You may or may not like big businesses but businesses are usually very good at reducing costs, governments are not (the reason that isn't true with ISPs or cable companies is because they don't have any competition - most people live where there is a de facto ISP monopoly).
No. They are really good at EXTERNALIZING costs.
Governments have a much harder time doing that. So we see the full bill up front.
The way big business does it we get the full bill many years later when the Superfund cleanup is costed out.
Having worked at Apple -- though it was many years ago... they make a point of eating their own dog food. Nothing improves quality like having not only a formal QA team, but every employee part of an informal QA team.
I also worked at Microsoft in the early 90's... they eat their dog food too... but where do I submit a bug report?
They had no process for non-QA employees/contractors to file a bug report....
could be any number of causes. Here's an example from my own experience:
I once had some embedded CODE that failed only when the system was off, and exposed to sub-freezing temps for several days. If it was off under any other conditions it would start up and work correctly.
Turns out it was an uninitialized global variable, the compiler was not warning me about it, though it would for local variables.
Now one might expect that this would fail randomly on power up since the contents of SRAM is undefined... most programmers will assume it's random. It's not really random. There's often only a few values that a SRAM cell will take on typically at room temperature. Additionally as others have noted, SRAM can have a slight "memory effect" it also will sip holding current from decoupling capacitors long after other devices around it are well below their minimum forward Vth voltage. So in every case during in house testing the functions that used this variable managed to see a positive value on power-up which caused their first calculation on power-up to be wrong, but had no material impact on the output since it wasn't ever wrong enough to be noticed, or cause the system to mis-operate.
Then the system was deployed. The first few weeks the system was fine. It was late summer at the customer's site. The customer feedback was that it was working perfectly. We deployed another few units. Also working fine. Then summer ended. Fall First cold-snap of fall took place over a weekend. On monday morning all of the systems were started by their operators and crashed. Then restarted normally.
Lots of head scratching. No more failures that whole week. But something was clearly up. We couldn't reproduce the problem in the lab... We didn't know about the cold snap either. A week went by. No one spotted the bum variable. The following Monday no failures. No failures for a few more weeks. Still no one spotted the bum variable, code and hardware passed review.
Then the site got their second sub-freezing cold-snap on a weekend... This one we knew about before hand... our on-site rep mentioned during a conference call that it might snow over the weekend. Internally our team was still looking for answers, but without more failures we just didn't know what to look for. We'd left systems off for weeks at a time and they never failed to start. The hardware guys froze them, and over heated them. Kicked them around the lab.... none of them showed the failure seen by the customer.
The Rep called on monday and said all of the units failed to start the first time. The rest of the week they were fine.
Hardware team put three units in the freezer and left them there for three days. To replicate the weekend conditions. All three failed to boot. Hardware probed the frozen boards... code checksum was fine.... everything looked fine. The code was crashing though, and we got a call chain out of the device.
So I went in and looked again.... this time I spotted the uninitialized variable.
Turns out it could only crash when the variable had a negative value in it. Turns out if really cold AND the system was left off long enough for all the capacitors to drain then on power-up the SRAM in this particular device would come ready with a majority of it's bits set high. If it was above freezing... the majority of bits were low. In over-night freezes there was enough capacitance on the board to keep the RAM holding.
We had the on-sight rep re-flash the systems with the new code.... bug killed.
This was not a complex system and it was not required to meet Safety-of-Life standards. It had about 8K of code and 2K of active data, and three active IC packages.
Having watched Mr. Toyoda and his US operations exec get raked over the coals on C-SPAN was painful. Very little of the questioning was relevant beyond a cursory "clarification" of the record, and calling on Toyota to make it right. Most of it was political grandstanding. If Mr. Toyoda knew then what he knows now about how Congress conducts hearings, I doubt he would have made his voluntary appearance. On the other hand... how many American execs can stand before the US Congress and say "Every product we make has my family name on it." Add to that the Japanese cultural value of family legacy and honor. Maybe he would have come to stand before that Congressional circus-act with a heavy infantry unit, rather than a translator and the American COO.
