going to fall like a rock.
In this case, Wall Street estimates of Google's 2006 earnings are anywhere from $5.50 to $7.50 a share. If you use the forward P/E ratio for comparable companies (Yahoo's is 60-ish), then Google's price ends up somewhere between $330 and $450. The current price is a conservative estimate - the only reason that the trailing P/E is so high is because earnings *growth* estimates are so huge.
Google may be a good company with good products, but there is nothing realy to justify the insane price their stock is selling for.
Nothing.... except earnings.
Lehman Brothers upped its 2006 earnings forecast for Google to more than $7.50 a share today. If you use the same forward P/E that Yahoo has (60), then you would end up with a price target of $7.50 x 60 = $450.
Google's current price of about $300 is a conservative estimate of its value.
Next thing you know, a journalist is going to do a report on music file sharing/copyright issues/DRM, innocently including a factual statement such as, "Sites such as 'mp3s4free' make copies of songs from CDs available over the web," and she'll get sued for it.
And based on this precedent, it wouldn't be far-fetched for her to lose.
Actually, the only time that a mob would appear right on top of you like that is if the "cheat detection" went off. Back in the day (1999), when not everybody was completely uberized, people actually used to grind XPs in Lavastorm. The less scrupulous would tag a mob, run to the entrance to Najena, and duck to the left just before the zoneline. If they were fast enough, they could do it before the mob got inside the cave entrance, and it would get stuck on the outside of the cave on the hill, where they could nuke it freely (they were outdoors, so no line-of-sight check, and the mob was hung up on the hillside just inside of spell range).
The fix was that if the game detected a mob pathing toward a player, but the mob stopped actually moving for a while, it would just port the mob directly on top of the player. This would sometimes happen in dungeons, but generally the planned pathing was a lot tighter, meaning that while the mob might take the long way to get to you, it would eventually be able to find you without actually going off the "rails". Later content was significantly better in this respect, and things got better again when they revamped the pathing system some time back. There are still spots to avoid, though, if you don't want things to go all screwy on you.
Also, nowadays, pets don't aggro anything unless they are actually attacking something. I'd just note that this is *not* true of WoW - if you drop off a ledge in a dungeon somewhere, your pet will take the safe way down and aggro everything it runs into along the way.
Remember, though, that Raph Koster mentioned in an article linked in another Slashdot post that servers devote roughly 40% of their processing time to pathfinding for NPCs. (The stat was for SWG in particular, though it likely applies to most games with the same NPC-to-PC ratio).
Ballmer is probably under the mistaken impression that the "open source business model" means companies like Red Hat that try to drive a business by leveraging open source software. Sorry, Steve, but the real innovation comes from the trenches, from the people who write open source code without the expectation of making any money off of it at all.
He claims it to be a framework, yes, but in reality it's just Yet Another Computational Model. I wasn't clear about that in the sentence you quoted - sorry.
By the way, note that there's nothing inherently cheesy about developing a framework for something. One could argue that programming languages are merely frameworks for developing software, but nobody tries to downplay the importance of (commonly used) programming languages in the field of engineering computing devices.
Designing these games is a lot like designing the fitness function for a genetic algorithm. You spend some time writing the code, and let it run for a while, only to discover that you have to start over because the GA found a degenerate solution to the fitness function you posed to it.
The difference is that with MMOGs, there's an outlay of millions of dollars and multiple years involved, and just "starting over" isn't really feasible. Since you can never really know for certain whether you got the game design right until the unwashed masses start playing, you're pretty much stuck with the game design, regardless of how successful you were at steering players away from grinding behavior.
"it's a beautiful design, it's the user's fault it doesn't work."
More often than not this is actually true. How many people do you know who grinded away for several levels in one spot and never bothered to see the vast bulk of the content created for their game? Hardcore "achievers" will always find a MMOG boring once the novelty wears off, because no matter what, they will always try to find the quickest route to maximum level/best gear. Since you can never satisfy the achievers in the long term, you might as well come up with a game design that tries to satisfy the explorers and socializers (and maybe even the killers). Those players will find ways to make the most of the content provided to them, rather than squandering it all and becoming bored within six months.
