There is no easy answer, yes, but basically the IT business is busy digging a hole for itself at the moment. Not just suffering from an economic problem, but actively helping _create_ that problem for themselves.
With everyone desperate to undercut each other's bid, some of the contracts negotiated aren't even for a "Quick and Dirty" solution, or cutting down on unnecessary functionality, they're requiring 60-70 hour weeks to even string together some crap which barely sorta looks like what the client wanted.
There are some desperate people throwing bids which can't _possibly_ be done in that time frame or budget. And what you think is an old time satisfied client which should by now know better, comes and says, "Well, guys, I like your work, but business is business. You'll have to bid even lower than that if you want the contract." And sometimes your equally desperate PHB actually does.
And you think that you've won the client's grattitude, don't you? That in return for those 60 hour weeks and your company actually making a small loss there, you'll get some big fat contract from that client in the near future. Which will make it all worth it. Right?
Well, wrong.
You know what the client really sees? He sees, "ooh, I could get it a lot cheaper now. Let's see if next time I can get a bigger program for two potatoes and a chicken."
I've actually seen it happen. At the last company (now bankrupt) we eventually got to the point where one client basically wanted us to program a complete equivalent to MS Excel over HTTP... for $20,000 if I remember right.
Well, let me give you an actual example, not from some major Open Source project but from a non-profit MUD.
Most MUDs tend to work like that. Some players eventually volunteer to help you create stuff. Some rare cases can help with the actual programming part, but most can fill the equally (if not more) important part of writing content for that game.
And for some reason, they tend to attract a lot higher volunteers/users ratio than other projects. Maybe because you have them coming daily to your site anyway. Maybe because it's official that you don't need to be a seasoned C guru (or even know C at all) to donate some help. Dunno why.
But either way, I was one of those who thought "hey, maybe I can help too." You know, give something back to the community and all that.
What I had not counted on, was that in the meantime it had grown beyond the stage of a few volunteers helping with whatever they can or feel like.
It had evolved into a sort of a faceless corporation. As soon as you joined as an unpaid volunteer helper, you got assigned a boss and deadlines. You had to write reports of what you did and what you're doing now.
In fact, worse than a faceless corporation. Those few who got to be the "bosses" didn't even have to worry about keeping you as an employee. Weren't about to start taking suggestions, either.
And then came the paranoia. A select few came to the idea that "hey, other MUDs are stealing our precious code!" (Never mind that those others more likely just copied a few room descriptions, since those weren't even running the same codebase, and porting code would have been more work than it's worth anyway.)
Now it had never been truly an open source project, but there was, well, at least some illusion that you're contributing to some common pool of code, for the common good. Now it turned into an ACL fest, where even to get to the examples directory, you had to negotiate with someone. It was as much fun as negotiating with terrorists. And you had to go through it again for every single directory you wanted to have a look at. There were hundreds of directories.
Didn't take me that long to get to the idea that my day job was, in fact, _more_ fun than that. I quit and never looked back.
So the point isn't as much about haircuts and basements, but that when someone's voluntarily donating work, they're not happy to take the same shit as from their boss at work. People are doing stuff on their free time, and they're doing it only as long as they like it. If you turn it into something which resembles a full time job, only without the pay and medical plan, they'll go do something else instead. Assholes and control freaks don't make good leaders for these projects.
The mindless sheep herd is a valuable commodity to politicians. Which is why it has been encouraged, and in fact most of the time _enforced_, for the last 8000 years or so.
The last thing you want as a king/president/generalissimo/whatever is that people decide they don't want to go die in your pointless wars. Or start thinking that you better solve some _real_ problem if you're to get elected, instead of fabricating a completely imaginary problem and promising to solve it.
E.g.: "Elect me and I'll keep your children away from games." Well, duh. Why do I need someone keeping kids away from SimCity 4 or Tropico? What are they gonna do wrong? Turn into maniac city planners and go on a house building spree?:D
As you can see, when people start thinking for themselves, you have a problem.
Yes, the "hive mind" did produce the crusades, inquisition, WW2 and suicidal bombers. Guess what? It was exactly what the rulers wanted.
If people actually started thinking for themselves, they might have said things like "well, ok, but exactly what are God and the King doing for _me_? Isn't it about time _I_ got something in return too?" instead of accepting that burning dissidents at the stake is the proper solution to all problems.
So, yes, mankind as a whole might benefit from thinking outside the box. But to those leading it it's just about as welcome a prospect, as the prospect of cattle suddenly thinking for themselves is to a cattle rancher. It benefits the cattle, but not the rancher.
But society will try to resist it nevertheless. Some societies more than others, but resist they will.
As for the USSR, I'm pretty sure they didn't base any serious military project on technology which wasn't fully under their control. Experiment with them, maybe. (Same as in the USA some people experimented with making a Beowulf cluster of PS2 consoles, just for the heck of it.) But actually have some military thing go into production fully depending on an unsure supply of imported handhelds, no way. No. Never.
I'm also pretty sure that they had chips at least at the 8080 level, and an 8 bit hand-held game console at the time did _not_ have a more powerful CPU. I.e., IMHO the whole story is bogus.
You do bring a good point, though. While the USSR never did this, in an indirect way the USA today does. No, not putting GBA chips in any serious military projects, of course. But we gamers are effectively funding a lot of the computer research. A good slice of the R&D which went into making the latest and greatest chips that the western world militaries and governments are using, was really paid for by gamers like me and you. So indirectly, yeah, said governments and armies are, in fact, getting a benefit out of Random Joe's gaming addiction.
Well, when people don't understand something and/or it deviates from what they've been taught as the Proper Way (TM), they'll either:
A) be against it and claim it's dangerous ("it's turning kids into mass murderer snipers!")
B) find some way to make it sound like an insult (e.g., "it's only for geek who have no life")
C) both the above.
It's not even just about games. Just about anything reasonably new and even slightly different has went through the same things.
Mozart's music was called decadent at the time. Just like rock, metal, punk, rap, and just about every other music genre were called in this century.
Einstein's theory of relativity was called "bolshevik". (Just to show that scientists are _not_ always smarter than to act that way.)
Basically the whole gaming hype is nothing new. It's just the current step in this neverending chain of new stuff, and of angry self-righteous respectable parents and citizens being against it. But it's not the last. There'll be another such hype after it.
Basically people don't like changes. They don't like learning to understand and deal with new stuff.
It's been like this always. I bet that at the dawn of time, some cavemen were discussing about how this new "fire" thing is just for geeks and turning kids into bad members of the tribe. And then it probably was about how wearing sabertooth tiger skins instead of the traditional wolf skins is decadent, immoral, and turning kids into dangerous maniacs. And then it was about how this "wheel" thing is for nerds without a life, and turning kids into dangerous criminals. And so on, and so forth.
The alternative is medication (which is how I kicked the video game habit before I became the next Columbine)
You know, I pretty much grew up on games. Heck, I still have my gaming addiction. I'm almost 33 now, and I haven't shot anyone. In fact, I don't even consider violence to be a solution to anything.
I also have a well paid job as a programmer. Somehow gaming didn't interfere with that education after all. (In fact, it was what got me interested in programming in the first place. And my father fully cooperated there, so by the time I was 14 I was already fluent in Z80 assembly.)
No medication was necessary, either. Go figure.
My father did insist though that I go to bed at 9 PM, no matter what. Maybe that's why I didn't go to school on 3 hours sleep.
If your parents just put you on drugs instead, well, no offense to you, but I hope your parents do take offense. Because they're retards. They're a prime example of what's wrong with society today, and what's the _real_ cause of stuff like Columbine happening.
The real problem is: people who don't want to deal with their kids. In some situations even to talk to them. They're so busy making a career and working 12 hour geek shifts to impress the PHB, that poor kids get at most 5 minutes a day of speaking to their parents.
