I mourn the fact that the floodgates have been opened, because I think this will lead to the inevitable decline of the quality of games. For the moment- sure, it doesn't hurt anything, it might even add realism by having actual products in the game, but how long until some game developers are sitting around going "ok, so then we have this level where they walk through a forest and..." "what are you thinking bob? a forest? we can't stick ads in the middle of a forest, how 'bout a 10 minute long cutscene where they are on a subway instead, and ads flash by" "But Jim, the game takes place in 1047AD!" "Hmm, you're right, this whole setting needs to be changed"...etc. Of course, that's the more subtle way that ads will ruin games, the obvious fact is that advertisers don't f*cking realize that people get tired of their f*cking ads, and they keep pusing more and more intrusive ads on us. For people who say "ads will only go as far as players are willing to put up with them" - see the internet. People develop pop-up blockers and flash blockers and ad blockers to avoid ads, and marketers just keep comming up with new ways to spew their crap forth into our minds- single mindeldly bent on infesting every single facet of our lives with ceaseless messages to buy buy buy their soda and pills and toothpaste.
Higher resolutions and more polygons means that games require much more in the way of artists and developers. In the SNES days, one or two people could easily create a game on par with anything the big names were putting out- even in the PS1/N64 era a small group could put out a game on the cheap, now days even relatively simple games need teams of 15-20 people and a million or so dollars to get out there.
So far nothing on Xbox Arcade has seemed worth it to me. It seems largely to be a bunch of really old arcade games that there are numerous clones of - not much that is very unique. It's really just a matter of preference I guess. To be fair, I will almost certainly download Symphony of the Night at some point.
I have an XBOX360, and a Gold membership- but the fact is that I'm probably going to cancel my membership soon, because I was thinking to myself just the other day that it's really kind of a ripoff. It's touted as an easy-to-use, unified, quality-controlled service for online play, but my experience has been quite the opposite.
I don't play online extensively, but the few times that I have tried to load up a game online, I've found that half of the time I join a "game" where no game is actually taking place, just some people standing around- or the server goes down minutes after I join. When the games do start, they have a tendency to be laggy and unreliable- since they are all hosted on home broadband connections.
Not specific to XBOX Live, but the quality of players is abysmal as well. I wouldn't mind the technical issues so much if I had ever found a friendly game- unfortunately the only people on xbox live seem to be 13 year olds who's vocabularies consist entirely of the words: ghey, pwn, fuck, and asshole.
The market place is a bit better- and worth it since you don't have to pay for the right to buy stuff from the marketplace. I've paid for a few things (mostly stuff for Oblivion), but the selection in the xbox live arcade seems overpriced and unimpressive.
I haven't tried online play with the PS3 or the Wii yet (no wii games even support online play yet AFAIK, and the only PS3 game I have that supports it so far is Resistance- I'm not about to subject myself to playing a FPS online, though I suspect that I may play Motor Storm online once I pick it up in a couple of weeks) but both have suprior online catologues IMHO. The Virtual Console has a steadily growing collection of gems which, although overpriced IMHO, are hard to overlook even if you already have the ROMS. The Wii also does the best job of any of the consoles in making online part of the experience, with integrated messaging, as well as things like the internet, everybody votes, and weather channels. The Playstation Network on the PS3 also has a few things going for it- at least I haven't found it nearly as convoluted as everyone tries to make it out to be. I've bought more for the PS3 online than for any of the other consoles- that might be because of the lack of real games for the PS3 so far- but it also seems to have the best selection of new good games at a reasonable price ($20 for tekken seemed a bit high, but $10 for GripShift and Fl0w didn' seem too bad, and $4.99 for PS1 games for the PSP isn't a bad deal, I've paid for a few of those, although I do wish that I had the option of playing them on the PS3 as well as the PSP).
Gimp handles a lot of the less common advanced tasks that photoshop handles really well- and does some things much better than photoshop. The problem is those 7 or 8 things that the gimp doesn't do that photoshop does are 7 or 8 of the most common things that you might want to do when doing some graphic design. Layer styles, decent drop-shadow effects, layer grouping, color channels as layers, shape dynamics, all of these are really common things that Gimp either doesn't do at all, or does so poorly that it is functionally unusable for those tasks when compared to Photoshop.
Don't get me wrong, I love gimp for certain tasks, but there are some areas where it simply doesn't compete with photoshop- and I don't think it nessesarily attempts to.
