Why not? "Game" isn't synonymous with "First person shooter". An intelligent teenager can learn enough to make games better than half the stuff on Miniclip in less than 6 months.
Because you want to give the guy some bragging rights (to keep him motivated) and with as little effort as possible (so he doesn't go bored before seeing any results.)
Sure, if you're already a decent programmer and have at least some minimal graphics skills, by all means, go ahead and start a 6 months project. But if you want to motivate a 12 year old, 6 months before seeing a result is an eternity. It's 1/20 of his entire life so far, or even more if you discount the first years from which he has no memories. It's akin to starting a 2 year project at 40. It may work if it's already on the domain of your hobby, but not as a teaser to see if you like an entirely new domain.
(I don't know if perception really scales linearly that way, but some studies _do_ show that children perceive time as flowing a lot slower than adults perceive the same interval.)
If you want to get someone's attention, fast, you'll want to start with something like, "see, you click here and here, and type a bit here, and... taadaa... our automated patrolls in X2 The Threat will buy and use missiles. And, hmm, you know, maybe we could make them call the nearest destroyer to jump in the sector if they run into pirates." Stuff which you can finish in half an hour and upload on some mods site, and actually see a couple of guys saying, "thanks, that's just what I needed."
Heck, probably the smallest mod I've seen that apparently made a bunch of people happy, was IIRC a one line change in the Creatures 3 script. It's a special case, but it shows how little effort may be needed in some cases and still end up with something useful and a little bragging rights. That's the kind of thing you'll want, to get someone hooked.
While I'll aggree that kernel hacking won't get anyone interested in programming, I think programming web sites is somewhat lacking in motivation. As you were saying, you want it to provide some serious bragging rights.
Whatever you want to do on the web at teen level, has been done before and better. Publishing photos? There are a ton of providers which achieve the same thing. Forums? Ditto. All you need for a good guild web site are webmaster skills or maybe graphics design, _not_ programming. Approaching it from the programming side is the way to get the least bragging rights, with the most effort. Everyone won't go "woot, what an original forum you programmed!", but the more discouraging, "geesh, why don't you use PhpBB like everyone else?"
Personally, looking back at what motivated _me_ back then, I'd say start with games. That was my motivation. I could throw together a game as good as Psion and the gang made for the ZX 81 and later ZX Spectrum, and show it to my classmates and get some serious appreciation. The first game I wrote, when I invited a couple of classmates to see it, they ended up playing it all afternoon. Mind you, it was uber-simplistic by today's standards, but it was as good as anyone could possibly do on a 1K ZX-81.
It was motivating enough to get me started on assembly and converting it by hand to hex.
Nowadays I wouldn't advise anyone to write a game from scratch at home, but there's a _lot_ you can achieve as a mod. And mod-friendly games are getting rather common these days. I can think of a few where most of the game logic (i.e., minus the graphics and such) was Python, one even TCL, and one was scripted in Java.
So basically I'd say, show the guy how to make his own mods. Even if it's just for cheating it's a start.
And the distant carrot of making it big and famous is there too. Both Counter-Strike and Team Fortress started as mods, and ended up major successes.
Venus has a magnetic field. It's about 10^-5 that of Earth's but there is one there. If it weren't present, wouldn't the solar winds have stripped the atmosphere from the planet by now?
Well, that's actually the point: they did strip it of all hydrogen, for example. The solar winds ionize the atmosphere something fierce and break the molecules all the time. Heavier elements like C, N and O recombine, but H from (H20 or CH4) escaped into space.
Was worried by that survey myself. So I went hunting for the actual survey article. Sounds like they were picking one of several "most important" skills. I would guess(hope) the other 43% chose other options because either they already have a steady supply of developers with problem-solving skills, or they're respondents who are proficient in those other skills hoping for a job.
Well, I'm still not impressed. So basically:
- "18% cited the need to work with online communities"... as more important than analytical thinking and problem solving skills.
I'm sorry, but that skill profile fits a PR guy, or marketing, or generally your first line of interface with the users. The programmers don't and _should_ _not_ be the one working directly with a mass of 10 million online members, each wishing a different thing and half of them thinking they're so important that their question must be answered in 5 seconds flat. (I was just surfing for mods for a game, and, literally, in one thread someone had posted a _demand_ and 8 minutes later he was revolted that he's got no answer yet. Yes, 8 minutes.) You wouldn't even give that community access to your level 2 support, because, frankly, they're too expensive and a limited resource. So why would you ever let your programmers do that, to such extent that that skill is more important than the skill used in programming?
So basically 18% are truly and monumentally clueless.
- "Meanwhile, 24% said that code generation is the key long-range development skill."... so, if I get it right, it's more important to write lots of lines of code, than to be any good at actually solving a problem with it or what the problem really is.
I'm sorry, but the very existence of this category rubs me the awfully wrong way. It's the kind of people who'd think (and obviously thought) my ex-coleague Wally was a great coder, because he included whole tens of megabytes of open-source sources in his projects (with his name plastered on it.) And even stuff that had no relevance to the problem at hand. E.g., I swear to the elder Gods, I found the sources for a file chooser dialog in a server-side servlet-based project. E.g., instead of just making his ant script generate the EJB home and remote stubs (something he never really understood), he just did it by manually deploying once, and then decompiled the IBM-generated classes and included those sources in his project. Of course, now if you changed an EJB and ran the build script, you'd get the wrong stubs. (Effectively the old ones for the old class, decompiled and recompiled again.) Plus whole obfuscation layers and, I swear to the elder gods again, an (obfuscated) stateless "state machine".
But hey, it's lots of lines of code.
Briefly, I'm no less worried.
And I don't think the "already have a steady supply of developers with problem-solving skills" is an excuse at all, either way I can understand it.
Assuming you mean, basically, "they all have problem solving skills, let's test them primarily by some other criterion", that's basically based on a false premise. Like any other skill, it varies greatly among different people. So not all have it to the same extent. Some will be great at it, and some will hardly have it at all, or not enough to actually program anything more complex than "hello world". If you literally put another criterion X above it, you can literally get people who are great at X, but sucky at problem-solving.
It's, if you will, like saying that, bah, for a theoretical physicist job, surely all know physics, so you might as well test them for their appearance and social skills instead. Well, then you wouldn't have hired Einstein, for a start. You'd get someone who's sharply dressed and charismatic, because that's what you tested, but only the Gods know how much physics he actually knows. It can be anything from Feynmann to a devout Flat Earth believer with a degree in dowsing.
If you have more candidates with that skill than jobs, then sort them by skill level or even skill-per-buck, and take the best. Anything else, in end effect, is throwing your hands up and solving the wrong problem instead.
Not to start a big flamewar about games, but all these barbarians prancing around with faeries comes off as "pretty ghey".
Pfft. That's not even true.
I'll have you know that my barbarian in EQ2 had some delicate earrings and a delicate necklace with a butterfly pendant. And let's just say that the "monk outfit" showed so much skin that you'd think skin cancer was all the rage. If you think being grouped with some Faeries made him look "teh ghey", you haven't seen him;)
It gets even better. "Fifty seven percent of the respondents said that problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers." Heh, so then the other about 43% believe that you can be a developer/programmer _without_ problem-solving and analytical skills? And, wait, it's supposed to be a new and web-2.0 thing that now a whole 57% see a need for those skills? I.e., that previously even _more_ PHB's thought that any drooling retard is just as fit to be hastily drafted into programming?
I mean, geesh, every single method you write _is_ problem solving, and involves analytical skills. It's design all the way to the bottom, to paraphrase the old turtle quote. You may get the big structure handed to you from some architect, but every single decision like "do I split this loop into a separate method?" or like "do I use <insert patern> here?" _is_ a design decision, and _is_ problem solving.
It's all designing one big huge Rube Goldberg-style, incredible machine out of the available blocks and patterns. And sometimes given frameworks and libraries that fit the problem at hand at hand, well, just about as much as a model boat, a pool table and an anvil fit the problem of catching a mouse. And you have to figure out how to fit it all together. And at any time analyze what you have, what is still missing after taking the existing parts into consideration, etc. And you must also achive the secondary goals of security, maintainability, and the like. Surely nobody thinks you can solve such a problem -- or any other problem, for that matter -- without problem-solving skills, right?