And when said kids have a problem, the parent takes the easy way out. Just put the kid on drugs or insist that the government take care of that problem. Hey, it's easier than talking to the kid, right?
A lot of blowing stuff out of proportion is based on that lack of communication too. It's easier to make blanket statements about games, than to talk to the kid and find out exactly what games does he play.
It's downright retarded to put for example FPS gaming in the same pot as, for example, puzzle games. You tell me how some kid growing on logic games is going to be the next serial killer. No, really. I'm all ears. He's going to get the idea of shooting people with a shotgun... from a game which doesn't even have shotguns anywhere?
Yet people will still make these blanket statements anyway and expect the government to do their work for them. It's easier than actually talking to their children. Or than, you know, actually trying to influence the kid's choice of games.
So here's an idea: if you're going to put your carreer in first place, and the kids only in 10'th place (after watching football, beer, watching news, and everything else) on your list of priorities... you shouldn't have kids in the first place. Wear a condom. They're cheap. Or take a pill. Have an abortion. Whatever.
But don't just bring a poor kid into this world and then treat it like it's some unwanted rat in the basement.
Yes, I already know how management and marketroids will value graphics gizmos over content, and buzzwords over functionality. I'd think everyone who works in programming already knows that.
I like to think, though, that that's still no excuse to throw a two hands up salute and produce a sub-par program. Even if you do end up putting animated gifs and rollovers and orange scrollbars on the program anyway, to make it manager-friendly and get your pay. (I ended up programming an orange-on-orange look and feel myself, much as it offended my eyes. Among many other manager-focused aberations.) Still, at the end of the day it's sorta nice to look back and think "well, that was a clean programmed and efficient program... in spite of the pointy haired interface."
IANAL, but so basically it means: in Germany the idea is that the consumer has some inalienable rights. (Incidentally they also insist that employees have some inalienable rights, and are not at the mercy of the employer.)
I.e., it may come as a shock to some people from the USA, where the idea is that big corporations make the law and the common man must bend over and pull down the pants whenever some billion dollar company says so... but in Germany, and some other places in Europe, politicians still do something for the population, not just for Microsoft and IBM and the like. Maybe also because the population itself has not yet thrown in the towel and accepted that it's at the mercy of whoever is currently on top.
But either way, the idea is that Europe actually has laws, as opposed to letting the biggest bully make his own rules. Those laws dictate that as a customer (or again, as an employee) you have this and that right, and noone can bully you into accepting any less. No contract or EULA or GPL can override the _law_. If you bought something, you have the right to some warranty, for example.
That's what made it possible, for example, to override some provisions in Microsoft's own EULA. Not because it was or wasn't read by the buyer, as is usually the debate in the US courts. But because even if the buyer had fully read and understood all that, it would still have been a case of allowing one company to override the law in their contracts. It would have meant that Microsoft can effectively say "no, we don't want to obey the law." (I.e., not give the customer his legal rights.)
However, the same applies to the GPL too. If you sell some product, you have to support it and offer the legal warranty, and are liable if it does really bad stuff. Writing "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" can not override the law.
And, if you think about it, it already happens. If some German company goes and buys a copy of SuSe Linux, they'll get plenty of support from SuSe.
Should you worry about it for your own freeware utilities? Probably not too much, unless it reformats someone's database server. Or unless it's a cleverly disguised virus. Then you can start worrying a lot.
And, honestly, I fail to see why that's a bad thing. IMHO it's about time that the whole software industry had some responsibility for their actions. The standard has become selling disfunctional software and then hiding behind some EULA. Or sneaking in provisions which basically give some vendor full rights on your computer, just because it said so near the end of the EULA. And, well, maybe what's needed is precisely some consumer protection law stepping in.
Just about any language can gets its power from a database, but only as long as it's well programmed. Never underestimate the power of sloppy design, sloppy coding, lack of clue, or (my all time favourite) including useless buzzword technologies just because they're the latest hype with clueless managers.
Yes, if you do a solid database design, and a solid program design which uses said database efficiently, in just about any language you can be as efficient as the database allows you to.
However, you'd be surprised how a clueless design, riddled with inapplicable buzzwords (e.g., converting the data internally to XML and then parsing it right back, just because XML is a buzzword) and going through a billion unneeded and mis-designed extra software layers, can _crawl_ even when the database is mostly idle. Or generate a flurry of 1,000,001 individual querries to read 1,000,000 records, instead of doing it all in one go. (The n+1 querries problem is best known with Entity EJB, but in all honesty any badly designed OOP program can end up with the exact same problem.)
Please don't take it as some offence, but you seem confuse two very different issues there.
Yes, Windows does insist on doing the non-neighbourly thing and do whatever it damn pleases, like it's the boss. It's done so all the time. One of the things which put me off as early as Win'95 was that it insisted to auto-detect something completely wrong, in spite of my best efforts to tell it not to.
Yes, I too would like some more control over what happens on _my_ computer. Bill Gates has his own computer(s), he doesn't need to completely take over mine, thank you very much.
_However_, I fail to see how that means that user-UNfriendly is the way to go. Yes, you can still edit your own config files, and noone will replace them with a Windows-style registry. But why is it bad if Random J User can configure the same things via a comfortable GUI?
Some people seem to have this elitist attitude that "Hey, we're the only ones who matter, because we can chain 10 obscure shell commands via pipes, to achieve some trivial result. All you point-and-drool GUI users suck and should go away."
And it's _precisely_ this kind of attitude which has kept Linux off the desktop so far.
When Mr Oldtimer Guru wants to demonstrate Linux to his pal Random J User, or help Random J User configure his freshly installed Linux distro... guess what happens? Let's say it's something as easy as helping Random J User configure his ISDN connection.
The knowledgeable Mr Oldtimer Guru starts grepping around and editing arcane config files in emacs or vi. All while his pal Random J User is getting this frightening impression that the _only_ way is to go through all that nightmare. Because for Random J User, with zero Unix knowledge, it _is_ a nightmare to just look at all that. He's already getting the creeps at the mere thought of trying to remember that the next time he needs to change something.
That is already assuming that Mr Oldtimer Guru isn't elitist too. We're assuming here that he's a nice guy, but as it happens, just a too firm believer in the command line and vi. He wouldn't even _consider_ using a nice GUI there, just because, you know, GUIs are just for those clueless Windows wimps.
Whereas if Mr Oldtimer Guru remembered that it's all for the benefit of a NON-technical person, and used one of the nice GUIs available for configuring an ISDN connection in Linux, _then_ Random J User might have felt less threatened. Maybe Random J User wouldn't then proceed to uninstall Linux and swear never to touch it again.
So basically yeah, user-unfriendly != survivability. And it's a good thing, too. The whole "unfriendly == good" or "unfriendly == the proper Unix way" philosophy is doing far more harm to Linux than Microsoft ever did.
The "but it's cheaper than a Dell PC" mantra is a nice one. Too bad it ain't true.
The flawed part is that you assume I'd actually need all those features. E.g.,:
- Do I need a DVD writer? Dunno about you, but I don't. (And if I did, I could get a better performing and cheaper model for the PC.)
- Do I need dual _Xeons_? That's already funny. For the casual PC user a normal P4 is more than enough.
So let's do an actual comparison between a high end Dell PC and a Mac, shall we?
Dell: 3 GHz P4, 512 MB DDR400, Radeon 9800 Pro, SoundBlaster Audigy 2, 200 GB hard drive (7200 RPM), 16x DVD drive, 48x/24x/48x CD/RW drive, 17" flat panel display, no speakers, Windows XP Professional
It costs... $2,738
Mac: 1800 MHz G5, 512 MB DDR 400, Radeon 9800 Pro, 160 GB hard drive (7200 RPM), Apple 17" flat panel, no modem, CD-RW/DVD combo
It costs... $3,219
So please, gimme a break. The Apple configuration there is both under-performing and over-priced, compared to Dell's offering. In fact, about 500$ overpriced.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against buying expensive designer stuff. I'm not against conspicuous consumption, either. But please do check the actual prices before claiming stuff like "but a Mac is actually cheaper than a Dell". That's simply not true, in any shape or form.
