According to this wonderful documentary http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
the problem is that corporations now have more power than the government. Cheap labor is current in the manufacture industry since the industrial revoltion and unions where made to prevent that in the US. The resulting factor is that the Us companies went abroad to get more cheap labor.
It isn't unionized, but even if it were, the offshoring is already underway.
The governement should pass some sort of cheap labor tax where the companies using offshoring would have to pay a tax, but since corporations hold more power than the governement now, such a law would never pass, and even if it did, it would just be a tax, the governement would hold the money and we poor IT workers wouldn't see it do any good.
Well, looking at the following courses I have to choose from in the coming years in my computer science engineering course, there's a course named "Analysis and conception of user interfaces".
If I sum up quickly the description and loosely translate from french it goes: Base techniques of user interface conception and analysis. Ergonomics and quality study of software interfaces. Coherence notions. Advanced modelisation techniques. Event driven programming. User centric conception. Dialogue conception. Interaction techniques. Multimodal systems. Interface evaluation methods : qualitative and quantitative.
Seems like The gimp could make a nice case study. But anyway, I don't know if this course is a popular one among the students, and I don't know if I will take it myself yet.
I think that for ncie UI, you NEED a team of programmers and a team of graphic artists. This might not be so easy to find in open-source software and that is the problem.
I have programmed flash sites designed by artists and made UI in video games that were designed by artists. We complemented each other to perfection. I could have never designed such things by myself and they would have never been able to code them.
So, either find a way to lure artists into OSS or copy the UIs from commercial products that were designed by artists. . .
People love the fact that you can buy a single song instead of a whole CD. They are voting with their dollars for the better scheme.
They just don't want DRM crippled songs. They vote against it by using cracking tools built by the people, for the people.
What's so hard to understand? Executives should just wake up and give the consumers what they want, and that's been the basis of business forever.
As for apple's relationship with their business partners, I couldn't care less. If they don't do it, someone else will, or I will put my money elsewhere. I owe them noting.
I'm sure that in fact, they would really like to sell non-drm songs, but it's probably part of the business deal and they have no control over it.
When you buy a book, do you buy a physical object or someone else's intellectual property, dumbass?
What you pay for with your 0.99$ is not the music itself, but a liscence to use the file with certain restrictions. With a book, you get nothing of the sort.
You could photocopy the book, or scan it, which is illegal if you plan on distributing the copies, but essentially, the piracy potential is still there. Yet you don't see an equivalent to the RIAA suing people sharing e-books (yet). You don't hear book publishers saying that book revenues are down. Why? because they are not as corrupt. They know that piracy is there and they keep prices (relatively) low to incite people to buy the real deal.
This has been said tons of times before but still, people continue to buy and support a system that breaks down your rights.
A law that can't be enforced is a law that makes no sense.
Frankly, some games are just plain better than movies. I was amazed when I first played Metal Gear Solid on the PSX. It was like playing a 5-6 hour long tom clancy story, but I was in control. The script was awesome, the acting (voice acting in this case) was top notch and the directing was the best I've seen in a game and was better than most movies.
Now, you can play longer games as a running show, like the final fantasy series, that had some great episodes (and some lesser ones. ..)
So, when done right, story-driven games are more enjoyable than movies to me. Let's just hope they keep making such jewels.
Software companies just are out looking for the quick buck.
They know for sure no protection is fail proof. They just think of something that looks clever to the unknowing, and convince them that their software can really do what it claims to do.
Then it gets cracked in matter of hours, but the maker of the software has already made it's profit.
We see this all the time. We just hear about the really lame protections that can be broken by holding the shift key or using a common black felt tip marker.
Still, the problem is not with inventing new protections, the problem is inventing new protections that don't work but prevent legitimate users to fully enjoy what they paid for.
They are grinding the fair use to a point where buying a cd (or movie or else) will only be legal if you play it using a DRM enabled device with you locked inside a black box connected to the copyright holder's server with a secret password key they will have given you after they made you swear an oath in front of a federal judge.
-They have access to before they are released to the public.
