_If_ some Nvidia fan goes to all the trouble to buy an ATI card, install the drivers, and spend weeks trying to write code that crashes the driver (so he can submit a crash report to MS)... well, as an ATI user I'll thank him wholeheartedly. Any bugs they document that way is going to be one bug that gets fixed in the next Catalyst release, so, heh, they helped raise the quality of ATI drivers. That's mighty kind, I would say even altruistic, coming from a fan of a competitor:P
1. Asking for the protocol descriptions, not the APIs or the code. (Hence, MS giving them a bunch of undocumented code isn't what they asked for.)
2. It's about internal details that MS never intended to be used by anyone else. (Note that I'm not discussing whether that attitude is monopolistic or not. Just saying that they never planned to give everyone details as exactly how to talk to a Windows server from a Solaris box.) I.e., I can easily see how something like that in most projects, not just MS, would end up a growing mass of code doing whatever quick hacks do the job, rather than a clean and well designed API.
Drivers are an entirely different dish altogether, and MS has always been actively trying to get OEMs to write their drivers for Windows. I.e., it's the exact _opposite_ of point 2 above. And they've always supplied ample docs and examples of how to do that.
So basically, far from me to keep you from some mindless anti-MS karma whoring, but extrapolating something from a completely unrelated domain as if it had any relevance to Windows _drivers_ is... just surrealistic. I'm sure you can get your daily karma dose in a more believable way than this.
" Trying to fit all games into an online model forces them to be basically all versions of the same game (all the same run around-kill-collect-level model of game play)."
Not really. MMO games also include stuff that's pretty different from WoW. Mind you, not _completely_ different, but still. E.g.:
1. Planetside.
It's really a MMO-FPS. Think UT2004 with 200 players in each team. Think battles where a SF fortress is attacked by waves of a hundred infantry (ranging from unarmored infiltrators to the massive mechanized exo-skeletons) and tens of tanks, artillery vehicles, AA vehicles, bombers, gunships, giant transport ships paradropping whole squads on top of it, and even about a lance of mechs in most fights.
It also has absolutely _zero_ grinding, farming, etc, as the game has no money (you're a soldier, so your equipment is provided to you based on your certifications) and levels don't give anyone an unfair advantage in combat (being higher level gives you more flexibility, as it allows you to be certified in several different things, but you still have the same health, do the same damage and can use the same weapons as someone half your level.)
_And_ it doesn't really need 3 hours of gathering a 40 man group a la WoW or of waiting in a queue for some battleground. Anyone can just jump into any battle and get xp for whatever they can do. E.g., if you're certified as a medic, you don't have to wait until some raid invites you: you can just jump into any battle and get xp for healing the combatants. E.g., if you're an engineer, you can just jump into any fight and start repairing the damaged vehicles, and get xp for it. E.g., if you're certified to pilot a transport, just load up a squad and paradrop them wherever they want to go, and not only you'll be a very popular guy or gal, but you'll get xp for their kills there too. Or, of course, if you can use a gun, you can just get your gun and go join whatever assault or defense is in progress.
Sure, joining a squad or outfit lets you fight more coordinated as part of a team, but that's about it. If you don't want to, you can just go solo in any battle just as well. You'll figure out something useful to do pretty easily. Be it healing, repairing, shooting a gun, being gunner on a tank, laying mines, or jumping into a chaingun turret and laying down the suppression fire.
And, again, any of those you can do from level 1 (though you can gain a few levels first by just doing the tutorials anyway) and have max level people thanking you for it. There is no grinding to level 60 or collecting epic equipment before you can go play with the big boys. You can take part in any battle right after installing the game, and feel like you've made a difference.
So, basically, you know, you can just play the game and let levels and stuff happen on their own. There is no need to focus on collecting anything either.
2. City Of Heroes / City Of Villains.
Well, this is a sorta more standard type of MMO, but it cuts down on pretty much anything that could be seen as a time sink. E.g., travel time is short (SuperSpeed caps at about 90mph, Teleport caps at about 200mph), combat is fast and furious, there is no collecting "loot" in the traditional sense of the word (if you want your character to wear big red pauldrons, you can just paint him that way in the character editor), there is no crafting in the traditional sense (though you can craft devices for your super-hero base or super-villain lair), and there is no farming for gold or resources.
Also, although it does depend on grouping (unlike the loose action of Planetside), missions are automatically instanced for whatever number of people you have. I.e., the same mission can either be soloed or you can find an 8-player group for it. Since groups yield better xp per minute, you rarely have a problem finding random people to group with at any level. (Though whether they can also play well in a group, is a bit of a hit-and-miss issue. Some groups rule, some can make a good point for misanthropy.) But again, any instanced mission can also be soloed if you're not in a social mood.
Again you assume too much about what I aggree or disaggree with.
This has nothing to do with whether I like or dislike MS, or with whether I aggree or not with his views. It is strictly about exercising some healthy skepticism when your source of information isn't an independent unbiased source. That's all.
Yes, it's pretty stupid to assume that he must be lying, but here's the catch: it's equally stupid to assume that he must be saying the untainted truth just because he seems cool, hip, intelligent and independent. Ignoring the obvious factors that he was paid by MS and his job only existed as long as MS liked the image he painted, is, at best, naive. Cooler and smarter people have caved in before, for the sake of keeping a comfy job.
Does the Soviet Union prove anything? Well, damn right. It's proof that a few tens of thousand of people have already chosen to lie, if their job depends on pleasing the ones who can terminate that job.
So is he lying? I don't know, but tbh, I don't even give a damn. I'll just go with an independent source instead of trying to guess that.
Some ideas are sorta like vampires are described, for example, by Terry Pratchett. You may think you've beheaded one, stuffed full of garlick, and dragged out into the sun, but a few years later someone drops a drop of blood in the right place and there you have the old vampire back again. Some bad ideas can be like that.
And smell reproduction has been one of those bad ideas that just won't stay dead. It's been popping up again and again, as computer peripheral, phone peripheral, etc. Just when you think you've buried it at crossroads with a stake through its chest, and under a small tumulus of ridicule and "no, I _don't_ want to smell the environment in games, especially not with the mandatory sewers levels everyone has" posts... hardly a year goes by before it pops up somewhere else. Some dolt comes up with "I know! We'll make a smell plugin for IM and IRC!!!" Bury that too, watch a year or two go by, there it pops up again. "I know! Let's make a TV that can reproduce smell too!" Laugh that out of court too, bury it, watch some time go by... "I know! Let's make a mobile phone that transmits smells!!!"
I'm already curious where it'll pop up next. Probably in MP3 players. Surely everyone will want to walk down the street with tubes up their nose. Plus, you'll have so much to look forward to when the bogus MP3 files on the net aren't just some white noise or "piracy is theft" reminder, but also come with a recording of someone's fart.
At any rate, mark my words: we haven't heard the last of this stupidity.
As opposed to you, who just post the above bullshit about anyone who dares think different than you do? Is that your point, little fanboy? That surely only those who are on your side of the story are open minded, and everyone even exercising some minimal skepticism is covering their eyes before The Truth(TM)?
Did you even bother checking that I'm actually fairly pro-MS before writing that idiocy? Nah, you just assumed that anyone who even dares be skeptical about one particular PR voice _must_ be some sworn enemy of MS. Every good citizen should, of course, put their faith 100% in paid PR shills and religiously believe every word they say. Heh.
How about the minimal skepticism of preferring to take my news and facts from a more impartial source? _Both_ MS _and_ the OSS zealots might, shall we say, be less than unbiased in their coverage of MS. So how about I'll trust _neither_ the paid PR guy filming it through rose-coloured glasses _nor_ the sworn enemies painting it all black with a broad brush. I'll do my own research and ask someone who _doesn't_ have a vested interest in slanting the story in their favourite direction, thank you very much.
Yes, so one company's paid PR guy finds that company a wonderful place to work at, wonderfully open and democratic, and led by wonderful managers who appreciate criticism and always have only the most sound reasons for all decisions, ever. Now, that's a big surprise. Same as, say, any other company's PR guy presents their employer? Lemme see, perchance the same as:
- big pharma's PR guys finds big pharma to be wonderful humanitarian-minded companies, and only doing The Right Thing? (Animal testing is, obviously, The Right Thing.)
- tobacco companies' PR guys finding those same tobacco companies to be wonderful and caring companies, and find smoking to be a wonderful and harmless thing that's never had any side-effects
- EA's PR guy finds their 20'th football game to be absolutely original and innovative
- Sony's PR guys find Sony to be a wonderful company and the PS3 to be a bargain
Etc.
No, really, it's such a big surprise that a PR guy bravely puts a rose tint on the company's image. It's so unexpected and brave that it _must_ be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we must all do our duty of believing every word unconditionally. That was sarcasm, if you can't tell.
Let me tell you about another group to which your words can be applied verbatim. In Soviet Russia they had newspapers, radio, and TV, and reporters who:
1) interviewed many high high and middle level party officials
2) had a job involving walking the halls of various official institutions to try to figure out what was going on
3) challenged their audience daily with their findings
4) thought daily about politics and the Soviet Union's role in the future
5) publically spoke out against (mild and pre-approved) various shortcomings.
And yet we already know that they published lies and propaganda anyway, and put an artifficial kind face on something that was a failure both economically and as human rights go. The party officially recognized that one little bit of truth makes people more eager to swallow the big lie, so, yes, number 5 happened pretty routinely too. So, yes, it's nothing new that a propaganda shill would "dare" "bravely" confront Ballmer about such utterly irrelevant issues as his opinions of gay rights, which frankly bear no relevance to MS's products or monopolistic stance... to seem independent enough so you'll swallow the bigger lies that do bear relevance.
But, anyway, let's resume mis-using your words in that context. You don't believe them? It seems to me you're implying that
1) A journalist from Pravda was stupid,
2) He was a liar,
3) His employment was one big consipiracy where 49999 Soviet citizens put on an act every time he was in the room and he was the one person who was not in on the big joke
And, blimey, yes, you'd be right. It was number 2. He who pays the orchestra gets to choose the music, and he who pays your salary to write about the company gets to choose what positive spin he wants you to put on it. And, yes, a bit of number 3 too: people are good at putting on an act when the CEO's PR lackey comes asking questions.
The corrolary being that it doesn't have to be a _good_ reason, nor be ther best way to act upon that reason. It also doesn't have to be the publically stated one: people are very good at starting with what they personally want ("but I really want a pony!!!") and working from there to find some bogus rationale they can tell others ("our poll (on exactly one person) indicated that the company's productivity and morale would increase if the CEO had a pony.")
Frankly, I've seen lots of decisions that technically had a reason, but not the kind of reason you'd expect in that kind of a job or decision.