I wasn't talking about SWG, I was talking about every MMORPG I've actually played so far.
Is SWG any different? Heck if I know. Could be.
Am I going to pay 50 bucks to find out? Nope. I hope you can't blame me if I grew a bit circumspect of anything which starts with "MMO".
That said, the other MMORPG's had (theoretically) non-combat classes too. Like believe it or not, on UO I've played a healer, a smith, a baker, and (don't laugh) a beggar.
But you know what? It was still the same case of repetitive beating rats with a stick. Replace "rat" with "lump of ore", and "stick" with "pickaxe", and you get an exact description of mining in UO. Or replace "rat" with "tree" and "stick" with "axe", and there you go, you have an 100% accurate description of life in UO as a lumberjack.
Basically it was the same boring repetitive work, only less rewarding.
It also didn't help the dignity of the crafts profession that every single l33t kill3|2 kid had a crafts character. It was easier to just switch to the smith character to repair your armour, and it was easier to switch to your alchemist character to brew your own potions. Aparently it beat interacting with real people.
Which left the full time crafts people with relatively little market or recognition. Compared to the work involved.
Sun is a victim of their own foolishness anyway.
They seem to spend too much time posing as the Holy Anti-Microsoft Crusaders, and too little time actually making a good product.
The ultra-sparcs, sad to say, have fallen behind to the point where for most people they're 100% useless as workstations. In case you wondered what do all those thousands of dollars buy you when you buy a Sun Blade, the answer is:
- 32 bit bus worth of SDR RAM (when the rest of the world, Macs included have DDR and 64 bit busses)
- an ancient ATI Rage graphics chip with 8 MB video RAM (which Sun sells for 450$ anyway)
- a CPU with all the power of an old 450 MHz K6-3 (Actually, since the cache isn't full speed, the K6-2 would be a more apt comparison.)
And so on and so forth.
Dig out that old Pentium 3 computer, install Linux on it, and there you go. You now have a Unix(-like) Workstation, with twice the power of a Sun Blade. (If you have a GF2 MX as a graphics card, then you also have twice the graphics power of Sun's high end 3D cards, which sell for over a thousand dollars.) And you have a more modern operating system too.
To realize how big a joke Sun's workstations are, the PCI card they offer with a 733 MHz Celeron is actually faster than the main CPU in that workstation. Go figure.
Which leaves the server market. But having used Sun servers both here and at the old company for Java stuff: they're rather slow too, compared to what their MHz rating would indicate. If I'm to take an estimate, a dual Xeon 3 GHz should be roughly in the same ballpark as an 8 CPU 1 GHz server from Sun.
At that point it's _far_ cheaper to buy the dual Xeon, it's _not_ more expensive to maintain (it's still only one server), and it's got enough power for the vast majority of enterprise applications. It's cheaper to upgrade when you need more power, too. (And you can install Linux on the Xeon too: there you go, you now have a Unix server.)
Basically it seems to me that at the moment Sun's _only_ busines proposition is "but we're the Holy Crusaders against Microsoft and Intel." And, honestly, who cares about that? Sure, it's nice to know, but how does it solve the client's business problems? Even if the client happens to already be anti-Microsoft or anti-Intel (which is rarely the case), why should they buy Sun kit and not, say, Apple kit?
Basically my take is that Sun would do well to concentrate on their own products, not on bashing Microsoft and Intel. (And now IBM too.) It's getting old and it's getting nowhere.
After trying some 5 MMORPGs or so, including AC, I really can't understand what's the big deal about them.
The _only_ thing to do in a MMORPG is to run around beating rats with a stick (or goblins with a sword, or whatever), to hopefully level up in the next 6 months. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam. Only the next level-up will require even more hours of beating bigger rats with a bigger stick.
It's repetitive, it's boring... and generally it's not a game, it's _work_. Only I'm supposed to pay for the privilege of doing boring repetitive stuff each day, instead of being paid for that.
What's the point? Do my actions advance the plot? No, because there's no plot and no story. Does it exercise my gray cells by requiring some cunning and strategy? Well, no, because you only need to click on enemies. Repeatedly. That's the only strategy involved. Ever. Does it require reflexes, accuracy or some other skill? Well, no, because the "skills" are just a bunch of numbers on your character. As long as you can click on a rat, that's all the skill you'll ever need. Etc.
The _only_ MMORPG so far which I could somewhate enjoy was Ultima Online. And you know why? Because I could ignore the MMORPG part. The UO interface makes it wonderfully easy to communicate with people, even in the middle of combat.
So basically you can treat it like a glorified chat room with graphics. And predictably it had attracted a lot of social people, who actually used it as a glorified chat room with graphics. It was fun.
That is, until I realized that I could just go back to IRC and save the 10 bucks a month fee.
So here's my proposal. You want some online life having to do with Star Wars? Well, go find an IRC channel about Star Wars. It's free, it's got a less lot bugs than a MMORPG, and generally a far more rewarding online social experience. And it doesn't make you hit rats 50 times with a stick, either.
You know what's either funny or sad, depending on how you want to look at it? That I was at the same stage myself, about 3 years ago. I was happily posting (not on slashdot, though) about how everyone who says that Linux isn't 100% perfect and desktop ready is astroturfing for Microsoft. Guess it just shows that what goes around comes around:)
I'm not going to argue with that. Yes, the average gamer is too "brain-dead" (or rather simply lacks the knowledge and inclination) to even configure X. Much less compile Winex. Heck, he or she doesn't even know where to unpack winex, if you gave him a version already compiled for his system. He doesn't even know what the heck the/var directory is, or what's the difference between/home/joe and/root. He or she thinks that mounting a disk is something perverts do, and that fsck is a swear word. (Well, ok, so without journalling it _is_ a swear word.)
And precisely _because_ of that, I wouldn't recommend that they install Linux on their gaming machine.
I don't doubt that he or she could eventually learn to compile the kernel, edit arcane config files in emacs, and whatever else counts as proper alpha-geek activities. It's possible. God knows it's not even half as hard as it was, say, 5 years ago.
But for your average Random J Gamer, these skills have _zero_ practical value, and don't count as fun either. He or she would rather just pop the CD into their trusty old Windows or PS2 and spend their time actually playing.
Basically my point of view is siding with my pal Random J Gamer here. Which option is the best for _him_, not which option does the most evangelizing for Linux. Under which system does he get more games, and has an easier time playing them?
It's also siding with myself. I don't have the time or inclination to babysit Random J Gamer on the phone each time he has a problem compiling some library, and every time he can't figure out how to run some game in winex. That kind of thing only translates into wasted time both for him and for me. I'd rather that both him and I would do more fun stuff in that time.
Basically I'm not saying that Linux is crap or anything. No better system for work, that's for sure.
But before I'd start evangelizing it to my non-technical gamer friends, I'll wait for it to be as viable a gaming platform as Windows or the PS2 are. Not "somewhat viable", not "fairly viable if you're Unix literate", but at the point where you can tell Random J Gamer with a straight face that he can format his whole C: drive as a Linux partition and not miss anything gaming-wise. _Then_ I'll start evangelizing it as a gaming platform.
With this and ut2003 native linux clients, Tux finally can be a gamer.
Sadly, no. It will take a lot more than two games to get this gamer anywhere near taking Linux seriously as a gaming platform. I go through more than two games in a week.
It's a shame, really. I know that technically Linux has all it takes, but until game companies start taking it anywhere _near_ seriously, well, it doesn't start to count as a gaming platform.