I would like to second this. I have a PS3, and the vast majority of the time I'm using it for playing PS2 games at the moment (currently FFXII and God of War) and there are still new PS2 games that are on the horizon that I will be wanting to play (God of War II for sure). In the long run, it won't be such a big deal, but as it stands right now, once you finish Resistance you're pretty much left with fl0w and a bunch of PS1 and PSZ games.
As an aside, you're comming games list isn't bad, but for the love of all that is pure and good in gaming avoid Enchanted Arms. I picked it up for the 360 a while ago, since I had been starving for a good RPG- that game is terrible. Of course, you only find out how terrible the game itself is if you have it on mute, because if you have the sound on the godawful voice acting will have you running out of the room screaming before you ever get to any gameplay. Just a bit of friendly advice;)
I'm guessing that while performance might suck for large images, anyone doing real graphic design and photography will have a real version of Photoshop. This is probably intended for people who want to be able to quickly design some small graphics for use on their website.
I think that this is one of the first good examples of some of the things that we are going to see coming out of the power of the next generation systems. While for a game like GTA, more realistic physical simulation of the body may not be integral to the gameplay, the development of this technology can lead to new and interesting sorts of gameplay. Imagine this technology used in a fighting game for more realistic combat simulation.
I've had a few software related crashes on the 360 (including a really strange one in Oblivion where I managed to find a seam in the level or clipping got broken momentarily or something, and I ended up "outside" of the level, with no way to get back "inside") but the vast majority of problems with the 360 are just booting it up. At least 1/3rd of the time booting up the system will simply error out and leave me with an error screen and a red light on the power button ring thing. Rebooting the system fixes it. I find it extremely annoying, but I'm not sure what else I would expect really comming from a Microsoft product.
I get a fairly strong signal in the living room where I have the Wii set up. It seems more to get stuck when there is a lot of traffic. My ISP throttles bandwidth horribly, so if I have bittorrent or something running the bandwidth and latency go to crap (strangely enough this seems to happen even when I have KTorrent set to only connect using encryption). If I try to connect with the Wii, it will get stuck- even if I go and kill Bittorrent it will just sit there, like it tries to connect once, times out, and then just sits there not knowing what to do.
I've noticed that both the Wii and the Xbox 360 seem to crash way more often than a console should. I've had the Wii crash probably 5 or 6 times since I've had it- which seems really excessive to me. The 360 has crashed mid-game maybe two dozen times- most of those after the fall patch that caused games to freeze up randomly- but about half the time the 360 won't boot up properly and I have to turn it off and boot it back up again to get the damned thing to turn on.
Haven't had any trouble with the PS3 crashing yet, although I did have a couple of problems with downloading psone games onto the PSP through the playstation store (of course that turned out to actually be a problem with the memory stick in the PSP- which I guess is still sonys fault, but not a software problem, which is the topic of this discussion).
I don't care for the trend of Consoles getting treated more like PCs in this generation, with software updates and patches and things crashing.
I'm not from the UK, but I imagine the problem would be to do with the region coding for the games that they already have.
The scenario basically is that someone has a large library of PS2 games. The European PS2 is going to have a more limited support for PS2 games as compared to the North American or Japanese systems. Since the PS3 is region coded to enforce the region locks on the games, they can't buy a North Amerian or Japanese PS3 to play those games, because those systems are region coded to their specific areas, and won't play european PS2 games.
In the end, I'm not sure how big of a deal it will be. Microsoft seems to have had good luck in doing the same thing with the 360, although the PS2 does have a much larger library to accomodate.
yes, the current version of the Wii would not be able to store much of anything, but there wouldn't be anything stopping them from releasing a version with a hard drive, or a slot for a hard drive for in case someone wanted to use it as a PVR.
I hope the Wii with DVD support comes to the US. Personally, I would love to see something like WiiTV with some PVR and DVD support built into the Wii. I realize that nintendo was going for something that was cheap, and was puretly a gaming system- as opposed to the PS3 and 360 that want to be everything to everybody, but with the channels interface and the wii remote as it's controler, I can't think there has been a better fit since peanutbutter and chocolate.
You make it sound like people are SHOCKED to see nintendo releasing incremental updates to their hardware. The fact is that nintendo has been doing this for a long time. It has been mostly in the gameboy line, and I expect a few more revisions of the DS as well, but the N64 got colours, and they released the top loading nes and the new version of the SNES as well.
