No... but I could hit you acting that we-tawd-ed.
The last thing we need to do in this world is to spread even MORE idiocy around. I can hardly take a walk down the street anymore without being assaulted by ineptness in some way or another.
Back to topic though, I honestly don't see the need to protect one's NAME. Sure, you're I can justify making records of your ACTIONS private or even disassociated (voting ballots). However I can only envision very rare cases where one's IDENTITY need be anonymous (battered spouce, WitPro), and in these rare cases there are in fact steps that can be made to change one's identity to one that would otherwise be unrecognizeable. It's not foolproof, but nothing ever is. If I want to know who you are there are literally hundreds of ways that I can legally do it. As the opinion noted, one's identity is hardly private domain knowledge anyways as you have to disseminate that information to countless other entities and do so frequently with the odd exception of the recluse.
The concept of anonymous IDENTITY in the public is absurd, the concept of anonymous ACTION in the public is more on target... but even that gets abused by privacy nuts from time to time in my opinion. I'd personally like to know if a 2 time rape offender just moved in to the house next to mine after getting out of jail.
Privacy then simply comes down to the question of which is more important: Personal privacy or Public/Community safety. I'd rather err on the side of Public/Community safety.
WE are more important than YOU.
Much like the comment on the front page says, I would have to first assume that you have an INTP class personality. Go google it to find all you want about it. Needless to say, I am also one of the few belonging to that personality class. I had difficulty much like you in highschool and early college... and even to some degree in my postgraduate work. The thing that got me by was a proffessor (also of that same personality class) who started working with me about developing an "outside world" mask.
Basically, I have had to engineer a personality complete with social and personal mannerisms that I can use in the "real world." You'll simply have to develop this if you want to get hired and lead a seemingly "normal" life. Otherwise you'll find yourself alone (not always a bad thing) and very much unapproachable/unlikeable and it could have a detrimental effect on you're life in countless many ways. You just have to face the fact that this world is an extrovertive "normal" world (read: filled with extrovertive "normal" people) and you have to live among and in some cases WITH them (ever plan on getting married some day?... yah, personality counts there too.)
D to me just seems like a language that rehashes a language that doesn't really need to be rehashed. Not that that's a bad thing necessarily, I'm always in favor of innovation. However, I don't see it making much of a difference unless it can make a particularly BIG splash in the sea of languages that already exist. There's also a factor of familiarity of languages and/or their use in certain situations.
I for one generally program in one of three different situations. On the one hand, I deal with programming low level drivers and/or real-time systems and programming high performance engines (whether networking, graphics, or sound oriented)and so I use C for the obvious reasons of speed and low level control. On the other hand, I also involve myself in programming GUI based business apps and web services and so I also use C# for its relatively rapid devel time. On yet another hand (didn't know I had 3......), I use Perl when i'm feeling like doing some system administration scripting or web interface scripting.
Even if D (or some other further iteration) becomes the absolute best language to do everything in (which I doubt) I still have my three languages that do everything I really need to do (with the occasional offshoot into LISP for personal AI projects).
Why do people think that the command line is *not* "user friendly"? Do we write books by pointing and clicking at icons, avatars, and pictures? Except under amazing cirumcstances (Steven Hawking, the blind, etc) would you hire an author that did? Then why a system administrator?
Simply put, not all machines that need to be used are going to be used solely by the system administrator. The simplest example being your common system user. While a command line is indeed user friendly if you already know how to use it, it can be daunting and intimidating if you're more familiar with graphical environments. If the argument that "the commandline can do everything and is still user friendly" actually held true, then I would say that graphical interfaces would likely have never been invented, nor grown to such popularity.
Back to the original question posed by the article though, there have been many research articles in the past few years that have all come to the same conclusion that adding security features will generally detriment useability.
Some security aspects are in fact invisible to users, but if you are trying to secure all potential transactions that your common user initiates then it adds steps upon steps of procedure and policy that the user has to go through in order to complete the transaction. Following that line of thought, there comes a point where adding too many security features actually renders a system unusable.
Dorothy Denning has spoken many times of when she was working on a secure database project (complete with fully polyinstantiated tables and user authentication) for a government contract and the project ended up as a failure because of its lack of useability and general expense.
There is also a trend that the more useable a product is, the more popular it becomes, the more it becomes used, and the bigger a target for attacks in general. As is, Linux is hardly "secure", nor is OS X for that matter. When they become the dominant workstation platform of the world then I daresay that much of the security hype of said OS's will prove largely exaggerated. Just because Windows is the favorite for attacks also does not mean that it is any less secure than the other OS's. Quite frankly, they've hardly been put to the test to make a fair comparison to begin with.
Based upon those two reasons, I'd say that the hypothesis that Usability degrades Security (and vice-versa) stands as a reasonable argument.