I recommend downloading Gentoo's Unreal Tournament bootable CD if you want to demo native Linux gaming for some non-believers
And "demo it to non-believers" is one thing I wouldn't do, either. Sorry, it's not there yet. In fact, if anyone really is a gamer, my honest advice would be not to even think about Linux to that end. Use it for your firewall, use it for editing docs in StarOffice, heck, maybe even for browsing the web. But for gaming it's _not_ the OS I'd recommend to anyone.
Also I recommend transgaming for Windows games on Linux. Warcraft 3, Ghost Recon, Max Payne to name a few games that run under Winex3
... if you don't have anything better to do than spend a week configuring the damn thing to even run at all. And going through the usual Linux routine of "the app wants version 42.5.1 of some library, but everything else on the system was compiled with the incompatible 43.18.9 version, while the video card drivers can't possibly be installed without the 41.2.6 version, and is incompatible with the beta AGP drivers. And oh, each of them wants a completely different and incompatible version of 42 other libraries." So you spend a month just tracking the dependencies and downloading and compiling everything, just to play a game. No, thanks.
You see, gaming is about, you know, _games_. Strange concept, I know.
It's _not_ about feeling macho that you could recompile X and the kernel to run some 2 year old 2D game. _That_ is not something that your average gamer thinks of as fun.
Your average gamer wants ideally something like the Playstation 2 that you mention: where you can just pop in a CD, and it just works.
Don't get me wrong, I'm aware than the Winex does the best it can, and is remarkable from a technical point of view. But even with that, I still wouldn't recommend Linux as a gaming platform to anyone who isn't already a total nerd. (In which case they'll have so much fun recompiling the kernel, that they don't need more than a game per year anyway.)
Look, I'm not against knowing their target audience, to some degree. However:
1) Do they _really_ need to go into that kind of detail? I mean, honestly, there's a difference between knowing that 25-35 year old men from Seattle bought your game, and requiring to know exactly on what street I live in.
A statistic that fine grained is just pointless. There's a fine line between (A) knowing that 5000 men from NW Germany bought the product, and (B) knowing that 2 guys living on Gneisenau street bought it, as opposed to only 1 guy living on Dresdner street. The difference is that A may be a useful statistic, while B is just pointless trivia.
It's the same difference as between knowing (A) a football team's highest/average/whatever score, and knowing (B) "the highest score played on a tuesday in rain under a full moon and artifficial lighting, between teams whose name end in vowels." The first is a statistic, the second is just trivia. The chances of getting any useful information out of such trivia is nil.
2) Does it have to be personalized? For the kind of statistics that you mention, it would be enough if it all got lumped directly into a nameless aggregate. You can still know that 5000 men in the 25-35 years group from Seattle bought your game, even without knowing exactly who those men are and what's their telephone number.
No, this kind of data is usable for only one thing: directly marketing to those people. Even if a company doesn't actually start spamming its customers. (Though most at least try to sneak in a "send me the newsletter" checkbox, already checked.) Even in that case, it serves to create an illusion that they at least _could_ do that and rake in some big cash. Makes some clueless CEO and some even more clueless directors feel like they have some gold mine just waiting to be used.
3) I already paid for the damn game. Providing a patch is not some personal favour they're doing me, it's some late and incomplete reparation for the fact that they released it buggy and untested to start with.
In fact, patches aren't even released as much for the customer's benefit, as for the benefit of the publisher. They serve to perpetuate the mentality that it's ok to buy a buggy untested game now and wait 6 months for an even buggier patch. If there were no patches, people might expect software to work as advertised from the start.
So why then use the patch to blackmail me into handing over my personal data? Why say essentially "if you don't give us your address and telephone number, we won't let you download the patch"?
No offense, but you seem to have gotten your "facts" from Hollywood, instead of from actual history.
1) The longbow did not make plate armour obsolete, it was one of the factors which made it _necessary_. I.e., quite the exact opposite. What longbows, crossbows and impact weapons did make obsolete was chain armour.
What eventually made plate obsolete was the constant evolution of firearms. When it got to the point that an armour thick enough to stop a bullet was too heavy to run around with, armour was discarded.
2) About the knight laying helpless on the ground, that's utter and total BS. It originated in Mark Twain's wild imagination, and is not supported by any historical or achaeological data.
A full suit of combat plate weighed about 60 pounds. Even if you're a total geek, you don't collapse helplessly under 60 pounds. Knights in full armour could and did fight on foot when needed.
What helped make this stupidity seem believable, were two things:
A) Tournament armour. Unlike real combat, a tournament was a sport with rules. Thus the equipment for it didn't have to be the same as actual combat equipment. (The US Marines do not wear the same gear as a US football team, either.)
Tournament armour was considerably thicker on likely points of impact, i.e., on the front, but thinner to the point of offering almost no protection on the back and sides. Still, on the whole it was heavier than regular combat armour.
B) Firearms era breastplates. As firearms became more and more powerful, the first counter-step was to concentrate all those 60 pounds into just a super-thick breastplate and helmet.
_But_ at that point that was _all_ that the soldier would wear. Those super-thick breastplates did _not_ have a matching back plate, nor leg or arm protection.
I.e., taking one of those breastplates and extrapolating its weight to a full suit that thick is just pointless. Such a suit never existed. Ever.
3) The comparison to computer security is pointless anyway. Armour (plate or otherwise) was _never_ supposed to make one 100% bullet (or sword) proof. At that point you'd also be too immobile to actually fight well.
So in fact what happened there is simply trying to give those troops enough of an edge. If your knight in a plate suit was more survivable than one without armour, then you paid for a plate suit. When, on the other hand, armour became a liability (too heavy and still didn't stop a bullet), they just discarded it.
Again, the purpose _never_ was to make the wearer invulnerable.
Personally I'm just disappointed in it all. The electronics age seems to have just created wonderful new opportunities for the dishonest and the corrupt.
What are they going to do with that data about the users? What _can_ they do with that data? Probably nothing useful. Ever.
And I don't mean only Netscape. I mean all the retards who just have to collect a whole database of every single CD you listened to, every single piece of shareware installed on your computer, every web site you've been to, etc.
_Including_ sites where you have to hand over all the data imaginable (including company name and address, shoe size and name of your pet), just to be allowed to download a patch for a program you've bought.
E.g., Maxis's registration comes to mind. How's every single detail of my life going to help them make a better game? Does my street, house number and phone number really help their design process? Or what?
What it does do, though, is impress retarded investors and advertisers. (And local PHBs.) It gives an impression of power and competence. It gives the false impression that with all that data you could do something useful (e.g., marketing), and actually turn it into money.
So there you go. It's the golden age of dishonesty on both fronts. Dishonesty to the users, _and_ to the investors/advertisers/etc.
Everyone seems to miss that point: that as a kid I didn't want to learn programming just for programming sake. I wanted to make cool games.
The '10 PRINT "Hello World!"' stage was a step to that end. But the very second program I wrote was a (very primitive) level bombing run simulation.
So the points are:
1) And in BASIC that all easy. You just needed to print some characters at given positions, and your games were (almost) as good as shrink wrapped titles. Before moving on to complex stuff, you saw some feedback on your efforts on simple stuff.
To that end, I _pity_ the poor kid who gets Linux and GCC to get him started. Or Java. Or Microsoft Visual C++. What's the poor kid going to do with THAT? Learn a _ton_ of X (or Win32 or Swing) programming before he can even see his first mini-game working at all? Good grief!
2) It didn't look discouraging. On a ZX-81 games were really primitive. Noone, not even the biggest software house, could do more than blocky characters as graphics. It was easy to think "hey, I can make one of these too." And indeed you could. See again point 1. You saw some positive feedback for your efforts.
Nowadays... well, if you were 12 nowadays and you saw Unreal Tournament 2003... would you think the same? And could you really? In C++ or Java? And are you going to make all those 3D models and textures alone? Dream on. Basically this time the feedback for your efforts would be _negative_ for a long time.
