Well, that's of course a good point and very insightful. What I meant is that it can get a lot worse. Even with shooting second, I wouldn't rate Han Solo as exactly demolished yet. There's a lot more demolishing to do:P
First of all, did you hear that he's playing Indiana Jones instead? It's in the same link. So it's not like he refused SW to go play some peaceful suburban father with 2.5 kids role.
Second, we don't know the details there. It could be simply that the Indiana Jones role paid better.
Third, after what George Lucas did to Episodes 1 to 3, can you really blame him? I mean, it's ok to bitch and moan about it as a fan, but he's the one who gets it on his CV and maybe conscience. Maybe he's good at knowing a dud when he sees one. Or maybe, especially given the choices of roles as a good guy, he doesn't want to star in Lucas's recent moral relativism (and revisionism) lectures.
SW started as a simple kids' story, a SF version of a mix of fantasy and swashbucklers and WW2 carrier battles. Brave knights with magic swords against clear super-villains. (You'd be hard pressed to paint blowing up a planet they already knew was not a rebellion planet, just to make an example, as a moral grey zone.) The rebels are good, the Empire is evil, and it tells you so right in the opening text. Even when the good guys tell a little lie (e.g., Ben saying that Luke's father is dead), it's with the best intentions, and even when the evil guys tell the truth, you know it's just scheming to some evil end. Follow your heart, do the right thing, don't let old farts tell you what to do (even if it's Yoda), don't fall for the excuses and promises of the dark side. And, oh, trust your own skills, not some targetting computer gizmo.
Not entirely applicable to RL, but it's a simple (or simplified) story, that's easy to digest and entertaining.
And it's not _that_ far off the mark either. While RL situations are a lot less black-and-white, it's not as impossible to have some principles as some people try to tell you. Just because neither side is pure black or white, it doesn't mean there's no difference. If one side is only 75% right and the other 75% wrong, it still doesn't mean that they're perfectly equivalent and it doesn't matter which you choose. Moral relativism is a subject very dear to both philosophers (since that's their job) and sociopaths (who just love muddying the waters and justifying any evil they do), but RL isn't _that_ relative. Just because some details varied across time and space, doesn't mean that the entire concepts of good and evil are purely arbitrary and irrelevant. But I digress.
So a long time after Episode 6, Lucas seems to have decided to undo that whole simplicity. Most of what Episodes 1 to 3 do isn't as much about showing you the history of it, as about trying to undo the good-vs-evil theme of the original trilogy. It's a lecture in how, see, the good guys weren't really good, they were just some self-serving self-indulgent caste, and, see, the evil guys weren't evil as such, they were really just another point of view and at most a bit mis-guided. And Vader (you know, the same guy who supervised blowing up a planet full of innocents) didn't as much fall to the dark side by some act of selfish evil, but was just yet another guy who thought he's doing the right thing, if in a bit of a mis-guided way. Etc.
It's been about rewriting the SW universe in more profound ways than "Han shot first." The whole "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack" got kicked into the garbage bin, for example, and that was a far more central idea than Han shooting first.
It's not just the bad acting and bad scripting and bad directing and Jar Jar that make the prequels hard to swallow, it's also that it's a moral ambiguity lesson with some special effects and badly acted/scripted/directed at that. Once the whole monomyth structure and clear cut sides fly out the window, it becomes a lot harder to empathise with the heroes or follow why did they have to do this and that. Or to what (justifiable) end.
Contrast Episode 4 where it followed a logical and archetypal structure to destroy the evil Death Star, to Episode 1 where the grand achievement is finding Anakin
What they probably mean is "no applications unless you pay through the nose to Cingular or Apple for them." And they probably painted themselves in that corner with the price.
Let's face it, the fact that cell phones so far did less is _not_ because Nokia and others are stupid. Psion alone has quite a lot of experience in making stuff that goes from phones to good PDAs (including some decent office tools, for a PDA) to a sort of a micro-laptop. They figured out by now what the users want, and believe me, the thought of using a touch-screen _did_ occur to them before too. (The Psion 5 did a great job of using both touch screen and keyboard, for example.) Anyone who thinks it took Jobs to show everyone how to scroll a map on a touch screen, needs a bit of a reality check.
The reason why cell phones were limited devices has to do with cost, power consumption and "how much do we think the market would pay for it" issues. Most of the market wants to get their phone almost for free, and in fact often get some other stuff with it too. Then the contract recoups most of that, but then it means the phone itself can't cost thousands, because even with the contract and fleecing them for ringtones and SMS, there's only so much money you'll have to pay for phones _and_ the telco infrastructure _and_ other operating costs _and_ hopefully make a small profit, or at least not make a big loss.
So the more money you want a telco to pay to subsidize your phone, the more hope you must give them that they'll actually get that money back one way or another. E.g., you pack an IRC client on it to give them some hope that some idiot kid will rake up a huge phone bill while spending hours on IRC with a crap number pad as a keyboard. Or you give them an exclusivity contract, in which they practically pay you advertising money for a reason for people to switch to their network. That's worth more money, but even that has a limited upper limit. Or you try to lock it down and give them a "see, but they'll have to buy this and that only from you" hope. Which is obviously what Apple is doing here.
So at the end of the day, that's about how much a traditional phone can cost. That's why you can only pack so much CPU, RAM and everything in it.
Why the iPhone does more is probably because it costs an arm and a leg to produce. Being launched with an exclusive contract and still be left with a huge price tag anyway already hinted at that, but it's details like these that hint at exactly how huge the price must be. Cingular probably ends up paying a heck of a lot to subsidize Apple's gizmo, and they needed a heck of a reason to do that. Enter the "what if we completely locked it down, so people have to buy _everything_ from you?" factor.
The script is one thing and, surprisingly enough, someone's ability to act is quite another unrelated thing. It's not like he has to improvise the bad-boy lines, LARP-style. That's what he gets a script for. He just has to deliver them convincingly. And since he's done it before, repeatedly, I can't see any reason why he'd suddenly lose the ability to play a kind of role.
Good actors tend to be quite versatile. (Heck, Ronald Reagan even played the president of the USA for years convincingly;) Typecasting someone into a role or another often has more to do with looks, accent, previous roles, and generally what you think the public would associate them with, rather than some inability to say another set of lines convincingly. E.g., you probably wouldn't cast Sean Connery in the role of a rebellious punk teenager, but that's more because noone would take that seriously at his age. I don't doubt that he could say that set of lines very well anyway.
In Ford's case, I don't see that being a problem. The public already associates him with Han Solo or with Indiana Jones.
E.g., I'm looking on The Register and they have a title like "Acer Preloads Vulns On Computers." And since The Register is light on the details and misses the poing (they parrot the "turns on 'safe for scripting'", but miss the _real_ problem there), I had over to F-Secure's site to see what this is about then.
The short and skinny is: Acer helpfully preloads your laptop with a handy little ActiveX control that downloads updates from their website. The problem: it will just as cheerfully download and install anything else. If the user visits some malicious web site, it just needs the right HTML code there to install anything it wants to on your computer. A rootkit, a spam bot, a keylogger, whatever. Take your pick. It can download those for you, just because the website told it to.
The icing on the cake (and the bit The Register picked) is that Acer's preloaded ActiveX control is marked as "safe for scripting", so you won't even be asked when it gets invoked. Wouldn't want the users to have to click "yes" when downloading Acer's driver updates, after all. But then you also don't have to click "yes" when it downloads a keylogger onto your machine.
What does Jack Average see at the end of the day? "Crap Windows! Fucking MS software! It runs like crap and uses my DLS connection to full."
Note that we didn't even have to assume a clueless Jack Average for that to happen. Let's even assume he's pretty savvy for a non-CS guy. He doesn't enter his email on all those "enter your email for free porn" sites, he checks the URL on those "verify your PayPal account" emails, and generally does most of what his nerdy son told him to. (Well, except switch to Linux, maybe.) And he's smart enough to click "no" when some web site offers to install some IHakU codec on his machine. Too bad Acer's software isn't that smart. It just takes one site that knows about that ActiveX control to install whatever it wishes on Jack's computer.
So, yeah, whatever your opinion of MS may be, some of these OEMs and their crapware are actually far worse.
Well, the APIs that are the latest and greatest and best to have on a resume are one thing, but the old ones tend to stay there. OLE and COM certainly still work, and in fact a lot of the newer stuff is just built using those. You can even pretty much compile ANSI C that would work command-line in Unix, and chances are you won't have to change horribly much to have it working in Windows. (There are some exceptions, for example sockets, that needlessly use different functions, but otherwise the standard functions tend to be still there. If you don't want to use the latest Windows-centric function to read a file, fopen still works.)
The size of the compilers... well, I feel your pain if you have to download that through dialup. Still, technically it's not like they're non-existent. We can, of course, still bitch about how big software got nowadays, and chances are we'd even be in aggreement. But you can't really say that MS tried to kill the aspiring programmer by not offering compilers.
About it working in Linux vs Cygwin, well, ya know, the funny thing is that both suffer from exactly the same module problem. Getting a distro on a CD just gives you everything neatly packaged and grouped together. But otherwise if you tried to individually upgrade bits and pieces of a Linux system by hand, you'd run into the exact same problem. To get program X in version 2.80.15, you also need library Y in version 13.10.14, which needs library Z in version 1.3.9, which breaks something else when you install it. But that's another discussion for another time.
At any rate, it's IMHO a bit unfair to blame MS for whatever problems you had with Cygwin. Seeing that it's not a MS product, you know:)
1. Take the ball and run. They keep shifting the operating system behaviors and the programming interface. Everyone's playing catch-up, with no time to stabilize anything worth while.
Compared to some of the alternatives, the interface remained _remarkably_ stable. In fact, one of the criticized things even on/., in the name of "look how bloated it is", is the mammoth of code that's there for backwards compatibility. And, frankly, for an AI where you don't need DirectX or EAX or other fancy gamer stuff, the same program that compiled and ran ok in Win 3.0 should still compile and run ok in XP.
And even if you took a Unix command-line program (seeing that in the next point you mourn CLI programming), you can compile it in Cygwin, or it's trivial to adapt it to be a Windows program. And you can just make it a Windows command line program anyway, but even adding a simple Window for the output and/or a couple of dialogs for the input is a newbie-level exercise.
And I'm saying that as a programmer, so you can take that as first hand experience.
2. Poison the well. They let text-based programming die. QBasic won't support long file names. Microsoft-sanctioned languages are generally either expensive, or they tend to induce brain damage. They've done their level best to kill off the amateur programmer.
Heh... QBasic isn't the alpha and omega, you know.
MS still offers the command line versions of their compilers for free. For a while they disabled optimizations in the free version, but nowadays they dropped even that. So if CLI programming is your cup of tea, there you go, they give you all you'll ever need to program in C/C++ or a few other languages.
Or if MS's C gives you brain damage, you can still get Java for free (you even have a choice of Sun or IBM for free JDKs), or you can get Cygwin and run pretty much the same compilers as in Linux, or you have several other choices. I'm pretty sure you can even get a free version of Basic, or at least one game development kit (crappy, but, hey, it's free and can be used to teach a kid programming).
And several games come with either some own script interpreter (e.g., Morrowind) or with Python (e.g., The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia). So whoever wants to learn some elementary programming, can start by scripting a few quests for those. Heck, at least for The Fall, I know from first hand experience that you can even rewrite the game and combat system with nothing more than Notepad.
So while amateur programming does seem to have gone downhill, it's not really the lack of compilers that's too blame. Maybe it's the lack of awareness that those tools exist, or maybe it's the perceived gargantuan size of the challenge. (I know most games made me think "I can code this better" back on the ZX Spectrum, while nowadays I wouldn't even dream of writing my own Doom 3 from scratch, on my own.) No idea exactly what. But lack of compilers it ain't.
The fact that all 3 movies seriously overestimated the rate of progress in technology can be excused by the fact that no one could have anticipated Microsoft slapping a parking brake on the industry for the past ~30 years.
I'd blame MS for many things, but not _that_. The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
And you don't need MS's blessing to research that. Exactly why can't you write your super-AI on Linux or Aix or Solaris anyway? It doesn't even have to be an Intel or AMD CPU. There have been clusters made of everything including PS2 consoles, custom designed FPGA chips, transputers, super-computers with thousands of CPUs, or experimental architectures involving 3D or 4D interconnect topologies.
The fact that all 3 movies seriously over-estimated it, has nothing to do with MS, and more with the fact that they wanted to play on the ignorant public's enthusiasm and millenialism. Something that happens in the year 3025 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 3000 or 40,000, because people have this fascination with 1000 year intervals. Something _has_ to happen there, good or bad. And if it's the 60's or 70's or even 80's, something that will happen in the year 3000 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 2000, because the latter is close enough to worry about.
It's, if you will, the same thing that made the Y2K scare and scam possible. While there was a real potential problem there too, the blowing out of proportion and selling so much pure snake oil (I've seen network cables, speakers, etc, sold as "Y2K compliant", ffs) was also facilitated by millenialism. It's the year 2000, something bad _has_ to happen. And this time the scamsters also had the technology explanation that went right over Joe Average's head, but was sounding just believable enough to play on that millenialism.