Well apparently wrong. Almost half of the polled people actually do think that you don't need problem-solving skills.
It would explain a lot about the sad state this industry is in...
Yes, but that's what management is for. It's not just there to cash in the big bonuses and invent pseudo-jargon babble for the next meeting.
If the shipping department doesn't know what they're shipping, then make sure they know it. If corporate regulations are 50 years too old and have no provisions for shipping individual pages, and disgruntled people slip into drone mode and apply the dumb rules verbatim, then update those rules. That's what management is supposed to do: manage the whole damned thing.
I mean, this kind of thing just reminds me of Scott Adams's assertion that capitalism is harnessing the power of human stupidity, and that at any given time 80% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by idiots. And in this case, also considering the extra truck space for the boxes (hence, you're also hauling more tons of truck per page sent, and paying the gasoline for it) and all, it comes out to orders of mangnitude more waste than actual product.
1. Well, just to complement what you said, it wouldn't bother me as much if they at least tried to come up with something new. It's like the same bad ideas pop up again and again and again. Just when you thought you finally buried one stupidity at crossroads, with a stake through its chest, some new clueless guy stumbles by and imagines that surely he's the first one to come up with it. He sees that nobody does that already, and imagines that surely he's such a genius that nobody else thought of it before.
In this case, sure, there probably is still some better ways to input x/y coordinates, that has yet to be discovered. (Sorry, while some things are better strictly for inputting x/y, none yet match the mouse for the combination of not just input, but also ease of use, comfort for extended times, having _both_ accuracy and speed, ease of switching between keys and mouse, etc.) But I don't see many people even trying. Nah, they come up _again_ with "I know, let's make a touch screen!"
I remember that idea as early as the 90's, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came even earlier. It just doesn't work, and it's already known why. But, nah, it just has to come back again.
2. The Wiimote fails in a whole other aspect, in addition to what you pointed out: switching quickly between keyboard and mouse, which is one thing people do need for work. You're not going to hold it in your hand the whole time, like when playing a Wii game. You also need both hands to type.
With a mouse you pretty much just slide the hand to it and start moving it already.
With a Wiimote, you'd have to actually pick it up first, which is a much slower operation. Try it.
Plus, you can't have it tracking movement all the time, because otherwise the act of picking it up will also be tracked as a movement of the cursor. So you'd probably have to (find and) press one of the buttons first, to have it start tracking. You'd presumably have to keep it pressed while you move it, because otherwise you'll leave it on and have an inconvenience the next time you pick it up.
Or maybe it would only count when it's pointed at the screen. Well, then you don't need an extra button, but the act of picking it up and pointing it at the screen just became longer and more inconvenient.
It's just not a substitute for a mouse. Well, ok, maybe for games it is, but not for work. I just don't see the mouse dying and being replaced by a Wiimote, on the millions of business computers around the world.
Well, I've heard those points before, and they were very compelling and well made too. I've also heard the point that Darl and the gang were selling their shares like crazy, each time the stock spiked. And a couple of others.
So I'm more like sorta curious, which of them was it, after all? Or what were the details of that mix? Did it really start as an abuse by Darl of the corporate shield, to siphon what was left of Caldera's worth, and MS and Sun just recognized an oportunity and jumped in? Or was it started by MS, and Darl then started siphoning those funds into his own pocket? Or what?
But I guess we'll never know the sordid story in that kind of details.
Well, as the usual excuse goes: free will. Humans are allowed to decide for themselves what they want to do, even something evil or bloody stupid, so Lucas too can decide to unflict Jar Jar upon millions of innocents;)
Well, it still makes me wonder what were they thinking.
"seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them." is _weird_ plan, considering that IBM actually prided itself on not giving in to such claims. IBM's lawyers have been at various times compared to the Nazgul, or it was claimed that IBM could darken the skies with them. And it's shown before that it's not affraid to use it. In fact, that it makes a point to use them to maximum devastation effect, to discourage other parasites from trying to extort them. It's not even a matter of conjecture or correlation, it's IBM's policy.
So hoping that IBM would just fold down is... surrealistic. It's a bit like me taking my scrawny nerd ass to the heavyweight boxing champion and going, "hey, pretty boy, hand over the wallet or I'm punching you in the nose." And hanging around to insist on it, instead of scramming while he's laughing his ass off.
And if it were just Darl, I'd probably reach for good ol' Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But his legal council also seemed to have no problem with it, and at least two different investor groups paid good money to fund this farce. Even if it were just PHBs who got wooed by being shown "#include " lines as infringing code in Linux, they have legal departs they can go and ask first. It just doesn't add up.
Were those contracts _that_ ambiguously written, that _nobody_ knew who really owns Unix until a judge scratched his/her head and decided it? I doubt it.
So I'm wondering what was the _real_ game there. The whole legal farce was probably just means to the real end, or maybe just a diversion. So what was it? Who made a buck out of it, and/or who paid for this expensive distraction?
Well, grow up. Even if this particular one doesn't affect you, it does show the kind of privacy problems that google has _again_. And it seems to be perfect illustration of what a few Google deffecters were ranting about recently.
Depending on what of their services you use, Google usually has a lot more data about you than your name. E.g., your searches, the news/mailing-lists you're subscribed to, your credit card number if you use their payment processor, possibly your medical history, etc. Heck, it even has the contents of your emails. Now that's something to worry about.
Now also bear in mind that a lot of that information has the potential to be worse than it really is, if taken out of context. E.g., if you're a Muslim and searched for "AK-47 tactics", I can assure you that the nice guys from the government won't think of Counter-Strike first. And I hope you don't mind waterboarding if you search for a map that involves placing a bomb at a refinery, and used the wrong wording. It's the same guys who tried to data-mine grocery purchases to find terrorists, i.e., anyone who orders arab kinda food.
So, yes, stop acting like an emotionally charged idiot. I know that some people get a boner out of defending Google, but grow up. They do have a recurring QA problem, and they do store all data about everyone they can get their hands on. (See their fighting the EU to keep everyone's search data for ever.) Yes, maybe this time it doesn't affect you, but it illustrates a broader problem they have. Unless they start taking QA and privacy seriously, it's only a matter of time before they leak something a lot more sensitive.
Yes, but in a lot of cases and domains, the RL the conditions change so often, that essentially you're not even rolling the same kinds of dice twice. One time you roll D6, the next time you roll D20, and the next time they just explode in your face. So in fact expecting the same to happen again and again is the dumbest possible attitude.
One example is warfare. We have some thousands of years littered with the corpses of those who expected to win like in the previous war.
E.g., in the secession war, experience said that for a couple of hundred years armies had simply marched to a hundred yards of each other, stood tall, and shot volley after volley at each other. Tough luck. Now the armies were increasingly equipped with rifles, which had an effective range about 3 times longer than a musket's. Walking to 100m of a rifle squad was your death.
E.g., in the 100 years war, experience said that for more than 1000 years knights had dominated the battlefield and could just ride down archers with impunity. Dumbly enough, this time it was longbows and the armour-piercing Bodkin tip. Those mighty knights rode to their doom. Again and again, btw. It took the French about 100 years of doing what they had done before, and expecting the same result, before they finally learned.
E.g., a massed frontal assault against a weakly fortified (by previous wars' standard) position should have worked every time in WW1. Dumbly enough this time the defense was a good offense. Instead of walls and bunkers we mostly just had machineguns. Millions of soldiers on both sides died charging at machineguns.
Etc. That's just a quick random sample out of literally thousands.
Sometimes the crazy thing is quite the opposite of that quote. The crazy thing to expect that just because something worked once before, the exact same must happen again.
In reality a lot of actions have long lasting effects which change the problem completely. E.g., _because_ something worked well before, someone else will figure out a way to counter it. So doing it again might be the guaranteed way to fail.
