At the risk of sounding like a troll, it comes down to: fanboy cults develop around the underdog, not around the big 800 pound gorilla who is winning anyway. Or rather, fanboys/zealots/cultists seem to have this need to, pretty much, save the world. Or at least they need something to defend, some cause to champion against all odds, some us-vs-them theme where "them" can be perceived as a credible threat. They have to be the (messiah of the) minority, even in a perverse minority-inside-a-minority way, or at least the unsung defenders against the barbarian hordes. They have to feel persecuted, looked down upon, but know in their heart that they're the Luke Skywalker against the might of the Empire, or one of the outnumbered hoplites at Thermopilae against the Persian hordes.
This isn't just about tech fanboys, but a more general phenomenon. You don't get many zealots when you're the one religion, you get them when it's 12 apostles vs the whole world. When it's the mainstream religion _and_ under no credible threat, you just get sheep and wolves in sheep skin. To get people all worked up there has to be a threat, a battle against all odds, where they're the few saving the world from a(n imaginary) threat it doesn't even acknowledge.
You can see that in Christianity too. Most of the spark it retained past a point was not because it was already the winner, but because it fragmented and ended up its own enemy. Arians vs Catholics vs Nestorians, Orthodox vs Catholic, Catholic vs Cathar, Catholic vs Protestant, and protestant factions against each other. That's what got people rallying to be the bleating champions of it: the credible us-vs-them setup, where "them" might just win if someone doesn't gather a (self-)righteous mob against it. When it didn't have such a challenger, it just ended up a court intrigues game where noone really gave a damn about the church. And occasionally it had to invent its own challenge, e.g., the Crusades.
It may sound like rehashing your first paragraph, but it's not. The definition of cult you give, is pretty much cult as opposed to religion. You're a cult if you're non-mainstream, you're a religion if it's mainstream. That's really all that that definition says.
But look at it this way: all mainstream religions got there by first being a cult. You don't get a religion directly formed around the mainstream thing in the first place. If something is already the undisputed 800 pound gorilla without a credible challenger, it already lost the chance of getting its own army of zealots. That's what I'm saying.
And Microsoft simply happens to be at that point, really. Apple is an underdog, it gets zealots. AMD used to be a major underdog, and it had some very rabid zealots, but then it became mainstream and now noone cares. Intel was always the big dog in CPUs, and it pretty much never really had zealots, it at most had some mild fans. IBM didn't use to have zealots either as long as it was _the_ big gorilla. Microsot is _the_ big gorilla and it has no zealots. Whop-de-do, big surprise there.
Because it does more and is more graphics intensive, that's why. I know it's fashionable to whine about bloat on/., but it would be nice to at least be sure you know what you're talking about. Such as whether it's indeed some problem with the animations or, get this, it might just be that it has more graphics and physics processing than WoW.
Yeah, it needs more CPU and GPU power than WoW, but then it has bigger textures than WoW's cartoonish graphics, more layers of textures, and it uses shaders much more extensively. It also has a lot of transparency (e.g., auras, spell effects, particles, etc) which requires a lot more horsepower than rendering opaque textures. _Especially_ if some form of transparency AA is activated on that machine.
Also COH has physics, while WoW, simply put, doesn't. All enemies in WoW will do the same, say, death animation regardless of where they are, even if they end up sticking over the edge of a cliff or embedded _into_ the cliff. In COH the'll ragdoll over railings, tumble down stairs, and god knows what else. You can see how that would need more computing power, right? Now add the fact that the same physics apply to spell effects. A fireball in WoW just plays an explosion sequence of sprites, and that's that, while in COH it involves a lot of flares and sparks flying around and having physics applied to them, _and_ leaves a lot of transparent stuff around like fires burning on the floor.
It also has a lot more enemies on the screen at the same time. Whereas in WoW you'd go "OMG, need to pull one and sheep one!" at groups of 3 enemies, in COH you'd routinely deal with groups of two dozen enemies as an 8-player group. So, you know, it's more stuff to render. Add some auras, particle effects, and whatnot, and there you have your explanation why on low end machines it's slower if you don't turn off some graphics options.
It also needs a lot more RAM for all those textures, especially if a lot of people are in sight. (Since they can customize their costumes.) You might notice a massive slowdown if you're on, say, 256 MB of RAM or have most of your RAM taken by other programs. On the other hand on 1 GB it runs like greased lightning.
Also, exactly what kind of "high end" machines are we talking about? It runs OK on my other machine, which is an Athlon 2000+ (the old Athlon, not the 64) with a 6800 GT graphics card. That's... what? A 3 years old graphics card, that wasn't even the highest end at launch? No, seriously. It was launched in April 2004.
Now I'm not saying it's a capital crime to have a 3 year old computer, but, please... if you're going to throw around assessments like "it runs slow on most high-end machines", then it would help if you were actually talking about high end machines.
At any rate, I could see some point if you argued about the design decision to push the graphics effects to that extent. (Although, you _can_ reduce it a lot.) But if you're going to pass blanket judgments like that the animation code or the client itself is bloated and slow, I'll have to say that you don't know what you're talking about.
What's the over/under that this technology will be bought by ford / gm and killed in development?
Ah, yes, the mandatory conspiracy theory. Get this, this is just variable valve timing which by now a _lot_ of car manufacturers _already_ use, with various degrees of sophistication. This one may be slightly more efficient, but the important thing is that steps in that exact direction have been made, and there is already a healthy competition in that domain.
If you'll kindly read that Wikipedia page, you'll notice that both Ford and GM, since you name-and-shame them, _already_ offer engines with variable valve timing. GM has worked on theirs since 1975, and built automobiles equipped with, say, their Northstar System since at least the 90's.
So, you know, even as conspiracy theories go, this one... shall we say, fails to be entertaining at least. It is lacking in the suspension-of-disbelief quality. It's akin to asking me to believe that Boeing is trying to kill the jet engine... never mind that they're already using them.
Real question is: will it be a part of the next gen DRM?
I mean, rhetoric about cutting down losses and all, well, it's good and fine. But here you have something that prevents a disc from being played, unless the correct key is sent to a chip. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Because I'm sure that someone at Sony just did. And if (ad absurdum) they didn't, then MS just did, in its quest to convince the MPAA and RIAA to make its own protection schemes the new entertainment centre standard.
I mean, it's a no brainer. Make the disc revert to opaque after a while, and have to be re-activated. So every time it has to be played in an authorized player.
As a bonus, it's got all the potential in the world to implement some other nasty roadblocks to fair use. E.g.,
- region coding. No more just messing with the firmware to make other region DVDs play, the chips for different regions can be physically tuned to different frequencies.
- killing the second-hand market for good. E.g., make the chip also contain a small flash area, just enough to hold the player's own key. The first time it's played, it stores the player's ID there, and subsequently refuses to activate on anything else. (Extra bonus: now you also need need to buy a new DVD each time you buy a new player.)
- limits on how often you can play the DVD. Pretty trivial: the chip also contains a counter, and when that limit is reached, it can no longer be activated. In the video market it actually has actually a legitimate use: mail-order rentals where you don't actually have to bring it back. But imagine the fun when your next Windows version has such a chip, to stop all those pirates from installing one copy of Windows on 20 machines. (And incidentally also stop anyone from reinstalling it more than once or twice after their hard drive failed, or they got pwned by a virus, or whatever.)
Etc.
And unlike just encryption, some of these can be a much bigger pain in the rear to defeat.
E.g., a counter on the chip can physically and irreversibly blow a tiny fuse for each time it's played. When it's out of fuses, that's it. There is no decryption key you can post on Digg or print on a t-shirt, that will bypass a physically destroyed circuit.
E.g., the chip doesn't need to be reprogrammable from outside in any form or shape. So there's no way to just crack its firmware to make it stay transparent. In fact, at that size and given that you want the absolute minimum power consumption, it doesn't need a firmware at all. It can simply be hard-wired.
Downside, there are physical ways to attack it, such as replacing the chip or marinating the disc in some chemical that neutralizes the dye. Both are a far bigger pain in the arse for Jack Sixpack than just downloading a cracked driver or firmware. I don't see Jack drilling holes and inserting micro-chips that gladly. Plus, it requires buying something tangible, such as a replacement chip, which is easier to trace and prosecute than an offshore warez site.
Then expect more outsourcing
on
The Human Mutation
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If you produce a monkey capable of being commanded to do the most basic tasks, somewhere a million PHBs will replace human workers with it.
Can it sew shoes? Well, cool. All those jobs were moved to inhuman sweatshops in poorer countries long ago. Imagine the savings if you don't even have to pay those salaries. Just dig some bunker with a thousand monkey cages, and make them sew for 18 hours a day, for the cost of just some water and biomass as food. Ok, they'll probably wear out pretty quickly at that rate, but you can always replace them and use the previous ones as extra protein for the next generation.
Can it operate a phone and compare simple questions to a canned FAQ? (Not necessarily intelligently or successfully, mind you.) Yay. There go the first level tech support jobs. Let's be honest, it _is_ a cheap monkey job as far as every manager in the organisation sees it. Level 1 is there just to deflect the trivial stuff from reaching the expensive level 2 guys, and occasionally discourage some people from escalating even non-trivial stuff. If you're a qualified nerd in a level 1 job, well, you have my sympathy, so take it as: you don't belong there.
Ok, so the monkeys probably won't have a larynx capable of human speech, but I'm sure someone will figure out some text-to-speech scheme.
For that matter, can it operate a keyboard? Well, the drive of the last half a century straight was to buy expensive tools and believe that now even less qualified burger-flippers can write your programs with them. Never mind that that guy is incapable of abstract algorithmic thought and too bored to even learn the language. The nice salesman from IBM/MS/BEA/whatever said that you don't need expensive smart guys any more. Any semi-trained monkey can write great enterprise programs with their tools in 21 days, don't you know? And that nice salesman plays such a nice game of golf, that he's surely trustworthy.
If that sounds like made-up fiction, sadly, it isn't. I actually know of two departments which hired their programmers by reverse auction. Whoever wants less money gets the job, no further qualifications needed or questions asked. Literally. Needless to say, they ended up with people about as sharp as a bowling ball. In the words of Foghorn Leghorn, "I've seen, AH SAY, I've seen better heads on a mug of beer." Some were just now discovering stuff like that they need to put quotes around a string, and some were having trouble understanding why. One guy had trouble understanding why the variable he declared in the constructor isn't visible in another method. Etc.
Plus, think of all the other advantages of putting semi-human monkeys in those jobs. For starters, who's gonna force you to pay for overtime or let them unionize? Schedules of 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, here we come. I'm sure some PHB (e.g., at EA) would ejaculate in his pants out of sheer joy at _that_ thought.
Or imagine the joy on some "your job could be the next to move to India" PHB's face, when he can replace it with the even more demeaning threat of, "remind me why I don't hire one of those new monkeys to do your job?"
Etc.
I'm sure there's a fun new economy just waiting to be discovered.
