Actually, they always were "corporate", but I don't think that's necessarily "evil".
Honestly, the shiny happy image of OSS as a community where thousands of volunteers in their free time do all sorts of useful things -- i.e., ESR's "bazaar" -- stopped being true, oh, about a decade ago. It was true when software complexity was on the level of "ls" and "cat" and had enough lines of code to need a day or two to fully understand and be able to add your own clever switches. When you need to understand a whole framework and a million lines of code, practically noone bothers with it. Understanding someone else's code and framework just looks too much like work, and just isn't as good for instant gratification and bragging rights.
So almost all OSS work lately is actually done by corporations.
Mozilla itself always had a paid team of _employees_ for example. The development was first paid for by Netscape, then by AOL, and nowadays it's funded by Google. It's not exactly the traditional model of selling a product, that's for sure. (AOL mostly wanted a threat to extort MS with for subsidies, and Google does it for free advertising.) But it's a small cathedral anyway, and the development model sure looks no different from the one at MS, from where I stand.
It's not the only piece of software whose development works like that. OOo is worked on by Sun's paid developpers, Apache is mostly IBM work, at least Trolltech (you know, the guys behind the all the pretty widgets in KDE) is a company, etc. A lot of other frameworks come to mind too. E.g., Xerces and Xalan are IBM work.
If you look at the kernel release notes, well, you'll notice that most email addresses are from IBM, RedHat, etc. And there's a reason why SCO thought they could hand-wave a case against IBM in court (other than that Darl is on crack): because IBM did donate a ton of AIX code. SCO just had no rights to that AIX code, but it's in there. Other parts of it were, basically, paid contract work for some company. E.g., since Hans Reiser has been mentioned a lot lately, ReiserFS development was paid for by SuSE. Etc.
Heck, even the fact that now we can sneer at MS's security problems, is because at some point RedHat paid for a code review and security audit of Linux. Before that (e.g., in 2000 or so), a non-firewalled Linux machine on the Internet would get pwned in about half an hour.
And I'm not saying it's a bad thing or "evil". Those developers have to eat too, and it's just increasingly more work to make a modern program and/or to learn a whole framework just to add your own "print diagonally" feature to OOo. If you rely only on idealistic/utopian volunteers, it's going to be a long slow road to nowhere. See: Hurd. Or the tens of thousands of alpha-stage little projects on Sourceforge, where they _didn't_ get thousands of elite developers just begging to donate code and bug fixes.
The funny thing is, that idealistic bazaar model sure has plenty of apologists, but extremely few of them actually contribute anything except lip service.
On the other hand, if you were in it for some idealistic "stick it to the evil corporations" reason... well, sorry to shatter that nice illusion, but you're a decade or two too late for that. Sorry.
Actually, I seem to remember playing some space shuttle sim in the 90's. Can't remember the name for the life of me, though.
IIRC you had to flip buttons until you got RSI just to lift-off, and landing was a bit like trying to fly a brick. I mean, in most flight sims you come almost horizontal at the runway, while this thing... well, let's just say that it seemed like the difference between landing it and free fall seemed mostly semantics.
The experience was almost invariably along the lines of "damn, this is coming too fast... oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, looks like I'll miss the runway... yep, I was right." Guess I'm like a gaming jedi at times. I know a few moments in advance what will happen. In this case, as soon as I saw the runway, I just knew I'll plough into the ground next to it. "Next" meaning in the next state.
I have a feeling that this breakthrough will eventually lead to the development of giant flying mecha.
Given that the Casimir effect actually produces enough force (well, pressure) at tens of nanometres distances between the two plates, that'll be some really tiny giant mecha;)
That is all informative in its all way, but that's not what Procedural Programming means. Seriously, look what the adjective or adverb applies to, because it says it all:
- procedural texture generation: generating textures using procedures, instead of painting them the old fashioned way. I.e., instead of paying a horde of artists, you pay a smart guy to write you a piece of code.
- procedural terrain generation: ditto for generating terrain, e.g., using fractals.
- procedural animation: ditto for animations. The old fashioned way was to actually have a pre-defined animation file. Nowadays the procedural way is getting to be the standard, since it's really the only one which can account for physics.
by contrast:
- procedural programming: programming using procedures (what you may call methods or functions in other languages.) The big improvement of procedural programming back in the day was that it actually introduced the partitioning the program into functions, as opposed to the first programs being a chunk of source with GOTOs to solve the flow.
It may seem like a simple concept nowadays, but it's sorta like the stirrups or the saddle: you'd be surprised to how many people it didn't occur to do that. The first CPUs didn't even have the equivalent of "call" and "return", and it wasn't mandated by the Turing Machine concept. Then the first ones who got that didn't have a stack yet, so you'd literally be limited to one level deep and you better be sure you never recurse.
So, really, it's a whole different concept.
You can have procedural texture generation, for example, without that procedure actually being procedurally programmed. It could be done with Functional Programming just as well, and in fact it even makes sense. Or you could use Logic Programming, and that makes sense too: you'll want to have _some_ rules there, so a language which is all about rules matching and inference might be all you need. Otherwise, you'll have to basically reinvent a sort of inference engine of your own. You could even use Genetic programming if, for example, you want to try to optimize the result to exactly what the player is doing there. Etc.
Or more pragmatically a mixture thereof. E.g., even if it's procedurally programmed, chances are you'll want some rules matching, and you'll probably at least have a functional concept along the way.
Actually, dunno about others, NC Soft did release the number of subscriptions at least in their financial reports. As of March 2007, that was 143,127 subscribers for US & Europe. Plain, clear and transparent.
So although I didn't originally want to get into that, I'll go now and add that AFAIK Sony is the only one who pulls that kind of crap.
That said, it seems to me like you're fixated on "yeah, but it didn't fail". Yeah, technically it didn't get canceled, if that's what you mean. Never said otherwise.
On the other hand, if you want to talk _success_, I'm not sure how you want to define "success" there, then. Sorry, I don't consider minor niche players to be big successes. As I was saying, noone aims for a niche, unless that's all they can get. A niche isn't "success", it's at best "honourable mention."
If you like it, good for you, and I certainly don't wish them anything bad. But a "success" it ain't, any way you want to slice it.
And let's talk another thing: Sony doesn't even look like it can decide on a niche. They went through several major changes and switched direction in mid-flight every few months. Sorry, that doesn't tell me that they had a vision or concept and were successful in implementing it. From where I stand, the only "vision" they have is trying desperately to find that random change which will get them more market share. That's it. There is virtually no artistic or game design concept left that they didn't randomly change once or twice already, in their endless quest to copy WoW without even understanding what they're copying.
At any rate, it tells me that they didn't carefully aim for a niche and succeeded in reaching it. It tells me their whole plan was and is to get mainstream... and failed miserably in that plan.
Don't take that as hate or anything. I just find it, and them... sad. That's just about the word that sums it up.
Does it _need_ to be #1? Well, no, technically not. But I don't think anyone, much less Sony, is going to actually want to be a niche. People aim at a niche only when they can't compete in the mainstream. Why?
1. I guess in the same way that anyone else needs more customers. Greed is a powerful driving force of capitalism. Plus, honestly, even when you invest your money in a corporation, you expect it to make as much more money as physically possible if it can, not to aim for a barely-survivable niche. Sony is a corporation, and it's out to make money, not art, so...
2. Because more money means more funds for development.
E.g., You can see in Planetside what happens when the revenue stream slows down too much. It's a game that's barely still maintained, but isn't getting an expansion any time soon.
3. As I was saying, being #1 is a powerful marketing factor. So you can't fault anyone for coveting that place.
E.g., the New Coke fiasco, was caused precisely by not wanting to split up the Coke line and end up with Pepsi being more sold than either of them.
E.g., you can see it in Sony's case by their refusing to disclose the number of subscribers for the last couple of years. When they were at the top, you had no problem getting all the statistics you wanted out of them... because those statistics proved that Sony is #1, king of the hill, owner of the MMO market. Ever since WoW they suddenly refuse to give exact numbers for a lot of their games. Why? Because it's not good for marketting. And also because of the next factor, probably.
4. For pride. And if SOE is about anything, it's about hubris. They just have to show the world that they're number one, they're the ones who are right, they're the ones whose overpriced console is worth getting a second job for, etc. I just can't see them bending over that easily.
But be that as it may, the fact is that Sony _is_ fixated on competing with WoW. My guesses for their reasons cold be wrong, but it's hard to miss the symptoms. Do they _have_ to be fixated on it? Well, technically no, but they are anyway. And as a corporation, they're expected to claw their way to the top too.