Unfortunately, it seems like most of the vocal players are of the achiever type, which is why there's so much whining on game forums.
I was, er, privileged enough to hear Wolfram speak at the Artificial Life 9 conference last year. Going in, I fully expected his head to expand to fill all available space in the room. But as it turned out, the self-ego-stroking was far less than I expected, and the only particularly ridiculous thing to come out of the talk was his unnecessary use of an acronym - NKS - which stood for nothing more than "New Kind of Science". (The book goes on to suggest that this new kind of science, which is not much more than Yet Another Computational Model, would revolutionize a wide variety of scientific fields. Wolfram was somewhat more reserved concerning this possibility during his talk.)
Three mornings later, Eors Szathmary gave the featured session, helpfully and humorously noting that his talk would for our benefit remain focused on OKS.;)
I think part of the reason is because there has historically been a channel between MMOG players and developers. Since MMOGs are generally works in progress, players see an opportunity to take part in the design process. Unfortunately, many of those players are motivated only by enhancing their own ease-of-gameplay, even at the expense of other players. Since that goal is pretty much directly opposed to the goal of balance held by the game designers, some players view it as a battle to be fought (a sort of "metagame").
In a sort of dramatic irony, part of the reason that some of the more ambitious features of SWG fell flat is because the players, driven by greed and the desire to be first at something, chose to do things the hard-but-fast way instead of doing things the way the game tried to steer them. They should be blaming themselves for the failures in SWG's design, instead of blaming the designers. It's really the players' fault tht eliminating "the grind" is probably the biggest challenge in MMOGs.
By the way, book authors really don't make a good comparison to MMOG designers. But you may cringe at who does:
Politicians.
All those rants on the official boards of whatever game? They're just the 21st century version of a grumpy, crotchety letter to the editor.
How slowly can the pathfinding be updated and still keep things believable for the player? That seems like an easy way to reduce server load. Are people using other optimization techniques as well, like only searching the local portions of the graph, bounding obstacles with large bounding polygons having few vertices, and such?
The MPAA doesn't lose out here. They're still (almost criminally) in control of the movie studios and the distribution of movies. All Freeman is doing is giving them a shove in a particular direction, whether the MPAA likes it or not.
The article indicates how complicit IGE is when it comes to gold* farming (and even accepting duped gold, laundering as necessary). Is it possible that their actions constitute intentional interference with a contract (or intentional inducement of a breach of contract)?
( * by gold, I mean the form of currency in any given game)
I ANAL, but from what I've been able to dig up on the web, proving such a case usually requires proving that (a) the defendant is aware of a contractual elationship between the plaintiff and a third party; (b) the defendant successfully took actions resulting in interference with the execution of the contract; and (c) damages were incurred.
If you accept that EULAs form legally binding contracts between the game company and its customer, then it's easy to prove (a). Every person able to sell gold must either own an account or have access to an account; in the first case, selling the gold violates the EULA, and in the second case, sharing the account violates the EULA. It is impossible to honestly deny the business relationship between the game company and its customer, and it would be easy (given the article in the OP) to prove that IGE is aware of that relationship.
If you accept the reasoning behind (a) as proof, then proving (b) isn't much more difficult. IGE is party to a transaction with a game account holder (bound by the EULA) involving the exchange of in-game gold for real-life cash. By participating in the transaction, IGE is inducing the account holder to violate the EULA.
The tricky part is (c), proving the damages incurred. Game companies could argue that there are additional customer service costs incurred in tracking down EULA violators and terminating their accounts, cleaning up after gold dupes, and performing other miscellaneous and sundry bits of work. One could also argue that there is in-game economic damage caused, which results in dissatisfied customers (an argument best taken up by companies who have suffered large losses in customer base, like Lineage I/II). Just parade witnesses and affidavits, as many as are required, to establish the damages.
