"Infinium Labs recently signed a five-year lease on 10,000 sq. ft. of prime office space to locate its corporate offices in the Centre Pointe Building in downtown Sarasota, Florida. The Centre Pointe offices are in close proximity to many of the company's early investors, its corporate legal counsel and the industrial design firm that is developing the Phantom Game System(TM) prototypes"
Coincidence or damage control?
It probably just means that enough investors have bought their hype that Timothy Roberts can now afford to splurge and start living the high life again. Look for the next press release to say that they're loading up on Aeron chairs for the employees.
(By the way, the link in that article probably should have been this one.)
Education will never be "free as in beer", only "free as in speech". Putting together a good curriculum, course notes, problem sets, and finals is a lot of work. Currently OpenCourseWare is subsidized by the school and existing MIT students, some of whom have not been terribly happy about the idea.
A better way to put it would be that the marginal cost of making information available once it's produced is free, and that the best we can hope for is that schools will make pre-existing information available for free. Whether this works as a business model will depend on whether the "value added" by the educational environment of actually attending an institution makes up for the cost of tuition.
I'm not sure that the article intended to discuss in-game stealing, but I'll bite.
It ought to be possible to handle in-game theft with in-game consequences. I don't have much experience with the latest crop of MMORPGs, but I'll draw on an example from Ancient Anguish, a MUD I used to play.
In Ancient Anguish, thieves existed as a character class with the ability to do certain not-nice things to other characters, such as steal their items, poison food/heals, etc. However, just like in the real world, society frowned on stealing what didn't belong to you. Hence, in-game laws existed which prohibited theft from players even though the gaming mechanisms existed. This parallels real life, where you can certainly try to steal things, but woe to you if you were caught.
The probability of success was appropriately propertional to things like the value of the item, the level and stats of the thief/victims, lighting conditions, and so forth. Unsuccessful attempts had a (non-negligible) chance of being noticed by the victim and/or bystanders. Anyone witnessing theft could file a report with the local in-game authorities, who would then place a "bounty" on the head of the thief. This resulted in a large number of PC bounty hunters (which was a popular profession) being given license to hunt down and PK the player -- kind of a rough "frontier justice". Since death resulted in loss of a level and stats, this represented a serious deterrence to thieving.
In this fashion, in-game theft could be made to parallel real theft. It was certainly possible to steal things, but you better not get caught or you'd be in trouble with the rest of society. It also taught other players that they had to be careful with their items and money, and to consider buying safeguards or insurance.
The same framework can be (and was, in AA) extended to any other sort of activity that society would frown upon, such as PK'ing or griefing. Most players agreed the approach worked very well in discouraging unwanted activity; in fact, by adding societal values to the game just like in real life, it actually helped make the game feel more realistic.
The article seemed pretty unclear about whether it was referring to in-game stealing or hacking. I'd guess the latter since there doesn't seem to be much of a case against the former: if you signed on for a game where they tell you up-front that some of the characters have thieving abilities, and you don't take the proper precautions, then you shouldn't be surprised when your items are stolen. Don't like it? Don't sign up for the game.
Thieving via hacking is a whole 'nother story. This is a case of where your losses occured because of something that wasn't supposed to happen: server security being compromised. In many other frameworks, this is already illegal. The article uses banking as an example, which is mostly electronic these days:
"In law a bank account is a credit balance. It's not a pile of money that can be stolen even though it is not representing anything physical."
If you think about it, there are a lot of parallels to online gaming items: like money, many gaming items require time and effort to get. (With eBay auctions, good items can even be directly exchanged for money.) Like your account balance, you expect your character and items to be safely there when you return. People can consequently be pretty upset if that's not the case.
The point is somewhat moot because hacking your way onto a company's server is already illegal anyway. The real problem is going to be enforcement -- given the relatively small dollar value of most of these items, and the fact that hacked game servers won't be perceived as a mainstream problem, chances are that even if such cases are acknowledged to be illegal, it'll be hard to get them investigated and prosecuted.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned it yet, but Top Mud Sites is a good place to check what's popular with people at any given moment. In addition to ranking the most popular MUDs, they also have interesting mudding-related articles and player reviews.