Except for the fact that this is what EQ1 did. Back when EQ1 launched, they *required* a 3D card. That was pure INSANITY according to the conventional wisdom at the time, because few single-player games required you to have a 3D card; most games had a software renderer, too, that looked like crap. This was back when 3Dfx was the top dog and you had to install Glide because DirectX wasn't quite up to snuff.
EQ1 was also the far better game at the time. Simply because the competition was even worse.
Since you mention UO, it was still a fucked-up, unbalanced, small, simplistic, gank-fest. The dynamic duo of self-centered narcisists, Lord British and his trusty sidekick Raph Koster (who'd later do the same with SWG) were still telling players what they should like, instead of even trying to notice what players actually want. Untested patches were issued that broke more than they fixed, and some had to be rolled back because they were a catastrophe. The fact that Lord British diverted the bug-fixing budget of UO to make Ultima 9, also didn't help.
And that's the short version. One could fill a tome with what was wrong with UO, and what got worse. It was only after EQ and AC ate their lunch big time, that Origin even started considering fixing their game.
If we're talking about looks and angular breasts, a lot of us actually thought that the 2D graphics of UO actually looked _better_ than the hideous 3D mess of EQ or AC. But UO just didn't give us what we wanted. So EQ won.
Don't mistake players for the circle-jerk clique of online reviewers. Reviewers seem to get outright orgasms over "OMG, it's shiny" or, back then, "OMG it's 3D". The average player cared a lot more about gameplay. EQ may bore you to tears by nowadays standards, but back then it was the best by a wide margin. Or rather: the competition was even worse. If you will, EQ2 won by being the one-eyed in the land of the blind.
And it seems to me like EQ2 is the result of just that kind of mistake. Sony got caught in the same mistaken belief that the servile "OMG, it's shiny" gang of reviewers actually represent the average gamer. And produced a game whose only merit was "OMG, it's shiny." And lost.
It just turns out that Warcraft was a stronger brand and ate Sony's lunch. Oops.
Brand only gets you so far. Star Wars was a bigger brand name than EQ and Warcraft _combined_, and it still got to be merely a niche game. The Sims had sold more copies than all Warcraft games _and_ Everquest _combined_, and it outright flopped. Etc.
Basically a crap game with a good franchise, still flops.
And if we're talking about EQ vs Warcraft, actually I remember it the other way around. Sony was _the_ big name in MMOs and everyone expected EQ2 to be teh uber-game that sweeps everyone off their feet. Blizzard was just another unproven "me too." People wanted a Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 from them, not a MMO. The reaction to Blizzard's announcement that they're making a MMO was _disappointment_, not "yay, I'm preordering it because it's Warcraft." The average Warcraft player was a RTS player, and was just about as looking forward to an MMO as to root canal.
So, no, Sony was the bigger name there, and it lost anyway.
WoW had high detailed textures, but relatively low polygon counts for the models.
High detailed is relative. By comparison to EQ2, which is what I was trying to do, WoW is a lot lower res. Or at least EQ2 needed 512 MB for max details, WoW ran decently on an 128 MB card. If that's not due to textures, well, I'm curious what it was.
While _some_ people do buy based on screenshots, the blanket generalization is little more than wishful thinking on the part of the publisher. You know, right next to, "people don't mind it if it's released buggy and patched later" and "people don't talk to each other, they only take their information from our marketing department."
The most visible fly in the ointment is WoW. It has the least detailed graphics of any MMO since, I dunno, 2003 or so. Yes, it actually has less polygons and lower detail textures than some games _older_ than it. Shader effects, bump-mapping, and any kind of shiny stuff are almost non-existent. (Ok, ok, they added weather later.) It also sold like hot cakes.
EQ2 was launched roughly at the same time as WoW, and tried to have _much_ higher resolution graphics and a metric buttload of shader effects. You can't even have a freaking armour modelled as just a texture, it just has to have a shader that makes it look 3D. It required a 512 MB card just to play with all those details... at a time where such a card didn't even exist. I think it never managed to get more than 1/50 the number of players WoW had, and it went slowly downhill from there.
Interestingly enough, more people complained about EQ2's "sterile graphics" than about WoW's cartoonish ones. (See what Penny Arcade had to say about EQ2's graphics back then, for example.) Turns out that just using insane texture resolutions and polygon counts isn't a substitute for talent, you know?
City Of Heroes had a _major_ graphics upgrade in Issue 6 (which coincides with launching the City Of Villains standalone expansion-pack), and the new Villain zones _quadruple_ even that number of polygons on screen. But let's concentrate on the COH side alone, because that was almost the same old game as before, only with a ton of graphical upgrades. Funnily, it didn't produce much of a jump in the number of players, and certainly no lasting effect. Anyway, the game peaked at 175,000 players in the USA alone soon after launch, and went gradually downhill from there. Last I heard a number it was last year at 145,000 in all territories combined and including both COV and COH players.
Basically high-res, shiny graphics don't seem to do all that much. Sure, it helps if you're not butt ugly. But if you look at the number of subscribers, the effect of insane graphics just isn't there. EQ2 vs WoW, the better game won, not the one requiring a new graphics card. Or COH pre-I6 and post-I6, just doesn't show the players rushing in because of the graphics.
Or in the offline game arena, The Sims was launched as a mostly 2D game with 2D sprites (ok, it used primitive low-polycount 3D graphics for the characters), in an age of shiny 3D games. It outsold not only any of those shiny 3D FPS games from the same year, it outsold them all combined.
And I'll further guess that Crysis and all those other games presented as "proof" that graphics sell... they probably had some other merits too. A lot fewer people would have bough them, if their _only_ merit were the graphics. Games with good, shiny graphics have flopped before.
At at the same time if a company has one program and doesn't like a different web browser (like Opera) they could ban you from using opera while their program is running.
It's already happening. A lot of games, for example, refuse to run if they even think that you have some kind of CD emulator installed on that computer. It doesn't even mean trying to detect if they're actually run off an emulated drive. No. If you have any traces of software which _could_ be used to run an unauthorized copy, they'll refuse to run at all on that machine.
Most won't even tell you why. The program will simply not start, or exit with some uninformative error message, or crash after 10 minutes of playing, just because the copy protection thinks you have a program they don't approve of.
So, well, sad to say nobody waited for this kind of a legal decision to do that. They already do it just because they can.
Well, the thing is, that wouldn't even make sense for a MMO. WoW is useless without a server, and to use the server, pay attention, you need to log in. Which needs you to enter a serial number of a bought copy, i.e., of a valid license.
WoW doesn't even contain any copy-protection on the client side, because that's not what matters. Blizzard even lets you download the full version of the client for free, right from their own server. Yes, seriously.
And you don't need any hack to load multiple copies of WoW. Try it. CTRL-ESC out of it, and double-click the icon again. Voila, a second copy of WoW. Without any hacks. It's trivial to make a program not launch a second copy (Mozilla does it, COH does it, etc), but Blizzard already chose to not bother. You're allowed to run as many copies on as many machines as you wish, as long as all the running copies have a valid login.
So there is _no_ copy protection to circumvent there. It's as stupid as if I were claiming that you lockpicked my door... which didn't even have a lock, and was widely open anyway.
So, sad to say, the whole "Oh, grow up and go read TFA." wisecrack does nothing for me, sorry. Grow up and have a clue what you're talking about. I don't care if one uninformed article claims that black is white, and north is south. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't work as you describe.
Um, no, it doesn't say that. They're _not_ saying that Vista still gets owned as fast as unpatched, pre-SP1 XP. They're saying that, basically, unpatched pre-SP1 XP is still getting owned as fast as... unpatched, pre-SP1 XP did. Well, gee, big surprise there.
It doesn't say anything about how much MS software improved in the meantime.
Basically, to take the mandatory car analogy, it's like saying that the original "unsafe at any speed" 1963 Corvair is... still as unsafe at any speed, as it was in 1963. Well, gee, that's such a big surprise.
Would you use that to claim that GM hasn't made any progress since 1963? No, seriously.
It's still not apples to apples. Yes, you can still buy XP, but you'll get XP SP2. It's hard to find even XP SP1 any more. Completely unpatched XP, would take some true dedication and ebay-fu to get at all. So, no, you can't buy a completely unpatched XP either. Not any more than you could buy an unpatched RedHat 8.