E.g., I've worked for someone who was a yes-man in _both_ directions. I can understand that he had a reason there: to just not rock the boat, not annoy anyone, and not risk taking a decision that later could be used against him. Is it the kind of reason that's expected of someone in a management position? Nope. Is the result good for the company? Nope.
E.g., take the chain of events that lead to the Boston molasses disaster. Did that beancounter have a reason to skip testing the tank, or to paint it brown (so it wouldn't be obvious that it leaks) instead of repairing it? Yes, he did: saving costs. I'm sure he probably got a big bonus for building it cheaper than what some real engineer had offered to build it for. Was it the right kind of decision? Nope, nevertheless, it was an idiotic decision that costed human lives and destruction of property.
Yes, I know you're seeing the same problem, but I felt someone should just spell it out by now, before the circular backpatting PHB squad starts the "see, we told you we always had a reason, even if you peons don't understand it" chorus.
A) how a major producer of one genre abandoned that genre, in spite of having a growing market and selling more copies than ever. And,
B) how profit and copies sold can be two very different things.
And, you know, taken from the mouth of those who were one of the two biggest names in the adventure game industry at the time.
But, in the end, it was there just as an example that you can't always just blame the demand side of the equation.
Is Sierra that relevant any more? No, but other publishers and developpers are still doing the same with other genres. E.g., Interplay sold the Fallout franchise where Fallout 2 had sold millions of copies, but announced yet another MMO at a time when _noone_ had millions of subscribers to their MMO. EQ had peaked at some 400,000 IIRC, and number 2 was at 250,000 or so. (And a couple of years later, other than Blizzard, noone still has millions of subscribers.) So basically they discarded Genre 1 where they had millions of buyers, and went for Genre 2 where they could hope at most for hundreds of thousands. Why? Because in Genre 2 you could get bigger profits even if you sold a tenth of the number of copies.
"These days, making an FPS is not necessarily very cheap, even if you license an engine. I'm going to guess that it's actually even more expensive than making adventure games."
Very insightful observation indeed. And indeed that might be why adventures are making a comeback in a major way.
Sad to say, the assumption that "if only genre X is produced, it's because people only buy genre X" was always false. I fell for it before too, but it never was true anyway.
The thing that matters is _profit_, not number of copies sold. Genre X can be more profitable than Genre Y for a miriad of reasons, even if Genre Y actually sells more copies.
E.g., read some interviews from Sierra and the like during the late 90's, when FPS and RTS exploded and Adventures nearly went extinct. Surely it was because everyone only bought FPS and RTS, and noone bought Adventures, right? Well, wrong. Adventures were a growing market, sold better than ever, and routinely outsold a lot of FPS. But here's the catch: they also cost a lot more to produce. Making a brainless FPS just needed a licensed 3D engine and making about a dozen levels and skins, whereas making an Adventure needed complex animations and scripts. You could sell half as many copies of a FPS and still have more money left.
Briefly: yes, a genre skirted with extinction although it had more demand than ever. Go figure.
E.g., the MMO growth today has _nothing_ to do with everyone wanting to play online only. On the contrary, there are still are _far_ more offline gamers than online gamers. So why do people want to produce a MMO instead of cattering to the larger market? Because of the monthly fee, that's why. If you sell someone an offline game, you get maybe 40$ from them, and worse yet, the retailers take most of that money. If you sell them a MMO, studies say people stay on the average 6 month in them, so at, say, 13$ per month and one of the months being included, you've raked in 13*5 + 40 = 105$ from the average gamer, and 65$ there bypass the retailers completely.
That's all. It's not that everyone wants just 3 genres. It's that those are the most profitable, but the reasons have _nothing_ to do with more people wanting those.
E.g., "Europa 1400 -- The Guild" is technically a "business sim", but that didn't really prevent it from mixing inter-personal relationships, a bit of politics, a bit of history lesson, even a bit of RTS, etc, into the mix.
E.g., between Europa Universalis and Hearts Of Iron 2, Paradox's games have technically been strategy in real time, but they're not even vaguely similar to C&C or Warcraft.
2. it's not like people outright refuse new genres. Quite the contrary.
E.g., Populous was debatably the first sorta-RTS, and didn't even fit any genre at the time. Guess what? It was a big success.
E.g., although technically first person shooters were not that new, they still were relatively uncommon, and Wolfenstein 3D was the first textured one. So although you can't really say that it invented a genre, it took an obscure genre and made it a huge success overnight.
E.g., both Sim City and Civilization pretty much created respectively the city-building and empire-building genres. Yup, they sold nicely.
E.g., The Sims only resembled one old game, and at that only vaguely. At any rate, noone though of it as a "genre" yet. Yep, it's quickly become the number one best-selling PC game of all times, out-selling any of Id's or Epic's shooters by a massive margin.
So from where I stand, it looks like inventing a genre actually can sell like hot cakes.
What doesn't sell is just making an uninspired melange of two genres, typically not even understanding what the people liked in either of them. Or not even noticing that they appeal to different types of personalities. E.g., you can't really hope for that much of a market overlap if you mix a slow-paced city-builder appealing to casual gamers with a "hardcore" Counter-Strike clone appealing mainly to die-hard loud-mouthed online "clansmen". E.g., you can't just take a pure-reflexes Mario clone and give it RPG-style cut-scenes and dialogues, and think you've covered both pure-reflexes fans and story-driven fans with one game. In practice, the two are more like opposites, so whoever likes one will be bored by the gameplay of the other.
But that's IMHO not really that much innovation anyway: copying verbatim from two sources isn't much more creative than copying from one. So if that isn't that tempting to publishers, I can't say we've really lost that much as a result.
"What creative industry ISN'T 95% derivative? Movies, television, books, music, art, you name it. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon when something is successful."
Yes, but that does not make it good or interesting to anyone with even the minimal intelligence needed to notice the verbatim copy.
E.g., yes, movies do the same, but that's exactly why movies have lost my interest long ago. Every single freakin' genre has been reduced to one standard script, with _maybe_ a couple of standard variants. So if you watch the first 5 minutes of any movie, by now you can tell pretty accurately what will happen in the rest of the movie, who will die, and exactly after how many minutes the standard plot twist will come.
I'm freakin' sick and tired of, for example, The Hero's Journey standard script, after seeing it being applied verbatim to every single freakin' action movie. It seems that just about _any_ topic is shoehorned into the same script, following the same steps, in the same order, and religiously obeying the percentage of minutes each step could take. And spicing it up with the same ingredients, e.g., sex and wanton destruction of property, because that's what sells.
And I really mean _any_ topic by now. I have all confidence that Hollywood could even shoehorn the whole WW2 into the same tired Hero's Journey script, starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt as an ordinary citizen you can relate to, climaxing with him single-handedly defeating Hitler and Mussolini and their super-soldier guards in a spectacular fight, and coming down from that climax by getting the girl and becoming a normal citizen again. Forget what you've learned in history class about how that war actually went, this is the Hero's Journey way, and we're not gonna let history get in the way of it. The fall of the Soviet Union? Same deal. Start with Clinton as an everyman figure, climax by defeating Gorbachev and his Spetsnaz guards in an epic fight, etc.
Yes, it's partially sarcasm, but also sadly serious: they're _that_ bloody one-track-minded about shoehorning anything into a standardised script.
I've even seen it seep into games. Sometimes in such an uninspired 1-to-1 transcription, that makes a 10 minute introductory sequence in a 90 minute movie become a boring horrible 5 hour grind in a 45 hour console RPG. They have their script saying that X% of the total time must be devoted to showing the hero as an everyman figure that the viewer can identify with, and they're gonna religiously obey that.
And so on.
Does that make movies better? No, it doesn't. As I've said, it just made my interest in movies take a nose dive as soon as I figured out those standard scripts. (That was around the mid-teens, btw, so it didn't even take a lifetime to get that "haven't I seen the exact same movie before, only with different names and props?" feeling.)
Am I looking forward to seeing games become the same thing? Good grief, no!
There are various degrees of boned, ranging from "merely" being at a "This guy thinks too much to ever go abroad. And we better keep an eye on him", to losing any chance of ever having a job better than minimum wage except it's in a mine, all the way to earning a one-way trip to Siberia/Guantanamo/whatever. Just because you're slightly boned doesn't mean you'll be willing to go all the way to ending your life in a concentration camp.
"Chilling effect on terrorists? Hmm, any terrorist who hasn't since 1998 heard of VAI is behind the times. I am sure that the smarter ones recruit online but cull in person, and probably do so after layer upon layer of vetting and looking over the shoulder. I am thinking that a number of these recruits are diversionary sacrificial lambs to weed out the VAI-type shadows..."
Nope, the chilling effect wasn't targetted at terrorists and real traitors in the communist block either. Sure, the average Soviet or Chinese or whatever citizen may have disliked their oppressive government, but basically still didn't dislike their country too much. In fact, I dare say most were probably patriots. So they wouldn't have actually went and sabotaged a factory or sold military secrets to the capitalists anyway.
No, the subtle fear campaign was to keep everyone in line and obeying the oppressor. The banner waved by the party was, of course, that they're doing it to unveil traitors and saboteurs selling their country for a handful of dollars. But in practice it also kept every ordinary Tom, Dick and Harry (or Ivan, Piotr and Evgeniy), who hadn't even _seen_ a dollar or a foreigner in their life, from trusting each other enough to start working together against the communism.
You knew that, although officially they're only doing the witch hunt for spies and saboteurs, they collected the information about _everyone_. Including you. You didn't want to be the person whose dossier says "he got drunk and started shouting 'let's have a demonstration for democracy.'" You didn't even want to be anywhere near Piotr any more if he started saying things like that. In fact, you'd start suspecting that Piotr may be an agent provocateur paid by the secret police. Better not start aggreeing with him now, only to have him interogating you at the NKVD later.
_That_ is the problem with such chilling effects. That they won't really even work against spies and terrorists (it's not like Al Quaeda members will form groups on Orkut or whatever, so such data mining is worthless to that end), but it will keep normal citizens in fear of what their givernment knows about them.
That's insightful and all, but we're talking about giving someone a keylogger-onna-stick (USB stick), not about breaking into their defenses layer by layer. I don't have to decrypt my way into the database, for example, when some gullible guy ran my program, which sent me all his source files. I just need to grep for something that looks like a database URL in his java sources, for example, to have all I need to connect to their productive database. It's that unskilled a work.
Sure, it won't be as easy as writing that Trojan for Windows, but it's not as hard as breaking in the hard way either. They can have the most secure system, with exactly zero exploits. Heck, even every single algorithm and method proved correct. It won't matter. With enough idiots running my program off that USB stick, it'll eventually fish all the information I need to just log in and export their whole database.