Unfortunately, the actual damages caused are probably insufficient to convince IGE to put a halt to their business. A game company would have to land a large punitive judgment against IGE to shut them down (or to ward them off from their game, at least).
There's also the issue of jurisdiction - whether IGE is a U.S. or Hong Kong-based company appears to be somewhat unclear (they claim one subsidiary, the website company, to be U.S.-based, and another, the gold-handling company, to be H.K.-based; the status of the holding company isn't mentioned on their webpage). IGE probably has taken steps to reduce their legal liability through jurisdictional issues, so a game company may not see a dime of a judgment against IGE anyway.
Any thoughts? Would anybody with more legal expertise care to chime in?
They *have* to speed. Ever seen what happens when a cop car ends up in freeway traffic? Nobody has the balls to pass them, even if they're going less than the speed limit.
Slashdot Mirror
we have one chance to make this right and it's all Prince Leia's fault.
...to join Princess Vespa and Princess Valium - (pause) - I'm sorry, it's the hair. Prince Valium....
Minister:
Note that the ads comment was in general - I have no idea whether there are ads in this particular file :/
MPlayer will play .wmv's, and it also won't open your browser to a bunch of ads that were embedded in the .wmv file.
You want to force people to get down on all fours to get their anal probe.
You'd think that instead of all this finger scanning, they'd just scan the inside of your ass when they do the anal probe and get it over with in one easy step.
It's fairly likely that this system will be similar to 5C content control, which is already in place on digital cable boxes' firewire ports. That is, the stream itself won't necessarily be encrypted, but the upstream devices will simply refuse to transmit if the downstream devices don't follow the protocol to verify that they are "secure".
Dole was also horribly stiff and unfriendly during the 1996 campaign, compared to the ultra-charismatic Bill Clinton as well as to himself in his numerous TV appearances after he lost the election. He probably still wouldn't have won, but he would at least have had a better showing if he'd just been himself a little more during the campaign.
1) Dean has no bearing on party policy. His job is to keep the grassroots liberals silent while making sure they're still donating their money to the party.
Actually, Dean's job now is to be as left-wing crackpot as possible (since it's fairly obvious after the 2004 primary that he's not going to be presidential material anytime soon), to make it easier for the also-very-liberal Hillary Clinton to seem centrist in time for 2008.
Except stock prices *anticipate* future earnings. If I'm the CFO of a company, and I release an earnings report that states that "We had record earnings this quarter, more than 20% over our previous estimates. Unfortunately, our guidance for the next fiscal year is a drop in earnings of 80%," you better believe that the price of my company's stock is going to fall like a rock.
In this case, Wall Street estimates of Google's 2006 earnings are anywhere from $5.50 to $7.50 a share. If you use the forward P/E ratio for comparable companies (Yahoo's is 60-ish), then Google's price ends up somewhere between $330 and $450. The current price is a conservative estimate - the only reason that the trailing P/E is so high is because earnings *growth* estimates are so huge.
Google may be a good company with good products, but there is nothing realy to justify the insane price their stock is selling for.
Nothing.... except earnings.
Lehman Brothers upped its 2006 earnings forecast for Google to more than $7.50 a share today. If you use the same forward P/E that Yahoo has (60), then you would end up with a price target of $7.50 x 60 = $450.
Google's current price of about $300 is a conservative estimate of its value.
Next thing you know, a journalist is going to do a report on music file sharing/copyright issues/DRM, innocently including a factual statement such as, "Sites such as 'mp3s4free' make copies of songs from CDs available over the web," and she'll get sued for it.
And based on this precedent, it wouldn't be far-fetched for her to lose.
I'll eat my slashdot user number
With a number as low as 355, all I can say is....
"Less filling, tastes great!"