So whop-de-do, they prove that an OS you can't even buy any more, and just as unpatched as 5 years ago... still gets owned just as fast as it did before. Well, gee, big surprise there.
Well, it's only a problem if you're (A) fucking stupid, or (B) a troll or security company trying to get some attention. (The difference between trolling and PR can be awfully subtle at times.) Well, not meant personally, but rather the generic "you".
The fact is, you can't even buy a computer nowadays without at least SP1 on XP, or Vista, both of which come with a firewall activated by default. To be unprotected on the Internet like that, you'd actually have to disable it. It's not something that every user will do, and right before downloading the patches, no less. Even if they were completely retarded, well, then they'd be too retarded to find that option.
Even in pre-SP1 XP or even on 2000, you have a little known option to not allow incoming connections. I think it's there even on NT. On 2000 it's under the TCP/IP settings, Advanced -> Options -> IP-Security. It's the poor man's firewall, basically. Not a full fledged one, but it _will_ keep you safe while you download the patches. Yes, I did try it. It worked.
But even that won't be necessary, since (A) you can't even buy a computer with unpatched Windows 2000 nowadays, and (B) even if you somehow found yourself stranded somewhere with a pre-SP1 XP with the firewall suspiciously missing, most vendors include stuff like ZoneAlarm or some security suite. If your computer has a nVidia chipset, it has its own half-hardware/half-software firewall right on the drivers CD. Again, it defaults to be activated by default, so you'd have to be truly retarded and disable it before you even look for the patches.
If you have a 64 bit CPU, as the vast majority are nowadays, and XP SP1 or later, you can also make it use the NX flag. Basically then it can't execute the data segment. That takes care of pretty much all buffer overflow exploits right there, because that's how they work. By default it only checks the Windows kernel and IE, which is enough to get those patches safely, but I'd advise making it check all programs anyway.
Again, you can't even buy pre-SP1 XP nowadays, so you _will_ have that capability.
The fact is, I've been running an unprotected PC for the last 5 years or so, and I don't seem to have any infection. I don't see anything suspicious in the registry. My router led doesn't blink when I'm not browsing and in fact the router does disconnect some 10 minutes after I did anything. I haven't had any extra charges on my credit card. I haven't had my WoW password stolen. So either I genuinely don't have anything bad on it, or it's awfully benign.
So basically this kind of statistics are just pure trolling. So someone took a computer on the net, and actually went and disabled the firewall and possibly the NX protection too. And whop-de-do, it got pwned. Big surprise. That doesn't mean anything about what will happen to the average user. It just means that some retarded troll (either fanboy or a security company's PR) found a way to fuck-up that computer to get a reason to whine, "OMG, Windows gets pwned." Well, gee, big surprise there.
Thanks for the correction. It's been some years since I had an interest in anthropology, and, well, my memory isn't what it used to be. And never was;)
Well, how about "two" as in "the whole f-ing tribe, all 300 of them"?
Small tribal communities have a lot more rigid expectations of what your duties are to the rest of the community, and your very life may depend on fulfilling those to the letter. Even if the tribe doesn't actually do an execution, simply being cast out in the jungle would spell death for any tribesman who's no longer liked by the tribe. But there are also documented cases where then the shaman would do the special voodoo, e.g., poison your food or put some bamboo needles in it or whatever, to get rid of you in a speedier way.
And to get an idea of what kind of obedience can be expected in such a tribal society, or what absurdities may be expected, at least one tribe had a proof of having become a man that involved wearing a glove made of live wasps for 10 minutes. And ones where even a single sting spells excruciating pain. The result of that trial would leave the boy (because the age of manhood is very low there by our standards) with a numb arm and shaking uncontrollably for days. Ok, now think doing that 20 times, on different days. You know, to prove that you really are a man.
And your life would depend on not failing it.
Are you thinking of the box of pain and the Gom Jabbar too, yet? Because that's essentially what they asked of every single boy in the tribe.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. Why currency?
1. Point in case: Ancient Egypt. I'm pretty sure that they had numbers and even maths, _long_ before they used currency.
It's a funny thing. We're so caught up in our own obsession with money, that we assume that it must have always been the alpha and the omega, or at least a major economic breakthrough. Well, Egypt used barter internally until the conquering Romans forced them to use coins, and nevertheless they were for a long while the most powerful economy.
Oh, they learned about coins earlier from the Greeks and Phoenicians, and even started minting their own gold into coins for external trade. But even that was long after they had numbers. But internally they still used barter and didn't seem worse off for it.
Thinking about it in modern terms, it must have fulfilled the same role as inflation nowadays. If your grain is your currency, you can't hoard it for generation, because it decays. The Pharaoh's granaries functioned as a sort of bank: they'd keep it for you, but you earned a -10% (yes, _minus_ ten percent) "interest" per year. Building your own granaries did somewhat better, but not by awfully much. So there was a very good reason to spend or invest that "money" instead. And unsurprisingly their economy included extensive trading and extensive crafts.
Or as another example, I don't remember coins being mentioned in Hamurabi's code of laws (from a bit over 4 millenia ago), but they already had numbers all right.
2. I'd argue that, actually, you start needing numbers much earlier anyway, when you switch to agriculture or animal husbandry.
For a shepherd there's a very good reason to know if you have 20 sheep (or goats, or whatever) or 21.
For an agricultor, you have to count days. Or the high priests count it for you, same deal. Think, for example, cultivating in the Nile's valley. It will take you X days to harvest all those crops. If you start later than X days before the next flood, then some of your crop will be lost. You also need to be able to reserve Y buckets/barrels/sacks/whatever of grain for sowing the next crop, or you will starve next year. I'd say there's a damn good reason to be able to count those.
And in either case if you counted the days wrong until the next crop, or the next sheep are born, you might get to starve.
It's events that happen long before you even need currency.
3. Even if you managed to avoid #2 somehow, numbers soon get you anyway: Any kind of more complex state than a 300 people tribe, starts needing numbers just to exist at all.
E.g., you have to raise an army. How many soldiers do you have? How much food do you need to take with you on a campaign? How many ships do you need to carry them? How many weapons do you need to build for them? How many smiths do you need for that?
Let's say you even don't use a professional standing army like post-marian Rome or Egypt, but go with citizen-soldiers like early Rome or Greece. Well, those guys need to get back to their farm when time comes to sow or reap. It doesn't matter what kind of food source you have. Even hunter-gatherers need to spend X days a year hunting and gathering. They need to be there when the good berries are ripe, or when the great Perfectly Normal Beast migration comes by. So you're back to counting days anyway, or you can't have any kind of warfare.
E.g., so you conquered the next city and installed your own nomarch/satrap/governor, loyal to you. How much tribute does it send you? How do you know how many more days you need to wait for it?
1. Even for birds, there are classifications which are useful even if they don't reflect the DNA. E.g., a "bird of prey" or "flightless bird" are still useful categories, no matter to whom the individual species are related.
Basically a category is just a way to say "all these have property X", no matter what X is or in what other categories they also belong. Grouping them by DNA is just _one_ of the many possible groupings. It's useful, no doubt, but it's not the only useful one. It doesn't make all others faulty. No, even the ones based on looking from the outside. Sorry.
I fail to see why the same can't apply to planets. We already have such categories as being in the right band to have liquid water too, for example. It tells you bugger all about its interior, but it does tell you that the exterior _could_ support Earth-like life. It's a useful category. Even if it's based on where it happens to be.
2. These have no DNA so to speak. They're chunks of rock and ice.
And a lot of other stuff is pretty much based on how big they are and where they are. E.g., whether it has one core or no core or multiple cores, is pretty much just an issue of how big it is. If gravity was high enough, it pulled the heavy stuff towards the centre. If not, not.
You didn't? We actually had one contractor here who singlehandedly wrote Google's search engine, according to himself and to the PHB from the company selling him. (Apparently he wrote it for some small startup, that got bought by another dot-com, who got bought by Google after Google had their IPO. That's not the story of Google's search engine how I knew it, but it just shows I was wrong;)
Meaning at least one corporation paid for that kind of expertise, possibly the contractor peddler too.