Windows boots faster because it cheats. Linux boots slower because it's got more useful stuff. Linux booting slower because you set it up wrong. The clock you used to time the boot-ups must be broken. Linus Torvalds' dad can beat up Bill Gates' dad.
I found the following quote particularly interesting:
The Direct Marketing Association, representing more than 70 percent of the telemarketing industry, asked its members last week to abide by the list. Nearly 200 of the largest members have voiced no objection to the request and some have actively pledged to comply, association spokesman Louis Mastria said Monday.
Given that the Do Not Call list consists solely of people who are not interested in buying telemarketers' products, you'd think they'd be happy about this. Effectively it lets them weed out calls to households who don't want their stuff that would waste their call times, and let them focus on spamming people who are more likely to be responsive. Given how much the telemarketing industry is focused on cranking up their purchases-per-minute, it's not surprising that many companies agreed to abide by the list.
I also found it strange that the author was so sure that today's job market problems were entirely caused by efficiency increases:
The gigantic combine of capitalism has always obsessively pursued efficiency, and computers make the pursuit almost child play. Capitalism has succeeded in sowing a cornucopia of innovation up and down society. But capitalism is atrocious at distributing the fruits of innovation. Each labor-saving device means the idling of thousands of people, wasting their years of experience, rigorous training, and practical insights
Essentially the author argues that efficiency increases have resulted in job losses and the downturn going on in today's economy. The corollary is that computers increase efficiency, so computers bad also.
However, I'd argue that there's some causality going in the other direction too. The lousy economy has caused plenty of companies to cut back on their workforce through layoffs, and typically they've just forced the survivors to pick up the slack by working harder and for longer hours. In this sense, it's the loss of jobs that's forcing an "increase" in productivity, if you can call it that. People just grin and bear it, because no one wants to lose their job in today's economy. However, I'd hardly call working longer hours to cover your former coworkers' job responsabilities as well as your own the fault of computers; rather, it's a byproduct of the market downturn. Once companies start hiring again and work is more evenly distributed, you'll see this effect go back down again.
1) Who would you send yours to if it gets recalled?
Given that even the Segways were recalled, it's a safe bet that homemade scooters probably aren't going to get safety approved anytime soon. My favorite quote from the guy's web site:
Safety
Segway: Everything is dual redundant. For example, "in the unlikely event of a battery failure, the system is designed to use the second battery to operate the machine and allow it to continue balancing until it is brought to a safe stop."
My scooter: There is no redundancy or backup system. It is not even robustly made. Loose wires literally dangle out the bottom. In the fairly likely event of the software crashing, a wire coming loose, a component failing, or the batteries running low, the wheels will lock and the entire kinetic energy of the system is used to accelerate my head toward the ground.
If you continue to ride after the low battery alert, it's your own dumbass fault if you get hurt. It's like saying it's Fords fault your engine died because you didn't check your oil.
How often does your engine oil require refilling? And how far can you go on an engine with low oil?
How about a Segway battery?
There's a much bigger margin for error on the car. A better analogy would be, wouldn't they recall cars if your car steering and brakes failed every time the "low gas" indicator went on.
university professors are tenured. Speaking your mind on controversial topics can have hazardous consequences for your career.
This really is something Greer should have seen coming. He published a highly critical, highly-publicized report bashing his consulting company's biggest client. Whether it is true or not is irrelevant; that the client was Microsoft is irrelevant -- replace "MS" with "Sun" or "Oracle" or any other company you like, and I bet his higher-ups still wouldn't be happy about it. You may not like who you work for, but it's not a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you.