So what to do?
Well, as you've said, give the poor kid a _game_ construction kit. It may be Pygame, or one of the many other freeware game building kits out there. I can think of half a dozen just for RPGs. (And at least two scriptable MMORPG engines.)
_That's_ what the kid needs. Something where it's (A) easy to get some minimal scripting done, and (B) quick to get some positive feedback. I.e., where it at least _looks_ like "hey, I'm actually making a game here."
Slashdot Mirror
There is no easy answer, yes, but basically the IT business is busy digging a hole for itself at the moment. Not just suffering from an economic problem, but actively helping _create_ that problem for themselves.
With everyone desperate to undercut each other's bid, some of the contracts negotiated aren't even for a "Quick and Dirty" solution, or cutting down on unnecessary functionality, they're requiring 60-70 hour weeks to even string together some crap which barely sorta looks like what the client wanted.
There are some desperate people throwing bids which can't _possibly_ be done in that time frame or budget. And what you think is an old time satisfied client which should by now know better, comes and says, "Well, guys, I like your work, but business is business. You'll have to bid even lower than that if you want the contract." And sometimes your equally desperate PHB actually does.
And you think that you've won the client's grattitude, don't you? That in return for those 60 hour weeks and your company actually making a small loss there, you'll get some big fat contract from that client in the near future. Which will make it all worth it. Right?
Well, wrong.
You know what the client really sees? He sees, "ooh, I could get it a lot cheaper now. Let's see if next time I can get a bigger program for two potatoes and a chicken."
I've actually seen it happen. At the last company (now bankrupt) we eventually got to the point where one client basically wanted us to program a complete equivalent to MS Excel over HTTP... for $20,000 if I remember right.
Well, let me give you an actual example, not from some major Open Source project but from a non-profit MUD.
Most MUDs tend to work like that. Some players eventually volunteer to help you create stuff. Some rare cases can help with the actual programming part, but most can fill the equally (if not more) important part of writing content for that game.
And for some reason, they tend to attract a lot higher volunteers/users ratio than other projects. Maybe because you have them coming daily to your site anyway. Maybe because it's official that you don't need to be a seasoned C guru (or even know C at all) to donate some help. Dunno why.
But either way, I was one of those who thought "hey, maybe I can help too." You know, give something back to the community and all that.
What I had not counted on, was that in the meantime it had grown beyond the stage of a few volunteers helping with whatever they can or feel like.
It had evolved into a sort of a faceless corporation. As soon as you joined as an unpaid volunteer helper, you got assigned a boss and deadlines. You had to write reports of what you did and what you're doing now.
In fact, worse than a faceless corporation. Those few who got to be the "bosses" didn't even have to worry about keeping you as an employee. Weren't about to start taking suggestions, either.
And then came the paranoia. A select few came to the idea that "hey, other MUDs are stealing our precious code!" (Never mind that those others more likely just copied a few room descriptions, since those weren't even running the same codebase, and porting code would have been more work than it's worth anyway.)
Now it had never been truly an open source project, but there was, well, at least some illusion that you're contributing to some common pool of code, for the common good. Now it turned into an ACL fest, where even to get to the examples directory, you had to negotiate with someone. It was as much fun as negotiating with terrorists. And you had to go through it again for every single directory you wanted to have a look at. There were hundreds of directories.
Didn't take me that long to get to the idea that my day job was, in fact, _more_ fun than that. I quit and never looked back.
So the point isn't as much about haircuts and basements, but that when someone's voluntarily donating work, they're not happy to take the same shit as from their boss at work. People are doing stuff on their free time, and they're doing it only as long as they like it. If you turn it into something which resembles a full time job, only without the pay and medical plan, they'll go do something else instead. Assholes and control freaks don't make good leaders for these projects.
You're missing the point.
:D
The mindless sheep herd is a valuable commodity to politicians. Which is why it has been encouraged, and in fact most of the time _enforced_, for the last 8000 years or so.
The last thing you want as a king/president/generalissimo/whatever is that people decide they don't want to go die in your pointless wars. Or start thinking that you better solve some _real_ problem if you're to get elected, instead of fabricating a completely imaginary problem and promising to solve it.
E.g.: "Elect me and I'll keep your children away from games." Well, duh. Why do I need someone keeping kids away from SimCity 4 or Tropico? What are they gonna do wrong? Turn into maniac city planners and go on a house building spree?
As you can see, when people start thinking for themselves, you have a problem.
Yes, the "hive mind" did produce the crusades, inquisition, WW2 and suicidal bombers. Guess what? It was exactly what the rulers wanted.
If people actually started thinking for themselves, they might have said things like "well, ok, but exactly what are God and the King doing for _me_? Isn't it about time _I_ got something in return too?" instead of accepting that burning dissidents at the stake is the proper solution to all problems.
So, yes, mankind as a whole might benefit from thinking outside the box. But to those leading it it's just about as welcome a prospect, as the prospect of cattle suddenly thinking for themselves is to a cattle rancher. It benefits the cattle, but not the rancher.
No argument there. You can't stop change.
But society will try to resist it nevertheless. Some societies more than others, but resist they will.
As for the USSR, I'm pretty sure they didn't base any serious military project on technology which wasn't fully under their control. Experiment with them, maybe. (Same as in the USA some people experimented with making a Beowulf cluster of PS2 consoles, just for the heck of it.) But actually have some military thing go into production fully depending on an unsure supply of imported handhelds, no way. No. Never.
I'm also pretty sure that they had chips at least at the 8080 level, and an 8 bit hand-held game console at the time did _not_ have a more powerful CPU. I.e., IMHO the whole story is bogus.
You do bring a good point, though. While the USSR never did this, in an indirect way the USA today does. No, not putting GBA chips in any serious military projects, of course. But we gamers are effectively funding a lot of the computer research. A good slice of the R&D which went into making the latest and greatest chips that the western world militaries and governments are using, was really paid for by gamers like me and you. So indirectly, yeah, said governments and armies are, in fact, getting a benefit out of Random Joe's gaming addiction.
Well, when people don't understand something and/or it deviates from what they've been taught as the Proper Way (TM), they'll either:
A) be against it and claim it's dangerous ("it's turning kids into mass murderer snipers!")
B) find some way to make it sound like an insult (e.g., "it's only for geek who have no life")
C) both the above.
It's not even just about games. Just about anything reasonably new and even slightly different has went through the same things.
Mozart's music was called decadent at the time. Just like rock, metal, punk, rap, and just about every other music genre were called in this century.
Einstein's theory of relativity was called "bolshevik". (Just to show that scientists are _not_ always smarter than to act that way.)
Basically the whole gaming hype is nothing new. It's just the current step in this neverending chain of new stuff, and of angry self-righteous respectable parents and citizens being against it. But it's not the last. There'll be another such hype after it.
Basically people don't like changes. They don't like learning to understand and deal with new stuff.
It's been like this always. I bet that at the dawn of time, some cavemen were discussing about how this new "fire" thing is just for geeks and turning kids into bad members of the tribe. And then it probably was about how wearing sabertooth tiger skins instead of the traditional wolf skins is decadent, immoral, and turning kids into dangerous maniacs. And then it was about how this "wheel" thing is for nerds without a life, and turning kids into dangerous criminals. And so on, and so forth.
So what else is new?
The alternative is medication (which is how I kicked the video game habit before I became the next Columbine)
You know, I pretty much grew up on games. Heck, I still have my gaming addiction. I'm almost 33 now, and I haven't shot anyone. In fact, I don't even consider violence to be a solution to anything.
I also have a well paid job as a programmer. Somehow gaming didn't interfere with that education after all. (In fact, it was what got me interested in programming in the first place. And my father fully cooperated there, so by the time I was 14 I was already fluent in Z80 assembly.)
