All I see there is Carmack being either (A) a complete nerd, for whom sticking to some rules is more important than his friends, or (B) being a dick willing to ruin everyone's campaign just to teach Romero a lesson.
It wasn't Romero that decided to introduce the devil into the game, and it wasn't Romero that made that NPC summon enough demons to destroy the world. It was the GM. Plain and simple. It was the kind of spiteful GM action that occasionally nukes everyone's characters to make a point, or as a quick "I've got the power" trip, or just being tired of the existing campaign. We've all run into moments like that.
The fact is, the game was at all times under the control of the GM. If you don't want your players to nuke the world, don't lead them to a room with big red button that launches the nukes. If you don't want them to bring forth the apocalypse, don't lead them to a room with a big pentagram and written instructions on how to summon the four horsemen. Etc. If you choose to "test" them with an event that may destroy the world, don't be surprised if they push the big red button just to see what happens.
And if you really want to save the world, you can always twist the rules as you like. That's why you're called a Game _Master_. Maybe decide that that big red button needed to first be activated by the Pentagon, or could be overriden by the Pentagon, so the missiles don't launch. Maybe a bunch of soldiers charge in and try to arrest the party, shooting the cable from that switch in the process. Etc.
Or in your example, maybe the devil can be toned down so the party can win. Maybe, I don't know, an archangel descends and blasts the book into oblivion. Whatever. If you're the GM, you have the power to pull that kind of shit.
Basically if you're the GM and (A) you've lead the players to a situation where they can destroy the world, and (B) you let them do that, then just accept the responsibility. _You_ ended the game, not the players. It's ok, if that's what you wanted to do. Start a new campaign or whatever. But don't be a prick and act as if some player is a great monster that deserves all the blame.
Plus, it's just a freakin' game. Acting like Romero is some monster that destroyed the whole world, strikes me as (A) taking it waaaay too seriously, and (B) pretty damn unimaginative and contrary to the whole spirit of the game.
I mean, have you actually played a tabletop RPG? That's exactly what the players are supposed to do. In a sense, it's sort of like playing chess against the GM. The whole fun is trying to (A) personally be creative and (B) to challenge others to be creative, in response to some unforeseen twist. That's a _two_ way street: the GM challenges the players and the players challenge the GM.
Heck, even that Demonicron episode's tame stuff. Look at some episodes on Full Frontal Nerdity (same site as Nodwick) for some stuff that good gamers can pull. Stuff like someone choosing the "royal blood" trait just so later they can usurp the new king of the realm, and turn the whole campaign on its head. Now that's the good stuff. That's what good players _do_.
As long as it's not deliberately trying to annoy someone or prevent them from achieving their goals, acting unpredictably in a creative way is what RP is all about. Just following the campaign and acting in a predictable way is _boring_.
From there it's the GM's job to react. It may be some equally surprising twist, or just proclaiming it to not be possible, or somewhere in between. That's what the game is all about.
As opposed to someone I know going fishing for 12 hours straight? Lemme guess, that's sooo contributing to society. It's been such a great gain for the country and community that he's caught half a pound worth of fish.
As opposed to sitting in front of the TV and watching football? Or soap operas? Or channel-surfing to see the same news again and again? Well, gee, that's so productive. I soo want to be like those when I grow up. Not.
No, you "grow the fuck up" already. People aren't at work 16 hours a day like in the middle ages any more. There are 8 hours a day of being productive. The rest is called "free" time. Hint: "free" as in "I'm free to spend it in any damn way I see fit, no matter how unproductive." Whether I want to use it tweaking a car, or collecting stamps, or playing a computer game, it's 100% only my decision. It's _my_ time, I used it as _I_ see fit.
If you don't like my passtime, tough luck, it's your problem not mine. Maybe you could find one for yourself that doesn't involve telling others what to do? Maybe grow up and realize that the world doesn't revolve around you?
People obsessed with games are everywhere, but I don't understand why only chinese and similars die because of it.
Because if you die at your home computer in your house, it just gets written as Trombosis, which is due to all that sitting without moving can cause. Or whatever else killed you.
If you do it in a cyber-cafe in Korea, they publish a story like "gamer dies after a month of playing Lineage!!!"
Note that in most of those cases the guy didn't exactly die at the computer, but did something like go to the bathroom and die or go to the bar to ask for some water and die. So if you did it in your home, they wouldn't even find you at the computer with WoW running.
But conversely, it's not enough with just one decent lead designer when making a game, as Daikatana showed.
Well, not contradicting what you wrote, but more as a reminder to everyone else: Daikatana was a complex phenomenon, at no number of designers could have saved it past a certain point.
For starters, it was largely a management failure, rather than a game design failure. The game design wasn't particularly bad, and in some ways it was ahead of its time. E.g., Daikatana tried to have a story in a FPS long before Half-Life, for example. In fact, it tried to have a story at a point in time where everyone else was churning mindless Wolfenstein 3D clones. And by comparison, once John Romero was gone, Id reverted to John Carmack's view that a plot is as needed for a game as for a porno movie.
What killed most of that design for Daikatana was simply being released so late as to not matter any more. Story in a FPS was no longer unheard of, the game engine was outdated, and some of the artwork looked like classic ass by sheer virtue of being old by now.
And that, in turn, could be traced to just bad management of the project and the company as a whole. John Romero wasn't necessarily bad at game design, but he was useless as a manager. All I'm saying is: let's not confuse the two issues, because they're different skills.
Plus, let's not underestimate the effect of Ion Storm's being the "victim" of a massive hype backlash. Partially because of its own PR blunders, that's for sure. (E.g., the "bitch" ad.) But also partially because a few idiots started screaming that Ion Storm killed Looking Glass, when Eidos let Looking Glass die. Suddenly it was _fashionable_ to be against John Romero and mourning Looking Glass, and a lot of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) joined in the chorus without even having a fucking clue what they're pro or against in that campaign.
So me say just one thing: if a _quarter_ of the people posting all "Daikatana sucks!!!" all over the place had actually played the fucking game, it would have been a major commercial success. It would have probably outsold The Sims. No, that's not saying it was that good, it's just saying how many SFVs were posting about it without even having seen it. Just because it was fashionable to be against it. It was instant karma to bitch about how much Daikatana sucks.
A lot of people still bitching about how bad Daikatana's design or gameplay supposedly was, still haven't actually even _seen_ that design or gameplay.
No, I'm not saying that it was great, but it was's as bad as people love to post all over the place either. It was just a mediocre FPS with a story. No more, no less. I _am_ however, saying, that the world would be a better place if people refrained from talking about stuff they have no clue about. I wish that everyone who hasn't actually played Daikatana (or whatever other game) just freakin' gave it a break already and talked about things they've actually experienced, instead of rehashing the same old canned hype they've read on some site.
There were games with much better levels and gameplay long before Doom, or even Wolfenstein 3D, they just weren't textured. E.g., Bethesda had a Terminator game that featured walking or _driving_ (yes, driving) around a town, with cars, pedestrians (yep, you could run them over), etc, years before Doom. It took the textured FPS genre almost a decade to get back to that point.
Or Ultima Underworld? It was a complex RPG and had a much more complex 3D engine too. It came out around the same time as Wolfenstein 3D and it still allowed far more complex and, well, "more 3D" maps than Doom would much later. E.g., the UU engine allowed bridges and tunnels under other tunnels, while Doom was still a 2D map with terrain elevation.
What Doom had was simply a more vocal gang of willy-wavers. The kind of personalities that just had to willy-wave about their deathmatch score were suddenly all over the place, making 10 times more noise than the peaceful SP RPG players, and acting as if they're speaking for some absolute majority. Doom was being proclaimed all over the place as the genre of the future, and indeed the only genre that anyone plays any more, at a time where SP console RPGs routinely out-sold it 10 to 1. Heck, even adventures were outselling Doom.
I believe the original requestor is asking about software to help automate/speed-up monitoring and scanning of content that's being put up on web sites by staff and/or students.
And I never cease to be amazed by the sheer number of people sharing that belief that there's some magical amulet (uber-security program/appliance/whatever) that you can just tack onto a site and make it auto-magically secure.
Unfortunately that kind of thinking is outright counter-productive. It's dangerous. It's the kind of thinking that breeds such disasters as "we use SSL, so we're secure." (Shame that someone uploaded confidential documents on the web site anyway, so they can be downloaded by anyone. _Securely_ downloaded, to be sure;) Or "we have a Snake Oil (TM) gateway that can scan SOAP requests, so we're secure." (Shame that noone actually configured the rules for it, though. Or shame that the Web front-end there allowed users to escalate their privileges _before_ it all got packed in a SOAP request: the gateway can't detect whether it's genuinely a site admin or a regular user who escalated their privileges.) Or "we have a hardened Single Sign-On front-end in front of the servers, enforcing login and access rights, so we're secure." (Shame, that, literally, one application allowed users to escalate their privileges and see any content, by just editing the URL. E.g., someone could edit the admin's password by just editing the admin's user ID in the URL for the password change page, _then_ properly log in as the admin through that hardened SSO front-end. Literally. I'm not making it up.) Etc.
But to address your actual point: content scanners aren't the answer, or rather are a bad and incomplete answer. E.g., I've seen one company deploy such a thing in front of the back-end, in their case to supposedly protect against SQL injection in the front-end. So it rejected anything that looked like an SQL keyword. Should be secure, right? But what do you do if it's not as secure or well-programmed as you think? E.g., the thing would cause a form submit to fail if you wrote something like "Visa Select" in a field, because it contained "select", but actually failed to protect against actual SQL injection using the quote sign, or XSS injection using the greater-then and less-than signs.
Worse yet, it encouraged everyone to be lax and don't bother thinking about security or doing a code review, because, hey, they have the magical amulet on the backend. Even worse, it encouraged managers to not allocate time or resources for an actual security review.
Security isn't about magical amulets, it's "holistic", so to speak. The security chain is literally as weak as the weakest link. People need to be educated to actually sit and think about the whole and about every single piece and scenario, not to throw in a couple of +5 Security amulets and call it a day. Throwing in the towel and relying on some magical amulet which somehow makes it all secure just because it's there, is actually the antonym and nemesis of security.