It's not like you have to buy every version that comes out. You can buy a Wii now, and when Wii 1.5 comes out, you can upgrade if it's worth the money, or not, historically the hardware upgrades have not lead to incompatible games - so you're not going to be forced to upgrade to run the newer games.
As I understand it, what the parent was saying was that one should be able to patent the construct, e.g. the engine, but not ways to use that engine, e.g. "a method for moving a vehicle through the use of an engine".
That seems to be one of the major problems with software patents, they don't just patent the algorithm, they patent what can be done with the algorithm.
It would be the same as if I were to build a better mousetrap, then patent not only the mousetrap itself, but catching mice with the mousetrap as well- then suing anyone who invented their own similar mousetrap and went around selling their mouse-trapping services.
I'm not a lawyer, or a mathemetician, but I'm not sure that a ban on patening an equation would extend to an algorithm. An equation is a statement of truth, e.g. "x=y". An algorithm isn't a statement of truth, but rather a process.
I would say this is the same as saying you can't patent a physical law, but you can patent a device that is based off of that physical law.
For example, I can't patent gravity, but I could patent a machine that worked by dropping things.
Similarly, I shouldn't be able to patent "f(x)=y" - which is a statement of truth, but I should be able to patent the process of using the fact that f(x)=y and g(t)=n, etc. to do something- which is what an algorithm is.
This comment reflects what seems to be one of the biggest misconceptions in computer security. People seem to be under the impression that vulnrabilities are magically conjured into existance when the bugs are made public.
The fact is that the bugs have really been there the whole time, and just because we didn't know about it doesn't mean that some nefarious person didn't know about it.
Now, script kiddies might not know about the vulnrabilities until they are made public, but they are called script kiddies because they use scripts- usually written by someone who has an inkling of what they are doing.
There are already some good ideas on what should be done to the patent system, so allow me to make a few predictions on what will actually happen if congress does get around to revising the patent system.
Patents will become much more expensive. This will be ostensibly to either cover the cost of searching for prior art, or to make junk patents less appealing. This will effectively keep anyone but large corperations from filing patents.
Rules regarding software patents will be fleshed out which will explicitely allow for patents regarding not only algorithms, but also functionality and look-and-feel.
The length of patents will be shortened.
...but they will be renewable.
Patents will no longer be public- a company can apply for a patent and keep how the product works as a trade secret.
Some sort of DMCA like legislation will make it illegal to work around patents by comming up with a new way to do something for which a patent already exists.
Now I just hope that, unlike Orwell's 1984, they politicians don't use my warning as a how-to manual instead.
it's funny how every post in this thread has put a larger portion of Canada's population closer to the US border.
I just keep expecting to see:
Everyone in Canada lives in one house who's front porch is on US soil, except bill, who lives on Neptune, but he still gets 1TB down and they pay him $25 a month to use it!
I consider myself a fairly hardcore gamer- at least as close to a hard core gamer as one can be and still retain a full time job. I've always liked the concept of the MMORPG, and I've tried several different games, both large and well known (Ragnarok, WoW, CoH, DoaC) and less well known (A Tale in the Desert, Eternal Lands), and I've never played any game for more than 2 or 3 months.
I have since come to the conclusion that there are a few things that any MMO will have to deal with before I will consider giving it a shot. The first, and most important to me is, Eliminate Metagaming in MMOs. I realize that some amount of metagaming will always be present, but it seems like every MMO that I've played has really been all about the metagaming, with a small amount of lip service paid to the actual game.
The second thing that I want to see is for players to have the ability to have an effect on the game world. Specifically, I would like to see some sort of AI applied to NPCs which would allow dynamically generated generic NPC quests. If you've seen some of the demos for the Radiant AI that Bethesda developed for Oblivion (they eventually dropped most of what the developed in the actual release, because it was too processor intensive and they were having trouble tuning it from what I understand- but there are some interesting demo videos out there, they are included in the bonus DVD with the Oblivion collectors edition for the 360- probably available online as well) then this isn't so far out. If NPC Joe wants me to retrieve the Orb of Flabotanum for him, once I get it to him, then I don't really want 47 other people also retreiving the same thing.
I think that if a game developer could address these two issues, so that characters were actually role played, and that the PCs really could affect the world (even if the effects are largely just token nods to what the players have done) then it would get me, and a lot of other MMO hold outs, on board.