It was very interesting to see the Congressional reaction to his understanding English far better than he could speak it. He probably should have let his translator do more of the leg work. I got the sense that the Reps thought he was messing with them. And yet anyone who knows a second language less than fluently might understand far more than they can comfortably speak, especially if there is serious consequences for being misunderstood.
On the issue of developing embedded systems where Safety-of-Life is a factor... legacy code is probably the most dangerous element to deal with. However this is an issue that is going to haunt any manufacturer that builds many generations of evolutionary systems. At some point testing becomes frightfully difficult because in complex, deeply embedded systems the test process is very invasive. Also with corporate fears of IP leakage, a system that fails in the field often cannot be completely tested, or diagnosed. Many of the diagnostic features have been deliberately, and permanently disabled by "burning off" the security fuses in the chips when the system completes final testing. While traditionally automakers have kept "backdoors" in their systems, any sensible security conscious system designer who hasn't been living in a cave for the last 20 years is going to make damn sure their system is locked down. No backdoors, no exposed debugging tools.... nothing left to examine a failed system from it's last known state because the cost of not locking the system down is IP leakage and potentially dangerous tampering that would be difficult or impossible to detect.
Getting automakers to start designing systems that have more transparency -even for authorized investigations- is going to be an uphill battle. They don't want the risk of IP leakage, they don't want unauthorized 3rd party development/support on their platforms, or having their own products rat them out when they do make a blunder.
On the first two points how is this any different than what Boeing, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, and many other companies do on their closed-platform products?
Laws like DMCA only make the situation worse in that attempts to independently examine the system might lead to criminal prosecution.
our long term partners mistakenly shipped a small number of demo boxes instead of functional units.
That shit is a bald faced lie.
Intel has come out with a statement that contradicts this, and from the images suppled from the customers that have received these "Nigerian Core i7" packages, the box is not up to Intel's standards by any stretch of the imagination. Why would Intel fake their own security seals, and allow embarrassingly bad spelling? Add to that the low grade castings of the fan and chip... Intel has reason to go getto on those materials. IMO: Someone pulled a switch job on their supply lines somewhere between Intel and Newegg. The real issue is that somehow this slipped past their ISO9000 Process QA and got into customer hands. This is a major screw up for Intel's entire distribution chain.
Newegg is clearly following a misguided PR strategy for dealing with this disaster. D&H the alleged distributor who appears from early reports to be the upstream source of this supply stream contamination has taken a similarly misguided stance. They are firing off Cease and Desist letters to the forums who broke the story of D & H likely being involved.
Newegg needs to come clean... D & H needs to come clean... They need to stop covering up and admit that they were not watching their supply lines well enough to prevent this crap getting to the end-users. It's simple you admit to a weakness in process and move on from their. This coverup crap just feeds the trolls and builds negative vibes... So far only intel has been factual: (paraphrasing) [We didn't make that bullshit! We are going to find out who did... **ITS CLOBBERIN' TIIIIME!!!!**] |EOL| Not a very informative statement.... However, it appears honest, and clear, that they care about solving the problem.
D&H came out rattling their saber; Newegg is blaming "demos" delivered by mistake. Both approaches are disingenuous and patently insulting to the customers involved, and potential customers paying attention to the market.
Newegg has been getting a anecdotal bad rap for a long time... their statement on this issue kind of validates those complaints now. D & H has been around for longer than most of us have been alive.... they should know better.
IMO: They got caught fappin' off when they should have been minding the store. Now they lie about it.