How? They get their stuff from people working in the medias that leak the promo copies to these groups. Why? Because they get premium access to all the other releases they don,t have access to before everyone else. That's 0-day.
So this makes a big incentive for many people to download stuff, they can get it MONTHS before it's in stores.
Quit sending promo copies, or just send them at the same time the game is in stores. This will diminish leeching A LOT I guarantee. Too simple a solution to be considered it seems.
With this beign said, I was wondering why console games where allowed to be rented in video stores while PC games couldn't. It's probably something to do with the EULAs but with all that nonsense, I'm wondering why no one ever tried to take a EULA fight to court.
The piracy issue is in deadlock. Hopeless for both sides. Consumers won't unite and boycott an illogical business model down to it's knees while governments makes laws to protect a corporation against its consumers.
So, their point is legitimate.
They kill to regain their land.
Why do they have to call the rest of the world "infidels" and hide behind god whenever they can?
Their position would get much more sympathy if they didn't use religion in such a manner in my humble opinion.
If a lot of people manage to make a lot of money off this, watch new laws and amendments pop up. Beign canadian, I see that pretty much everything is taxed, one way or the other. It's just a question of time.
Moreover, I was reading the infoceptor article and in the end, a Blizzard statement makes me wonder: " If you can't beat 'em, might as well join them".
What would you people think if Blizzard would officially sell their own games related items on the internet?
Many would find it unacceptable, as they have to spend time to gather items and build characters while Blizzard could just summon one right up, and charge way less than what would be profitable for someone who spent time doing it.
Now, since we all know this would be cheap-shot-controversial, who knows if they don't operate seemingly third-party sites?
Watch for their new World Of Warcraft game. I'm sure lots of people are looking into making this profitable.
Re:A more favourable environment for Linux
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 0
In recent news we had the CRIA (canadian RIAA) suing illegal mp3 sharing. They wanted ISPs to be forced to share client information in order to get suing material to court.
A federal judge ruled that sharing files over P2P isnt copyright infringement. In order to be considered illegal distribution, the user should make a real effort to distribute the files. Just putting them in a network shared environment isnt considered a concious distribution effort.
Now, the Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin (who was never elected by the way) decided that he will overrule that judgement because he cares about the "patrimoine".
I am not a subscriber. I do enjoy this site, but not the ads. I really feel like I have a right to view a website without paying for it.
This is a community-based website. Users post comments, news and some even contribute to the code that runs this site. No one gets paid. Without them this site would wither and die.
NY times articles are made by paid professionals. nothing in commmon.
I chose not to sell my personal info, so I'm not going to read their articles.
What about the software coders fault?
Nah. The truth is that it's a combination of all these 3 combined.
The solution?
Make secure software, inform and teach new and not so new users.
We've known that for years. It's like safe sex. Everyone knows about it, but some people just don't worry.
You're partly right. We do have pussies here in Quebec and thy're the greatest you'll ever find, tho I doubt that's what you were meaning.
Other than that, over 400 years of beign surrounded by anglos have made us somewhat foreign to the real Frenchmen. Even our language doesn't sound the same. It's like telling an American that he's British. .. Complete nonsense.
So quit comparing us to the French all the time, you only show your ignorance and ability to turn an interesting subject into a juvenile flame war.
Oh. And read up on the WW2 implication of Canada, moreso, about the Royal 22ieme Regiment of Quebec, Val-Cartier. They were named "The Red Devils" by the germans, as they were wearing a red armband and were reknowned for their fierceness in battle (somewhere in Italy). Nothing to be ashamed of. . . Now, I wonder where you're from . ..
From experience:
A game designer is a complex and unmolded beast that must shapeshift and be the type of person that convince just about anybody of anything and can take criticism from just about anybody.
The thing with this job is that everybody in the conpany thinks they can do it. The artists, the programmers, the management, everybody, down to the secretary think they are great game design ideas and will constantly engage you into discussions about THEIR ideas.
Technically, a good game designer should be specialised in some particular genre and different skill sets come with each genre.