Even if such appliances and programs are used, someone needs to sit and think about how they're used, how they affect their own program, what they prevent, and most importantly what they _don't_ prevent. What data and how does it prevent from being stolen, and what happens when (not if) someone _does_ get through. E.g., what data you shouldn't be collecting in the first place anyway, because you don't actually need it. (If it's not there at all, it can't get stolen.) And most often the right thing to do is _not_ to rely on them: they're there as a last ditch defense, that can't catch everything, but it's one last chance to _maybe_ catch something that got through the other layers of defense. Not as a replacement for the other layers.
And teams and managers need to be educated that they _need_ to do just that: sit and do a proper analysis. And not just the technical implementation parts, but also, yes, the people processes involved. E.g., if a process can w
Eh, actually our department still clings to the idea of hiring competent people and paying them well. The complaint was about the monkeys in the IT department, who are neither.
No, you've just told me that _you_ need stress in a game. (And another post down the line apparently needs fear of losing.) But from there to extrapolating that all humans need stress, it's a big blanket generalization.
E.g., some of the most fun games I've played were Lucas Arts adventures like Secret Of Monkey Island or Day Of The Tentacle. There was nothing stressful about them. They were just funny. In fact, if anyone played DOTT in a way that made them get stressed, I'd seriously worry about them.
The fact is, not all humans are the same and not all humans play for the same purpose.
E.g., in the MUD/MMO arena we've known for years that there are, for example, Bartle's 4 player types, and they have fundamentally different goals and reasons for playing a game. A Socializer for example is there mainly to socialize or otherwise peacefully interact with other people, and they actually _resent_ being stressed by those they interact with. (Which makes them the favourite prey for griefers: a victim which takes it personally is the sweetest kind of victim for a griefer.) An Explorer for example is mainly interested in discovering things and plays in a thoroughly non-competitive manner: they're really _not_ trying to compete either with other players or with the environment. They're _not_ there (mainly) to either be the greatest in PvP, nor to achieve tangible material goals like gaining more xp or gold or epic equipment, nor to prove that they can overcome some challenge. I.e., there's very little reason to get stressed when playing as an Explorer.
And you can see it the best in MMOs if you look not at the Real Man (TM) die-hard willy-waver gang grinding up their PvP rank, but at crafters and the occasional social class like SWG's Entertainers. Some people genuinely play those classes because they prefer doing something peaceful and non-stressing, and not just for gold for a bigger sword or as part of the hologrind to Jedi. Some people genuinely like to just, you know, get together and chat while hacking at an ore vein with a pickaxe, in a thoroughly non-challengin place. Some people genuinely like to get together and RP, or have a party in the Mos Eisley cantina, and forget the stress, not look for more of it.
E.g., take movies or books, which are another popular passtime. The genres don't include just action and horror flicks, they also include comedies, romance flicks, documentaries, and generally a ton of stuff which causes exactly zero stress in the viewers. And in a sense you can see shades of Bartle's player interests again. E.g., an "Explorer" kinda personality might just watch a documentary on the Discovery Channel instead of getting all pumped up on adrenaline with an action flick.
Basically, just because most games so far have followed the model of porn movies, where all they ever try to do is appeal to your base instincts and hormones, doesn't mean that that's the only model or possible audience. Yes, there are people who need stress and pressure, and you can see that at work too: some people don't seem to be happy unless they're stressed, and will actively seek or create reasons to be stressed. But then some (most?) don't.
Basically, the sooner we get out of blanket generalizations like "all games need a challenge" or "all gamers need stress", the better off we'll all be.
Well, that reminds me... seeing the recent story on/. about people becoming more immature, I've also been wondering about going a million years down that path. You might just get a civilization where you don't just get Steve Irwin, but people who travel half the galaxy just to cut a crop circle on someone's farm or to tip their cows.
I'm still waiting for the day when someone will decode a SETI signal like "asl??? u wanna cyber??? what u wear???"
Or better yet:
"Lol, d00d, watch this!!!" *BOOM a star goes supernova* "OMGWTFBBQ!!!" "LMAO!!!"
A very insightful point indeed. Considering that the whole human evolution from ape to civilization is measured in millions of years, a civilization that's one billion years older would probably have evolved a lot even biologically in that time. So, indeed, you're right. I wouldn't be surprised if their view of our species were comparable to what we think of baboons.
Lots of people here seem to assume that somehow the skins are for the web site, or overriding CSS elements, or whatever, which is just not the case. What she was talking about with those skins is: fake UI. Nothing more, nothing less.
E.g., let's say that you got your old mom to use Mozilla, so she has _both_ the coloured URL box _and_ the padlock on the status bar as indication that she's indeed at a secure site. I'll assume you've also educated her to carefully read the URL up there.
So noone can fool her now, right? I mean, right? Well, wrong. One attack method they used in that study was fake UI.
So let's say your mom now lands at some www.phishers-r-us.ru site pretending to be her bank. The site doesn't even use SSL or anything. How can that site spoof all those checks both up there in the browser's toolbar and down there on the status bar? Simple. Fake them.
So the site gives you a javascripted popup, requesting a window without those interface elements. But fakes them as.gif images in the page itself. The page is, say, a frame set with three horizontal frames: one at the top, with a faked toolbar and URL bar (with the correct URL of the bank in that.gif, and correctly colour coded as if it were Mozilla saying it's HTTPS), the login page in the middle, and a faked status bar at the bottom (complete with the padlock icon telling you it's secure.)
_That_ is the problem. Fake UI fools most users.
So the researcher's idea is basically, "I know, so let's encourage each user to skin their own UI." So let's say your mom has set her Mozilla UI to be brushed blue-hued metal, the colour for HTTPS URLs to be green, and the padlock icon to be replaced by a thumbs up icon. The fake UI site can't know that. So when they show her a page with the UI in the default colours and icons instead of hers, hopefully your mom will know that it's faked UI. It doesn't look like her other browser windows.
Now personally I think the idea isn't that great anyway, since (A) it requires users to actually do that, and I'll bet most will just click on the default theme and be done with it, and (B) because it's working around what I consider a fucking stupid mis-feature. IMHO there's no need to allow browser windows without an URL bar and without a status bar in the first place. In an age where those are the main (and often only) things that can warn you against such attacks, allowing a site to disable them is just stupid. So just disable the option to hide the UI and, voila, suddenly noone can fake that UI any more. It's that simple.
Humans have shown that unless faced with a challenge, they tend to become lazy and stupid. Only a truly daunting challenge brings out the best in human nature, so it makes sense that only the challenge of facing an advanced alien race could possibly get us all together with the same agenda.
Oh, you mean just like the challenge of meeting the Europeans helped the African tribes? Oh, wait, they were dragged in chains to be slaves on a plantation. Well, I suppose that sure prevented them from becoming lazy. (Although it did help with becoming stupid. There wasn't much education or a cultural life on a plantation.)
Or like meeting the Spanish gave the Aztecs a challenge? Well, they were challenged all right. Their weapons couldn't even penetrate a conquistador's armour, and their battle tactics doomed them from the start.
Basically don't think that meeting an alien civilization will happen on equal terms, like in SF movies. Even assuming that the maximum age of a Sun-like star would put a maximum age cap on a civilization (although a star faring one might be even older), a civilization you'd meet could be _billions_ of years old. Stars kept forming and dying since the dawn of the universe, out of sync with each other, so a civilization you meet now might be from a star that's a few billions years older and just about starting to die. (Which would also give them a damn good incentive to take yours as living space.)
So basically roll a random number between 1 and, say, 3,000,000,000. That's the age of a civilization you might encounter. Compare it to the age of the human civilization. Teh oops. The aliens are _far_ ahead, aren't they. Even the odds of their civilization being "only" a million years old are of the order of 1 in 3000. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet on something at those odds.
But even "only" a million years old is _huge_. The technological difference, even if they were lazy and stupid and only advanced 1/10 as fast, would be well in the realm of "magic" for us.
Think what a difference of less than 200 years means on Earth: think a modern destroyer (not even a battleship) against Lord Nelson's whole fleet at Trafalgar. I mean, heh, with its engines it would have no problem staying just outside the range of their old guns, and could sink them quite easily even with just the 5" guns. It doesn't even need missiles or anything for that. Heck, probably even the _AA_ guns on a modern destroyer could simply cut through the wood.
And if you want to be a complete asshole -- e.g., if you're another species and feel no empathy for those aliens in wooden vessels -- you could use exactly one tactical nuke to wipe out the whole fleet in just one shot. One.
Now move on to a difference 10 times bigger: an authentic Greek phalanx, in bronze armours and with bronze spears, versus a modern mechanized infantry division. No, forget what you've learned in Civ 4, IRL the phalanx would inflict exactly zero casualties before being utterly wiped out. It's not just that their equipment is inferior, it's that even their tactics were utterly unfit as soon as anyone of equal tech level learned how to outflank. (See the complete wipe out of the Romans at Canae.) If you tried standing tall in the open, in a compact formation, against a modern army, and imagined that your wooden shield protects you, you'd be dead before you can say "ouch". A single.50 heavy machinegun could mow down that compact formation without breaking a sweat. (A wooden shield and a bronze breastplate would _not_ stop that. In fact, even _steel_ shields and steel breastplates wouldn't, and the ancient greeks had no such things.) Or a couple of guys with grenades could blow that compact formation to smithereens.
And again, if you wanted to be a complete asshole and get rid of some non-humans with the minimum fuss, you could just break out the chemical weapons. Their armours won't even start to be any use against that. Sure, we don't use them agains
To start with answering your questions: the PC's-with-wrong-drivers episode happened in August 2002. (Don't ask me why they still used NT 4.0 in 2002. Maybe some beancounter thought he saved money by sticking to it.) The RAM upgrade episode happened two months ago. Yep, in 2006. Formatting a workstation instead of replacing the RAM also happened at that time.
So, nope, I don't have to reach too far back for those examples.
Either way, you're latching onto the irrelevant detail there:
The point is _not_ about the quality of NT 4.0 or its drivers. Yes, as you correctly say, "Supporting workstations today, by comparison, is a much simpler ordeal. Finding drivers on the Internet is commonplace." That's what I did too, back then. I just pointed the browser at the manufacturer's web site, and downloaded the correct drivers. It certainly was no challenge and no great feat of engineering.
The point is about the quality of the _people_ involved. Precisely _because_ it would have been that easy to get the right drivers, I find it just inexcusable incompetence to install the wrong ones. I mean, FFS, not even from the correct manufacturer. The clueless monkeys just had a drive image on a CD, and proceeded to mindlessly install it on all PCs without ever stopping to use their brains. Like, I don't know, find out the hardware configuration first.
_That's_ the point. And it's pretty damn sad.
And let me assure you that it's not just NT 4.0. They're just as clueless under XP. (We did get XP eventually. Keyword: eventually.) The computer they formatted instead of installing RAM was an XP machine. The one where they proclaimed it to work, even though it couldn't actually load Windows, was an XP machine. Fat lot of good that did.
How about Stefan-Boltzman, then? Last I've checked it was still accepted in reputable science circles. There's this law that says that the energy radiated by a black body's unit of surface in a unit of time is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature.
Now let's look at global warming. A 1C temperature increase in a century is a 1K temperature increase. Let's say Earth's average temperature is 300K, or at least so close to that as to not make much of a difference in the maths that follow. A 1K temperature increase is a, pay attention, 0.33% temperature increase.
Yes, I know that bullshit save-the-earth rhetoric describes the change as "huge", "unprecedented" and other emotional hyperboles, but that's how much it is in actual science units. A whole 0.33%. A third of a percent. Which is just as well, since if you actually had a "huge" increase in SI terms, you'd be cooked. Literally.
Now let's plug that into Stefan-Boltzman's formula. The relative increase in radiated energy is (T2/T1)^4. The constant would be present both above and below the fraction line, so it neatly goes away. So since T2/T1 is 1.0033, we have an increase in radiated energy equal to 1.0033^4 = 1.013. A whole 1.3% increase.
Now let's also remember that equilibrium is reached when the radiated energy equals the the incoming energy. So, yep, there you go, you only need a 1.3% fluctuation in the Sun's energy output, or again a 0.33% difference in the Sun's temperature (Stefan-Boltzman applies there too), to account for the _whole_ global warming.
Note that I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case. Maybe, maybe not. Hell if I know.
_All_ I'm saying is just that, seriously, you don't actually need huge numbers to account for a 0.33% difference in temperature. Sometimes about 1% is really all you need. Sometimes just because political speeches describe something as "huge", it doesn't actually need huge numbers.
You won't find good techs working at Best Buy, or Frys, or CompUSA......
You'd be surprised where else you won't find good techs.
E.g., for the last 4 years I've been sorta a permanent consultant/contractor at a big corporation. You'd think that they could afford competent people, right? I mean, when you have tens of thousands of PCs (quite literally), it pays to have them well set up at least, right?
Well, wrong. PCs always routinely came with some stupidly wrong image installed.
E.g., the batch mine was in came with the wrong IDE drivers. Thank goodness Windows didn't use those, but performance was _abysmal_. You wouldn't believe how slow a fairly modern HDD is with NT 4.0's default drivers in PIO mode. Even stuff like switching between applications took seconds. (I assume that NT swapped some of the old app out, or something.)
E.g., they came with Matrox drivers installed... even though they had Nvidia cards.
Now being crazy enough to do the non-standard thing, I did download the right drivers off the internet and got our boss to give us the admin password to install them. But, you know, (A) I shouldn't have to. Wtf is the IT department for, if I have to do that. And (B) I wonder how many peons in other departments just gnash their teeth and put up with a system that performs like a lobotomized 486.
But let's delve a bit further into this madness...
So at some point it was decided to finally upgrade our RAM. So they send two IT drones to open the PCs and replace the RAM sticks. Easy job, right? I mean, right? Well, you wouldn't believe the uphill struggle that it was on every single PC. The problem? The RAM timings on the new sticks were different. So on every single PC, out of a batch of identical PCs, it was starting again from scratch digging into the BIOS and randomly changing stuff until it worked. You'd think they'd at least be able to remember what they did to the first half a dozen PCs by the time they get to the next one.
One coleague was left with a PC which was proclaimed to work after passing POST. Except it froze when trying to load Windows.
It gets better. They couldn't make one PC work at all, so they took it with them. It came back without the extra RAM, but freshly formatted and reinstalled. They fucking deleted that guy's 2 years worth of work instead of installing the RAM, and didn't even do a backup first. (Well, at least the sources were in CVS, but everything else, e.g., emails, documents he's downloaded, etc, wasn't.) How _does_ one end up formatting the hard drive instead of replacing the RAM? I mean, seriously, at which point are they similar or related enough to accidentally do one instead of the other?
And if you thought that the PC drones are the only ones without half a brain, let's just say that we actually have the whole flying circus. We have DBAs who don't know how to admin a database, and have to be told exactly what commands to run on it. (And occasionally do stupid stuff on their own, like disabling XA transactions on a productive Oracle database, because they thought it just takes up memory and doesn't do anything.) We have Unix admins who don't actually know jack about Unix. And I don't mean as in "not experts." I mean they probably haven't even _seen_ a Unix prompt before, and aren't going to start learning now. Etc.
*sigh* Methinks cost cutting is good and fine, but sometimes people should know when to stop. At the point where such clueless monkeys are hired just because they're very cheap... maybe it's already too much.
You know, noone forces you or him to play a 20 hour game in a 20 hour burst. If he only gets an hour a day to play, then a 20 hour game will keep him entertained for 3 weeks. I fail to see why that's a bad thing. He's proposing, what? That if he only has 1 hour a day, games should be 1 hour long? He wants to have to buy a new game each day, or what?
Plus, in my book it's not the vendor that should tell everyone what the consumer really wants. Ask a consumer, if you want to know what the consumer wants.
It's getting on my nerves already, the way the games industry seems to think that just repeating some bullshit often enough will eventually make it true. And not just about the game length, but I'm already digressing.
Do gamers want shorter games? Since when? The usual complaint I hear from actual gamers is that some gamer was too short, not that it was too long. Buying, say, an RPG used to keep you entertained for something like 70 hours. (And I'm not even getting into the _good_ replayable ones like Fallout 2 or Arena or Daggerfall, which I've sunk _hundreds_ of hours into.) Now we're down to games which one can finish in one sunday afternoon. It's already getting 1/8 as much bang per buck. Is any actual gamer actually demanding that they become even shorter? Did anyone finish, say, Fable and go, "man, I so wish it had only half as much content"? Or did anyone who's played a Gran Turismo game find themselves thinking "man, I so wish this had only 2 cars and 3 races, so it doesn't need more than a couple of hours to see everything"?
I mean, seriously, wtf? Since when and where did consumers start demanding less for their money?
So I'll tell you what it is: bullshit PR. The vendor wishes they could sell you half as much stuff for the same money, or at least not much less money. So they proceed to tell you again and again that you really want less stuff. No, seriously, you do. Trust us. Would we lie to you? Again?
And since the same bullshit fallacies pop up again and again, let's dismantle them once and for all:
1. "But I don't have 20 hours in a day!!!" Well, guess what? That's what save and restore are for. Unless he has a bad case of Alzheimer's (so tomorrow he won't remember what he's been doing or why), he just doesn't have to finish a game in one day.
2. "But I'm no longer a teen who has all the time in the world!! Only those can put 20 hours into a game!!!" Well, that's bullshit. I've seen casual gamers sink more than 20 hours in a game. E.g., mom isn't gaming 16 hours a day either, yet that didn't prevent her from putting a lot of total time into playing Mercury or Lumines. She just did it in smaller bursts, spread over almost a year. E.g., there are a lot of casual playing moms and pops in MMOs, who did manage to put in as much as 200 or 300 hours into maxxing their character's level. It just was spread over several months, in some cases even over a year. So excuse me if I don't see 20 hours as some unreasonable total time for a game. You _can_ do that even without being 15 years old.
3. "But look how many games you've never finished!!! It just shows that games are too long!!!" Well, bullshit again. If a game reaches the point where it becomes too boring to continue, then that's the real problem, not the length: it's just a boring game. Yes, having too little content dilluted to fill some hideous number of hours is one way to make a boring game, but sometimes it's not even that, it's just badly designed. But even when that's the case, the real problem isn't the length, it's the lack of interesting content to fill that length.
Now that's a good question, I'll concede that, although it's most likely just editing a config file in Notepad.
Still, even if it were an EULA violation, that's still a very far cry from alleging code theft, artwork theft, and SW IP theft, don't you think? I'm pretty sure that, for example, George Lucas's property isn't really violated by editing an IP address.
While those of us that were players are quick to criticize and rightfully call out that "SOE ruined Star Wars!" SOE never did anything that is illegal.
Noone said that anything Sony did was _illegal_ (or unconstitutional or whatever.) That's one... element that _you_ introduced in that discussion, I'm not even sure in response to what.
Then again, I'm sure Palpatine never did anything illegal after he was in power either. I'm sure he just changed the law to give himself full legal rights to do whatever he wanted to do. So even taken that literally, the analogy between Sony and Palpatine doesn't really fail.
But again, that analogy was (A) for comedy purposes, and (B) more reflecting on Sony's oppressive/abusive/disrespectful treatment of their customers, than implying literally that they force-choked anyone, Sith-style.
With that said, the emulator is outright theft of intellecual property owned by Lucas Arts and Sony Online Entertainment. You can argue with me until you are blue in the face about how SOE deserves it, how they screwed their customers, deleted forum posts, etc. but that does not change the fact that Lucas Arts owns the images, likenesses, movie characters, settings and a host of other things that are being used within this emulator.
No. Just no. You have mis-understood that. The emulator is a server-side program that doesn't even need SOE's or Lucas's images. It can't even use them. Those are in the client, and are 100% useless to a server emulator.
Server-side code doesn't actually _need_, say, Darth Vader's 3D model or textures. All that is handled by SOE's client. For the server it's just a generic character with a generic hitbox. It doesn't even need to know it's Darth Vader, or anything that would violate Lucas's IP. For all the server neds to know, it's something like "internal character number 42", or some such. Nothing more. From there to actually rendering that as Darth Vader is the job of the client.
And the client isn't emulated, it's the plain-old SWG client that SOE sold you on a CD. Noone ripped the artwork or anything out of it. It's exactly the program that SOE sold you, only you tell it to connect to an emulated server. Nothing more.
SOE owns the code
And noone stole any SOE code. Noone broke into SOE's network and stole some server-side code, and the client code wasn't even applicable, so the theft just doesn't exist. This is newly-implemented clean-room server code that copied no lines of Sony code whatsoever.
Basically this whole rant just tells me that, no offense, you just mis-understood it all and over-reacted based on that mis-understanding. You _assume_ some code or artwork or franchise thefts that weren't even possible or needed, and then react to those incorrect assumptions.
I can respect your lawful good determination to uphold the law and IP. It's good to see someone lawful good and all that. But here you just mis-understood it as some heinous theft, where there really was none.
according to an SOe devs words on the swg forums he said if someone could do such a task he would hire him on the spot. of course that is assuming whoever said that isnt full of shit.
They probably _are_ full of shit. It's just some funky way of bragging that their game is too complex to be emulated. And, let's face it, bragging is half of what the SWG team is all about. They're too busy polishing their own statue to even fix the damn game. So whether they'll actually make a job offer or not is pretty much irrelevant there. The main point was just to brag.
Mind you, with something like this on one's CV, one can probably get hired anywhere anyway. So it's not like SOE is their only option, or like that dev was saying anything we didn't already know.
I can see SOE trying to hire them just to give them a non-compete aggreement that makes them stop working on the emu, though... Then again, nah, that wouldn't be Sony. They'll just try to sue them into oblivion.
And finally, even if they did get a job at SOE, don't set your hopes too high. It's not like some netcode programmer will be allowed to give much input in game design issues, especially issues that would require getting past some continent-sized egos there. I just can't see it going too well, trying to tell them that you know better then them how to design a game that player would like.
I don't know... I've never worked for them, so I can't say first hand, but seeing the kind of half-arsed run-of-the-mill stuff they churn as content, SOE doesn't strike me as the kind of company that values personal creativity and vision. (And if you read some Penny Arcade rants about EQ2, they seem to be left with the same impression, albeit in their case about the artwork.) Their games are chock-full of such mass-produced illogical crap as getting bone by chopping wood (EQ2), killing deers and bears to find which of them stole a manuscript (EQ2), a sniper scope for a sword (SWG), and other stuff that just makes you wonder. I just can't see someone implementing that kind of idiocy unless they're (A) completely retarded, or (B) just a jaded cog in a corporate machine, that gave up long ago on trying to make sense or to "rock the boat". And it's probably not A.
I mean, seriously, everywhere else you'd get the scripter implementing that coming to the designer and saying "excuse me? did I get this right? I'm supposed to code a quest that has a sniper scope for a _sword_ as a reward? And how? We don't even have the code to attach anything to any weapon." That they went and just coded it half-arsedly as a strength potion that just looks like a sniper scope, makes me really think about it. It's the kind of half-arsed job that people usually do when they're just jaded about their work, and gave up on trying to be anything other than a brainless slave to the wage. It's the kind of half-arsed job you do when you realized long ago that noone gives a damn about your input, thinking isn't rewarded, and you just want to get it over with and set that task as "completed", go home and forget about it all.
As was said, have you _played_ SWG? SOE has been just about the most oppressive and heavy-handed publisher to date. Their approach has always been along the lines of "fuck you, we're Sony and we're right, and you're probably just some whining idiot and a cheater to boot." Deleting any threads even mentioning a game shortcoming, banning people for unfair reasons like unknowingly being tipped with duped money (as if they could even know or refuse), beaming people into space when they had an in-game protest, etc, etc, etc.
Now OK, I know that US constitution amendments don't apply to Sony's private property, but it's hard to not draw some parallels, especially (like the GP post was doing it) in a sarcastic way. It's perfectly valid to say that someone is acting in a dictatorial manner, or compare them to a dictator (e.g., Palpatine), especially in a parody context, if they did half the shit that SOE did. Even though, technically, they're not the ruler of a country or galaxy, so they can't technically be a dictator.
At the very least, Sony shows the same respect for other people that Palpatine and Darth Vader showed. Sure, they're not in a position to physically murder anyone (and get away with it), but they're just as sociopathic anyway. The only difference is that it's the corporate kind of a psychopath rather than the axe-murderer (or red-lightsaber-murderer) kind. But that's pretty much it.
Maybe SWG should read thier forums more than to just delete negative threads, but actually notice how you have four pages of poeple saying they would recommend pre-cu(pre-combat upgrade) SWG to friends, but not the NGE(new game enhancements)-SWG to friends.
Now that would be a bit of a paradox, wouldn't it? A Sony which cares about its customers and about what they want? (And for that matter a Raph Koster that cares about customers, instead of doing some more ego-masturbation along the lines of "I know what players find fun better than the players themselves"?) Now that's one mental exercise that's not for the uninitiated or faint of heart. It's a bit like trying to imagine a fish that can't breath water, or a really tall dwarf, or a triangle without three sides, or the sound of one hand clapping.
This is Sony. What makes you think they give a damn about getting bad press or alienating customers?
I mean in this case they even have some excuse that they're protecting their IP, but they've been known to do worse stuff just because they could. From SOE's heavy-handed handling of customer relations, to the Sony rootkit of their music division, to the PS3 interviews (especially the one where they say you should get a second job already if you can't afford a PS3), to a few other things, there seems to be this common trend about Sony's corporate culture: they don't give a fuck about the customer. They're the great Sony, you're the peon who's there just to pay your taxes to Sony. And they have no qualms with bashing your door in to see if you've been poaching their royal deer.
And just look at the history of SWG. The team had no problems with wantonly pissing off their paying customers in any way they could. Ranging from "merely" outright lies, to banning people for being tipped with duped money (as if anyone could know they've been tipped with duped money, or refuse a tip), to a patch that rolled back a sold expansion pack, to the rest of the NGE, to God knows what else. Even the quality of the game itself, ranging from still lacking content for whole classes (after how many years?), to illogical mass produced content (e.g., a "sword scope" that's, yes, a sniper scope for a sword... except it works like a potion, since they don't actually have the mechanics to attach a scope to anything), to content that's little more than just merchandising the SW characters, etc, the common theme seems to be that they just don't give a fuck. They do what they damn please, and if you like it or not, that's your problem, not theirs.
I mean, seriously, how do you top selling an expansion pack for real money and then rolling it back in a patch? Or banning half the player base for something as out of their control as being tipped, and then beaming the protesters into space? Suing a bunch of fans of the old game seems pretty tame when put in that perspective.
One problem with treating a child as an adult is that they don't have the experiences to back up their decisions.
Oh, we can aggree there very quickly. In fact, I find that a very productive attitude. I wish more people thought that way.
It's in a way the exact opposite of the "kids are illogical little idiots" attitude I was against. Once you've accepted that they _can_ follow at least basic "cause ==> effect" reasoning and just lack the experience to make much use out of it, the road is open to a honest discussion and giving them the data that they lack. I find that very productive.
Face it, the vast majority of kids don't speak multiple languages fluently by 1st grade or can do basic physics by then.
Well, looking back, I certainly hope they don't need to. In my case it was just a bad auto-allergic reaction that transformed the slightest cold into an asthmatic bronchitis that pinned me in bed for _months_. It's a lot easier to read a book in bed than to go play with sticks and puddles, when you barely have enough air even to survive horizontal in bed. I must thank grandma for teaching me to read there. It would have been a lot shittier to just stare at the ceiling instead.
I must say, though, I don't think it's been that bad on the whole. Learning that the lightbulb works because of an electrical current going through the wire there wasn't that horrible, I must say. It's an age where you're pre-programmed to learn as much new stuff as you can, so, well, it's not any worse to learn that instead of some wonderful pseudo-explanation with pixies and fairies. And it made just as good fantasy material: you can dream of flying bikes just as well when you have some crude and inaccurate idea of what would take to make a bike fly.
Languages too come pretty naturally to learn at that age. It's actually a _lot_ easier to learn a foreign language when you're three and, well, that's what you're pre-programmed to do at that age. Even your mother tongue is a foreign language you're learning at that age. And doubly so when it's the highlight of the day that grandma comes over to your bed to teach you French using Pif comics. Heck, it sure beat being sick and alone.
But I digress. The point, sorta, was just that small kids aren't idiots. I don't think I was anyone special. Just, you know, your average Calvin. Those shitty circumstances, sure, they gave me enough incentive to learn, because there was nothing else to do, but I'd think the mental capacity is there in most kids. That was, really, the whole point.
Even if they could, learning facts and being able to apply them to real life are two different skills.
Heh... I think I understand what you're saying. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. And it's just normal human biology, not anything even remotely blamable on "immaturity" or on the western culture or anything.
See, the brain doesn't see absolute levels, when it comes to being happy or unhappy. It sees a differential. It sees the difference to the previous state, not absolute values. You can't just say "at standard of living X you're perpetually unhappy, at standard Y you're perpetually happy." If both X and Y are were constant at all time, both would have zero difference to the previous state at all time, so both would be stuck somewhere in the middle: neither happy, nor unhappy.
Well, it's not even that simple. The more detailed explanation is that the brain gives you "I'm happy" or "I'm unhappy" chemical signals for stuff that is respectively judged as being an improvement or a worsening of your current situation. E.g., if I'm getting hungry, I'm getting less happy, and if then I'm eating, I'm temporarily happier for fulfilling that need.
But here's that catch: those chemical signals also immediately trigger the release of the "antidote" that will gradually bring you back to the baseline. Otherwise eating once would keep you happy for the rest of your days. And you're not supposed to stay perpetually happy like that. You're supposed to almost immediately need to work on your next "I'm happy" signal, e.g., fulfill your next need.
What I'm saying is that old farts ranting and raving stuff like "back in my day we didn't have TV or microwave ovens and we were happy like that" are missing the whole bloody point. It just doesn't work that way. Humans back in the 50's, or humans in Ghana, were adjusted to one given "point" in the space of desires and available means. Happiness or unhappiness are judged with that point as a reference point. They were the deviations from _that_ point. Humans in the USA or EU in 2006 are adjusted to another point. So, yes, they judge their happiness or unhappiness, their achievements or losses, compared to that other point. Now they're the deviations from _this_ point.
Or to put it otherwise, imagine that you took a caveman and let him live 5 year intervals in various times in history. Let's say you moved him from his cave to a hut in ancient Greece. For a while he's happy, then this improved standard becomes his new baseline. From there happiness and sadness, achievement and loss, are compared to this new state, not to his old days in the cave. If from there you moved him to a modern day third world, he'd be happy again for a while... then get adjusted to this new standard. Then you'd move him to being a rich homeowner in the suburbs, and he'd now be happy for a while, then... adjust to this new state as his new reference point.
There is no maturity or immaturity involved there, since it's the same human that grew up with the same hardships. It's just adjusting to a different reference point. What's a signifficant positive delta for one situation ("yay, I have some meat today") is just the baseline for another ("yeh, so I have meat, just like every day. What's the big improvement or reason for celebration?") to being a _negative_ delta compared to a very high reference point ("oh, dear, the meat today isn't baked in fine french wine and the spices are rather bland").
In fact, you don't even have to believe that hypothetical scenario. There are plenty of RL scenarios showing just that. E.g., just look at how consumerism is a never-ending race because of that very phenomenon. It may seem like "man, if I had a plasma TV I'd be soo happy"... and you actually would... for a couple of days, until it becomes the baseline. Then it's back to needing the next delta, if you want to be happy again. E.g., see how winning the lottery jackpot is way more likely to make one depressed for life, instead of locking them into perpetual bliss.
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All I see there is Carmack being either (A) a complete nerd, for whom sticking to some rules is more important than his friends, or (B) being a dick willing to ruin everyone's campaign just to teach Romero a lesson.
It wasn't Romero that decided to introduce the devil into the game, and it wasn't Romero that made that NPC summon enough demons to destroy the world. It was the GM. Plain and simple. It was the kind of spiteful GM action that occasionally nukes everyone's characters to make a point, or as a quick "I've got the power" trip, or just being tired of the existing campaign. We've all run into moments like that.
The fact is, the game was at all times under the control of the GM. If you don't want your players to nuke the world, don't lead them to a room with big red button that launches the nukes. If you don't want them to bring forth the apocalypse, don't lead them to a room with a big pentagram and written instructions on how to summon the four horsemen. Etc. If you choose to "test" them with an event that may destroy the world, don't be surprised if they push the big red button just to see what happens.
And if you really want to save the world, you can always twist the rules as you like. That's why you're called a Game _Master_. Maybe decide that that big red button needed to first be activated by the Pentagon, or could be overriden by the Pentagon, so the missiles don't launch. Maybe a bunch of soldiers charge in and try to arrest the party, shooting the cable from that switch in the process. Etc.
Or in your example, maybe the devil can be toned down so the party can win. Maybe, I don't know, an archangel descends and blasts the book into oblivion. Whatever. If you're the GM, you have the power to pull that kind of shit.
Basically if you're the GM and (A) you've lead the players to a situation where they can destroy the world, and (B) you let them do that, then just accept the responsibility. _You_ ended the game, not the players. It's ok, if that's what you wanted to do. Start a new campaign or whatever. But don't be a prick and act as if some player is a great monster that deserves all the blame.
Plus, it's just a freakin' game. Acting like Romero is some monster that destroyed the whole world, strikes me as (A) taking it waaaay too seriously, and (B) pretty damn unimaginative and contrary to the whole spirit of the game.
I mean, have you actually played a tabletop RPG? That's exactly what the players are supposed to do. In a sense, it's sort of like playing chess against the GM. The whole fun is trying to (A) personally be creative and (B) to challenge others to be creative, in response to some unforeseen twist. That's a _two_ way street: the GM challenges the players and the players challenge the GM.
Heck, even that Demonicron episode's tame stuff. Look at some episodes on Full Frontal Nerdity (same site as Nodwick) for some stuff that good gamers can pull. Stuff like someone choosing the "royal blood" trait just so later they can usurp the new king of the realm, and turn the whole campaign on its head. Now that's the good stuff. That's what good players _do_.
As long as it's not deliberately trying to annoy someone or prevent them from achieving their goals, acting unpredictably in a creative way is what RP is all about. Just following the campaign and acting in a predictable way is _boring_.
From there it's the GM's job to react. It may be some equally surprising twist, or just proclaiming it to not be possible, or somewhere in between. That's what the game is all about.
As opposed to someone I know going fishing for 12 hours straight? Lemme guess, that's sooo contributing to society. It's been such a great gain for the country and community that he's caught half a pound worth of fish.
As opposed to sitting in front of the TV and watching football? Or soap operas? Or channel-surfing to see the same news again and again? Well, gee, that's so productive. I soo want to be like those when I grow up. Not.
No, you "grow the fuck up" already. People aren't at work 16 hours a day like in the middle ages any more. There are 8 hours a day of being productive. The rest is called "free" time. Hint: "free" as in "I'm free to spend it in any damn way I see fit, no matter how unproductive." Whether I want to use it tweaking a car, or collecting stamps, or playing a computer game, it's 100% only my decision. It's _my_ time, I used it as _I_ see fit.
If you don't like my passtime, tough luck, it's your problem not mine. Maybe you could find one for yourself that doesn't involve telling others what to do? Maybe grow up and realize that the world doesn't revolve around you?
Because if you die at your home computer in your house, it just gets written as Trombosis, which is due to all that sitting without moving can cause. Or whatever else killed you.
If you do it in a cyber-cafe in Korea, they publish a story like "gamer dies after a month of playing Lineage!!!"
Note that in most of those cases the guy didn't exactly die at the computer, but did something like go to the bathroom and die or go to the bar to ask for some water and die. So if you did it in your home, they wouldn't even find you at the computer with WoW running.
Well, not contradicting what you wrote, but more as a reminder to everyone else: Daikatana was a complex phenomenon, at no number of designers could have saved it past a certain point.
For starters, it was largely a management failure, rather than a game design failure. The game design wasn't particularly bad, and in some ways it was ahead of its time. E.g., Daikatana tried to have a story in a FPS long before Half-Life, for example. In fact, it tried to have a story at a point in time where everyone else was churning mindless Wolfenstein 3D clones. And by comparison, once John Romero was gone, Id reverted to John Carmack's view that a plot is as needed for a game as for a porno movie.
What killed most of that design for Daikatana was simply being released so late as to not matter any more. Story in a FPS was no longer unheard of, the game engine was outdated, and some of the artwork looked like classic ass by sheer virtue of being old by now.
And that, in turn, could be traced to just bad management of the project and the company as a whole. John Romero wasn't necessarily bad at game design, but he was useless as a manager. All I'm saying is: let's not confuse the two issues, because they're different skills.
Plus, let's not underestimate the effect of Ion Storm's being the "victim" of a massive hype backlash. Partially because of its own PR blunders, that's for sure. (E.g., the "bitch" ad.) But also partially because a few idiots started screaming that Ion Storm killed Looking Glass, when Eidos let Looking Glass die. Suddenly it was _fashionable_ to be against John Romero and mourning Looking Glass, and a lot of SFVs (Stupid Fashion Victims) joined in the chorus without even having a fucking clue what they're pro or against in that campaign.
So me say just one thing: if a _quarter_ of the people posting all "Daikatana sucks!!!" all over the place had actually played the fucking game, it would have been a major commercial success. It would have probably outsold The Sims. No, that's not saying it was that good, it's just saying how many SFVs were posting about it without even having seen it. Just because it was fashionable to be against it. It was instant karma to bitch about how much Daikatana sucks.
A lot of people still bitching about how bad Daikatana's design or gameplay supposedly was, still haven't actually even _seen_ that design or gameplay.
No, I'm not saying that it was great, but it was's as bad as people love to post all over the place either. It was just a mediocre FPS with a story. No more, no less. I _am_ however, saying, that the world would be a better place if people refrained from talking about stuff they have no clue about. I wish that everyone who hasn't actually played Daikatana (or whatever other game) just freakin' gave it a break already and talked about things they've actually experienced, instead of rehashing the same old canned hype they've read on some site.
There were games with much better levels and gameplay long before Doom, or even Wolfenstein 3D, they just weren't textured. E.g., Bethesda had a Terminator game that featured walking or _driving_ (yes, driving) around a town, with cars, pedestrians (yep, you could run them over), etc, years before Doom. It took the textured FPS genre almost a decade to get back to that point.
Or Ultima Underworld? It was a complex RPG and had a much more complex 3D engine too. It came out around the same time as Wolfenstein 3D and it still allowed far more complex and, well, "more 3D" maps than Doom would much later. E.g., the UU engine allowed bridges and tunnels under other tunnels, while Doom was still a 2D map with terrain elevation.
What Doom had was simply a more vocal gang of willy-wavers. The kind of personalities that just had to willy-wave about their deathmatch score were suddenly all over the place, making 10 times more noise than the peaceful SP RPG players, and acting as if they're speaking for some absolute majority. Doom was being proclaimed all over the place as the genre of the future, and indeed the only genre that anyone plays any more, at a time where SP console RPGs routinely out-sold it 10 to 1. Heck, even adventures were outselling Doom.
And I never cease to be amazed by the sheer number of people sharing that belief that there's some magical amulet (uber-security program/appliance/whatever) that you can just tack onto a site and make it auto-magically secure.
Unfortunately that kind of thinking is outright counter-productive. It's dangerous. It's the kind of thinking that breeds such disasters as "we use SSL, so we're secure." (Shame that someone uploaded confidential documents on the web site anyway, so they can be downloaded by anyone. _Securely_ downloaded, to be sure;) Or "we have a Snake Oil (TM) gateway that can scan SOAP requests, so we're secure." (Shame that noone actually configured the rules for it, though. Or shame that the Web front-end there allowed users to escalate their privileges _before_ it all got packed in a SOAP request: the gateway can't detect whether it's genuinely a site admin or a regular user who escalated their privileges.) Or "we have a hardened Single Sign-On front-end in front of the servers, enforcing login and access rights, so we're secure." (Shame, that, literally, one application allowed users to escalate their privileges and see any content, by just editing the URL. E.g., someone could edit the admin's password by just editing the admin's user ID in the URL for the password change page, _then_ properly log in as the admin through that hardened SSO front-end. Literally. I'm not making it up.) Etc.
But to address your actual point: content scanners aren't the answer, or rather are a bad and incomplete answer. E.g., I've seen one company deploy such a thing in front of the back-end, in their case to supposedly protect against SQL injection in the front-end. So it rejected anything that looked like an SQL keyword. Should be secure, right? But what do you do if it's not as secure or well-programmed as you think? E.g., the thing would cause a form submit to fail if you wrote something like "Visa Select" in a field, because it contained "select", but actually failed to protect against actual SQL injection using the quote sign, or XSS injection using the greater-then and less-than signs.
Worse yet, it encouraged everyone to be lax and don't bother thinking about security or doing a code review, because, hey, they have the magical amulet on the backend. Even worse, it encouraged managers to not allocate time or resources for an actual security review.
Security isn't about magical amulets, it's "holistic", so to speak. The security chain is literally as weak as the weakest link. People need to be educated to actually sit and think about the whole and about every single piece and scenario, not to throw in a couple of +5 Security amulets and call it a day. Throwing in the towel and relying on some magical amulet which somehow makes it all secure just because it's there, is actually the antonym and nemesis of security.
Even if such appliances and programs are used, someone needs to sit and think about how they're used, how they affect their own program, what they prevent, and most importantly what they _don't_ prevent. What data and how does it prevent from being stolen, and what happens when (not if) someone _does_ get through. E.g., what data you shouldn't be collecting in the first place anyway, because you don't actually need it. (If it's not there at all, it can't get stolen.) And most often the right thing to do is _not_ to rely on them: they're there as a last ditch defense, that can't catch everything, but it's one last chance to _maybe_ catch something that got through the other layers of defense. Not as a replacement for the other layers.
And teams and managers need to be educated that they _need_ to do just that: sit and do a proper analysis. And not just the technical implementation parts, but also, yes, the people processes involved. E.g., if a process can w
Eh, actually our department still clings to the idea of hiring competent people and paying them well. The complaint was about the monkeys in the IT department, who are neither.
No, you've just told me that _you_ need stress in a game. (And another post down the line apparently needs fear of losing.) But from there to extrapolating that all humans need stress, it's a big blanket generalization.
E.g., some of the most fun games I've played were Lucas Arts adventures like Secret Of Monkey Island or Day Of The Tentacle. There was nothing stressful about them. They were just funny. In fact, if anyone played DOTT in a way that made them get stressed, I'd seriously worry about them.
The fact is, not all humans are the same and not all humans play for the same purpose.
E.g., in the MUD/MMO arena we've known for years that there are, for example, Bartle's 4 player types, and they have fundamentally different goals and reasons for playing a game. A Socializer for example is there mainly to socialize or otherwise peacefully interact with other people, and they actually _resent_ being stressed by those they interact with. (Which makes them the favourite prey for griefers: a victim which takes it personally is the sweetest kind of victim for a griefer.) An Explorer for example is mainly interested in discovering things and plays in a thoroughly non-competitive manner: they're really _not_ trying to compete either with other players or with the environment. They're _not_ there (mainly) to either be the greatest in PvP, nor to achieve tangible material goals like gaining more xp or gold or epic equipment, nor to prove that they can overcome some challenge. I.e., there's very little reason to get stressed when playing as an Explorer.
And you can see it the best in MMOs if you look not at the Real Man (TM) die-hard willy-waver gang grinding up their PvP rank, but at crafters and the occasional social class like SWG's Entertainers. Some people genuinely play those classes because they prefer doing something peaceful and non-stressing, and not just for gold for a bigger sword or as part of the hologrind to Jedi. Some people genuinely like to just, you know, get together and chat while hacking at an ore vein with a pickaxe, in a thoroughly non-challengin place. Some people genuinely like to get together and RP, or have a party in the Mos Eisley cantina, and forget the stress, not look for more of it.
E.g., take movies or books, which are another popular passtime. The genres don't include just action and horror flicks, they also include comedies, romance flicks, documentaries, and generally a ton of stuff which causes exactly zero stress in the viewers. And in a sense you can see shades of Bartle's player interests again. E.g., an "Explorer" kinda personality might just watch a documentary on the Discovery Channel instead of getting all pumped up on adrenaline with an action flick.
Basically, just because most games so far have followed the model of porn movies, where all they ever try to do is appeal to your base instincts and hormones, doesn't mean that that's the only model or possible audience. Yes, there are people who need stress and pressure, and you can see that at work too: some people don't seem to be happy unless they're stressed, and will actively seek or create reasons to be stressed. But then some (most?) don't.
Basically, the sooner we get out of blanket generalizations like "all games need a challenge" or "all gamers need stress", the better off we'll all be.
Well, that reminds me... seeing the recent story on /. about people becoming more immature, I've also been wondering about going a million years down that path. You might just get a civilization where you don't just get Steve Irwin, but people who travel half the galaxy just to cut a crop circle on someone's farm or to tip their cows.
I'm still waiting for the day when someone will decode a SETI signal like "asl??? u wanna cyber??? what u wear???"
Or better yet:
"Lol, d00d, watch this!!!"
*BOOM a star goes supernova*
"OMGWTFBBQ!!!"
"LMAO!!!"
A very insightful point indeed. Considering that the whole human evolution from ape to civilization is measured in millions of years, a civilization that's one billion years older would probably have evolved a lot even biologically in that time. So, indeed, you're right. I wouldn't be surprised if their view of our species were comparable to what we think of baboons.
Lots of people here seem to assume that somehow the skins are for the web site, or overriding CSS elements, or whatever, which is just not the case. What she was talking about with those skins is: fake UI. Nothing more, nothing less.
.gif images in the page itself. The page is, say, a frame set with three horizontal frames: one at the top, with a faked toolbar and URL bar (with the correct URL of the bank in that .gif, and correctly colour coded as if it were Mozilla saying it's HTTPS), the login page in the middle, and a faked status bar at the bottom (complete with the padlock icon telling you it's secure.)
E.g., let's say that you got your old mom to use Mozilla, so she has _both_ the coloured URL box _and_ the padlock on the status bar as indication that she's indeed at a secure site. I'll assume you've also educated her to carefully read the URL up there.
So noone can fool her now, right? I mean, right? Well, wrong. One attack method they used in that study was fake UI.
So let's say your mom now lands at some www.phishers-r-us.ru site pretending to be her bank. The site doesn't even use SSL or anything. How can that site spoof all those checks both up there in the browser's toolbar and down there on the status bar? Simple. Fake them.
So the site gives you a javascripted popup, requesting a window without those interface elements. But fakes them as
_That_ is the problem. Fake UI fools most users.
So the researcher's idea is basically, "I know, so let's encourage each user to skin their own UI." So let's say your mom has set her Mozilla UI to be brushed blue-hued metal, the colour for HTTPS URLs to be green, and the padlock icon to be replaced by a thumbs up icon. The fake UI site can't know that. So when they show her a page with the UI in the default colours and icons instead of hers, hopefully your mom will know that it's faked UI. It doesn't look like her other browser windows.
Now personally I think the idea isn't that great anyway, since (A) it requires users to actually do that, and I'll bet most will just click on the default theme and be done with it, and (B) because it's working around what I consider a fucking stupid mis-feature. IMHO there's no need to allow browser windows without an URL bar and without a status bar in the first place. In an age where those are the main (and often only) things that can warn you against such attacks, allowing a site to disable them is just stupid. So just disable the option to hide the UI and, voila, suddenly noone can fake that UI any more. It's that simple.
Oh, you mean just like the challenge of meeting the Europeans helped the African tribes? Oh, wait, they were dragged in chains to be slaves on a plantation. Well, I suppose that sure prevented them from becoming lazy. (Although it did help with becoming stupid. There wasn't much education or a cultural life on a plantation.)
.50 heavy machinegun could mow down that compact formation without breaking a sweat. (A wooden shield and a bronze breastplate would _not_ stop that. In fact, even _steel_ shields and steel breastplates wouldn't, and the ancient greeks had no such things.) Or a couple of guys with grenades could blow that compact formation to smithereens.
Or like meeting the Spanish gave the Aztecs a challenge? Well, they were challenged all right. Their weapons couldn't even penetrate a conquistador's armour, and their battle tactics doomed them from the start.
Basically don't think that meeting an alien civilization will happen on equal terms, like in SF movies. Even assuming that the maximum age of a Sun-like star would put a maximum age cap on a civilization (although a star faring one might be even older), a civilization you'd meet could be _billions_ of years old. Stars kept forming and dying since the dawn of the universe, out of sync with each other, so a civilization you meet now might be from a star that's a few billions years older and just about starting to die. (Which would also give them a damn good incentive to take yours as living space.)
So basically roll a random number between 1 and, say, 3,000,000,000. That's the age of a civilization you might encounter. Compare it to the age of the human civilization. Teh oops. The aliens are _far_ ahead, aren't they. Even the odds of their civilization being "only" a million years old are of the order of 1 in 3000. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't bet on something at those odds.
But even "only" a million years old is _huge_. The technological difference, even if they were lazy and stupid and only advanced 1/10 as fast, would be well in the realm of "magic" for us.
Think what a difference of less than 200 years means on Earth: think a modern destroyer (not even a battleship) against Lord Nelson's whole fleet at Trafalgar. I mean, heh, with its engines it would have no problem staying just outside the range of their old guns, and could sink them quite easily even with just the 5" guns. It doesn't even need missiles or anything for that. Heck, probably even the _AA_ guns on a modern destroyer could simply cut through the wood.
And if you want to be a complete asshole -- e.g., if you're another species and feel no empathy for those aliens in wooden vessels -- you could use exactly one tactical nuke to wipe out the whole fleet in just one shot. One.
Now move on to a difference 10 times bigger: an authentic Greek phalanx, in bronze armours and with bronze spears, versus a modern mechanized infantry division. No, forget what you've learned in Civ 4, IRL the phalanx would inflict exactly zero casualties before being utterly wiped out. It's not just that their equipment is inferior, it's that even their tactics were utterly unfit as soon as anyone of equal tech level learned how to outflank. (See the complete wipe out of the Romans at Canae.) If you tried standing tall in the open, in a compact formation, against a modern army, and imagined that your wooden shield protects you, you'd be dead before you can say "ouch". A single
And again, if you wanted to be a complete asshole and get rid of some non-humans with the minimum fuss, you could just break out the chemical weapons. Their armours won't even start to be any use against that. Sure, we don't use them agains
To start with answering your questions: the PC's-with-wrong-drivers episode happened in August 2002. (Don't ask me why they still used NT 4.0 in 2002. Maybe some beancounter thought he saved money by sticking to it.) The RAM upgrade episode happened two months ago. Yep, in 2006. Formatting a workstation instead of replacing the RAM also happened at that time.
So, nope, I don't have to reach too far back for those examples.
Either way, you're latching onto the irrelevant detail there:
The point is _not_ about the quality of NT 4.0 or its drivers. Yes, as you correctly say, "Supporting workstations today, by comparison, is a much simpler ordeal. Finding drivers on the Internet is commonplace." That's what I did too, back then. I just pointed the browser at the manufacturer's web site, and downloaded the correct drivers. It certainly was no challenge and no great feat of engineering.
The point is about the quality of the _people_ involved. Precisely _because_ it would have been that easy to get the right drivers, I find it just inexcusable incompetence to install the wrong ones. I mean, FFS, not even from the correct manufacturer. The clueless monkeys just had a drive image on a CD, and proceeded to mindlessly install it on all PCs without ever stopping to use their brains. Like, I don't know, find out the hardware configuration first.
_That's_ the point. And it's pretty damn sad.
And let me assure you that it's not just NT 4.0. They're just as clueless under XP. (We did get XP eventually. Keyword: eventually.) The computer they formatted instead of installing RAM was an XP machine. The one where they proclaimed it to work, even though it couldn't actually load Windows, was an XP machine. Fat lot of good that did.
How about Stefan-Boltzman, then? Last I've checked it was still accepted in reputable science circles. There's this law that says that the energy radiated by a black body's unit of surface in a unit of time is proportional to the fourth power of its absolute temperature.
Now let's look at global warming. A 1C temperature increase in a century is a 1K temperature increase. Let's say Earth's average temperature is 300K, or at least so close to that as to not make much of a difference in the maths that follow. A 1K temperature increase is a, pay attention, 0.33% temperature increase.
Yes, I know that bullshit save-the-earth rhetoric describes the change as "huge", "unprecedented" and other emotional hyperboles, but that's how much it is in actual science units. A whole 0.33%. A third of a percent. Which is just as well, since if you actually had a "huge" increase in SI terms, you'd be cooked. Literally.
Now let's plug that into Stefan-Boltzman's formula. The relative increase in radiated energy is (T2/T1)^4. The constant would be present both above and below the fraction line, so it neatly goes away. So since T2/T1 is 1.0033, we have an increase in radiated energy equal to 1.0033^4 = 1.013. A whole 1.3% increase.
Now let's also remember that equilibrium is reached when the radiated energy equals the the incoming energy. So, yep, there you go, you only need a 1.3% fluctuation in the Sun's energy output, or again a 0.33% difference in the Sun's temperature (Stefan-Boltzman applies there too), to account for the _whole_ global warming.
Note that I'm not saying that that's necessarily the case. Maybe, maybe not. Hell if I know.
_All_ I'm saying is just that, seriously, you don't actually need huge numbers to account for a 0.33% difference in temperature. Sometimes about 1% is really all you need. Sometimes just because political speeches describe something as "huge", it doesn't actually need huge numbers.
You'd be surprised where else you won't find good techs.
E.g., for the last 4 years I've been sorta a permanent consultant/contractor at a big corporation. You'd think that they could afford competent people, right? I mean, when you have tens of thousands of PCs (quite literally), it pays to have them well set up at least, right?
Well, wrong. PCs always routinely came with some stupidly wrong image installed.
E.g., the batch mine was in came with the wrong IDE drivers. Thank goodness Windows didn't use those, but performance was _abysmal_. You wouldn't believe how slow a fairly modern HDD is with NT 4.0's default drivers in PIO mode. Even stuff like switching between applications took seconds. (I assume that NT swapped some of the old app out, or something.)
E.g., they came with Matrox drivers installed... even though they had Nvidia cards.
Now being crazy enough to do the non-standard thing, I did download the right drivers off the internet and got our boss to give us the admin password to install them. But, you know, (A) I shouldn't have to. Wtf is the IT department for, if I have to do that. And (B) I wonder how many peons in other departments just gnash their teeth and put up with a system that performs like a lobotomized 486.
But let's delve a bit further into this madness...
So at some point it was decided to finally upgrade our RAM. So they send two IT drones to open the PCs and replace the RAM sticks. Easy job, right? I mean, right? Well, you wouldn't believe the uphill struggle that it was on every single PC. The problem? The RAM timings on the new sticks were different. So on every single PC, out of a batch of identical PCs, it was starting again from scratch digging into the BIOS and randomly changing stuff until it worked. You'd think they'd at least be able to remember what they did to the first half a dozen PCs by the time they get to the next one.
One coleague was left with a PC which was proclaimed to work after passing POST. Except it froze when trying to load Windows.
It gets better. They couldn't make one PC work at all, so they took it with them. It came back without the extra RAM, but freshly formatted and reinstalled. They fucking deleted that guy's 2 years worth of work instead of installing the RAM, and didn't even do a backup first. (Well, at least the sources were in CVS, but everything else, e.g., emails, documents he's downloaded, etc, wasn't.) How _does_ one end up formatting the hard drive instead of replacing the RAM? I mean, seriously, at which point are they similar or related enough to accidentally do one instead of the other?
And if you thought that the PC drones are the only ones without half a brain, let's just say that we actually have the whole flying circus. We have DBAs who don't know how to admin a database, and have to be told exactly what commands to run on it. (And occasionally do stupid stuff on their own, like disabling XA transactions on a productive Oracle database, because they thought it just takes up memory and doesn't do anything.) We have Unix admins who don't actually know jack about Unix. And I don't mean as in "not experts." I mean they probably haven't even _seen_ a Unix prompt before, and aren't going to start learning now. Etc.
*sigh* Methinks cost cutting is good and fine, but sometimes people should know when to stop. At the point where such clueless monkeys are hired just because they're very cheap... maybe it's already too much.
Well, thank you, Captain Obvious. What would we ever have done without you?
Well, seriously, I'm no longer playing SWG. But I still have all the contempt in the world for Sony's self-centered corporate culture anyway.
You know, noone forces you or him to play a 20 hour game in a 20 hour burst. If he only gets an hour a day to play, then a 20 hour game will keep him entertained for 3 weeks. I fail to see why that's a bad thing. He's proposing, what? That if he only has 1 hour a day, games should be 1 hour long? He wants to have to buy a new game each day, or what?
Plus, in my book it's not the vendor that should tell everyone what the consumer really wants. Ask a consumer, if you want to know what the consumer wants.
It's getting on my nerves already, the way the games industry seems to think that just repeating some bullshit often enough will eventually make it true. And not just about the game length, but I'm already digressing.
Do gamers want shorter games? Since when? The usual complaint I hear from actual gamers is that some gamer was too short, not that it was too long. Buying, say, an RPG used to keep you entertained for something like 70 hours. (And I'm not even getting into the _good_ replayable ones like Fallout 2 or Arena or Daggerfall, which I've sunk _hundreds_ of hours into.) Now we're down to games which one can finish in one sunday afternoon. It's already getting 1/8 as much bang per buck. Is any actual gamer actually demanding that they become even shorter? Did anyone finish, say, Fable and go, "man, I so wish it had only half as much content"? Or did anyone who's played a Gran Turismo game find themselves thinking "man, I so wish this had only 2 cars and 3 races, so it doesn't need more than a couple of hours to see everything"?
I mean, seriously, wtf? Since when and where did consumers start demanding less for their money?
So I'll tell you what it is: bullshit PR. The vendor wishes they could sell you half as much stuff for the same money, or at least not much less money. So they proceed to tell you again and again that you really want less stuff. No, seriously, you do. Trust us. Would we lie to you? Again?
And since the same bullshit fallacies pop up again and again, let's dismantle them once and for all:
1. "But I don't have 20 hours in a day!!!" Well, guess what? That's what save and restore are for. Unless he has a bad case of Alzheimer's (so tomorrow he won't remember what he's been doing or why), he just doesn't have to finish a game in one day.
2. "But I'm no longer a teen who has all the time in the world!! Only those can put 20 hours into a game!!!" Well, that's bullshit. I've seen casual gamers sink more than 20 hours in a game. E.g., mom isn't gaming 16 hours a day either, yet that didn't prevent her from putting a lot of total time into playing Mercury or Lumines. She just did it in smaller bursts, spread over almost a year. E.g., there are a lot of casual playing moms and pops in MMOs, who did manage to put in as much as 200 or 300 hours into maxxing their character's level. It just was spread over several months, in some cases even over a year. So excuse me if I don't see 20 hours as some unreasonable total time for a game. You _can_ do that even without being 15 years old.
3. "But look how many games you've never finished!!! It just shows that games are too long!!!" Well, bullshit again. If a game reaches the point where it becomes too boring to continue, then that's the real problem, not the length: it's just a boring game. Yes, having too little content dilluted to fill some hideous number of hours is one way to make a boring game, but sometimes it's not even that, it's just badly designed. But even when that's the case, the real problem isn't the length, it's the lack of interesting content to fill that length.
Now that's a good question, I'll concede that, although it's most likely just editing a config file in Notepad.
Still, even if it were an EULA violation, that's still a very far cry from alleging code theft, artwork theft, and SW IP theft, don't you think? I'm pretty sure that, for example, George Lucas's property isn't really violated by editing an IP address.
Noone said that anything Sony did was _illegal_ (or unconstitutional or whatever.) That's one... element that _you_ introduced in that discussion, I'm not even sure in response to what.
Then again, I'm sure Palpatine never did anything illegal after he was in power either. I'm sure he just changed the law to give himself full legal rights to do whatever he wanted to do. So even taken that literally, the analogy between Sony and Palpatine doesn't really fail.
But again, that analogy was (A) for comedy purposes, and (B) more reflecting on Sony's oppressive/abusive/disrespectful treatment of their customers, than implying literally that they force-choked anyone, Sith-style.
No. Just no. You have mis-understood that. The emulator is a server-side program that doesn't even need SOE's or Lucas's images. It can't even use them. Those are in the client, and are 100% useless to a server emulator.
Server-side code doesn't actually _need_, say, Darth Vader's 3D model or textures. All that is handled by SOE's client. For the server it's just a generic character with a generic hitbox. It doesn't even need to know it's Darth Vader, or anything that would violate Lucas's IP. For all the server neds to know, it's something like "internal character number 42", or some such. Nothing more. From there to actually rendering that as Darth Vader is the job of the client.
And the client isn't emulated, it's the plain-old SWG client that SOE sold you on a CD. Noone ripped the artwork or anything out of it. It's exactly the program that SOE sold you, only you tell it to connect to an emulated server. Nothing more.
And noone stole any SOE code. Noone broke into SOE's network and stole some server-side code, and the client code wasn't even applicable, so the theft just doesn't exist. This is newly-implemented clean-room server code that copied no lines of Sony code whatsoever.
Basically this whole rant just tells me that, no offense, you just mis-understood it all and over-reacted based on that mis-understanding. You _assume_ some code or artwork or franchise thefts that weren't even possible or needed, and then react to those incorrect assumptions.
I can respect your lawful good determination to uphold the law and IP. It's good to see someone lawful good and all that. But here you just mis-understood it as some heinous theft, where there really was none.
They probably _are_ full of shit. It's just some funky way of bragging that their game is too complex to be emulated. And, let's face it, bragging is half of what the SWG team is all about. They're too busy polishing their own statue to even fix the damn game. So whether they'll actually make a job offer or not is pretty much irrelevant there. The main point was just to brag.
Mind you, with something like this on one's CV, one can probably get hired anywhere anyway. So it's not like SOE is their only option, or like that dev was saying anything we didn't already know.
I can see SOE trying to hire them just to give them a non-compete aggreement that makes them stop working on the emu, though... Then again, nah, that wouldn't be Sony. They'll just try to sue them into oblivion.
And finally, even if they did get a job at SOE, don't set your hopes too high. It's not like some netcode programmer will be allowed to give much input in game design issues, especially issues that would require getting past some continent-sized egos there. I just can't see it going too well, trying to tell them that you know better then them how to design a game that player would like.
I don't know... I've never worked for them, so I can't say first hand, but seeing the kind of half-arsed run-of-the-mill stuff they churn as content, SOE doesn't strike me as the kind of company that values personal creativity and vision. (And if you read some Penny Arcade rants about EQ2, they seem to be left with the same impression, albeit in their case about the artwork.) Their games are chock-full of such mass-produced illogical crap as getting bone by chopping wood (EQ2), killing deers and bears to find which of them stole a manuscript (EQ2), a sniper scope for a sword (SWG), and other stuff that just makes you wonder. I just can't see someone implementing that kind of idiocy unless they're (A) completely retarded, or (B) just a jaded cog in a corporate machine, that gave up long ago on trying to make sense or to "rock the boat". And it's probably not A.
I mean, seriously, everywhere else you'd get the scripter implementing that coming to the designer and saying "excuse me? did I get this right? I'm supposed to code a quest that has a sniper scope for a _sword_ as a reward? And how? We don't even have the code to attach anything to any weapon." That they went and just coded it half-arsedly as a strength potion that just looks like a sniper scope, makes me really think about it. It's the kind of half-arsed job that people usually do when they're just jaded about their work, and gave up on trying to be anything other than a brainless slave to the wage. It's the kind of half-arsed job you do when you realized long ago that noone gives a damn about your input, thinking isn't rewarded, and you just want to get it over with and set that task as "completed", go home and forget about it all.
As was said, have you _played_ SWG? SOE has been just about the most oppressive and heavy-handed publisher to date. Their approach has always been along the lines of "fuck you, we're Sony and we're right, and you're probably just some whining idiot and a cheater to boot." Deleting any threads even mentioning a game shortcoming, banning people for unfair reasons like unknowingly being tipped with duped money (as if they could even know or refuse), beaming people into space when they had an in-game protest, etc, etc, etc.
Now OK, I know that US constitution amendments don't apply to Sony's private property, but it's hard to not draw some parallels, especially (like the GP post was doing it) in a sarcastic way. It's perfectly valid to say that someone is acting in a dictatorial manner, or compare them to a dictator (e.g., Palpatine), especially in a parody context, if they did half the shit that SOE did. Even though, technically, they're not the ruler of a country or galaxy, so they can't technically be a dictator.
At the very least, Sony shows the same respect for other people that Palpatine and Darth Vader showed. Sure, they're not in a position to physically murder anyone (and get away with it), but they're just as sociopathic anyway. The only difference is that it's the corporate kind of a psychopath rather than the axe-murderer (or red-lightsaber-murderer) kind. But that's pretty much it.
Now that would be a bit of a paradox, wouldn't it? A Sony which cares about its customers and about what they want? (And for that matter a Raph Koster that cares about customers, instead of doing some more ego-masturbation along the lines of "I know what players find fun better than the players themselves"?) Now that's one mental exercise that's not for the uninitiated or faint of heart. It's a bit like trying to imagine a fish that can't breath water, or a really tall dwarf, or a triangle without three sides, or the sound of one hand clapping.
This is Sony. What makes you think they give a damn about getting bad press or alienating customers?
I mean in this case they even have some excuse that they're protecting their IP, but they've been known to do worse stuff just because they could. From SOE's heavy-handed handling of customer relations, to the Sony rootkit of their music division, to the PS3 interviews (especially the one where they say you should get a second job already if you can't afford a PS3), to a few other things, there seems to be this common trend about Sony's corporate culture: they don't give a fuck about the customer. They're the great Sony, you're the peon who's there just to pay your taxes to Sony. And they have no qualms with bashing your door in to see if you've been poaching their royal deer.
And just look at the history of SWG. The team had no problems with wantonly pissing off their paying customers in any way they could. Ranging from "merely" outright lies, to banning people for being tipped with duped money (as if anyone could know they've been tipped with duped money, or refuse a tip), to a patch that rolled back a sold expansion pack, to the rest of the NGE, to God knows what else. Even the quality of the game itself, ranging from still lacking content for whole classes (after how many years?), to illogical mass produced content (e.g., a "sword scope" that's, yes, a sniper scope for a sword... except it works like a potion, since they don't actually have the mechanics to attach a scope to anything), to content that's little more than just merchandising the SW characters, etc, the common theme seems to be that they just don't give a fuck. They do what they damn please, and if you like it or not, that's your problem, not theirs.
I mean, seriously, how do you top selling an expansion pack for real money and then rolling it back in a patch? Or banning half the player base for something as out of their control as being tipped, and then beaming the protesters into space? Suing a bunch of fans of the old game seems pretty tame when put in that perspective.
Oh, we can aggree there very quickly. In fact, I find that a very productive attitude. I wish more people thought that way.
It's in a way the exact opposite of the "kids are illogical little idiots" attitude I was against. Once you've accepted that they _can_ follow at least basic "cause ==> effect" reasoning and just lack the experience to make much use out of it, the road is open to a honest discussion and giving them the data that they lack. I find that very productive.
Well, looking back, I certainly hope they don't need to. In my case it was just a bad auto-allergic reaction that transformed the slightest cold into an asthmatic bronchitis that pinned me in bed for _months_. It's a lot easier to read a book in bed than to go play with sticks and puddles, when you barely have enough air even to survive horizontal in bed. I must thank grandma for teaching me to read there. It would have been a lot shittier to just stare at the ceiling instead.
I must say, though, I don't think it's been that bad on the whole. Learning that the lightbulb works because of an electrical current going through the wire there wasn't that horrible, I must say. It's an age where you're pre-programmed to learn as much new stuff as you can, so, well, it's not any worse to learn that instead of some wonderful pseudo-explanation with pixies and fairies. And it made just as good fantasy material: you can dream of flying bikes just as well when you have some crude and inaccurate idea of what would take to make a bike fly.
Languages too come pretty naturally to learn at that age. It's actually a _lot_ easier to learn a foreign language when you're three and, well, that's what you're pre-programmed to do at that age. Even your mother tongue is a foreign language you're learning at that age. And doubly so when it's the highlight of the day that grandma comes over to your bed to teach you French using Pif comics. Heck, it sure beat being sick and alone.
But I digress. The point, sorta, was just that small kids aren't idiots. I don't think I was anyone special. Just, you know, your average Calvin. Those shitty circumstances, sure, they gave me enough incentive to learn, because there was nothing else to do, but I'd think the mental capacity is there in most kids. That was, really, the whole point.
Nothing against that point of view either.
Heh... I think I understand what you're saying. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. And it's just normal human biology, not anything even remotely blamable on "immaturity" or on the western culture or anything.
See, the brain doesn't see absolute levels, when it comes to being happy or unhappy. It sees a differential. It sees the difference to the previous state, not absolute values. You can't just say "at standard of living X you're perpetually unhappy, at standard Y you're perpetually happy." If both X and Y are were constant at all time, both would have zero difference to the previous state at all time, so both would be stuck somewhere in the middle: neither happy, nor unhappy.
Well, it's not even that simple. The more detailed explanation is that the brain gives you "I'm happy" or "I'm unhappy" chemical signals for stuff that is respectively judged as being an improvement or a worsening of your current situation. E.g., if I'm getting hungry, I'm getting less happy, and if then I'm eating, I'm temporarily happier for fulfilling that need.
But here's that catch: those chemical signals also immediately trigger the release of the "antidote" that will gradually bring you back to the baseline. Otherwise eating once would keep you happy for the rest of your days. And you're not supposed to stay perpetually happy like that. You're supposed to almost immediately need to work on your next "I'm happy" signal, e.g., fulfill your next need.
What I'm saying is that old farts ranting and raving stuff like "back in my day we didn't have TV or microwave ovens and we were happy like that" are missing the whole bloody point. It just doesn't work that way. Humans back in the 50's, or humans in Ghana, were adjusted to one given "point" in the space of desires and available means. Happiness or unhappiness are judged with that point as a reference point. They were the deviations from _that_ point. Humans in the USA or EU in 2006 are adjusted to another point. So, yes, they judge their happiness or unhappiness, their achievements or losses, compared to that other point. Now they're the deviations from _this_ point.
Or to put it otherwise, imagine that you took a caveman and let him live 5 year intervals in various times in history. Let's say you moved him from his cave to a hut in ancient Greece. For a while he's happy, then this improved standard becomes his new baseline. From there happiness and sadness, achievement and loss, are compared to this new state, not to his old days in the cave. If from there you moved him to a modern day third world, he'd be happy again for a while... then get adjusted to this new standard. Then you'd move him to being a rich homeowner in the suburbs, and he'd now be happy for a while, then... adjust to this new state as his new reference point.
There is no maturity or immaturity involved there, since it's the same human that grew up with the same hardships. It's just adjusting to a different reference point. What's a signifficant positive delta for one situation ("yay, I have some meat today") is just the baseline for another ("yeh, so I have meat, just like every day. What's the big improvement or reason for celebration?") to being a _negative_ delta compared to a very high reference point ("oh, dear, the meat today isn't baked in fine french wine and the spices are rather bland").
In fact, you don't even have to believe that hypothetical scenario. There are plenty of RL scenarios showing just that. E.g., just look at how consumerism is a never-ending race because of that very phenomenon. It may seem like "man, if I had a plasma TV I'd be soo happy"... and you actually would... for a couple of days, until it becomes the baseline. Then it's back to needing the next delta, if you want to be happy again. E.g., see how winning the lottery jackpot is way more likely to make one depressed for life, instead of locking them into perpetual bliss.