We were all excited to see such a guru in action, especially since we did need a good search for the portal. Mind you, we would have settled for using Lucene, but something Google-class would of course be even better. He left for some other project after a couple of weeks, though.
Hmm, only now it dawns upon me that I had worked before with someone from the same contractor company, who had coded AOL's search engine. I guess they must have a really strong competence on that domain;)
Slashdot Mirror
Because you want to give the guy some bragging rights (to keep him motivated) and with as little effort as possible (so he doesn't go bored before seeing any results.)
Sure, if you're already a decent programmer and have at least some minimal graphics skills, by all means, go ahead and start a 6 months project. But if you want to motivate a 12 year old, 6 months before seeing a result is an eternity. It's 1/20 of his entire life so far, or even more if you discount the first years from which he has no memories. It's akin to starting a 2 year project at 40. It may work if it's already on the domain of your hobby, but not as a teaser to see if you like an entirely new domain.
(I don't know if perception really scales linearly that way, but some studies _do_ show that children perceive time as flowing a lot slower than adults perceive the same interval.)
If you want to get someone's attention, fast, you'll want to start with something like, "see, you click here and here, and type a bit here, and... taadaa... our automated patrolls in X2 The Threat will buy and use missiles. And, hmm, you know, maybe we could make them call the nearest destroyer to jump in the sector if they run into pirates." Stuff which you can finish in half an hour and upload on some mods site, and actually see a couple of guys saying, "thanks, that's just what I needed."
Heck, probably the smallest mod I've seen that apparently made a bunch of people happy, was IIRC a one line change in the Creatures 3 script. It's a special case, but it shows how little effort may be needed in some cases and still end up with something useful and a little bragging rights. That's the kind of thing you'll want, to get someone hooked.
IMHO.
While I'll aggree that kernel hacking won't get anyone interested in programming, I think programming web sites is somewhat lacking in motivation. As you were saying, you want it to provide some serious bragging rights.
Whatever you want to do on the web at teen level, has been done before and better. Publishing photos? There are a ton of providers which achieve the same thing. Forums? Ditto. All you need for a good guild web site are webmaster skills or maybe graphics design, _not_ programming. Approaching it from the programming side is the way to get the least bragging rights, with the most effort. Everyone won't go "woot, what an original forum you programmed!", but the more discouraging, "geesh, why don't you use PhpBB like everyone else?"
Personally, looking back at what motivated _me_ back then, I'd say start with games. That was my motivation. I could throw together a game as good as Psion and the gang made for the ZX 81 and later ZX Spectrum, and show it to my classmates and get some serious appreciation. The first game I wrote, when I invited a couple of classmates to see it, they ended up playing it all afternoon. Mind you, it was uber-simplistic by today's standards, but it was as good as anyone could possibly do on a 1K ZX-81.
It was motivating enough to get me started on assembly and converting it by hand to hex.
Nowadays I wouldn't advise anyone to write a game from scratch at home, but there's a _lot_ you can achieve as a mod. And mod-friendly games are getting rather common these days. I can think of a few where most of the game logic (i.e., minus the graphics and such) was Python, one even TCL, and one was scripted in Java.
So basically I'd say, show the guy how to make his own mods. Even if it's just for cheating it's a start.
And the distant carrot of making it big and famous is there too. Both Counter-Strike and Team Fortress started as mods, and ended up major successes.
Well, that's actually the point: they did strip it of all hydrogen, for example. The solar winds ionize the atmosphere something fierce and break the molecules all the time. Heavier elements like C, N and O recombine, but H from (H20 or CH4) escaped into space.
Well, I'm still not impressed. So basically:
- "18% cited the need to work with online communities"... as more important than analytical thinking and problem solving skills.
I'm sorry, but that skill profile fits a PR guy, or marketing, or generally your first line of interface with the users. The programmers don't and _should_ _not_ be the one working directly with a mass of 10 million online members, each wishing a different thing and half of them thinking they're so important that their question must be answered in 5 seconds flat. (I was just surfing for mods for a game, and, literally, in one thread someone had posted a _demand_ and 8 minutes later he was revolted that he's got no answer yet. Yes, 8 minutes.) You wouldn't even give that community access to your level 2 support, because, frankly, they're too expensive and a limited resource. So why would you ever let your programmers do that, to such extent that that skill is more important than the skill used in programming?
So basically 18% are truly and monumentally clueless.
- "Meanwhile, 24% said that code generation is the key long-range development skill."... so, if I get it right, it's more important to write lots of lines of code, than to be any good at actually solving a problem with it or what the problem really is.
I'm sorry, but the very existence of this category rubs me the awfully wrong way. It's the kind of people who'd think (and obviously thought) my ex-coleague Wally was a great coder, because he included whole tens of megabytes of open-source sources in his projects (with his name plastered on it.) And even stuff that had no relevance to the problem at hand. E.g., I swear to the elder Gods, I found the sources for a file chooser dialog in a server-side servlet-based project. E.g., instead of just making his ant script generate the EJB home and remote stubs (something he never really understood), he just did it by manually deploying once, and then decompiled the IBM-generated classes and included those sources in his project. Of course, now if you changed an EJB and ran the build script, you'd get the wrong stubs. (Effectively the old ones for the old class, decompiled and recompiled again.) Plus whole obfuscation layers and, I swear to the elder gods again, an (obfuscated) stateless "state machine".
But hey, it's lots of lines of code.
Briefly, I'm no less worried.
And I don't think the "already have a steady supply of developers with problem-solving skills" is an excuse at all, either way I can understand it.
Assuming you mean, basically, "they all have problem solving skills, let's test them primarily by some other criterion", that's basically based on a false premise. Like any other skill, it varies greatly among different people. So not all have it to the same extent. Some will be great at it, and some will hardly have it at all, or not enough to actually program anything more complex than "hello world". If you literally put another criterion X above it, you can literally get people who are great at X, but sucky at problem-solving.
It's, if you will, like saying that, bah, for a theoretical physicist job, surely all know physics, so you might as well test them for their appearance and social skills instead. Well, then you wouldn't have hired Einstein, for a start. You'd get someone who's sharply dressed and charismatic, because that's what you tested, but only the Gods know how much physics he actually knows. It can be anything from Feynmann to a devout Flat Earth believer with a degree in dowsing.
If you have more candidates with that skill than jobs, then sort them by skill level or even skill-per-buck, and take the best. Anything else, in end effect, is throwing your hands up and solving the wrong problem instead.
Pfft. That's not even true.
I'll have you know that my barbarian in EQ2 had some delicate earrings and a delicate necklace with a butterfly pendant. And let's just say that the "monk outfit" showed so much skin that you'd think skin cancer was all the rage. If you think being grouped with some Faeries made him look "teh ghey", you haven't seen him ;)
It gets even better. "Fifty seven percent of the respondents said that problem-solving and analytical skills will be key requirements for next generation developers." Heh, so then the other about 43% believe that you can be a developer/programmer _without_ problem-solving and analytical skills? And, wait, it's supposed to be a new and web-2.0 thing that now a whole 57% see a need for those skills? I.e., that previously even _more_ PHB's thought that any drooling retard is just as fit to be hastily drafted into programming?
I mean, geesh, every single method you write _is_ problem solving, and involves analytical skills. It's design all the way to the bottom, to paraphrase the old turtle quote. You may get the big structure handed to you from some architect, but every single decision like "do I split this loop into a separate method?" or like "do I use <insert patern> here?" _is_ a design decision, and _is_ problem solving.
It's all designing one big huge Rube Goldberg-style, incredible machine out of the available blocks and patterns. And sometimes given frameworks and libraries that fit the problem at hand at hand, well, just about as much as a model boat, a pool table and an anvil fit the problem of catching a mouse. And you have to figure out how to fit it all together. And at any time analyze what you have, what is still missing after taking the existing parts into consideration, etc. And you must also achive the secondary goals of security, maintainability, and the like. Surely nobody thinks you can solve such a problem -- or any other problem, for that matter -- without problem-solving skills, right?