This law is not being put into place to restrict the sales of M-rated games, it is simply to make them well marked. This raises the awareness to conscious parents allowing them to make more educated choices to what to allow their kids to play.
Now, some of the long reaching and indirect effects would mean a shift in what is generally considered acceptable on the developers end. Psychologically this law would actually stop sales of a significant number of units simply because it raises awareness. This would hopefully mean that developers would look at the T-rating to be the cash crop rating much like PG-13 is the movie cash crop rating.
I'll be the first to admit that I was raised on violent video games and movies and I turned out just fine. However, not everyone has my firm grasp on reality and my ethical resolve. Following that line of thought, it is rediculous to assume that everyone else would have that same grasp on reality and ethical resolve. This is why ratings are put in place, and laws enforcing those ratings, or at the very least informing about the ratings as in this case, are enacted. I just don't see how this could possibly be a bad thing.
Just because you CAN do something does not mean you SHOULD.
then why the hell are you using some 3rd party service to hold that email. As is, most email is unsecured and technically stored many places on transit anyway (caching effects and the like). To top that off, even if you decide to do it all yourself on your own machines, I work with forensic tools that can recover shit that had been written over as many as 20 times previously and reconstruct what was there. So if you're REALLY concerned about your privacy or the security of your communication service you had better stick to inviting your friends into darkened, soundproof rooms... talking at a whisper and without moving your lips just to be sure.
Basically it boils down to the rediculous nature of any complaint that something in the digital realm... especially on the internet... actually be "secure" or "private". OK, so there happen to be pretty nice encryption protocols that do pretty nicely, but they're not used all that often on items deemed "less than critically sensitive" in the large scheme of things. These people generally give me large headaches and the desire to go postal on little kids or something....
Lets face it... we'll always have to deal with "end users"... scary huh.
Who exactly to you mean by "they". iD isn't handling coding for the Xbox. The porting group is. In that context iD has NOT already solved these problems. Not to mention the solution on the Xbox is very much NOT what we want for a PC. I don't want to have to sit next to my friend to play co-op with him on one monitor. For PC, the proper network communication protocols would have to be derived for syncronization (duh), but more importantly script syncronization would have to be taken care of. That's easy to do when both players are on the local machine sharing the same resources and the same screen display (split screen). Going the extra mile to co-op over network is a pretty long mile if you haven't specifically included that in your original design.
Ah... but it ISNT implemented in the code so to speak.
You have to remember that the codebase is for the PC version alone. VV is responsible for porting it to the Xbox. iD is not designing the game with co-op in mind... VV is designing the PORT with co-op in mind. You can look a co-op as a pre-release mod hard coded into the Xbox release. Aside from that, co-op play can be a tricky thing to code up. Let me give you an example to illustrate this point.
Assume you are playing a single player mission. You play on a map where the map designer had intentions of trapping you in a small room once stepping on a certain platform. In co-op if the code requires that only one player be on the platform to activate the scripts then it is entirely possible to catch your teammates outside of the situation with the possibility of getting them perpetually stuck (due to later puzzles that would require the entire party to be present). Likewise, if you code that all party members must be on the platform before the trap is activated you have to rely on the fact that all the players are going to know to do this. It is also entirely possible that even with co-op principles in mind the map designer fails to realize the potential number of players that might be playing at one time and designs certain triggers too small for the entire large party to fit in... thus impeding progress yet again.
By no means does this mean that it is impossible to do co-op nicely. However it DOES mean that there are likely to be longer development cycles due to the large deal of complexity required to go into something like that. It would better be left up to an expansion pack or patch or left alone in favor of hoping some mod project picks up co-op.
Touching back on the statement that "iD is not making the code with co-op in mind" I would remind you that if they HAD initially designed the game to be played co-op and "oh by the way" single player as well then there would be no reason not to include it in the PC version. It is much harder to do it the other way around. NWN and its expansions DID have co-op play in the design of the game and so making it singleplayer is a simple process. It just so happens that some of the earlier co-op able games were simple enough to make the transition from single player to co-op without too much hassle. Even then I have been stuck in Doom2 when odd bugs arose that are only possible in co-op mode and largely unforseeable until it accidentally happens.
It is particularly easy to translate singleplayer to co-op when progression is limited to killing key entities and/or limited branch paths to goals. However once you start adding in puzzles and traps and scripted events the effort to orchestrate everything becomes noticeably difficult.