Hmmm.. I've been pretty happy with Newegg and their service. I've had nothing but good experiences in trading with them. Now... I'm not so sure I want to continue doing business with them.... Now that I see how they want to spin this crisis; I'm thinking maybe I have been lucky in my dealing with them so far. I'm thinking I'll take my custom elsewhere. YMMV
Boxes and fans show up on the grey market... disposal of evidence by selling it into the grey market. Reselling the boxes on the grey market seems like an organized crime move. Make a few extra bucks selling off evidence from the heist, makes more sense than dumping it. It also obscures the trail of the whole production with little guys who distribute flea market junk for pennies a pound.
Hmmm... I wonder who got the chips and why they wanted them? Seems like a pretty high risk venture for a shady VAR, or just fencing them on the black market... They have enough value that the authorities are going to be looking for them to turn up, and they can be uniquely identified pretty easily.
It seems likely the Feds are going to be looking into this pretty quickly.... to make sure they don't end up in a FAR restricted country.
BTW: @daverk: you may be in possession of stolen goods....
Its most likely that this Newegg thing is the last step in a well funded transit heist.
The mockups just had to be good enough to fool customs inspectors, who are looking for scheduled contraband,(this will now be added to their list) and receiving dock inspections looking to see that the shipment doesn't look damaged, shorted, or overtly tampered with.
The goal, if this is what happened, is to give the thieves time to deliver the stolen goods into their underground distribution network, get paid, and vanish before the investigation starts.
This could have been done in the US for all we know, ATM. As soon as those mockups were discovered.... it became a criminal matter,(fraud or theft) and if they crossed state lines and/or national borders it becomes federal investigation. It doesn't matter how these boxes arrived at the customer's door; everyone involved in handling those shipment(s) is gonna have some 'splainin' to do.
Newegg's obviously bogus public statements about the demo boxes may just be an uncomfortable artifact of having to say something quickly for PR that doesn't scream 'criminal investigation.'
You raise some good points here. This patent application seems to be violating a foundational rule of advertising. If a game publisher wants to maintain mindshare it seems to me about the worst thing to do would be to erode the game experience on the demo. The hypothetical teenager is in effect maintaining their resolve to nag their parents, do extra yard-work, baby-sit, etc by playing the demo. If the game demo experience gradually sublimes away, I would expect the kid's interest in buying to similarly fade.
Another possible outcome is that the first time a kid runs into one of these demos they are going to get pissed. All games introduce a suite of rules and features that a player reasonably expects will remain consistent throughout. Computer games often introduce these rules slowly during the early levels, guiding and developing the player's experience, and confidence in the game, and their ability to play it. In a way the rules become an implied contract between the player and the artists who created it. When a game breaks a rule that it has already established, the player is unlikely to continue playing the game. Yeah, it is a DEMO, but the parts of the brain that a good game satisfies don't make that distinction. Recent work in this area shows that at the emotional/reptilian brain/subconscious level the brain does not differentiate higher order ideas such as "this is a movie", "this is a game", "this is not real", "this is only a demo." These lower levels of the brain are where we feel and react to trust, fun, betrayal, winning and losing, etc. without regard to "this is just a demo."
I hope Sony implements this and has a few of their games tank hard.
As for the rental model for games... If they attempt to pull a pure "landlord" model where failure to pay rent leads to an eviction and loss of all right of recovery... (i.e. Three day Pay or Quit) then that publisher can expect their user base to dwindle away and stay away. The most successful service-rental games handle this pretty well. For the same reasons it is unwise to implement 'perma-death' in an MMORPG, it is equally unwise to implement a similar arrangement in handling 'failure-to-pay.'
Unfortunately game publishers will probably continue down the path to the dark side. This is not just and issue with game publishers. This is a symptom of a fundamental breakdown in corporate governance, and cultural values in executive suites and boardrooms throughout the world.
I gotta wonder why people resist the simple notion: If you give a living creature a CHOICE between a zero-sum game and and a viable push. They will take the push every time. If you give them nothing but zero-sum solutions... they will fight to the death pretty much as soon as they realize they don't have any real choices to break even, let alone win.
