You should be happy that a company that has so closely embraced closed/proprietary licensing is doing the right thing by honoring the GPL as they should. They could have chosen any number of wrong directions, but they chose the right one. Their motives for doing so are irrelevant.
No. When dealing with enemies, you try to stay one step ahead of them. Understanding why they do what they do is key to preventing them from succeeding.
If you think the motives for IBM, Oracle, Sun, or even RedHat for honoring and promoting the GPL are anything other than financial or self-interested you are seriously deluding yourself. This isn't a religion to those companies. It is a tool that they leverage to try and increase their dominance and profits in the technology sector.
I don't think anyone is thus deluded. None of those companies are presently in a position to be serious threats. Microsoft still has the OS, and by virtue of that, device drivers with priorietary interfaces and NDA-based documentation/code. This prevents us from building a truly competitive system. As long as MS retains that, it is in a position of extreme power. So to that end, the enemy of my enemy is my ally. The day may, and hopefully will, come when Microsoft has been stripped of the part of its business which enables it to stifle competition and hurt the industry. Those companies may stop being allies, but provided we've done nothing to enable them to take Microsoft's place, it will at least be competition, which is always a good thing. I note you're missing the most dangerous "Ally", Apple. They absolutely are poised to become the new Microsoft, and certainly have the sharpest knife right now.
If anything this should be good news for FOSS zealots everywhere because it shows that Microsoft now considers the GPL a viable route to see product success. It is a fairly huge paradigm shift. Unfortunately there will be people who are more concerned with Microsoft failing than they are with corporate giants moving in the right direction. It limits you.
No, this has not been established. The point is that MS does not necessarily consider the GPL a viable route, at worst they simply had no choice. It's also not a given that Microsoft isn't changing it's ways for the better, however after 20 years of being used and abused, you can't expect us all to change our mindset towards them overnight because of one very suspicious move.
We all know that for-profit businesses act for-profit. This does not excuse them of common decency and the moral obligation to go above and beyond the bare minimum the law requires. The lack of expectation from the general public that corporations have any form of ethics or standards is what has driven so many of the bad behaviors we've seen in the past 20 years. Everything from crappy customer service, to offshoring jobs (i.e. hurting your country for personal gain), to monopolistic behavior to financial misreporting all fall into that category. Capitalism requires competition to be successful, the more of it, the better. Any company which views their business as a game to destroy competitors, explicitly or implicitly, is hurting all of us. You either act to make yourself the best you can possibly be (perhaps using competitors as a guide-post) and let your competitors do the same, or you should expect hostility and sanctions.
It's interactive. You watch as Frodo the Gnome enters the world at level 1, and kills kobolds to level 80. The sequel features instance PUGging (it's a spring break drinking movie), and the trilogy rounds out with guild drama in raid content (this is more like one of those plotless teeny bopper movies where everyone is depressed and mad at their parents).
They need to check exhaustively, I'm sure out there somewhere is Fizzle Sparksprocket, a fire mage gnome who contributed to the overthrow of Gnomeregan, and who immolates himself periodically in worship of an Old God.
The usual way is to make their tools and solutions cheap/free, and get people to build their entire operation (code, infrastructure,etc.) around it. Require enough infrastructure that rebuilding is very expensive. Then, once the industry has managed to use your software as the center of their infrastructure, hammer them.
All they seemed to do was ensure linux will run on HyperV, something it has not previously done well, and which puts MS at a disadvantage. Thus customers have not been adopting that platform in droves. Now they'll have fewer excuses not to. Nothing prevents MS from later making the LinuxIC tools incompatible at a later date (or just letting them atrophy, as the technology develops).
Just don't use Microsoft products ever again...if you want to run a business you really shouldn't put all your eggs in their basket anyway.
But while your developers, artists, voice actors etc. will all make good money and feed their family, your investors will have to scrape by on a lousy 8%, which is not how we do things here.
I completely support his efforts to reverse engineer the satellite system, and publish his findings. If he goes to jail it better be for piracy. I don't agree that he necessarily deserves what he'll get, he probably deserves a fraction of what he could get.
It runs in 32-bit mode, so if you're on 64-bit you'll need to run the linux32 shell to get it to work. The 64-bit edition is presently payware. Honestly the linux version works for me better and faster than the windows version, but if you have multiple targets (particularly that are non-Xilinx) windows may be safer.