"OK," they'll say, "we'll mandate that 30% of stuff move to Linux". OK, great idea: which 30%? "Hmm, you're right. We'll say 10% of web servers, 10% of desktops, and 10% of back-end (DB, etc) stuff." Getting warmer: which 10% of the web servers? Which 10% of the DB servers?
Doesn't having different parts of your infrastructure spread over a smorgasbord of different operating systems just increase your exposure? All it takes is a single unpatched exploit on any one of your operating systems, and suddenly there's a way in. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link...
Not to mention the hell of having to have technical staff who are proficient in a multiplicity of different OS types, as well as internetworking them. While there may exist some companies out there that could pull it off, this is the government we're talking about here.
Selling items and characters might be new, but only because MMORPGs themselves are fairly new. The concept of paying money to "short-cut" your way to the top has been around ever since games were available. Companies have been selling products like GameShark for buffing your characters long before eBay. Or, even before that, people paid money for hint books and strategy guides for shortcutting puzzles and in-game challenges.
If you think about it, it's not much of a stretch to go from paying money to a programmer who makes a game that you'd like to play, to paying another gamer who trained up a character with high-level abilities you'd like to try out. As gaming becomes more mainstream and attracts more casual gamers with disposable incomes and limited time to invest in gaming, we'll probably see this trend increase.
Before many of you run amok, and make fun of heavy people, please read the article. It's in development, and has plans to be used to assist the elderly and those in hospitals. This is not some way to keep people indoors, or track their TV habits, or any of the other conspiracy baloney that will sure to be brought up soon.
I wouldn't put too much credibility in these "applications" just yet - I suspect this is what's known in the business world as having a solution, and fishing for a problem. As the project stands at the moment, there's no way this can be used in public spaces in hospitals or nursing homes, for the simple reason that weight isn't a sufficiently unique identifier. Once you have a large number of people using the couch, the probability of confusing two people of similar weight shoots through the roof.
Nor would it be effective to place one in each room and use it to track patients, as the article suggests, unless (1) your facility had cash to burn, and didn't feel like looking into more cost-effective solutions, and (2) you were planning to enforce the policy that none of the patients/residents were allowed to leave the sofa.
I suspect that this is more like one of those "Offbeat" stories they have at CNN every once in a while -- funny and cutesy in a "what will they think of next" kinda way, but not something you'll ever hear of again.
PopCap Games has a free online shark-hunting game ("Typer Shark") based on the same premise. It was actually pretty fun for a while even though I already knew how to touch type.
Of course, none of these types of games are particularly innovative since Mavis Beacon has been doing this since at least the 80's.
Heh, guess cynics think alike:) I'm of the opinion that it might not necessarily suck for the winners (after all, you get the money in return for not having to do marketing/support/etc) but it definitely bites for everyone else.
Slightly off-topic, but how did you get the/. filters not to flip out over all the caps in the contest rules? I had to retype them before it'd go through.
Each entrant will be required to assign all ownership of a game idea and the game entry, and all intellectual property rights in that game idea and game entry, to the Foundation in order to be eligible for participation in the contest.
If you want to continue work on your game idea after the contest, or want or hope to sell it to a third party sometime in the future, do not enter your game idea into this contest.
$25,000 as an R&D/development cost in return for a large bunch of new games is a pretty good deal for the organizers. It's not as good a deal for the participants, particularly for the vast majority who won't win, and yet have signed away all rights to their game. In the interests of fairness, contests like this really should only be allowed to take your game publishing rights if you're a winner.
(Retyping the rules by hand was fun. Why does Slashdot have an ALL CAPS checker and not a spellchecker?)
It won't be easy to shove those two aside, however. Danny Sullivan, editor of Search Engine Watch online newsletter, noted that Google and Yahoo have loyal followings.
Google commands the large following it has today because people trust the search results to be impartial as well as accurate. Having a good search algorithm is only part of the battle. That's why Google has been scrupulous about setting its "sponsored links" off to the side where they're clearly identifiable, and refusing to push up search results in return for cash. The trust issue is especially important in the closed-source world of search engines, where the details of how the searches operate are not released (part of their "security by obscurity" approach).