The signs, e.g., Moore's Law, were there all the time that nope, technology can't advance fast enough to have enough transistors to compete with a brain by 2000 or 2001. It has nothing to do with MS. Technology hasn't really evolved faster before MS's monopoly either. (Not to mention how the heck _would_ MS slap a brake on the industry 30 years ago, when the PC is only 25 years old, and Wintel becoming _the_ standard came _much_ later.)
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way. While the latter gang was piling up evidence that, for example, the brain completely edits out the non-interesting parts of a picture, even if it's as ludicrious as a pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, half the CS gang was busy postulating such BS as that just squeezing the whole picture as a stream of bits through an arithmetic compression would be necessary for AI. And generally all sorts of "look what maths I can do on a stream of bits" stuff that misses the whole point of actually extracting, indexing and processing the _meaning_ in it.
What also wasn't maybe obvious in all that enthusiasm, was that _all_ corporations (not just MS) showed a total lack of interest in funding AI research. Corporations live and die by quarterly reports, and an AI that takes 20 years to learn, and maybe then you discover that it learned wrong or you coded it wrong altogether, would be completely uninteresting in that context. And before we blame it all on greedy corporations, again, the CS gang in ivory towers was too busy with abstract unmarkettable research that just didn't appeal to potential sponsors.
What also wasn't maybe obvious was that Moore's Law wouldn't actually be translated into code actually running exponentially faster each year. Humans
Hell I don't know why Apple hasn't done a "Buy a Mac and get an Ipod Free" deal as of yet. It would definitely get a mac in the door faster.
Because Apple's business model for iPods is more along the lines of "get some DRM'ed songs for nearly free (as Apple's bottom line is concerned), and pay us big bucks for an iPod to play them."
Apple doesn't actually make much money with iTunes, and it's actually managed to push the record labels into making even less money in the process. (Which is an accomplishment, no doubt, when dealing with some of the biggest sharks in history.) Previously you'd buy a whole CD or a single for pretty much half the price of the whole CD. Now you buy the 1 or 2 songs that interest you from iTunes, for $1 or $2. (And unlike radio, you don't thereafter go and buy the CD too.) The record label gets even less of that, and Apple gets barely enough to cover their expenses.
Where Apple makes its money in that deal is by selling iPods to play those songs. If you look at their sales numbers, for every 10-20 songs sold on iTunes, they sell an iPod. That't the money maker in that deal.
Seriously, the whole thing is a textbook example of how to build a monopoly of interlocking parts. You can't compete with the iPod on fair ground because the first thing the average lemming will see in your player is: "but it doesn't work with iTunes!!!" You can't really compete with iTunes because it's predatory pricing at its finest, and because "but your DRM doesn't work on my iPod!!!".
The only wrench in what could be a good monopoly mechanism is the availability of MP3s, but otherwise the model is there.
So, as a side-note, if you detested it in MS, well, glad to know you admire Apple for doing the exact same thing. Windows and Office, Windows server and clients, etc, is the exact same model of interlocking parts to raise the entry barriers. You can't compete with one part without competing with all of them. That's how you kill a free market.
And if you wondered why, for example, Sony shafts themselves so often by trying to push their own shitty codecs or media (minidisk or UMD) on everything, even game consoles, now you know why: because if they actually pulled that heist just once, they'd be in just that kind of situation, where they control both halves of an interlocking monopoly mechanism. But I digress.
At any rate, now you know why Apple can't just give free iPods. You somewhat guessed right that it would indeed be even more profitable to bring in the Macs as third piece of that monopoly recipe. But that would require it to be a part that raises the entry barriers, as in, for example, making the iPod and iTunes only work with Macs. But they're not in a position to pull that kind of a heist at the moment. If it were back in time, at the apex of Mac popularity, then they could. But not right now.
How would someone know if a price is wrong, anyway? I don't know about you, but I don't go make a whole study of an industry to determine if a low price is indeed feasible, economically sustainable, etc. Plus, there are promotional prices, occasionally predatory pricing, someone dumping a product to clear their stock, etc. Even for telcos, how would I know? Maybe they just installed a fatter cable and they can afford to give the bandwidth away, for all I know. If someone displays a price, I'm going to assume that that's actually the price they want to sell the damn thing or service for.
As for stupid people working for the sales departments, I'd say then it's the company's problem, isn't it? If you hire some guy to sell, say, used cars, and he sells a car for $4000 instead of $40,000, then you'd at least fire him, no? Maybe even start making sure you start hiring smarter people, or at least training them, no?
Year after year of quotting the wrong prices and TOS and then switching on the customers is hardly excusable any more. Because that's what the telcos everywhere seem to have already made a tradition of. I'm sorry, but after all this time I'm no longer buying the crap "teh oops, it was out sales rep that forgot to tell you about the hidden charges / right price / kick in the nuts that's not even in the fine print / etc" excuse.
Honestly, while I won't condone being dishonest as a customer either, I see it as equally dishonest to lure the customer with a low price, then demand that he pays a huge extra. Or at the very least baiting someone with one price and switching to another _looks_ so much like a genuine dishonest tactic (on the part of the provider or of the sales rep or whatever) that you just have to wonder if it's real stupidity. Or, you know, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then maybe it isn't fish. The choice of a provider over another was based on that low price. If you knew the real price from the start, maybe you'd have picked another provider, or maybe used the service differently, or whatever. There's a non-zero probability there, and the incentive too, that it wasn't an error there, but a genuine scam.
Are you implying that you need a forty million dollar budget to get balance, gameplay and quests right?
Actually, I'm implying... well, no, saying it loud and clear, that it's about content, balance and gameplay. (See the very first bulleted point: sheer quantity of content.) Content includes quests, yes, but it's also the landscape, artwork, animations, etc.
The biggest cost in making a blockbuster game content and most of that cost is artwork. Until procedural animation becomes standard practice, this will remain so.
No arguments so far. At any rate, it's not the netcode, that's really the main idea I was trying to give. So someone trying to present their netcode as going to soo make MMOs cheaper and easier to make (which is in the end what this whole thread is about) is, well, at best exagerating.
Compare Eve Online with WoW. The latter is a blockbuster and is an example of a bland, take no risks route to development. The former was written in python on a shoestring budget and uses starships as avatars; not least to control costs. Many, many people will argue that Eve is a better game.
We're already drifting off topic, but ok. "Some" will even argue that extremely obese women are hot, or that eating shit is kinky (yes, literally), or that being tied up and whipped is some quality time, or whatever. In matters of taste, you'll always find a minority who'll have seriously different tastes.
And some people that that somehow being in such a minority makes them right and elite. That is kinda ridiculous, because it's based on the ridiculous assumption that there is such thing as "right" or "elite" in a matter of taste. There isn't. But I digress already.
Basically: to some people WoW is better, to some people Eve is better. And in a matter of taste neither is "right".
But if you want to compare it anyway, Blizzard managed to make a game which appeals to several million players, while Eve peaked AFAIK around 125,000. So on the whole Blizzard did manage to appeal to more people. As achievements go, Blizzard did better. (Again, note that I'm discussing achievemnt, not taste.)
And if you look deeper than the surface, there is a reason for why Blizzard is doing so well. It may not be the most revolutionary or radical design (pretty much no Blizzard game ever was), but it is a high quality game in an age where almost everyone else released half-finished and unbalanced crap. It may not have invented much, as such, but it took all those element, polished each almost perfectly, balanced them very well, and fitted them neatly in what is a neat whole as opposed to a heap of mis-matching parts. It's, if you will, a quality of life issue: between a game that just works right, and a revolutionary piece of crap, more people seem to choose the former. That, in a nutshell, has been Blizzard's secret sauce all along.
And that is going to set a new quality standard if you want to really compete with them. It used to be that just releasing any unfinished crap was ok for a MMO. It no longer is. You're going to dump a _lot_ more money into quests, balance, scripting, etc, if you want to be more than a narrow niche product for the few with weird tastes. Hence, a lot more than having some netcode just became actually important.
An MMO engine is also not just a little bit of netcode. The current trend is buying engines for Mmos, just like in FPSes. Bioware licensed the Hero Engine for its MMO in development. Hero costs a million bucks. Or you can build your MMO on BigWorld for a similar cost. The engine's role is not dissimilar to Apache's role in web services. Nobody goes about writing their own server, they create services and apps on top of that.
Nobody does, because Apache actually works right. We know all those big sites that just work well in Apache and which don't have any major problems with it. I.e., not just becaus
Let me say that whoever thinks that the network engine is the most expensive part of a MMO is either a snake oil vendor, or genuinely deluded. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's trivial, but it pales in comparison with other money sinks and bug oportunities. E.g.,
- The sheer quantity of content there. Compare the surface of WoW, including instances, to, say, NWN2. And NWN2 was a long one. A SP game is meant to be played for 10 hours, maybe even 50 hours in some cases (e.g., NWN2), while a MMO is meant to be played for 6 months on the average. (That's about how long it takes for an average player to get bored anyway and quit. Mind you, like with all averages, some quit after a week, some stay for 6 years.) So you actually have to have content for all that time. Even if it gets more time sinks at the end, you have to, you know, still keep people there and excited by the time they get to the endgame grind, or they won't be goaded into it.
And while sheer terrain surface can be algorithmically generated, the next parts can't:
- Quests and scripting. A world which is just populated with hordes of respawning monsters to kill repeatedly, just doesn't cut it any more. You may find your 10,000 player niche that way, but you'll never be the next WoW. The aspect that the world is essentially a static one is a turn-off. It takes much work and scripting to get the player to suspend disbelief and believe "yay, I saved the elven girl" just as he watches the next group member standing in line to deliver the same cure again.
Ok, so it's not that bad, but you want the quests to be _interesting_, and _believable_, and make the players feel like they've discovered a bit of the story or background or whatever. Copy and paste, mass-produced quests... well, ask Sony how well that worked for EQ2.
- Balance. It's not just for Blizzard any more, folks. In a SP game it's less problem if everyone plays the Godmode class, though even there it _will_ piss off everyone who picked the Pussy class and can't even get to an enemy before being nuked. But in MP a game where everyone plays the same class is boring. Doubly so if it has PvP.
Worse yet, in SP you can give the player a known mix of party NPCs, so you can know what abilities combine with what other NPCs ability. In MP you can have (and _should_ have, because otherwise again it's uninteresting) all sorts of possibilities to combine the abilities of any two classes. Is there some uber combination you've never foreseen?
Are there some items which are horribly unbalanced? E.g., if, say, you give players an ice sword which applies a slow effect, what happens when 5 players with ice swords hack at the same NPC? Does it stack, effectively being able to freeze someone solid for as long as you wish? Does it stack with other slowing abilities, like a mage's Slow spell? If not, do your items make a class completely obsolete as the same spells and effects are available from items? Does it stack with, say, applying an ice oil to that sword? What is the trade-off if I use that sword, compared to another?
Basically, balance is more work than most companies realize or are willing to put in their game. But it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
- Support. If your whole game's premise and repeated business incentive is that it's a persistent world, and people should get attached to their possessions and character, then you'll have to deal with whatever unfair stuff happens to their character or their equipment. Don't underestimate the costs of that, because few things piss a player off at your game than falling in some hole and the understaffed support not answering for a week. And it's not only because of getting attached to that, but while in SP you'd just curse and reload a previous save, in a MMO you don't even have reload.
- General code quality. E.g., did you make sure that the game glitches don't double your support requests? E.g., if in a SP game it's possible to duplicatee items or money, well, (A) it doesn't affect anyone e
now it's been a little while but back when i worked for ubisoft, pre alpha deffinitly did not mean you could play it from beginning to end.
Heh. I'm with you. Now I don't know what it's called internally at the various publishers, "EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" already sounds better than what others call a release. In fact, for some it's where you get after 3 patches... if you're lucky.
Take, say, Jowood for example. If "play from beginning to end" is a condition for "pre-alpha", then all their games aren't even pre-alpha as released. Unless you play them in half hour increments, because that's about how long it takes them to CTD. (OK, ok, so it's not a hard number. If you have 2GB RAM you can actually play some for 2-3 hours until the memory leak kills them. 'Course, the last half of that time they're swapping, so they "run" like a snail on sandpaper.)
Or looking at some of the patch logs, e.g., "family tree dissappeared when the first generation of player chars died out" or "in singleplayer mode the game could freeze between 1432 and 1440" in The Guild 2, as well as the other 30+ _major_ bugs listed in there... I honestly can't imagine that someone at Jowood actually played (or could play) that game from beginning to end. I mean, fuck, 1432 is literally after 8 game turns, and the death of the first generation of characters could be even earlier than that. And let me also say that if that doesn't kill your game by then, the pathfinding has already flown off the hook by that time too. It can't deal well with city growth. Or a few other issues will kill it. Count 'em and weep: 8 turns tops before the game flies off the hook.