The serious tragedy of the US for the last 40+ years, is how few people realize they are being offered no real solutions, and are really facing a zero-sum game. When that realization finally dawns on a significant portion of the people in this country.... it's likely to get very unpleasant for everyone in this country.
Who is going to front money to a pair of developers who told their publisher to get stuffed?
That history of confrontation is going to make VCs queasy. They don't want more risk from principled developers... they want massive sales and residuals. Principled developers are a serious liability to ROI. No sane investor wants loose cannons between them and their unearned income.
Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all have strong unions. And when they strike (as the writers did in 2007), they are not easily replaced. If Joss Whedon walks off the set you can't just grab some random schmuck off the street to replace him.
Game developers are creative people too. They have just as much leverage as the showbiz creatives in New York and LA do. All they need to do to stop being treated like crap is to exercise it.
As I recall, when the writers struck, they were supported by agents, actors, politicians, and many other unions. This gave the other side incentive to negotiate.
Who would go out on a financial limb to support striking game creators?
How about the custies who love the game? Oh.. NVM... they live in Mommie's basement and smoke cloves.... they are worthless... NOT....
If you love your entertainment creators then be prepared to defend them when that-bad-old-puddy-tat musses them up.
Or to use an arcane but easier to interpret value:
enough water to cover about 486428 acres (760 sq miles[1968.5 sq km]) of land in a foot-thick[-.3048 m] sheet of solid ice.
Good thing it's concentrated in convenient pockets. Were it a diffuse 'binder' over the pole areas it would be quite process intensive to extract. Sifting through 75 kg of dust for 100gm of water seems like a huge waste of energy, even though the water is technically easy to extract by mild heating of raw stock.
A first cut might include tapping that source for potable water on extended lunar missions..... like that is going to happen with Oh-Bummer at the helm.
You are forgetting that one could cache an MD5 hash of the image and have a pretty good chance of identifying that image regardless of it's image URL or request information, simply based on it's content. Apparently ReCAPTCHA was flawed in a number of different ways, and WiseGuys and others have apparently learned to exploit that weakness through straight-forward data-mining, and strategic IP and code theft.
Category: Programming & Databases Description: We are looking for a bot which will work its way through the ticket purchasing process on www.ticketmaster.co.uk,including: 1) Selecting the number of tickets 2) Selecting "Best available tickets" and "Best available section" - these are the default search options so the bot should not change alter these. 3) Writing out the captcha to a minimum 70% success rate 4) Once the ticket selection is available, we would like to receive an email notification to notify us that tickets have become available for that URL. Please note that we are NOT looking for a programme that will go through the payment process. 5) If the URL is for an event which has sold out, we would like the bot to continue searching automatically all day long. We would like the programme to have the capacity to search through 100+ URLS throughout the day so it must be designed to handle such processing. It is also vital that the bot has some sort of IP hiding mechanism embedded into it. This could be in the form of a proxy or you can make other suggestions. This is a vital point as www.ticketmaster.co.uk has various ways of detecting such bots and the programme will just stop working.
Slashdot Mirror
How profound.... my parents are now active in a similar instance.... but on the Arizona server. o.0
You may or may not like big businesses but businesses are usually very good at reducing costs, governments are not (the reason that isn't true with ISPs or cable companies is because they don't have any competition - most people live where there is a de facto ISP monopoly).
No. They are really good at EXTERNALIZING costs.
Governments have a much harder time doing that. So we see the full bill up front.
The way big business does it we get the full bill many years later when the Superfund cleanup is costed out.
Having worked at both companies' main campuses.... the cultural differences are HUGE. (Apple from 85 - 90 Microsoft from 93 - 97)
Apple's culture encouraged iconoclasts and obsession even if you worked in a sea of cubicles.
At Microsoft: it was just a job with some nice offices, heavy desks, and lush appointments.
Having worked at Apple -- though it was many years ago... they make a point of eating their own dog food.