Actually, the only time that a mob would appear right on top of you like that is if the "cheat detection" went off. Back in the day (1999), when not everybody was completely uberized, people actually used to grind XPs in Lavastorm. The less scrupulous would tag a mob, run to the entrance to Najena, and duck to the left just before the zoneline. If they were fast enough, they could do it before the mob got inside the cave entrance, and it would get stuck on the outside of the cave on the hill, where they could nuke it freely (they were outdoors, so no line-of-sight check, and the mob was hung up on the hillside just inside of spell range).
The fix was that if the game detected a mob pathing toward a player, but the mob stopped actually moving for a while, it would just port the mob directly on top of the player. This would sometimes happen in dungeons, but generally the planned pathing was a lot tighter, meaning that while the mob might take the long way to get to you, it would eventually be able to find you without actually going off the "rails". Later content was significantly better in this respect, and things got better again when they revamped the pathing system some time back. There are still spots to avoid, though, if you don't want things to go all screwy on you.
Also, nowadays, pets don't aggro anything unless they are actually attacking something. I'd just note that this is *not* true of WoW - if you drop off a ledge in a dungeon somewhere, your pet will take the safe way down and aggro everything it runs into along the way.
Remember, though, that Raph Koster mentioned in an article linked in another Slashdot post that servers devote roughly 40% of their processing time to pathfinding for NPCs. (The stat was for SWG in particular, though it likely applies to most games with the same NPC-to-PC ratio).
Ballmer is probably under the mistaken impression that the "open source business model" means companies like Red Hat that try to drive a business by leveraging open source software. Sorry, Steve, but the real innovation comes from the trenches, from the people who write open source code without the expectation of making any money off of it at all.
He claims it to be a framework, yes, but in reality it's just Yet Another Computational Model. I wasn't clear about that in the sentence you quoted - sorry.
By the way, note that there's nothing inherently cheesy about developing a framework for something. One could argue that programming languages are merely frameworks for developing software, but nobody tries to downplay the importance of (commonly used) programming languages in the field of engineering computing devices.
Designing these games is a lot like designing the fitness function for a genetic algorithm. You spend some time writing the code, and let it run for a while, only to discover that you have to start over because the GA found a degenerate solution to the fitness function you posed to it.
The difference is that with MMOGs, there's an outlay of millions of dollars and multiple years involved, and just "starting over" isn't really feasible. Since you can never really know for certain whether you got the game design right until the unwashed masses start playing, you're pretty much stuck with the game design, regardless of how successful you were at steering players away from grinding behavior.
"it's a beautiful design, it's the user's fault it doesn't work."
More often than not this is actually true. How many people do you know who grinded away for several levels in one spot and never bothered to see the vast bulk of the content created for their game? Hardcore "achievers" will always find a MMOG boring once the novelty wears off, because no matter what, they will always try to find the quickest route to maximum level/best gear. Since you can never satisfy the achievers in the long term, you might as well come up with a game design that tries to satisfy the explorers and socializers (and maybe even the killers). Those players will find ways to make the most of the content provided to them, rather than squandering it all and becoming bored within six months.
Unfortunately, it seems like most of the vocal players are of the achiever type, which is why there's so much whining on game forums.
I was, er, privileged enough to hear Wolfram speak at the Artificial Life 9 conference last year. Going in, I fully expected his head to expand to fill all available space in the room. But as it turned out, the self-ego-stroking was far less than I expected, and the only particularly ridiculous thing to come out of the talk was his unnecessary use of an acronym - NKS - which stood for nothing more than "New Kind of Science". (The book goes on to suggest that this new kind of science, which is not much more than Yet Another Computational Model, would revolutionize a wide variety of scientific fields. Wolfram was somewhat more reserved concerning this possibility during his talk.)
;)
Three mornings later, Eors Szathmary gave the featured session, helpfully and humorously noting that his talk would for our benefit remain focused on OKS.