The problem of course is that I'm not sure how many people would want a game like I described. It seems most people like metagamming and grinding the same quest a hundred times, so I don't hold out much hope that a game will ever be made. Oh well, there is always still D&D on IRC- the real MMORPG.
I agree that at some point computer security is no longer the issue, and physical security is. I was using hyperbole to demonstrate a point however. The point I was trying to make is that there are levels of security, and there are almost certainly instances where something "could, potentially" be exploited, but for which there is no known exploit, or where it's something like a brute force attack where it could be done, but it's highly unlikely to be done successfully.
There are also considerations for things like social engineering, and to some limited extent, physical security. These things my be outside the strict limits of computer security, but they are things that any competent admin should think about.
I think that the numbers might be a little misleading, but I'm not sure that 70% is entirely incorrect. I think that it depends heavily on what sites are included in the sample, and how you define "can be hacked".
For the first point, although big websites certainly have had their share of vulnrabilities, the number is certainly less than 70% (I would venture a guess that it's in the are of 25%, which is still way more than it should be) - but if you start adding in things like peoples home boxes running quick and dirty PHP sites, things out there for testing purposes, various boards and such, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers start reaching 70%.
The other point of course is how you define hackable. Anything is hackable, given a sufficient amount of time and desire on the part of an intruder. Even if a machine storing personal data was disconnected from any sort of network and locked up in a safe, someone could always break into the safe and steal the computer.
The question really should be: What percent of websites which contain a significant amount of personal data have vulnrabilities which are easily enough exploited to be a viable target for: A: script kiddies/etc. B: moderately skilled and determined intruders, and C: highly skilled and determined intruders.
I think that part of the problem is that almost nobody actually roleplays in MMOs to any extent. Most of the MMOs that I've played are more like IRC with avatars, and there is the expectation that people, by and large, act as though the avatar is a conduit for the actual player, rather than the player taking the role of the character. That's actually one of the reasons that I don't like MMORPGs (second on the list, just under the fact that I don't like subscription based games- not because of the cost, but because I feel obligated to play, which takes the fun out of it for me).
Slashdot Mirror
I mourn the fact that the floodgates have been opened, because I think this will lead to the inevitable decline of the quality of games. For the moment- sure, it doesn't hurt anything, it might even add realism by having actual products in the game, but how long until some game developers are sitting around going "ok, so then we have this level where they walk through a forest and..." "what are you thinking bob? a forest? we can't stick ads in the middle of a forest, how 'bout a 10 minute long cutscene where they are on a subway instead, and ads flash by" "But Jim, the game takes place in 1047AD!" "Hmm, you're right, this whole setting needs to be changed"...etc. Of course, that's the more subtle way that ads will ruin games, the obvious fact is that advertisers don't f*cking realize that people get tired of their f*cking ads, and they keep pusing more and more intrusive ads on us. For people who say "ads will only go as far as players are willing to put up with them" - see the internet. People develop pop-up blockers and flash blockers and ad blockers to avoid ads, and marketers just keep comming up with new ways to spew their crap forth into our minds- single mindeldly bent on infesting every single facet of our lives with ceaseless messages to buy buy buy their soda and pills and toothpaste.
Higher resolutions and more polygons means that games require much more in the way of artists and developers. In the SNES days, one or two people could easily create a game on par with anything the big names were putting out- even in the PS1/N64 era a small group could put out a game on the cheap, now days even relatively simple games need teams of 15-20 people and a million or so dollars to get out there.
So far nothing on Xbox Arcade has seemed worth it to me. It seems largely to be a bunch of really old arcade games that there are numerous clones of - not much that is very unique. It's really just a matter of preference I guess. To be fair, I will almost certainly download Symphony of the Night at some point.
I have an XBOX360, and a Gold membership- but the fact is that I'm probably going to cancel my membership soon, because I was thinking to myself just the other day that it's really kind of a ripoff. It's touted as an easy-to-use, unified, quality-controlled service for online play, but my experience has been quite the opposite.
I don't play online extensively, but the few times that I have tried to load up a game online, I've found that half of the time I join a "game" where no game is actually taking place, just some people standing around- or the server goes down minutes after I join. When the games do start, they have a tendency to be laggy and unreliable- since they are all hosted on home broadband connections.