Nothing improves quality like having not only a formal QA team, but every employee part of an informal QA team.
I also worked at Microsoft in the early 90's ... they eat their dog food too... but where do I submit a bug report?
They had no process for non-QA employees/contractors to file a bug report....
Big difference in quality.
could be any number of causes.
Here's an example from my own experience:
I once had some embedded CODE that failed only when the system was off, and exposed to sub-freezing temps for several days.
If it was off under any other conditions it would start up and work correctly.
Turns out it was an uninitialized global variable, the compiler was not warning me about it, though it would for local variables.
Now one might expect that this would fail randomly on power up since the contents of SRAM is undefined... most programmers will assume it's random. It's not really random. There's often only a few values that a SRAM cell will take on typically at room temperature. Additionally as others have noted, SRAM can have a slight "memory effect" it also will sip holding current from decoupling capacitors long after other devices around it are well below their minimum forward Vth voltage. So in every case during in house testing the functions that used this variable managed to see a positive value on power-up which caused their first calculation on power-up to be wrong, but had no material impact on the output since it wasn't ever wrong enough to be noticed, or cause the system to mis-operate.
Then the system was deployed. The first few weeks the system was fine. It was late summer at the customer's site. The customer feedback was that it was working perfectly. We deployed another few units. Also working fine. Then summer ended. Fall First cold-snap of fall took place over a weekend. On monday morning all of the systems were started by their operators and crashed. Then restarted normally.
Lots of head scratching. No more failures that whole week. But something was clearly up. We couldn't reproduce the problem in the lab... We didn't know about the cold snap either. A week went by. No one spotted the bum variable. The following Monday no failures. No failures for a few more weeks. Still no one spotted the bum variable, code and hardware passed review.
Then the site got their second sub-freezing cold-snap on a weekend... This one we knew about before hand... our on-site rep mentioned during a conference call that it might snow over the weekend. Internally our team was still looking for answers, but without more failures we just didn't know what to look for. We'd left systems off for weeks at a time and they never failed to start.
The hardware guys froze them, and over heated them. Kicked them around the lab.... none of them showed the failure seen by the customer.
The Rep called on monday and said all of the units failed to start the first time. The rest of the week they were fine.
Hardware team put three units in the freezer and left them there for three days. To replicate the weekend conditions. All three failed to boot. Hardware probed the frozen boards... code checksum was fine.... everything looked fine. The code was crashing though, and we got a call chain out of the device.
So I went in and looked again.... this time I spotted the uninitialized variable.
Turns out it could only crash when the variable had a negative value in it. Turns out if really cold AND the system was left off long enough for all the capacitors to drain then on power-up the SRAM in this particular device would come ready with a majority of it's bits set high. If it was above freezing... the majority of bits were low. In over-night freezes there was enough capacitance on the board to keep the RAM holding.
We had the on-sight rep re-flash the systems with the new code.... bug killed.
This was not a complex system and it was not required to meet Safety-of-Life standards. It had about 8K of code and 2K of active data, and three active IC packages.
Having watched Mr. Toyoda and his US operations exec get raked over the coals on C-SPAN was painful. Very little of the questioning was relevant beyond a cursory "clarification" of the record, and calling on Toyota to make it right. Most of it was political grandstanding. If Mr. Toyoda knew then what he knows now about how Congress conducts hearings, I doubt he would have made his voluntary appearance. On the other hand... how many American execs can stand before the US Congress and say "Every product we make has my family name on it." Add to that the Japanese cultural value of family legacy and honor. Maybe he would have come to stand before that Congressional circus-act with a heavy infantry unit, rather than a translator and the American COO.
It was very interesting to see the Congressional reaction to his understanding English far better than he could speak it. He probably should have let his translator do more of the leg work. I got the sense that the Reps thought he was messing with them. And yet anyone who knows a second language less than fluently might understand far more than they can comfortably speak, especially if there is serious consequences for being misunderstood.