No medication was necessary, either. Go figure.
My father did insist though that I go to bed at 9 PM, no matter what. Maybe that's why I didn't go to school on 3 hours sleep.
If your parents just put you on drugs instead, well, no offense to you, but I hope your parents do take offense. Because they're retards. They're a prime example of what's wrong with society today, and what's the _real_ cause of stuff like Columbine happening.
The real problem is: people who don't want to deal with their kids. In some situations even to talk to them. They're so busy making a career and working 12 hour geek shifts to impress the PHB, that poor kids get at most 5 minutes a day of speaking to their parents.
And when said kids have a problem, the parent takes the easy way out. Just put the kid on drugs or insist that the government take care of that problem. Hey, it's easier than talking to the kid, right?
A lot of blowing stuff out of proportion is based on that lack of communication too. It's easier to make blanket statements about games, than to talk to the kid and find out exactly what games does he play.
It's downright retarded to put for example FPS gaming in the same pot as, for example, puzzle games. You tell me how some kid growing on logic games is going to be the next serial killer. No, really. I'm all ears. He's going to get the idea of shooting people with a shotgun... from a game which doesn't even have shotguns anywhere?
Yet people will still make these blanket statements anyway and expect the government to do their work for them. It's easier than actually talking to their children. Or than, you know, actually trying to influence the kid's choice of games.
So here's an idea: if you're going to put your carreer in first place, and the kids only in 10'th place (after watching football, beer, watching news, and everything else) on your list of priorities... you shouldn't have kids in the first place. Wear a condom. They're cheap. Or take a pill. Have an abortion. Whatever.
But don't just bring a poor kid into this world and then treat it like it's some unwanted rat in the basement.
Tell me something I don't already know :)
Yes, I already know how management and marketroids will value graphics gizmos over content, and buzzwords over functionality. I'd think everyone who works in programming already knows that.
I like to think, though, that that's still no excuse to throw a two hands up salute and produce a sub-par program. Even if you do end up putting animated gifs and rollovers and orange scrollbars on the program anyway, to make it manager-friendly and get your pay. (I ended up programming an orange-on-orange look and feel myself, much as it offended my eyes. Among many other manager-focused aberations.) Still, at the end of the day it's sorta nice to look back and think "well, that was a clean programmed and efficient program... in spite of the pointy haired interface."
IANAL, but so basically it means: in Germany the idea is that the consumer has some inalienable rights. (Incidentally they also insist that employees have some inalienable rights, and are not at the mercy of the employer.)
I.e., it may come as a shock to some people from the USA, where the idea is that big corporations make the law and the common man must bend over and pull down the pants whenever some billion dollar company says so... but in Germany, and some other places in Europe, politicians still do something for the population, not just for Microsoft and IBM and the like. Maybe also because the population itself has not yet thrown in the towel and accepted that it's at the mercy of whoever is currently on top.
But either way, the idea is that Europe actually has laws, as opposed to letting the biggest bully make his own rules. Those laws dictate that as a customer (or again, as an employee) you have this and that right, and noone can bully you into accepting any less. No contract or EULA or GPL can override the _law_. If you bought something, you have the right to some warranty, for example.
That's what made it possible, for example, to override some provisions in Microsoft's own EULA. Not because it was or wasn't read by the buyer, as is usually the debate in the US courts. But because even if the buyer had fully read and understood all that, it would still have been a case of allowing one company to override the law in their contracts. It would have meant that Microsoft can effectively say "no, we don't want to obey the law." (I.e., not give the customer his legal rights.)
However, the same applies to the GPL too. If you sell some product, you have to support it and offer the legal warranty, and are liable if it does really bad stuff. Writing "ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY" can not override the law.
And, if you think about it, it already happens. If some German company goes and buys a copy of SuSe Linux, they'll get plenty of support from SuSe.
Should you worry about it for your own freeware utilities? Probably not too much, unless it reformats someone's database server. Or unless it's a cleverly disguised virus. Then you can start worrying a lot.
And, honestly, I fail to see why that's a bad thing. IMHO it's about time that the whole software industry had some responsibility for their actions. The standard has become selling disfunctional software and then hiding behind some EULA. Or sneaking in provisions which basically give some vendor full rights on your computer, just because it said so near the end of the EULA. And, well, maybe what's needed is precisely some consumer protection law stepping in.
Just about any language can gets its power from a database, but only as long as it's well programmed. Never underestimate the power of sloppy design, sloppy coding, lack of clue, or (my all time favourite) including useless buzzword technologies just because they're the latest hype with clueless managers.
Yes, if you do a solid database design, and a solid program design which uses said database efficiently, in just about any language you can be as efficient as the database allows you to.
However, you'd be surprised how a clueless design, riddled with inapplicable buzzwords (e.g., converting the data internally to XML and then parsing it right back, just because XML is a buzzword) and going through a billion unneeded and mis-designed extra software layers, can _crawl_ even when the database is mostly idle. Or generate a flurry of 1,000,001 individual querries to read 1,000,000 records, instead of doing it all in one go. (The n+1 querries problem is best known with Entity EJB, but in all honesty any badly designed OOP program can end up with the exact same problem.)
Which I guess is why books are useful.
Please don't take it as some offence, but you seem confuse two very different issues there.
Yes, Windows does insist on doing the non-neighbourly thing and do whatever it damn pleases, like it's the boss. It's done so all the time. One of the things which put me off as early as Win'95 was that it insisted to auto-detect something completely wrong, in spite of my best efforts to tell it not to.
Yes, I too would like some more control over what happens on _my_ computer. Bill Gates has his own computer(s), he doesn't need to completely take over mine, thank you very much.
_However_, I fail to see how that means that user-UNfriendly is the way to go. Yes, you can still edit your own config files, and noone will replace them with a Windows-style registry. But why is it bad if Random J User can configure the same things via a comfortable GUI?
Some people seem to have this elitist attitude that "Hey, we're the only ones who matter, because we can chain 10 obscure shell commands via pipes, to achieve some trivial result. All you point-and-drool GUI users suck and should go away."
And it's _precisely_ this kind of attitude which has kept Linux off the desktop so far.
When Mr Oldtimer Guru wants to demonstrate Linux to his pal Random J User, or help Random J User configure his freshly installed Linux distro... guess what happens? Let's say it's something as easy as helping Random J User configure his ISDN connection.
The knowledgeable Mr Oldtimer Guru starts grepping around and editing arcane config files in emacs or vi. All while his pal Random J User is getting this frightening impression that the _only_ way is to go through all that nightmare. Because for Random J User, with zero Unix knowledge, it _is_ a nightmare to just look at all that. He's already getting the creeps at the mere thought of trying to remember that the next time he needs to change something.
That is already assuming that Mr Oldtimer Guru isn't elitist too. We're assuming here that he's a nice guy, but as it happens, just a too firm believer in the command line and vi. He wouldn't even _consider_ using a nice GUI there, just because, you know, GUIs are just for those clueless Windows wimps.
Whereas if Mr Oldtimer Guru remembered that it's all for the benefit of a NON-technical person, and used one of the nice GUIs available for configuring an ISDN connection in Linux, _then_ Random J User might have felt less threatened. Maybe Random J User wouldn't then proceed to uninstall Linux and swear never to touch it again.
So basically yeah, user-unfriendly != survivability. And it's a good thing, too. The whole "unfriendly == good" or "unfriendly == the proper Unix way" philosophy is doing far more harm to Linux than Microsoft ever did.
The "but it's cheaper than a Dell PC" mantra is a nice one. Too bad it ain't true.
The flawed part is that you assume I'd actually need all those features. E.g.,:
- Do I need a DVD writer? Dunno about you, but I don't. (And if I did, I could get a better performing and cheaper model for the PC.)
- Do I need dual _Xeons_? That's already funny. For the casual PC user a normal P4 is more than enough.