Or take such massive fuck-ups as, say, AO at launch. Read the review on Something Awful, if you're curious, and I can vouch that all the issues described there were 100% accurate. Those swirling doors and enemies attacking through walls still bring back bad memories. In fact, SA goes pretty easy on them. There were a ton of other issues that they don't even mention there. You could run on flat ground on the street and then the game would glitch and you'd find yourself falling from stratosphere for no obvious reason. Characters would occasionally fall into the floor and start swimming in the floor. Mission instances (the non-city ones a little later) were often generated in such ways where you couldn't even get through one without falling in some hole in the ground and having no way out. Enemies' melee attacks had the same range as a sniper rifle. "Stealth" missions required you to kill everyone in the building to get the badge. Balance was a _sick_ joke: not only whole classes were useless, but a whole _faction_ in the game didn't even have shops above newbie level. Etc.
Or the German version of Victoria. Oeer. Now that was a new low. It threw a script syntax error when you tried to start the campaign. Not something blamable on the gamer's computer, or drivers, or whatever. Literally, one of the main scripts had a typo. That game couldn't run as released on _any_ computer. Forget playing from beginning to end. You couldn't even _start_ the game. It's that sad, folks. We all occasionally joke about games being shipped when they can display the main menu, but that game was the literal case of it. I can't imagine it being tested more than that, because as shipped it _couldn't_ get past the main menu.
Etc.
So, heh... "can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" is pre-alpha? Heh. Oh what I wouldn't give to only endure "rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" in most games released nowadays.
There was an article linked to from The Register (but I'm too lazy to search for it right now= where they figured out that tens of tons of earth dust from some hole in Sahara are carried by wind currents all the way over to the Amazon. They said that without that, the rain forest would be a lot less impressive.
Kinda makes one wonder. Take some of the massive solar energy input out (and/or add enough wind turbines around too, while we're at it) and those currents may no longer carry any dust over, or carry it just a few miles into the Atlantic. Well, that one is obvious, but it makes me wonder what else. The Gulf Stream is also powered by the sun, for example, and that's what makes the climate of, say, the Netherlands be not quite the same as that of Siberia.
Please tell me where can you find a Windows XP DVD that includes all of these on the base install and for the same price, because the OS on its own doesn't have much use for me.
Heh. Exactly in which way is "for the same price" relevant in a discussion about supposed Windows bloat? No, seriously. Please do enlighten me, because I find it such a fascinating concept. Do DLLs automagically double in size if you raise the price? Or?
But ok, if you need an extra strawman there to make the mandatory anti-MS point, by all means, let us discuss the extra price of all those: exactly 0$ total. OOo costs just as much for Windows as for Linux. Ditto for Apache. Ditto for GIMP. P2P programs also tend to be available for free. IRC client? You can find lots of free, if a bit limited ones, and occasionally you even find one bundled with what you'd expect least. E.g., Unreal Tournament had a built-in IRC client. Development tools? You can download MS's compilers for free. Or GCC if that's what floats your boat. Or download Eclipse and Java for free too. Etc.
So while I might tolerate a smart straw-man, this one seems to me like it's not even particularly useful: again, we're talking exactly 0$ difference between Windows with those and Windows without those.
Oh, but wait, you probably meant the usual "but MS Office and MSVC.NET and Photoshop cost sooo much more" thrust. Right? Well, see, that would be relevant at all if you actually had to buy those. But since OOo and Gimp and the gang run just as well under Windows, you don't.
What MS Office and the rest are is an extra _option_, in case you think you need/want it. If you think MS Office or Photoshop have some feature you need, you can buy them. If not, not. (And believe me, just about every normal person I've shown the Gimp to, quickly decided they'd rather pay for Paintshop or Photoshop.) Options are good. _Lacking_ an option in Linux isn't actually an advantage over Windows. Sometimes it may be no great loss, sure, but an advantage it ain't.
Or for that matter, how's "includes all of these on the base install" relevant to a discussion about size? Do the installed packages take less space if you just bundle the installer on the same CD as the OS? Will my OOo install under, say, Linux take more space if I download it from Sun than if it's included on the SuSE DVD? Or? Enlighten me please.
But we've lost enough time on that silliness, so let's get back to size and the OLPC. Since that was the whole topic.
May I point out that the average Linux distro you mention comes with one or more of each of these: word processor, presentation manager, spreadsheet, graphics manipulation software, HTTP and FTP server, development tools, CD&DVD burning software, IRC client, P2P
May I point out that you don't have room for all those on an OLPC either? That's the whole point.
In fact, you don't even have space for a reasonable base system that can from there on run any Linux program I might download. The dependencies of Linux programs are spread between so many libraries and frameworks, that, seriously, if you want Joe Sixpack Jr with an OLPC to be able to just run any program like in Windows, he'll actually need all those libraries or space for them. At the very least, he'll need both KDE and Gnome, plus of course the system and X libraries, plus a whole bunch of others.
Have you looked in your KDE directory lately? The libraries alone are well over 200 megabytes. Gnome? Not exactly small either. Just between the _libraries_ of those two alone, you're using more space than a minimal Windows install. And that doesn't even give you a usable desktop yet. It's just the stupid libraries to run programs based on those. Talk about bloat. By the time you crammed everything else onto an OLPC, you don't actually _have_ those extra programs, or space for them.
So the whole "muahahaha, Windows need to trim out the fat to fit on an OLPC" is moot
Oh, what a glorious day it shall be when MS has to admit their OS it too bloated and slow to compete with Linux.
You might be a tad disappointed then.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of versions of Windows, including Windows Embedded and Windows CE, which run in a lot less RAM and reside on a lot less Flash. And even from the "normal" XP, there are a _lot_ of things which can be removed without the end user noticing much.
Sure, at that point you can still do the retarded thing and go "ha ha, so the full install didn't fit and they had to strip it down", but may I point out that the average Linux distro is even bigger than the full XP? SuSE Linux for example (to use an example from everyone's favourite, Novell) comes on a DVD or more than half a dozen CDs. Compressed. So that wouldn't fit there either.
As for slow, I don't know where you get your data from, but comparing my gaming XP box to my SuSE Linux 10.0 box, XP actually boots faster, and the GUI is quite a bit more responsive than X with either KDE or Gnome too.
I think MicroSoft's best bet at success would be a heavily stripped down version of Windows CE.
It might come as a surprise, but some of the devices running Windows CE actually have less RAM and ROM/Flash than an OLPC. So why would MS need to strip it down?
So please, let's cut it down on the arrogant-fanboy-disconnected-from-reality act. MS does have a lot of faults, but being stupid isn't one of them. They _do_ employ some of the best programmers, and can (and do) throw ridiculous amounts of money at a problem, if they really want to. And both Windows and compilers are something they have two decades of experience with.
They already know how to compile something for size instead of unrolling and inlining everything for performance. It's not like they have yet to discover "wow, there's this 'size' option in the compile options of MSVC."
And they already have the experience with porting and stripping Windows to a variety of platforms. They actually used to have NT versions for pretty much everything including RISC and a few other architectures. The XBox 360 itself isn't an Intel machine either. And there even was a version of CE that ran on the Dreamcast.
The only question is whether they want to, exactly what they want to do there, and how much effort do they want to put into a computer whose price would more than double if they actually sold a Windows OEM license with it.
Then again, they already know how to play the fake-charity card by giving away a 50 cent CD and counting it as the price of a full Windows license generously donated. (In addition to some real charity too, it must be said.) So they could just give away a locked down version of Windows to some kids who otherwise couldn't afford a Windows computer anyway, thus ensuring that a whole generation in those countries grows on Windows and Windows Media Player formats. It's good marketting. _And_ write it off a some hundreds of millions of dollars in Windows licenses generously donated to the poor countries.
On the whole, I wouldn't be surprised if the effort right now isn't getting Windows installed, but figuring out how best to lock it down and how much and what bait they can build into it.
RTFA already, lemming. Yes, your idea is nice, simple and fair, but it's also _not_ what these "let's tax it" people are proposing. It discusses some aspects that have nothing to do with selling the items on e-bay, or whatever assumption you're under. Sorry if I'm not nice, but when you start accusing people of being crazy, ffs, at least have the basic decency to understand what they're talking about.
TFA is based on the dangerous assumption that those _are_ real assets with a real money value, which has a helluva lot more worrying implications than just "well, you owe taxes when you sell it." E.g., they include such stuff as:
1. Inheritance tax. It even gives an example of someone whose "virtual estate" is supposedly worth 1 million, so if she dies, the heir could have to pay a shitload of inheritance money for something he probably can't even actually sell for 1 million.
Imagine, basically, that your dad or brother or whatever owns some rare +5 Boots Of Arse-Kicking in some Everquest or UO account that he doesn't even play any more. But in the meantime it stopped dropping 5 years ago, it became an ultra-rare item in the process, and the other known such pair of boots sold for 20,000$ on Ebay to some rich nutcase. (Don't laugh, I've been briefly on some shitty web-based game where someone made it a point of pride that he'd paid $20,000 for in-game advantages.) So in the eyes of the law, your dad's is worth about that much too. Let's say he had a bunch of platinum coins too, and those are viewed as having a value in RL dollars too. And a big castle in a desirable spot, if it's UO, just for that "virtual estate" aspect.
So he has a heart attack and you "inherit" it, presumably not even knowing or caring much about the game to even know the value. Congrats, now you owe the IRS some inheritance tax on all that virtual fortune you've inherited. What, you thought you wouldn't pay inheritance on a (virtual) castle, just because you didn't immediately sell it on eBay?
2. "Sale" in their explicit view also includes barter. This is an actual paragraph from TFA:
As an example, he explained that if two people were to exchange copies of books, one of which is worth $30 and the other worth $24, the person ending up with the more expensive volume would have acquired $6 of taxable income.
So let's say I give you my +4 Sword Of Ganking in exchange for those +5 Boots Of Arse-Kicking. Maybe we're just two guild-mates, and my spec is in axes so I don't need the sword, and maybe you don't have the armour proficiency for those boots. Such exchanges happen every day, and chances are neither of us would think of it as the same as selling that loot on e-bay. (At least you sure don't seem to.) Now let's say that, unknown to either of us, that sword is worth $200 on ebay, while your boots are worth only $100.
What they're saying there is that in that transaction you've made a taxable $100 profit. Do that often enough, and it can add up to be real money. Either put it on your IRS form, or you're guilty of cheating on your taxes.
Or maybe you've ever been paid in-game for some service? Like, say, "we'll let you have all cloth drops if you're a holy priest and join our group?" (Ok, so don't expect that in an endgame instance, but it occasionally happens at lower levels.) Well, congrats, all those items have a dollar value. You've essentially been paid a RL value for a service. Would you have thought that that should count towards your income tax?
Or maybe you just use the in-game Auction House instead of such barters? Same thing: both the virtual sword and the virtual money are items being exchanged. So technically you _could_ literally owe the IRS a bunch of RL dollars, for stuff you "sold" only in-game for virtual gold and silver coins.
So to cut a long story short, _that_ is why a bunch of us "crazy" folks discuss that. Because literally that's the kind of craziness that TFA is all about.
Gamers can't have it both ways, try to monetize their virtual assets, and then say it's not really worth anything. We know very well than many people make lots of money on this useless crap, so obviously, it's worth something. One way or the other, people. Taxes are a bitch, but they too exist.
I'm sorry, but who is this homogenous "gamers" category where everyone says the same thing, does the same thing, etc? Has it ever occured to you that maybe two different people can actually have two different goals, two different ways to play, etc?
As far as I can tell, and supported by the backlash against Sony's sanctioning such transactions, most MMO gamers are actually _against_ trading in-game items for real cash. For a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the facts that:
- it seems to bring with it not only virtual crime, but real crime as well. (Breaking into someone's RL computer is a RL crime.) See for example the recent instances of keyloggers that, among other harm, stole WoW passwords for the purpose of striping those people's characters of all gold and equipment. So believe it or not, even if the other issues didn't exist, a lot of us would still have a problem with (A) buying something stolen from a fellow gamer, and (B) encouraging the script kiddies to infect even more computers.
- it devalues the achievements of those who actually worked and quested for that
- it fucks up the virtual economy, as in some cases it becomes tuned and balanced for the idiots who buy gold by the thousands instead of for the honest players
- it fills the world with farmers and farm-bots, to the point where in some areas you have to spend an hour to complete even the simplest quest, because the needed NPCs are farmed non-stop by a small horde of farm-bots
- buying a ton of ganker-grade equipment and level 60 characters attracts a certain kind of insecure loser who makes the game worse for everyone else.
- plus, as the lesser problem of whole armies of characters who just don't know how to function at their level, what to do, or what to use. You could group with, for example, a Kheldian (prestige classes unlocked by having 1 max-level character) on COH and they don't even know the elementary basics of playing the game. How'd they get through the whole game once without even learning how it works? Oh, wait, they didn't.
Etc, etc, etc.
So, basically, fuck off. Most gamers do _not_ support transforming virtual assets into real gold, and it's even against the TOS in most games. So you're telling me, what? That because a minority of idiots already ruin the game for the majority of us, let's all be taxed for it? That governments should just assume we're all doing something illegal, and tax it? Well, then how about we assume that you use your car as a taxi (some poeple do, so by your logic it applies to everyone) and tax you per mile, according to how much you _could_ have charged if you actually used your car like that.
and if you're not from the United States, than imagine that I'm suggesting you include this in your Government's constitution/body of laws if it is not already there...
You know, no offense meant, but it's sorta funny to hear that coming from the _USA_.