Well, I'm flattered, but actually I'm not an expert on swords by any kind of reckoning. It's all just extensively googled on the Internet. And, as usually is the case with that source of information, it's probably not all accurate either. At any rate, I wish I could tell you some authoritative source, but other than hitting Google again, I'm a bit at a loss.
Pretty much it all started with a MUD I was playing on. They used to have the regular weaponry and armour mis-conception, namely 10 pound rapiers, 30 pound warhammers and 100 pound gothic breastplates. And we all kinda took it for granted.
So someone gets it into his head to change it to something more realistic, and the MUD pretty quickly got polarized into "noo, 3 pound warhammers are bogus" and "damn right they only weighed 2 to 3 pounds" factions. Being the wisearse you can see here, of course I wanted to jump into the debate and sound like a know-it-all. Also being a complete nerd, I went and googled it first. Much to my unexpected surprise, it turned out that the latter faction was right, and I found a bit more information about those weapons and armours too. Damn, I never would have guessed that a warhammer isn't a giant sledgehammer.
Not much later came a similar debate about katanas vs longswords, with manga fans swearing that a katana should be armour-piercing and how they've read somewhere that in WW2 some japanese bugger with a katana cut straight through a machinegun barrel. More googling, turns out that, damn, I was wrong about that one too.
Fast forward a bit more, and I was pondering making my own MUD. I actually wrote a driver from scratch, and it even worked, now to code the equipment and stuff. Now that was a lot of googling to get each and every piece of armour as historically-accurate described and balanced as possible.
'Course, then I decided I don't want to run a MUD after all.
At any rate, there you go, it's all googled. And from there, I just have a good memory for all sorts of trivia that no sane person would bother with.
Oh yes, because Everquest needs something to make it more addictive lol. Obviously they don't think their players are playing enough lol.
Actually, it does need more players. Badly. And, no, not enough people play it. World Of Warcraft is currently at around 20 times more subscribers than EQ1 at its peak, and rising. (Whereas by definition EQ1 went downwards after the peak.) And EQ2 actually peaked lower than EQ1, and even giving away the base game didn't save it.
EQ2 actually had to merge pairs of servers into a single server pretty quickly, because the populations on each was ridiculously low. It was starting to get the reputation of being, I quote loosely from memory, "like Morrowind, except you occasionally see another player." Of course, Sony's PR hacks worded it like it was some great innovation to improve gameplay experience... which technically it was, but only because it reduced a _problem_ they were having.
Add the fact that WoW subscriptions are slightly more expensive, and you're looking at Blizzard making some 25 times more money than EQ1 at its peak. And, you know, EQ1 used to be called a money printing license.
Add to that a bit of hubris too. Sony used to own the MMO market, and now they went to being an also-ran, fighting to keep a single-digit market share percentage. I'm betting that a lot of people at Sony took that as an insult.
From a more pragmatic thing, there's the image and word-of-mouth factor too. At one point Sony used to be _the_ name in MMOs and EQ was almost a synonim for MMOs. Anyone you knew who was playing an MMO, chances are they played EQ. That's free marketting. Nowadays, if you think "MMO", you think "WoW". And if you hear of someone who plays any Sony MMO, you don't ask, "how much does it cost?", you ask, "why?" (Planetside almost bombed, Matrix Online was a major dud, EQ2 we already discussed, and SWG managed to allienate even its die-hard fanboys without bringing any new customers in the process.)
Heck, even if you talk to someone who's sick and tired of WoW, chances are they won't say, "I'm gonna try EQ2 then", they'll say something like, "I'm gonna try LOTRO, 'cause it's like WoW with a Tolkien theme."
Add to that the awful lot of bad PR that Sony managed to get itself into lately, and you can see how it would only amplify the existing problems.
Basically, Sony has all the reasons to fight for more players, and you could watch them getting in a panic to copy WoW ever since it got launched and their EQ2 barely survived. There are a lot of disjointed, poorly planned, uninspired changes that their games went through precisely to try to copy WoW. The history of the last couple of years at Sony has been almost 100% trying to play catch with WoW.
The problem is that they don't have any designer who even understands _why_ WoW did well, or what actually worked. So they're taking random guesses, managing at most to annoy the players whose characters just got massively changed, but not quite to hit the mark. Or come even within 1 mile of it. It's like watching a (piss-poor) cook trying to copy someone else's dish that sells better, and going, "Oh, they used salt too. I get it! People love salt. I'll put 10 times more salt in mine!" But I digress.
On the bright side, this sounds like the kind of a change which, if done even half-way sane, at least doesn't mess anyone's existing character or annoy the existing players in any other way. Then again, it's Sony. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to screw up even this.
In a nutshell, yes, you've explained exactly what I was trying to say. The more person/group X perceives that person Y is trying to change their beliefs, the less inclined they'll be to listen.
It won't work. If just having the means to prove something were actually enough to convince the faithful... well, how do you explain the southern USA?
It's not just a jab at the fine bible-thumping guys and gals down there, though. It happens the same everywhere. Europe had its own counter-enlightenment movement, waaaay back. As in, a couple of centuries back. That's really what happens when you assault someone's beliefs hard enough: he'll just switch to block-head mode.
If it's truly a believer you don't just have to push hard enough until his defenses crumble and he goes, "omg, I've been blind for so long, I've seen the light now." It's more like the Dune shields: the harder you push, the more resistance you get. And if you're doing an all out fast assault, expect to meet a (mental) immovable wall. And more than a good dose of hostility. It'll get nowhere.
You have to go slowly and nicely if you want to get anywhere.
(The same applies to culture, to some extent, btw. If you try to change a culture at gun point, expect a lot of resistance, and when it changes it will be in the direction you don't expect. It's a bit like trying to twist a gyroscope.)
Plus, humans generally can act... well, like small children. If they like you, they'll believe every word you say, and if they dislike you, they'll try to spite you and contradict you.
The rise of fundamentalist islamism can be traced mostly to the above two factors. The middle east has been shafted _hard_ by the western powers and partially by Israel. So a lot of people rallied around those waving a "fuck the West!" banner. Add to that a lot of (perceived) sneering and outright hostility to their religion, and they'll just rally harder to defend it.
It's just human nature, and the west did the same in similar situations.
And the lack of dialog sure doesn't help either. Each time someone there actually tries to say what _is_ their problem, the west goes "la la la, I'm not hearing anything" or "they're probably rambling about their false god or something." It's the perfect recipe to keep the hostility going.
At any rate, IMHO just adding more force to that already disastrous recipe won't do any good. You may think that just giving them more proof that you're right and they're wrong is just what's needed to finally make their mental defenses crumble, but see what I've said before: it's IMHO already at the point where increasing the pressure just increases the resistance.
Well, I'd guess there's also a bit of a case of Hanlon's Razor: "Don't attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
There was this whine a long time ago on The Register, by an (ex) professional media photograph. Apparently his job was about to go the way of the dodo, because more and more newspapers were trying to cut costs by just buying images for almost nothing from either amateurs on the web, or from agencies selling thousands of photos for pennies. (And don't think those send photographers all over the globe to take photos after each and every event, because that would cost a lot more.)
In other words: it's becoming little more than clip art. If you're writing an article about Baghdad, you find the cheapest picture claiming to be from Baghdad, and put it on the page. If you're writing about Al Qaeda, you do the same with a pic claiming to have anything to do with Al Qaeda. Etc.
'Course, especially with pictures selected off Photocommunity and the like, for a couple of bucks, you never know what you're _really_ getting. It could be that someone photographed the demolition of an old mall in Elbonia and is hawking it as the aftermath of the tsunami in East Bumfuckistan. How would you know? (And probably a better question is: would they even care, if they knew?)
Briefly, it doesn't have to be manipulation. Or if it is, it doesn't have to be by the newspaper. If a joker posted that image as proof of his l33t photoshop skills, or if such a photos-by-the-dozen agency took a shortcut and photoshopped a photo just so they could sell something about an event... well, chances are the newspaper staff wouldn't even know.
I guess it's just what this general craze to reduce costs leads to. A lot of time the obvious way to reduce costs is to reduce quality. In this case, also add total lack of quality control, since they don't actually have someone there who could check if things are like in the photo. You can expect a lot of junk to go through undetected.
And, btw, if you thought only the photos were fake, you'd be surprised how many of the _articles_ are bogus stuff written by a PR agency and disguised as news.
White _technically_ it may be true, it's IMHO a highly mis-leading statement. About 90% of the devs don't "meet the deadline" in that the game is anywhere _near_ finished, tested and balanced. They "meet the deadline" only in that the publisher forces them to shovel it out the door at that date, ready or not. Usually the latter.