We're going to aggree there very quickly. I have no problem with seeing it as an extra road bump. That's a sane and realistic attitude, and every bit helps, obviously.
However the argument does end up again and again being, basically: "if we were finally on IPv6 you could really give up all firewalling and defense, since you're impossible to find in all those gazillions of possible addresses anyway." Now probably no serious admin would think it's security, but somehow just that claim does seems to pop up on Slashdot every time IPv6 is mentioned. I've seen half a dozen messages to that effect in this thread alone, and that just skimming through it.
Now maybe they had something more along your assessment in mind, but any details were missing that would hint that way.
Depends on your personality, I guess. There is more than one kind of player, and there are several classifications already.
E.g., in Bartle's scheme (ok, so it was made for MUDs/MMOs, not FPS, but it does partially apply to more than MUDs/MMOs) I can just see a die-hard achiever (the guys playing for score) jumping in front of the same vent or taking the same pre-learned route to maximize his score. Whereas an explorer will love discovering new routes, dealing with new situations, etc.
And don't laugh, I personally know someone who spent _years_ playing the same map, taking the same route, climbing on the same ladder, crawling through the same duct, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent, because that's where he got the biggest score. Just the thought of _that_ kind of mind-numbing monotony makes me cringe, but he found it fun. There you go, it's illustration enough that more than one player type exists.
E.g., taking the casual player vs hardcore player distinction, a casual player is less likely to devote time learning and fine-tuning their exact route and tactics to win on that exact map. He/she just wants to jump in, run around and shoot someone, and basically be done with it. A random map scenario is pretty much ideal for a casual player since, basically, it's new for everyone. There are no people who have already spent months learning this exact map. So everyone starts equal, and from there it's only up to your reflexes and ability to deal with the new. If you do have the reflexes, it doesn't matter if you're new to the game or to that map.
That's just two distinctions, but I'm sure more can be defined. Bottom line is that some of us _will_ find it more fun and mentally stimulating to play on random maps, while others will hate it. What else is new?:)
Sorry to rain on that parrade, but the (variants of) "IPv6 is secure because it's a 64 bit space and noone will ever guess your address" sound... surrealistic. It's security by obscurity of the worst kind. The kind that can't possibly work.
We live in an age where far larger combinations of bits -- e.g., email addresses or name/password combinations -- are sniffed, phished, compiled into lists and sold, etc. What on Earth makes people think that a fixed IPv6 address would be more secure? No, honestly, what's so special about an 8 byte IPv6 address that makes it un-sniffable?
The notion that your machine is only findable by raw brute-force scanning is pretty laughable. Yes, it's one of the easiest and most non-brainer methods, but it's not the only one.
As a counter-example, look at how email viruses work. Because they _do_ work without scanning and without looking for you speciffically. They just go through more hops, each hop sending itself further to everyone in your address book.
Guess what? The exact same can be trivially adapted to an IPv6 worm. Each pwned machine just continuously looks for incoming and outgoing connections, and tries to spread to those too.
Or how about lists of static addresses, the same as the lists of email addresses that spammers buy and sell. Only unlike email addresses, if you're unfirewalled, you can't keep yours secret. You _have_ to tell each visited site your address every time you connect to it, so it knows where to send the response packets.
So basically it's the setup for the easiest kind of phishing imaginable. It's like automatically giving your email address to every site you ever visited, except this time it's your IPv6 address. Someone just has to create or pwn a popular site, and just record all the IP's that connect to it. Voila, that's a nice list to sell to the hackers. No more brute force scanning needed.
We already have major corporations whose computers are spam bots. What makes you think none will host IP recording bots? How do you know none of the ecommerce sites or forums you visit could be pwned to record all those static IPv6 addresses?
Or it just takes one bored intern working at a major ISP to run a sniffer and get a huge list of all static IPv6 addresses that sent or received anything through their pipe. Remember, idiots exist everywhere. One guy sold the whole list of AOL addresses to spammers, for example. So are you _sure_ noone will sell the list of allocated/known IPv6 addresses?
And since it's static addresses (after all, the whole idea is to get rid of NAT, right? No more dynamic addresses and remapping, right?), you know that each address logged will be available for a long long time thereafter.
Basically let's stop using the whole "we're secure by obscurity" concept to rest already. If there are other security mechanisms in place, fine, I want to hear about them. But "noone will find your IPv6 address" is _not_ security. If you want to talk security, you start from the most paranoid scenarios imaginable, not from wishful thinking.
_If_ you're giving away your work for free, ok, none of us has any expectations as to how. Whatever works for you, really.
The problem is that Tim O'Reily sees BitTorrent as a successor not to Sourceforge, but to Akamai. Which is distributed servers for large companies. We're talking the likes of MS, Yahoo, Symantec, AOL, etc. I don't think many people bought Akamai hosting for some small freeware utility they wrote.
And it's positioning it _there_ that makes me have a trouble with it. If I paid a ton of money for, say, Vista, the keywords are: paid money. We're not talking some free content. I think the least they can do is give me the patches in a fast and convenient way. I _don't_ want to use my outbound pipe, and having it stuffed, to participate in sharing MS's patches. MS can just keep paying for some civilized hosting, thank you very much.
That's really why I used the WoW patches as an example, because it's just what irks me. I'm paying a ton of money, and they can't even host their own freaking patches. It's not freeware and, frankly, I _don't_ think I have any obligation to chip in a little to help Blizzard's bottom line some more.
And if that kind of crap is (part of) what Web 2.0 is all about, then: no, thanks.
That, in a nutshell is all that bothers me about that part of the Web 2.0 concept.
Generally you got the right idea, but it's not just about marketting and not just dynamic content as such. If you read Tim O'Reilly's own explanations of it, since he invented and pushes the buzzword, it's more about techno-fetishism and the deep seated belief that a million monkeys on keyboards _can_ write Hamlet... if only they're on the Internet and have all the latest buzzwords.
E.g., he sees personal web pages as soo Web 1.0, and replaced by wikis in Web 2.0. No, really.
I mean, seriously, it's sooo pase to just have your own resume on your own homepage. Make it a wiki so everyone can edit it! Surely reality works by consensus, and a million bored strangers who never heard of you before are more qualified than you to fill that content! Or, bah, corporate web sites are so dull. Make it a wiki, so random strangers can spice it up. (That was sarcasm, btw.)
E.g., ditto for sources of information. Having an authoritative source is soo Web 1.0, when you could just have a wiki instead. Wikis are the Web 2.0 way! And I don't even mean the sane way of using, say, Wikipedia as a starting point and following the links to the authoritative sources. No, no, no. He sees wikis as the _replacement_.
E.g., publishing content is soo Web 1.0. You should have everyone participate! Participation is the Web 2.0 way, don't you know?
So, yeah, forget about writing your own press releases and product manuals and FAQs. Let the community participate! Let perfect strangers and competitors spice it up. Imagine the possibilities! Imagine the excitement of checking each day to find out what perversions someone added to your company or product info! (Yep, you guessed, sarcasm.)
E.g., buying servers (e.g., from Akamai) to distribute your patches and executables is soo web 1.0. The Web 2.0 way is BitTorrent. Get on with the times.
I mean, hey, look at how excited WoW players were to get their ADSL's _outbound_ pipe stuffed up by a modified BitTorrent to download the patches. Not to mention at times being stuck with sucking a huge patch through a straw, from 1-2 other people's outbound pipe. Surely they'd barf if they could download the same patch in 5 minutes from a dedicated server without the hassle. (Sarcasm too, btw. It was actually a major gripe about WoW. See, for example, the Penny Arcade strip.)
Etc.
Now don't get me wrong, I can see some point in some of that stuff if it's an extra. Providing a forum for the users is pretty much expected anyway, and offering a torrent in _addition_ to the plain old download can't hurt at least. But presenting it as the _replacement_ to the boring old Web 1.0 stuff is... brain dead. It takes an unhealthy dose of techno-fetishism and techno-utopianism to see everything solvable by just more network buzzwords and a million networked monkeys writing reality by consensus.
It does fit with his other brain-damaged ideas, though, such as the call for censoring and regulating the blogosphere. The guy genuinely seems _that_ convinced that he can forge a whole utopian society on the Internet.
What about Tim O'Reilly? He seems to take the whole "Web 2.0" buzzword he invented pretty seriously. Plus, as repeating it goes, I assume that having a Web 2.0 Summit (the next one is in October) would kinda qualify as repeating it.
Then again, he generally seems to take himself too seriously. What with the attempt to regulate blogosphere and all.
He's not the only one, though, since it wouldn't be much of a summit if only he was going there. There are a lot of people pining for the good ol' days of the 1.0 Bubble, and wanting to once again get big VC money for just having a web page and a sock puppet. Bubble 2.0 if you will. Cue trying to tell investors and each other that this time they're Web 2.0, see. Not the old failed Bubble 1.0, see. This time they have javascript and wikis and blogs and BitTorrent and whatnot, and a shiny happy everyone-participates model. _This_ time you'll get your money worth if you invest in them. Would they lie to you... again?
(And if that sounds stupid and made up, sadly it isn't made up. That's what makes Web 2.0 in Tim O'Reilly's own view and definition of it. See, it's 2.0, because now it has wikis, and blogs, and participation, and Google search, etc. And this time there's search engine optimization too, btw! And that all's _the_ recipe for not going bankrupt as a VC capital sink!)
Oh, wait... you meant perchance that nobody _sane_ is repeating it? Ok, in that case no objection.
Quoth the great pundit: "When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"
You can't make up something like that, really. It's something I just couldn't come up with on my own, even if I were to make up dialogue for a SF story where a Neanderthal is brought to the present and given a computer. It's stuff that just makes you go, "naaah, no user is _that_ stupid."
Turns out that one can even write as some great tech guru for a major magazine and still actually be that stupid. Go figure.
Not to mention that reading the rest of his complaints in that article is enough to make me worry about his qualifications anyway. I mean, being stumped why Windows is suddenly sluggish and he can't even reboot, well, is stuff that I _can_ understand in Joe Sixpack or Jane Grandma who are computer-illiterate. But someone who's a great computer pundit in a major magazine, would be expected to know better. Before you can write why company X should do Y, and what's technically good/bad/ugly about company Z's product, I'd expect one to be the kind of techie that fixes such stuff before breakfast. I'd have forgiven him if it were "look at the stuff mom's computer was doing", but if that's what his computer does and he's stumped, he just told me that he's totally unqualified for the column he writes.
Well, I didn't say necessarily "more brutal", but you usually think of larger percentages when you say stuff like "sales were decimated" nowadays. No company nowadays would call a 10% sales dip a "decimation". Even if it's accompanied -- as loved by Wall Street -- by firing 10% of the employees, everyone prefers milder euphemisms.
Presumably because sales lost or even jobs lost isn't exactly a brutal mental image, so it tends to need way higher numbers before it conjures a mental image worthy of being called "decimation." You need a loss that can be called "devastating" for that.