So let's do an actual comparison between a high end Dell PC and a Mac, shall we?
Dell: 3 GHz P4, 512 MB DDR400, Radeon 9800 Pro, SoundBlaster Audigy 2, 200 GB hard drive (7200 RPM), 16x DVD drive, 48x/24x/48x CD/RW drive, 17" flat panel display, no speakers, Windows XP Professional
It costs... $2,738
Mac: 1800 MHz G5, 512 MB DDR 400, Radeon 9800 Pro, 160 GB hard drive (7200 RPM), Apple 17" flat panel, no modem, CD-RW/DVD combo
It costs... $3,219
So please, gimme a break. The Apple configuration there is both under-performing and over-priced, compared to Dell's offering. In fact, about 500$ overpriced.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm not against buying expensive designer stuff. I'm not against conspicuous consumption, either. But please do check the actual prices before claiming stuff like "but a Mac is actually cheaper than a Dell". That's simply not true, in any shape or form.
Is SWG any different? Heck if I know. Could be.
Am I going to pay 50 bucks to find out? Nope. I hope you can't blame me if I grew a bit circumspect of anything which starts with "MMO".
That said, the other MMORPG's had (theoretically) non-combat classes too. Like believe it or not, on UO I've played a healer, a smith, a baker, and (don't laugh) a beggar.
But you know what? It was still the same case of repetitive beating rats with a stick. Replace "rat" with "lump of ore", and "stick" with "pickaxe", and you get an exact description of mining in UO. Or replace "rat" with "tree" and "stick" with "axe", and there you go, you have an 100% accurate description of life in UO as a lumberjack.
Basically it was the same boring repetitive work, only less rewarding.
It also didn't help the dignity of the crafts profession that every single l33t kill3|2 kid had a crafts character. It was easier to just switch to the smith character to repair your armour, and it was easier to switch to your alchemist character to brew your own potions. Aparently it beat interacting with real people.
Which left the full time crafts people with relatively little market or recognition. Compared to the work involved.
The ultra-sparcs, sad to say, have fallen behind to the point where for most people they're 100% useless as workstations. In case you wondered what do all those thousands of dollars buy you when you buy a Sun Blade, the answer is:
- 32 bit bus worth of SDR RAM (when the rest of the world, Macs included have DDR and 64 bit busses)
- an ancient ATI Rage graphics chip with 8 MB video RAM (which Sun sells for 450$ anyway)
- a CPU with all the power of an old 450 MHz K6-3 (Actually, since the cache isn't full speed, the K6-2 would be a more apt comparison.)
And so on and so forth.
Dig out that old Pentium 3 computer, install Linux on it, and there you go. You now have a Unix(-like) Workstation, with twice the power of a Sun Blade. (If you have a GF2 MX as a graphics card, then you also have twice the graphics power of Sun's high end 3D cards, which sell for over a thousand dollars.) And you have a more modern operating system too.
To realize how big a joke Sun's workstations are, the PCI card they offer with a 733 MHz Celeron is actually faster than the main CPU in that workstation. Go figure.
Which leaves the server market. But having used Sun servers both here and at the old company for Java stuff: they're rather slow too, compared to what their MHz rating would indicate. If I'm to take an estimate, a dual Xeon 3 GHz should be roughly in the same ballpark as an 8 CPU 1 GHz server from Sun.
At that point it's _far_ cheaper to buy the dual Xeon, it's _not_ more expensive to maintain (it's still only one server), and it's got enough power for the vast majority of enterprise applications. It's cheaper to upgrade when you need more power, too. (And you can install Linux on the Xeon too: there you go, you now have a Unix server.)
Basically it seems to me that at the moment Sun's _only_ busines proposition is "but we're the Holy Crusaders against Microsoft and Intel." And, honestly, who cares about that? Sure, it's nice to know, but how does it solve the client's business problems? Even if the client happens to already be anti-Microsoft or anti-Intel (which is rarely the case), why should they buy Sun kit and not, say, Apple kit?
Basically my take is that Sun would do well to concentrate on their own products, not on bashing Microsoft and Intel. (And now IBM too.) It's getting old and it's getting nowhere.
The _only_ thing to do in a MMORPG is to run around beating rats with a stick (or goblins with a sword, or whatever), to hopefully level up in the next 6 months. Lather, rinse, repeat ad nauseam. Only the next level-up will require even more hours of beating bigger rats with a bigger stick.
It's repetitive, it's boring... and generally it's not a game, it's _work_. Only I'm supposed to pay for the privilege of doing boring repetitive stuff each day, instead of being paid for that.
What's the point? Do my actions advance the plot? No, because there's no plot and no story. Does it exercise my gray cells by requiring some cunning and strategy? Well, no, because you only need to click on enemies. Repeatedly. That's the only strategy involved. Ever. Does it require reflexes, accuracy or some other skill? Well, no, because the "skills" are just a bunch of numbers on your character. As long as you can click on a rat, that's all the skill you'll ever need. Etc.
The _only_ MMORPG so far which I could somewhate enjoy was Ultima Online. And you know why? Because I could ignore the MMORPG part. The UO interface makes it wonderfully easy to communicate with people, even in the middle of combat.
So basically you can treat it like a glorified chat room with graphics. And predictably it had attracted a lot of social people, who actually used it as a glorified chat room with graphics. It was fun.
That is, until I realized that I could just go back to IRC and save the 10 bucks a month fee.
So here's my proposal. You want some online life having to do with Star Wars? Well, go find an IRC channel about Star Wars. It's free, it's got a less lot bugs than a MMORPG, and generally a far more rewarding online social experience. And it doesn't make you hit rats 50 times with a stick, either.
You know what's either funny or sad, depending on how you want to look at it? That I was at the same stage myself, about 3 years ago. I was happily posting (not on slashdot, though) about how everyone who says that Linux isn't 100% perfect and desktop ready is astroturfing for Microsoft. Guess it just shows that what goes around comes around :)
And precisely _because_ of that, I wouldn't recommend that they install Linux on their gaming machine.
I don't doubt that he or she could eventually learn to compile the kernel, edit arcane config files in emacs, and whatever else counts as proper alpha-geek activities. It's possible. God knows it's not even half as hard as it was, say, 5 years ago.
But for your average Random J Gamer, these skills have _zero_ practical value, and don't count as fun either. He or she would rather just pop the CD into their trusty old Windows or PS2 and spend their time actually playing.
Basically my point of view is siding with my pal Random J Gamer here. Which option is the best for _him_, not which option does the most evangelizing for Linux. Under which system does he get more games, and has an easier time playing them?
It's also siding with myself. I don't have the time or inclination to babysit Random J Gamer on the phone each time he has a problem compiling some library, and every time he can't figure out how to run some game in winex. That kind of thing only translates into wasted time both for him and for me. I'd rather that both him and I would do more fun stuff in that time.
Basically I'm not saying that Linux is crap or anything. No better system for work, that's for sure.
But before I'd start evangelizing it to my non-technical gamer friends, I'll wait for it to be as viable a gaming platform as Windows or the PS2 are. Not "somewhat viable", not "fairly viable if you're Unix literate", but at the point where you can tell Random J Gamer with a straight face that he can format his whole C: drive as a Linux partition and not miss anything gaming-wise. _Then_ I'll start evangelizing it as a gaming platform.
Sadly, no. It will take a lot more than two games to get this gamer anywhere near taking Linux seriously as a gaming platform. I go through more than two games in a week.
It's a shame, really. I know that technically Linux has all it takes, but until game companies start taking it anywhere _near_ seriously, well, it doesn't start to count as a gaming platform.
I recommend downloading Gentoo's Unreal Tournament bootable CD if you want to demo native Linux gaming for some non-believers
And "demo it to non-believers" is one thing I wouldn't do, either. Sorry, it's not there yet. In fact, if anyone really is a gamer, my honest advice would be not to even think about Linux to that end. Use it for your firewall, use it for editing docs in StarOffice, heck, maybe even for browsing the web. But for gaming it's _not_ the OS I'd recommend to anyone.