I guess my opinion for MMOGs should be that you use special abilities to alter the normal flow of combat. DPS should be primarily driven from auto-attack abilities. Using skills then turns in to watching the boss, watching the environment, working with your team, to coordinate abilities for effect. It's a very EQ mindset, but I never really thought that aspect of EQ was "broken". EQ wasn't meant to be like UO, and shouldn't be compared to it. While WoW is none of the above, but wants to be both.
As to the skill argument, let's assume the statement is correct: skill boils down to a mechanical set of processes. If you develop the process, and others do not, aren't you, therefore, more skilled?
You can be a low latency, T9 geared tank, who can out-dps your group. But you fail to turn aoe bosses away from your group, you position poorly, you don't LOS casters, you don't protect your group. You still wipe, you still fail. A less well geared tank might pull out an easy victory in your shoes, because he knows the process. This is a real scenario, if you play enough PUGs you can easily develop a sense for who knows their stuff. I call that skill. Sure it's less physical, less about reaction time and more about thinking, but isn't it still skill?
I think the issue is that in MMOGs more people tend to cluster into the "highly skilled" brackets than would be the case in other areas. There is not anything like a bell curve distribution, thus the winner of any given contest is probably less deterministic than people would like. They want to win, and when they win to feel like it was a sign of divinity. But that often isn't the case, and there may be no way for them to increase their skill to get the determinism they're looking for. It doesn't mean there's no skill, it means simply that they've hit a cap.
I disagree, there IS "skill". It's probably not a useful quantity outside of the game, and unlike some athletic events there is probably a point at which you cannot be more skilled than another person, but there is a huge gap between some players in ability, you can call that skill. Also hardware, latency, etc. also can blur the line between skill and wealth. The problem with this topic is what "skill" means to various people.
The latest trends in MMOGs (which WoW still seems to want to be the frontrunner) is mashing keys fast. The entire design of the latest expansion is the concept of "rotations", be it dps, healing (previously a relatively cerebral job) and tanking. On one hand they've added an element requiring players to mash buttons faster and more accurately (throwing in some proc effects that require you to adapt your rotation periodically). On the other hand they've almost entirely eliminated strategy and situational awareness. But yeah, it plays a lot more like an FPS and there is "skill" in mashing your buttons fast, clicking fast and turning fast.
Then there's FPS skill, which has traditionally been being prepared, fast and accurate, usually in that order.
Skill is increasingly being defined, across genre's in a one size fits all way: a) competitive player versus player, b) a measure of reaction time and ability to manipulate the UI/interface well, c) familiarity with the content (and practice within it) and to a somewhat lesser extent d) familiarity with the boundaries of the simulator in question (not exploits, just how far the rules bend).
Other things that skill could be, and in some genre's should be: a) adaptability to dynamic, unknown situations, b) coordination across groups of people, c) preparation for encounters for which a few datapoints are known, d) how to combine/synergize abilities across classes, and how to make trade-offs as a unit, etc. I play MMOGs primarily for this concept of "skill", although it's been in serious decline.
So I guess I want to undermine the entire thesis of the article. People bitch about "level systems" versus "skill" systems, but often because they aren't playing the same game. Levels in MMOGs are supposed to be about lumping people into similar categories of character ability level, gear and progression, at least in theory. The idea behind levels is a social tool from game designers that helps people identify others with similar interests, to get together and collectively tackle content that is otherwise too difficult for them singly. This is also, not coincidentally, the idea behind the class system! You know for a balanced group you need some tanking, some healing, some slowing (in EQ) and a mix of damage (melee and magic, usually). The class system worked well for helping people identify what element they needed to round out the group, and provided enough class differentiation to make it interesting. This works well in traditional MMOGs where the game is primarily PVE, and where game designers go out of their way to use levels appropriately and define classes well. WoW blurs this a lot, and IMO, screws up the game a lot. In any event, in context of MMOGs, levels != skill. You can have one without the other, and it's absolutely OK.
On the flip side, in an FPS where you are primarily engaged in PVP, it makes a lot less sense to rank people by arbitrary factors such as level (i.e. time spent killing monsters, content completed, etc.) and more sense to lump them into categories that allow like people to interact with like people. A tournament system works here. Of course not all contestants are in the same league as one another, some have better hardware, lower latency connections, more playtime, etc. You don't want people to feel completely outclassed. In boxing/wrestling/etc. you have the concept of "weight class". Perhaps grouping people with similar characteristics and ranking them within their class makes the most sense, providing a good level of adequate comparison of skill, bracketed within boundaries that seem rea
But if you take drugs as correctly prescribed, you can, and should, have both. In spite of the hysteria, people have taken vicodin for pain and not died from liver failure.