Given that Microsoft doesn't have the best history as far as impartiality goes, even if they did come up with a good search algorithm, how much would people trust the results?
Verisign has just acquired more domain names than there are atoms in the universe. If Mountain View wanted them they'd have to pay more money than exists, whereas it only cost versign a line in their DNS records.
Exactly. Most Slashdotters (myself included) are objecting to the fact that Verisign has essentially hijacked all unused domains. However, Mountain View's objection is that doing the same would cost them money, while it's free for Verisign. The action itself doesn't bother them; it's the uneven costs of doing so that has them annoyed.
Or, put another way, Mountain View would be perfectly satisfied if the result of the lawsuit was that Verisign allowed other cybersquatters to grab mistyped domains for free also, creating a huge happy cybersquatting family. Somehow I don't think the rest of us would be quite as delighted though.
According to the lawsuit, Mountain View, California-based VeriSign has been using its position as the keeper of the master list of all Web addresses ending in ".com" and ".net," also called domain names, to unfair advantage.
So Popular Enterprises' complaint is not that VeriSign is cybersquatting, but that they're doing it more effectively without letting others have a slice of the pie?
I guess people will figure that the end justifies the means, but the argument still seems a little distasteful.
Do I think that the game makers should be sued? Nope, if anything the family of the deceased should be suing the parents of the brainless kids for what is an obvious case of lack of parenting.
I've seen a number of other posts in this thread making the same point. You all do realize why Take 2 and Sony are getting sued rather than the parents, right?
Slashdot Mirror
(By the way, the link in that article probably should have been this one.)
A better way to put it would be that the marginal cost of making information available once it's produced is free, and that the best we can hope for is that schools will make pre-existing information available for free. Whether this works as a business model will depend on whether the "value added" by the educational environment of actually attending an institution makes up for the cost of tuition.
It ought to be possible to handle in-game theft with in-game consequences. I don't have much experience with the latest crop of MMORPGs, but I'll draw on an example from Ancient Anguish, a MUD I used to play.
In Ancient Anguish, thieves existed as a character class with the ability to do certain not-nice things to other characters, such as steal their items, poison food/heals, etc. However, just like in the real world, society frowned on stealing what didn't belong to you. Hence, in-game laws existed which prohibited theft from players even though the gaming mechanisms existed. This parallels real life, where you can certainly try to steal things, but woe to you if you were caught.
The probability of success was appropriately propertional to things like the value of the item, the level and stats of the thief/victims, lighting conditions, and so forth. Unsuccessful attempts had a (non-negligible) chance of being noticed by the victim and/or bystanders. Anyone witnessing theft could file a report with the local in-game authorities, who would then place a "bounty" on the head of the thief. This resulted in a large number of PC bounty hunters (which was a popular profession) being given license to hunt down and PK the player -- kind of a rough "frontier justice". Since death resulted in loss of a level and stats, this represented a serious deterrence to thieving.
In this fashion, in-game theft could be made to parallel real theft. It was certainly possible to steal things, but you better not get caught or you'd be in trouble with the rest of society. It also taught other players that they had to be careful with their items and money, and to consider buying safeguards or insurance.
The same framework can be (and was, in AA) extended to any other sort of activity that society would frown upon, such as PK'ing or griefing. Most players agreed the approach worked very well in discouraging unwanted activity; in fact, by adding societal values to the game just like in real life, it actually helped make the game feel more realistic.