Those of us that have been playing games for 10+ years have for the most part become very adept at playing the games we play. However the newcomers don't have our vast vaults of knowledge with which to rely on and find them very difficult. Case in point: both my little brother and my father are fairly new to the gaming scene and they have a great deal of trouble playing many games to completion because they find them too difficult... however I can play through the whole game in a matter of minutes. If developers constantly made games more and more challenging on par to the existing players, they'd never really latch onto newer players in any significant way. They would basically limit their market to one generation of gamers... and then die out because after a while no one is left that can even approach succeeding at any game that is put out. If the company wants to stay in business they have to create games at a fairly predictable level of difficulty and occasionally include an uber hard difficulty that assuages even the most 1337 gamers out there.
Actually they DO know game concepts sell to females by the millions. Surely you've heard of the rampant success that games like Sims and its myriad of expansions have had. There ARE games out there that are very popular with the ladies. It just so happens that most of them could care less about our fast-paced blood and guts frag fests. If they WANT to play the game, then they'll buy it and play it. Its not like its on a shelf in best buy that is too high for any women, yet miraculously easy to acquire for men. Simply put, the money to be made from the female gaming community is largely in sectors that have gameplay similar to Sims, many MMOs, and any other game focusing more on social interation rather than direct competition and definitive victory.
Its not so much that women can or can't participate in the same brackets as men.
The point is that the winnings of any competition are distributed by the mandates of the competitions holders, not those participating in it. We live in a capitalist society (well most of the world anyways) and that means that the man with the money makes all the rules. If the competitions holders want to discriminate then that is their prerogative. Its not like you are forced to participate in that competition if you feel the policies to be discriminatory. There are plenty of other competitions that aren't discriminatory.
Likewise, those admins on public servers that wish to be can be as discriminatory as they want. Discrimination is not illegal, only more expensive. A company that wants to maintain its right to be selective about its employees without regard to equal opportunity simply have to pay fines and be marked as such. The government isn't going to put them out of business because of this.
But then again I don't really see the point of playing to the point that you are so good to warrant going to any of these competitions. That's just too much time invested in a practice that can't pay the bills for the majority of those who participate. Its not like professional sports where all the athletes still make a living whether they lose or not.
The bottom line is, if its not yours then you have to live by the edicts of its owner when using it. Pretty simple concept really. Its surprising to see as many people as I do feeling entitled to equal access to someone else's holdings.
think about it.
If outsourcing trends continue as they are now including in fields other than the current business sectors it heavily affects now, the entire country will inevitably be a bunch of international business that don't really do any work, but just rake in the money that everyone else earns for them.
I'd shudder to think that the only viable college degree in the future will be some form of business administration. The entire US will be full of managers managing other managers while all the foreign countries provide us with our real revenue.
Many of the arguments i've read thus far have a lot to do with the logical reasoning of a situation and how it applies to rules set by the situations creator. These arguments go on to state that the enjoyability of a situation (read game/story/movie) is directly linked to how logically believable that situation is.
One thing I'd like to mention though... not all people that play games, read stories, and watch movies are as logically analytical of situations as many of the brainiacs that frequent this site are. I would actually pose that people who do NOT think on the lines of logical reasonability actually have MORE fun than the rest. Instead of a situations feasibility relying upon their ability to logically comprehend it, they rely upon their imagination to fill in the holes that a more analytical person would blatantly complain about to the point of becoming discontent.
For example, one friend of mine having the brain of 5 men considered the latest Matrix movie to be so full of holes that he promptly left the theatres out of utter frustration and disbelief. I on the other hand was more in tune with the symbolics and fantasy of the movie and consider it to be an excellent end to one of the world's greatest contemporary epic cinematic works (second only to the LotR installments).
The same thing applies to many of the games we play. He is almost logically stubborn to the point that any kind of fantasy role-playing game is anathema. I on the other hand find many of the games he plays tedious and dull while he holds that they are some of the best games ever known to man.
To wrap things up, it is a disgrace to think that only logically believable games can be enjoyed because you discount the rest of the gaming population that enjoys their games more with thier creative side.
While I agree that MS having a monopoly is a bad thing, I hardly think that *nix has what it takes to truly compete with them on the home user front. The MS platform has the largest proliferation of software available, not to mention most home users are basically very familiar with the windows environment and the apps that have traditionally come with it. For any viable competition on the home market to arise they would have to be 100% compatible with everything MS supports and then have features that surpass them (for instance, heightened security).
Everyone here already knows that the *nix platform is already more complex than most people are willing to cope with. Even with distributions as user-friendly as RedHat and SuSe there is still a shortage of convenience that many home users would demand. This is not to say that MS is necesarily more convenient, but these people are already acclemated to its environment. Throwing something at them that is totally different will give most a pretty good scare. On top of that, none of their familiar software suites are there to comfort them.
Now while I really appreciate the work that Lindows tries to do, they just aren't getting it done... whatever it is. If we as the uber-geeks of the world really want to persuade the rest of the tech-illiterate to our side we're going to have to make something that they will take a bite into... then we'll see about weaning them out of their familiar software suites with our superior OS solutions.