Well apparently wrong. Almost half of the polled people actually do think that you don't need problem-solving skills.
It would explain a lot about the sad state this industry is in...
Yes, but that's what management is for. It's not just there to cash in the big bonuses and invent pseudo-jargon babble for the next meeting.
If the shipping department doesn't know what they're shipping, then make sure they know it. If corporate regulations are 50 years too old and have no provisions for shipping individual pages, and disgruntled people slip into drone mode and apply the dumb rules verbatim, then update those rules. That's what management is supposed to do: manage the whole damned thing.
I mean, this kind of thing just reminds me of Scott Adams's assertion that capitalism is harnessing the power of human stupidity, and that at any given time 80% of society's resources are pushed off a cliff by idiots. And in this case, also considering the extra truck space for the boxes (hence, you're also hauling more tons of truck per page sent, and paying the gasoline for it) and all, it comes out to orders of mangnitude more waste than actual product.
1. Well, just to complement what you said, it wouldn't bother me as much if they at least tried to come up with something new. It's like the same bad ideas pop up again and again and again. Just when you thought you finally buried one stupidity at crossroads, with a stake through its chest, some new clueless guy stumbles by and imagines that surely he's the first one to come up with it. He sees that nobody does that already, and imagines that surely he's such a genius that nobody else thought of it before.
In this case, sure, there probably is still some better ways to input x/y coordinates, that has yet to be discovered. (Sorry, while some things are better strictly for inputting x/y, none yet match the mouse for the combination of not just input, but also ease of use, comfort for extended times, having _both_ accuracy and speed, ease of switching between keys and mouse, etc.) But I don't see many people even trying. Nah, they come up _again_ with "I know, let's make a touch screen!"
I remember that idea as early as the 90's, but I wouldn't be surprised if it came even earlier. It just doesn't work, and it's already known why. But, nah, it just has to come back again.
2. The Wiimote fails in a whole other aspect, in addition to what you pointed out: switching quickly between keyboard and mouse, which is one thing people do need for work. You're not going to hold it in your hand the whole time, like when playing a Wii game. You also need both hands to type.
With a mouse you pretty much just slide the hand to it and start moving it already.
With a Wiimote, you'd have to actually pick it up first, which is a much slower operation. Try it.
Plus, you can't have it tracking movement all the time, because otherwise the act of picking it up will also be tracked as a movement of the cursor. So you'd probably have to (find and) press one of the buttons first, to have it start tracking. You'd presumably have to keep it pressed while you move it, because otherwise you'll leave it on and have an inconvenience the next time you pick it up.
Or maybe it would only count when it's pointed at the screen. Well, then you don't need an extra button, but the act of picking it up and pointing it at the screen just became longer and more inconvenient.
It's just not a substitute for a mouse. Well, ok, maybe for games it is, but not for work. I just don't see the mouse dying and being replaced by a Wiimote, on the millions of business computers around the world.
Well, I've heard those points before, and they were very compelling and well made too. I've also heard the point that Darl and the gang were selling their shares like crazy, each time the stock spiked. And a couple of others.
So I'm more like sorta curious, which of them was it, after all? Or what were the details of that mix? Did it really start as an abuse by Darl of the corporate shield, to siphon what was left of Caldera's worth, and MS and Sun just recognized an oportunity and jumped in? Or was it started by MS, and Darl then started siphoning those funds into his own pocket? Or what?
But I guess we'll never know the sordid story in that kind of details.
Well, as the usual excuse goes: free will. Humans are allowed to decide for themselves what they want to do, even something evil or bloody stupid, so Lucas too can decide to unflict Jar Jar upon millions of innocents ;)
Well, it still makes me wonder what were they thinking.
"seeing their x86-UNIX business sinking, sued their former development partner, IBM, assuming they'd get a quick payoff to shut up and go away. Big surprise when IBM unleashed their lawyers right back at them." is _weird_ plan, considering that IBM actually prided itself on not giving in to such claims. IBM's lawyers have been at various times compared to the Nazgul, or it was claimed that IBM could darken the skies with them. And it's shown before that it's not affraid to use it. In fact, that it makes a point to use them to maximum devastation effect, to discourage other parasites from trying to extort them. It's not even a matter of conjecture or correlation, it's IBM's policy.
So hoping that IBM would just fold down is... surrealistic. It's a bit like me taking my scrawny nerd ass to the heavyweight boxing champion and going, "hey, pretty boy, hand over the wallet or I'm punching you in the nose." And hanging around to insist on it, instead of scramming while he's laughing his ass off.
And if it were just Darl, I'd probably reach for good ol' Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity." But his legal council also seemed to have no problem with it, and at least two different investor groups paid good money to fund this farce. Even if it were just PHBs who got wooed by being shown "#include " lines as infringing code in Linux, they have legal departs they can go and ask first. It just doesn't add up.
Were those contracts _that_ ambiguously written, that _nobody_ knew who really owns Unix until a judge scratched his/her head and decided it? I doubt it.
So I'm wondering what was the _real_ game there. The whole legal farce was probably just means to the real end, or maybe just a diversion. So what was it? Who made a buck out of it, and/or who paid for this expensive distraction?
Well, grow up. Even if this particular one doesn't affect you, it does show the kind of privacy problems that google has _again_. And it seems to be perfect illustration of what a few Google deffecters were ranting about recently.
Depending on what of their services you use, Google usually has a lot more data about you than your name. E.g., your searches, the news/mailing-lists you're subscribed to, your credit card number if you use their payment processor, possibly your medical history, etc. Heck, it even has the contents of your emails. Now that's something to worry about.
Now also bear in mind that a lot of that information has the potential to be worse than it really is, if taken out of context. E.g., if you're a Muslim and searched for "AK-47 tactics", I can assure you that the nice guys from the government won't think of Counter-Strike first. And I hope you don't mind waterboarding if you search for a map that involves placing a bomb at a refinery, and used the wrong wording. It's the same guys who tried to data-mine grocery purchases to find terrorists, i.e., anyone who orders arab kinda food.
So, yes, stop acting like an emotionally charged idiot. I know that some people get a boner out of defending Google, but grow up. They do have a recurring QA problem, and they do store all data about everyone they can get their hands on. (See their fighting the EU to keep everyone's search data for ever.) Yes, maybe this time it doesn't affect you, but it illustrates a broader problem they have. Unless they start taking QA and privacy seriously, it's only a matter of time before they leak something a lot more sensitive.
Yes, but in a lot of cases and domains, the RL the conditions change so often, that essentially you're not even rolling the same kinds of dice twice. One time you roll D6, the next time you roll D20, and the next time they just explode in your face. So in fact expecting the same to happen again and again is the dumbest possible attitude.
One example is warfare. We have some thousands of years littered with the corpses of those who expected to win like in the previous war.
E.g., in the secession war, experience said that for a couple of hundred years armies had simply marched to a hundred yards of each other, stood tall, and shot volley after volley at each other. Tough luck. Now the armies were increasingly equipped with rifles, which had an effective range about 3 times longer than a musket's. Walking to 100m of a rifle squad was your death.
E.g., in the 100 years war, experience said that for more than 1000 years knights had dominated the battlefield and could just ride down archers with impunity. Dumbly enough, this time it was longbows and the armour-piercing Bodkin tip. Those mighty knights rode to their doom. Again and again, btw. It took the French about 100 years of doing what they had done before, and expecting the same result, before they finally learned.
E.g., a massed frontal assault against a weakly fortified (by previous wars' standard) position should have worked every time in WW1. Dumbly enough this time the defense was a good offense. Instead of walls and bunkers we mostly just had machineguns. Millions of soldiers on both sides died charging at machineguns.
Etc. That's just a quick random sample out of literally thousands.
Sometimes the crazy thing is quite the opposite of that quote. The crazy thing to expect that just because something worked once before, the exact same must happen again.
In reality a lot of actions have long lasting effects which change the problem completely. E.g., _because_ something worked well before, someone else will figure out a way to counter it. So doing it again might be the guaranteed way to fail.
EQ1 was also the far better game at the time. Simply because the competition was even worse.