For FPS/3rd person games, you will definitely need to know how to work in a 3d modeling software like 3DSMAX. You will have to create rough architecture layout that you will be able to model.
With the architecture flow designed, artists will work upon the foundations you provided. Photo references can be used to give an idea of the texturing to be used and such.
Some programming skills are also required as you will need to script some game logic and some AI.
In RTS games, you will need to be able to design maps and environnements using a map editor that has been created in house, or script some parameter-based script for generating random maps out of templates you will have designed too.
Then comes the balancing of units. You will need some maths skills and endless patience.
For sports games, you will need to know the sport in question to so much detail, that people will think you have a doctorate degree in it. Ai is very complex in a good sport game as the computer opponent has to have great strategic depth, but since most sports are team-played, your own AI controled players will need to know where to be so you can play the game without controlling all of your team at once.
For RPGs, you need to be a dungeons and dragons freak. Then you need to be good at writing novels or movies because of the sheer amount of dialogue, intrigue and character design/development involved.
There's a lot more involved but that's a start.
Of course, you need an infinite imagination, regardless of genre and great versatility.
Communication skills are important in the sense that you really need to be good at it to make an artist with is own vision of things be able to see your vision, on convincing a programmer that the feature you really need has to be coded, even tho the engine is not built to support such features.
So, great tools are available and make some nice demo (you WILL need a demo). For fps, unrealEd and Vavle editor are perfect. Script and model with them a lot.
For sports game I dont know any.
For rpgs, neverwinter nights also has great toolset.
For rts, use the map editors and modify the units data where you can. All great new RTS comes with this now (warcraft 3, age of mythology, etc)
Have hope and good luck!
D
Slashdot Mirror
"...found a way to provide what everyone said they wanted: convenient, electronic distribution..."
It's NOT convenient. It's crippled.
"What they really want is stores with no cash registers. "
No one said they didn't want to pay. What they REALLY want is UNCRIPPLED files.
If this is insightful, make me a troll.
According to this wonderful documentary
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379225/
the problem is that corporations now have more power than the government. Cheap labor is current in the manufacture industry since the industrial revoltion and unions where made to prevent that in the US.
The resulting factor is that the Us companies went abroad to get more cheap labor.
It isn't unionized, but even if it were, the offshoring is already underway.
The governement should pass some sort of cheap labor tax where the companies using offshoring would have to pay a tax, but since corporations hold more power than the governement now, such a law would never pass, and even if it did, it would just be a tax, the governement would hold the money and we poor IT workers wouldn't see it do any good.
Go see this movie, it's an eye and mind opener.
Well, looking at the following courses I have to choose from in the coming years in my computer science engineering course, there's a course named
"Analysis and conception of user interfaces".
If I sum up quickly the description and loosely translate from french it goes:
Base techniques of user interface conception and analysis. Ergonomics and quality study of software interfaces. Coherence notions.
Advanced modelisation techniques. Event driven programming. User centric conception. Dialogue conception. Interaction techniques. Multimodal systems. Interface evaluation methods : qualitative and quantitative.
Seems like The gimp could make a nice case study.
But anyway, I don't know if this course is a popular one among the students, and I don't know if I will take it myself yet.
I think that for ncie UI, you NEED a team of programmers and a team of graphic artists. This might not be so easy to find in open-source software and that is the problem.
I have programmed flash sites designed by artists and made UI in video games that were designed by artists. We complemented each other to perfection.
I could have never designed such things by myself and they would have never been able to code them.
So, either find a way to lure artists into OSS or copy the UIs from commercial products that were designed by artists. . .
Wrong.
What they really wanted is convenient, electronic distribution of music at a fair price WITH A FAIR LISCENCE AND NO DRM CRIPPLE.
The message is pretty clear it seems.
People love the fact that you can buy a single song instead of a whole CD. They are voting with their dollars for the better scheme.
They just don't want DRM crippled songs. They vote against it by using cracking tools built by the people, for the people.
What's so hard to understand?
Executives should just wake up and give the consumers what they want, and that's been the basis of business forever.