Also I recommend transgaming for Windows games on Linux. Warcraft 3, Ghost Recon, Max Payne to name a few games that run under Winex3
... if you don't have anything better to do than spend a week configuring the damn thing to even run at all. And going through the usual Linux routine of "the app wants version 42.5.1 of some library, but everything else on the system was compiled with the incompatible 43.18.9 version, while the video card drivers can't possibly be installed without the 41.2.6 version, and is incompatible with the beta AGP drivers. And oh, each of them wants a completely different and incompatible version of 42 other libraries." So you spend a month just tracking the dependencies and downloading and compiling everything, just to play a game. No, thanks.
You see, gaming is about, you know, _games_. Strange concept, I know.
It's _not_ about feeling macho that you could recompile X and the kernel to run some 2 year old 2D game. _That_ is not something that your average gamer thinks of as fun.
Your average gamer wants ideally something like the Playstation 2 that you mention: where you can just pop in a CD, and it just works.
Don't get me wrong, I'm aware than the Winex does the best it can, and is remarkable from a technical point of view. But even with that, I still wouldn't recommend Linux as a gaming platform to anyone who isn't already a total nerd. (In which case they'll have so much fun recompiling the kernel, that they don't need more than a game per year anyway.)
1) Do they _really_ need to go into that kind of detail? I mean, honestly, there's a difference between knowing that 25-35 year old men from Seattle bought your game, and requiring to know exactly on what street I live in.
A statistic that fine grained is just pointless. There's a fine line between (A) knowing that 5000 men from NW Germany bought the product, and (B) knowing that 2 guys living on Gneisenau street bought it, as opposed to only 1 guy living on Dresdner street. The difference is that A may be a useful statistic, while B is just pointless trivia.
It's the same difference as between knowing (A) a football team's highest/average/whatever score, and knowing (B) "the highest score played on a tuesday in rain under a full moon and artifficial lighting, between teams whose name end in vowels." The first is a statistic, the second is just trivia. The chances of getting any useful information out of such trivia is nil.
2) Does it have to be personalized? For the kind of statistics that you mention, it would be enough if it all got lumped directly into a nameless aggregate. You can still know that 5000 men in the 25-35 years group from Seattle bought your game, even without knowing exactly who those men are and what's their telephone number.
No, this kind of data is usable for only one thing: directly marketing to those people. Even if a company doesn't actually start spamming its customers. (Though most at least try to sneak in a "send me the newsletter" checkbox, already checked.) Even in that case, it serves to create an illusion that they at least _could_ do that and rake in some big cash. Makes some clueless CEO and some even more clueless directors feel like they have some gold mine just waiting to be used.
3) I already paid for the damn game. Providing a patch is not some personal favour they're doing me, it's some late and incomplete reparation for the fact that they released it buggy and untested to start with.
In fact, patches aren't even released as much for the customer's benefit, as for the benefit of the publisher. They serve to perpetuate the mentality that it's ok to buy a buggy untested game now and wait 6 months for an even buggier patch. If there were no patches, people might expect software to work as advertised from the start.
So why then use the patch to blackmail me into handing over my personal data? Why say essentially "if you don't give us your address and telephone number, we won't let you download the patch"?
No offense, but you seem to have gotten your "facts" from Hollywood, instead of from actual history.
1) The longbow did not make plate armour obsolete, it was one of the factors which made it _necessary_. I.e., quite the exact opposite. What longbows, crossbows and impact weapons did make obsolete was chain armour.
What eventually made plate obsolete was the constant evolution of firearms. When it got to the point that an armour thick enough to stop a bullet was too heavy to run around with, armour was discarded.
2) About the knight laying helpless on the ground, that's utter and total BS. It originated in Mark Twain's wild imagination, and is not supported by any historical or achaeological data.
A full suit of combat plate weighed about 60 pounds. Even if you're a total geek, you don't collapse helplessly under 60 pounds. Knights in full armour could and did fight on foot when needed.
What helped make this stupidity seem believable, were two things:
A) Tournament armour. Unlike real combat, a tournament was a sport with rules. Thus the equipment for it didn't have to be the same as actual combat equipment. (The US Marines do not wear the same gear as a US football team, either.)
Tournament armour was considerably thicker on likely points of impact, i.e., on the front, but thinner to the point of offering almost no protection on the back and sides. Still, on the whole it was heavier than regular combat armour.
B) Firearms era breastplates. As firearms became more and more powerful, the first counter-step was to concentrate all those 60 pounds into just a super-thick breastplate and helmet.
_But_ at that point that was _all_ that the soldier would wear. Those super-thick breastplates did _not_ have a matching back plate, nor leg or arm protection.
I.e., taking one of those breastplates and extrapolating its weight to a full suit that thick is just pointless. Such a suit never existed. Ever.
3) The comparison to computer security is pointless anyway. Armour (plate or otherwise) was _never_ supposed to make one 100% bullet (or sword) proof. At that point you'd also be too immobile to actually fight well.
So in fact what happened there is simply trying to give those troops enough of an edge. If your knight in a plate suit was more survivable than one without armour, then you paid for a plate suit. When, on the other hand, armour became a liability (too heavy and still didn't stop a bullet), they just discarded it.
Again, the purpose _never_ was to make the wearer invulnerable.
What are they going to do with that data about the users? What _can_ they do with that data? Probably nothing useful. Ever.
And I don't mean only Netscape. I mean all the retards who just have to collect a whole database of every single CD you listened to, every single piece of shareware installed on your computer, every web site you've been to, etc.
_Including_ sites where you have to hand over all the data imaginable (including company name and address, shoe size and name of your pet), just to be allowed to download a patch for a program you've bought.
E.g., Maxis's registration comes to mind. How's every single detail of my life going to help them make a better game? Does my street, house number and phone number really help their design process? Or what?
What it does do, though, is impress retarded investors and advertisers. (And local PHBs.) It gives an impression of power and competence. It gives the false impression that with all that data you could do something useful (e.g., marketing), and actually turn it into money.
So there you go. It's the golden age of dishonesty on both fronts. Dishonesty to the users, _and_ to the investors/advertisers/etc.
The '10 PRINT "Hello World!"' stage was a step to that end. But the very second program I wrote was a (very primitive) level bombing run simulation.
So the points are:
1) And in BASIC that all easy. You just needed to print some characters at given positions, and your games were (almost) as good as shrink wrapped titles. Before moving on to complex stuff, you saw some feedback on your efforts on simple stuff.
To that end, I _pity_ the poor kid who gets Linux and GCC to get him started. Or Java. Or Microsoft Visual C++. What's the poor kid going to do with THAT? Learn a _ton_ of X (or Win32 or Swing) programming before he can even see his first mini-game working at all? Good grief!
2) It didn't look discouraging. On a ZX-81 games were really primitive. Noone, not even the biggest software house, could do more than blocky characters as graphics. It was easy to think "hey, I can make one of these too." And indeed you could. See again point 1. You saw some positive feedback for your efforts.
Nowadays... well, if you were 12 nowadays and you saw Unreal Tournament 2003... would you think the same? And could you really? In C++ or Java? And are you going to make all those 3D models and textures alone? Dream on. Basically this time the feedback for your efforts would be _negative_ for a long time.
So what to do?
Well, as you've said, give the poor kid a _game_ construction kit. It may be Pygame, or one of the many other freeware game building kits out there. I can think of half a dozen just for RPGs. (And at least two scriptable MMORPG engines.)
_That's_ what the kid needs. Something where it's (A) easy to get some minimal scripting done, and (B) quick to get some positive feedback. I.e., where it at least _looks_ like "hey, I'm actually making a game here."