Not specific to XBOX Live, but the quality of players is abysmal as well. I wouldn't mind the technical issues so much if I had ever found a friendly game- unfortunately the only people on xbox live seem to be 13 year olds who's vocabularies consist entirely of the words: ghey, pwn, fuck, and asshole.
The market place is a bit better- and worth it since you don't have to pay for the right to buy stuff from the marketplace. I've paid for a few things (mostly stuff for Oblivion), but the selection in the xbox live arcade seems overpriced and unimpressive.
I haven't tried online play with the PS3 or the Wii yet (no wii games even support online play yet AFAIK, and the only PS3 game I have that supports it so far is Resistance- I'm not about to subject myself to playing a FPS online, though I suspect that I may play Motor Storm online once I pick it up in a couple of weeks) but both have suprior online catologues IMHO. The Virtual Console has a steadily growing collection of gems which, although overpriced IMHO, are hard to overlook even if you already have the ROMS. The Wii also does the best job of any of the consoles in making online part of the experience, with integrated messaging, as well as things like the internet, everybody votes, and weather channels. The Playstation Network on the PS3 also has a few things going for it- at least I haven't found it nearly as convoluted as everyone tries to make it out to be. I've bought more for the PS3 online than for any of the other consoles- that might be because of the lack of real games for the PS3 so far- but it also seems to have the best selection of new good games at a reasonable price ($20 for tekken seemed a bit high, but $10 for GripShift and Fl0w didn' seem too bad, and $4.99 for PS1 games for the PSP isn't a bad deal, I've paid for a few of those, although I do wish that I had the option of playing them on the PS3 as well as the PSP).
Gimp handles a lot of the less common advanced tasks that photoshop handles really well- and does some things much better than photoshop. The problem is those 7 or 8 things that the gimp doesn't do that photoshop does are 7 or 8 of the most common things that you might want to do when doing some graphic design. Layer styles, decent drop-shadow effects, layer grouping, color channels as layers, shape dynamics, all of these are really common things that Gimp either doesn't do at all, or does so poorly that it is functionally unusable for those tasks when compared to Photoshop.
Don't get me wrong, I love gimp for certain tasks, but there are some areas where it simply doesn't compete with photoshop- and I don't think it nessesarily attempts to.
I would like to second this. I have a PS3, and the vast majority of the time I'm using it for playing PS2 games at the moment (currently FFXII and God of War) and there are still new PS2 games that are on the horizon that I will be wanting to play (God of War II for sure). In the long run, it won't be such a big deal, but as it stands right now, once you finish Resistance you're pretty much left with fl0w and a bunch of PS1 and PSZ games. ;)
As an aside, you're comming games list isn't bad, but for the love of all that is pure and good in gaming avoid Enchanted Arms. I picked it up for the 360 a while ago, since I had been starving for a good RPG- that game is terrible. Of course, you only find out how terrible the game itself is if you have it on mute, because if you have the sound on the godawful voice acting will have you running out of the room screaming before you ever get to any gameplay. Just a bit of friendly advice
I'm guessing that while performance might suck for large images, anyone doing real graphic design and photography will have a real version of Photoshop. This is probably intended for people who want to be able to quickly design some small graphics for use on their website.
I think that this is one of the first good examples of some of the things that we are going to see coming out of the power of the next generation systems. While for a game like GTA, more realistic physical simulation of the body may not be integral to the gameplay, the development of this technology can lead to new and interesting sorts of gameplay. Imagine this technology used in a fighting game for more realistic combat simulation.
I've had a few software related crashes on the 360 (including a really strange one in Oblivion where I managed to find a seam in the level or clipping got broken momentarily or something, and I ended up "outside" of the level, with no way to get back "inside") but the vast majority of problems with the 360 are just booting it up. At least 1/3rd of the time booting up the system will simply error out and leave me with an error screen and a red light on the power button ring thing. Rebooting the system fixes it. I find it extremely annoying, but I'm not sure what else I would expect really comming from a Microsoft product.
I get a fairly strong signal in the living room where I have the Wii set up. It seems more to get stuck when there is a lot of traffic. My ISP throttles bandwidth horribly, so if I have bittorrent or something running the bandwidth and latency go to crap (strangely enough this seems to happen even when I have KTorrent set to only connect using encryption). If I try to connect with the Wii, it will get stuck- even if I go and kill Bittorrent it will just sit there, like it tries to connect once, times out, and then just sits there not knowing what to do.