What you have over there is some vague principle, that, as you say, is constantly being reinterpreted to mean, "yeah, well, it says we can't search your papers, but your computer's files are still fair game" or "yeah, well, once you gave that info to someone else, or it passed through someone else's servers/wires/whatever, then you have no more claim to privacy" or other such.
What we have in the EU, on the other hand, are very precise laws saying what can you do with other people's data (very little without their consent), what you _can't_ do with it, and what kind of data you're not even supposed to be collecting at all. And not just for government agencies. Your bank or phone company also can't just sell your information to everyone for an extra buck, for example.
So maybe, dunno, maybe you could include _that_ idea in your body of laws?
Personally I wonder if it's not just a case of Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It could be that someone just wrote down the wrong phone number for someone named Mark, and your obstinacy to not give any detail tripped _their_ paranoia.
I'm saying it because something similar happened on my normal (non-mobile) phone line. And the Deutsche Telekom certainly had all my data there, so there would have been no need for such a masquerade.
Anyway, someone with an extra-thick arabic or maybe turkish accent repeatedly called, first to ask to talk to Achmed or something like that, then gradually after a few calls (spaced a couple of weeks apart) it turned into trying to bully me into "admitting" that I'm Achmed. (Dunno what gave him _that_ stupid idea.) And, yeah, demanding to know who I am, if not Achmed. By the time it turned into screaming at me in his weird language, I told him I'll call the police if he doesn't leave me alone.
Well, since I've said that those three points aren't enough by themselves, here are a few more to consider:
1. Balance -- it's not just for Blizzard any more.
1.a. Not all classes should do the same, of course, but all should have a fair chance of completing the tasks ahead of them. A rogue may backstab, and a hunter may use their pet to avoid taking damage, and a paladin might win it by attrition, but all should have a fairly equal chance against an equal level opponent.
1.b. All classes should bring _something_ unique to a group, and combine in some way with other classes' abilities. E.g., take a hint from Blizzard. A paladin's auras and seals aren't there just to boost his own combat ability, but they can also boost the meatshield warrior to be a more robust meatshield, or the rogue into being an even better damage dealer, and the mage or priest into drawing less aggro and having more mana. And the mage isn't just a damage dealer, but can also take one enemy out of combat completely so the meatshield warrior doesn't get pounded into the ground prematurely, or slow down a fleeing enemy so the rogue can finish him off before he allerts others. Or the priest may be a "healer", but combine it with some paladin's holy damage boosts, and you'd be surprised how a holy/discipline priest can actually become a primary damage dealer in non-instance missions. Etc.
Few things are a bigger put-off than pulling a "wow, this combat medic class looks great" and then discovering that you've picked the pussy class which can't even go to the toilet on its own. Worse yet, discovering that while you can't solo it, everyone else doesn't have an incentive to group with you.
2. KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid -- or let me rephrase it: if some option doesn't bring something unique to gameplay, it shouldn't be in the game at all. Having, for example, a sniper class and a martial artist class that both do exactly the same and fulfill the same role, only with the sniper being weaker and more expensive to play, like in AO at launch, should tell you that you have one class too many there.
3. Keep It New, Keep It Interesting -- a lot of the "but people get bored of our games after 5 hours" justifications of why games should be shorter, just prove that those people haven't understood much about game design. People get bored if they just have to do the same over and over again. Most successful games slightly shift focus, challenges and gameplay over the course of the game. It's that shifting focus and discovering new toys and new kinds of challenges that keeps it interesting.
E.g., in a city/empire builder you could start only worrying about taxes and placing the houses near a well, but by the end worry more about polution, religion, war, diplomatic relations, etc. You may even automatize some of the tasks which, at the start, you had to min-max by hand. E.g., even in a board game like Go, there are differences between the opening phase of staking your claims and generally avoiding getting bogged down in a combat for them (if your opponent gets bogged down removing your one piece in a corner while you claim the rest of the board, let him do so at his own peril), and the finishing phase where you actually fight it off and resolve any ambiguities.
Or in an MMO your fighter may start as just hitting wolves with a mallet until they fall down, and by the end of the game worry more about things like holding aggro, min-maxing their use of the rage bar, etc.
4. Avoid Disrupting Gameplay Or Social Mechanisms -- here SWG is the prime example. For a game and a designer which keep using the cheap excuse that players should create content for each other and leave the designers alone, its forcing people to play one character per server (ok, _two_ per server in the NGE) sure disrupts exactly that kind of social mechanisms. If you want to play more than one char, you'll perpetually be on the wrong server, compared to where other people play, effectively getting in the way of any l
It's not that simple. Those three points are not necessarily enough by themselves, and actually implementing them is a lot harder than being able to name them. E.g.,
Easy to learn, difficult to master - Anyone should be able to intuatively figure out how to play within a few minutes, but the gameplay should have enough depth to show a differance between a beginner and an avid fan.
This is a good principle, no doubt, but fine-tweaking it to actually work is another thing. E.g., how difficult to master is all right? How much mastering is _needed_? If you have to invest months to be able to finish an otherwise 10 hour game, most people will just get frustrated and hate it. If "difficult to master" isn't actually reflected in a minimum required mastery at some point, it might as well not be there at all. E.g., what's the point in mastering a double-grenade-jump if you can finish the game without it anyway?
And now that I gave you the questions, let me give you an answer too. And it's not the one you'd expect: at least for single-player games most people actually _don't_ want it to be necessary to master anything. The ideal game for casual gamers (and those are more than 90% of the market) should actually only create a smoke-and-mirrors illusion of the gamer being good at it. In reality, it should be perfectly possible for a quadriplegic on hard drugs to finish it just the same.
It's not even something new. See such concepts as "rubberband AI"/"rubberband physics" in driving games, or scaled enemies in RPGs, or Max Payne's outright manipulating the difficulty level, all to the same end: addapting the game to the player's skill level, instead of forcing them to master the game. You could miss half the side-quests in an RPG, and it will just give you an easier end boss. You could never learn to dodge or use cover in Max Payne, and it will just lower difficulty to the point where enemies become Humpty Dumpty with a peashooter to let you finish anyway.
Sense of power - Your character/car/robot/whatever should over 'feel' powerful; this can mean anything in the context of your game, but players like to feel their better-than-average in the game universe.
Not only it can mean different things in different games, but it means different things to different people too. E.g., taking Bartle's 4 categories, "power" means:
- for a socializer: the ability to become a popular guy or gal, make friends, maybe organize a guild, etc
- for an achiever: getting in-game achievements. A high score, a gazillion gold coins in the bank, the deadliest sword in the game, the biggest castle in the game, a full tier 2 equipment set, etc
- for an explorer: discovering how the game works, and occasionally how you can use that knowledge to your ends. Discovering a piece of the story. Discovering a new area. Etc.
- for a killer: the power to annoy/harrass/humiliate other players, and maybe drive them to leave the game completely (effectively "killing" them off the game universe, hence the category name)
And that's just one such splitting players into categories. Other splits like "crafters vs adventurers" or "RP-ers vs min-maxers" introduce more differences in interests, and occasionally impossibilities to please everyone. E.g., to give crafters a sense of power and of being above average, you have to make their goods better than any loot in the game. But that also invariably creates a massive inflation, and cuts a lot of incentive from adventuring too: why bother collecting a full MC set, if any crafter could forge you better equipment? Which is why both Blizzard and Sony have effectively reversed an earlier attempt at pleasing the crafters, and in some cases made crafting just a money sink.
Seriously. This should be required so that boring, stupid games don't even get published. So they'll KNOW beforehand how horrid their games are.
Remember that this is done for the marketters, not for _you_. It may seem like they only want the best games too, but sometimes their interests and yours may diverge slightly. Think of having to choose between the following two games:
A. "The gameplay was fast-paced, interesting and with hardly any time-sinks. The players were busy and having fun at every step, and noone complained about their ability to suspend disbelief. However, they also hardly ever had time to throw more than a brief glance at our ad, if ever. In exit interviews half the participants said they didn't even think it was a real ad, but just some fictional company from that game universe, and that the billboards were just for flavour. The other half couldn't quite remember what product we're selling, and preferred to discuss such topics as, 'Duude, I blew that guy's brains out all over the fucking billboard!'"
B. "We had groups of 39 people at a time staring at the billboard for two hours straight, out of sheer boredom as they waited for the 40th guild member to join their MC raid. Better yet, they talked to each other about it too, once they ran out of other topics. Mostly about how it sticks out like a sore thumb in a medieval setting, but still they'll _definitely_ remember our brand after two hours of that. Two people actually typed the company URL in their browser, to pass the time away. And then they did it again when someone ninja-looted all the way to the first boss and they had to kick him out and wait for another guy for 2 hours straight... right in front of our strategically placed second ad. In exit interviews, people commented, 'Dude, you mis-spelled the third word on the fifth row of the fine print.'"
I know which one you'd prefer as a gamer, but now think which one will a marketting department prefer. Not quite the same, is it?
Also consider the sad tale of web advertising, and all the bullshit metrics they used as smoke and mirrors. See, the only thing that would actually measure the success of a marketting campaign is, basically, how many more people bought the product. Anything else, be it "clicks", "unique eyeballs", etc, is just prestidigitation and actually pretty much irrelevant. It's just there to sound like you have some scientific measurable criterion, but omitting that you have no idea what correlation (if any) there is between that and the actual goal of selling more products.
And you can see how irrelevant those are, in all the attempts to game the system. Fake UI, punch-the-monkey, outright redirects, etc, are just ways to inflate such a metric (e.g., "number of clicks"), without actually getting the user more interested in the product you're selling. There's a monster of a difference between (A) a user who was genuinely interested enough in your product to want to learn more about it, and (B) a user who was thinking he's punching the monkey to win some prize, and just closed the window when he was redirected to the company's page. But both look the same in aggregate "number of clicks" metrics, and it's very tempting to game the system that way.
So now think what will happen here. I can just see such bullshit metrics being used here too. "See, the users had a total of 100,000 extra heartbeats while viewing your ad, therefore you owe me a big pile of money." And the subsequent attempts to inflate those meaningless metrics without actually making either the game or the ad more interesting.
E.g., just include some incredibly frustrating minigame there, like Fahrenheit's interminable "alternately press two buttons a frillion times per second, and you fail if you missed even a beat in 5 minutes" sequences by the end of the game. _That_ will raise anyone's pulse and blood pressure all right. Especially by the time they fail the 6th time and have to replay since a savegame that was half an hour ago.
Bullshit. I think that a lot of problems with the way the corporate world operates these days is down to exactly that attitude.
Bullshit indeed. Two wrongs don't make a right, and you can't be the "good guy" by using immoral means. Whatever problems you have with corporate morals or behaviour, turning into an immoral asshole yourself and blowing other people's money to reward people you like (whether it's your girlfriend or your favourite OSS developper) is _not_ a moral high ground.
Now, I know that there is still the point of it being other peoples money
No, I don't think you fully grasp that, seein' as you promptly handwave it as some secondary consideration. That is the _whole_ point.
A corporation, in the end, uses its own money. And it is _supposed_ to use them in whichever way it benefits itself. Be it charity to polish its PR image, or encouraging developpers for their system, or just buying friends, or whatever. Even when we buy their shares we do so, basically, on the assumption, "go do something good for yourself with these money, and incidentally I'll benefit too from your growth and good fortune."
An analyst is _not_ dealing with his own money. He's acting on behalf of other people, and under the implied relationship of trust that he'll act in their best interest. Anything else is violating that relationship of trust. Unless those people explicitly aggreed to use their money for the global good of the economy or whatever noble goals you may have, it is simply wrong to basically steal from them to pursue those noble goals.
If you will, consider the following two cases, because they're _fundamentally_ different: (A) corporation X gives $10,000 to charity, vs (B) stock market analyst Y takes $10,000 from other people's money and gives them to charity. The former is good and commendable, the latter is plain old theft and morally wrong. You cannot be the good guy, when that "good" is based on theft and dishonesty.
We're not talking even some kind of Robin Hood taking from the oppressors and giving to the poor oppressed peasants. We're talking about blowing $10,000 out of some kid's college fund or out of some grandma's pension fund, to pursue your own bullshit ideals instead of their interests.
It is reasonable to think that even though investing in open source might not have the best immediate returns, that helping open source based companies through investments could lead to growth in the tech industry, which will mean higher returns on many other tech based investments.
Which is still bullshit if those people didn't explicitly aggree to use their money for that. Just because something is some vaguely defined "greater good" or "common long term good", doesn't make it right to use dishonesty and theft to forward that goal. See the charity example again. Charities are good for society too, but that doesn't make it right to steal someone's college fund or pension fund to support your favourite charity. If you want to forward the "greater good" or "common good", do it with your own money, not by stealing other people's money.
I would imagine that, as he isn't a professional broker or investor, he will almost certainly have to consult the other members of the club before investing the money.
"Probably someone else will block it anyway" is not an excuse for dishonesty. I'm sure that if someone from your bank emptied your account and gave them to a charity, you wouldn't think it's ok if they say, "oh, I thought they'd catch me and stop me in time."