Since you mention UO, it was still a fucked-up, unbalanced, small, simplistic, gank-fest. The dynamic duo of self-centered narcisists, Lord British and his trusty sidekick Raph Koster (who'd later do the same with SWG) were still telling players what they should like, instead of even trying to notice what players actually want. Untested patches were issued that broke more than they fixed, and some had to be rolled back because they were a catastrophe. The fact that Lord British diverted the bug-fixing budget of UO to make Ultima 9, also didn't help.
And that's the short version. One could fill a tome with what was wrong with UO, and what got worse. It was only after EQ and AC ate their lunch big time, that Origin even started considering fixing their game.
If we're talking about looks and angular breasts, a lot of us actually thought that the 2D graphics of UO actually looked _better_ than the hideous 3D mess of EQ or AC. But UO just didn't give us what we wanted. So EQ won.
Don't mistake players for the circle-jerk clique of online reviewers. Reviewers seem to get outright orgasms over "OMG, it's shiny" or, back then, "OMG it's 3D". The average player cared a lot more about gameplay. EQ may bore you to tears by nowadays standards, but back then it was the best by a wide margin. Or rather: the competition was even worse. If you will, EQ2 won by being the one-eyed in the land of the blind.
And it seems to me like EQ2 is the result of just that kind of mistake. Sony got caught in the same mistaken belief that the servile "OMG, it's shiny" gang of reviewers actually represent the average gamer. And produced a game whose only merit was "OMG, it's shiny." And lost.
Brand only gets you so far. Star Wars was a bigger brand name than EQ and Warcraft _combined_, and it still got to be merely a niche game. The Sims had sold more copies than all Warcraft games _and_ Everquest _combined_, and it outright flopped. Etc.
Basically a crap game with a good franchise, still flops.
And if we're talking about EQ vs Warcraft, actually I remember it the other way around. Sony was _the_ big name in MMOs and everyone expected EQ2 to be teh uber-game that sweeps everyone off their feet. Blizzard was just another unproven "me too." People wanted a Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3 from them, not a MMO. The reaction to Blizzard's announcement that they're making a MMO was _disappointment_, not "yay, I'm preordering it because it's Warcraft." The average Warcraft player was a RTS player, and was just about as looking forward to an MMO as to root canal.
So, no, Sony was the bigger name there, and it lost anyway.
High detailed is relative. By comparison to EQ2, which is what I was trying to do, WoW is a lot lower res. Or at least EQ2 needed 512 MB for max details, WoW ran decently on an 128 MB card. If that's not due to textures, well, I'm curious what it was.
While _some_ people do buy based on screenshots, the blanket generalization is little more than wishful thinking on the part of the publisher. You know, right next to, "people don't mind it if it's released buggy and patched later" and "people don't talk to each other, they only take their information from our marketing department."
The most visible fly in the ointment is WoW. It has the least detailed graphics of any MMO since, I dunno, 2003 or so. Yes, it actually has less polygons and lower detail textures than some games _older_ than it. Shader effects, bump-mapping, and any kind of shiny stuff are almost non-existent. (Ok, ok, they added weather later.) It also sold like hot cakes.
EQ2 was launched roughly at the same time as WoW, and tried to have _much_ higher resolution graphics and a metric buttload of shader effects. You can't even have a freaking armour modelled as just a texture, it just has to have a shader that makes it look 3D. It required a 512 MB card just to play with all those details... at a time where such a card didn't even exist. I think it never managed to get more than 1/50 the number of players WoW had, and it went slowly downhill from there.
Interestingly enough, more people complained about EQ2's "sterile graphics" than about WoW's cartoonish ones. (See what Penny Arcade had to say about EQ2's graphics back then, for example.) Turns out that just using insane texture resolutions and polygon counts isn't a substitute for talent, you know?
City Of Heroes had a _major_ graphics upgrade in Issue 6 (which coincides with launching the City Of Villains standalone expansion-pack), and the new Villain zones _quadruple_ even that number of polygons on screen. But let's concentrate on the COH side alone, because that was almost the same old game as before, only with a ton of graphical upgrades. Funnily, it didn't produce much of a jump in the number of players, and certainly no lasting effect. Anyway, the game peaked at 175,000 players in the USA alone soon after launch, and went gradually downhill from there. Last I heard a number it was last year at 145,000 in all territories combined and including both COV and COH players.
Basically high-res, shiny graphics don't seem to do all that much. Sure, it helps if you're not butt ugly. But if you look at the number of subscribers, the effect of insane graphics just isn't there. EQ2 vs WoW, the better game won, not the one requiring a new graphics card. Or COH pre-I6 and post-I6, just doesn't show the players rushing in because of the graphics.
Or in the offline game arena, The Sims was launched as a mostly 2D game with 2D sprites (ok, it used primitive low-polycount 3D graphics for the characters), in an age of shiny 3D games. It outsold not only any of those shiny 3D FPS games from the same year, it outsold them all combined.
And I'll further guess that Crysis and all those other games presented as "proof" that graphics sell... they probably had some other merits too. A lot fewer people would have bough them, if their _only_ merit were the graphics. Games with good, shiny graphics have flopped before.
It's already happening. A lot of games, for example, refuse to run if they even think that you have some kind of CD emulator installed on that computer. It doesn't even mean trying to detect if they're actually run off an emulated drive. No. If you have any traces of software which _could_ be used to run an unauthorized copy, they'll refuse to run at all on that machine.
Most won't even tell you why. The program will simply not start, or exit with some uninformative error message, or crash after 10 minutes of playing, just because the copy protection thinks you have a program they don't approve of.
So, well, sad to say nobody waited for this kind of a legal decision to do that. They already do it just because they can.
Well, the thing is, that wouldn't even make sense for a MMO. WoW is useless without a server, and to use the server, pay attention, you need to log in. Which needs you to enter a serial number of a bought copy, i.e., of a valid license.
WoW doesn't even contain any copy-protection on the client side, because that's not what matters. Blizzard even lets you download the full version of the client for free, right from their own server. Yes, seriously.
And you don't need any hack to load multiple copies of WoW. Try it. CTRL-ESC out of it, and double-click the icon again. Voila, a second copy of WoW. Without any hacks. It's trivial to make a program not launch a second copy (Mozilla does it, COH does it, etc), but Blizzard already chose to not bother. You're allowed to run as many copies on as many machines as you wish, as long as all the running copies have a valid login.
So there is _no_ copy protection to circumvent there. It's as stupid as if I were claiming that you lockpicked my door... which didn't even have a lock, and was widely open anyway.
So, sad to say, the whole "Oh, grow up and go read TFA." wisecrack does nothing for me, sorry. Grow up and have a clue what you're talking about. I don't care if one uninformed article claims that black is white, and north is south. The fact of the matter is that it doesn't work as you describe.
Um, no, it doesn't say that. They're _not_ saying that Vista still gets owned as fast as unpatched, pre-SP1 XP. They're saying that, basically, unpatched pre-SP1 XP is still getting owned as fast as... unpatched, pre-SP1 XP did. Well, gee, big surprise there.
It doesn't say anything about how much MS software improved in the meantime.
Basically, to take the mandatory car analogy, it's like saying that the original "unsafe at any speed" 1963 Corvair is... still as unsafe at any speed, as it was in 1963. Well, gee, that's such a big surprise.
Would you use that to claim that GM hasn't made any progress since 1963? No, seriously.
It's still not apples to apples. Yes, you can still buy XP, but you'll get XP SP2. It's hard to find even XP SP1 any more. Completely unpatched XP, would take some true dedication and ebay-fu to get at all. So, no, you can't buy a completely unpatched XP either. Not any more than you could buy an unpatched RedHat 8.
So whop-de-do, they prove that an OS you can't even buy any more, and just as unpatched as 5 years ago... still gets owned just as fast as it did before. Well, gee, big surprise there.
Well, it's only a problem if you're (A) fucking stupid, or (B) a troll or security company trying to get some attention. (The difference between trolling and PR can be awfully subtle at times.) Well, not meant personally, but rather the generic "you".