On the issue of developing embedded systems where Safety-of-Life is a factor... legacy code is probably the most dangerous element to deal with. However this is an issue that is going to haunt any manufacturer that builds many generations of evolutionary systems. At some point testing becomes frightfully difficult because in complex, deeply embedded systems the test process is very invasive. Also with corporate fears of IP leakage, a system that fails in the field often cannot be completely tested, or diagnosed. Many of the diagnostic features have been deliberately, and permanently disabled by "burning off" the security fuses in the chips when the system completes final testing. While traditionally automakers have kept "backdoors" in their systems, any sensible security conscious system designer who hasn't been living in a cave for the last 20 years is going to make damn sure their system is locked down. No backdoors, no exposed debugging tools.... nothing left to examine a failed system from it's last known state because the cost of not locking the system down is IP leakage and potentially dangerous tampering that would be difficult or impossible to detect.
Getting automakers to start designing systems that have more transparency -even for authorized investigations- is going to be an uphill battle. They don't want the risk of IP leakage, they don't want unauthorized 3rd party development/support on their platforms, or having their own products rat them out when they do make a blunder.
On the first two points how is this any different than what Boeing, Apple, Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft, and many other companies do on their closed-platform products?
Laws like DMCA only make the situation worse in that attempts to independently examine the system might lead to criminal prosecution.
our long term partners mistakenly shipped a small number of demo boxes instead of functional units.
That shit is a bald faced lie.
Intel has come out with a statement that contradicts this, and from the images suppled from the customers that have received these "Nigerian Core i7" packages, the box is not up to Intel's standards by any stretch of the imagination. Why would Intel fake their own security seals, and allow embarrassingly bad spelling? Add to that the low grade castings of the fan and chip... Intel has reason to go getto on those materials. IMO: Someone pulled a switch job on their supply lines somewhere between Intel and Newegg. The real issue is that somehow this slipped past their ISO9000 Process QA and got into customer hands. This is a major screw up for Intel's entire distribution chain.
Newegg is clearly following a misguided PR strategy for dealing with this disaster. D&H the alleged distributor who appears from early reports to be the upstream source of this supply stream contamination has taken a similarly misguided stance. They are firing off Cease and Desist letters to the forums who broke the story of D & H likely being involved.
Newegg needs to come clean... D & H needs to come clean... They need to stop covering up and admit that they were not watching their supply lines well enough to prevent this crap getting to the end-users. It's simple you admit to a weakness in process and move on from their. This coverup crap just feeds the trolls and builds negative vibes... So far only intel has been factual: (paraphrasing) [We didn't make that bullshit! We are going to find out who did... **ITS CLOBBERIN' TIIIIME!!!!**] |EOL| Not a very informative statement.... However, it appears honest, and clear, that they care about solving the problem.
D&H came out rattling their saber; Newegg is blaming "demos" delivered by mistake. Both approaches are disingenuous and patently insulting to the customers involved, and potential customers paying attention to the market.
Newegg has been getting a anecdotal bad rap for a long time... their statement on this issue kind of validates those complaints now. D & H has been around for longer than most of us have been alive.... they should know better.
IMO: They got caught fappin' off when they should have been minding the store. Now they lie about it.
Hmmm.. I've been pretty happy with Newegg and their service. I've had nothing but good experiences in trading with them. Now... I'm not so sure I want to continue doing business with them.... Now that I see how they want to spin this crisis; I'm thinking maybe I have been lucky in my dealing with them so far. I'm thinking I'll take my custom elsewhere. YMMV
And ya know, Jackass, I did it just to piss you off.
look down another post and see it was a browser glitch.
And the self-reply
browser glitch.... I didn't think the first one made it.
his Core i7 is fake....
hilarious video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrAOQ4TzQc
Newegg..