As for apple's relationship with their business partners, I couldn't care less. If they don't do it, someone else will, or I will put my money elsewhere. I owe them noting.
I'm sure that in fact, they would really like to sell non-drm songs, but it's probably part of the business deal and they have no control over it.
When you buy a book, do you buy a physical object or someone else's intellectual property, dumbass? What you pay for with your 0.99$ is not the music itself, but a liscence to use the file with certain restrictions. With a book, you get nothing of the sort. You could photocopy the book, or scan it, which is illegal if you plan on distributing the copies, but essentially, the piracy potential is still there. Yet you don't see an equivalent to the RIAA suing people sharing e-books (yet). You don't hear book publishers saying that book revenues are down. Why? because they are not as corrupt. They know that piracy is there and they keep prices (relatively) low to incite people to buy the real deal. This has been said tons of times before but still, people continue to buy and support a system that breaks down your rights. A law that can't be enforced is a law that makes no sense.
Why do you buy from them?
Boycott and spread the knowledge instead of relying on other people to do the right thing.
Frankly, some games are just plain better than movies.
.)
I was amazed when I first played Metal Gear Solid on the PSX. It was like playing a 5-6 hour long tom clancy story, but I was in control. The script was awesome, the acting (voice acting in this case) was top notch and the directing was the best I've seen in a game and was better than most movies.
Now, you can play longer games as a running show, like the final fantasy series, that had some great episodes (and some lesser ones. .
So, when done right, story-driven games are more enjoyable than movies to me. Let's just hope they keep making such jewels.
Software companies just are out looking for the quick buck.
They know for sure no protection is fail proof. They just think of something that looks clever to the unknowing, and convince them that their software can really do what it claims to do.
Then it gets cracked in matter of hours, but the maker of the software has already made it's profit.
We see this all the time. We just hear about the really lame protections that can be broken by holding the shift key or using a common black felt tip marker.
Still, the problem is not with inventing new protections, the problem is inventing new protections that don't work but prevent legitimate users to fully enjoy what they paid for.
They are grinding the fair use to a point where buying a cd (or movie or else) will only be legal if you play it using a DRM enabled device with you locked inside a black box connected to the copyright holder's server with a secret password key they will have given you after they made you swear an oath in front of a federal judge.
Freedom? Yeah, you're free to get fucked.
A fact about release groups:
-They have access to before they are released to the public.
How?
They get their stuff from people working in the medias that leak the promo copies to these groups.
Why?
Because they get premium access to all the other releases they don,t have access to before everyone else. That's 0-day.
So this makes a big incentive for many people to download stuff, they can get it MONTHS before it's in stores.
Quit sending promo copies, or just send them at the same time the game is in stores. This will diminish leeching A LOT I guarantee.
Too simple a solution to be considered it seems.
With this beign said, I was wondering why console games where allowed to be rented in video stores while PC games couldn't.
It's probably something to do with the EULAs but with all that nonsense, I'm wondering why no one ever tried to take a EULA fight to court.
The piracy issue is in deadlock.
Hopeless for both sides.
Consumers won't unite and boycott an illogical business model down to it's knees while governments makes laws to protect a corporation against its consumers.
7 mirrors to choose from. . .
So, their point is legitimate. They kill to regain their land. Why do they have to call the rest of the world "infidels" and hide behind god whenever they can? Their position would get much more sympathy if they didn't use religion in such a manner in my humble opinion.
I read somewhere that Vin Diesel had started a game developement studio.
can anyone confirm?
If a lot of people manage to make a lot of money off this, watch new laws and amendments pop up. Beign canadian, I see that pretty much everything is taxed, one way or the other. It's just a question of time.
Moreover, I was reading the infoceptor article and in the end, a Blizzard statement makes me wonder: " If you can't beat 'em, might as well join them".
What would you people think if Blizzard would officially sell their own games related items on the internet?
Many would find it unacceptable, as they have to spend time to gather items and build characters while Blizzard could just summon one right up, and charge way less than what would be profitable for someone who spent time doing it.
Now, since we all know this would be cheap-shot-controversial, who knows if they don't operate seemingly third-party sites?