It won't even trip their admin until at least half of it is exported. There won't be a long log of trying out every single past exploit and whatever, but just one login that's successful. If you can spot it instantly, you're a better admin than anyone I know.
Basically I'm not saying that Linux is insecure or anything. I'm saying that, as the article proves, we're at a point where attacking the humans is easier. And as phishing proved long before that: you don't have to break into a bank's systems the hard way, when you can get 1000 guys simply telling you their login data. The bank may well be behind the best firewalls and running the most secure version of Unix ever sold, the phisher can still login and take the schmuck's money anyway.
Or to put it otherwise: Linux may well be secure. The human at the keyboard, though, can be a much weaker link.
Basically, you know, just because you're running a good secure OS, doesn't mean you can just run programs off an USB stick or CD found on the front stairs.
I'll tell you a different kind of a "in soviet russia" story, and it's not a joke. I'll tell you what kept those people in line under most totalitarian regimes. Yes, the short story is "the secret police", but that's only a very superficial view of the problem.
The communist block's secret police didn't always have the indiscriminate brutality of Stalin's black cars and summary executions. It eventually evolved into something more "subtle": the widespread idea that somewhere they have a dossier of what you've said and who you've associated with. That even if you don't land in the Gulag (but then again, you might land there anyway) for going drinking again with comrade Piotr who speaks against the government, there'll be a page in your dossier for ever flagging you as sharing Piotr's subversive views. And it someday might bite you in the ass. E.g., maybe some day you won't get a promotion, or the party's approval to go abroad (on business or holyday), or whatever, just because somewhere there's a page in your dossier saying you're a subversive element and associate with traitors.
Now they didn't have the computers or manpower to actually do that on anywhere near the scale NSA is doing it, so the probability was really low, but the chilling effect was thorough anyway. People didn't want to take risks, so they tended to shut up.
But the effect was more perverse than that. Anyone who openly spoke against the government was seen as a potential agent provocateur, trying to bait you into saying something that'll come back to haunt you later. It's the most perverse thing you can do to prevent organized resistance: make sure that people don't trust each other. The guy shouting against the government might be paid by the government, or may be someone who has a petty grudge against you and tries to get you to say something you might regret.
Basically, the the most effective threats don't have to be explicit, but vague and implicit. People don't have to know that the government will swiftly come and send them to Guantanamo for speaking against it. The most effective threat is to just have everyone know that you know everything they did and everyone they associated with, that it's for ever attached to their file somewhere, and they don't know how or when you'll use it. Maybe you'll go for direct retaliation, or maybe their son won't be able to get a government scholarship/job/whatever because of what they said, or whatever. That unknown can pretty chilling while costing very little to maintain. (A lot less than trying to execute everyone who disaggrees, and creates less martyrs.)
And all this mining phone calls and social sites (a lot do have personal information, e.g., dating sites) has the potential to create a chilling effect of epic proportions. Is John speaking out against the new fascist government? Well, then better make sure you're not on his friends list or calling him every week. You don't want to have _that_ on your file, now do you? If you're an employer, better get rid of him on your own, because otherwise, you know, that relationship goes on your file too. Plus, you know they'll make a connection every time he calls you to take a sick day, or you call him to ask why the server isn't up. Better not risk losing a fat government contract just because you're associating with and employing undesirables.
Does that have to be accurate and filtered clean of character assassination bullshit? No, it's probably better if it isn't. Might get some people thinking they already have plenty of bogus or inaccurate stuff on their file anyway, so all the more reason not to add real stuff to it too. Better keep low and try not to trip their radar, than have to explain which stuff is bogus and which isn't
On the whole, I certainly aggree with you, and it's certainly refreshing to see someone who doesn't fall into the "I use Linux so I'm immune to anything" trap. But I think even you underestimate it a little.
"Now, while you are watching a cool graphics demo, it checks if you are logged in as root and, if you are, installs a nasty payload. If not, it could simply start emailing every file it finds in your home directory, or delete them, or encrypt them."
Doesn't even need root to steal passwords. There are a _ton_ of config files and startup scripts in your home directory, which a trojan can attach itself to. It can load itself in your bash window, as a plugin in your mozilla, launch an extra program in your X, replace icons on your desktop, and god knows what else. One of those will catch on to something.
E.g., if it's, say, Suse, I know that there'll be some programs -- e.g., Yast, every time you run the auto-updater -- where the system will ask for the root password first. I can just replace the link with one to program that shows an identical dialogue.
Or, yeah, transmitting every file in your home directory is indeed another great way to get a ton of info. Source files that contain the URL, account and password to the productive database are the norm, rather than the exception. Or some cutesy script that goes through the firewall to download the latest nasa pic of the day or whatnot with wget, and in the process contains the user's name and password to go through that proxy. (Let's hope he's used that password in more than one place.) Or there'll always be one idiot who exported the productive database onto his local computer, or downloaded the server configs (including all database connections, with name and password) god knows what else he's copied there. There'll often be one idiot who's built some back door because he can't be arsed to go through the IT department to have something reconfigured or to properly log in. I'll love to know about that backdoor. There'll be emails with forgotten passwords. There'll be emails where people tell each other about those backdoors. ("Oh, if you come from the intranet zone, you can bypass the stupid authenticating proxy completely. Just use http//prod.somebank.com/internalurl/some.jsp?secre t_user_login=admin.") There'll often be text files or spreadsheets with all the URLs, names and passwords he uses. (The geek equivalent of post-it notes.) Etc.
Config files outside the home directory? Those can be fun too. E.g., everyone will have access to fstab. Maybe they'll have the name and password for every single file share they use in there, or maybe it'll be offloaded to some.smbpassword file, but there's nothing that some trivial parsing can't extract. Or just send it to me as it is, together with any readable file referenced in it. I'll do the extraction by hand.
Log files? Now those can be a cornucopia of classified information. I've seen people even log each user's name and password at each login through their clever UserRegistry or Single Sign On module or such. If someone copied a bunch of productive logs to their machine -- or I can get the password to the machine where they are -- I might be able to login and cause mayhem as 1000 of their customers. Or go to those customers' profile pages and find out their personal data.
Etc.
"If you aren't root the damage is limited, but there is still damage."
As I was saying, even if you aren't root, the damage done can be catastrophic. The thinking that all that matters is that the OS survives, can sometimes miss the point. Yeah, some guy's Linux installation survived perfectly. But then I got access to his company's servers. Was it that much better? I'll bet that as far as the company is concerned, they would have cared less if I just wiped out one workstation's hard drive.
There are basically two fundamentally different things that could have happened there:
1. That the site itself created false profiles to seem populated. That's fraud.
2. That some member put in a false address on their own profile just because they _don't_ want to be stalked, spammed, or have their identity stolen for character assassination purposes as retaliation by some cretin who can't deal with rejection. This is just having a brain. The sheer number of idiots out there is truly frightening, and these sites _also_ act like the wrong kind of a filter by mainly attracting those who are too socially-retarded to find a date any other way. So anyone who put any true personal info on a site that'll give it unquestioningly to every horny Tom, Dick and Harry, I'd consider them genuinely and truly retarded.
So is it some guy that was scammed by the site owners, _or_ some socially-retarded guy who's angered that he can't stalk the girl who dared refuse him? They're very very different cases. So as long as we aren't told which of them it is, I won't hurry to join in the angry mob with torches and pitchforks.
In fact, the way the original post was phrased, it sounded like getting a false email was _the_ grand fraud. Not even "proof" of fraud, but as being the grand despicable act of deception itself. That the site should have made sure the guy only gets genuine email addresses for his money.
In which case, I'm left scratching my head: exactly what the fuck was he actually expecting to get on that site? Did he think he was buying a list of verified email addresses, like on some spammers' sites? Or what? The site only promised to put him in contact with another person, nothing more. As long as they did that (or at least he can't prove that they didn't), it seems to me like they're perfectly in the clear. They didn't promise to sell him someone's verified personal data.
On the whole, it looks more and more like an idiot who can't deal with rejection than anything else. Read the whole thing again. Starting with the whole flipping out and trying to sue the site after the very first rejection. There is no mention of trying to gather more proof or anything. (E.g., you know, trying to chat to more than one person just to see if all conversations follow the same bait-and-dump script or what. Or trying to see if more people run into the same kind of a problem. Surely he's not the only one who talked to a staff member in disguise, if that's the case.) And continuing with the not-so-veiled quotes all over the place ("she", "woman", etc) implying that it must have been a guy, although, again, there was no finding or even an actual case.
Seriously, the more I look at it, the more it looks like a very good possibility that it's just a clown who'd do anything rather than admit that someone rejected him. He's scream fraud, he'll scream that it must have been a man in disguise, anyting. Because god forbid admitting that maybe, just maybe, a woman could have actually rejected him.
Of course, I can't know that either, but it's a distinct possibility.
Google has only claimed "do no evil" as their motto. They never claimed to be a global Robin Hood, fighting to right every single wrong under the Sun.
Basically the world isn't made of just two extremes. (Nor even a good-neutral-evil, trio that you may have learned from D&D.) The real world has shades and nuances, not just pure black and pure white.
Even if you see it unidimensionally, the it's still an axis, not just two points. It's possible to be at various points to the left or to the right of zero (e.g., just a little naughty, or just a little nice) without being either a paragon of pure blinding light or the prince of darkness. And that applies to Google too: they just promised to not go into negatives on that axis, not to be the holiest Champion Of Light, Liberator Of The Serfs, Overthrower Of Tyrants, Righter Of Wrongs, and Avenger Of All Injustices.
But the RL isn't even that unidimensional and clear cut. Most RL actions aren't clear cut and obviously good or evil. A lot of them are a mixed bag of good stuff _and_ bad stuff, and stuff that's just personal opinion, or stuff that you have no fucking clue whether it really is good or really is evil. Or stuff where if you asked 100 different people, you'd get 101 different views.
"Too many "unlockables" and it's work. No "unlockables" and it's 30 minutes of gameplay."
That's precisely the kind of game that pisses me off: it barely has 30 minutes of content, and thinks that forcing some idiotic time sink (work to unlock something, no save so you need to replay each level 20 times before you pass, etc) onto the user is making up for that.
Which is bullshit. Thinking that 30 minutes of content can be stretched to 20 hours of fun by just mixing in 19.5 hours of crap, is like thinking that you can take a can of beer and multiply the drinking fun by mixing it with two gallons of piss. At the end of the day, that content will be so thinned out as to not even count as fun any more. What I'll remember weren't (keeping the proportions) the occasion 3 minutes of joy at finally seeing a new area or finally getting that new car, but the 117 minutes minutes of sheer repetitive mind-numbing grind to get there.
How many games have you given up out of sheer boredom by the half of the game? How many times have you read the crap excuse "most gamers don't finish games any more, so we really need to make games shorter and shallower. It's what the gamers want, really." from some publisher's PR drones? Well, that's your syndrome right there of that game content dillution.
How about returning to the point where games actually had enough content? E.g., I remember getting 70 hours out of, say, "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment" and at _no_ point did it become a "yawn, I'm only doing it to unlock the secret Golden Buttplug collectable" kind of grind.
There _are_ ways to keep a game interesting for hours. Inserting some boring grind _isn't_ it. There are plot twists, gradual gameplay changes, levels with different ways to solve, etc. E.g., in "Europa 1400 -- The Guild", the focus gradually changes from micro-managing a small shop with an apprentice, to managing half the town's shops and dabbling into politics, to fighting bandits (or robbing people as a bandit) and assaulting buildings. E.g., in "X2: The Threat" the focus changes gradually from (and occasionally back to) a straight space sim, to a single ship trader like Elite, to managing a commercial empire spanning a whole galaxy and fleets with destroyers and carriers.
Guess what neither "Europa 1400 -- The Guild" nor "X2: The Threat" had _any_ unlockable content whatsoever, and never needed any. There was no secret profession or ship that you get only if you collected some idiotic tokens. Yet you _can't_ say you've seen it all in 30 minutes and then it was just the same without a grind, because the focus changes constantly. What you've seen and done in the first 30 minutes doesn't even resemble what you'll do in it after a week. Even the piloting part alone isn't even similar between dogfighting in your starting light scout and driving an 18 gun space destroyer with fighter escorts.
Want replay value? How about providing _actual_ good reasons to replay, right from the start? E.g., I've spent _hundreds_ of hours replaying Fallout 2, because it could actually be solved in that many different ways. E.g., if you started a smart and charismatic diplomat character, it would play massively different from a low intelligence brawler. E.g., solving each quest -- and it had a _ton_ of them -- could be done in at least 3 different ways.
For example doing the Navarro infiltration could be done by going in through the front gate, guns blazing, and hoping you get the plasma turrets before they nail you. Or you could bullshit your way in as a new recruit, get a power armour and plasma gun for joining, bullshit the techie into giving you the vertibird plans, bullshit the commander into giving your the tanker FOB, and so on. Or you could use stealth. Or you could use your traps skill to defuse some mines and go in through the back door, get the big lizzard as a temporary ally, lay waste to the bunker, then use the elevators for hit-and-run tactics against the soldiers and turrets above. Or various combinations of that.
"No, but it is ABSOLUTELY his job to make sure his products work properly. What is he managing, if not the products that users get stuck with?"
We can aggree there very quickly. Yep, that's his job. He's a manager. He should manage.
But that was not the submission's spin. The submission's spin was more along the tone of "Ha ha, he couldn't remove spyware off a Windows computer." Which already isn't a management job.
Without any MS bashing, I still find it... no offense, but it's mildy amusing and yet mildly sad to read what you wrote.
1. As an engineer myself (and I mean with actually a college diploma saying "electrical engineer"), it's not my job to do that kind of thing. I don't work for MS, but nevertheless it's not what I was looking forward to do in life, and not what I negotiated when I took any job so far. I'm a programmer, not a computer janitor, Jim. I'll take pride in doing my job, not in doing something that unrelated just to brown-nose the boss. Sure, it can be seen as a challenge, but it ranks up there with the challenge of licking the office floor clean.
In fact, I'm outright insulted by the usual assumption that I'm some generic nerd with an indiscriminate addiction to anything even vaguely computer-related, from programming to removing spyware to pulling someone's ethernet cables to cleaning someone's CPU fan. It's like assuming that if an architect likes designing a good building, he should be thrilled to come fix your roof. People assuming that I'm such a junkie that I should be grateful and excited because they let me near their computers, are quick to land on my freaks list. I've actually left a job when the boss started assuming that since I'd spend my weekend (or parts of it) near a computer anyway, spending it doing unpaid overtime for him should be equally exciting for me.
And if a manager abused his position and asked me to do personal favours for _his_ buddies, that by itself would actually lower my morale, not turn it into a thing of pride. Yes, it's a "boss ego" thing. It's not strong, it's just what that kind of crap is. At that point the guy is simply _that_ convinced that he's some royal blood and everyone else is his personal janitor. And if he also insulted my intelligence with some retarded "you should take it as a thing of pride" bullshit talk, it would already tell me how low he thinks of me. And I'll be more than happy to give him a reality check and look for the next job.
But I can see how others would just do a crappy half-arsed job instead while looking for the next job. So _if_ actually any engineer at MS (or, yes, at Red Hat, Sun, IBM or whatever else) just slacked around it for a couple of days, and then said "nope, can't be done", (well, if they're not on the anti-spyware team in the first place), I wouldn't be too hasty to draw and quarter them. Sure, I'll consider it dishonest and look down upon it, but then an abrupt morale drop might just make people do that.
2. It's not the kind of thing I've trained for, and not the kind of skill that I'll have a use for any further. There are only 24 hours in a day, and if I actually want to learn something job-related, it will be just that: something job related. I might read a book on good programming techniques or learn a new language, not learn all the newest spyware strains and whatnot.
I.e., basically I _don't_ know everything even remotely computer-related, and I don't even plan to. Sure, after enough googling and cussing, I'd _probably_ be able to do it. But it will be just a pointless waste of my time _and_ yours anyway. Someone who does that for a living would be more qualified and faster to do it. And having my time wasted won't be a thing of pride.
Again, not all computer activities are the same. Assuming that "computing" is some one skill covering everything from programming, to administration, to hardware, to removing spyware, is... uninformed, to put it very very mildly. It's like expecting an aircraft pilot to also be able to repair a turbojet engine, just because both involve an airplane. Sure, he can have a vague idea if he really loves aircrafts, he may be able to learn more if forced to, but I still would rather not be on that plane afterwards.
I'm not even opposed to keeping it at a "it'll be a form on which you can enter data" level, but usually the problem is:
1. The poor sap has already been confused by some marketting guy (ours, IBM's, whatever) that he absolutely needs SOAP, BPML, Web 2.0 compliance, etc. Or he's read some "IT for managers" ragazine and now he thinks he's a software architect. E.g., I've had some management type decide that I must do an application in Visual Fox Pro instead of, say, C++ or Java, because, in his words, "Java isn't Visual enough." The guy had had a couple of hours with a MS sales drone that showed him how easy it is to drag buttons around on a "Hello World" form, that now nothing could convince him that there's more to programming (e.g., being able to refactor, or debug sanely, or a dozen other things) than dragging buttons around. Or that saving a single-user database's file on the file server does _not_ make it a substitute for a real database.
Basically, as the saying goes, "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." If the CFO doesn't want to talk about database record locking, then he shouldn't try to design the application for me. If he's trying to discuss such engineering issues as what database to use, then he damn better not act offended if he gets actual engineering talk. He may be able to understand how much dollars he'll save by dumping a Fox Pro (or Access or Excel) file on a file server, but he better also be able to understand when I tell him why that'll be a liability when 20 people try to use that file at the same time. Or refrain from pretending that he's a software architect.
2. When discussing the Why / Why Not and Other Options, those seeming buzzwords can actually make or break the whole thing.
E.g., if I have to explain why my solution needs some kind of messaging server or database server instead of just dumping a file in a shared directory, there's no sane way of explaining that without some reference to XA Transactions and the like. And why you need those to ensure that if customer X bought product Y for Z dollars, either both the payment and the order to the warehouse must _both_ succeed or _both_ must fail. Having a system that's held together with spit and duct tape, and people routinely get their money taken but get to battle the support guys to actually get the product, won't even save the company money, it'll cost more in lost reputation. But there's no way to explain why his great idea of saving money by using an Excel spreadsheet on a file server can produce the problem, without, you know, at least mentioning the engineering theory behind it.
One of our professors in college, a really old guy, on the last day has read to us a text where someone was complaining about "today's youth." You know, the usual. Too loud, too indecently dressed, show no respect, do nothing right, etc. As you can imagine, we were a tad annoyed by the time he was done with that text. Then came the punchline. That text was, IIRC, by Socrates, waaaay back in the ancient times.
And the same happens with these "waah, we've become dependent of X" complaints. Every single bloody time something new happens, there'll be some old guy in his horse-drawn buggy shaking a fist at the newfangled automobiles and complaining about people becoming so addicted to these newfangled things. I bet that if you could go back in time to prehistoric times, you'd find a couple of wrinkled white-haired cavemen in a corner of the cave, lamenting about how people have become so dependent of this newfangled "fire" thing. Or about how they're taking this new "wheel" thing for granted, instead of hauling the dead antelopes on their back, like their grandfathers did.
And yes, communication has been an important thing ever since the dawn of mankind. And, yes, humans always wanted to overcome the problem of having to be within a couple of metres of each other to need to talk. People always wanted to be able to keep talking to their brother Jack who lived in another town. Or even to learn from or teach to people who weren't even alive at the same time: hence books.
Ever since the first summerian sent a written clay tablet to someone else, we've basically been on the same evolution arc that today has reached cell phones, IM and chat rooms. People always wanted to reduce the latency of it all and make it more convenient. E.g., some kingdoms would maintain some sort of a courier system, where emissaries could change horses every X km to reach important destinations in the minimum of time. E.g., people would go through the trouble of using trained pigeons, you guessed, just so their message would reach someone faster. Then it was telegrams. Then phones. Then public phones, so you don't have to wait until you get home to send someone a message. Then pagers, so you could also _receive_ messages while under way. Then cell phones.
Or taking the other branch of the evolution, the other branch traceable all the way back to telegrams is... email.
The same for finding stuff on the web. The success of the internet isn't that surprising once you put it into this perspective: people have always liked to have a repository of knowledge, and have built libraries ever since the ancient times. Sometimes at great cost and effort. See the Library of Alexandria, for example. The effort to acquire and transcribe all that stuff by hand was measured in tremendous quantities of man-hours, compared to the populations they had.
And there you can trace the same evolution too, always driven by the same pressure: making information even easier available, and to more people. Transcribing manuscripts by hand was replaced by Guttenberg's flat press, which in turn was replaced by the rotary press. And then we had those texts available on the Internet.
So whop-de-freaking do. Big surprise there. It's all just the current stage of an evolution that spanned millenia. It's sooo surprising that the same species that queued at the telegraph office to send a message instead of riding to the next town to deliver the news in person... now uses cell phones and email to the same end. Or that the same species that in the 1600's paid good money for maps copied by hand by a cartographer, now uses Google Maps.
Slashdot Mirror
_If_ some Nvidia fan goes to all the trouble to buy an ATI card, install the drivers, and spend weeks trying to write code that crashes the driver (so he can submit a crash report to MS)... well, as an ATI user I'll thank him wholeheartedly. Any bugs they document that way is going to be one bug that gets fixed in the next Catalyst release, so, heh, they helped raise the quality of ATI drivers. That's mighty kind, I would say even altruistic, coming from a fan of a competitor :P
The EU lawsuit over network protocols is:
1. Asking for the protocol descriptions, not the APIs or the code. (Hence, MS giving them a bunch of undocumented code isn't what they asked for.)
2. It's about internal details that MS never intended to be used by anyone else. (Note that I'm not discussing whether that attitude is monopolistic or not. Just saying that they never planned to give everyone details as exactly how to talk to a Windows server from a Solaris box.) I.e., I can easily see how something like that in most projects, not just MS, would end up a growing mass of code doing whatever quick hacks do the job, rather than a clean and well designed API.
Drivers are an entirely different dish altogether, and MS has always been actively trying to get OEMs to write their drivers for Windows. I.e., it's the exact _opposite_ of point 2 above. And they've always supplied ample docs and examples of how to do that.
So basically, far from me to keep you from some mindless anti-MS karma whoring, but extrapolating something from a completely unrelated domain as if it had any relevance to Windows _drivers_ is... just surrealistic. I'm sure you can get your daily karma dose in a more believable way than this.
" Trying to fit all games into an online model forces them to be basically all versions of the same game (all the same run around-kill-collect-level model of game play)."
Not really. MMO games also include stuff that's pretty different from WoW. Mind you, not _completely_ different, but still. E.g.:
1. Planetside.
It's really a MMO-FPS. Think UT2004 with 200 players in each team. Think battles where a SF fortress is attacked by waves of a hundred infantry (ranging from unarmored infiltrators to the massive mechanized exo-skeletons) and tens of tanks, artillery vehicles, AA vehicles, bombers, gunships, giant transport ships paradropping whole squads on top of it, and even about a lance of mechs in most fights.
It also has absolutely _zero_ grinding, farming, etc, as the game has no money (you're a soldier, so your equipment is provided to you based on your certifications) and levels don't give anyone an unfair advantage in combat (being higher level gives you more flexibility, as it allows you to be certified in several different things, but you still have the same health, do the same damage and can use the same weapons as someone half your level.)
_And_ it doesn't really need 3 hours of gathering a 40 man group a la WoW or of waiting in a queue for some battleground. Anyone can just jump into any battle and get xp for whatever they can do. E.g., if you're certified as a medic, you don't have to wait until some raid invites you: you can just jump into any battle and get xp for healing the combatants. E.g., if you're an engineer, you can just jump into any fight and start repairing the damaged vehicles, and get xp for it. E.g., if you're certified to pilot a transport, just load up a squad and paradrop them wherever they want to go, and not only you'll be a very popular guy or gal, but you'll get xp for their kills there too. Or, of course, if you can use a gun, you can just get your gun and go join whatever assault or defense is in progress.
Sure, joining a squad or outfit lets you fight more coordinated as part of a team, but that's about it. If you don't want to, you can just go solo in any battle just as well. You'll figure out something useful to do pretty easily. Be it healing, repairing, shooting a gun, being gunner on a tank, laying mines, or jumping into a chaingun turret and laying down the suppression fire.
And, again, any of those you can do from level 1 (though you can gain a few levels first by just doing the tutorials anyway) and have max level people thanking you for it. There is no grinding to level 60 or collecting epic equipment before you can go play with the big boys. You can take part in any battle right after installing the game, and feel like you've made a difference.
So, basically, you know, you can just play the game and let levels and stuff happen on their own. There is no need to focus on collecting anything either.
2. City Of Heroes / City Of Villains.
Well, this is a sorta more standard type of MMO, but it cuts down on pretty much anything that could be seen as a time sink. E.g., travel time is short (SuperSpeed caps at about 90mph, Teleport caps at about 200mph), combat is fast and furious, there is no collecting "loot" in the traditional sense of the word (if you want your character to wear big red pauldrons, you can just paint him that way in the character editor), there is no crafting in the traditional sense (though you can craft devices for your super-hero base or super-villain lair), and there is no farming for gold or resources.
Also, although it does depend on grouping (unlike the loose action of Planetside), missions are automatically instanced for whatever number of people you have. I.e., the same mission can either be soloed or you can find an 8-player group for it. Since groups yield better xp per minute, you rarely have a problem finding random people to group with at any level. (Though whether they can also play well in a group, is a bit of a hit-and-miss issue. Some groups rule, some can make a good point for misanthropy.) But again, any instanced mission can also be soloed if you're not in a social mood.
Again you assume too much about what I aggree or disaggree with.
This has nothing to do with whether I like or dislike MS, or with whether I aggree or not with his views. It is strictly about exercising some healthy skepticism when your source of information isn't an independent unbiased source. That's all.
Yes, it's pretty stupid to assume that he must be lying, but here's the catch: it's equally stupid to assume that he must be saying the untainted truth just because he seems cool, hip, intelligent and independent. Ignoring the obvious factors that he was paid by MS and his job only existed as long as MS liked the image he painted, is, at best, naive. Cooler and smarter people have caved in before, for the sake of keeping a comfy job.
Does the Soviet Union prove anything? Well, damn right. It's proof that a few tens of thousand of people have already chosen to lie, if their job depends on pleasing the ones who can terminate that job.
So is he lying? I don't know, but tbh, I don't even give a damn. I'll just go with an independent source instead of trying to guess that.
Some ideas are sorta like vampires are described, for example, by Terry Pratchett. You may think you've beheaded one, stuffed full of garlick, and dragged out into the sun, but a few years later someone drops a drop of blood in the right place and there you have the old vampire back again. Some bad ideas can be like that.
And smell reproduction has been one of those bad ideas that just won't stay dead. It's been popping up again and again, as computer peripheral, phone peripheral, etc. Just when you think you've buried it at crossroads with a stake through its chest, and under a small tumulus of ridicule and "no, I _don't_ want to smell the environment in games, especially not with the mandatory sewers levels everyone has" posts... hardly a year goes by before it pops up somewhere else. Some dolt comes up with "I know! We'll make a smell plugin for IM and IRC!!!" Bury that too, watch a year or two go by, there it pops up again. "I know! Let's make a TV that can reproduce smell too!" Laugh that out of court too, bury it, watch some time go by... "I know! Let's make a mobile phone that transmits smells!!!"
I'm already curious where it'll pop up next. Probably in MP3 players. Surely everyone will want to walk down the street with tubes up their nose. Plus, you'll have so much to look forward to when the bogus MP3 files on the net aren't just some white noise or "piracy is theft" reminder, but also come with a recording of someone's fart.
At any rate, mark my words: we haven't heard the last of this stupidity.
As opposed to you, who just post the above bullshit about anyone who dares think different than you do? Is that your point, little fanboy? That surely only those who are on your side of the story are open minded, and everyone even exercising some minimal skepticism is covering their eyes before The Truth(TM)?
Did you even bother checking that I'm actually fairly pro-MS before writing that idiocy? Nah, you just assumed that anyone who even dares be skeptical about one particular PR voice _must_ be some sworn enemy of MS. Every good citizen should, of course, put their faith 100% in paid PR shills and religiously believe every word they say. Heh.
How about the minimal skepticism of preferring to take my news and facts from a more impartial source? _Both_ MS _and_ the OSS zealots might, shall we say, be less than unbiased in their coverage of MS. So how about I'll trust _neither_ the paid PR guy filming it through rose-coloured glasses _nor_ the sworn enemies painting it all black with a broad brush. I'll do my own research and ask someone who _doesn't_ have a vested interest in slanting the story in their favourite direction, thank you very much.
Yes, so one company's paid PR guy finds that company a wonderful place to work at, wonderfully open and democratic, and led by wonderful managers who appreciate criticism and always have only the most sound reasons for all decisions, ever. Now, that's a big surprise. Same as, say, any other company's PR guy presents their employer? Lemme see, perchance the same as:
- big pharma's PR guys finds big pharma to be wonderful humanitarian-minded companies, and only doing The Right Thing? (Animal testing is, obviously, The Right Thing.)
- tobacco companies' PR guys finding those same tobacco companies to be wonderful and caring companies, and find smoking to be a wonderful and harmless thing that's never had any side-effects
- EA's PR guy finds their 20'th football game to be absolutely original and innovative
- Sony's PR guys find Sony to be a wonderful company and the PS3 to be a bargain
Etc.
No, really, it's such a big surprise that a PR guy bravely puts a rose tint on the company's image. It's so unexpected and brave that it _must_ be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and we must all do our duty of believing every word unconditionally. That was sarcasm, if you can't tell.
Let me tell you about another group to which your words can be applied verbatim. In Soviet Russia they had newspapers, radio, and TV, and reporters who:
1) interviewed many high high and middle level party officials
2) had a job involving walking the halls of various official institutions to try to figure out what was going on
3) challenged their audience daily with their findings
4) thought daily about politics and the Soviet Union's role in the future
5) publically spoke out against (mild and pre-approved) various shortcomings.
And yet we already know that they published lies and propaganda anyway, and put an artifficial kind face on something that was a failure both economically and as human rights go. The party officially recognized that one little bit of truth makes people more eager to swallow the big lie, so, yes, number 5 happened pretty routinely too. So, yes, it's nothing new that a propaganda shill would "dare" "bravely" confront Ballmer about such utterly irrelevant issues as his opinions of gay rights, which frankly bear no relevance to MS's products or monopolistic stance... to seem independent enough so you'll swallow the bigger lies that do bear relevance.
But, anyway, let's resume mis-using your words in that context. You don't believe them? It seems to me you're implying that
1) A journalist from Pravda was stupid,
2) He was a liar,
3) His employment was one big consipiracy where 49999 Soviet citizens put on an act every time he was in the room and he was the one person who was not in on the big joke
And, blimey, yes, you'd be right. It was number 2. He who pays the orchestra gets to choose the music, and he who pays your salary to write about the company gets to choose what positive spin he wants you to put on it. And, yes, a bit of number 3 too: people are good at putting on an act when the CEO's PR lackey comes asking questions.
The corrolary being that it doesn't have to be a _good_ reason, nor be ther best way to act upon that reason. It also doesn't have to be the publically stated one: people are very good at starting with what they personally want ("but I really want a pony!!!") and working from there to find some bogus rationale they can tell others ("our poll (on exactly one person) indicated that the company's productivity and morale would increase if the CEO had a pony.")
Frankly, I've seen lots of decisions that technically had a reason, but not the kind of reason you'd expect in that kind of a job or decision.
E.g., I've worked for someone who was a yes-man in _both_ directions. I can understand that he had a reason there: to just not rock the boat, not annoy anyone, and not risk taking a decision that later could be used against him. Is it the kind of reason that's expected of someone in a management position? Nope. Is the result good for the company? Nope.
E.g., take the chain of events that lead to the Boston molasses disaster. Did that beancounter have a reason to skip testing the tank, or to paint it brown (so it wouldn't be obvious that it leaks) instead of repairing it? Yes, he did: saving costs. I'm sure he probably got a big bonus for building it cheaper than what some real engineer had offered to build it for. Was it the right kind of decision? Nope, nevertheless, it was an idiotic decision that costed human lives and destruction of property.
Yes, I know you're seeing the same problem, but I felt someone should just spell it out by now, before the circular backpatting PHB squad starts the "see, we told you we always had a reason, even if you peons don't understand it" chorus.
"But, is the Sierra example relevant anymore?"
It was relevant as strictly an example of
A) how a major producer of one genre abandoned that genre, in spite of having a growing market and selling more copies than ever. And,
B) how profit and copies sold can be two very different things.
And, you know, taken from the mouth of those who were one of the two biggest names in the adventure game industry at the time.
But, in the end, it was there just as an example that you can't always just blame the demand side of the equation.
Is Sierra that relevant any more? No, but other publishers and developpers are still doing the same with other genres. E.g., Interplay sold the Fallout franchise where Fallout 2 had sold millions of copies, but announced yet another MMO at a time when _noone_ had millions of subscribers to their MMO. EQ had peaked at some 400,000 IIRC, and number 2 was at 250,000 or so. (And a couple of years later, other than Blizzard, noone still has millions of subscribers.) So basically they discarded Genre 1 where they had millions of buyers, and went for Genre 2 where they could hope at most for hundreds of thousands. Why? Because in Genre 2 you could get bigger profits even if you sold a tenth of the number of copies.
"These days, making an FPS is not necessarily very cheap, even if you license an engine. I'm going to guess that it's actually even more expensive than making adventure games."
Very insightful observation indeed. And indeed that might be why adventures are making a comeback in a major way.
Sad to say, the assumption that "if only genre X is produced, it's because people only buy genre X" was always false. I fell for it before too, but it never was true anyway.
The thing that matters is _profit_, not number of copies sold. Genre X can be more profitable than Genre Y for a miriad of reasons, even if Genre Y actually sells more copies.
E.g., read some interviews from Sierra and the like during the late 90's, when FPS and RTS exploded and Adventures nearly went extinct. Surely it was because everyone only bought FPS and RTS, and noone bought Adventures, right? Well, wrong. Adventures were a growing market, sold better than ever, and routinely outsold a lot of FPS. But here's the catch: they also cost a lot more to produce. Making a brainless FPS just needed a licensed 3D engine and making about a dozen levels and skins, whereas making an Adventure needed complex animations and scripts. You could sell half as many copies of a FPS and still have more money left.
Briefly: yes, a genre skirted with extinction although it had more demand than ever. Go figure.
E.g., the MMO growth today has _nothing_ to do with everyone wanting to play online only. On the contrary, there are still are _far_ more offline gamers than online gamers. So why do people want to produce a MMO instead of cattering to the larger market? Because of the monthly fee, that's why. If you sell someone an offline game, you get maybe 40$ from them, and worse yet, the retailers take most of that money. If you sell them a MMO, studies say people stay on the average 6 month in them, so at, say, 13$ per month and one of the months being included, you've raked in 13*5 + 40 = 105$ from the average gamer, and 65$ there bypass the retailers completely.
That's all. It's not that everyone wants just 3 genres. It's that those are the most profitable, but the reasons have _nothing_ to do with more people wanting those.
Personally I find that:
1. genres aren't _that_ limitting
E.g., "Europa 1400 -- The Guild" is technically a "business sim", but that didn't really prevent it from mixing inter-personal relationships, a bit of politics, a bit of history lesson, even a bit of RTS, etc, into the mix.
E.g., between Europa Universalis and Hearts Of Iron 2, Paradox's games have technically been strategy in real time, but they're not even vaguely similar to C&C or Warcraft.
2. it's not like people outright refuse new genres. Quite the contrary.
E.g., Populous was debatably the first sorta-RTS, and didn't even fit any genre at the time. Guess what? It was a big success.
E.g., although technically first person shooters were not that new, they still were relatively uncommon, and Wolfenstein 3D was the first textured one. So although you can't really say that it invented a genre, it took an obscure genre and made it a huge success overnight.
E.g., both Sim City and Civilization pretty much created respectively the city-building and empire-building genres. Yup, they sold nicely.
E.g., The Sims only resembled one old game, and at that only vaguely. At any rate, noone though of it as a "genre" yet. Yep, it's quickly become the number one best-selling PC game of all times, out-selling any of Id's or Epic's shooters by a massive margin.
So from where I stand, it looks like inventing a genre actually can sell like hot cakes.
What doesn't sell is just making an uninspired melange of two genres, typically not even understanding what the people liked in either of them. Or not even noticing that they appeal to different types of personalities. E.g., you can't really hope for that much of a market overlap if you mix a slow-paced city-builder appealing to casual gamers with a "hardcore" Counter-Strike clone appealing mainly to die-hard loud-mouthed online "clansmen". E.g., you can't just take a pure-reflexes Mario clone and give it RPG-style cut-scenes and dialogues, and think you've covered both pure-reflexes fans and story-driven fans with one game. In practice, the two are more like opposites, so whoever likes one will be bored by the gameplay of the other.
But that's IMHO not really that much innovation anyway: copying verbatim from two sources isn't much more creative than copying from one. So if that isn't that tempting to publishers, I can't say we've really lost that much as a result.
"What creative industry ISN'T 95% derivative? Movies, television, books, music, art, you name it. Everyone jumps on the bandwagon when something is successful."
Yes, but that does not make it good or interesting to anyone with even the minimal intelligence needed to notice the verbatim copy.
E.g., yes, movies do the same, but that's exactly why movies have lost my interest long ago. Every single freakin' genre has been reduced to one standard script, with _maybe_ a couple of standard variants. So if you watch the first 5 minutes of any movie, by now you can tell pretty accurately what will happen in the rest of the movie, who will die, and exactly after how many minutes the standard plot twist will come.
I'm freakin' sick and tired of, for example, The Hero's Journey standard script, after seeing it being applied verbatim to every single freakin' action movie. It seems that just about _any_ topic is shoehorned into the same script, following the same steps, in the same order, and religiously obeying the percentage of minutes each step could take. And spicing it up with the same ingredients, e.g., sex and wanton destruction of property, because that's what sells.
And I really mean _any_ topic by now. I have all confidence that Hollywood could even shoehorn the whole WW2 into the same tired Hero's Journey script, starting with Franklin D. Roosevelt as an ordinary citizen you can relate to, climaxing with him single-handedly defeating Hitler and Mussolini and their super-soldier guards in a spectacular fight, and coming down from that climax by getting the girl and becoming a normal citizen again. Forget what you've learned in history class about how that war actually went, this is the Hero's Journey way, and we're not gonna let history get in the way of it. The fall of the Soviet Union? Same deal. Start with Clinton as an everyman figure, climax by defeating Gorbachev and his Spetsnaz guards in an epic fight, etc.
Yes, it's partially sarcasm, but also sadly serious: they're _that_ bloody one-track-minded about shoehorning anything into a standardised script.
I've even seen it seep into games. Sometimes in such an uninspired 1-to-1 transcription, that makes a 10 minute introductory sequence in a 90 minute movie become a boring horrible 5 hour grind in a 45 hour console RPG. They have their script saying that X% of the total time must be devoted to showing the hero as an everyman figure that the viewer can identify with, and they're gonna religiously obey that.
And so on.
Does that make movies better? No, it doesn't. As I've said, it just made my interest in movies take a nose dive as soon as I figured out those standard scripts. (That was around the mid-teens, btw, so it didn't even take a lifetime to get that "haven't I seen the exact same movie before, only with different names and props?" feeling.)
Am I looking forward to seeing games become the same thing? Good grief, no!
There are various degrees of boned, ranging from "merely" being at a "This guy thinks too much to ever go abroad. And we better keep an eye on him", to losing any chance of ever having a job better than minimum wage except it's in a mine, all the way to earning a one-way trip to Siberia/Guantanamo/whatever. Just because you're slightly boned doesn't mean you'll be willing to go all the way to ending your life in a concentration camp.
Go ahead. I didn't think I was saying anything non-obvious anyway.
"Chilling effect on terrorists? Hmm, any terrorist who hasn't since 1998 heard of VAI is behind the times. I am sure that the smarter ones recruit online but cull in person, and probably do so after layer upon layer of vetting and looking over the shoulder. I am thinking that a number of these recruits are diversionary sacrificial lambs to weed out the VAI-type shadows..."
Nope, the chilling effect wasn't targetted at terrorists and real traitors in the communist block either. Sure, the average Soviet or Chinese or whatever citizen may have disliked their oppressive government, but basically still didn't dislike their country too much. In fact, I dare say most were probably patriots. So they wouldn't have actually went and sabotaged a factory or sold military secrets to the capitalists anyway.
No, the subtle fear campaign was to keep everyone in line and obeying the oppressor. The banner waved by the party was, of course, that they're doing it to unveil traitors and saboteurs selling their country for a handful of dollars. But in practice it also kept every ordinary Tom, Dick and Harry (or Ivan, Piotr and Evgeniy), who hadn't even _seen_ a dollar or a foreigner in their life, from trusting each other enough to start working together against the communism.
You knew that, although officially they're only doing the witch hunt for spies and saboteurs, they collected the information about _everyone_. Including you. You didn't want to be the person whose dossier says "he got drunk and started shouting 'let's have a demonstration for democracy.'" You didn't even want to be anywhere near Piotr any more if he started saying things like that. In fact, you'd start suspecting that Piotr may be an agent provocateur paid by the secret police. Better not start aggreeing with him now, only to have him interogating you at the NKVD later.
_That_ is the problem with such chilling effects. That they won't really even work against spies and terrorists (it's not like Al Quaeda members will form groups on Orkut or whatever, so such data mining is worthless to that end), but it will keep normal citizens in fear of what their givernment knows about them.
That's insightful and all, but we're talking about giving someone a keylogger-onna-stick (USB stick), not about breaking into their defenses layer by layer. I don't have to decrypt my way into the database, for example, when some gullible guy ran my program, which sent me all his source files. I just need to grep for something that looks like a database URL in his java sources, for example, to have all I need to connect to their productive database. It's that unskilled a work.
Sure, it won't be as easy as writing that Trojan for Windows, but it's not as hard as breaking in the hard way either. They can have the most secure system, with exactly zero exploits. Heck, even every single algorithm and method proved correct. It won't matter. With enough idiots running my program off that USB stick, it'll eventually fish all the information I need to just log in and export their whole database.
It won't even trip their admin until at least half of it is exported. There won't be a long log of trying out every single past exploit and whatever, but just one login that's successful. If you can spot it instantly, you're a better admin than anyone I know.
Basically I'm not saying that Linux is insecure or anything. I'm saying that, as the article proves, we're at a point where attacking the humans is easier. And as phishing proved long before that: you don't have to break into a bank's systems the hard way, when you can get 1000 guys simply telling you their login data. The bank may well be behind the best firewalls and running the most secure version of Unix ever sold, the phisher can still login and take the schmuck's money anyway.
Or to put it otherwise: Linux may well be secure. The human at the keyboard, though, can be a much weaker link.
Basically, you know, just because you're running a good secure OS, doesn't mean you can just run programs off an USB stick or CD found on the front stairs.
I'll tell you a different kind of a "in soviet russia" story, and it's not a joke. I'll tell you what kept those people in line under most totalitarian regimes. Yes, the short story is "the secret police", but that's only a very superficial view of the problem.
The communist block's secret police didn't always have the indiscriminate brutality of Stalin's black cars and summary executions. It eventually evolved into something more "subtle": the widespread idea that somewhere they have a dossier of what you've said and who you've associated with. That even if you don't land in the Gulag (but then again, you might land there anyway) for going drinking again with comrade Piotr who speaks against the government, there'll be a page in your dossier for ever flagging you as sharing Piotr's subversive views. And it someday might bite you in the ass. E.g., maybe some day you won't get a promotion, or the party's approval to go abroad (on business or holyday), or whatever, just because somewhere there's a page in your dossier saying you're a subversive element and associate with traitors.
Now they didn't have the computers or manpower to actually do that on anywhere near the scale NSA is doing it, so the probability was really low, but the chilling effect was thorough anyway. People didn't want to take risks, so they tended to shut up.
But the effect was more perverse than that. Anyone who openly spoke against the government was seen as a potential agent provocateur, trying to bait you into saying something that'll come back to haunt you later. It's the most perverse thing you can do to prevent organized resistance: make sure that people don't trust each other. The guy shouting against the government might be paid by the government, or may be someone who has a petty grudge against you and tries to get you to say something you might regret.
Basically, the the most effective threats don't have to be explicit, but vague and implicit. People don't have to know that the government will swiftly come and send them to Guantanamo for speaking against it. The most effective threat is to just have everyone know that you know everything they did and everyone they associated with, that it's for ever attached to their file somewhere, and they don't know how or when you'll use it. Maybe you'll go for direct retaliation, or maybe their son won't be able to get a government scholarship/job/whatever because of what they said, or whatever. That unknown can pretty chilling while costing very little to maintain. (A lot less than trying to execute everyone who disaggrees, and creates less martyrs.)
And all this mining phone calls and social sites (a lot do have personal information, e.g., dating sites) has the potential to create a chilling effect of epic proportions. Is John speaking out against the new fascist government? Well, then better make sure you're not on his friends list or calling him every week. You don't want to have _that_ on your file, now do you? If you're an employer, better get rid of him on your own, because otherwise, you know, that relationship goes on your file too. Plus, you know they'll make a connection every time he calls you to take a sick day, or you call him to ask why the server isn't up. Better not risk losing a fat government contract just because you're associating with and employing undesirables.
Does that have to be accurate and filtered clean of character assassination bullshit? No, it's probably better if it isn't. Might get some people thinking they already have plenty of bogus or inaccurate stuff on their file anyway, so all the more reason not to add real stuff to it too. Better keep low and try not to trip their radar, than have to explain which stuff is bogus and which isn't
On the whole, I certainly aggree with you, and it's certainly refreshing to see someone who doesn't fall into the "I use Linux so I'm immune to anything" trap. But I think even you underestimate it a little.
e t_user_login=admin.") There'll often be text files or spreadsheets with all the URLs, names and passwords he uses. (The geek equivalent of post-it notes.) Etc.
.smbpassword file, but there's nothing that some trivial parsing can't extract. Or just send it to me as it is, together with any readable file referenced in it. I'll do the extraction by hand.
"Now, while you are watching a cool graphics demo, it checks if you are logged in as root and, if you are, installs a nasty payload. If not, it could simply start emailing every file it finds in your home directory, or delete them, or encrypt them."
Doesn't even need root to steal passwords. There are a _ton_ of config files and startup scripts in your home directory, which a trojan can attach itself to. It can load itself in your bash window, as a plugin in your mozilla, launch an extra program in your X, replace icons on your desktop, and god knows what else. One of those will catch on to something.
E.g., if it's, say, Suse, I know that there'll be some programs -- e.g., Yast, every time you run the auto-updater -- where the system will ask for the root password first. I can just replace the link with one to program that shows an identical dialogue.
Or, yeah, transmitting every file in your home directory is indeed another great way to get a ton of info. Source files that contain the URL, account and password to the productive database are the norm, rather than the exception. Or some cutesy script that goes through the firewall to download the latest nasa pic of the day or whatnot with wget, and in the process contains the user's name and password to go through that proxy. (Let's hope he's used that password in more than one place.) Or there'll always be one idiot who exported the productive database onto his local computer, or downloaded the server configs (including all database connections, with name and password) god knows what else he's copied there. There'll often be one idiot who's built some back door because he can't be arsed to go through the IT department to have something reconfigured or to properly log in. I'll love to know about that backdoor. There'll be emails with forgotten passwords. There'll be emails where people tell each other about those backdoors. ("Oh, if you come from the intranet zone, you can bypass the stupid authenticating proxy completely. Just use http//prod.somebank.com/internalurl/some.jsp?secr
Config files outside the home directory? Those can be fun too. E.g., everyone will have access to fstab. Maybe they'll have the name and password for every single file share they use in there, or maybe it'll be offloaded to some
Log files? Now those can be a cornucopia of classified information. I've seen people even log each user's name and password at each login through their clever UserRegistry or Single Sign On module or such. If someone copied a bunch of productive logs to their machine -- or I can get the password to the machine where they are -- I might be able to login and cause mayhem as 1000 of their customers. Or go to those customers' profile pages and find out their personal data.
Etc.
"If you aren't root the damage is limited, but there is still damage."
As I was saying, even if you aren't root, the damage done can be catastrophic. The thinking that all that matters is that the OS survives, can sometimes miss the point. Yeah, some guy's Linux installation survived perfectly. But then I got access to his company's servers. Was it that much better? I'll bet that as far as the company is concerned, they would have cared less if I just wiped out one workstation's hard drive.
There are basically two fundamentally different things that could have happened there:
1. That the site itself created false profiles to seem populated. That's fraud.
2. That some member put in a false address on their own profile just because they _don't_ want to be stalked, spammed, or have their identity stolen for character assassination purposes as retaliation by some cretin who can't deal with rejection. This is just having a brain. The sheer number of idiots out there is truly frightening, and these sites _also_ act like the wrong kind of a filter by mainly attracting those who are too socially-retarded to find a date any other way. So anyone who put any true personal info on a site that'll give it unquestioningly to every horny Tom, Dick and Harry, I'd consider them genuinely and truly retarded.
So is it some guy that was scammed by the site owners, _or_ some socially-retarded guy who's angered that he can't stalk the girl who dared refuse him? They're very very different cases. So as long as we aren't told which of them it is, I won't hurry to join in the angry mob with torches and pitchforks.
In fact, the way the original post was phrased, it sounded like getting a false email was _the_ grand fraud. Not even "proof" of fraud, but as being the grand despicable act of deception itself. That the site should have made sure the guy only gets genuine email addresses for his money.
In which case, I'm left scratching my head: exactly what the fuck was he actually expecting to get on that site? Did he think he was buying a list of verified email addresses, like on some spammers' sites? Or what? The site only promised to put him in contact with another person, nothing more. As long as they did that (or at least he can't prove that they didn't), it seems to me like they're perfectly in the clear. They didn't promise to sell him someone's verified personal data.
On the whole, it looks more and more like an idiot who can't deal with rejection than anything else. Read the whole thing again. Starting with the whole flipping out and trying to sue the site after the very first rejection. There is no mention of trying to gather more proof or anything. (E.g., you know, trying to chat to more than one person just to see if all conversations follow the same bait-and-dump script or what. Or trying to see if more people run into the same kind of a problem. Surely he's not the only one who talked to a staff member in disguise, if that's the case.) And continuing with the not-so-veiled quotes all over the place ("she", "woman", etc) implying that it must have been a guy, although, again, there was no finding or even an actual case.
Seriously, the more I look at it, the more it looks like a very good possibility that it's just a clown who'd do anything rather than admit that someone rejected him. He's scream fraud, he'll scream that it must have been a man in disguise, anyting. Because god forbid admitting that maybe, just maybe, a woman could have actually rejected him.
Of course, I can't know that either, but it's a distinct possibility.
Google has only claimed "do no evil" as their motto. They never claimed to be a global Robin Hood, fighting to right every single wrong under the Sun.
Basically the world isn't made of just two extremes. (Nor even a good-neutral-evil, trio that you may have learned from D&D.) The real world has shades and nuances, not just pure black and pure white.
Even if you see it unidimensionally, the it's still an axis, not just two points. It's possible to be at various points to the left or to the right of zero (e.g., just a little naughty, or just a little nice) without being either a paragon of pure blinding light or the prince of darkness. And that applies to Google too: they just promised to not go into negatives on that axis, not to be the holiest Champion Of Light, Liberator Of The Serfs, Overthrower Of Tyrants, Righter Of Wrongs, and Avenger Of All Injustices.
But the RL isn't even that unidimensional and clear cut. Most RL actions aren't clear cut and obviously good or evil. A lot of them are a mixed bag of good stuff _and_ bad stuff, and stuff that's just personal opinion, or stuff that you have no fucking clue whether it really is good or really is evil. Or stuff where if you asked 100 different people, you'd get 101 different views.
"Too many "unlockables" and it's work. No "unlockables" and it's 30 minutes of gameplay."
That's precisely the kind of game that pisses me off: it barely has 30 minutes of content, and thinks that forcing some idiotic time sink (work to unlock something, no save so you need to replay each level 20 times before you pass, etc) onto the user is making up for that.
Which is bullshit. Thinking that 30 minutes of content can be stretched to 20 hours of fun by just mixing in 19.5 hours of crap, is like thinking that you can take a can of beer and multiply the drinking fun by mixing it with two gallons of piss. At the end of the day, that content will be so thinned out as to not even count as fun any more. What I'll remember weren't (keeping the proportions) the occasion 3 minutes of joy at finally seeing a new area or finally getting that new car, but the 117 minutes minutes of sheer repetitive mind-numbing grind to get there.