I've noticed that both the Wii and the Xbox 360 seem to crash way more often than a console should. I've had the Wii crash probably 5 or 6 times since I've had it- which seems really excessive to me. The 360 has crashed mid-game maybe two dozen times- most of those after the fall patch that caused games to freeze up randomly- but about half the time the 360 won't boot up properly and I have to turn it off and boot it back up again to get the damned thing to turn on.
Haven't had any trouble with the PS3 crashing yet, although I did have a couple of problems with downloading psone games onto the PSP through the playstation store (of course that turned out to actually be a problem with the memory stick in the PSP- which I guess is still sonys fault, but not a software problem, which is the topic of this discussion).
I don't care for the trend of Consoles getting treated more like PCs in this generation, with software updates and patches and things crashing.
I'm not from the UK, but I imagine the problem would be to do with the region coding for the games that they already have.
The scenario basically is that someone has a large library of PS2 games. The European PS2 is going to have a more limited support for PS2 games as compared to the North American or Japanese systems. Since the PS3 is region coded to enforce the region locks on the games, they can't buy a North Amerian or Japanese PS3 to play those games, because those systems are region coded to their specific areas, and won't play european PS2 games.
In the end, I'm not sure how big of a deal it will be. Microsoft seems to have had good luck in doing the same thing with the 360, although the PS2 does have a much larger library to accomodate.
yes, the current version of the Wii would not be able to store much of anything, but there wouldn't be anything stopping them from releasing a version with a hard drive, or a slot for a hard drive for in case someone wanted to use it as a PVR.
I hope the Wii with DVD support comes to the US. Personally, I would love to see something like WiiTV with some PVR and DVD support built into the Wii. I realize that nintendo was going for something that was cheap, and was puretly a gaming system- as opposed to the PS3 and 360 that want to be everything to everybody, but with the channels interface and the wii remote as it's controler, I can't think there has been a better fit since peanutbutter and chocolate.
You make it sound like people are SHOCKED to see nintendo releasing incremental updates to their hardware. The fact is that nintendo has been doing this for a long time. It has been mostly in the gameboy line, and I expect a few more revisions of the DS as well, but the N64 got colours, and they released the top loading nes and the new version of the SNES as well.
It's not like you have to buy every version that comes out. You can buy a Wii now, and when Wii 1.5 comes out, you can upgrade if it's worth the money, or not, historically the hardware upgrades have not lead to incompatible games - so you're not going to be forced to upgrade to run the newer games.
As I understand it, what the parent was saying was that one should be able to patent the construct, e.g. the engine, but not ways to use that engine, e.g. "a method for moving a vehicle through the use of an engine".
That seems to be one of the major problems with software patents, they don't just patent the algorithm, they patent what can be done with the algorithm.
It would be the same as if I were to build a better mousetrap, then patent not only the mousetrap itself, but catching mice with the mousetrap as well- then suing anyone who invented their own similar mousetrap and went around selling their mouse-trapping services.
I'm not a lawyer, or a mathemetician, but I'm not sure that a ban on patening an equation would extend to an algorithm. An equation is a statement of truth, e.g. "x=y". An algorithm isn't a statement of truth, but rather a process.
I would say this is the same as saying you can't patent a physical law, but you can patent a device that is based off of that physical law.
For example, I can't patent gravity, but I could patent a machine that worked by dropping things.
Similarly, I shouldn't be able to patent "f(x)=y" - which is a statement of truth, but I should be able to patent the process of using the fact that f(x)=y and g(t)=n, etc. to do something- which is what an algorithm is.
This comment reflects what seems to be one of the biggest misconceptions in computer security. People seem to be under the impression that vulnrabilities are magically conjured into existance when the bugs are made public.
The fact is that the bugs have really been there the whole time, and just because we didn't know about it doesn't mean that some nefarious person didn't know about it.
Now, script kiddies might not know about the vulnrabilities until they are made public, but they are called script kiddies because they use scripts- usually written by someone who has an inkling of what they are doing.
- Patents will become much more expensive. This will be ostensibly to either cover the cost of searching for prior art, or to make junk patents less appealing. This will effectively keep anyone but large corperations from filing patents.
- Rules regarding software patents will be fleshed out which will explicitely allow for patents regarding not only algorithms, but also functionality and look-and-feel.