- Funcom: makers of Anarchy Online, launched as the buggiest pile of shit in recorded history. Read the reviews on Something Awful, and know that they're actually going soft on it. The game was actually buggier than that. Also bear in mind that that's not at launch, that's after Funcom had been given more time to fix it, and had proclaimed it 110% fixed and working as intended. Yet people fell through the ground and/or started swimming in the ground, enemies attacked through walls, enemy melee attacks had longer range than a sniper rifle, doors were a swirling graphics error, balance in _all_ aspects was a sick joke, crashes and disconnects were common, getting trapped in scenery was also common, missions were randomly generated crap from the same template (e.g., you actually had to kill everyone in a "stealth" or "infiltration" mission to get the token), etc, etc, etc. It says something about the kind of people who'd proclaim that to be working as intended.
Heck, even the whole freaking factions were so messed up that faction 1 got more money and better equipment, faction 2 just got shafted, and faction 3 didn't even have a shop above newbie level. How's that for balance? Imagine joining, say, the Horde in WoW and discovering that your side doesn't even have more than the newbie areas in the game.
So basically forget these guys, they just _can't_ design a competitor to WoW. All they can do is hope that someone else comes along and kills it.
- SWG: it stayed afloat at all because of being a merchandising exercise (you know, like putting Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt: you hope people will buy it just because it's official merchandise), _not_ because of having good design. It was the game that was awaited by _millions_ of SW nerds like it's the second coming of Obi Wan, and it just managed to disappoint almost all of them. Either right away, or in the many changes, culminating with the NGE that turned the whole game into a whole other _genre_. Among many other sins.
And reading TFA just reminds me of another thing: the team also always had a thorough contempt for the players, and had no qualms with making excuses or telling outright lies. And I see it continues to this day. E.g., now they're introducing pets as some exciting brand-new feature... never mind that it was there before they removed it in the NGE, pissing off everyone whose class had been eliminated. E.g., claiming that reducing the classes was because of noticing what players do and want is... rich. It's like claiming that you kicked someone in the balls because he obviously wanted that. E.g., the excuse that they were the first and that excuses their mistakes... no it doesn't. There were things known not to work long before, some since the time of MUDs, the SWG team just chose to ignore everything. And at any rate, by the time they did some of their biggest blunders, such as the NGE, that was already after a decade of MMOs. They simply didn't have that excuse any more. Etc.
At any rate, to return to the main idea: everyone who is still there, is there because it's SW. _Not_ because the SWG team can design a good game.
- Turbine: Well, these guys did make Asheron's Call, which was rather popular at one point. (Even if mainly due to being the place where you won't get ganked instantly like on UO.) So at least at one point they did have the mojo to challenge the kings of the hill.
Then they seem to have forgotten how.
AC2 was a flop, and its long list of mistakes could make a case study in how _not_ to go about designing a MMO. It seemed to actually go out of the way to be the opposite of what the players wanted in at least two dozen aspects, or at least miss the mark by a mile. Thoroughly clueless game design.
D&D Online was a thoroughly mediocre and uninspired game, which again managed to miss the mark of everything that most players want in a game. Not even a case of trying to innovate and happening to get it wrong, but just getting it wrong with
So basically you're saying that LOTRO's lack of grind is... well, the same as WoW before it.
Well, I'm not arguing with your assessment of either. It's just silly nevertheless to hear the LOTRO creators make such claims as that they're beating WoW by eliminating grinding (when WoW didn't require any either) or that titles for the number of creatures killed are what turns grind into non-grind.
It's blatantly silly. If anyone despised WoW's "collect 25 murloc heads... and only 1 murloc out of 20 has a head" quests and considers those "grind", then adding a title for number of murloc kills doesn't turn it into non-grind. If anything, it just adds insult to injury. The _last_ thing I'd want, when I'm bored out of my skull killing those murlocs... and yet another one was headless, is a message to pop up telling me that I got some title for a million murlocs killed. Not only it wouldn't make it magically "non-grind", it would be a reminder of all the points before when I grinded murlocs for some dumb quest.
Basically I'm used to hearing silly boasts from people making yet another "X killer" (where X can be WoW, iPod, etc) or "beating X at its own game", but this kind ranks not only as silly, but as... clueless. If the best they can come up with is "I know, let's add some titles", then they're truly and completely clueless. They didn't actually look hard at what they're copying, what works, what doesn't, what's not what the players want, and what they could design otherwise. They're taking wild guesses at something they don't even freaking understand, and hoping WoW would just have a heart attack so they can claim the kill.
Now I know that it meant something different back in the Roman times, from which we inherited the word, but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic. You know, massive destruction. As in, "the population of Europe was decimated by the plague in the late middle ages." (When some documented outbreaks wiped out as much as 80% of a city's population, and, as statistics flukes often work, some smaller villages saw 100% deaths and became ghost villages.)
Did the music industry suffer anything even remotely callable "decimation". On what data do you or Dvorak base such statements? All the sales data I've seen indicated a steady, but relatively unspectacular decline in number of CDs sold, not some devastating dive at the end of Napster. And it becomes even less so when you consider how many people bought at least one track from an album on, say, iTunes, as basically the equivalent of one CD sale lost. Those people poached the one track that interested them, and are not gonna buy the whole CD now.
And let's be serious for a minute. If you think teenagers will start protesting DMCA en masse instead of trying to be fashionable among their peers, I have a nice waterfront property in Sahara to sell. Are you interested? I mean, heh, seriously, 90% of the high school population lives, dresses, eats and buys music based 100% on peer tastes. Even if they go for the rebellious independent teenager image, it's the exact image that their peers want to see. If among their peers it's fashionable to be a Britney Spears fan and have all her albums, that's what they'll do.
"There is no data that says otherwise"... actually, there is plenty.
1. Even if Napster went down, other P2P networks exist and existed. And by all estimates I've seen, the usage is rising steadily. Plus both pre- and post-napster there were pirate websites, ftp sites, binaries newsgroups, etc. What was so special about Napster among them? Why would piracy on Napster improve sales, but piracy on other networks cause sales to drop? Because that's what you're asking me to believe there, if Napster's death was single-handedly responsible for decimating the music business.
2. Last I've heard, most of the decline pre- or post-Napster also suspiciously correlated for a long while with a decline in the number of albums published. You don't need a conspiracy to start wondering about cause and effect there. Let's say Moraelin Music Inc publishes 20 albums in one year, and rakes 20 million dollars in sales. Then next year it publishes 19 albums and the sales dip to 19 million dollars. Hmm... Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
3. How about the correlation with iTunes and the other online music shops that I've mentioned earlier? Unlike pirating a song, which makes most people feel slightly guilty, this time it's an officially bought song. No reason to go buy the CD too. And it went a long way towards killing the album. While previously the music companies would sell you a whole CD, now you can poach individual tracks, for a tenth of the cost. Do you see how that would cause a loss of $$ in sales? And then there were sites like Allofmp3, which didn't even pay the music companies a cent, but allowed some people to put a "well, then copyright is their problem, not mine, I bought the song" blanket over their conscience anyway.
Or in other words, Dvorak is, as usual, talking out the ass. His job as a tech pundit is to sound all smart, and tell the readers what they want to hear. Or at least some outlandish prediction. It's a short-story writer job, not some real all-knowing oracle. And if you've read some of his other pieces (e.g., the now infamous whine about how the Windows idle process is eating up 99% of his CPU power), he's... a helluval less than all-knowing. In fact, he's an outright idiot.
So be a smart guy and don't base your understanding of the world on his clueless rants. I'm sure you can find better sources of information.
Just read enough slashdot and you'll run into enough people ranting and raving about how any form of IP is _fundamentally_ an abhomination, including not only patents and copyright, but also _trademarks_. Even if _some_ don't outright spell out "abolish copyright", they go at such great lengths about how it's fundamentally an oppressive evil, a major violation of your constitutional rights, _and_ a plot to plunder the economy of poorer countries... that, really, it's hard to see what other solution than abolishment would the author see there.
The MPAA and RIAA threads have been mentioned, so I'll add I've also run into them in topics about MS, BSA, piracy in China, etc. Really, just read enough of those and it's impossible to not run into the "abolish copyright" rants. Some even modded +5.
And then there are the clever guys who think they're all stealthy and subtle if they pack it as "fair use", "civil rights", etc. Add a bit of "information wants to be free", "copying != theft", "you can't stop the flow of information", etc, rhetoric. Most of them ammount to nothing more and nothing less than effectively abolishing copyright, if they had their way.
Get this: "copy right" is about who has the right to make copies. That was the original idea that the law was supposed to embody. The moment you've extended "fair use" to mean that anyone can make any number of copies, sell them in their shop, do anything to them, incorporate them in their own products without giving credit, set their own terms, etc, well, you effectively abolished any copyright protection. Effectively in that kind of world, even if you could still put "(C) Nefarity, 2007" on your work, it would have exactly zero use or meaning, so it's as good as abolished.
It's a bit, if you will, like having private property without having the right to lock your door, put any limits on who may enter your house, and can't stop them from leaving with your TV or selling tickets to watch the latest movie on your DVD player. I'm sure some could equally argue that distributing someone _else_'s TV is just a way of helping the neighbour, makes a better community, and indeed is as fundamental as the freedom of speech. (After all, it's exactly what "freedom 2" is in the Free Software Definition.) Anyway, the point I'm trying to make: at that point you effectively _don't_ have private property any more. If there are no legal limits you can actually enforce, then you just don't have it.
Same here. Copyright is all about private property of information. Whether that's good or bad, you decide, I'm not going into tha The moment you've removed all legal protections, and you can't tell people what they can do with your bits, and who can do it, you effectively don't have copyright any more.
It's actually not easy at all. Sex is easy. The whole emotional, cultural, etc, baggage that humans attach to it, isn't.
If you sent cats to space, yeah, it would be easy. They get in heat, they fuck, they're over it. Humans don't. Or not unless you manage to breed/educate a whole new breed of humans for which sex doesn't really meen anything deeper.
And it's not just the obvious emotional aspect as such, but also a whole class of status games, penis-size games, mind games, and power games exist for both genders, associated with sex or sometimes as a substitute for sex. Sex is used as currency, insult material, status symbol (e.g., look who I'm with), blackmail material, reason for feud or insecurity, etc.
E.g., and bear in mind that this is a _mild_ example, but I don't feel like turning it into a whole flame: there was this italian documentary about a town where everyone had to have a mistress, to prove that he's a macho man with a working set of genitals. And there was this guy who was sane enough to realize the whole peer pressure thing, and admitted that he was perfectly happy with his wife, loved her, didn't want to hurt her... but, you know, the other guys were starting to think he's maybe impotent if he doesn't have a mistress too. So he just had to get one, as proof and status symbol. That's just one of the many kinds of extra importance that gets attached to sex, and I was saying, one of the milder ones.
And then there are the break-ups. There have been very few reasons for hatred, revenge, or ever-lasting depression than that.