The fact is, you can't even buy a computer nowadays without at least SP1 on XP, or Vista, both of which come with a firewall activated by default. To be unprotected on the Internet like that, you'd actually have to disable it. It's not something that every user will do, and right before downloading the patches, no less. Even if they were completely retarded, well, then they'd be too retarded to find that option.
Even in pre-SP1 XP or even on 2000, you have a little known option to not allow incoming connections. I think it's there even on NT. On 2000 it's under the TCP/IP settings, Advanced -> Options -> IP-Security. It's the poor man's firewall, basically. Not a full fledged one, but it _will_ keep you safe while you download the patches. Yes, I did try it. It worked.
But even that won't be necessary, since (A) you can't even buy a computer with unpatched Windows 2000 nowadays, and (B) even if you somehow found yourself stranded somewhere with a pre-SP1 XP with the firewall suspiciously missing, most vendors include stuff like ZoneAlarm or some security suite. If your computer has a nVidia chipset, it has its own half-hardware/half-software firewall right on the drivers CD. Again, it defaults to be activated by default, so you'd have to be truly retarded and disable it before you even look for the patches.
If you have a 64 bit CPU, as the vast majority are nowadays, and XP SP1 or later, you can also make it use the NX flag. Basically then it can't execute the data segment. That takes care of pretty much all buffer overflow exploits right there, because that's how they work. By default it only checks the Windows kernel and IE, which is enough to get those patches safely, but I'd advise making it check all programs anyway.
Again, you can't even buy pre-SP1 XP nowadays, so you _will_ have that capability.
The fact is, I've been running an unprotected PC for the last 5 years or so, and I don't seem to have any infection. I don't see anything suspicious in the registry. My router led doesn't blink when I'm not browsing and in fact the router does disconnect some 10 minutes after I did anything. I haven't had any extra charges on my credit card. I haven't had my WoW password stolen. So either I genuinely don't have anything bad on it, or it's awfully benign.
So basically this kind of statistics are just pure trolling. So someone took a computer on the net, and actually went and disabled the firewall and possibly the NX protection too. And whop-de-do, it got pwned. Big surprise. That doesn't mean anything about what will happen to the average user. It just means that some retarded troll (either fanboy or a security company's PR) found a way to fuck-up that computer to get a reason to whine, "OMG, Windows gets pwned." Well, gee, big surprise there.
Thanks for the correction. It's been some years since I had an interest in anthropology, and, well, my memory isn't what it used to be. And never was ;)
Well, how about "two" as in "the whole f-ing tribe, all 300 of them"?
Small tribal communities have a lot more rigid expectations of what your duties are to the rest of the community, and your very life may depend on fulfilling those to the letter. Even if the tribe doesn't actually do an execution, simply being cast out in the jungle would spell death for any tribesman who's no longer liked by the tribe. But there are also documented cases where then the shaman would do the special voodoo, e.g., poison your food or put some bamboo needles in it or whatever, to get rid of you in a speedier way.
And to get an idea of what kind of obedience can be expected in such a tribal society, or what absurdities may be expected, at least one tribe had a proof of having become a man that involved wearing a glove made of live wasps for 10 minutes. And ones where even a single sting spells excruciating pain. The result of that trial would leave the boy (because the age of manhood is very low there by our standards) with a numb arm and shaking uncontrollably for days. Ok, now think doing that 20 times, on different days. You know, to prove that you really are a man.
And your life would depend on not failing it.
Are you thinking of the box of pain and the Gom Jabbar too, yet? Because that's essentially what they asked of every single boy in the tribe.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. Why currency?
1. Point in case: Ancient Egypt. I'm pretty sure that they had numbers and even maths, _long_ before they used currency.
It's a funny thing. We're so caught up in our own obsession with money, that we assume that it must have always been the alpha and the omega, or at least a major economic breakthrough. Well, Egypt used barter internally until the conquering Romans forced them to use coins, and nevertheless they were for a long while the most powerful economy.
Oh, they learned about coins earlier from the Greeks and Phoenicians, and even started minting their own gold into coins for external trade. But even that was long after they had numbers. But internally they still used barter and didn't seem worse off for it.
Thinking about it in modern terms, it must have fulfilled the same role as inflation nowadays. If your grain is your currency, you can't hoard it for generation, because it decays. The Pharaoh's granaries functioned as a sort of bank: they'd keep it for you, but you earned a -10% (yes, _minus_ ten percent) "interest" per year. Building your own granaries did somewhat better, but not by awfully much. So there was a very good reason to spend or invest that "money" instead. And unsurprisingly their economy included extensive trading and extensive crafts.
Or as another example, I don't remember coins being mentioned in Hamurabi's code of laws (from a bit over 4 millenia ago), but they already had numbers all right.
2. I'd argue that, actually, you start needing numbers much earlier anyway, when you switch to agriculture or animal husbandry.
For a shepherd there's a very good reason to know if you have 20 sheep (or goats, or whatever) or 21.
For an agricultor, you have to count days. Or the high priests count it for you, same deal. Think, for example, cultivating in the Nile's valley. It will take you X days to harvest all those crops. If you start later than X days before the next flood, then some of your crop will be lost. You also need to be able to reserve Y buckets/barrels/sacks/whatever of grain for sowing the next crop, or you will starve next year. I'd say there's a damn good reason to be able to count those.
And in either case if you counted the days wrong until the next crop, or the next sheep are born, you might get to starve.
It's events that happen long before you even need currency.
3. Even if you managed to avoid #2 somehow, numbers soon get you anyway: Any kind of more complex state than a 300 people tribe, starts needing numbers just to exist at all.
E.g., you have to raise an army. How many soldiers do you have? How much food do you need to take with you on a campaign? How many ships do you need to carry them? How many weapons do you need to build for them? How many smiths do you need for that?
Let's say you even don't use a professional standing army like post-marian Rome or Egypt, but go with citizen-soldiers like early Rome or Greece. Well, those guys need to get back to their farm when time comes to sow or reap. It doesn't matter what kind of food source you have. Even hunter-gatherers need to spend X days a year hunting and gathering. They need to be there when the good berries are ripe, or when the great Perfectly Normal Beast migration comes by. So you're back to counting days anyway, or you can't have any kind of warfare.
E.g., so you conquered the next city and installed your own nomarch/satrap/governor, loyal to you. How much tribute does it send you? How do you know how many more days you need to wait for it?
Except:
1. Even for birds, there are classifications which are useful even if they don't reflect the DNA. E.g., a "bird of prey" or "flightless bird" are still useful categories, no matter to whom the individual species are related.
Basically a category is just a way to say "all these have property X", no matter what X is or in what other categories they also belong. Grouping them by DNA is just _one_ of the many possible groupings. It's useful, no doubt, but it's not the only useful one. It doesn't make all others faulty. No, even the ones based on looking from the outside. Sorry.
I fail to see why the same can't apply to planets. We already have such categories as being in the right band to have liquid water too, for example. It tells you bugger all about its interior, but it does tell you that the exterior _could_ support Earth-like life. It's a useful category. Even if it's based on where it happens to be.
2. These have no DNA so to speak. They're chunks of rock and ice.
And a lot of other stuff is pretty much based on how big they are and where they are. E.g., whether it has one core or no core or multiple cores, is pretty much just an issue of how big it is. If gravity was high enough, it pulled the heavy stuff towards the centre. If not, not.
You didn't? We actually had one contractor here who singlehandedly wrote Google's search engine, according to himself and to the PHB from the company selling him. (Apparently he wrote it for some small startup, that got bought by another dot-com, who got bought by Google after Google had their IPO. That's not the story of Google's search engine how I knew it, but it just shows I was wrong;)
Meaning at least one corporation paid for that kind of expertise, possibly the contractor peddler too.
We were all excited to see such a guru in action, especially since we did need a good search for the portal. Mind you, we would have settled for using Lucene, but something Google-class would of course be even better. He left for some other project after a couple of weeks, though.
Hmm, only now it dawns upon me that I had worked before with someone from the same contractor company, who had coded AOL's search engine. I guess they must have a really strong competence on that domain ;)