Fraekin Hilarious..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQrAOQ4TzQc
Boxes and fans show up on the grey market... disposal of evidence by selling it into the grey market. Reselling the boxes on the grey market seems like an organized crime move. Make a few extra bucks selling off evidence from the heist, makes more sense than dumping it. It also obscures the trail of the whole production with little guys who distribute flea market junk for pennies a pound.
Hmmm... I wonder who got the chips and why they wanted them? Seems like a pretty high risk venture for a shady VAR, or just fencing them on the black market... They have enough value that the authorities are going to be looking for them to turn up, and they can be uniquely identified pretty easily.
It seems likely the Feds are going to be looking into this pretty quickly .... to make sure they don't end up in a FAR restricted country.
BTW:
@daverk: you may be in possession of stolen goods....
Its most likely that this Newegg thing is the last step in a well funded transit heist.
The mockups just had to be good enough to fool customs inspectors, who are looking for scheduled contraband,(this will now be added to their list) and receiving dock inspections looking to see that the shipment doesn't look damaged, shorted, or overtly tampered with.
The goal, if this is what happened, is to give the thieves time to deliver the stolen goods into their underground distribution network, get paid, and vanish before the investigation starts.
This could have been done in the US for all we know, ATM. As soon as those mockups were discovered.... it became a criminal matter,(fraud or theft) and if they crossed state lines and/or national borders it becomes federal investigation. It doesn't matter how these boxes arrived at the customer's door; everyone involved in handling those shipment(s) is gonna have some 'splainin' to do.
Newegg's obviously bogus public statements about the demo boxes may just be an uncomfortable artifact of having to say something quickly for PR that doesn't scream 'criminal investigation.'
You raise some good points here. This patent application seems to be violating a foundational rule of advertising. If a game publisher wants to maintain mindshare it seems to me about the worst thing to do would be to erode the game experience on the demo. The hypothetical teenager is in effect maintaining their resolve to nag their parents, do extra yard-work, baby-sit, etc by playing the demo. If the game demo experience gradually sublimes away, I would expect the kid's interest in buying to similarly fade.
Another possible outcome is that the first time a kid runs into one of these demos they are going to get pissed. All games introduce a suite of rules and features that a player reasonably expects will remain consistent throughout. Computer games often introduce these rules slowly during the early levels, guiding and developing the player's experience, and confidence in the game, and their ability to play it. In a way the rules become an implied contract between the player and the artists who created it. When a game breaks a rule that it has already established, the player is unlikely to continue playing the game.
Yeah, it is a DEMO, but the parts of the brain that a good game satisfies don't make that distinction. Recent work in this area shows that at the emotional/reptilian brain/subconscious level the brain does not differentiate higher order ideas such as "this is a movie", "this is a game", "this is not real", "this is only a demo." These lower levels of the brain are where we feel and react to trust, fun, betrayal, winning and losing, etc. without regard to "this is just a demo."
I hope Sony implements this and has a few of their games tank hard.
As for the rental model for games... If they attempt to pull a pure "landlord" model where failure to pay rent leads to an eviction and loss of all right of recovery... (i.e. Three day Pay or Quit) then that publisher can expect their user base to dwindle away and stay away. The most successful service-rental games handle this pretty well. For the same reasons it is unwise to implement 'perma-death' in an MMORPG, it is equally unwise to implement a similar arrangement in handling 'failure-to-pay.'
Unfortunately game publishers will probably continue down the path to the dark side. This is not just and issue with game publishers. This is a symptom of a fundamental breakdown in corporate governance, and cultural values in executive suites and boardrooms throughout the world.
Lol!
No sane business person builds a business plan that incorporates
"Win lawsuit"
As a lead in the funding column.
I gotta wonder why people resist the simple notion: If you give a living creature a CHOICE between a zero-sum game and
and a viable push. They will take the push every time. If you give them nothing but zero-sum solutions... they will fight to the death pretty much as soon as they realize they don't have any real choices to break even, let alone win.