Now picture putting those people in a small tin can where they can't escape each other. It's the worst case "why you shouldn't date a coworker" scenario... squared. They can't escape each other even after work, and one can't just quit and move to another town. It's a ship in space that will take a year to reach its destination, and, really, there's no way to just get off it and move somewhere else.
So unless you breed a race of humans who'd regard sex as just a mechanical release, you're far better off _not_ having sex on that ship.
And before anyone quips, "I.e., men?", even for men it's not that easy and detached. A whole genre of "the bitch took my heart and dumped me" whines exists, and some even get set to music or turned into a novel or movie. Or the ever popular "the bitch took offense to my fucking the secretary and now wants alimony! The unfairness of it all!" whine. Or the nerds' favourite, the whine about how those heartless girls go for the jock instead of the nerd. Etc.
Methinks you're still underestimating it, or maybe I haven't explained it well enough:
A) Just having a number of players in Lineage 2 doesn't mean you'll have the same audience in Lineage 3. Ask Turbine about Asheron's Call 2, which flopped abysmally. Just being the sequel to AC1 didn't say much. Or ask Sony about Everquest 2. They went from EQ1 being the #1 MMO to EQ2 being a niche game. So what makes you think that Lineage III has already hit the mark, when it's not even released yet?
B) You don't seem to understand how those "emulated" servers work. We're not talking something that just looks vaguely similar, we're talking stuff that's:
- played with the official client, hence it looks exactly the same
- quite often has the exact same maps, quests, etc, since enough information usually exists in the client. E.g., don't think that when you play WoW it transfers the landscape from the server. Your client CD already has those files. You'd be surprised what else is on a client CD. For starters all the quest texts and rewards.
That's the way it worked ever since the first free servers were made for UO. The "emulated server" would be just an executable, maybe also some tools, and it would require an installed client or a client CD to get the rest of the game from. E.g., the whole Britannia map and all the creatures.
And it's pretty hard to sue them, since:
1. They're not distributing any copyrighted material. They don't distribute a copy of your map or meshes or textures, they tell people to go buy a boxed copy of the game for those. You can't easily forbid people from just making an exe that incidentally reads your files, or MS would stop OOo from working with Office files.
2. It's hard to even take the DMCA route (which I don't think Korea has anyway), since they're not gaining or providing any unauthorized access to your servers. Quite the contrary, they let your client connect to their server, if anyone wants to. It's also not circumventing any copy-protection mechanisms, since a MMO isn't copy-protected anyway, and they're not telling people to copy anything.
Now having a source theft is a different thing, but even there you'll first have to prove that they've actually used your files. It can take some time.
At any rate, we're talking about something which is an exact clone of the official game at launch. We're not talking about asking people to switch to a similar game, but about asking them to play on a free server from the start. Having something like that from the start, when people don't have social networks keeping them on the official servers, can be very damaging.
I din't know if it will actually happen to Lineage III, but it is a possibility.
So basically your whole confirmation there is that you, yourself, were _worried_ that you _might_ drive aggressively.
First of all, that doesn't say anything about actually driving aggressively, it just says you had a thought about it. I thought "heh, if this were City Of Heroes I'd jump out the window instead of taking the stairs" but it doesn't mean I'd actually do it. If anything, all that _really_ proves is that you've been influenced by the media/peer hype, not by the game itself. You were told that games might affect you and you proceeded to worry.
Even if you said "I noticed that I'm more aggressive", that's still flawed. That's self-fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias most of the time. People notice more whatever supports their pre-conception, and conveniently skip or forget that which doesn't. E.g., if I wanted to believe, say, "I'm teh greatest fps player ever", I'd notice every time I won or shot someone, but promptly forget every time I got pwned badly. Even a thoroughly mediocre player can feel great that way, and is one reason why competitive games are popular. The same here: if you worry enough about driving badly, you'll notice and blow out of proportion stuff that happens daily to non-gamers too.
I.e., the only way to really know if you were driving more aggressively, is if people who don't know about your gaming started noticing that you drive aggressively. Otherwise, it could be all in your head.
It gets funnier when you're the actor too, because you can often just fulfill your own prophecy. If you think you must fail an exam, it's often an easy way out to actually fail it. If you think you have to have an accident, you might subconsciously go ahead and just cause it. Etc.
And finally, I don't know if you realize it, but in the end what you say there is: so you're actually a more careful driver, then. I don't know if it's the games or your natural temper, but what you're saying there is that you actually worried about driving too aggressively, and tried not to. Right?
That's head and shoulders over some non-gamers I know, for which driving is a penis size thing. They don't just drive to get from point A to point B, they drive to prove that they're Real Man. They drive with the aggressivity of someone who thinks that if, god forbid, they're doing less than 120 km/h in a 100 km/h zone, the next day the Manhood Police will show up at the door with some big scissors and revoke their right to pee standing. But I digress.
At any rate, from what I gather, (A) it made you try not to, and (B) even believing that such an influence existed, it went off after a short break, right? I mean, otherwise there would be no point in waiting a bit. That's a far cry from the premeditated murders that get blamed on gaming. It seems to me that even if violent games affected moods that way, after a round of quake, you might similarly (A) worry about being too aggressive and take a break while adrenaline wears off, and (B) by the time you went to school/work tomorrow the whole thing would have died down anyway. You don't end up shooting the school or office because of what mood you had yesterday.
Especially point A tells me that games would actually make you a better person, or made you a better driver, if games are really the cause there.
The simplest "emergency exit" sign can be always lit, and have a battery backup that kicks in if the power goes down. It's a trivial circuit.
Now enter such complex monitoring schemes. How _do_ you know you've covered all possible scenarios? What if power didn't go down, but one of the motion sensors is on the fritz and doesn't detect movement any more, for example? You can design complex challenge-response protocols and all sorts of smart self-diagnostics, but that's even more complexity and even more possibility for bugs. (Software completely without bugs is somewhat akin to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.)
Basically the latter is taking a bet that you won't be the ones who discover a bug in an emergency. Is it really worth it? To me it seems akin to playing russian roulette for a few bucks.
Yes and no. Mostly I think you haven't thought about it much. There are a couple of problems I can see there right away:
1. Rampant cheating. Think WoW Glider on steroids. If you have the source code, you can write a client which looks to the server 100% like a player at the keyboard on the official client. Write a client which drives a whole group of player characters on a farming or ganking spree from a single machine. Which _will_ screw up the game, and drive people away. (Especially in a game where _all_ there is to do is farm and PvP.) That's money lost.
Or you could delay the game and invest in changing the whole protocol, so the old code doesn't even work with the server any more. Which again is money lost. Both extra development time, and time in which you're not collecting the monthly fees. A single month delay, if you had, say, 1 million players, is 10 to 15 million dollars lost in fees alone.
But even if you do, someone saw all your weak points. Yes, most games do rely on security through obscurity, because noone has the funds, computing power and bandwidth, to do everything on the server securely. There's invariably a lot of functionality in the client, and you basically keep your fingers crossed. Maybe you code some "tripwires" on the server to detect if someone did something awfully wrong, but (A) it's still keeping your fingers crossed that noone will do something that you haven't checked, and (B) more importantly, whoever saw the code now also knows exactly what to avoid.
Basically, it's pretty much _the_ cheating nightmare scenario.
2. Whoever has that code will have a trivial job of making some "emulated" servers and stealing your subscribers that way. It's one thing to have a shabby half-way there alternative server available after a year, it's entirely another thing to maybe have a 100% perfect alternative right at the start.
And yes, that _is_ money lost, and not just profits lost. Most MMOs have far more content than a single-player RPG. (Even Oblivion is a spit in the bucket compared to the sheer size of WoW.) For most, basically the boxed copy is subsidized, and they're betting you'll stay there for more than 2-3 months to break even and start making a profit. That already doesn't leave you with that much pure profit, since the average player stays about 6 months on a MMO. If half your player base buys the boxed copy and buggers off to play on someone else's servers, you'll feel it. If you also over-estimated a little what population you'll get (and hence, how much can you spend on development), it can turn a moderately survivable game into a flop right there and then.
Yes, we all can look at WoW and see one big money printing license. They actually underestimated how many players they'll get. Most MMOs aren't WoW, though. Flops are more common than successes. Even big names like EQ2 or TSO have managed to get only a fraction of the player base they counted on. They may not have seen the plug pulled outright, but then again, others did. It doesn't take much of a shove to topple a game which already missed the mark.
I mean, in most emergencies I can think of (flood, earthquake, tornado, whatever), you can pretty much bet on something being, you know, _damaged_. What if it's a sensor, or one of the hubs for this monitoring thing, or whatever? I can easily imagine someone getting lost, or trapped because they were too slow to evacuate, or end up with a stampede, just because the computer thought there was noone on that floor.
Heck, common sense says that something will be damaged even if nothing goes wrong. E.g., an escape sign will have a burned lightbulb. If the one at the other end of the corridor does light up, maybe I'll see that one.
Hmm... I don't think the faction-vs-faction thing is what decimated the SWG player base. Off the top of my head, other stuff ranks higher. Such as:
- turning the whole game into a whole other genre (let's face it, it's SF Planetside with a horrible interface now),
- making most popular skill combinations unavailable as a combination or unavailable at all any more (e.g., ask an animal handler if they can even play the same character any more),
- turning some races into a fuck-up where they kept the previous disadvantages but none of the advantages that balanced them (e.g., Wookies or Trandoshans kept the equipment restrictions, but none of the racial bonuses that made up for that)
- making what used to be a prestige class into a common class everyone can get, thereby nuking the whole achievement of everyone who worked and grinded to unlock it (mind you, the grind to jedi was a bad idea in the first place, and made a lot of people quit. But two wrongs don't make a right, and stripping them of their hard-earned achievement made even more people quit.)
- speaking of skills and combinations, the classes are so uni-dimensional it's not even funny. Whereas previously you could mix and match things like being a scout who also mods weapons on the side, or a jedi who can also play an instrument for fun, or other unique character concepts, now everyone is a member of a class of identical clones. And some became a fuck-up that can't even do the quests any more. (E.g., traders or entertainers.)
- nuking the economy _had_ and making everyone's crafting useless.
- the new quests are mass-produced crap, whose only "saving grace" is that they merchandise the main SW characters
- the devs handling everything heavy-handedly and outright lying to the players. I don't know... I don't say they owe me anything, but at least don't treat me badly and don't outright lie to my face. The whole dev attitude in SWG is, well, like going to a shop and being lied to, treated snottily and seeing the shopkeepers act like you're some bum that should be grateful for the great privilege of being _tollerated_ there. I wouldn't think the shop owners owe me anything either, but that's one shop I wouldn't go to ever again.
Basically, rest assured that the list of "sins" of the NGE is a mile long. Whatever flaws their PvP system has, pfft, it's lost in the decimals as annoyance factor goes.
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At the risk of sounding like a troll, it comes down to: fanboy cults develop around the underdog, not around the big 800 pound gorilla who is winning anyway. Or rather, fanboys/zealots/cultists seem to have this need to, pretty much, save the world. Or at least they need something to defend, some cause to champion against all odds, some us-vs-them theme where "them" can be perceived as a credible threat. They have to be the (messiah of the) minority, even in a perverse minority-inside-a-minority way, or at least the unsung defenders against the barbarian hordes. They have to feel persecuted, looked down upon, but know in their heart that they're the Luke Skywalker against the might of the Empire, or one of the outnumbered hoplites at Thermopilae against the Persian hordes.
This isn't just about tech fanboys, but a more general phenomenon. You don't get many zealots when you're the one religion, you get them when it's 12 apostles vs the whole world. When it's the mainstream religion _and_ under no credible threat, you just get sheep and wolves in sheep skin. To get people all worked up there has to be a threat, a battle against all odds, where they're the few saving the world from a(n imaginary) threat it doesn't even acknowledge.
You can see that in Christianity too. Most of the spark it retained past a point was not because it was already the winner, but because it fragmented and ended up its own enemy. Arians vs Catholics vs Nestorians, Orthodox vs Catholic, Catholic vs Cathar, Catholic vs Protestant, and protestant factions against each other. That's what got people rallying to be the bleating champions of it: the credible us-vs-them setup, where "them" might just win if someone doesn't gather a (self-)righteous mob against it. When it didn't have such a challenger, it just ended up a court intrigues game where noone really gave a damn about the church. And occasionally it had to invent its own challenge, e.g., the Crusades.
It may sound like rehashing your first paragraph, but it's not. The definition of cult you give, is pretty much cult as opposed to religion. You're a cult if you're non-mainstream, you're a religion if it's mainstream. That's really all that that definition says.
But look at it this way: all mainstream religions got there by first being a cult. You don't get a religion directly formed around the mainstream thing in the first place. If something is already the undisputed 800 pound gorilla without a credible challenger, it already lost the chance of getting its own army of zealots. That's what I'm saying.
And Microsoft simply happens to be at that point, really. Apple is an underdog, it gets zealots. AMD used to be a major underdog, and it had some very rabid zealots, but then it became mainstream and now noone cares. Intel was always the big dog in CPUs, and it pretty much never really had zealots, it at most had some mild fans. IBM didn't use to have zealots either as long as it was _the_ big gorilla. Microsot is _the_ big gorilla and it has no zealots. Whop-de-do, big surprise there.
Because it does more and is more graphics intensive, that's why. I know it's fashionable to whine about bloat on /., but it would be nice to at least be sure you know what you're talking about. Such as whether it's indeed some problem with the animations or, get this, it might just be that it has more graphics and physics processing than WoW.
Yeah, it needs more CPU and GPU power than WoW, but then it has bigger textures than WoW's cartoonish graphics, more layers of textures, and it uses shaders much more extensively. It also has a lot of transparency (e.g., auras, spell effects, particles, etc) which requires a lot more horsepower than rendering opaque textures. _Especially_ if some form of transparency AA is activated on that machine.
Also COH has physics, while WoW, simply put, doesn't. All enemies in WoW will do the same, say, death animation regardless of where they are, even if they end up sticking over the edge of a cliff or embedded _into_ the cliff. In COH the'll ragdoll over railings, tumble down stairs, and god knows what else. You can see how that would need more computing power, right? Now add the fact that the same physics apply to spell effects. A fireball in WoW just plays an explosion sequence of sprites, and that's that, while in COH it involves a lot of flares and sparks flying around and having physics applied to them, _and_ leaves a lot of transparent stuff around like fires burning on the floor.
It also has a lot more enemies on the screen at the same time. Whereas in WoW you'd go "OMG, need to pull one and sheep one!" at groups of 3 enemies, in COH you'd routinely deal with groups of two dozen enemies as an 8-player group. So, you know, it's more stuff to render. Add some auras, particle effects, and whatnot, and there you have your explanation why on low end machines it's slower if you don't turn off some graphics options.
It also needs a lot more RAM for all those textures, especially if a lot of people are in sight. (Since they can customize their costumes.) You might notice a massive slowdown if you're on, say, 256 MB of RAM or have most of your RAM taken by other programs. On the other hand on 1 GB it runs like greased lightning.
Also, exactly what kind of "high end" machines are we talking about? It runs OK on my other machine, which is an Athlon 2000+ (the old Athlon, not the 64) with a 6800 GT graphics card. That's... what? A 3 years old graphics card, that wasn't even the highest end at launch? No, seriously. It was launched in April 2004.
Now I'm not saying it's a capital crime to have a 3 year old computer, but, please... if you're going to throw around assessments like "it runs slow on most high-end machines", then it would help if you were actually talking about high end machines.
At any rate, I could see some point if you argued about the design decision to push the graphics effects to that extent. (Although, you _can_ reduce it a lot.) But if you're going to pass blanket judgments like that the animation code or the client itself is bloated and slow, I'll have to say that you don't know what you're talking about.
Ah, yes, the mandatory conspiracy theory. Get this, this is just variable valve timing which by now a _lot_ of car manufacturers _already_ use, with various degrees of sophistication. This one may be slightly more efficient, but the important thing is that steps in that exact direction have been made, and there is already a healthy competition in that domain.
If you'll kindly read that Wikipedia page, you'll notice that both Ford and GM, since you name-and-shame them, _already_ offer engines with variable valve timing. GM has worked on theirs since 1975, and built automobiles equipped with, say, their Northstar System since at least the 90's.
So, you know, even as conspiracy theories go, this one... shall we say, fails to be entertaining at least. It is lacking in the suspension-of-disbelief quality. It's akin to asking me to believe that Boeing is trying to kill the jet engine... never mind that they're already using them.
Real question is: will it be a part of the next gen DRM?
I mean, rhetoric about cutting down losses and all, well, it's good and fine. But here you have something that prevents a disc from being played, unless the correct key is sent to a chip. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky? Because I'm sure that someone at Sony just did. And if (ad absurdum) they didn't, then MS just did, in its quest to convince the MPAA and RIAA to make its own protection schemes the new entertainment centre standard.
I mean, it's a no brainer. Make the disc revert to opaque after a while, and have to be re-activated. So every time it has to be played in an authorized player.
As a bonus, it's got all the potential in the world to implement some other nasty roadblocks to fair use. E.g.,
- region coding. No more just messing with the firmware to make other region DVDs play, the chips for different regions can be physically tuned to different frequencies.
- killing the second-hand market for good. E.g., make the chip also contain a small flash area, just enough to hold the player's own key. The first time it's played, it stores the player's ID there, and subsequently refuses to activate on anything else. (Extra bonus: now you also need need to buy a new DVD each time you buy a new player.)
- limits on how often you can play the DVD. Pretty trivial: the chip also contains a counter, and when that limit is reached, it can no longer be activated. In the video market it actually has actually a legitimate use: mail-order rentals where you don't actually have to bring it back. But imagine the fun when your next Windows version has such a chip, to stop all those pirates from installing one copy of Windows on 20 machines. (And incidentally also stop anyone from reinstalling it more than once or twice after their hard drive failed, or they got pwned by a virus, or whatever.)
Etc.
And unlike just encryption, some of these can be a much bigger pain in the rear to defeat.
E.g., a counter on the chip can physically and irreversibly blow a tiny fuse for each time it's played. When it's out of fuses, that's it. There is no decryption key you can post on Digg or print on a t-shirt, that will bypass a physically destroyed circuit.
E.g., the chip doesn't need to be reprogrammable from outside in any form or shape. So there's no way to just crack its firmware to make it stay transparent. In fact, at that size and given that you want the absolute minimum power consumption, it doesn't need a firmware at all. It can simply be hard-wired.
Downside, there are physical ways to attack it, such as replacing the chip or marinating the disc in some chemical that neutralizes the dye. Both are a far bigger pain in the arse for Jack Sixpack than just downloading a cracked driver or firmware. I don't see Jack drilling holes and inserting micro-chips that gladly. Plus, it requires buying something tangible, such as a replacement chip, which is easier to trace and prosecute than an offshore warez site.
If you produce a monkey capable of being commanded to do the most basic tasks, somewhere a million PHBs will replace human workers with it.
Can it sew shoes? Well, cool. All those jobs were moved to inhuman sweatshops in poorer countries long ago. Imagine the savings if you don't even have to pay those salaries. Just dig some bunker with a thousand monkey cages, and make them sew for 18 hours a day, for the cost of just some water and biomass as food. Ok, they'll probably wear out pretty quickly at that rate, but you can always replace them and use the previous ones as extra protein for the next generation.
Can it operate a phone and compare simple questions to a canned FAQ? (Not necessarily intelligently or successfully, mind you.) Yay. There go the first level tech support jobs. Let's be honest, it _is_ a cheap monkey job as far as every manager in the organisation sees it. Level 1 is there just to deflect the trivial stuff from reaching the expensive level 2 guys, and occasionally discourage some people from escalating even non-trivial stuff. If you're a qualified nerd in a level 1 job, well, you have my sympathy, so take it as: you don't belong there.
Ok, so the monkeys probably won't have a larynx capable of human speech, but I'm sure someone will figure out some text-to-speech scheme.
For that matter, can it operate a keyboard? Well, the drive of the last half a century straight was to buy expensive tools and believe that now even less qualified burger-flippers can write your programs with them. Never mind that that guy is incapable of abstract algorithmic thought and too bored to even learn the language. The nice salesman from IBM/MS/BEA/whatever said that you don't need expensive smart guys any more. Any semi-trained monkey can write great enterprise programs with their tools in 21 days, don't you know? And that nice salesman plays such a nice game of golf, that he's surely trustworthy.
If that sounds like made-up fiction, sadly, it isn't. I actually know of two departments which hired their programmers by reverse auction. Whoever wants less money gets the job, no further qualifications needed or questions asked. Literally. Needless to say, they ended up with people about as sharp as a bowling ball. In the words of Foghorn Leghorn, "I've seen, AH SAY, I've seen better heads on a mug of beer." Some were just now discovering stuff like that they need to put quotes around a string, and some were having trouble understanding why. One guy had trouble understanding why the variable he declared in the constructor isn't visible in another method. Etc.
Plus, think of all the other advantages of putting semi-human monkeys in those jobs. For starters, who's gonna force you to pay for overtime or let them unionize? Schedules of 16 hours a day, 7 days a week, here we come. I'm sure some PHB (e.g., at EA) would ejaculate in his pants out of sheer joy at _that_ thought.
Or imagine the joy on some "your job could be the next to move to India" PHB's face, when he can replace it with the even more demeaning threat of, "remind me why I don't hire one of those new monkeys to do your job?"
Etc.
I'm sure there's a fun new economy just waiting to be discovered.
We're going to aggree there very quickly. I have no problem with seeing it as an extra road bump. That's a sane and realistic attitude, and every bit helps, obviously.
However the argument does end up again and again being, basically: "if we were finally on IPv6 you could really give up all firewalling and defense, since you're impossible to find in all those gazillions of possible addresses anyway." Now probably no serious admin would think it's security, but somehow just that claim does seems to pop up on Slashdot every time IPv6 is mentioned. I've seen half a dozen messages to that effect in this thread alone, and that just skimming through it.
Now maybe they had something more along your assessment in mind, but any details were missing that would hint that way.
Depends on your personality, I guess. There is more than one kind of player, and there are several classifications already.
:)
E.g., in Bartle's scheme (ok, so it was made for MUDs/MMOs, not FPS, but it does partially apply to more than MUDs/MMOs) I can just see a die-hard achiever (the guys playing for score) jumping in front of the same vent or taking the same pre-learned route to maximize his score. Whereas an explorer will love discovering new routes, dealing with new situations, etc.
And don't laugh, I personally know someone who spent _years_ playing the same map, taking the same route, climbing on the same ladder, crawling through the same duct, and jumping up and down in front of the same vent, because that's where he got the biggest score. Just the thought of _that_ kind of mind-numbing monotony makes me cringe, but he found it fun. There you go, it's illustration enough that more than one player type exists.
E.g., taking the casual player vs hardcore player distinction, a casual player is less likely to devote time learning and fine-tuning their exact route and tactics to win on that exact map. He/she just wants to jump in, run around and shoot someone, and basically be done with it. A random map scenario is pretty much ideal for a casual player since, basically, it's new for everyone. There are no people who have already spent months learning this exact map. So everyone starts equal, and from there it's only up to your reflexes and ability to deal with the new. If you do have the reflexes, it doesn't matter if you're new to the game or to that map.
That's just two distinctions, but I'm sure more can be defined. Bottom line is that some of us _will_ find it more fun and mentally stimulating to play on random maps, while others will hate it. What else is new?
Sorry to rain on that parrade, but the (variants of) "IPv6 is secure because it's a 64 bit space and noone will ever guess your address" sound... surrealistic. It's security by obscurity of the worst kind. The kind that can't possibly work.
We live in an age where far larger combinations of bits -- e.g., email addresses or name/password combinations -- are sniffed, phished, compiled into lists and sold, etc. What on Earth makes people think that a fixed IPv6 address would be more secure? No, honestly, what's so special about an 8 byte IPv6 address that makes it un-sniffable?
The notion that your machine is only findable by raw brute-force scanning is pretty laughable. Yes, it's one of the easiest and most non-brainer methods, but it's not the only one.
As a counter-example, look at how email viruses work. Because they _do_ work without scanning and without looking for you speciffically. They just go through more hops, each hop sending itself further to everyone in your address book.
Guess what? The exact same can be trivially adapted to an IPv6 worm. Each pwned machine just continuously looks for incoming and outgoing connections, and tries to spread to those too.
Or how about lists of static addresses, the same as the lists of email addresses that spammers buy and sell. Only unlike email addresses, if you're unfirewalled, you can't keep yours secret. You _have_ to tell each visited site your address every time you connect to it, so it knows where to send the response packets.
So basically it's the setup for the easiest kind of phishing imaginable. It's like automatically giving your email address to every site you ever visited, except this time it's your IPv6 address. Someone just has to create or pwn a popular site, and just record all the IP's that connect to it. Voila, that's a nice list to sell to the hackers. No more brute force scanning needed.
We already have major corporations whose computers are spam bots. What makes you think none will host IP recording bots? How do you know none of the ecommerce sites or forums you visit could be pwned to record all those static IPv6 addresses?
Or it just takes one bored intern working at a major ISP to run a sniffer and get a huge list of all static IPv6 addresses that sent or received anything through their pipe. Remember, idiots exist everywhere. One guy sold the whole list of AOL addresses to spammers, for example. So are you _sure_ noone will sell the list of allocated/known IPv6 addresses?
And since it's static addresses (after all, the whole idea is to get rid of NAT, right? No more dynamic addresses and remapping, right?), you know that each address logged will be available for a long long time thereafter.
Basically let's stop using the whole "we're secure by obscurity" concept to rest already. If there are other security mechanisms in place, fine, I want to hear about them. But "noone will find your IPv6 address" is _not_ security. If you want to talk security, you start from the most paranoid scenarios imaginable, not from wishful thinking.
_If_ you're giving away your work for free, ok, none of us has any expectations as to how. Whatever works for you, really.
The problem is that Tim O'Reily sees BitTorrent as a successor not to Sourceforge, but to Akamai. Which is distributed servers for large companies. We're talking the likes of MS, Yahoo, Symantec, AOL, etc. I don't think many people bought Akamai hosting for some small freeware utility they wrote.
And it's positioning it _there_ that makes me have a trouble with it. If I paid a ton of money for, say, Vista, the keywords are: paid money. We're not talking some free content. I think the least they can do is give me the patches in a fast and convenient way. I _don't_ want to use my outbound pipe, and having it stuffed, to participate in sharing MS's patches. MS can just keep paying for some civilized hosting, thank you very much.
That's really why I used the WoW patches as an example, because it's just what irks me. I'm paying a ton of money, and they can't even host their own freaking patches. It's not freeware and, frankly, I _don't_ think I have any obligation to chip in a little to help Blizzard's bottom line some more.
And if that kind of crap is (part of) what Web 2.0 is all about, then: no, thanks.
That, in a nutshell is all that bothers me about that part of the Web 2.0 concept.
Generally you got the right idea, but it's not just about marketting and not just dynamic content as such. If you read Tim O'Reilly's own explanations of it, since he invented and pushes the buzzword, it's more about techno-fetishism and the deep seated belief that a million monkeys on keyboards _can_ write Hamlet... if only they're on the Internet and have all the latest buzzwords.
E.g., he sees personal web pages as soo Web 1.0, and replaced by wikis in Web 2.0. No, really.
I mean, seriously, it's sooo pase to just have your own resume on your own homepage. Make it a wiki so everyone can edit it! Surely reality works by consensus, and a million bored strangers who never heard of you before are more qualified than you to fill that content! Or, bah, corporate web sites are so dull. Make it a wiki, so random strangers can spice it up. (That was sarcasm, btw.)
E.g., ditto for sources of information. Having an authoritative source is soo Web 1.0, when you could just have a wiki instead. Wikis are the Web 2.0 way! And I don't even mean the sane way of using, say, Wikipedia as a starting point and following the links to the authoritative sources. No, no, no. He sees wikis as the _replacement_.
E.g., publishing content is soo Web 1.0. You should have everyone participate! Participation is the Web 2.0 way, don't you know?
So, yeah, forget about writing your own press releases and product manuals and FAQs. Let the community participate! Let perfect strangers and competitors spice it up. Imagine the possibilities! Imagine the excitement of checking each day to find out what perversions someone added to your company or product info! (Yep, you guessed, sarcasm.)
E.g., buying servers (e.g., from Akamai) to distribute your patches and executables is soo web 1.0. The Web 2.0 way is BitTorrent. Get on with the times.
I mean, hey, look at how excited WoW players were to get their ADSL's _outbound_ pipe stuffed up by a modified BitTorrent to download the patches. Not to mention at times being stuck with sucking a huge patch through a straw, from 1-2 other people's outbound pipe. Surely they'd barf if they could download the same patch in 5 minutes from a dedicated server without the hassle. (Sarcasm too, btw. It was actually a major gripe about WoW. See, for example, the Penny Arcade strip.)
Etc.
Now don't get me wrong, I can see some point in some of that stuff if it's an extra. Providing a forum for the users is pretty much expected anyway, and offering a torrent in _addition_ to the plain old download can't hurt at least. But presenting it as the _replacement_ to the boring old Web 1.0 stuff is... brain dead. It takes an unhealthy dose of techno-fetishism and techno-utopianism to see everything solvable by just more network buzzwords and a million networked monkeys writing reality by consensus.
It does fit with his other brain-damaged ideas, though, such as the call for censoring and regulating the blogosphere. The guy genuinely seems _that_ convinced that he can forge a whole utopian society on the Internet.
What about Tim O'Reilly? He seems to take the whole "Web 2.0" buzzword he invented pretty seriously. Plus, as repeating it goes, I assume that having a Web 2.0 Summit (the next one is in October) would kinda qualify as repeating it.
Then again, he generally seems to take himself too seriously. What with the attempt to regulate blogosphere and all.
He's not the only one, though, since it wouldn't be much of a summit if only he was going there. There are a lot of people pining for the good ol' days of the 1.0 Bubble, and wanting to once again get big VC money for just having a web page and a sock puppet. Bubble 2.0 if you will. Cue trying to tell investors and each other that this time they're Web 2.0, see. Not the old failed Bubble 1.0, see. This time they have javascript and wikis and blogs and BitTorrent and whatnot, and a shiny happy everyone-participates model. _This_ time you'll get your money worth if you invest in them. Would they lie to you... again?
(And if that sounds stupid and made up, sadly it isn't made up. That's what makes Web 2.0 in Tim O'Reilly's own view and definition of it. See, it's 2.0, because now it has wikis, and blogs, and participation, and Google search, etc. And this time there's search engine optimization too, btw! And that all's _the_ recipe for not going bankrupt as a VC capital sink!)
Oh, wait... you meant perchance that nobody _sane_ is repeating it? Ok, in that case no objection.
Sadly, I _am_ serious: XP Decay.
Quoth the great pundit: "When I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete, I see that the System Idle Process is hogging all the resources and chewing up 95 percent of the processor's cycles. Doing what? Doing nothing?"
You can't make up something like that, really. It's something I just couldn't come up with on my own, even if I were to make up dialogue for a SF story where a Neanderthal is brought to the present and given a computer. It's stuff that just makes you go, "naaah, no user is _that_ stupid."
Turns out that one can even write as some great tech guru for a major magazine and still actually be that stupid. Go figure.
Not to mention that reading the rest of his complaints in that article is enough to make me worry about his qualifications anyway. I mean, being stumped why Windows is suddenly sluggish and he can't even reboot, well, is stuff that I _can_ understand in Joe Sixpack or Jane Grandma who are computer-illiterate. But someone who's a great computer pundit in a major magazine, would be expected to know better. Before you can write why company X should do Y, and what's technically good/bad/ugly about company Z's product, I'd expect one to be the kind of techie that fixes such stuff before breakfast. I'd have forgiven him if it were "look at the stuff mom's computer was doing", but if that's what his computer does and he's stumped, he just told me that he's totally unqualified for the column he writes.
Well, I didn't say necessarily "more brutal", but you usually think of larger percentages when you say stuff like "sales were decimated" nowadays. No company nowadays would call a 10% sales dip a "decimation". Even if it's accompanied -- as loved by Wall Street -- by firing 10% of the employees, everyone prefers milder euphemisms.
Presumably because sales lost or even jobs lost isn't exactly a brutal mental image, so it tends to need way higher numbers before it conjures a mental image worthy of being called "decimation." You need a loss that can be called "devastating" for that.
Well, let's see who they mention there:
- Funcom: makers of Anarchy Online, launched as the buggiest pile of shit in recorded history. Read the reviews on Something Awful, and know that they're actually going soft on it. The game was actually buggier than that. Also bear in mind that that's not at launch, that's after Funcom had been given more time to fix it, and had proclaimed it 110% fixed and working as intended. Yet people fell through the ground and/or started swimming in the ground, enemies attacked through walls, enemy melee attacks had longer range than a sniper rifle, doors were a swirling graphics error, balance in _all_ aspects was a sick joke, crashes and disconnects were common, getting trapped in scenery was also common, missions were randomly generated crap from the same template (e.g., you actually had to kill everyone in a "stealth" or "infiltration" mission to get the token), etc, etc, etc. It says something about the kind of people who'd proclaim that to be working as intended.
Heck, even the whole freaking factions were so messed up that faction 1 got more money and better equipment, faction 2 just got shafted, and faction 3 didn't even have a shop above newbie level. How's that for balance? Imagine joining, say, the Horde in WoW and discovering that your side doesn't even have more than the newbie areas in the game.
So basically forget these guys, they just _can't_ design a competitor to WoW. All they can do is hope that someone else comes along and kills it.
- SWG: it stayed afloat at all because of being a merchandising exercise (you know, like putting Darth Vader's head on a t-shirt: you hope people will buy it just because it's official merchandise), _not_ because of having good design. It was the game that was awaited by _millions_ of SW nerds like it's the second coming of Obi Wan, and it just managed to disappoint almost all of them. Either right away, or in the many changes, culminating with the NGE that turned the whole game into a whole other _genre_. Among many other sins.
And reading TFA just reminds me of another thing: the team also always had a thorough contempt for the players, and had no qualms with making excuses or telling outright lies. And I see it continues to this day. E.g., now they're introducing pets as some exciting brand-new feature... never mind that it was there before they removed it in the NGE, pissing off everyone whose class had been eliminated. E.g., claiming that reducing the classes was because of noticing what players do and want is... rich. It's like claiming that you kicked someone in the balls because he obviously wanted that. E.g., the excuse that they were the first and that excuses their mistakes... no it doesn't. There were things known not to work long before, some since the time of MUDs, the SWG team just chose to ignore everything. And at any rate, by the time they did some of their biggest blunders, such as the NGE, that was already after a decade of MMOs. They simply didn't have that excuse any more. Etc.
At any rate, to return to the main idea: everyone who is still there, is there because it's SW. _Not_ because the SWG team can design a good game.
- Turbine: Well, these guys did make Asheron's Call, which was rather popular at one point. (Even if mainly due to being the place where you won't get ganked instantly like on UO.) So at least at one point they did have the mojo to challenge the kings of the hill.
Then they seem to have forgotten how.
AC2 was a flop, and its long list of mistakes could make a case study in how _not_ to go about designing a MMO. It seemed to actually go out of the way to be the opposite of what the players wanted in at least two dozen aspects, or at least miss the mark by a mile. Thoroughly clueless game design.
D&D Online was a thoroughly mediocre and uninspired game, which again managed to miss the mark of everything that most players want in a game. Not even a case of trying to innovate and happening to get it wrong, but just getting it wrong with
So basically you're saying that LOTRO's lack of grind is... well, the same as WoW before it.
Well, I'm not arguing with your assessment of either. It's just silly nevertheless to hear the LOTRO creators make such claims as that they're beating WoW by eliminating grinding (when WoW didn't require any either) or that titles for the number of creatures killed are what turns grind into non-grind.
It's blatantly silly. If anyone despised WoW's "collect 25 murloc heads... and only 1 murloc out of 20 has a head" quests and considers those "grind", then adding a title for number of murloc kills doesn't turn it into non-grind. If anything, it just adds insult to injury. The _last_ thing I'd want, when I'm bored out of my skull killing those murlocs... and yet another one was headless, is a message to pop up telling me that I got some title for a million murlocs killed. Not only it wouldn't make it magically "non-grind", it would be a reminder of all the points before when I grinded murlocs for some dumb quest.
Basically I'm used to hearing silly boasts from people making yet another "X killer" (where X can be WoW, iPod, etc) or "beating X at its own game", but this kind ranks not only as silly, but as... clueless. If the best they can come up with is "I know, let's add some titles", then they're truly and completely clueless. They didn't actually look hard at what they're copying, what works, what doesn't, what's not what the players want, and what they could design otherwise. They're taking wild guesses at something they don't even freaking understand, and hoping WoW would just have a heart attack so they can claim the kill.
Ah, yes, "The music industry is decimated". LOL.
Now I know that it meant something different back in the Roman times, from which we inherited the word, but nowadays "decimated" means something a lot more drastic. You know, massive destruction. As in, "the population of Europe was decimated by the plague in the late middle ages." (When some documented outbreaks wiped out as much as 80% of a city's population, and, as statistics flukes often work, some smaller villages saw 100% deaths and became ghost villages.)
Did the music industry suffer anything even remotely callable "decimation". On what data do you or Dvorak base such statements? All the sales data I've seen indicated a steady, but relatively unspectacular decline in number of CDs sold, not some devastating dive at the end of Napster. And it becomes even less so when you consider how many people bought at least one track from an album on, say, iTunes, as basically the equivalent of one CD sale lost. Those people poached the one track that interested them, and are not gonna buy the whole CD now.
And let's be serious for a minute. If you think teenagers will start protesting DMCA en masse instead of trying to be fashionable among their peers, I have a nice waterfront property in Sahara to sell. Are you interested? I mean, heh, seriously, 90% of the high school population lives, dresses, eats and buys music based 100% on peer tastes. Even if they go for the rebellious independent teenager image, it's the exact image that their peers want to see. If among their peers it's fashionable to be a Britney Spears fan and have all her albums, that's what they'll do.
"There is no data that says otherwise"... actually, there is plenty.
1. Even if Napster went down, other P2P networks exist and existed. And by all estimates I've seen, the usage is rising steadily. Plus both pre- and post-napster there were pirate websites, ftp sites, binaries newsgroups, etc. What was so special about Napster among them? Why would piracy on Napster improve sales, but piracy on other networks cause sales to drop? Because that's what you're asking me to believe there, if Napster's death was single-handedly responsible for decimating the music business.
2. Last I've heard, most of the decline pre- or post-Napster also suspiciously correlated for a long while with a decline in the number of albums published. You don't need a conspiracy to start wondering about cause and effect there. Let's say Moraelin Music Inc publishes 20 albums in one year, and rakes 20 million dollars in sales. Then next year it publishes 19 albums and the sales dip to 19 million dollars. Hmm... Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Pinky?
3. How about the correlation with iTunes and the other online music shops that I've mentioned earlier? Unlike pirating a song, which makes most people feel slightly guilty, this time it's an officially bought song. No reason to go buy the CD too. And it went a long way towards killing the album. While previously the music companies would sell you a whole CD, now you can poach individual tracks, for a tenth of the cost. Do you see how that would cause a loss of $$ in sales? And then there were sites like Allofmp3, which didn't even pay the music companies a cent, but allowed some people to put a "well, then copyright is their problem, not mine, I bought the song" blanket over their conscience anyway.
Or in other words, Dvorak is, as usual, talking out the ass. His job as a tech pundit is to sound all smart, and tell the readers what they want to hear. Or at least some outlandish prediction. It's a short-story writer job, not some real all-knowing oracle. And if you've read some of his other pieces (e.g., the now infamous whine about how the Windows idle process is eating up 99% of his CPU power), he's... a helluval less than all-knowing. In fact, he's an outright idiot.
So be a smart guy and don't base your understanding of the world on his clueless rants. I'm sure you can find better sources of information.
You don't read slashdot much, do you?
Just read enough slashdot and you'll run into enough people ranting and raving about how any form of IP is _fundamentally_ an abhomination, including not only patents and copyright, but also _trademarks_. Even if _some_ don't outright spell out "abolish copyright", they go at such great lengths about how it's fundamentally an oppressive evil, a major violation of your constitutional rights, _and_ a plot to plunder the economy of poorer countries... that, really, it's hard to see what other solution than abolishment would the author see there.
The MPAA and RIAA threads have been mentioned, so I'll add I've also run into them in topics about MS, BSA, piracy in China, etc. Really, just read enough of those and it's impossible to not run into the "abolish copyright" rants. Some even modded +5.
And then there are the clever guys who think they're all stealthy and subtle if they pack it as "fair use", "civil rights", etc. Add a bit of "information wants to be free", "copying != theft", "you can't stop the flow of information", etc, rhetoric. Most of them ammount to nothing more and nothing less than effectively abolishing copyright, if they had their way.
Get this: "copy right" is about who has the right to make copies. That was the original idea that the law was supposed to embody. The moment you've extended "fair use" to mean that anyone can make any number of copies, sell them in their shop, do anything to them, incorporate them in their own products without giving credit, set their own terms, etc, well, you effectively abolished any copyright protection. Effectively in that kind of world, even if you could still put "(C) Nefarity, 2007" on your work, it would have exactly zero use or meaning, so it's as good as abolished.
It's a bit, if you will, like having private property without having the right to lock your door, put any limits on who may enter your house, and can't stop them from leaving with your TV or selling tickets to watch the latest movie on your DVD player. I'm sure some could equally argue that distributing someone _else_'s TV is just a way of helping the neighbour, makes a better community, and indeed is as fundamental as the freedom of speech. (After all, it's exactly what "freedom 2" is in the Free Software Definition.) Anyway, the point I'm trying to make: at that point you effectively _don't_ have private property any more. If there are no legal limits you can actually enforce, then you just don't have it.
Same here. Copyright is all about private property of information. Whether that's good or bad, you decide, I'm not going into tha The moment you've removed all legal protections, and you can't tell people what they can do with your bits, and who can do it, you effectively don't have copyright any more.
It's actually not easy at all. Sex is easy. The whole emotional, cultural, etc, baggage that humans attach to it, isn't.
If you sent cats to space, yeah, it would be easy. They get in heat, they fuck, they're over it. Humans don't. Or not unless you manage to breed/educate a whole new breed of humans for which sex doesn't really meen anything deeper.
And it's not just the obvious emotional aspect as such, but also a whole class of status games, penis-size games, mind games, and power games exist for both genders, associated with sex or sometimes as a substitute for sex. Sex is used as currency, insult material, status symbol (e.g., look who I'm with), blackmail material, reason for feud or insecurity, etc.
E.g., and bear in mind that this is a _mild_ example, but I don't feel like turning it into a whole flame: there was this italian documentary about a town where everyone had to have a mistress, to prove that he's a macho man with a working set of genitals. And there was this guy who was sane enough to realize the whole peer pressure thing, and admitted that he was perfectly happy with his wife, loved her, didn't want to hurt her... but, you know, the other guys were starting to think he's maybe impotent if he doesn't have a mistress too. So he just had to get one, as proof and status symbol. That's just one of the many kinds of extra importance that gets attached to sex, and I was saying, one of the milder ones.
And then there are the break-ups. There have been very few reasons for hatred, revenge, or ever-lasting depression than that.