I think part of the reason is because there has historically been a channel between MMOG players and developers. Since MMOGs are generally works in progress, players see an opportunity to take part in the design process. Unfortunately, many of those players are motivated only by enhancing their own ease-of-gameplay, even at the expense of other players. Since that goal is pretty much directly opposed to the goal of balance held by the game designers, some players view it as a battle to be fought (a sort of "metagame").
In a sort of dramatic irony, part of the reason that some of the more ambitious features of SWG fell flat is because the players, driven by greed and the desire to be first at something, chose to do things the hard-but-fast way instead of doing things the way the game tried to steer them. They should be blaming themselves for the failures in SWG's design, instead of blaming the designers. It's really the players' fault tht eliminating "the grind" is probably the biggest challenge in MMOGs.
By the way, book authors really don't make a good comparison to MMOG designers. But you may cringe at who does:
Politicians.
All those rants on the official boards of whatever game? They're just the 21st century version of a grumpy, crotchety letter to the editor.
How slowly can the pathfinding be updated and still keep things believable for the player? That seems like an easy way to reduce server load. Are people using other optimization techniques as well, like only searching the local portions of the graph, bounding obstacles with large bounding polygons having few vertices, and such?
Apparently, people place value on learning from the mistakes of others.
The MPAA doesn't lose out here. They're still (almost criminally) in control of the movie studios and the distribution of movies. All Freeman is doing is giving them a shove in a particular direction, whether the MPAA likes it or not.
The article indicates how complicit IGE is when it comes to gold* farming (and even accepting duped gold, laundering as necessary). Is it possible that their actions constitute intentional interference with a contract (or intentional inducement of a breach of contract)?
( * by gold, I mean the form of currency in any given game)
I ANAL, but from what I've been able to dig up on the web, proving such a case usually requires proving that (a) the defendant is aware of a contractual elationship between the plaintiff and a third party; (b) the defendant successfully took actions resulting in interference with the execution of the contract; and (c) damages were incurred.
See http://www.pumilia.com/articles/article3.htm for more info.
If you accept that EULAs form legally binding contracts between the game company and its customer, then it's easy to prove (a). Every person able to sell gold must either own an account or have access to an account; in the first case, selling the gold violates the EULA, and in the second case, sharing the account violates the EULA. It is impossible to honestly deny the business relationship between the game company and its customer, and it would be easy (given the article in the OP) to prove that IGE is aware of that relationship.
If you accept the reasoning behind (a) as proof, then proving (b) isn't much more difficult. IGE is party to a transaction with a game account holder (bound by the EULA) involving the exchange of in-game gold for real-life cash. By participating in the transaction, IGE is inducing the account holder to violate the EULA.
The tricky part is (c), proving the damages incurred. Game companies could argue that there are additional customer service costs incurred in tracking down EULA violators and terminating their accounts, cleaning up after gold dupes, and performing other miscellaneous and sundry bits of work. One could also argue that there is in-game economic damage caused, which results in dissatisfied customers (an argument best taken up by companies who have suffered large losses in customer base, like Lineage I/II). Just parade witnesses and affidavits, as many as are required, to establish the damages.
Unfortunately, the actual damages caused are probably insufficient to convince IGE to put a halt to their business. A game company would have to land a large punitive judgment against IGE to shut them down (or to ward them off from their game, at least).
There's also the issue of jurisdiction - whether IGE is a U.S. or Hong Kong-based company appears to be somewhat unclear (they claim one subsidiary, the website company, to be U.S.-based, and another, the gold-handling company, to be H.K.-based; the status of the holding company isn't mentioned on their webpage). IGE probably has taken steps to reduce their legal liability through jurisdictional issues, so a game company may not see a dime of a judgment against IGE anyway.
Any thoughts? Would anybody with more legal expertise care to chime in?
Programming is like cooking - at its best, it's the combination of art *and* science. It's one part Emeril Lagasse and one part Alton Brown.
They *have* to speed. Ever seen what happens when a cop car ends up in freeway traffic? Nobody has the balls to pass them, even if they're going less than the speed limit.
This joke may need to be explained to us Yanks. ;)