2: As others have said, he may honestly believe that there is a lot of money to be made in open source. 2 isn't as ridiculous as it might sound to some people. If the major players like IBM, Oracle, Sun, and Google think Open Source is a business plan worth putting time, money, and effort into, then it seems not unreasonable fo
It's been IBM's policy for _decades_ to never create a "we give in to extortion" precedent. Because the instance they pay off one leech with a dodgy claim (either settling, or by buying the company, i.e., giving someone good money for their worthless shares), they've just painted a huge bullseye on themselves. That would be the day when a thousand other leeches sue IBM to get some money too.
IBM is a big rich target, and there are entirely too many people whose sole business plan is frivolous litigation. And anyone with lots of money is a natural target. It's like putting a sign on your porch saying "I have a big pile of gold in my basement". Someone will take it as a personal challenge to take it from you. And if you give in to the first guy who comes over and says "I'll sue you if you don't give me some of that gold", tomorrow you'll find a big queue of people at your door who want some too. It's not a precedent you want to set.
So settling frivolous claims is _not_ what IBM wants, and it's never been what it wanted. What it wants is the equivalent of a bunch of skulls on spikes, with a sign saying "these are the last guys who tried to extort us."
And I have to wonder what have Darl and the gang been thinking. It's been common knowledge for ages, complete with such mental images like "IBM's lawyers are like the Nazgul" or "IBM can darken the sky with its lawyers". So I can't really imagine someone genuinely thinking, "I know! surely one more try is all it takes! They'll certainly do the stupid thing _this_ time!"
Even assuming that Darl were actually _that_ stupid and disconnected from reality, you have to wonder about everyone else involved. Like the investors that funded this stupid charge of the light brigade. What were _those_ thinking?
Cue conspiracy theories about MS paying off Darl to create FUD even if SCO loses the lawsuit.
Then again, maybe Hanlon's Razor does apply, after all: Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
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Well, that's of course a good point and very insightful. What I meant is that it can get a lot worse. Even with shooting second, I wouldn't rate Han Solo as exactly demolished yet. There's a lot more demolishing to do :P
First of all, did you hear that he's playing Indiana Jones instead? It's in the same link. So it's not like he refused SW to go play some peaceful suburban father with 2.5 kids role.
Second, we don't know the details there. It could be simply that the Indiana Jones role paid better.
Third, after what George Lucas did to Episodes 1 to 3, can you really blame him? I mean, it's ok to bitch and moan about it as a fan, but he's the one who gets it on his CV and maybe conscience. Maybe he's good at knowing a dud when he sees one. Or maybe, especially given the choices of roles as a good guy, he doesn't want to star in Lucas's recent moral relativism (and revisionism) lectures.
SW started as a simple kids' story, a SF version of a mix of fantasy and swashbucklers and WW2 carrier battles. Brave knights with magic swords against clear super-villains. (You'd be hard pressed to paint blowing up a planet they already knew was not a rebellion planet, just to make an example, as a moral grey zone.) The rebels are good, the Empire is evil, and it tells you so right in the opening text. Even when the good guys tell a little lie (e.g., Ben saying that Luke's father is dead), it's with the best intentions, and even when the evil guys tell the truth, you know it's just scheming to some evil end. Follow your heart, do the right thing, don't let old farts tell you what to do (even if it's Yoda), don't fall for the excuses and promises of the dark side. And, oh, trust your own skills, not some targetting computer gizmo.
Not entirely applicable to RL, but it's a simple (or simplified) story, that's easy to digest and entertaining.
And it's not _that_ far off the mark either. While RL situations are a lot less black-and-white, it's not as impossible to have some principles as some people try to tell you. Just because neither side is pure black or white, it doesn't mean there's no difference. If one side is only 75% right and the other 75% wrong, it still doesn't mean that they're perfectly equivalent and it doesn't matter which you choose. Moral relativism is a subject very dear to both philosophers (since that's their job) and sociopaths (who just love muddying the waters and justifying any evil they do), but RL isn't _that_ relative. Just because some details varied across time and space, doesn't mean that the entire concepts of good and evil are purely arbitrary and irrelevant. But I digress.
So a long time after Episode 6, Lucas seems to have decided to undo that whole simplicity. Most of what Episodes 1 to 3 do isn't as much about showing you the history of it, as about trying to undo the good-vs-evil theme of the original trilogy. It's a lecture in how, see, the good guys weren't really good, they were just some self-serving self-indulgent caste, and, see, the evil guys weren't evil as such, they were really just another point of view and at most a bit mis-guided. And Vader (you know, the same guy who supervised blowing up a planet full of innocents) didn't as much fall to the dark side by some act of selfish evil, but was just yet another guy who thought he's doing the right thing, if in a bit of a mis-guided way. Etc.
It's been about rewriting the SW universe in more profound ways than "Han shot first." The whole "A Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack" got kicked into the garbage bin, for example, and that was a far more central idea than Han shooting first.
It's not just the bad acting and bad scripting and bad directing and Jar Jar that make the prequels hard to swallow, it's also that it's a moral ambiguity lesson with some special effects and badly acted/scripted/directed at that. Once the whole monomyth structure and clear cut sides fly out the window, it becomes a lot harder to empathise with the heroes or follow why did they have to do this and that. Or to what (justifiable) end.
Contrast Episode 4 where it followed a logical and archetypal structure to destroy the evil Death Star, to Episode 1 where the grand achievement is finding Anakin
What they probably mean is "no applications unless you pay through the nose to Cingular or Apple for them." And they probably painted themselves in that corner with the price.
Let's face it, the fact that cell phones so far did less is _not_ because Nokia and others are stupid. Psion alone has quite a lot of experience in making stuff that goes from phones to good PDAs (including some decent office tools, for a PDA) to a sort of a micro-laptop. They figured out by now what the users want, and believe me, the thought of using a touch-screen _did_ occur to them before too. (The Psion 5 did a great job of using both touch screen and keyboard, for example.) Anyone who thinks it took Jobs to show everyone how to scroll a map on a touch screen, needs a bit of a reality check.
The reason why cell phones were limited devices has to do with cost, power consumption and "how much do we think the market would pay for it" issues. Most of the market wants to get their phone almost for free, and in fact often get some other stuff with it too. Then the contract recoups most of that, but then it means the phone itself can't cost thousands, because even with the contract and fleecing them for ringtones and SMS, there's only so much money you'll have to pay for phones _and_ the telco infrastructure _and_ other operating costs _and_ hopefully make a small profit, or at least not make a big loss.
So the more money you want a telco to pay to subsidize your phone, the more hope you must give them that they'll actually get that money back one way or another. E.g., you pack an IRC client on it to give them some hope that some idiot kid will rake up a huge phone bill while spending hours on IRC with a crap number pad as a keyboard. Or you give them an exclusivity contract, in which they practically pay you advertising money for a reason for people to switch to their network. That's worth more money, but even that has a limited upper limit. Or you try to lock it down and give them a "see, but they'll have to buy this and that only from you" hope. Which is obviously what Apple is doing here.
So at the end of the day, that's about how much a traditional phone can cost. That's why you can only pack so much CPU, RAM and everything in it.
Why the iPhone does more is probably because it costs an arm and a leg to produce. Being launched with an exclusive contract and still be left with a huge price tag anyway already hinted at that, but it's details like these that hint at exactly how huge the price must be. Cingular probably ends up paying a heck of a lot to subsidize Apple's gizmo, and they needed a heck of a reason to do that. Enter the "what if we completely locked it down, so people have to buy _everything_ from you?" factor.
The script is one thing and, surprisingly enough, someone's ability to act is quite another unrelated thing. It's not like he has to improvise the bad-boy lines, LARP-style. That's what he gets a script for. He just has to deliver them convincingly. And since he's done it before, repeatedly, I can't see any reason why he'd suddenly lose the ability to play a kind of role.
Good actors tend to be quite versatile. (Heck, Ronald Reagan even played the president of the USA for years convincingly;) Typecasting someone into a role or another often has more to do with looks, accent, previous roles, and generally what you think the public would associate them with, rather than some inability to say another set of lines convincingly. E.g., you probably wouldn't cast Sean Connery in the role of a rebellious punk teenager, but that's more because noone would take that seriously at his age. I don't doubt that he could say that set of lines very well anyway.
In Ford's case, I don't see that being a problem. The public already associates him with Han Solo or with Indiana Jones.
E.g., I'm looking on The Register and they have a title like "Acer Preloads Vulns On Computers." And since The Register is light on the details and misses the poing (they parrot the "turns on 'safe for scripting'", but miss the _real_ problem there), I had over to F-Secure's site to see what this is about then.
The short and skinny is: Acer helpfully preloads your laptop with a handy little ActiveX control that downloads updates from their website. The problem: it will just as cheerfully download and install anything else. If the user visits some malicious web site, it just needs the right HTML code there to install anything it wants to on your computer. A rootkit, a spam bot, a keylogger, whatever. Take your pick. It can download those for you, just because the website told it to.
The icing on the cake (and the bit The Register picked) is that Acer's preloaded ActiveX control is marked as "safe for scripting", so you won't even be asked when it gets invoked. Wouldn't want the users to have to click "yes" when downloading Acer's driver updates, after all. But then you also don't have to click "yes" when it downloads a keylogger onto your machine.
What does Jack Average see at the end of the day? "Crap Windows! Fucking MS software! It runs like crap and uses my DLS connection to full."
Note that we didn't even have to assume a clueless Jack Average for that to happen. Let's even assume he's pretty savvy for a non-CS guy. He doesn't enter his email on all those "enter your email for free porn" sites, he checks the URL on those "verify your PayPal account" emails, and generally does most of what his nerdy son told him to. (Well, except switch to Linux, maybe.) And he's smart enough to click "no" when some web site offers to install some IHakU codec on his machine. Too bad Acer's software isn't that smart. It just takes one site that knows about that ActiveX control to install whatever it wishes on Jack's computer.
So, yeah, whatever your opinion of MS may be, some of these OEMs and their crapware are actually far worse.
Well, the APIs that are the latest and greatest and best to have on a resume are one thing, but the old ones tend to stay there. OLE and COM certainly still work, and in fact a lot of the newer stuff is just built using those. You can even pretty much compile ANSI C that would work command-line in Unix, and chances are you won't have to change horribly much to have it working in Windows. (There are some exceptions, for example sockets, that needlessly use different functions, but otherwise the standard functions tend to be still there. If you don't want to use the latest Windows-centric function to read a file, fopen still works.)
:)
The size of the compilers... well, I feel your pain if you have to download that through dialup. Still, technically it's not like they're non-existent. We can, of course, still bitch about how big software got nowadays, and chances are we'd even be in aggreement. But you can't really say that MS tried to kill the aspiring programmer by not offering compilers.
About it working in Linux vs Cygwin, well, ya know, the funny thing is that both suffer from exactly the same module problem. Getting a distro on a CD just gives you everything neatly packaged and grouped together. But otherwise if you tried to individually upgrade bits and pieces of a Linux system by hand, you'd run into the exact same problem. To get program X in version 2.80.15, you also need library Y in version 13.10.14, which needs library Z in version 1.3.9, which breaks something else when you install it. But that's another discussion for another time.
At any rate, it's IMHO a bit unfair to blame MS for whatever problems you had with Cygwin. Seeing that it's not a MS product, you know
Compared to some of the alternatives, the interface remained _remarkably_ stable. In fact, one of the criticized things even on
And even if you took a Unix command-line program (seeing that in the next point you mourn CLI programming), you can compile it in Cygwin, or it's trivial to adapt it to be a Windows program. And you can just make it a Windows command line program anyway, but even adding a simple Window for the output and/or a couple of dialogs for the input is a newbie-level exercise.
And I'm saying that as a programmer, so you can take that as first hand experience.
Heh... QBasic isn't the alpha and omega, you know.
MS still offers the command line versions of their compilers for free. For a while they disabled optimizations in the free version, but nowadays they dropped even that. So if CLI programming is your cup of tea, there you go, they give you all you'll ever need to program in C/C++ or a few other languages.
Or if MS's C gives you brain damage, you can still get Java for free (you even have a choice of Sun or IBM for free JDKs), or you can get Cygwin and run pretty much the same compilers as in Linux, or you have several other choices. I'm pretty sure you can even get a free version of Basic, or at least one game development kit (crappy, but, hey, it's free and can be used to teach a kid programming).
And several games come with either some own script interpreter (e.g., Morrowind) or with Python (e.g., The Fall: Last Days Of Gaia). So whoever wants to learn some elementary programming, can start by scripting a few quests for those. Heck, at least for The Fall, I know from first hand experience that you can even rewrite the game and combat system with nothing more than Notepad.
So while amateur programming does seem to have gone downhill, it's not really the lack of compilers that's too blame. Maybe it's the lack of awareness that those tools exist, or maybe it's the perceived gargantuan size of the challenge. (I know most games made me think "I can code this better" back on the ZX Spectrum, while nowadays I wouldn't even dream of writing my own Doom 3 from scratch, on my own.) No idea exactly what. But lack of compilers it ain't.
I'd blame MS for many things, but not _that_. The fact is, noone really knows how to make a computer think, and that's that.