Watch for their new World Of Warcraft game. I'm sure lots of people are looking into making this profitable.
In recent news we had the CRIA (canadian RIAA) suing
illegal mp3 sharing. They wanted ISPs to be forced to share client information in order to get suing material to court.
A federal judge ruled that sharing files over P2P isnt copyright infringement. In order to be considered illegal distribution, the user should make a real effort to distribute the files. Just putting them in a network shared environment isnt considered a concious distribution effort.
Now, the Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin (who was never elected by the way) decided that he will overrule that judgement because he cares about the "patrimoine".
What's next?
I am not a subscriber.
I do enjoy this site, but not the ads.
I really feel like I have a right to view a website without paying for it.
This is a community-based website. Users post comments, news and some even contribute to the code that runs this site. No one gets paid.
Without them this site would wither and die.
NY times articles are made by paid professionals.
nothing in commmon.
I chose not to sell my personal info, so I'm not going to read their articles.
What about the software coders fault? Nah. The truth is that it's a combination of all these 3 combined. The solution? Make secure software, inform and teach new and not so new users. We've known that for years. It's like safe sex. Everyone knows about it, but some people just don't worry.
You're partly right.
.
.
We do have pussies here in Quebec and thy're the greatest you'll ever find, tho I doubt that's what you were meaning.
Other than that, over 400 years of beign surrounded by anglos have made us somewhat foreign to the real Frenchmen. Even our language doesn't sound the same.
It's like telling an American that he's British. .
Complete nonsense.
So quit comparing us to the French all the time, you only show your ignorance and ability to turn an interesting subject into a juvenile flame war.
Oh. And read up on the WW2 implication of Canada, moreso, about the Royal 22ieme Regiment of Quebec, Val-Cartier. They were named "The Red Devils" by the germans, as they were wearing a red armband and were reknowned for their fierceness in battle (somewhere in Italy). Nothing to be ashamed of. . . Now, I wonder where you're from . .
End off-topic-rant
From experience: A game designer is a complex and unmolded beast that must shapeshift and be the type of person that convince just about anybody of anything and can take criticism from just about anybody. The thing with this job is that everybody in the conpany thinks they can do it. The artists, the programmers, the management, everybody, down to the secretary think they are great game design ideas and will constantly engage you into discussions about THEIR ideas. Technically, a good game designer should be specialised in some particular genre and different skill sets come with each genre. For FPS/3rd person games, you will definitely need to know how to work in a 3d modeling software like 3DSMAX. You will have to create rough architecture layout that you will be able to model. With the architecture flow designed, artists will work upon the foundations you provided. Photo references can be used to give an idea of the texturing to be used and such. Some programming skills are also required as you will need to script some game logic and some AI. In RTS games, you will need to be able to design maps and environnements using a map editor that has been created in house, or script some parameter-based script for generating random maps out of templates you will have designed too. Then comes the balancing of units. You will need some maths skills and endless patience. For sports games, you will need to know the sport in question to so much detail, that people will think you have a doctorate degree in it. Ai is very complex in a good sport game as the computer opponent has to have great strategic depth, but since most sports are team-played, your own AI controled players will need to know where to be so you can play the game without controlling all of your team at once. For RPGs, you need to be a dungeons and dragons freak. Then you need to be good at writing novels or movies because of the sheer amount of dialogue, intrigue and character design/development involved. There's a lot more involved but that's a start. Of course, you need an infinite imagination, regardless of genre and great versatility. Communication skills are important in the sense that you really need to be good at it to make an artist with is own vision of things be able to see your vision, on convincing a programmer that the feature you really need has to be coded, even tho the engine is not built to support such features. So, great tools are available and make some nice demo (you WILL need a demo). For fps, unrealEd and Vavle editor are perfect. Script and model with them a lot. For sports game I dont know any. For rpgs, neverwinter nights also has great toolset. For rts, use the map editors and modify the units data where you can. All great new RTS comes with this now (warcraft 3, age of mythology, etc) Have hope and good luck! D