I think the greatest place to start is to tone down the absolute customizable nature of *nix distributions. If we create a common distro base that is extremely user friendly and not necessarily "maximum utility" and then name everything else extra (yes even the development tools) then we stand a chance. The next step would be to write up a fully functional kernel loosely (very loosely) based on *nix that supports everything that is Win32.
Obviously a very difficult job, but who among us is truly up to the challenge? Until something like this happens I see no end to MS's monopoly in the near future.
...extends back almost to the Big Bang at the top...
I thought that at this point the Big Bang theory has actually been disproven without a shadow of doubt by many teams of blast physicists and astronomers all confirming each others work.
Anyone have an upgrade of Scientist 4.8.32.1 lying around to send to thees guys? Their making wonderful art based on old / false info. It really surprises me that this falsehood is still acceptable in the respectable halls of Princeton... or did they just not get the memo?
You think that just because stores are accepting pre-orders that the game is going to come out? Don't get me wrong... I admit it's possible, but unlikely.
We all remember what happened with Half-Life 2 right? There were plenty of places touting pre-orders for it three months of its initial proposed release. How long has it been since then? And to top that, we STILL don't have an official release date on the thing (though we do have confirmation that the SDK will be coming out soon... however long that is).
Try a denial of service approach instead of a power enabling approach. Set your kids' account(s) to an administrative role. Then add them also to a "Kids" group. Then for all the Directories/Files that you want to restrict access to, place denial permissions for the "Kids" group. I would assume that you would do this for just about every folder except their account settings folder and the "Games" folder.
One thing I would like to note is that I wish game developers were more concious of the fact that not all players will have administrative rights on their machines and should code it the 'correct' way for multi-user systems. I have done this on two separate projects myself and the process of making the game multi-user friendly is only about 10 (15 max) lines of code during installation and MAYBE an extra 50 lines of code in the actual game itself. That's hardly even half a day's work. In fact the only part of a game that MAY need administrative properties should only be the installer itself (or perhaps a service/daemon oriented server mechanism).
I'm all for laziness... even to the point of vowing upon it as a prime virtue... but that's just rediculous guys.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving artists their fair share for providing much needed entertainment.
BUT!!!
What exactly constitutes fair share? In many cases, I believe that the majority of musicians are in fact receiving their fair share, but this majority of musicians do not include those supported by big labels and represented by RIAA. Quite frankly it sickens me to see some crack addict write a few repetitive phrases and mumble them to a beat and get paid 10 times more than cancer cure researchers... hell... even garbage men have a more important, productive purpose in society.
Personally I believe dissemination of music (or any other intellectual property for that matter) should be absolutely free. The methods of dissemination should mandate a monetary value (ie. the RIAA can still sell their cds as long as they don't mind going out of business).
If a band wants to actually make money on their "intellectual property" then go get hooked up at the local bar or something. Playing for a live audience becomes the dissemination of the music. In fact, I think its totally legit if another band comes along and plays the song and makes money off the performance (dissemintaion). I say give the creator a small part of the proceeds (say 5%). But this only applies when you are trying to disseminate for profit. If you have no plans on making money through the dissemination, then 5% of nothing is nothing. The only thing that I truly care about is proper accreditation.
Honestly, I feel sorry for the musician that wants to live solely off the proceeds of his music, because his situation is simply in the crapper. I say go to college and become a CPA as an alternative... never can be enough CPA's and they make a pretty penny too!
This is a topic of which I am thouroughly interested. I think there is definitely something to be said about your classic side-scroller games like super mario brothers, contra, and castlevania. Taking these games into the realm of 3D, and all the benefits therein, does not mean you have to take away the all important side-scrolling aspect though. The latest smash brothers game is a good example of what I'm talking about. Granted the genre of that particular game does not allow it much extension into the free-roaming aspect of other games, but it serves at least as a visual guide for other games to follow suit.
That aside, there are also some very key places that I would much prefer a very detailed free-roaming 3D environment. If the game was focused on story moreso than gameplay and using camera angles and lighting to set moods and create drama, then there is a good reason to implement a free-roaming environment. I think that is where these new itereations of Castlevania and its look-alikes (Devil May Cry) are pushing towards.
This is not to say that gameplay is not an important factor, however, highly satisfying gameplay in a free-roaming environment requires some level of complexity that simply does not exist on your side-scroller games. Following this argument, if storyline and plot aren't incredibly key to your game's entertainment factor, you may want to consider making the game into a side-scroller, whether it be in 3D or 2D. I haven't actually played it, but I think Viewtiful Joe would be a prime example of this.