And you don't need MS's blessing to research that. Exactly why can't you write your super-AI on Linux or Aix or Solaris anyway? It doesn't even have to be an Intel or AMD CPU. There have been clusters made of everything including PS2 consoles, custom designed FPGA chips, transputers, super-computers with thousands of CPUs, or experimental architectures involving 3D or 4D interconnect topologies.
The fact that all 3 movies seriously over-estimated it, has nothing to do with MS, and more with the fact that they wanted to play on the ignorant public's enthusiasm and millenialism. Something that happens in the year 3025 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 3000 or 40,000, because people have this fascination with 1000 year intervals. Something _has_ to happen there, good or bad. And if it's the 60's or 70's or even 80's, something that will happen in the year 3000 is less interesting than something that happens in the year 2000, because the latter is close enough to worry about.
It's, if you will, the same thing that made the Y2K scare and scam possible. While there was a real potential problem there too, the blowing out of proportion and selling so much pure snake oil (I've seen network cables, speakers, etc, sold as "Y2K compliant", ffs) was also facilitated by millenialism. It's the year 2000, something bad _has_ to happen. And this time the scamsters also had the technology explanation that went right over Joe Average's head, but was sounding just believable enough to play on that millenialism.
The signs, e.g., Moore's Law, were there all the time that nope, technology can't advance fast enough to have enough transistors to compete with a brain by 2000 or 2001. It has nothing to do with MS. Technology hasn't really evolved faster before MS's monopoly either. (Not to mention how the heck _would_ MS slap a brake on the industry 30 years ago, when the PC is only 25 years old, and Wintel becoming _the_ standard came _much_ later.)
What maybe wasn't there as a warning sign was the fact that AI research would be even slower. And that it would be so disjointed as to have half the CS guys in ivory towers busy postulating all sorts of maths theorems as fundamental conditions for an AI, while completely ignoring the neurologists, anthropologists, and even stage magicians piling up evidence that the brains just don't work that way. While the latter gang was piling up evidence that, for example, the brain completely edits out the non-interesting parts of a picture, even if it's as ludicrious as a pink gorilla doing cartwheels in the background, half the CS gang was busy postulating such BS as that just squeezing the whole picture as a stream of bits through an arithmetic compression would be necessary for AI. And generally all sorts of "look what maths I can do on a stream of bits" stuff that misses the whole point of actually extracting, indexing and processing the _meaning_ in it.
What also wasn't maybe obvious in all that enthusiasm, was that _all_ corporations (not just MS) showed a total lack of interest in funding AI research. Corporations live and die by quarterly reports, and an AI that takes 20 years to learn, and maybe then you discover that it learned wrong or you coded it wrong altogether, would be completely uninteresting in that context. And before we blame it all on greedy corporations, again, the CS gang in ivory towers was too busy with abstract unmarkettable research that just didn't appeal to potential sponsors.
What also wasn't maybe obvious was that Moore's Law wouldn't actually be translated into code actually running exponentially faster each year. Humans
Because Apple's business model for iPods is more along the lines of "get some DRM'ed songs for nearly free (as Apple's bottom line is concerned), and pay us big bucks for an iPod to play them."
Apple doesn't actually make much money with iTunes, and it's actually managed to push the record labels into making even less money in the process. (Which is an accomplishment, no doubt, when dealing with some of the biggest sharks in history.) Previously you'd buy a whole CD or a single for pretty much half the price of the whole CD. Now you buy the 1 or 2 songs that interest you from iTunes, for $1 or $2. (And unlike radio, you don't thereafter go and buy the CD too.) The record label gets even less of that, and Apple gets barely enough to cover their expenses.
Where Apple makes its money in that deal is by selling iPods to play those songs. If you look at their sales numbers, for every 10-20 songs sold on iTunes, they sell an iPod. That't the money maker in that deal.
Seriously, the whole thing is a textbook example of how to build a monopoly of interlocking parts. You can't compete with the iPod on fair ground because the first thing the average lemming will see in your player is: "but it doesn't work with iTunes!!!" You can't really compete with iTunes because it's predatory pricing at its finest, and because "but your DRM doesn't work on my iPod!!!".
The only wrench in what could be a good monopoly mechanism is the availability of MP3s, but otherwise the model is there.
So, as a side-note, if you detested it in MS, well, glad to know you admire Apple for doing the exact same thing. Windows and Office, Windows server and clients, etc, is the exact same model of interlocking parts to raise the entry barriers. You can't compete with one part without competing with all of them. That's how you kill a free market.
And if you wondered why, for example, Sony shafts themselves so often by trying to push their own shitty codecs or media (minidisk or UMD) on everything, even game consoles, now you know why: because if they actually pulled that heist just once, they'd be in just that kind of situation, where they control both halves of an interlocking monopoly mechanism. But I digress.
At any rate, now you know why Apple can't just give free iPods. You somewhat guessed right that it would indeed be even more profitable to bring in the Macs as third piece of that monopoly recipe. But that would require it to be a part that raises the entry barriers, as in, for example, making the iPod and iTunes only work with Macs. But they're not in a position to pull that kind of a heist at the moment. If it were back in time, at the apex of Mac popularity, then they could. But not right now.
How would someone know if a price is wrong, anyway? I don't know about you, but I don't go make a whole study of an industry to determine if a low price is indeed feasible, economically sustainable, etc. Plus, there are promotional prices, occasionally predatory pricing, someone dumping a product to clear their stock, etc. Even for telcos, how would I know? Maybe they just installed a fatter cable and they can afford to give the bandwidth away, for all I know. If someone displays a price, I'm going to assume that that's actually the price they want to sell the damn thing or service for.
As for stupid people working for the sales departments, I'd say then it's the company's problem, isn't it? If you hire some guy to sell, say, used cars, and he sells a car for $4000 instead of $40,000, then you'd at least fire him, no? Maybe even start making sure you start hiring smarter people, or at least training them, no?
Year after year of quotting the wrong prices and TOS and then switching on the customers is hardly excusable any more. Because that's what the telcos everywhere seem to have already made a tradition of. I'm sorry, but after all this time I'm no longer buying the crap "teh oops, it was out sales rep that forgot to tell you about the hidden charges / right price / kick in the nuts that's not even in the fine print / etc" excuse.
Honestly, while I won't condone being dishonest as a customer either, I see it as equally dishonest to lure the customer with a low price, then demand that he pays a huge extra. Or at the very least baiting someone with one price and switching to another _looks_ so much like a genuine dishonest tactic (on the part of the provider or of the sales rep or whatever) that you just have to wonder if it's real stupidity. Or, you know, if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then maybe it isn't fish. The choice of a provider over another was based on that low price. If you knew the real price from the start, maybe you'd have picked another provider, or maybe used the service differently, or whatever. There's a non-zero probability there, and the incentive too, that it wasn't an error there, but a genuine scam.
Actually, I'm implying... well, no, saying it loud and clear, that it's about content, balance and gameplay. (See the very first bulleted point: sheer quantity of content.) Content includes quests, yes, but it's also the landscape, artwork, animations, etc.
No arguments so far. At any rate, it's not the netcode, that's really the main idea I was trying to give. So someone trying to present their netcode as going to soo make MMOs cheaper and easier to make (which is in the end what this whole thread is about) is, well, at best exagerating.
We're already drifting off topic, but ok. "Some" will even argue that extremely obese women are hot, or that eating shit is kinky (yes, literally), or that being tied up and whipped is some quality time, or whatever. In matters of taste, you'll always find a minority who'll have seriously different tastes.
And some people that that somehow being in such a minority makes them right and elite. That is kinda ridiculous, because it's based on the ridiculous assumption that there is such thing as "right" or "elite" in a matter of taste. There isn't. But I digress already.
Basically: to some people WoW is better, to some people Eve is better. And in a matter of taste neither is "right".
But if you want to compare it anyway, Blizzard managed to make a game which appeals to several million players, while Eve peaked AFAIK around 125,000. So on the whole Blizzard did manage to appeal to more people. As achievements go, Blizzard did better. (Again, note that I'm discussing achievemnt, not taste.)
And if you look deeper than the surface, there is a reason for why Blizzard is doing so well. It may not be the most revolutionary or radical design (pretty much no Blizzard game ever was), but it is a high quality game in an age where almost everyone else released half-finished and unbalanced crap. It may not have invented much, as such, but it took all those element, polished each almost perfectly, balanced them very well, and fitted them neatly in what is a neat whole as opposed to a heap of mis-matching parts. It's, if you will, a quality of life issue: between a game that just works right, and a revolutionary piece of crap, more people seem to choose the former. That, in a nutshell, has been Blizzard's secret sauce all along.
And that is going to set a new quality standard if you want to really compete with them. It used to be that just releasing any unfinished crap was ok for a MMO. It no longer is. You're going to dump a _lot_ more money into quests, balance, scripting, etc, if you want to be more than a narrow niche product for the few with weird tastes. Hence, a lot more than having some netcode just became actually important.
Nobody does, because Apache actually works right. We know all those big sites that just work well in Apache and which don't have any major problems with it. I.e., not just becaus
Let me say that whoever thinks that the network engine is the most expensive part of a MMO is either a snake oil vendor, or genuinely deluded. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it's trivial, but it pales in comparison with other money sinks and bug oportunities. E.g.,
- The sheer quantity of content there. Compare the surface of WoW, including instances, to, say, NWN2. And NWN2 was a long one. A SP game is meant to be played for 10 hours, maybe even 50 hours in some cases (e.g., NWN2), while a MMO is meant to be played for 6 months on the average. (That's about how long it takes for an average player to get bored anyway and quit. Mind you, like with all averages, some quit after a week, some stay for 6 years.) So you actually have to have content for all that time. Even if it gets more time sinks at the end, you have to, you know, still keep people there and excited by the time they get to the endgame grind, or they won't be goaded into it.
And while sheer terrain surface can be algorithmically generated, the next parts can't:
- Quests and scripting. A world which is just populated with hordes of respawning monsters to kill repeatedly, just doesn't cut it any more. You may find your 10,000 player niche that way, but you'll never be the next WoW. The aspect that the world is essentially a static one is a turn-off. It takes much work and scripting to get the player to suspend disbelief and believe "yay, I saved the elven girl" just as he watches the next group member standing in line to deliver the same cure again.
Ok, so it's not that bad, but you want the quests to be _interesting_, and _believable_, and make the players feel like they've discovered a bit of the story or background or whatever. Copy and paste, mass-produced quests... well, ask Sony how well that worked for EQ2.
- Balance. It's not just for Blizzard any more, folks. In a SP game it's less problem if everyone plays the Godmode class, though even there it _will_ piss off everyone who picked the Pussy class and can't even get to an enemy before being nuked. But in MP a game where everyone plays the same class is boring. Doubly so if it has PvP.
Worse yet, in SP you can give the player a known mix of party NPCs, so you can know what abilities combine with what other NPCs ability. In MP you can have (and _should_ have, because otherwise again it's uninteresting) all sorts of possibilities to combine the abilities of any two classes. Is there some uber combination you've never foreseen?
Are there some items which are horribly unbalanced? E.g., if, say, you give players an ice sword which applies a slow effect, what happens when 5 players with ice swords hack at the same NPC? Does it stack, effectively being able to freeze someone solid for as long as you wish? Does it stack with other slowing abilities, like a mage's Slow spell? If not, do your items make a class completely obsolete as the same spells and effects are available from items? Does it stack with, say, applying an ice oil to that sword? What is the trade-off if I use that sword, compared to another?
Basically, balance is more work than most companies realize or are willing to put in their game. But it makes a hell of a lot of difference.
- Support. If your whole game's premise and repeated business incentive is that it's a persistent world, and people should get attached to their possessions and character, then you'll have to deal with whatever unfair stuff happens to their character or their equipment. Don't underestimate the costs of that, because few things piss a player off at your game than falling in some hole and the understaffed support not answering for a week. And it's not only because of getting attached to that, but while in SP you'd just curse and reload a previous save, in a MMO you don't even have reload.
- General code quality. E.g., did you make sure that the game glitches don't double your support requests? E.g., if in a SP game it's possible to duplicatee items or money, well, (A) it doesn't affect anyone e
Heh. I'm with you. Now I don't know what it's called internally at the various publishers, "EA employees outside of his team can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" already sounds better than what others call a release. In fact, for some it's where you get after 3 patches... if you're lucky.
Take, say, Jowood for example. If "play from beginning to end" is a condition for "pre-alpha", then all their games aren't even pre-alpha as released. Unless you play them in half hour increments, because that's about how long it takes them to CTD. (OK, ok, so it's not a hard number. If you have 2GB RAM you can actually play some for 2-3 hours until the memory leak kills them. 'Course, the last half of that time they're swapping, so they "run" like a snail on sandpaper.)
Or looking at some of the patch logs, e.g., "family tree dissappeared when the first generation of player chars died out" or "in singleplayer mode the game could freeze between 1432 and 1440" in The Guild 2, as well as the other 30+ _major_ bugs listed in there... I honestly can't imagine that someone at Jowood actually played (or could play) that game from beginning to end. I mean, fuck, 1432 is literally after 8 game turns, and the death of the first generation of characters could be even earlier than that. And let me also say that if that doesn't kill your game by then, the pathfinding has already flown off the hook by that time too. It can't deal well with city growth. Or a few other issues will kill it. Count 'em and weep: 8 turns tops before the game flies off the hook.