If random people got the ability to use the phone of their choice, and treat their wireless company as a bandwidth provider, a lot of value would be destroyed.
Totally agree. I would like to be able to buy booze before noon on Sunday in Texas...because the only time the lines are short at the grocery store is when the locals are praying.
I know, it's a joke, but you'll probably be disappointed. Everyone you'll be competing with has a degree, the subject of the degree and the magnitude are now the dominate forces (even when ridiculous). In some areas right now they argue you need a PhD to do silicon verification, when in fact I think you probably don't need any degree, at all to do what the job ACTUALLY requires. It's just a matter of having a huge number of equally qualified applicants after the same job.
The problem with this, for all of you who have jobs, is not about some wishy washy bullshit about "the joy of learning", it's about manipulating metrics for maximum return. It's not about how much you learned or how well you can apply your knowledge, but how to appear best on paper to get the paycheck. When the rubber meets the road, are you any more qualified to do what you say you can do? We've all known people who groomed that 4.0 GPA (or close to it), who didn't amount to anything or who got washed ashore when they jumped in the ocean.
To be fair, it is a very applicable life skill to large corporation life, and we all have to do it from time to time. But if you look around your organizations and note the flaws, defects and absolutely mind-bogglingly braindead behavior that somehow persist...behind each one of those is usually some bogus metric that says "we're great!". The road to hell is paved with broken metrics.
To the present day businessman, nothing else matters but making money today. Thus any short term manipulation that demonstrably shows profit, is a good behavior. To almost any other profession, including responsible businessmen, you have to be sustainable through at least your career, or however long it takes to return what you owe, ride out tough times, and guarantee your future. Teaching kids how to act in their short term best interests exclusively is not at all the right way to go.
Slashdot Mirror
k, but 12-15 hours in 2-3 days (4-7 hrs/day) is not semi-casual. That's pretty heavy playing, especially if all you do is farm isk.
We have no idea who is behind this or what they intend to do so we will continue with wild-ass speculation in order to keep our companies in the news.
Which may be exactly what the virus was designed to do: infect as many people as possible in detectable ways, and keep the industry going!
You should be happy that a company that has so closely embraced closed/proprietary licensing is doing the right thing by honoring the GPL as they should. They could have chosen any number of wrong directions, but they chose the right one. Their motives for doing so are irrelevant.
No. When dealing with enemies, you try to stay one step ahead of them. Understanding why they do what they do is key to preventing them from succeeding.
If you think the motives for IBM, Oracle, Sun, or even RedHat for honoring and promoting the GPL are anything other than financial or self-interested you are seriously deluding yourself. This isn't a religion to those companies. It is a tool that they leverage to try and increase their dominance and profits in the technology sector.
I don't think anyone is thus deluded. None of those companies are presently in a position to be serious threats. Microsoft still has the OS, and by virtue of that, device drivers with priorietary interfaces and NDA-based documentation/code. This prevents us from building a truly competitive system. As long as MS retains that, it is in a position of extreme power. So to that end, the enemy of my enemy is my ally. The day may, and hopefully will, come when Microsoft has been stripped of the part of its business which enables it to stifle competition and hurt the industry. Those companies may stop being allies, but provided we've done nothing to enable them to take Microsoft's place, it will at least be competition, which is always a good thing. I note you're missing the most dangerous "Ally", Apple. They absolutely are poised to become the new Microsoft, and certainly have the sharpest knife right now.
If anything this should be good news for FOSS zealots everywhere because it shows that Microsoft now considers the GPL a viable route to see product success. It is a fairly huge paradigm shift. Unfortunately there will be people who are more concerned with Microsoft failing than they are with corporate giants moving in the right direction. It limits you.
No, this has not been established. The point is that MS does not necessarily consider the GPL a viable route, at worst they simply had no choice. It's also not a given that Microsoft isn't changing it's ways for the better, however after 20 years of being used and abused, you can't expect us all to change our mindset towards them overnight because of one very suspicious move.
We all know that for-profit businesses act for-profit. This does not excuse them of common decency and the moral obligation to go above and beyond the bare minimum the law requires. The lack of expectation from the general public that corporations have any form of ethics or standards is what has driven so many of the bad behaviors we've seen in the past 20 years. Everything from crappy customer service, to offshoring jobs (i.e. hurting your country for personal gain), to monopolistic behavior to financial misreporting all fall into that category. Capitalism requires competition to be successful, the more of it, the better. Any company which views their business as a game to destroy competitors, explicitly or implicitly, is hurting all of us. You either act to make yourself the best you can possibly be (perhaps using competitors as a guide-post) and let your competitors do the same, or you should expect hostility and sanctions.
It's interactive. You watch as Frodo the Gnome enters the world at level 1, and kills kobolds to level 80. The sequel features instance PUGging (it's a spring break drinking movie), and the trilogy rounds out with guild drama in raid content (this is more like one of those plotless teeny bopper movies where everyone is depressed and mad at their parents).
They need to check exhaustively, I'm sure out there somewhere is Fizzle Sparksprocket, a fire mage gnome who contributed to the overthrow of Gnomeregan, and who immolates himself periodically in worship of an Old God.
The usual way is to make their tools and solutions cheap/free, and get people to build their entire operation (code, infrastructure,etc.) around it. Require enough infrastructure that rebuilding is very expensive. Then, once the industry has managed to use your software as the center of their infrastructure, hammer them.
All they seemed to do was ensure linux will run on HyperV, something it has not previously done well, and which puts MS at a disadvantage. Thus customers have not been adopting that platform in droves. Now they'll have fewer excuses not to. Nothing prevents MS from later making the LinuxIC tools incompatible at a later date (or just letting them atrophy, as the technology develops).
Just don't use Microsoft products ever again...if you want to run a business you really shouldn't put all your eggs in their basket anyway.
But while your developers, artists, voice actors etc. will all make good money and feed their family, your investors will have to scrape by on a lousy 8%, which is not how we do things here.
I completely support his efforts to reverse engineer the satellite system, and publish his findings. If he goes to jail it better be for piracy. I don't agree that he necessarily deserves what he'll get, he probably deserves a fraction of what he could get.
It runs fine on ubuntu, perhaps 64-bit linux is ok now, haven't tried in a little while.
We lived "upstate" (Poughkeepsie) briefly and my parents referred to it as Canada. Yeah yeah I know.
Anywhere that Wednesday July 15, @05:06PM is early in the morning.
It runs in 32-bit mode, so if you're on 64-bit you'll need to run the linux32 shell to get it to work. The 64-bit edition is presently payware. Honestly the linux version works for me better and faster than the windows version, but if you have multiple targets (particularly that are non-Xilinx) windows may be safer.
I guess my opinion for MMOGs should be that you use special abilities to alter the normal flow of combat. DPS should be primarily driven from auto-attack abilities. Using skills then turns in to watching the boss, watching the environment, working with your team, to coordinate abilities for effect. It's a very EQ mindset, but I never really thought that aspect of EQ was "broken". EQ wasn't meant to be like UO, and shouldn't be compared to it. While WoW is none of the above, but wants to be both.
As to the skill argument, let's assume the statement is correct: skill boils down to a mechanical set of processes. If you develop the process, and others do not, aren't you, therefore, more skilled?
You can be a low latency, T9 geared tank, who can out-dps your group. But you fail to turn aoe bosses away from your group, you position poorly, you don't LOS casters, you don't protect your group. You still wipe, you still fail. A less well geared tank might pull out an easy victory in your shoes, because he knows the process. This is a real scenario, if you play enough PUGs you can easily develop a sense for who knows their stuff. I call that skill. Sure it's less physical, less about reaction time and more about thinking, but isn't it still skill?
I think the issue is that in MMOGs more people tend to cluster into the "highly skilled" brackets than would be the case in other areas. There is not anything like a bell curve distribution, thus the winner of any given contest is probably less deterministic than people would like. They want to win, and when they win to feel like it was a sign of divinity. But that often isn't the case, and there may be no way for them to increase their skill to get the determinism they're looking for. It doesn't mean there's no skill, it means simply that they've hit a cap.
I disagree, there IS "skill". It's probably not a useful quantity outside of the game, and unlike some athletic events there is probably a point at which you cannot be more skilled than another person, but there is a huge gap between some players in ability, you can call that skill. Also hardware, latency, etc. also can blur the line between skill and wealth. The problem with this topic is what "skill" means to various people.
The latest trends in MMOGs (which WoW still seems to want to be the frontrunner) is mashing keys fast. The entire design of the latest expansion is the concept of "rotations", be it dps, healing (previously a relatively cerebral job) and tanking. On one hand they've added an element requiring players to mash buttons faster and more accurately (throwing in some proc effects that require you to adapt your rotation periodically). On the other hand they've almost entirely eliminated strategy and situational awareness. But yeah, it plays a lot more like an FPS and there is "skill" in mashing your buttons fast, clicking fast and turning fast.
Then there's FPS skill, which has traditionally been being prepared, fast and accurate, usually in that order.
Skill is increasingly being defined, across genre's in a one size fits all way: a) competitive player versus player, b) a measure of reaction time and ability to manipulate the UI/interface well, c) familiarity with the content (and practice within it) and to a somewhat lesser extent d) familiarity with the boundaries of the simulator in question (not exploits, just how far the rules bend).
Other things that skill could be, and in some genre's should be: a) adaptability to dynamic, unknown situations, b) coordination across groups of people, c) preparation for encounters for which a few datapoints are known, d) how to combine/synergize abilities across classes, and how to make trade-offs as a unit, etc. I play MMOGs primarily for this concept of "skill", although it's been in serious decline.
So I guess I want to undermine the entire thesis of the article. People bitch about "level systems" versus "skill" systems, but often because they aren't playing the same game. Levels in MMOGs are supposed to be about lumping people into similar categories of character ability level, gear and progression, at least in theory. The idea behind levels is a social tool from game designers that helps people identify others with similar interests, to get together and collectively tackle content that is otherwise too difficult for them singly. This is also, not coincidentally, the idea behind the class system! You know for a balanced group you need some tanking, some healing, some slowing (in EQ) and a mix of damage (melee and magic, usually). The class system worked well for helping people identify what element they needed to round out the group, and provided enough class differentiation to make it interesting. This works well in traditional MMOGs where the game is primarily PVE, and where game designers go out of their way to use levels appropriately and define classes well. WoW blurs this a lot, and IMO, screws up the game a lot. In any event, in context of MMOGs, levels != skill. You can have one without the other, and it's absolutely OK.
On the flip side, in an FPS where you are primarily engaged in PVP, it makes a lot less sense to rank people by arbitrary factors such as level (i.e. time spent killing monsters, content completed, etc.) and more sense to lump them into categories that allow like people to interact with like people. A tournament system works here. Of course not all contestants are in the same league as one another, some have better hardware, lower latency connections, more playtime, etc. You don't want people to feel completely outclassed. In boxing/wrestling/etc. you have the concept of "weight class". Perhaps grouping people with similar characteristics and ranking them within their class makes the most sense, providing a good level of adequate comparison of skill, bracketed within boundaries that seem rea
But if you take drugs as correctly prescribed, you can, and should, have both. In spite of the hysteria, people have taken vicodin for pain and not died from liver failure.
You left off inscription, jewelcrafting and enchanting.
Oddly I use vector calculus more in the software I write, than the hardware I design.
If random people got the ability to use the phone of their choice, and treat their wireless company as a bandwidth provider, a lot of value would be destroyed.
To fix this, assign all bugs with error code "42" to him.
Would these be the starving ones? Or the ones dying of disease?
Totally agree. I would like to be able to buy booze before noon on Sunday in Texas...because the only time the lines are short at the grocery store is when the locals are praying.
There's always extensive internet research, and the, uh, journals.
Dammit it said I'm pregnant!
That would be silicone verification. I don't believe a degree is required for that. It also happens to be a very hands-on field.
I know, it's a joke, but you'll probably be disappointed. Everyone you'll be competing with has a degree, the subject of the degree and the magnitude are now the dominate forces (even when ridiculous). In some areas right now they argue you need a PhD to do silicon verification, when in fact I think you probably don't need any degree, at all to do what the job ACTUALLY requires. It's just a matter of having a huge number of equally qualified applicants after the same job.
The problem with this, for all of you who have jobs, is not about some wishy washy bullshit about "the joy of learning", it's about manipulating metrics for maximum return. It's not about how much you learned or how well you can apply your knowledge, but how to appear best on paper to get the paycheck. When the rubber meets the road, are you any more qualified to do what you say you can do? We've all known people who groomed that 4.0 GPA (or close to it), who didn't amount to anything or who got washed ashore when they jumped in the ocean.
To be fair, it is a very applicable life skill to large corporation life, and we all have to do it from time to time. But if you look around your organizations and note the flaws, defects and absolutely mind-bogglingly braindead behavior that somehow persist...behind each one of those is usually some bogus metric that says "we're great!". The road to hell is paved with broken metrics.
To the present day businessman, nothing else matters but making money today. Thus any short term manipulation that demonstrably shows profit, is a good behavior. To almost any other profession, including responsible businessmen, you have to be sustainable through at least your career, or however long it takes to return what you owe, ride out tough times, and guarantee your future. Teaching kids how to act in their short term best interests exclusively is not at all the right way to go.