The serious tragedy of the US for the last 40+ years, is how few people realize they are being offered no real solutions, and are really facing a zero-sum game. When that realization finally dawns on a significant portion of the people in this country.... it's likely to get very unpleasant for everyone in this country.
Only one problem.....
Who is going to front money to a pair of developers who told their publisher to get stuffed?
That history of confrontation is going to make VCs queasy. They don't want more risk from principled developers... they want massive sales and residuals. Principled developers are a serious liability to ROI. No sane investor wants loose cannons between them and their unearned income.
sure.... they want people in management who drank the kool-ade before they knew what they were drinking.
Problem is if you sell you ass to a union you get played for the pawn you are.
If you bend over for one "Man" you'll bend over for ALL MEN.
Unions are not a viable solution to the problem they claim to solve.
Get a union.
Seriously!
Hollywood actors, screenwriters and directors all have strong unions. And when they strike (as the writers did in 2007), they are not easily replaced. If Joss Whedon walks off the set you can't just grab some random schmuck off the street to replace him.
Game developers are creative people too. They have just as much leverage as the showbiz creatives in New York and LA do. All they need to do to stop being treated like crap is to exercise it.
As I recall, when the writers struck, they were supported by agents, actors, politicians, and many other unions. This gave the other side incentive to negotiate.
Who would go out on a financial limb to support striking game creators?
How about the custies who love the game? Oh.. NVM... they live in Mommie's basement and smoke cloves.... they are worthless...
NOT....
If you love your entertainment creators then be prepared to defend them when that-bad-old-puddy-tat musses them up.
Or to use an arcane but easier to interpret value:
enough water to cover about 486428 acres (760 sq miles[1968.5 sq km]) of land in a foot-thick[-.3048 m] sheet of solid ice.
Good thing it's concentrated in convenient pockets. Were it a diffuse 'binder' over the pole areas it would be quite process intensive to extract. Sifting through 75 kg of dust for 100gm of water seems like a huge waste of energy, even though the water is technically easy to extract by mild heating of raw stock.
A first cut might include tapping that source for potable water on extended lunar missions..... like that is going to happen with Oh-Bummer at the helm.
Ah well it will just keep accreting.
You are forgetting that one could cache an MD5 hash of the image and have a pretty good chance of identifying that image regardless of it's image URL or request information, simply based on it's content. Apparently ReCAPTCHA was flawed in a number of different ways, and WiseGuys and others have apparently learned to exploit that weakness through straight-forward data-mining, and strategic IP and code theft.
I read the indictment. No mention of tax fraud, failure to pay, or evasion. Citation please?
The above comments reminds me of an old saying:
Locks don't keep criminals out. They keep honest people honest.
Sorry to reply to myself... but this gem just popped across my mail o.0 From a popular freelance site:
Profile ID: 1177190 matches...
Title: Ticketmaster UK ReCAPTCHA
Project ID: 592566
Category: Programming & Databases
Description:
We are looking for a bot which will work its way through the ticket purchasing process on www.ticketmaster.co.uk,including:
1) Selecting the number of tickets
2) Selecting "Best available tickets" and "Best available section" - these are the default search options so the bot should not change alter these.
3) Writing out the captcha to a minimum 70% success rate
4) Once the ticket selection is available, we would like to receive an email notification to notify us that tickets have become available for that URL. Please note that we are NOT looking for a programme that will go through the payment process.
5) If the URL is for an event which has sold out, we would like the bot to continue searching automatically all day long.
We would like the programme to have the capacity to search through 100+ URLS throughout the day so it must be designed to handle such processing. It is also vital that the bot has some sort of IP hiding mechanism embedded into it. This could be in the form of a proxy or you can make other suggestions. This is a vital point as www.ticketmaster.co.uk has various ways of detecting such bots and the programme will just stop working.
Need I say more....