- The length of patents will be shortened.
- ...but they will be renewable.
- Patents will no longer be public- a company can apply for a patent and keep how the product works as a trade secret.
- Some sort of DMCA like legislation will make it illegal to work around patents by comming up with a new way to do something for which a patent already exists.
Now I just hope that, unlike Orwell's 1984, they politicians don't use my warning as a how-to manual instead.it's funny how every post in this thread has put a larger portion of Canada's population closer to the US border.
I just keep expecting to see:
Everyone in Canada lives in one house who's front porch is on US soil, except bill, who lives on Neptune, but he still gets 1TB down and they pay him $25 a month to use it!
I consider myself a fairly hardcore gamer- at least as close to a hard core gamer as one can be and still retain a full time job. I've always liked the concept of the MMORPG, and I've tried several different games, both large and well known (Ragnarok, WoW, CoH, DoaC) and less well known (A Tale in the Desert, Eternal Lands), and I've never played any game for more than 2 or 3 months.
I have since come to the conclusion that there are a few things that any MMO will have to deal with before I will consider giving it a shot. The first, and most important to me is, Eliminate Metagaming in MMOs. I realize that some amount of metagaming will always be present, but it seems like every MMO that I've played has really been all about the metagaming, with a small amount of lip service paid to the actual game.
The second thing that I want to see is for players to have the ability to have an effect on the game world. Specifically, I would like to see some sort of AI applied to NPCs which would allow dynamically generated generic NPC quests. If you've seen some of the demos for the Radiant AI that Bethesda developed for Oblivion (they eventually dropped most of what the developed in the actual release, because it was too processor intensive and they were having trouble tuning it from what I understand- but there are some interesting demo videos out there, they are included in the bonus DVD with the Oblivion collectors edition for the 360- probably available online as well) then this isn't so far out. If NPC Joe wants me to retrieve the Orb of Flabotanum for him, once I get it to him, then I don't really want 47 other people also retreiving the same thing.
I think that if a game developer could address these two issues, so that characters were actually role played, and that the PCs really could affect the world (even if the effects are largely just token nods to what the players have done) then it would get me, and a lot of other MMO hold outs, on board.
The problem of course is that I'm not sure how many people would want a game like I described. It seems most people like metagamming and grinding the same quest a hundred times, so I don't hold out much hope that a game will ever be made. Oh well, there is always still D&D on IRC- the real MMORPG.
I agree that at some point computer security is no longer the issue, and physical security is. I was using hyperbole to demonstrate a point however. The point I was trying to make is that there are levels of security, and there are almost certainly instances where something "could, potentially" be exploited, but for which there is no known exploit, or where it's something like a brute force attack where it could be done, but it's highly unlikely to be done successfully.
There are also considerations for things like social engineering, and to some limited extent, physical security. These things my be outside the strict limits of computer security, but they are things that any competent admin should think about.
I think that the numbers might be a little misleading, but I'm not sure that 70% is entirely incorrect. I think that it depends heavily on what sites are included in the sample, and how you define "can be hacked".
For the first point, although big websites certainly have had their share of vulnrabilities, the number is certainly less than 70% (I would venture a guess that it's in the are of 25%, which is still way more than it should be) - but if you start adding in things like peoples home boxes running quick and dirty PHP sites, things out there for testing purposes, various boards and such, I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers start reaching 70%.
The other point of course is how you define hackable. Anything is hackable, given a sufficient amount of time and desire on the part of an intruder. Even if a machine storing personal data was disconnected from any sort of network and locked up in a safe, someone could always break into the safe and steal the computer.
The question really should be: What percent of websites which contain a significant amount of personal data have vulnrabilities which are easily enough exploited to be a viable target for: A: script kiddies/etc. B: moderately skilled and determined intruders, and C: highly skilled and determined intruders.
Have you ever played a Final Fantasy (or other japanese style RPG) game? They've been doing this for years
I think that part of the problem is that almost nobody actually roleplays in MMOs to any extent. Most of the MMOs that I've played are more like IRC with avatars, and there is the expectation that people, by and large, act as though the avatar is a conduit for the actual player, rather than the player taking the role of the character. That's actually one of the reasons that I don't like MMORPGs (second on the list, just under the fact that I don't like subscription based games- not because of the cost, but because I feel obligated to play, which takes the fun out of it for me).