Or take such massive fuck-ups as, say, AO at launch. Read the review on Something Awful, if you're curious, and I can vouch that all the issues described there were 100% accurate. Those swirling doors and enemies attacking through walls still bring back bad memories. In fact, SA goes pretty easy on them. There were a ton of other issues that they don't even mention there. You could run on flat ground on the street and then the game would glitch and you'd find yourself falling from stratosphere for no obvious reason. Characters would occasionally fall into the floor and start swimming in the floor. Mission instances (the non-city ones a little later) were often generated in such ways where you couldn't even get through one without falling in some hole in the ground and having no way out. Enemies' melee attacks had the same range as a sniper rifle. "Stealth" missions required you to kill everyone in the building to get the badge. Balance was a _sick_ joke: not only whole classes were useless, but a whole _faction_ in the game didn't even have shops above newbie level. Etc.
Or the German version of Victoria. Oeer. Now that was a new low. It threw a script syntax error when you tried to start the campaign. Not something blamable on the gamer's computer, or drivers, or whatever. Literally, one of the main scripts had a typo. That game couldn't run as released on _any_ computer. Forget playing from beginning to end. You couldn't even _start_ the game. It's that sad, folks. We all occasionally joke about games being shipped when they can display the main menu, but that game was the literal case of it. I can't imagine it being tested more than that, because as shipped it _couldn't_ get past the main menu.
Etc.
So, heh... "can play it from beginning to end, though they must endure rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" is pre-alpha? Heh. Oh what I wouldn't give to only endure "rough transitions and levels of difficulty that have yet to be tuned" in most games released nowadays.
There was an article linked to from The Register (but I'm too lazy to search for it right now= where they figured out that tens of tons of earth dust from some hole in Sahara are carried by wind currents all the way over to the Amazon. They said that without that, the rain forest would be a lot less impressive.
Kinda makes one wonder. Take some of the massive solar energy input out (and/or add enough wind turbines around too, while we're at it) and those currents may no longer carry any dust over, or carry it just a few miles into the Atlantic. Well, that one is obvious, but it makes me wonder what else. The Gulf Stream is also powered by the sun, for example, and that's what makes the climate of, say, the Netherlands be not quite the same as that of Siberia.
Heh. Exactly in which way is "for the same price" relevant in a discussion about supposed Windows bloat? No, seriously. Please do enlighten me, because I find it such a fascinating concept. Do DLLs automagically double in size if you raise the price? Or?
But ok, if you need an extra strawman there to make the mandatory anti-MS point, by all means, let us discuss the extra price of all those: exactly 0$ total. OOo costs just as much for Windows as for Linux. Ditto for Apache. Ditto for GIMP. P2P programs also tend to be available for free. IRC client? You can find lots of free, if a bit limited ones, and occasionally you even find one bundled with what you'd expect least. E.g., Unreal Tournament had a built-in IRC client. Development tools? You can download MS's compilers for free. Or GCC if that's what floats your boat. Or download Eclipse and Java for free too. Etc.
So while I might tolerate a smart straw-man, this one seems to me like it's not even particularly useful: again, we're talking exactly 0$ difference between Windows with those and Windows without those.
Oh, but wait, you probably meant the usual "but MS Office and MSVC.NET and Photoshop cost sooo much more" thrust. Right? Well, see, that would be relevant at all if you actually had to buy those. But since OOo and Gimp and the gang run just as well under Windows, you don't.
What MS Office and the rest are is an extra _option_, in case you think you need/want it. If you think MS Office or Photoshop have some feature you need, you can buy them. If not, not. (And believe me, just about every normal person I've shown the Gimp to, quickly decided they'd rather pay for Paintshop or Photoshop.) Options are good. _Lacking_ an option in Linux isn't actually an advantage over Windows. Sometimes it may be no great loss, sure, but an advantage it ain't.
Or for that matter, how's "includes all of these on the base install" relevant to a discussion about size? Do the installed packages take less space if you just bundle the installer on the same CD as the OS? Will my OOo install under, say, Linux take more space if I download it from Sun than if it's included on the SuSE DVD? Or? Enlighten me please.
But we've lost enough time on that silliness, so let's get back to size and the OLPC. Since that was the whole topic.
May I point out that you don't have room for all those on an OLPC either? That's the whole point.
In fact, you don't even have space for a reasonable base system that can from there on run any Linux program I might download. The dependencies of Linux programs are spread between so many libraries and frameworks, that, seriously, if you want Joe Sixpack Jr with an OLPC to be able to just run any program like in Windows, he'll actually need all those libraries or space for them. At the very least, he'll need both KDE and Gnome, plus of course the system and X libraries, plus a whole bunch of others.
Have you looked in your KDE directory lately? The libraries alone are well over 200 megabytes. Gnome? Not exactly small either. Just between the _libraries_ of those two alone, you're using more space than a minimal Windows install. And that doesn't even give you a usable desktop yet. It's just the stupid libraries to run programs based on those. Talk about bloat. By the time you crammed everything else onto an OLPC, you don't actually _have_ those extra programs, or space for them.
So the whole "muahahaha, Windows need to trim out the fat to fit on an OLPC" is moot
You might be a tad disappointed then.
Believe it or not, there are plenty of versions of Windows, including Windows Embedded and Windows CE, which run in a lot less RAM and reside on a lot less Flash. And even from the "normal" XP, there are a _lot_ of things which can be removed without the end user noticing much.
Sure, at that point you can still do the retarded thing and go "ha ha, so the full install didn't fit and they had to strip it down", but may I point out that the average Linux distro is even bigger than the full XP? SuSE Linux for example (to use an example from everyone's favourite, Novell) comes on a DVD or more than half a dozen CDs. Compressed. So that wouldn't fit there either.
As for slow, I don't know where you get your data from, but comparing my gaming XP box to my SuSE Linux 10.0 box, XP actually boots faster, and the GUI is quite a bit more responsive than X with either KDE or Gnome too.
I think MicroSoft's best bet at success would be a heavily stripped down version of Windows CE.
It might come as a surprise, but some of the devices running Windows CE actually have less RAM and ROM/Flash than an OLPC. So why would MS need to strip it down?
So please, let's cut it down on the arrogant-fanboy-disconnected-from-reality act. MS does have a lot of faults, but being stupid isn't one of them. They _do_ employ some of the best programmers, and can (and do) throw ridiculous amounts of money at a problem, if they really want to. And both Windows and compilers are something they have two decades of experience with.
They already know how to compile something for size instead of unrolling and inlining everything for performance. It's not like they have yet to discover "wow, there's this 'size' option in the compile options of MSVC."
And they already have the experience with porting and stripping Windows to a variety of platforms. They actually used to have NT versions for pretty much everything including RISC and a few other architectures. The XBox 360 itself isn't an Intel machine either. And there even was a version of CE that ran on the Dreamcast.
The only question is whether they want to, exactly what they want to do there, and how much effort do they want to put into a computer whose price would more than double if they actually sold a Windows OEM license with it.
Then again, they already know how to play the fake-charity card by giving away a 50 cent CD and counting it as the price of a full Windows license generously donated. (In addition to some real charity too, it must be said.) So they could just give away a locked down version of Windows to some kids who otherwise couldn't afford a Windows computer anyway, thus ensuring that a whole generation in those countries grows on Windows and Windows Media Player formats. It's good marketting. _And_ write it off a some hundreds of millions of dollars in Windows licenses generously donated to the poor countries.
On the whole, I wouldn't be surprised if the effort right now isn't getting Windows installed, but figuring out how best to lock it down and how much and what bait they can build into it.
TFA is based on the dangerous assumption that those _are_ real assets with a real money value, which has a helluva lot more worrying implications than just "well, you owe taxes when you sell it." E.g., they include such stuff as:
1. Inheritance tax. It even gives an example of someone whose "virtual estate" is supposedly worth 1 million, so if she dies, the heir could have to pay a shitload of inheritance money for something he probably can't even actually sell for 1 million.
Imagine, basically, that your dad or brother or whatever owns some rare +5 Boots Of Arse-Kicking in some Everquest or UO account that he doesn't even play any more. But in the meantime it stopped dropping 5 years ago, it became an ultra-rare item in the process, and the other known such pair of boots sold for 20,000$ on Ebay to some rich nutcase. (Don't laugh, I've been briefly on some shitty web-based game where someone made it a point of pride that he'd paid $20,000 for in-game advantages.) So in the eyes of the law, your dad's is worth about that much too. Let's say he had a bunch of platinum coins too, and those are viewed as having a value in RL dollars too. And a big castle in a desirable spot, if it's UO, just for that "virtual estate" aspect.
So he has a heart attack and you "inherit" it, presumably not even knowing or caring much about the game to even know the value. Congrats, now you owe the IRS some inheritance tax on all that virtual fortune you've inherited. What, you thought you wouldn't pay inheritance on a (virtual) castle, just because you didn't immediately sell it on eBay?
2. "Sale" in their explicit view also includes barter. This is an actual paragraph from TFA:
So let's say I give you my +4 Sword Of Ganking in exchange for those +5 Boots Of Arse-Kicking. Maybe we're just two guild-mates, and my spec is in axes so I don't need the sword, and maybe you don't have the armour proficiency for those boots. Such exchanges happen every day, and chances are neither of us would think of it as the same as selling that loot on e-bay. (At least you sure don't seem to.) Now let's say that, unknown to either of us, that sword is worth $200 on ebay, while your boots are worth only $100.
What they're saying there is that in that transaction you've made a taxable $100 profit. Do that often enough, and it can add up to be real money. Either put it on your IRS form, or you're guilty of cheating on your taxes.
Or maybe you've ever been paid in-game for some service? Like, say, "we'll let you have all cloth drops if you're a holy priest and join our group?" (Ok, so don't expect that in an endgame instance, but it occasionally happens at lower levels.) Well, congrats, all those items have a dollar value. You've essentially been paid a RL value for a service. Would you have thought that that should count towards your income tax?
Or maybe you just use the in-game Auction House instead of such barters? Same thing: both the virtual sword and the virtual money are items being exchanged. So technically you _could_ literally owe the IRS a bunch of RL dollars, for stuff you "sold" only in-game for virtual gold and silver coins.
So to cut a long story short, _that_ is why a bunch of us "crazy" folks discuss that. Because literally that's the kind of craziness that TFA is all about.
I'm sorry, but who is this homogenous "gamers" category where everyone says the same thing, does the same thing, etc? Has it ever occured to you that maybe two different people can actually have two different goals, two different ways to play, etc?
As far as I can tell, and supported by the backlash against Sony's sanctioning such transactions, most MMO gamers are actually _against_ trading in-game items for real cash. For a variety of reasons, including, but not limited to, the facts that:
- it seems to bring with it not only virtual crime, but real crime as well. (Breaking into someone's RL computer is a RL crime.) See for example the recent instances of keyloggers that, among other harm, stole WoW passwords for the purpose of striping those people's characters of all gold and equipment. So believe it or not, even if the other issues didn't exist, a lot of us would still have a problem with (A) buying something stolen from a fellow gamer, and (B) encouraging the script kiddies to infect even more computers.
- it devalues the achievements of those who actually worked and quested for that
- it fucks up the virtual economy, as in some cases it becomes tuned and balanced for the idiots who buy gold by the thousands instead of for the honest players
- it fills the world with farmers and farm-bots, to the point where in some areas you have to spend an hour to complete even the simplest quest, because the needed NPCs are farmed non-stop by a small horde of farm-bots
- buying a ton of ganker-grade equipment and level 60 characters attracts a certain kind of insecure loser who makes the game worse for everyone else.
- plus, as the lesser problem of whole armies of characters who just don't know how to function at their level, what to do, or what to use. You could group with, for example, a Kheldian (prestige classes unlocked by having 1 max-level character) on COH and they don't even know the elementary basics of playing the game. How'd they get through the whole game once without even learning how it works? Oh, wait, they didn't.
Etc, etc, etc.
So, basically, fuck off. Most gamers do _not_ support transforming virtual assets into real gold, and it's even against the TOS in most games. So you're telling me, what? That because a minority of idiots already ruin the game for the majority of us, let's all be taxed for it? That governments should just assume we're all doing something illegal, and tax it? Well, then how about we assume that you use your car as a taxi (some poeple do, so by your logic it applies to everyone) and tax you per mile, according to how much you _could_ have charged if you actually used your car like that.
You know, no offense meant, but it's sorta funny to hear that coming from the _USA_.
What you have over there is some vague principle, that, as you say, is constantly being reinterpreted to mean, "yeah, well, it says we can't search your papers, but your computer's files are still fair game" or "yeah, well, once you gave that info to someone else, or it passed through someone else's servers/wires/whatever, then you have no more claim to privacy" or other such.
What we have in the EU, on the other hand, are very precise laws saying what can you do with other people's data (very little without their consent), what you _can't_ do with it, and what kind of data you're not even supposed to be collecting at all. And not just for government agencies. Your bank or phone company also can't just sell your information to everyone for an extra buck, for example.
So maybe, dunno, maybe you could include _that_ idea in your body of laws?