Now picture putting those people in a small tin can where they can't escape each other. It's the worst case "why you shouldn't date a coworker" scenario... squared. They can't escape each other even after work, and one can't just quit and move to another town. It's a ship in space that will take a year to reach its destination, and, really, there's no way to just get off it and move somewhere else.
So unless you breed a race of humans who'd regard sex as just a mechanical release, you're far better off _not_ having sex on that ship.
And before anyone quips, "I.e., men?", even for men it's not that easy and detached. A whole genre of "the bitch took my heart and dumped me" whines exists, and some even get set to music or turned into a novel or movie. Or the ever popular "the bitch took offense to my fucking the secretary and now wants alimony! The unfairness of it all!" whine. Or the nerds' favourite, the whine about how those heartless girls go for the jock instead of the nerd. Etc.
A small fire can still cause a stampede if it gets unnoticed or unreported until it's a big fire.
Methinks you're still underestimating it, or maybe I haven't explained it well enough:
A) Just having a number of players in Lineage 2 doesn't mean you'll have the same audience in Lineage 3. Ask Turbine about Asheron's Call 2, which flopped abysmally. Just being the sequel to AC1 didn't say much. Or ask Sony about Everquest 2. They went from EQ1 being the #1 MMO to EQ2 being a niche game. So what makes you think that Lineage III has already hit the mark, when it's not even released yet?
B) You don't seem to understand how those "emulated" servers work. We're not talking something that just looks vaguely similar, we're talking stuff that's:
- played with the official client, hence it looks exactly the same
- quite often has the exact same maps, quests, etc, since enough information usually exists in the client. E.g., don't think that when you play WoW it transfers the landscape from the server. Your client CD already has those files. You'd be surprised what else is on a client CD. For starters all the quest texts and rewards.
That's the way it worked ever since the first free servers were made for UO. The "emulated server" would be just an executable, maybe also some tools, and it would require an installed client or a client CD to get the rest of the game from. E.g., the whole Britannia map and all the creatures.
And it's pretty hard to sue them, since:
1. They're not distributing any copyrighted material. They don't distribute a copy of your map or meshes or textures, they tell people to go buy a boxed copy of the game for those. You can't easily forbid people from just making an exe that incidentally reads your files, or MS would stop OOo from working with Office files.
2. It's hard to even take the DMCA route (which I don't think Korea has anyway), since they're not gaining or providing any unauthorized access to your servers. Quite the contrary, they let your client connect to their server, if anyone wants to. It's also not circumventing any copy-protection mechanisms, since a MMO isn't copy-protected anyway, and they're not telling people to copy anything.
Now having a source theft is a different thing, but even there you'll first have to prove that they've actually used your files. It can take some time.
At any rate, we're talking about something which is an exact clone of the official game at launch. We're not talking about asking people to switch to a similar game, but about asking them to play on a free server from the start. Having something like that from the start, when people don't have social networks keeping them on the official servers, can be very damaging.
I din't know if it will actually happen to Lineage III, but it is a possibility.
So basically your whole confirmation there is that you, yourself, were _worried_ that you _might_ drive aggressively.
First of all, that doesn't say anything about actually driving aggressively, it just says you had a thought about it. I thought "heh, if this were City Of Heroes I'd jump out the window instead of taking the stairs" but it doesn't mean I'd actually do it. If anything, all that _really_ proves is that you've been influenced by the media/peer hype, not by the game itself. You were told that games might affect you and you proceeded to worry.
Even if you said "I noticed that I'm more aggressive", that's still flawed. That's self-fulfilling prophecy and confirmation bias most of the time. People notice more whatever supports their pre-conception, and conveniently skip or forget that which doesn't. E.g., if I wanted to believe, say, "I'm teh greatest fps player ever", I'd notice every time I won or shot someone, but promptly forget every time I got pwned badly. Even a thoroughly mediocre player can feel great that way, and is one reason why competitive games are popular. The same here: if you worry enough about driving badly, you'll notice and blow out of proportion stuff that happens daily to non-gamers too.
I.e., the only way to really know if you were driving more aggressively, is if people who don't know about your gaming started noticing that you drive aggressively. Otherwise, it could be all in your head.
It gets funnier when you're the actor too, because you can often just fulfill your own prophecy. If you think you must fail an exam, it's often an easy way out to actually fail it. If you think you have to have an accident, you might subconsciously go ahead and just cause it. Etc.
And finally, I don't know if you realize it, but in the end what you say there is: so you're actually a more careful driver, then. I don't know if it's the games or your natural temper, but what you're saying there is that you actually worried about driving too aggressively, and tried not to. Right?
That's head and shoulders over some non-gamers I know, for which driving is a penis size thing. They don't just drive to get from point A to point B, they drive to prove that they're Real Man. They drive with the aggressivity of someone who thinks that if, god forbid, they're doing less than 120 km/h in a 100 km/h zone, the next day the Manhood Police will show up at the door with some big scissors and revoke their right to pee standing. But I digress.
At any rate, from what I gather, (A) it made you try not to, and (B) even believing that such an influence existed, it went off after a short break, right? I mean, otherwise there would be no point in waiting a bit. That's a far cry from the premeditated murders that get blamed on gaming. It seems to me that even if violent games affected moods that way, after a round of quake, you might similarly (A) worry about being too aggressive and take a break while adrenaline wears off, and (B) by the time you went to school/work tomorrow the whole thing would have died down anyway. You don't end up shooting the school or office because of what mood you had yesterday.
Especially point A tells me that games would actually make you a better person, or made you a better driver, if games are really the cause there.
It's still extra complexity.
The simplest "emergency exit" sign can be always lit, and have a battery backup that kicks in if the power goes down. It's a trivial circuit.
Now enter such complex monitoring schemes. How _do_ you know you've covered all possible scenarios? What if power didn't go down, but one of the motion sensors is on the fritz and doesn't detect movement any more, for example? You can design complex challenge-response protocols and all sorts of smart self-diagnostics, but that's even more complexity and even more possibility for bugs. (Software completely without bugs is somewhat akin to Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.)
Basically the latter is taking a bet that you won't be the ones who discover a bug in an emergency. Is it really worth it? To me it seems akin to playing russian roulette for a few bucks.
Yes and no. Mostly I think you haven't thought about it much. There are a couple of problems I can see there right away:
1. Rampant cheating. Think WoW Glider on steroids. If you have the source code, you can write a client which looks to the server 100% like a player at the keyboard on the official client. Write a client which drives a whole group of player characters on a farming or ganking spree from a single machine. Which _will_ screw up the game, and drive people away. (Especially in a game where _all_ there is to do is farm and PvP.) That's money lost.
Or you could delay the game and invest in changing the whole protocol, so the old code doesn't even work with the server any more. Which again is money lost. Both extra development time, and time in which you're not collecting the monthly fees. A single month delay, if you had, say, 1 million players, is 10 to 15 million dollars lost in fees alone.
But even if you do, someone saw all your weak points. Yes, most games do rely on security through obscurity, because noone has the funds, computing power and bandwidth, to do everything on the server securely. There's invariably a lot of functionality in the client, and you basically keep your fingers crossed. Maybe you code some "tripwires" on the server to detect if someone did something awfully wrong, but (A) it's still keeping your fingers crossed that noone will do something that you haven't checked, and (B) more importantly, whoever saw the code now also knows exactly what to avoid.
Basically, it's pretty much _the_ cheating nightmare scenario.
2. Whoever has that code will have a trivial job of making some "emulated" servers and stealing your subscribers that way. It's one thing to have a shabby half-way there alternative server available after a year, it's entirely another thing to maybe have a 100% perfect alternative right at the start.
And yes, that _is_ money lost, and not just profits lost. Most MMOs have far more content than a single-player RPG. (Even Oblivion is a spit in the bucket compared to the sheer size of WoW.) For most, basically the boxed copy is subsidized, and they're betting you'll stay there for more than 2-3 months to break even and start making a profit. That already doesn't leave you with that much pure profit, since the average player stays about 6 months on a MMO. If half your player base buys the boxed copy and buggers off to play on someone else's servers, you'll feel it. If you also over-estimated a little what population you'll get (and hence, how much can you spend on development), it can turn a moderately survivable game into a flop right there and then.
Yes, we all can look at WoW and see one big money printing license. They actually underestimated how many players they'll get. Most MMOs aren't WoW, though. Flops are more common than successes. Even big names like EQ2 or TSO have managed to get only a fraction of the player base they counted on. They may not have seen the plug pulled outright, but then again, others did. It doesn't take much of a shove to topple a game which already missed the mark.
Exactly.
I mean, in most emergencies I can think of (flood, earthquake, tornado, whatever), you can pretty much bet on something being, you know, _damaged_. What if it's a sensor, or one of the hubs for this monitoring thing, or whatever? I can easily imagine someone getting lost, or trapped because they were too slow to evacuate, or end up with a stampede, just because the computer thought there was noone on that floor.
Heck, common sense says that something will be damaged even if nothing goes wrong. E.g., an escape sign will have a burned lightbulb. If the one at the other end of the corridor does light up, maybe I'll see that one.
Hmm... I don't think the faction-vs-faction thing is what decimated the SWG player base. Off the top of my head, other stuff ranks higher. Such as:
- turning the whole game into a whole other genre (let's face it, it's SF Planetside with a horrible interface now),
- making most popular skill combinations unavailable as a combination or unavailable at all any more (e.g., ask an animal handler if they can even play the same character any more),
- turning some races into a fuck-up where they kept the previous disadvantages but none of the advantages that balanced them (e.g., Wookies or Trandoshans kept the equipment restrictions, but none of the racial bonuses that made up for that)
- making what used to be a prestige class into a common class everyone can get, thereby nuking the whole achievement of everyone who worked and grinded to unlock it (mind you, the grind to jedi was a bad idea in the first place, and made a lot of people quit. But two wrongs don't make a right, and stripping them of their hard-earned achievement made even more people quit.)
- speaking of skills and combinations, the classes are so uni-dimensional it's not even funny. Whereas previously you could mix and match things like being a scout who also mods weapons on the side, or a jedi who can also play an instrument for fun, or other unique character concepts, now everyone is a member of a class of identical clones. And some became a fuck-up that can't even do the quests any more. (E.g., traders or entertainers.)
- nuking the economy _had_ and making everyone's crafting useless.
- the new quests are mass-produced crap, whose only "saving grace" is that they merchandise the main SW characters
- the devs handling everything heavy-handedly and outright lying to the players. I don't know... I don't say they owe me anything, but at least don't treat me badly and don't outright lie to my face. The whole dev attitude in SWG is, well, like going to a shop and being lied to, treated snottily and seeing the shopkeepers act like you're some bum that should be grateful for the great privilege of being _tollerated_ there. I wouldn't think the shop owners owe me anything either, but that's one shop I wouldn't go to ever again.
Basically, rest assured that the list of "sins" of the NGE is a mile long. Whatever flaws their PvP system has, pfft, it's lost in the decimals as annoyance factor goes.