Plus, "meeting the deadline" is already stretching the term a bit, when the average game will need major debugging and rebalancing for the next 6 month or so. And I don't mean just cosmetic tweaks, but in a few cases even getting the features advertised. I'm sorry, but in almost any other kind of project it wouldn't be called "meeting the deadline", but "needing a 6 month extension to finish it."
Not to mention that half of them, at the end of all that patching, are still nowhere near finished. I can think of several that ended up with worse bugs than they were released with. Or where they said they fixed the same bug in 7 patches straight, and it still didn't work.
Plus, frankly, half of what counts as "meeting the deadline" at least in the PC games segment would be called a failed project almost anywhere else. If even an e-commerce site worked as unreliably and unpredictably as half the games at launch, the company running that site might even face civil or criminal prosecution, not just lost sales. And I'm not even getting into what would happen in domains like banking or insurance.
Heck, I can think of at least one game which, as shipped, threw a script syntax error right when trying to start the main campaign. Nothing blamable on the user's configuration or drivers or whatever: a script syntax error. That thing couldn't run on _any_ computer. Can you really imagine many domains where that would even get a productive deployment? Much less be called "meeting the deadline".
However, in the games segment we've been trained like Pavlov's dog to that it's ok to buy crap if you're promised that it will be patched later. Maybe.
Smaller studios don't survive long if they don't meet their deadlines.
Most of the smaller studios will go broke and die after one game or two, so IMHO that's hardly an indication of their great management skills.
_Hopefully_ they'd be forfeited too, as that is after all the standard in the whole western world at least.
The problem is that you can't always be sure how much someone earned. Especially when money laundering is involved, you can always hope that you got all the accounts, bzt you never have the exact sum. It also gets hairy when other companies are involved, because you can't just take someone's money only because they sold some service to a crook. Etc.
IIRC have been a few mafia dons who have almost certainly continued to lead their crime empire even from jail, so essentially not only they kept a lot of the benefits of their crimes, but continued to make more money out of it. Probably not this guy's case, but it's happened.
I wonder where I've heard this here "We'll ship it when it's finished" rhetoric before?
For example, from Epic, Blizzard, and a few others who are now the big names of the industry for it. It turns out that, surprise, more people buy a game which is finished and polished than something shoved out the door to meet an arbitrary deadline. Much as a couple of publishers still hope that if they believe the opposite really, really hard, it will somehow become reality.
The flip side of the coin is that if the penalty is too light, then people start doing bang/buck maths. If you scammed people out of 100,000$ and you get 1 year for it, well, then for a _lot_ of people it's more than they'd make in any other job.
Saying that inevitability alone is all the deterrent and harshness doesn't matter, paints a highly skewed and misleading picture. Consider this extreme example: let's say we make the penalty for murder something as trivial as house arrest for a day. We also make it 100% unavoidable. Well, you can probably see how inevitability alone wouldn't deter anyone in that situation.
So, no, neither over-simplification is right. The penalty must be _both_ (A) nearly inevitable, and (B) high enough to make the crime not worth it. One without the other simply isn't enough. It's not an either-or choice. Both need to be tuned just right.
What about imports? Now I'm told that at least the PS3 is no longer region-locked, but the PS2 was and so were a heck of a lot of PS1 units. (Although more loosely into PAL and NTSC regions.)
I'm in Europe which is mostly PAL, and which also didn't get half of the PS1 games available in the USA in NTSC.
So here's the deal: half the game I owned were US imports. None burned/"backed-up", all original CDs, with manual and box and everything. Sony got my money for every single one of them. Money which they otherwise wouldn't have gotten at all, since they never released those games down here. Yeah, that's the kind of an evil pirate I am: I went and gave Sony some money against their will.
Sony also always acted as if imports are piracy. Again, we're not talking about burned CDs, we're talking units sold. Apparently the fact that I bought some games from them, which they otherwise wouldn't have sold me, counted as piracy to them. Apparently it's soooo much of a similarity between an inconvenience like "yeah, but it screws up our marketting data of how much units were sold in each territory" (which is all that game imports ever did) and pirating that game.
Where I'm getting at is: it's not as simple as "modchips == piracy." There are perfectly non-piracy uses of modchips. One is mentioned in the summary (you'll ideally want your little kid to play with a copy, not to scratch the $60 disc) and another one I just gave you now.
Plus, there's the whole moral issue of criminalizing people for owning a tool, as opposed to actually committing the infraction. If you still don't see the problem, think this: if you're a guy, chances are you have all the equipment you'd ever need to be a rapist. It doesn't mean you're automatically one. How about looking for people who actually committed a crime, instead of those who would technically have the means.
And it seems to me that that's the whole problem here: the summary mentions raiding for mod-chips, not for burned DVDs.
yeah so? a AAA title that no one has ever heard of, won't sell either. This could be a turd. Chances are it is a turd, but the point was the company GOT what they HOPED FOR: Exposure! (That's the point of a press release!)
Dude, the question isn't whether exposure is good and bad, but whether you get the kind of PR you actually want. Exposure is only good when it doesn't cause you lost sales in the process.
Bad exposure is damn easy to get. Just do something extremely stupid, or have your product fail in a spectacular way. That'll get you headlines. Or just pull a "<insert name> will make you his bitch" again, and you might slapped by a similar backlash again. That's not the kind of exposure sane companies want though.
What you don't seem to understand is, really, where the zero point is. No PR doesn't mean "zero, it can't get any worse than that." An AAA title that noone heard much about will still be on the shelves at WallMart, will still be sent to a ton of reviews site, it will still be listed on Amazon, and will still have people posting about it or telling their friends about it. So some amount of exposure will be there anyway. I'm not saying that that's necessarily enough, but I'm saying there's room to do even worse than that. If you give people the message, basically, "stay away from these arse-clowns", you can actually do worse than if you didn't do a press release at all.
And even if you didn't get something that horrible, there's a whole continuum of reactions and effects you can get. You'll want to get people not only to hear the company or game name, but hopefully also get them interested in it. If you can have a choice between giving people the right message and the wrong message, you'd have to be a dolt to deliberately choose the second. The first also gets you, basically, some marketing on top of the exposure, the latter can lose you as many potential customers as it got you. Or as said before, it can occasionally actually lose you more customers.
(Why are people so incapable of seeing the business side of things?)
Actually, are _you_ capable? No offense, but I have trouble taking anyone seriously when they operate with grossly-oversimplified canned wisecracks as their grand insight into any domain, marketing included.
Bingo. One thing anthropologists discovered very early is that, basically, people lie even on anonymous polls. Or not exactly "lie" consciously, but paint an image closer to how they'd _like_ to be, rather than how they _are_.
E.g., a tribe was asked whether they're hunters or agricultors or what. Virtually everyone proclaimed themselves to be a brave hunter, even though they had in the meantime gradually evolve towards mostly agriculture, and IIRC a lot didn't even have weapons any more. But their culture glorified the hunter/warrior archetype to such an extent, that everyone still pictured themselves as just that.
E.g., a rural community was asked several questions on a poll, such as if they work the fields together and help each other build a barn, and stuff like that. The vast majority said that, yep, they do it all the time. Turns out that the last time anyone helped build a barn was half a century earlier, and if you wanted help in the fields you had to hire someone. But their culture was so biased towards selfless helping each other, that people _imagined_ themselves being still all tightly knit and helpful even long after they had changed.
E.g., at one point there was a hike in the price of meat, and people were polled whether they eat more meat, less meat, or the same. The vast majority said they're not putting up with that kind of prices, and they're definitely eating less meat in that time. Turns out that in reality, they ate _more_ meat on the average. (Presumably to show themselves that they can still afford it.)
Etc.
Basically I'd take all polls with a grain of salt. Unless you can actually observe those people and/or validate the data by other means, they _will_ tell you something closer to their ideal self-image than to the real self. Especially in situations where one of the choice has a strong negative conotation, there'll be a lot of taking the other one.
So maybe all this shows isn't even IQ vs honesty as such, but more like "IQ vs realistic self assessment", mixed with a dose of "IQ vs realizing you don't need to lie on an anonymous test." E.g.:
- at the high end, people probably are more aware that saying "yes, I have sex all the time" won't make them more popular
- as you get closer to the middle, people are driven more by peer-pressure and by their image, so they're less going to admit they're anything less than perfectly cool
- move lower than 100 and gradually some start even having some problems understanding how an anonymous poll works and how social perceptions work, and start to lie even more for reasons like impressing the interviewer or something equally dumb
- move _much_ lower, and you start to deal with people who have trouble even understanding what's really asked of them, what the consequences are anyway, etc, and are increasingly under near-permanent supervision. So you start to get anything from people who haven't figured out yet how their peer's opinion of it works anyway, to "omg, if I say that I had here, mom will find out and yell at me."
If the last one seems unlikely, remember that they had one category for people under IQ 70, and that's a lot dumber than a gorilla. Literally.
Yes in that indeed it doesn't actually tell you anything that you'd base a buying decision on.
No, in that it's another somewhat comical (and somewhat sad) example of bad marketing and press releases that sound like they were generated by the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator, or a variant thereof. You know, the stuff that we all like to make fun of.
And it also shows at least one reaction to such crap, and it's not a positive one. It turns out that there _is_ such thing as bad publicity.
It's not exactly a new revelation, though. We've seen stuff like that before. Daikatana was massively torpedoed by the backlash to its own dumbly-worded marketing hype. And I forget the name now, but there was another game where a dumb PR hack thought he'd build buzz by causing a scandal with "leaked" information claiming that the game contains all sorts of moral abominations (especially to a non-gamer)... which didn't even exist in the game. Unfortunately the reaction was such that the publisher preferred to cancel the game rather than deal with it.
And then there are the less known cases where a company paid big bucks for, say, a funky company name (a few years back the hype had hit big time that some modern day shamen can construct for you a company or product name that's just short of pure magic, and causes all sorts of positive reactions and associations in people who hear it)... and then discovered that either it has no effect, or in a few cases that the test audience finds it repulsive or obscene. It actually happened. 'Course, then there are those which didn't test it first.
Etc.
Why is it important for nerds? Because for a lot of us our job depends on some marketer selling it. And it turns out that a dumb marketer can do more harm than good. Imagine your job depending on one of _these_ destructive press releases or PR campaigns.
And considering that he has the social skills to sell his ideas to the boss, while a lot of us nerds are more fluent in C++ than in our mother tongue... "do not be alarmed. Be very, very frightened, Arthur Dent."
Don't get me wrong, intelligent and competent marketing is good and I think most of us can respect a competent professional in any domain. But it's also a domain where success is so hard to measure, and there are plenty of bogus metrics with which the incompetents and dishonest pricks can justify their salary. (E.g., a fake UI campaign tends to be counted as a success based on the number of clicks, even though most just result in annoyed potential customers and chances are you didn't raise their interest in your product at all.) And there are a lot which... well, let's put it like this: when you select people based on their ability to be dishonest and sell crap, don't be surprised when they lie to your face and their main interest is in selling themselves.
As I was saying, I described only one kind of schizophrenia, and there are 5 major categories. In fact, the original term by, you know, the guy who coined the term, was the "schizophrenias". The 5 categories being:
- paranoid type (the one I described already)
- disorganized type (where thought disorders do occur)
- catatonic type
- undifferentiated type
- residual type
Some include two further subtypes:
- post-schizophrenic depression (somewhat deceptively named, since schizophrenic symptoms are still more or less present)
- simple schizophrenia (progressive development of the negative symptoms you describe. But even then, the keyword is progressive: it doesn't flat out start by flinging feces, as you put it, but includes a very long and slow progression through states that most people would at most think eccentric or slightly bizarre, and when the person is still fairly logical and intelligent.)
So basically, you're trying to tell me that there's more than one type, right? Well, given that I've said that repeatedly by now too, I'd say we're not disagreeing much, right?
I'd also like to say that schizophrenia is one of the most controversial and mis-diagnosed illnesses even in humans, who can, you know, talk and tell you their logic. If you take two psychiatrists, they're almost as likely to disagree about a diagnostic as they are to agree.
I'd just love to know how would they diagnose that in mice. Basically, again, how do they know if the mouse is simply retarded or having a delusional or illogical train of thought? Not everyone who can't learn is schizophrenic, you know, and all they showed there in the mice's behaviour is that they're dumb as a brick. It's not a mouse who uses some bizarre logic and ends up digging in some interestingly different place than the clues point him to, it's a mouse who flat out can't take the hints at all. That's all I'm saying.
Why not? There _will_ be people whose goal will be exactly to look as disturbing and menacing as possible. And there _will_ be people who'll wear "I'm the smart guy who took the xp advantage over dumb aesthetics" like a medal of honour.
You can see both sides of the medal in WoW too, that is, both PM's point and the counter-point.
On one hand, if you take a census of the population (repeatedly at different times, to have a good statistic), on any server, you'll find that, with exactly one notable exception, the more a race looks human and pretty, the more players play it. Before Burning Crusade, that meant there were more Humans or Night Elves than the whole Horde combined, no matter what advantages the Horde races got. Even as everyone was bitching about shamen and warlock-killing un-fearable Undead, most people didn't actually want to go and play one.
That's one major reason why the Horde got Blood Elves in the Burning Crusade expansion. Blizzard just caved in and realized that the only thing that would even start to even the odds was to give the Horde a pretty and human-looking race. In fact, one prettier than the Night Elves on the Alliance side.
So that would sorta illustrate PM's point that, indeed, a lot of people will take looking pretty over being an effective killing machine.
The counter-point, though, is that notable exception I've mentioned: the undead. (Technically called the "Forsaken".) The WoW undead aren't the pretty sanitized VTM vampires, but something more hideous than anything you could get in Fable or in most other games. They look literally like someone who's been rotting in a grave for two weeks and then got dug out. You know, with missing flesh, tattered clothes, bones poking out, etc.
The funny thing is, the undead were the most played Horde race. Ok, so the Will Of The Forsaken ability was a major selling point too, but even then it illustrates that some people do take power over looking pretty. But the funny thing is, even after WOTF got nerfed, the undead _still_ are disturbingly popular. Some people actually _like_ looking like that. Go figure.
You're right, your understanding of schizophrenia in general and this study in particular is clearly superior to all those published Psychiatry PhDs involved.
Some dumbasses even gave this Tonegawa moron a Nobel, yet passed you by. Fools.
Heh. Here's some free clue for you: you don't need any pre-requisites to start using your head. There's a reason why you have one on your shoulders, and it's not there just so it wouldn't rain straight down your throat.
No, seriously. Einstein was just a lowly patent office clerk, when he dared think he can do better than the great Hendrik Lorentz. No, seriously, Lorentz too was a Ph.D. and a Nobel Prize laureate, and a mighty smart guy all around.
So I guess people like you would have made fun of Einstein too, for daring even try to think on his own there, right?
Now I'm not saying that I or you are of the calibre of Einstein, but nevertheless, get this: you don't need to pass any special exam to start using your brains. You have it anyway, you can start using it any time you want to. You don't need anyone's royal stamp of approval.
Plus, you know, the site's motto says "news for _nerds_". You know, the guys who like to use their _brains_, even when it's as pointless as this or as memorizing Star Trek trivia. That's the whole point of being a "nerd".
So, no offense, but if you're rather in the cathegory that would just unthinkingly believe what some great figure of authority says, and never dare imagine yourself worthy enough to question it... why are you even here? I'm sure there's some religious community outhere where you'd feel more fulfilled, without having to deal with us pesky nerds who insist on thinking and questioning.
Well, being schizophrenic isn't the same as being a sociopath, or even the more fuzzy "being a dick".
A paranoid schizophrenic for example has (at least according to one theory), a pretty fuzzy line between fantasy and reality. At any rate, stuf originating purely in their imagination or beliefs gets mixed with the reality. They might hear voices, see stuff that isn't there, or feel or smell stuff that noone else can perceive. Where you might just imagine telling someone where to shove it, a schizophrenic might actually perceive it as having happened or as in progress. They might become convinced it's telepathy, or some kind of astral projection, or whatever. That is, either that others are able to project their thoughts into their head, or that they themselves have some telepathic or clairvoyance powers. Others might see stuff that's not actually there (e.g., ghosts) or distort their perception of real stuff (e.g., seeing a piece of string on their skin as some mysterious new parasite.)
Well, that's just one of the kinds of schizophrenia, and what I've described there is more like the extreme cases that get sent to a mental institutions. Most people are a lot more mild than that, and either never get diagnosed or are considered harmless enough to just give them some medicine and let them go back home. Plus a lot are intelligent and socially aware enough to know that everyone else will think they're crazy if they go around saying that they see ghosts, and that carries a major social stigma in our society. So they do their best to hide it, and might never get diagnosed at all.
That doesn't, however, mean that they're necessarily "a dick". The cases where the voices told them to do something nasty are actually quite rare, and most might not even hear voices at all, but have some other form of sensory delusions or distortions. A schizophrenic might just as well be a very nice guy or gal, who just happens to see or hear something slightly different than you do. Just because someone sees ghosts, for example, doesn't mean they will go and tell everyone where to shove it and how deep. That ghost might as well tell them to be nice, or do some great work of charity, or reinforce whatever other belief that spawned that bit of imagination in the first place.
The cases where the voices told them that everyone is their enemy and must be elliminated, are actually quite rare. The 1% of the total population being or having at some point been schizophrenic is a _lot_. Plus, as I was saying, there are a lot which never get diagnosed at all. If they all went and did nasty stuff, you'd notice.
So, basically, chances are you've met or interacted daily with one or more people with schizophrenia without even knowing it. And chances are they weren't the obnoxious "dicks" either.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they always were "corporate", but I don't think that's necessarily "evil".
Honestly, the shiny happy image of OSS as a community where thousands of volunteers in their free time do all sorts of useful things -- i.e., ESR's "bazaar" -- stopped being true, oh, about a decade ago. It was true when software complexity was on the level of "ls" and "cat" and had enough lines of code to need a day or two to fully understand and be able to add your own clever switches. When you need to understand a whole framework and a million lines of code, practically noone bothers with it. Understanding someone else's code and framework just looks too much like work, and just isn't as good for instant gratification and bragging rights.
So almost all OSS work lately is actually done by corporations.
Mozilla itself always had a paid team of _employees_ for example. The development was first paid for by Netscape, then by AOL, and nowadays it's funded by Google. It's not exactly the traditional model of selling a product, that's for sure. (AOL mostly wanted a threat to extort MS with for subsidies, and Google does it for free advertising.) But it's a small cathedral anyway, and the development model sure looks no different from the one at MS, from where I stand.
It's not the only piece of software whose development works like that. OOo is worked on by Sun's paid developpers, Apache is mostly IBM work, at least Trolltech (you know, the guys behind the all the pretty widgets in KDE) is a company, etc. A lot of other frameworks come to mind too. E.g., Xerces and Xalan are IBM work.
If you look at the kernel release notes, well, you'll notice that most email addresses are from IBM, RedHat, etc. And there's a reason why SCO thought they could hand-wave a case against IBM in court (other than that Darl is on crack): because IBM did donate a ton of AIX code. SCO just had no rights to that AIX code, but it's in there. Other parts of it were, basically, paid contract work for some company. E.g., since Hans Reiser has been mentioned a lot lately, ReiserFS development was paid for by SuSE. Etc.
Heck, even the fact that now we can sneer at MS's security problems, is because at some point RedHat paid for a code review and security audit of Linux. Before that (e.g., in 2000 or so), a non-firewalled Linux machine on the Internet would get pwned in about half an hour.
And I'm not saying it's a bad thing or "evil". Those developers have to eat too, and it's just increasingly more work to make a modern program and/or to learn a whole framework just to add your own "print diagonally" feature to OOo. If you rely only on idealistic/utopian volunteers, it's going to be a long slow road to nowhere. See: Hurd. Or the tens of thousands of alpha-stage little projects on Sourceforge, where they _didn't_ get thousands of elite developers just begging to donate code and bug fixes.
The funny thing is, that idealistic bazaar model sure has plenty of apologists, but extremely few of them actually contribute anything except lip service.
On the other hand, if you were in it for some idealistic "stick it to the evil corporations" reason... well, sorry to shatter that nice illusion, but you're a decade or two too late for that. Sorry.
Actually, I seem to remember playing some space shuttle sim in the 90's. Can't remember the name for the life of me, though.
IIRC you had to flip buttons until you got RSI just to lift-off, and landing was a bit like trying to fly a brick. I mean, in most flight sims you come almost horizontal at the runway, while this thing... well, let's just say that it seemed like the difference between landing it and free fall seemed mostly semantics.
The experience was almost invariably along the lines of "damn, this is coming too fast... oh shit, oh shit, oh shit, looks like I'll miss the runway... yep, I was right." Guess I'm like a gaming jedi at times. I know a few moments in advance what will happen. In this case, as soon as I saw the runway, I just knew I'll plough into the ground next to it. "Next" meaning in the next state.
Given that the Casimir effect actually produces enough force (well, pressure) at tens of nanometres distances between the two plates, that'll be some really tiny giant mecha
That is all informative in its all way, but that's not what Procedural Programming means. Seriously, look what the adjective or adverb applies to, because it says it all:
- procedural texture generation: generating textures using procedures, instead of painting them the old fashioned way. I.e., instead of paying a horde of artists, you pay a smart guy to write you a piece of code.
- procedural terrain generation: ditto for generating terrain, e.g., using fractals.
- procedural animation: ditto for animations. The old fashioned way was to actually have a pre-defined animation file. Nowadays the procedural way is getting to be the standard, since it's really the only one which can account for physics.
by contrast:
- procedural programming: programming using procedures (what you may call methods or functions in other languages.) The big improvement of procedural programming back in the day was that it actually introduced the partitioning the program into functions, as opposed to the first programs being a chunk of source with GOTOs to solve the flow.
It may seem like a simple concept nowadays, but it's sorta like the stirrups or the saddle: you'd be surprised to how many people it didn't occur to do that. The first CPUs didn't even have the equivalent of "call" and "return", and it wasn't mandated by the Turing Machine concept. Then the first ones who got that didn't have a stack yet, so you'd literally be limited to one level deep and you better be sure you never recurse.
So, really, it's a whole different concept.
You can have procedural texture generation, for example, without that procedure actually being procedurally programmed. It could be done with Functional Programming just as well, and in fact it even makes sense. Or you could use Logic Programming, and that makes sense too: you'll want to have _some_ rules there, so a language which is all about rules matching and inference might be all you need. Otherwise, you'll have to basically reinvent a sort of inference engine of your own. You could even use Genetic programming if, for example, you want to try to optimize the result to exactly what the player is doing there. Etc.
Or more pragmatically a mixture thereof. E.g., even if it's procedurally programmed, chances are you'll want some rules matching, and you'll probably at least have a functional concept along the way.
Actually, dunno about others, NC Soft did release the number of subscriptions at least in their financial reports. As of March 2007, that was 143,127 subscribers for US & Europe. Plain, clear and transparent.
So although I didn't originally want to get into that, I'll go now and add that AFAIK Sony is the only one who pulls that kind of crap.
That said, it seems to me like you're fixated on "yeah, but it didn't fail". Yeah, technically it didn't get canceled, if that's what you mean. Never said otherwise.
On the other hand, if you want to talk _success_, I'm not sure how you want to define "success" there, then. Sorry, I don't consider minor niche players to be big successes. As I was saying, noone aims for a niche, unless that's all they can get. A niche isn't "success", it's at best "honourable mention."
If you like it, good for you, and I certainly don't wish them anything bad. But a "success" it ain't, any way you want to slice it.
And let's talk another thing: Sony doesn't even look like it can decide on a niche. They went through several major changes and switched direction in mid-flight every few months. Sorry, that doesn't tell me that they had a vision or concept and were successful in implementing it. From where I stand, the only "vision" they have is trying desperately to find that random change which will get them more market share. That's it. There is virtually no artistic or game design concept left that they didn't randomly change once or twice already, in their endless quest to copy WoW without even understanding what they're copying.
At any rate, it tells me that they didn't carefully aim for a niche and succeeded in reaching it. It tells me their whole plan was and is to get mainstream... and failed miserably in that plan.
Don't take that as hate or anything. I just find it, and them... sad. That's just about the word that sums it up.
Does it _need_ to be #1? Well, no, technically not. But I don't think anyone, much less Sony, is going to actually want to be a niche. People aim at a niche only when they can't compete in the mainstream. Why?
1. I guess in the same way that anyone else needs more customers. Greed is a powerful driving force of capitalism. Plus, honestly, even when you invest your money in a corporation, you expect it to make as much more money as physically possible if it can, not to aim for a barely-survivable niche. Sony is a corporation, and it's out to make money, not art, so...
2. Because more money means more funds for development.
E.g., You can see in Planetside what happens when the revenue stream slows down too much. It's a game that's barely still maintained, but isn't getting an expansion any time soon.
3. As I was saying, being #1 is a powerful marketing factor. So you can't fault anyone for coveting that place.
E.g., the New Coke fiasco, was caused precisely by not wanting to split up the Coke line and end up with Pepsi being more sold than either of them.
E.g., you can see it in Sony's case by their refusing to disclose the number of subscribers for the last couple of years. When they were at the top, you had no problem getting all the statistics you wanted out of them... because those statistics proved that Sony is #1, king of the hill, owner of the MMO market. Ever since WoW they suddenly refuse to give exact numbers for a lot of their games. Why? Because it's not good for marketting. And also because of the next factor, probably.
4. For pride. And if SOE is about anything, it's about hubris. They just have to show the world that they're number one, they're the ones who are right, they're the ones whose overpriced console is worth getting a second job for, etc. I just can't see them bending over that easily.
But be that as it may, the fact is that Sony _is_ fixated on competing with WoW. My guesses for their reasons cold be wrong, but it's hard to miss the symptoms. Do they _have_ to be fixated on it? Well, technically no, but they are anyway. And as a corporation, they're expected to claw their way to the top too.
Well, I'm flattered, but actually I'm not an expert on swords by any kind of reckoning. It's all just extensively googled on the Internet. And, as usually is the case with that source of information, it's probably not all accurate either. At any rate, I wish I could tell you some authoritative source, but other than hitting Google again, I'm a bit at a loss.
Pretty much it all started with a MUD I was playing on. They used to have the regular weaponry and armour mis-conception, namely 10 pound rapiers, 30 pound warhammers and 100 pound gothic breastplates. And we all kinda took it for granted.
So someone gets it into his head to change it to something more realistic, and the MUD pretty quickly got polarized into "noo, 3 pound warhammers are bogus" and "damn right they only weighed 2 to 3 pounds" factions. Being the wisearse you can see here, of course I wanted to jump into the debate and sound like a know-it-all. Also being a complete nerd, I went and googled it first. Much to my unexpected surprise, it turned out that the latter faction was right, and I found a bit more information about those weapons and armours too. Damn, I never would have guessed that a warhammer isn't a giant sledgehammer.
Not much later came a similar debate about katanas vs longswords, with manga fans swearing that a katana should be armour-piercing and how they've read somewhere that in WW2 some japanese bugger with a katana cut straight through a machinegun barrel. More googling, turns out that, damn, I was wrong about that one too.
Fast forward a bit more, and I was pondering making my own MUD. I actually wrote a driver from scratch, and it even worked, now to code the equipment and stuff. Now that was a lot of googling to get each and every piece of armour as historically-accurate described and balanced as possible.
'Course, then I decided I don't want to run a MUD after all.
At any rate, there you go, it's all googled. And from there, I just have a good memory for all sorts of trivia that no sane person would bother with.
Actually, it does need more players. Badly. And, no, not enough people play it. World Of Warcraft is currently at around 20 times more subscribers than EQ1 at its peak, and rising. (Whereas by definition EQ1 went downwards after the peak.) And EQ2 actually peaked lower than EQ1, and even giving away the base game didn't save it.
EQ2 actually had to merge pairs of servers into a single server pretty quickly, because the populations on each was ridiculously low. It was starting to get the reputation of being, I quote loosely from memory, "like Morrowind, except you occasionally see another player." Of course, Sony's PR hacks worded it like it was some great innovation to improve gameplay experience... which technically it was, but only because it reduced a _problem_ they were having.
Add the fact that WoW subscriptions are slightly more expensive, and you're looking at Blizzard making some 25 times more money than EQ1 at its peak. And, you know, EQ1 used to be called a money printing license.
Add to that a bit of hubris too. Sony used to own the MMO market, and now they went to being an also-ran, fighting to keep a single-digit market share percentage. I'm betting that a lot of people at Sony took that as an insult.
From a more pragmatic thing, there's the image and word-of-mouth factor too. At one point Sony used to be _the_ name in MMOs and EQ was almost a synonim for MMOs. Anyone you knew who was playing an MMO, chances are they played EQ. That's free marketting. Nowadays, if you think "MMO", you think "WoW". And if you hear of someone who plays any Sony MMO, you don't ask, "how much does it cost?", you ask, "why?" (Planetside almost bombed, Matrix Online was a major dud, EQ2 we already discussed, and SWG managed to allienate even its die-hard fanboys without bringing any new customers in the process.)
Heck, even if you talk to someone who's sick and tired of WoW, chances are they won't say, "I'm gonna try EQ2 then", they'll say something like, "I'm gonna try LOTRO, 'cause it's like WoW with a Tolkien theme."
Add to that the awful lot of bad PR that Sony managed to get itself into lately, and you can see how it would only amplify the existing problems.
Basically, Sony has all the reasons to fight for more players, and you could watch them getting in a panic to copy WoW ever since it got launched and their EQ2 barely survived. There are a lot of disjointed, poorly planned, uninspired changes that their games went through precisely to try to copy WoW. The history of the last couple of years at Sony has been almost 100% trying to play catch with WoW.
The problem is that they don't have any designer who even understands _why_ WoW did well, or what actually worked. So they're taking random guesses, managing at most to annoy the players whose characters just got massively changed, but not quite to hit the mark. Or come even within 1 mile of it. It's like watching a (piss-poor) cook trying to copy someone else's dish that sells better, and going, "Oh, they used salt too. I get it! People love salt. I'll put 10 times more salt in mine!" But I digress.
On the bright side, this sounds like the kind of a change which, if done even half-way sane, at least doesn't mess anyone's existing character or annoy the existing players in any other way. Then again, it's Sony. I wouldn't be surprised if they manage to screw up even this.
In a nutshell, yes, you've explained exactly what I was trying to say. The more person/group X perceives that person Y is trying to change their beliefs, the less inclined they'll be to listen.
It won't work. If just having the means to prove something were actually enough to convince the faithful... well, how do you explain the southern USA?
It's not just a jab at the fine bible-thumping guys and gals down there, though. It happens the same everywhere. Europe had its own counter-enlightenment movement, waaaay back. As in, a couple of centuries back. That's really what happens when you assault someone's beliefs hard enough: he'll just switch to block-head mode.
If it's truly a believer you don't just have to push hard enough until his defenses crumble and he goes, "omg, I've been blind for so long, I've seen the light now." It's more like the Dune shields: the harder you push, the more resistance you get. And if you're doing an all out fast assault, expect to meet a (mental) immovable wall. And more than a good dose of hostility. It'll get nowhere.
You have to go slowly and nicely if you want to get anywhere.
(The same applies to culture, to some extent, btw. If you try to change a culture at gun point, expect a lot of resistance, and when it changes it will be in the direction you don't expect. It's a bit like trying to twist a gyroscope.)
Plus, humans generally can act... well, like small children. If they like you, they'll believe every word you say, and if they dislike you, they'll try to spite you and contradict you.
The rise of fundamentalist islamism can be traced mostly to the above two factors. The middle east has been shafted _hard_ by the western powers and partially by Israel. So a lot of people rallied around those waving a "fuck the West!" banner. Add to that a lot of (perceived) sneering and outright hostility to their religion, and they'll just rally harder to defend it.
It's just human nature, and the west did the same in similar situations.
And the lack of dialog sure doesn't help either. Each time someone there actually tries to say what _is_ their problem, the west goes "la la la, I'm not hearing anything" or "they're probably rambling about their false god or something." It's the perfect recipe to keep the hostility going.
At any rate, IMHO just adding more force to that already disastrous recipe won't do any good. You may think that just giving them more proof that you're right and they're wrong is just what's needed to finally make their mental defenses crumble, but see what I've said before: it's IMHO already at the point where increasing the pressure just increases the resistance.
Well, I'd guess there's also a bit of a case of Hanlon's Razor: "Don't attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
There was this whine a long time ago on The Register, by an (ex) professional media photograph. Apparently his job was about to go the way of the dodo, because more and more newspapers were trying to cut costs by just buying images for almost nothing from either amateurs on the web, or from agencies selling thousands of photos for pennies. (And don't think those send photographers all over the globe to take photos after each and every event, because that would cost a lot more.)
In other words: it's becoming little more than clip art. If you're writing an article about Baghdad, you find the cheapest picture claiming to be from Baghdad, and put it on the page. If you're writing about Al Qaeda, you do the same with a pic claiming to have anything to do with Al Qaeda. Etc.
'Course, especially with pictures selected off Photocommunity and the like, for a couple of bucks, you never know what you're _really_ getting. It could be that someone photographed the demolition of an old mall in Elbonia and is hawking it as the aftermath of the tsunami in East Bumfuckistan. How would you know? (And probably a better question is: would they even care, if they knew?)
Briefly, it doesn't have to be manipulation. Or if it is, it doesn't have to be by the newspaper. If a joker posted that image as proof of his l33t photoshop skills, or if such a photos-by-the-dozen agency took a shortcut and photoshopped a photo just so they could sell something about an event... well, chances are the newspaper staff wouldn't even know.
I guess it's just what this general craze to reduce costs leads to. A lot of time the obvious way to reduce costs is to reduce quality. In this case, also add total lack of quality control, since they don't actually have someone there who could check if things are like in the photo. You can expect a lot of junk to go through undetected.
And, btw, if you thought only the photos were fake, you'd be surprised how many of the _articles_ are bogus stuff written by a PR agency and disguised as news.
White _technically_ it may be true, it's IMHO a highly mis-leading statement. About 90% of the devs don't "meet the deadline" in that the game is anywhere _near_ finished, tested and balanced. They "meet the deadline" only in that the publisher forces them to shovel it out the door at that date, ready or not. Usually the latter.
Plus, "meeting the deadline" is already stretching the term a bit, when the average game will need major debugging and rebalancing for the next 6 month or so. And I don't mean just cosmetic tweaks, but in a few cases even getting the features advertised. I'm sorry, but in almost any other kind of project it wouldn't be called "meeting the deadline", but "needing a 6 month extension to finish it."
Not to mention that half of them, at the end of all that patching, are still nowhere near finished. I can think of several that ended up with worse bugs than they were released with. Or where they said they fixed the same bug in 7 patches straight, and it still didn't work.
Plus, frankly, half of what counts as "meeting the deadline" at least in the PC games segment would be called a failed project almost anywhere else. If even an e-commerce site worked as unreliably and unpredictably as half the games at launch, the company running that site might even face civil or criminal prosecution, not just lost sales. And I'm not even getting into what would happen in domains like banking or insurance.
Heck, I can think of at least one game which, as shipped, threw a script syntax error right when trying to start the main campaign. Nothing blamable on the user's configuration or drivers or whatever: a script syntax error. That thing couldn't run on _any_ computer. Can you really imagine many domains where that would even get a productive deployment? Much less be called "meeting the deadline".
However, in the games segment we've been trained like Pavlov's dog to that it's ok to buy crap if you're promised that it will be patched later. Maybe.
Most of the smaller studios will go broke and die after one game or two, so IMHO that's hardly an indication of their great management skills.
_Hopefully_ they'd be forfeited too, as that is after all the standard in the whole western world at least.
The problem is that you can't always be sure how much someone earned. Especially when money laundering is involved, you can always hope that you got all the accounts, bzt you never have the exact sum. It also gets hairy when other companies are involved, because you can't just take someone's money only because they sold some service to a crook. Etc.
IIRC have been a few mafia dons who have almost certainly continued to lead their crime empire even from jail, so essentially not only they kept a lot of the benefits of their crimes, but continued to make more money out of it. Probably not this guy's case, but it's happened.
For example, from Epic, Blizzard, and a few others who are now the big names of the industry for it. It turns out that, surprise, more people buy a game which is finished and polished than something shoved out the door to meet an arbitrary deadline. Much as a couple of publishers still hope that if they believe the opposite really, really hard, it will somehow become reality.
The flip side of the coin is that if the penalty is too light, then people start doing bang/buck maths. If you scammed people out of 100,000$ and you get 1 year for it, well, then for a _lot_ of people it's more than they'd make in any other job.
Saying that inevitability alone is all the deterrent and harshness doesn't matter, paints a highly skewed and misleading picture. Consider this extreme example: let's say we make the penalty for murder something as trivial as house arrest for a day. We also make it 100% unavoidable. Well, you can probably see how inevitability alone wouldn't deter anyone in that situation.
So, no, neither over-simplification is right. The penalty must be _both_ (A) nearly inevitable, and (B) high enough to make the crime not worth it. One without the other simply isn't enough. It's not an either-or choice. Both need to be tuned just right.
What about imports? Now I'm told that at least the PS3 is no longer region-locked, but the PS2 was and so were a heck of a lot of PS1 units. (Although more loosely into PAL and NTSC regions.)
I'm in Europe which is mostly PAL, and which also didn't get half of the PS1 games available in the USA in NTSC.
So here's the deal: half the game I owned were US imports. None burned/"backed-up", all original CDs, with manual and box and everything. Sony got my money for every single one of them. Money which they otherwise wouldn't have gotten at all, since they never released those games down here. Yeah, that's the kind of an evil pirate I am: I went and gave Sony some money against their will.
Sony also always acted as if imports are piracy. Again, we're not talking about burned CDs, we're talking units sold. Apparently the fact that I bought some games from them, which they otherwise wouldn't have sold me, counted as piracy to them. Apparently it's soooo much of a similarity between an inconvenience like "yeah, but it screws up our marketting data of how much units were sold in each territory" (which is all that game imports ever did) and pirating that game.
Where I'm getting at is: it's not as simple as "modchips == piracy." There are perfectly non-piracy uses of modchips. One is mentioned in the summary (you'll ideally want your little kid to play with a copy, not to scratch the $60 disc) and another one I just gave you now.
Plus, there's the whole moral issue of criminalizing people for owning a tool, as opposed to actually committing the infraction. If you still don't see the problem, think this: if you're a guy, chances are you have all the equipment you'd ever need to be a rapist. It doesn't mean you're automatically one. How about looking for people who actually committed a crime, instead of those who would technically have the means.
And it seems to me that that's the whole problem here: the summary mentions raiding for mod-chips, not for burned DVDs.
Dude, the question isn't whether exposure is good and bad, but whether you get the kind of PR you actually want. Exposure is only good when it doesn't cause you lost sales in the process.
Bad exposure is damn easy to get. Just do something extremely stupid, or have your product fail in a spectacular way. That'll get you headlines. Or just pull a "<insert name> will make you his bitch" again, and you might slapped by a similar backlash again. That's not the kind of exposure sane companies want though.
What you don't seem to understand is, really, where the zero point is. No PR doesn't mean "zero, it can't get any worse than that." An AAA title that noone heard much about will still be on the shelves at WallMart, will still be sent to a ton of reviews site, it will still be listed on Amazon, and will still have people posting about it or telling their friends about it. So some amount of exposure will be there anyway. I'm not saying that that's necessarily enough, but I'm saying there's room to do even worse than that. If you give people the message, basically, "stay away from these arse-clowns", you can actually do worse than if you didn't do a press release at all.
And even if you didn't get something that horrible, there's a whole continuum of reactions and effects you can get. You'll want to get people not only to hear the company or game name, but hopefully also get them interested in it. If you can have a choice between giving people the right message and the wrong message, you'd have to be a dolt to deliberately choose the second. The first also gets you, basically, some marketing on top of the exposure, the latter can lose you as many potential customers as it got you. Or as said before, it can occasionally actually lose you more customers.
Actually, are _you_ capable? No offense, but I have trouble taking anyone seriously when they operate with grossly-oversimplified canned wisecracks as their grand insight into any domain, marketing included.
Bingo. One thing anthropologists discovered very early is that, basically, people lie even on anonymous polls. Or not exactly "lie" consciously, but paint an image closer to how they'd _like_ to be, rather than how they _are_.
E.g., a tribe was asked whether they're hunters or agricultors or what. Virtually everyone proclaimed themselves to be a brave hunter, even though they had in the meantime gradually evolve towards mostly agriculture, and IIRC a lot didn't even have weapons any more. But their culture glorified the hunter/warrior archetype to such an extent, that everyone still pictured themselves as just that.
E.g., a rural community was asked several questions on a poll, such as if they work the fields together and help each other build a barn, and stuff like that. The vast majority said that, yep, they do it all the time. Turns out that the last time anyone helped build a barn was half a century earlier, and if you wanted help in the fields you had to hire someone. But their culture was so biased towards selfless helping each other, that people _imagined_ themselves being still all tightly knit and helpful even long after they had changed.
E.g., at one point there was a hike in the price of meat, and people were polled whether they eat more meat, less meat, or the same. The vast majority said they're not putting up with that kind of prices, and they're definitely eating less meat in that time. Turns out that in reality, they ate _more_ meat on the average. (Presumably to show themselves that they can still afford it.)
Etc.
Basically I'd take all polls with a grain of salt. Unless you can actually observe those people and/or validate the data by other means, they _will_ tell you something closer to their ideal self-image than to the real self. Especially in situations where one of the choice has a strong negative conotation, there'll be a lot of taking the other one.
So maybe all this shows isn't even IQ vs honesty as such, but more like "IQ vs realistic self assessment", mixed with a dose of "IQ vs realizing you don't need to lie on an anonymous test." E.g.:
- at the high end, people probably are more aware that saying "yes, I have sex all the time" won't make them more popular
- as you get closer to the middle, people are driven more by peer-pressure and by their image, so they're less going to admit they're anything less than perfectly cool
- move lower than 100 and gradually some start even having some problems understanding how an anonymous poll works and how social perceptions work, and start to lie even more for reasons like impressing the interviewer or something equally dumb
- move _much_ lower, and you start to deal with people who have trouble even understanding what's really asked of them, what the consequences are anyway, etc, and are increasingly under near-permanent supervision. So you start to get anything from people who haven't figured out yet how their peer's opinion of it works anyway, to "omg, if I say that I had here, mom will find out and yell at me."
If the last one seems unlikely, remember that they had one category for people under IQ 70, and that's a lot dumber than a gorilla. Literally.
"That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even death may die." -- H.P. Lovecraft
So did Daikatana, didn't they?
Well, yes and no.
Yes in that indeed it doesn't actually tell you anything that you'd base a buying decision on.
No, in that it's another somewhat comical (and somewhat sad) example of bad marketing and press releases that sound like they were generated by the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator, or a variant thereof. You know, the stuff that we all like to make fun of.
And it also shows at least one reaction to such crap, and it's not a positive one. It turns out that there _is_ such thing as bad publicity.
It's not exactly a new revelation, though. We've seen stuff like that before. Daikatana was massively torpedoed by the backlash to its own dumbly-worded marketing hype. And I forget the name now, but there was another game where a dumb PR hack thought he'd build buzz by causing a scandal with "leaked" information claiming that the game contains all sorts of moral abominations (especially to a non-gamer)... which didn't even exist in the game. Unfortunately the reaction was such that the publisher preferred to cancel the game rather than deal with it.
And then there are the less known cases where a company paid big bucks for, say, a funky company name (a few years back the hype had hit big time that some modern day shamen can construct for you a company or product name that's just short of pure magic, and causes all sorts of positive reactions and associations in people who hear it)... and then discovered that either it has no effect, or in a few cases that the test audience finds it repulsive or obscene. It actually happened. 'Course, then there are those which didn't test it first.
Etc.
Why is it important for nerds? Because for a lot of us our job depends on some marketer selling it. And it turns out that a dumb marketer can do more harm than good. Imagine your job depending on one of _these_ destructive press releases or PR campaigns.
And considering that he has the social skills to sell his ideas to the boss, while a lot of us nerds are more fluent in C++ than in our mother tongue... "do not be alarmed. Be very, very frightened, Arthur Dent."
Don't get me wrong, intelligent and competent marketing is good and I think most of us can respect a competent professional in any domain. But it's also a domain where success is so hard to measure, and there are plenty of bogus metrics with which the incompetents and dishonest pricks can justify their salary. (E.g., a fake UI campaign tends to be counted as a success based on the number of clicks, even though most just result in annoyed potential customers and chances are you didn't raise their interest in your product at all.) And there are a lot which... well, let's put it like this: when you select people based on their ability to be dishonest and sell crap, don't be surprised when they lie to your face and their main interest is in selling themselves.
As I was saying, I described only one kind of schizophrenia, and there are 5 major categories. In fact, the original term by, you know, the guy who coined the term, was the "schizophrenias". The 5 categories being:
- paranoid type (the one I described already)
- disorganized type (where thought disorders do occur)
- catatonic type
- undifferentiated type
- residual type
Some include two further subtypes:
- post-schizophrenic depression (somewhat deceptively named, since schizophrenic symptoms are still more or less present)
- simple schizophrenia (progressive development of the negative symptoms you describe. But even then, the keyword is progressive: it doesn't flat out start by flinging feces, as you put it, but includes a very long and slow progression through states that most people would at most think eccentric or slightly bizarre, and when the person is still fairly logical and intelligent.)
So basically, you're trying to tell me that there's more than one type, right? Well, given that I've said that repeatedly by now too, I'd say we're not disagreeing much, right?
I'd also like to say that schizophrenia is one of the most controversial and mis-diagnosed illnesses even in humans, who can, you know, talk and tell you their logic. If you take two psychiatrists, they're almost as likely to disagree about a diagnostic as they are to agree.
I'd just love to know how would they diagnose that in mice. Basically, again, how do they know if the mouse is simply retarded or having a delusional or illogical train of thought? Not everyone who can't learn is schizophrenic, you know, and all they showed there in the mice's behaviour is that they're dumb as a brick. It's not a mouse who uses some bizarre logic and ends up digging in some interestingly different place than the clues point him to, it's a mouse who flat out can't take the hints at all. That's all I'm saying.
Why not? There _will_ be people whose goal will be exactly to look as disturbing and menacing as possible. And there _will_ be people who'll wear "I'm the smart guy who took the xp advantage over dumb aesthetics" like a medal of honour.
You can see both sides of the medal in WoW too, that is, both PM's point and the counter-point.
On one hand, if you take a census of the population (repeatedly at different times, to have a good statistic), on any server, you'll find that, with exactly one notable exception, the more a race looks human and pretty, the more players play it. Before Burning Crusade, that meant there were more Humans or Night Elves than the whole Horde combined, no matter what advantages the Horde races got. Even as everyone was bitching about shamen and warlock-killing un-fearable Undead, most people didn't actually want to go and play one.
That's one major reason why the Horde got Blood Elves in the Burning Crusade expansion. Blizzard just caved in and realized that the only thing that would even start to even the odds was to give the Horde a pretty and human-looking race. In fact, one prettier than the Night Elves on the Alliance side.
So that would sorta illustrate PM's point that, indeed, a lot of people will take looking pretty over being an effective killing machine.
The counter-point, though, is that notable exception I've mentioned: the undead. (Technically called the "Forsaken".) The WoW undead aren't the pretty sanitized VTM vampires, but something more hideous than anything you could get in Fable or in most other games. They look literally like someone who's been rotting in a grave for two weeks and then got dug out. You know, with missing flesh, tattered clothes, bones poking out, etc.
The funny thing is, the undead were the most played Horde race. Ok, so the Will Of The Forsaken ability was a major selling point too, but even then it illustrates that some people do take power over looking pretty. But the funny thing is, even after WOTF got nerfed, the undead _still_ are disturbingly popular. Some people actually _like_ looking like that. Go figure.
Heh. Here's some free clue for you: you don't need any pre-requisites to start using your head. There's a reason why you have one on your shoulders, and it's not there just so it wouldn't rain straight down your throat.
No, seriously. Einstein was just a lowly patent office clerk, when he dared think he can do better than the great Hendrik Lorentz. No, seriously, Lorentz too was a Ph.D. and a Nobel Prize laureate, and a mighty smart guy all around.
So I guess people like you would have made fun of Einstein too, for daring even try to think on his own there, right?
Now I'm not saying that I or you are of the calibre of Einstein, but nevertheless, get this: you don't need to pass any special exam to start using your brains. You have it anyway, you can start using it any time you want to. You don't need anyone's royal stamp of approval.
Plus, you know, the site's motto says "news for _nerds_". You know, the guys who like to use their _brains_, even when it's as pointless as this or as memorizing Star Trek trivia. That's the whole point of being a "nerd".
So, no offense, but if you're rather in the cathegory that would just unthinkingly believe what some great figure of authority says, and never dare imagine yourself worthy enough to question it... why are you even here? I'm sure there's some religious community outhere where you'd feel more fulfilled, without having to deal with us pesky nerds who insist on thinking and questioning.
Well, being schizophrenic isn't the same as being a sociopath, or even the more fuzzy "being a dick".
A paranoid schizophrenic for example has (at least according to one theory), a pretty fuzzy line between fantasy and reality. At any rate, stuf originating purely in their imagination or beliefs gets mixed with the reality. They might hear voices, see stuff that isn't there, or feel or smell stuff that noone else can perceive. Where you might just imagine telling someone where to shove it, a schizophrenic might actually perceive it as having happened or as in progress. They might become convinced it's telepathy, or some kind of astral projection, or whatever. That is, either that others are able to project their thoughts into their head, or that they themselves have some telepathic or clairvoyance powers. Others might see stuff that's not actually there (e.g., ghosts) or distort their perception of real stuff (e.g., seeing a piece of string on their skin as some mysterious new parasite.)
Well, that's just one of the kinds of schizophrenia, and what I've described there is more like the extreme cases that get sent to a mental institutions. Most people are a lot more mild than that, and either never get diagnosed or are considered harmless enough to just give them some medicine and let them go back home. Plus a lot are intelligent and socially aware enough to know that everyone else will think they're crazy if they go around saying that they see ghosts, and that carries a major social stigma in our society. So they do their best to hide it, and might never get diagnosed at all.
That doesn't, however, mean that they're necessarily "a dick". The cases where the voices told them to do something nasty are actually quite rare, and most might not even hear voices at all, but have some other form of sensory delusions or distortions. A schizophrenic might just as well be a very nice guy or gal, who just happens to see or hear something slightly different than you do. Just because someone sees ghosts, for example, doesn't mean they will go and tell everyone where to shove it and how deep. That ghost might as well tell them to be nice, or do some great work of charity, or reinforce whatever other belief that spawned that bit of imagination in the first place.
The cases where the voices told them that everyone is their enemy and must be elliminated, are actually quite rare. The 1% of the total population being or having at some point been schizophrenic is a _lot_. Plus, as I was saying, there are a lot which never get diagnosed at all. If they all went and did nasty stuff, you'd notice.
So, basically, chances are you've met or interacted daily with one or more people with schizophrenia without even knowing it. And chances are they weren't the obnoxious "dicks" either.