Thieving via hacking is a whole 'nother story. This is a case of where your losses occured because of something that wasn't supposed to happen: server security being compromised. In many other frameworks, this is already illegal. The article uses banking as an example, which is mostly electronic these days:
If you think about it, there are a lot of parallels to online gaming items: like money, many gaming items require time and effort to get. (With eBay auctions, good items can even be directly exchanged for money.) Like your account balance, you expect your character and items to be safely there when you return. People can consequently be pretty upset if that's not the case.The point is somewhat moot because hacking your way onto a company's server is already illegal anyway. The real problem is going to be enforcement -- given the relatively small dollar value of most of these items, and the fact that hacked game servers won't be perceived as a mainstream problem, chances are that even if such cases are acknowledged to be illegal, it'll be hard to get them investigated and prosecuted.
I'm surprised no one's mentioned it yet, but Top Mud Sites is a good place to check what's popular with people at any given moment. In addition to ranking the most popular MUDs, they also have interesting mudding-related articles and player reviews.
Did I miss any?
However, I'd argue that there's some causality going in the other direction too. The lousy economy has caused plenty of companies to cut back on their workforce through layoffs, and typically they've just forced the survivors to pick up the slack by working harder and for longer hours. In this sense, it's the loss of jobs that's forcing an "increase" in productivity, if you can call it that. People just grin and bear it, because no one wants to lose their job in today's economy. However, I'd hardly call working longer hours to cover your former coworkers' job responsabilities as well as your own the fault of computers; rather, it's a byproduct of the market downturn. Once companies start hiring again and work is more evenly distributed, you'll see this effect go back down again.
How about a Segway battery?
There's a much bigger margin for error on the car. A better analogy would be, wouldn't they recall cars if your car steering and brakes failed every time the "low gas" indicator went on.
This really is something Greer should have seen coming. He published a highly critical, highly-publicized report bashing his consulting company's biggest client. Whether it is true or not is irrelevant; that the client was Microsoft is irrelevant -- replace "MS" with "Sun" or "Oracle" or any other company you like, and I bet his higher-ups still wouldn't be happy about it. You may not like who you work for, but it's not a good idea to bite the hand that feeds you.
Not to mention the hell of having to have technical staff who are proficient in a multiplicity of different OS types, as well as internetworking them. While there may exist some companies out there that could pull it off, this is the government we're talking about here.
If you think about it, it's not much of a stretch to go from paying money to a programmer who makes a game that you'd like to play, to paying another gamer who trained up a character with high-level abilities you'd like to try out. As gaming becomes more mainstream and attracts more casual gamers with disposable incomes and limited time to invest in gaming, we'll probably see this trend increase.
And this is a problem how, exactly? :)
Nor would it be effective to place one in each room and use it to track patients, as the article suggests, unless (1) your facility had cash to burn, and didn't feel like looking into more cost-effective solutions, and (2) you were planning to enforce the policy that none of the patients/residents were allowed to leave the sofa.
I suspect that this is more like one of those "Offbeat" stories they have at CNN every once in a while -- funny and cutesy in a "what will they think of next" kinda way, but not something you'll ever hear of again.
(Those Garfield comics where Garfield trashes the talking scale don't seem quite so farfetched now ...)
Of course, none of these types of games are particularly innovative since Mavis Beacon has been doing this since at least the 80's.
Heh, guess cynics think alike :) I'm of the opinion that it might not necessarily suck for the winners (after all, you get the money in return for not having to do marketing/support/etc) but it definitely bites for everyone else.
Slightly off-topic, but how did you get the /. filters not to flip out over all the caps in the contest rules? I had to retype them before it'd go through.
(Retyping the rules by hand was fun. Why does Slashdot have an ALL CAPS checker and not a spellchecker?)
Given that Microsoft doesn't have the best history as far as impartiality goes, even if they did come up with a good search algorithm, how much would people trust the results?
Or, put another way, Mountain View would be perfectly satisfied if the result of the lawsuit was that Verisign allowed other cybersquatters to grab mistyped domains for free also, creating a huge happy cybersquatting family. Somehow I don't think the rest of us would be quite as delighted though.
I guess people will figure that the end justifies the means, but the argument still seems a little distasteful.
The Hamel family lawyer put it this way:
Translation: "We're going to sue the people with the deeper pockets."