How many games have you given up out of sheer boredom by the half of the game? How many times have you read the crap excuse "most gamers don't finish games any more, so we really need to make games shorter and shallower. It's what the gamers want, really." from some publisher's PR drones? Well, that's your syndrome right there of that game content dillution.
How about returning to the point where games actually had enough content? E.g., I remember getting 70 hours out of, say, "Persona 2: Eternal Punishment" and at _no_ point did it become a "yawn, I'm only doing it to unlock the secret Golden Buttplug collectable" kind of grind.
There _are_ ways to keep a game interesting for hours. Inserting some boring grind _isn't_ it. There are plot twists, gradual gameplay changes, levels with different ways to solve, etc. E.g., in "Europa 1400 -- The Guild", the focus gradually changes from micro-managing a small shop with an apprentice, to managing half the town's shops and dabbling into politics, to fighting bandits (or robbing people as a bandit) and assaulting buildings. E.g., in "X2: The Threat" the focus changes gradually from (and occasionally back to) a straight space sim, to a single ship trader like Elite, to managing a commercial empire spanning a whole galaxy and fleets with destroyers and carriers.
Guess what neither "Europa 1400 -- The Guild" nor "X2: The Threat" had _any_ unlockable content whatsoever, and never needed any. There was no secret profession or ship that you get only if you collected some idiotic tokens. Yet you _can't_ say you've seen it all in 30 minutes and then it was just the same without a grind, because the focus changes constantly. What you've seen and done in the first 30 minutes doesn't even resemble what you'll do in it after a week. Even the piloting part alone isn't even similar between dogfighting in your starting light scout and driving an 18 gun space destroyer with fighter escorts.
Want replay value? How about providing _actual_ good reasons to replay, right from the start? E.g., I've spent _hundreds_ of hours replaying Fallout 2, because it could actually be solved in that many different ways. E.g., if you started a smart and charismatic diplomat character, it would play massively different from a low intelligence brawler. E.g., solving each quest -- and it had a _ton_ of them -- could be done in at least 3 different ways.
For example doing the Navarro infiltration could be done by going in through the front gate, guns blazing, and hoping you get the plasma turrets before they nail you. Or you could bullshit your way in as a new recruit, get a power armour and plasma gun for joining, bullshit the techie into giving you the vertibird plans, bullshit the commander into giving your the tanker FOB, and so on. Or you could use stealth. Or you could use your traps skill to defuse some mines and go in through the back door, get the big lizzard as a temporary ally, lay waste to the bunker, then use the elevators for hit-and-run tactics against the soldiers and turrets above. Or various combinations of that.
A
"No, but it is ABSOLUTELY his job to make sure his products work properly. What is he managing, if not the products that users get stuck with?"
We can aggree there very quickly. Yep, that's his job. He's a manager. He should manage.
But that was not the submission's spin. The submission's spin was more along the tone of "Ha ha, he couldn't remove spyware off a Windows computer." Which already isn't a management job.
Without any MS bashing, I still find it... no offense, but it's mildy amusing and yet mildly sad to read what you wrote.
1. As an engineer myself (and I mean with actually a college diploma saying "electrical engineer"), it's not my job to do that kind of thing. I don't work for MS, but nevertheless it's not what I was looking forward to do in life, and not what I negotiated when I took any job so far. I'm a programmer, not a computer janitor, Jim. I'll take pride in doing my job, not in doing something that unrelated just to brown-nose the boss. Sure, it can be seen as a challenge, but it ranks up there with the challenge of licking the office floor clean.
In fact, I'm outright insulted by the usual assumption that I'm some generic nerd with an indiscriminate addiction to anything even vaguely computer-related, from programming to removing spyware to pulling someone's ethernet cables to cleaning someone's CPU fan. It's like assuming that if an architect likes designing a good building, he should be thrilled to come fix your roof. People assuming that I'm such a junkie that I should be grateful and excited because they let me near their computers, are quick to land on my freaks list. I've actually left a job when the boss started assuming that since I'd spend my weekend (or parts of it) near a computer anyway, spending it doing unpaid overtime for him should be equally exciting for me.
And if a manager abused his position and asked me to do personal favours for _his_ buddies, that by itself would actually lower my morale, not turn it into a thing of pride. Yes, it's a "boss ego" thing. It's not strong, it's just what that kind of crap is. At that point the guy is simply _that_ convinced that he's some royal blood and everyone else is his personal janitor. And if he also insulted my intelligence with some retarded "you should take it as a thing of pride" bullshit talk, it would already tell me how low he thinks of me. And I'll be more than happy to give him a reality check and look for the next job.
But I can see how others would just do a crappy half-arsed job instead while looking for the next job. So _if_ actually any engineer at MS (or, yes, at Red Hat, Sun, IBM or whatever else) just slacked around it for a couple of days, and then said "nope, can't be done", (well, if they're not on the anti-spyware team in the first place), I wouldn't be too hasty to draw and quarter them. Sure, I'll consider it dishonest and look down upon it, but then an abrupt morale drop might just make people do that.
2. It's not the kind of thing I've trained for, and not the kind of skill that I'll have a use for any further. There are only 24 hours in a day, and if I actually want to learn something job-related, it will be just that: something job related. I might read a book on good programming techniques or learn a new language, not learn all the newest spyware strains and whatnot.
I.e., basically I _don't_ know everything even remotely computer-related, and I don't even plan to. Sure, after enough googling and cussing, I'd _probably_ be able to do it. But it will be just a pointless waste of my time _and_ yours anyway. Someone who does that for a living would be more qualified and faster to do it. And having my time wasted won't be a thing of pride.
Again, not all computer activities are the same. Assuming that "computing" is some one skill covering everything from programming, to administration, to hardware, to removing spyware, is... uninformed, to put it very very mildly. It's like expecting an aircraft pilot to also be able to repair a turbojet engine, just because both involve an airplane. Sure, he can have a vague idea if he really loves aircrafts, he may be able to learn more if forced to, but I still would rather not be on that plane afterwards.
I'm not even opposed to keeping it at a "it'll be a form on which you can enter data" level, but usually the problem is:
1. The poor sap has already been confused by some marketting guy (ours, IBM's, whatever) that he absolutely needs SOAP, BPML, Web 2.0 compliance, etc. Or he's read some "IT for managers" ragazine and now he thinks he's a software architect. E.g., I've had some management type decide that I must do an application in Visual Fox Pro instead of, say, C++ or Java, because, in his words, "Java isn't Visual enough." The guy had had a couple of hours with a MS sales drone that showed him how easy it is to drag buttons around on a "Hello World" form, that now nothing could convince him that there's more to programming (e.g., being able to refactor, or debug sanely, or a dozen other things) than dragging buttons around. Or that saving a single-user database's file on the file server does _not_ make it a substitute for a real database.
Basically, as the saying goes, "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen." If the CFO doesn't want to talk about database record locking, then he shouldn't try to design the application for me. If he's trying to discuss such engineering issues as what database to use, then he damn better not act offended if he gets actual engineering talk. He may be able to understand how much dollars he'll save by dumping a Fox Pro (or Access or Excel) file on a file server, but he better also be able to understand when I tell him why that'll be a liability when 20 people try to use that file at the same time. Or refrain from pretending that he's a software architect.
2. When discussing the Why / Why Not and Other Options, those seeming buzzwords can actually make or break the whole thing.
E.g., if I have to explain why my solution needs some kind of messaging server or database server instead of just dumping a file in a shared directory, there's no sane way of explaining that without some reference to XA Transactions and the like. And why you need those to ensure that if customer X bought product Y for Z dollars, either both the payment and the order to the warehouse must _both_ succeed or _both_ must fail. Having a system that's held together with spit and duct tape, and people routinely get their money taken but get to battle the support guys to actually get the product, won't even save the company money, it'll cost more in lost reputation. But there's no way to explain why his great idea of saving money by using an Excel spreadsheet on a file server can produce the problem, without, you know, at least mentioning the engineering theory behind it.
One of our professors in college, a really old guy, on the last day has read to us a text where someone was complaining about "today's youth." You know, the usual. Too loud, too indecently dressed, show no respect, do nothing right, etc. As you can imagine, we were a tad annoyed by the time he was done with that text. Then came the punchline. That text was, IIRC, by Socrates, waaaay back in the ancient times.
And the same happens with these "waah, we've become dependent of X" complaints. Every single bloody time something new happens, there'll be some old guy in his horse-drawn buggy shaking a fist at the newfangled automobiles and complaining about people becoming so addicted to these newfangled things. I bet that if you could go back in time to prehistoric times, you'd find a couple of wrinkled white-haired cavemen in a corner of the cave, lamenting about how people have become so dependent of this newfangled "fire" thing. Or about how they're taking this new "wheel" thing for granted, instead of hauling the dead antelopes on their back, like their grandfathers did.
And yes, communication has been an important thing ever since the dawn of mankind. And, yes, humans always wanted to overcome the problem of having to be within a couple of metres of each other to need to talk. People always wanted to be able to keep talking to their brother Jack who lived in another town. Or even to learn from or teach to people who weren't even alive at the same time: hence books.
Ever since the first summerian sent a written clay tablet to someone else, we've basically been on the same evolution arc that today has reached cell phones, IM and chat rooms. People always wanted to reduce the latency of it all and make it more convenient. E.g., some kingdoms would maintain some sort of a courier system, where emissaries could change horses every X km to reach important destinations in the minimum of time. E.g., people would go through the trouble of using trained pigeons, you guessed, just so their message would reach someone faster. Then it was telegrams. Then phones. Then public phones, so you don't have to wait until you get home to send someone a message. Then pagers, so you could also _receive_ messages while under way. Then cell phones.
Or taking the other branch of the evolution, the other branch traceable all the way back to telegrams is... email.
The same for finding stuff on the web. The success of the internet isn't that surprising once you put it into this perspective: people have always liked to have a repository of knowledge, and have built libraries ever since the ancient times. Sometimes at great cost and effort. See the Library of Alexandria, for example. The effort to acquire and transcribe all that stuff by hand was measured in tremendous quantities of man-hours, compared to the populations they had.
And there you can trace the same evolution too, always driven by the same pressure: making information even easier available, and to more people. Transcribing manuscripts by hand was replaced by Guttenberg's flat press, which in turn was replaced by the rotary press. And then we had those texts available on the Internet.
So whop-de-freaking do. Big surprise there. It's all just the current stage of an evolution that spanned millenia. It's sooo surprising that the same species that queued at the telegraph office to send a message instead of riding to the next town to deliver the news in person... now uses cell phones and email to the same end. Or that the same species that in the 1600's paid good money for maps copied by hand by a cartographer, now uses Google Maps.