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No... but I could hit you acting that we-tawd-ed. The last thing we need to do in this world is to spread even MORE idiocy around. I can hardly take a walk down the street anymore without being assaulted by ineptness in some way or another. Back to topic though, I honestly don't see the need to protect one's NAME. Sure, you're I can justify making records of your ACTIONS private or even disassociated (voting ballots). However I can only envision very rare cases where one's IDENTITY need be anonymous (battered spouce, WitPro), and in these rare cases there are in fact steps that can be made to change one's identity to one that would otherwise be unrecognizeable. It's not foolproof, but nothing ever is. If I want to know who you are there are literally hundreds of ways that I can legally do it. As the opinion noted, one's identity is hardly private domain knowledge anyways as you have to disseminate that information to countless other entities and do so frequently with the odd exception of the recluse. The concept of anonymous IDENTITY in the public is absurd, the concept of anonymous ACTION in the public is more on target... but even that gets abused by privacy nuts from time to time in my opinion. I'd personally like to know if a 2 time rape offender just moved in to the house next to mine after getting out of jail. Privacy then simply comes down to the question of which is more important: Personal privacy or Public/Community safety. I'd rather err on the side of Public/Community safety. WE are more important than YOU.
Much like the comment on the front page says, I would have to first assume that you have an INTP class personality. Go google it to find all you want about it. Needless to say, I am also one of the few belonging to that personality class. I had difficulty much like you in highschool and early college... and even to some degree in my postgraduate work. The thing that got me by was a proffessor (also of that same personality class) who started working with me about developing an "outside world" mask.
Basically, I have had to engineer a personality complete with social and personal mannerisms that I can use in the "real world." You'll simply have to develop this if you want to get hired and lead a seemingly "normal" life. Otherwise you'll find yourself alone (not always a bad thing) and very much unapproachable/unlikeable and it could have a detrimental effect on you're life in countless many ways. You just have to face the fact that this world is an extrovertive "normal" world (read: filled with extrovertive "normal" people) and you have to live among and in some cases WITH them (ever plan on getting married some day?... yah, personality counts there too.)
D to me just seems like a language that rehashes a language that doesn't really need to be rehashed. Not that that's a bad thing necessarily, I'm always in favor of innovation. However, I don't see it making much of a difference unless it can make a particularly BIG splash in the sea of languages that already exist. There's also a factor of familiarity of languages and/or their use in certain situations.
I for one generally program in one of three different situations. On the one hand, I deal with programming low level drivers and/or real-time systems and programming high performance engines (whether networking, graphics, or sound oriented)and so I use C for the obvious reasons of speed and low level control. On the other hand, I also involve myself in programming GUI based business apps and web services and so I also use C# for its relatively rapid devel time. On yet another hand (didn't know I had 3......), I use Perl when i'm feeling like doing some system administration scripting or web interface scripting.
Even if D (or some other further iteration) becomes the absolute best language to do everything in (which I doubt) I still have my three languages that do everything I really need to do (with the occasional offshoot into LISP for personal AI projects).
Why do people think that the command line is *not* "user friendly"? Do we write books by pointing and clicking at icons, avatars, and pictures? Except under amazing cirumcstances (Steven Hawking, the blind, etc) would you hire an author that did? Then why a system administrator?
Simply put, not all machines that need to be used are going to be used solely by the system administrator. The simplest example being your common system user. While a command line is indeed user friendly if you already know how to use it, it can be daunting and intimidating if you're more familiar with graphical environments. If the argument that "the commandline can do everything and is still user friendly" actually held true, then I would say that graphical interfaces would likely have never been invented, nor grown to such popularity.
Back to the original question posed by the article though, there have been many research articles in the past few years that have all come to the same conclusion that adding security features will generally detriment useability.
Some security aspects are in fact invisible to users, but if you are trying to secure all potential transactions that your common user initiates then it adds steps upon steps of procedure and policy that the user has to go through in order to complete the transaction. Following that line of thought, there comes a point where adding too many security features actually renders a system unusable.
Dorothy Denning has spoken many times of when she was working on a secure database project (complete with fully polyinstantiated tables and user authentication) for a government contract and the project ended up as a failure because of its lack of useability and general expense.
There is also a trend that the more useable a product is, the more popular it becomes, the more it becomes used, and the bigger a target for attacks in general. As is, Linux is hardly "secure", nor is OS X for that matter. When they become the dominant workstation platform of the world then I daresay that much of the security hype of said OS's will prove largely exaggerated. Just because Windows is the favorite for attacks also does not mean that it is any less secure than the other OS's. Quite frankly, they've hardly been put to the test to make a fair comparison to begin with.
Based upon those two reasons, I'd say that the hypothesis that Usability degrades Security (and vice-versa) stands as a reasonable argument.
This law is not being put into place to restrict the sales of M-rated games, it is simply to make them well marked. This raises the awareness to conscious parents allowing them to make more educated choices to what to allow their kids to play.
Now, some of the long reaching and indirect effects would mean a shift in what is generally considered acceptable on the developers end. Psychologically this law would actually stop sales of a significant number of units simply because it raises awareness. This would hopefully mean that developers would look at the T-rating to be the cash crop rating much like PG-13 is the movie cash crop rating.
I'll be the first to admit that I was raised on violent video games and movies and I turned out just fine. However, not everyone has my firm grasp on reality and my ethical resolve. Following that line of thought, it is rediculous to assume that everyone else would have that same grasp on reality and ethical resolve. This is why ratings are put in place, and laws enforcing those ratings, or at the very least informing about the ratings as in this case, are enacted. I just don't see how this could possibly be a bad thing.
Just because you CAN do something does not mean you SHOULD.
then why the hell are you using some 3rd party service to hold that email. As is, most email is unsecured and technically stored many places on transit anyway (caching effects and the like). To top that off, even if you decide to do it all yourself on your own machines, I work with forensic tools that can recover shit that had been written over as many as 20 times previously and reconstruct what was there. So if you're REALLY concerned about your privacy or the security of your communication service you had better stick to inviting your friends into darkened, soundproof rooms... talking at a whisper and without moving your lips just to be sure.
Basically it boils down to the rediculous nature of any complaint that something in the digital realm... especially on the internet... actually be "secure" or "private". OK, so there happen to be pretty nice encryption protocols that do pretty nicely, but they're not used all that often on items deemed "less than critically sensitive" in the large scheme of things. These people generally give me large headaches and the desire to go postal on little kids or something....
Lets face it... we'll always have to deal with "end users"... scary huh.
Who exactly to you mean by "they". iD isn't handling coding for the Xbox. The porting group is. In that context iD has NOT already solved these problems. Not to mention the solution on the Xbox is very much NOT what we want for a PC. I don't want to have to sit next to my friend to play co-op with him on one monitor. For PC, the proper network communication protocols would have to be derived for syncronization (duh), but more importantly script syncronization would have to be taken care of. That's easy to do when both players are on the local machine sharing the same resources and the same screen display (split screen). Going the extra mile to co-op over network is a pretty long mile if you haven't specifically included that in your original design.
Ah... but it ISNT implemented in the code so to speak. You have to remember that the codebase is for the PC version alone. VV is responsible for porting it to the Xbox. iD is not designing the game with co-op in mind... VV is designing the PORT with co-op in mind. You can look a co-op as a pre-release mod hard coded into the Xbox release. Aside from that, co-op play can be a tricky thing to code up. Let me give you an example to illustrate this point. Assume you are playing a single player mission. You play on a map where the map designer had intentions of trapping you in a small room once stepping on a certain platform. In co-op if the code requires that only one player be on the platform to activate the scripts then it is entirely possible to catch your teammates outside of the situation with the possibility of getting them perpetually stuck (due to later puzzles that would require the entire party to be present). Likewise, if you code that all party members must be on the platform before the trap is activated you have to rely on the fact that all the players are going to know to do this. It is also entirely possible that even with co-op principles in mind the map designer fails to realize the potential number of players that might be playing at one time and designs certain triggers too small for the entire large party to fit in... thus impeding progress yet again. By no means does this mean that it is impossible to do co-op nicely. However it DOES mean that there are likely to be longer development cycles due to the large deal of complexity required to go into something like that. It would better be left up to an expansion pack or patch or left alone in favor of hoping some mod project picks up co-op. Touching back on the statement that "iD is not making the code with co-op in mind" I would remind you that if they HAD initially designed the game to be played co-op and "oh by the way" single player as well then there would be no reason not to include it in the PC version. It is much harder to do it the other way around. NWN and its expansions DID have co-op play in the design of the game and so making it singleplayer is a simple process. It just so happens that some of the earlier co-op able games were simple enough to make the transition from single player to co-op without too much hassle. Even then I have been stuck in Doom2 when odd bugs arose that are only possible in co-op mode and largely unforseeable until it accidentally happens. It is particularly easy to translate singleplayer to co-op when progression is limited to killing key entities and/or limited branch paths to goals. However once you start adding in puzzles and traps and scripted events the effort to orchestrate everything becomes noticeably difficult.
Those of us that have been playing games for 10+ years have for the most part become very adept at playing the games we play. However the newcomers don't have our vast vaults of knowledge with which to rely on and find them very difficult. Case in point: both my little brother and my father are fairly new to the gaming scene and they have a great deal of trouble playing many games to completion because they find them too difficult... however I can play through the whole game in a matter of minutes. If developers constantly made games more and more challenging on par to the existing players, they'd never really latch onto newer players in any significant way. They would basically limit their market to one generation of gamers... and then die out because after a while no one is left that can even approach succeeding at any game that is put out. If the company wants to stay in business they have to create games at a fairly predictable level of difficulty and occasionally include an uber hard difficulty that assuages even the most 1337 gamers out there.
Enter the age where I can have my device tell your device to send a million copies of pr0n adverts to all my enemies. MWAHAHAHAHA!!!
Actually they DO know game concepts sell to females by the millions. Surely you've heard of the rampant success that games like Sims and its myriad of expansions have had. There ARE games out there that are very popular with the ladies. It just so happens that most of them could care less about our fast-paced blood and guts frag fests. If they WANT to play the game, then they'll buy it and play it. Its not like its on a shelf in best buy that is too high for any women, yet miraculously easy to acquire for men. Simply put, the money to be made from the female gaming community is largely in sectors that have gameplay similar to Sims, many MMOs, and any other game focusing more on social interation rather than direct competition and definitive victory.
Its not so much that women can or can't participate in the same brackets as men.
The point is that the winnings of any competition are distributed by the mandates of the competitions holders, not those participating in it. We live in a capitalist society (well most of the world anyways) and that means that the man with the money makes all the rules. If the competitions holders want to discriminate then that is their prerogative. Its not like you are forced to participate in that competition if you feel the policies to be discriminatory. There are plenty of other competitions that aren't discriminatory.
Likewise, those admins on public servers that wish to be can be as discriminatory as they want. Discrimination is not illegal, only more expensive. A company that wants to maintain its right to be selective about its employees without regard to equal opportunity simply have to pay fines and be marked as such. The government isn't going to put them out of business because of this.
But then again I don't really see the point of playing to the point that you are so good to warrant going to any of these competitions. That's just too much time invested in a practice that can't pay the bills for the majority of those who participate. Its not like professional sports where all the athletes still make a living whether they lose or not.
The bottom line is, if its not yours then you have to live by the edicts of its owner when using it. Pretty simple concept really. Its surprising to see as many people as I do feeling entitled to equal access to someone else's holdings.
think about it. If outsourcing trends continue as they are now including in fields other than the current business sectors it heavily affects now, the entire country will inevitably be a bunch of international business that don't really do any work, but just rake in the money that everyone else earns for them. I'd shudder to think that the only viable college degree in the future will be some form of business administration. The entire US will be full of managers managing other managers while all the foreign countries provide us with our real revenue.
... how about believable.
Many of the arguments i've read thus far have a lot to do with the logical reasoning of a situation and how it applies to rules set by the situations creator. These arguments go on to state that the enjoyability of a situation (read game/story/movie) is directly linked to how logically believable that situation is.
One thing I'd like to mention though... not all people that play games, read stories, and watch movies are as logically analytical of situations as many of the brainiacs that frequent this site are. I would actually pose that people who do NOT think on the lines of logical reasonability actually have MORE fun than the rest. Instead of a situations feasibility relying upon their ability to logically comprehend it, they rely upon their imagination to fill in the holes that a more analytical person would blatantly complain about to the point of becoming discontent.
For example, one friend of mine having the brain of 5 men considered the latest Matrix movie to be so full of holes that he promptly left the theatres out of utter frustration and disbelief. I on the other hand was more in tune with the symbolics and fantasy of the movie and consider it to be an excellent end to one of the world's greatest contemporary epic cinematic works (second only to the LotR installments).
The same thing applies to many of the games we play. He is almost logically stubborn to the point that any kind of fantasy role-playing game is anathema. I on the other hand find many of the games he plays tedious and dull while he holds that they are some of the best games ever known to man.
To wrap things up, it is a disgrace to think that only logically believable games can be enjoyed because you discount the rest of the gaming population that enjoys their games more with thier creative side.
While I agree that MS having a monopoly is a bad thing, I hardly think that *nix has what it takes to truly compete with them on the home user front. The MS platform has the largest proliferation of software available, not to mention most home users are basically very familiar with the windows environment and the apps that have traditionally come with it. For any viable competition on the home market to arise they would have to be 100% compatible with everything MS supports and then have features that surpass them (for instance, heightened security).
Everyone here already knows that the *nix platform is already more complex than most people are willing to cope with. Even with distributions as user-friendly as RedHat and SuSe there is still a shortage of convenience that many home users would demand. This is not to say that MS is necesarily more convenient, but these people are already acclemated to its environment. Throwing something at them that is totally different will give most a pretty good scare. On top of that, none of their familiar software suites are there to comfort them.
Now while I really appreciate the work that Lindows tries to do, they just aren't getting it done... whatever it is. If we as the uber-geeks of the world really want to persuade the rest of the tech-illiterate to our side we're going to have to make something that they will take a bite into... then we'll see about weaning them out of their familiar software suites with our superior OS solutions.
I think the greatest place to start is to tone down the absolute customizable nature of *nix distributions. If we create a common distro base that is extremely user friendly and not necessarily "maximum utility" and then name everything else extra (yes even the development tools) then we stand a chance. The next step would be to write up a fully functional kernel loosely (very loosely) based on *nix that supports everything that is Win32.
Obviously a very difficult job, but who among us is truly up to the challenge? Until something like this happens I see no end to MS's monopoly in the near future.
...extends back almost to the Big Bang at the top...
I thought that at this point the Big Bang theory has actually been disproven without a shadow of doubt by many teams of blast physicists and astronomers all confirming each others work. Anyone have an upgrade of Scientist 4.8.32.1 lying around to send to thees guys? Their making wonderful art based on old / false info. It really surprises me that this falsehood is still acceptable in the respectable halls of Princeton... or did they just not get the memo?
You think that just because stores are accepting pre-orders that the game is going to come out? Don't get me wrong... I admit it's possible, but unlikely.
We all remember what happened with Half-Life 2 right? There were plenty of places touting pre-orders for it three months of its initial proposed release. How long has it been since then? And to top that, we STILL don't have an official release date on the thing (though we do have confirmation that the SDK will be coming out soon... however long that is).
Try a denial of service approach instead of a power enabling approach. Set your kids' account(s) to an administrative role. Then add them also to a "Kids" group. Then for all the Directories/Files that you want to restrict access to, place denial permissions for the "Kids" group. I would assume that you would do this for just about every folder except their account settings folder and the "Games" folder.
One thing I would like to note is that I wish game developers were more concious of the fact that not all players will have administrative rights on their machines and should code it the 'correct' way for multi-user systems. I have done this on two separate projects myself and the process of making the game multi-user friendly is only about 10 (15 max) lines of code during installation and MAYBE an extra 50 lines of code in the actual game itself. That's hardly even half a day's work. In fact the only part of a game that MAY need administrative properties should only be the installer itself (or perhaps a service/daemon oriented server mechanism).
I'm all for laziness... even to the point of vowing upon it as a prime virtue... but that's just rediculous guys.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for giving artists their fair share for providing much needed entertainment.
BUT!!!
What exactly constitutes fair share? In many cases, I believe that the majority of musicians are in fact receiving their fair share, but this majority of musicians do not include those supported by big labels and represented by RIAA. Quite frankly it sickens me to see some crack addict write a few repetitive phrases and mumble them to a beat and get paid 10 times more than cancer cure researchers... hell... even garbage men have a more important, productive purpose in society.
Personally I believe dissemination of music (or any other intellectual property for that matter) should be absolutely free. The methods of dissemination should mandate a monetary value (ie. the RIAA can still sell their cds as long as they don't mind going out of business).
If a band wants to actually make money on their "intellectual property" then go get hooked up at the local bar or something. Playing for a live audience becomes the dissemination of the music. In fact, I think its totally legit if another band comes along and plays the song and makes money off the performance (dissemintaion). I say give the creator a small part of the proceeds (say 5%). But this only applies when you are trying to disseminate for profit. If you have no plans on making money through the dissemination, then 5% of nothing is nothing. The only thing that I truly care about is proper accreditation.
Honestly, I feel sorry for the musician that wants to live solely off the proceeds of his music, because his situation is simply in the crapper. I say go to college and become a CPA as an alternative... never can be enough CPA's and they make a pretty penny too!
This is a topic of which I am thouroughly interested. I think there is definitely something to be said about your classic side-scroller games like super mario brothers, contra, and castlevania. Taking these games into the realm of 3D, and all the benefits therein, does not mean you have to take away the all important side-scrolling aspect though. The latest smash brothers game is a good example of what I'm talking about. Granted the genre of that particular game does not allow it much extension into the free-roaming aspect of other games, but it serves at least as a visual guide for other games to follow suit.
That aside, there are also some very key places that I would much prefer a very detailed free-roaming 3D environment. If the game was focused on story moreso than gameplay and using camera angles and lighting to set moods and create drama, then there is a good reason to implement a free-roaming environment. I think that is where these new itereations of Castlevania and its look-alikes (Devil May Cry) are pushing towards.
This is not to say that gameplay is not an important factor, however, highly satisfying gameplay in a free-roaming environment requires some level of complexity that simply does not exist on your side-scroller games. Following this argument, if storyline and plot aren't incredibly key to your game's entertainment factor, you may want to consider making the game into a side-scroller, whether it be in 3D or 2D. I haven't actually played it, but I think Viewtiful Joe would be a prime example of this.