Personally I wonder if it's not just a case of Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity. It could be that someone just wrote down the wrong phone number for someone named Mark, and your obstinacy to not give any detail tripped _their_ paranoia.
I'm saying it because something similar happened on my normal (non-mobile) phone line. And the Deutsche Telekom certainly had all my data there, so there would have been no need for such a masquerade.
Anyway, someone with an extra-thick arabic or maybe turkish accent repeatedly called, first to ask to talk to Achmed or something like that, then gradually after a few calls (spaced a couple of weeks apart) it turned into trying to bully me into "admitting" that I'm Achmed. (Dunno what gave him _that_ stupid idea.) And, yeah, demanding to know who I am, if not Achmed. By the time it turned into screaming at me in his weird language, I told him I'll call the police if he doesn't leave me alone.
Well, since I've said that those three points aren't enough by themselves, here are a few more to consider:
1. Balance -- it's not just for Blizzard any more.
1.a. Not all classes should do the same, of course, but all should have a fair chance of completing the tasks ahead of them. A rogue may backstab, and a hunter may use their pet to avoid taking damage, and a paladin might win it by attrition, but all should have a fairly equal chance against an equal level opponent.
1.b. All classes should bring _something_ unique to a group, and combine in some way with other classes' abilities. E.g., take a hint from Blizzard. A paladin's auras and seals aren't there just to boost his own combat ability, but they can also boost the meatshield warrior to be a more robust meatshield, or the rogue into being an even better damage dealer, and the mage or priest into drawing less aggro and having more mana. And the mage isn't just a damage dealer, but can also take one enemy out of combat completely so the meatshield warrior doesn't get pounded into the ground prematurely, or slow down a fleeing enemy so the rogue can finish him off before he allerts others. Or the priest may be a "healer", but combine it with some paladin's holy damage boosts, and you'd be surprised how a holy/discipline priest can actually become a primary damage dealer in non-instance missions. Etc.
Few things are a bigger put-off than pulling a "wow, this combat medic class looks great" and then discovering that you've picked the pussy class which can't even go to the toilet on its own. Worse yet, discovering that while you can't solo it, everyone else doesn't have an incentive to group with you.
2. KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid -- or let me rephrase it: if some option doesn't bring something unique to gameplay, it shouldn't be in the game at all. Having, for example, a sniper class and a martial artist class that both do exactly the same and fulfill the same role, only with the sniper being weaker and more expensive to play, like in AO at launch, should tell you that you have one class too many there.
3. Keep It New, Keep It Interesting -- a lot of the "but people get bored of our games after 5 hours" justifications of why games should be shorter, just prove that those people haven't understood much about game design. People get bored if they just have to do the same over and over again. Most successful games slightly shift focus, challenges and gameplay over the course of the game. It's that shifting focus and discovering new toys and new kinds of challenges that keeps it interesting.
E.g., in a city/empire builder you could start only worrying about taxes and placing the houses near a well, but by the end worry more about polution, religion, war, diplomatic relations, etc. You may even automatize some of the tasks which, at the start, you had to min-max by hand. E.g., even in a board game like Go, there are differences between the opening phase of staking your claims and generally avoiding getting bogged down in a combat for them (if your opponent gets bogged down removing your one piece in a corner while you claim the rest of the board, let him do so at his own peril), and the finishing phase where you actually fight it off and resolve any ambiguities.
Or in an MMO your fighter may start as just hitting wolves with a mallet until they fall down, and by the end of the game worry more about things like holding aggro, min-maxing their use of the rage bar, etc.
4. Avoid Disrupting Gameplay Or Social Mechanisms -- here SWG is the prime example. For a game and a designer which keep using the cheap excuse that players should create content for each other and leave the designers alone, its forcing people to play one character per server (ok, _two_ per server in the NGE) sure disrupts exactly that kind of social mechanisms. If you want to play more than one char, you'll perpetually be on the wrong server, compared to where other people play, effectively getting in the way of any l
It's not that simple. Those three points are not necessarily enough by themselves, and actually implementing them is a lot harder than being able to name them. E.g.,
This is a good principle, no doubt, but fine-tweaking it to actually work is another thing. E.g., how difficult to master is all right? How much mastering is _needed_? If you have to invest months to be able to finish an otherwise 10 hour game, most people will just get frustrated and hate it. If "difficult to master" isn't actually reflected in a minimum required mastery at some point, it might as well not be there at all. E.g., what's the point in mastering a double-grenade-jump if you can finish the game without it anyway?
And now that I gave you the questions, let me give you an answer too. And it's not the one you'd expect: at least for single-player games most people actually _don't_ want it to be necessary to master anything. The ideal game for casual gamers (and those are more than 90% of the market) should actually only create a smoke-and-mirrors illusion of the gamer being good at it. In reality, it should be perfectly possible for a quadriplegic on hard drugs to finish it just the same.
It's not even something new. See such concepts as "rubberband AI"/"rubberband physics" in driving games, or scaled enemies in RPGs, or Max Payne's outright manipulating the difficulty level, all to the same end: addapting the game to the player's skill level, instead of forcing them to master the game. You could miss half the side-quests in an RPG, and it will just give you an easier end boss. You could never learn to dodge or use cover in Max Payne, and it will just lower difficulty to the point where enemies become Humpty Dumpty with a peashooter to let you finish anyway.
Not only it can mean different things in different games, but it means different things to different people too. E.g., taking Bartle's 4 categories, "power" means:
- for a socializer: the ability to become a popular guy or gal, make friends, maybe organize a guild, etc
- for an achiever: getting in-game achievements. A high score, a gazillion gold coins in the bank, the deadliest sword in the game, the biggest castle in the game, a full tier 2 equipment set, etc
- for an explorer: discovering how the game works, and occasionally how you can use that knowledge to your ends. Discovering a piece of the story. Discovering a new area. Etc.
- for a killer: the power to annoy/harrass/humiliate other players, and maybe drive them to leave the game completely (effectively "killing" them off the game universe, hence the category name)
And that's just one such splitting players into categories. Other splits like "crafters vs adventurers" or "RP-ers vs min-maxers" introduce more differences in interests, and occasionally impossibilities to please everyone. E.g., to give crafters a sense of power and of being above average, you have to make their goods better than any loot in the game. But that also invariably creates a massive inflation, and cuts a lot of incentive from adventuring too: why bother collecting a full MC set, if any crafter could forge you better equipment? Which is why both Blizzard and Sony have effectively reversed an earlier attempt at pleasing the crafters, and in some cases made crafting just a money sink.
Actually, this is the least self-ex
Remember that this is done for the marketters, not for _you_. It may seem like they only want the best games too, but sometimes their interests and yours may diverge slightly. Think of having to choose between the following two games:
A. "The gameplay was fast-paced, interesting and with hardly any time-sinks. The players were busy and having fun at every step, and noone complained about their ability to suspend disbelief. However, they also hardly ever had time to throw more than a brief glance at our ad, if ever. In exit interviews half the participants said they didn't even think it was a real ad, but just some fictional company from that game universe, and that the billboards were just for flavour. The other half couldn't quite remember what product we're selling, and preferred to discuss such topics as, 'Duude, I blew that guy's brains out all over the fucking billboard!'"
B. "We had groups of 39 people at a time staring at the billboard for two hours straight, out of sheer boredom as they waited for the 40th guild member to join their MC raid. Better yet, they talked to each other about it too, once they ran out of other topics. Mostly about how it sticks out like a sore thumb in a medieval setting, but still they'll _definitely_ remember our brand after two hours of that. Two people actually typed the company URL in their browser, to pass the time away. And then they did it again when someone ninja-looted all the way to the first boss and they had to kick him out and wait for another guy for 2 hours straight... right in front of our strategically placed second ad. In exit interviews, people commented, 'Dude, you mis-spelled the third word on the fifth row of the fine print.'"
I know which one you'd prefer as a gamer, but now think which one will a marketting department prefer. Not quite the same, is it?
Also consider the sad tale of web advertising, and all the bullshit metrics they used as smoke and mirrors. See, the only thing that would actually measure the success of a marketting campaign is, basically, how many more people bought the product. Anything else, be it "clicks", "unique eyeballs", etc, is just prestidigitation and actually pretty much irrelevant. It's just there to sound like you have some scientific measurable criterion, but omitting that you have no idea what correlation (if any) there is between that and the actual goal of selling more products.
And you can see how irrelevant those are, in all the attempts to game the system. Fake UI, punch-the-monkey, outright redirects, etc, are just ways to inflate such a metric (e.g., "number of clicks"), without actually getting the user more interested in the product you're selling. There's a monster of a difference between (A) a user who was genuinely interested enough in your product to want to learn more about it, and (B) a user who was thinking he's punching the monkey to win some prize, and just closed the window when he was redirected to the company's page. But both look the same in aggregate "number of clicks" metrics, and it's very tempting to game the system that way.
So now think what will happen here. I can just see such bullshit metrics being used here too. "See, the users had a total of 100,000 extra heartbeats while viewing your ad, therefore you owe me a big pile of money." And the subsequent attempts to inflate those meaningless metrics without actually making either the game or the ad more interesting.
E.g., just include some incredibly frustrating minigame there, like Fahrenheit's interminable "alternately press two buttons a frillion times per second, and you fail if you missed even a beat in 5 minutes" sequences by the end of the game. _That_ will raise anyone's pulse and blood pressure all right. Especially by the time they fail the 6th time and have to replay since a savegame that was half an hour ago.
Bullshit indeed. Two wrongs don't make a right, and you can't be the "good guy" by using immoral means. Whatever problems you have with corporate morals or behaviour, turning into an immoral asshole yourself and blowing other people's money to reward people you like (whether it's your girlfriend or your favourite OSS developper) is _not_ a moral high ground.
No, I don't think you fully grasp that, seein' as you promptly handwave it as some secondary consideration. That is the _whole_ point.
A corporation, in the end, uses its own money. And it is _supposed_ to use them in whichever way it benefits itself. Be it charity to polish its PR image, or encouraging developpers for their system, or just buying friends, or whatever. Even when we buy their shares we do so, basically, on the assumption, "go do something good for yourself with these money, and incidentally I'll benefit too from your growth and good fortune."
An analyst is _not_ dealing with his own money. He's acting on behalf of other people, and under the implied relationship of trust that he'll act in their best interest. Anything else is violating that relationship of trust. Unless those people explicitly aggreed to use their money for the global good of the economy or whatever noble goals you may have, it is simply wrong to basically steal from them to pursue those noble goals.
If you will, consider the following two cases, because they're _fundamentally_ different: (A) corporation X gives $10,000 to charity, vs (B) stock market analyst Y takes $10,000 from other people's money and gives them to charity. The former is good and commendable, the latter is plain old theft and morally wrong. You cannot be the good guy, when that "good" is based on theft and dishonesty.
We're not talking even some kind of Robin Hood taking from the oppressors and giving to the poor oppressed peasants. We're talking about blowing $10,000 out of some kid's college fund or out of some grandma's pension fund, to pursue your own bullshit ideals instead of their interests.
Which is still bullshit if those people didn't explicitly aggree to use their money for that. Just because something is some vaguely defined "greater good" or "common long term good", doesn't make it right to use dishonesty and theft to forward that goal. See the charity example again. Charities are good for society too, but that doesn't make it right to steal someone's college fund or pension fund to support your favourite charity. If you want to forward the "greater good" or "common good", do it with your own money, not by stealing other people's money.
"Probably someone else will block it anyway" is not an excuse for dishonesty. I'm sure that if someone from your bank emptied your account and gave them to a charity, you wouldn't think it's ok if they say, "oh, I thought they'd catch me and stop me in time."
It's been IBM's policy for _decades_ to never create a "we give in to extortion" precedent. Because the instance they pay off one leech with a dodgy claim (either settling, or by buying the company, i.e., giving someone good money for their worthless shares), they've just painted a huge bullseye on themselves. That would be the day when a thousand other leeches sue IBM to get some money too.
IBM is a big rich target, and there are entirely too many people whose sole business plan is frivolous litigation. And anyone with lots of money is a natural target. It's like putting a sign on your porch saying "I have a big pile of gold in my basement". Someone will take it as a personal challenge to take it from you. And if you give in to the first guy who comes over and says "I'll sue you if you don't give me some of that gold", tomorrow you'll find a big queue of people at your door who want some too. It's not a precedent you want to set.
So settling frivolous claims is _not_ what IBM wants, and it's never been what it wanted. What it wants is the equivalent of a bunch of skulls on spikes, with a sign saying "these are the last guys who tried to extort us."
And I have to wonder what have Darl and the gang been thinking. It's been common knowledge for ages, complete with such mental images like "IBM's lawyers are like the Nazgul" or "IBM can darken the sky with its lawyers". So I can't really imagine someone genuinely thinking, "I know! surely one more try is all it takes! They'll certainly do the stupid thing _this_ time!"
Even assuming that Darl were actually _that_ stupid and disconnected from reality, you have to wonder about everyone else involved. Like the investors that funded this stupid charge of the light brigade. What were _those_ thinking?
Cue conspiracy theories about MS paying off Darl to create FUD even if SCO loses the lawsuit.
Then again, maybe Hanlon's Razor does apply, after all: Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity.