Even if the game requires online saves (and there's some doubt) it'll only be a few months before pirate servers exist that you can run on your own machine to store the saves.
That's sort of the point of TFA, though -- that to be effective (from the developer's perspective) DRM doesn't have to be effective forever, it just has to be effective for a while. After Assassin's Creed 2 (or whatever) has been out for a few months, most of the people who will ever buy it already have.
I'd be really curious to see the data on that, since anecdotally, everyone I know who bought music ten years ago still does, and everyone I knew who downloaded music illegally ten years ago still does. In other words, rather than piracy decreasing, nothing has changed.
I don't discount the argument that the music industry's shitty policies and lack of a legal online presence at one point drove some consumers to piracy that otherwise wouldn't have been, but I really doubt that now-present reasonable legal alternatives are bringing those people back from piracy, either.
Considering that DRM never works yet always pisses off some consumers, wouldn't the sweet spot then be no DRM?
So you're saying that no one has EVER bought a game because DRM kept them from playing them without buying it? Not one time?
That's ludicrous -- just because the kind of people who post on Slashdot know how to dig up pirate torrents doesn't mean most people know how, and it certainly doesn't mean that everyone who has ever wanted to play a game knows.
Back in '96 I took a social psych class. If you're not familiar, the one sentence reductionist oversimplified explanation of the core theories of social psych is that people are influenced by the talk around them.
One of the (somewhat prophetic?) things I remember my professor talking about was the struggle between freedom of information and scholarship in China. In his view, China either had to choose to shut out internet access to the rest of the world (in which case their scholars would be significantly handicapped relative to everyone else) or allow it (in which case the Chinese people would become more influenced by the ideas of the rest of the world than they had been in the recent past.) The Great Firewall of China being something of a halfway measure that either didn't exist in those days or we didn't know about.
Along similar lines, he liked to say that a decent number of students had come from China to study at our school of Engineering, and that despite anyone's best efforts to focus them on purely scholastic matters, they would go home forever changed by having lived in a country with Steak and Shake.
It's interesting to see this tension at work still as there's talk of Google pulling out of China.
And I doubt OpenGL is not suited to fast game-style graphics rendering, because GAMES ON OSes OTHER THAN WINDOWS EXIST. See Halo on Mac, Everything Blizzard on the Mac, Quake 4, etc.
And yet you weren't able to give an example of something released less than 4-5 years or more ago. 5 years in games is an eternity.
That doesn't exactly make a strong statement on the graphical needs of modern games.
I kind of hate that the term "griefer" has been so watered down (not necessarily by the poster I'm replying to, the post just made me think of it) as to have become essentially meaningless.
Once upon a time you had to be a serious asshole to be called a griefer, not just someone who kills or steals from you when you don't want to die in a game that allows it. Worse than that is that you now could hear anyone who beats anyone else in any kind of game a griefer, even in games where it has no sensical context -- win a game of Starcraft, somebody's calling you a griefer.
Apple doesn't criticize its competitors any more or less than everyone else does. Microsoft bashes Linux and mocks Apple.
Yeah, those ubiquitous Microsoft TV commericals that are just 30 seconds of ragging on Linux without talking about their own product at all are hilarious!... or it could be that only Apple really has commercials like that, and you're completely full of shit.
Sorry, you can argue the merits of the products and operating systems if you want, but you can't argue the last few years of advertising campaigns to anyone who has even remotely been paying attention.
You really didn't have to. There are an awful lot of apps built in that era that render "correctly" in IE6 and look so different in, say, Firefox that they're essentially unusable.
Correcting/updating all that formatting isn't as bad as a full rewrite of the apps, but it's a seriously non-trivial amount of work.
What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
Clearly you're not a web developer or haven't been one for around ten years. There was a several year period (between when Netscape turned to utter shit and the rise of Firefox) where IE was the only reasonable choice for a graphical free (as in beer) web browser.
It doesn't take an idiot to make an app that only works in one browser when there only is one browser.
My assumption is that at some point you'd like to try to make a living as a Java developer. If that's not the case, please disregard this post.
How much do you know about databases? If the answer is nothing, you'll want to get up to speed on at least basic SQL. Pretty much every Java project you ever work on in the business world will make use of a database. 80-90% of the syntax is pretty standard from database to database, although nearly every professional Java project I've worked on used Oracle.
While not every Java project is a web project, it wouldn't hurt to have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and at least one web server commonly used to host JSP such as Tomcat or WebSphere. Even if these pieces don't end up being your job, the basics are helpful.
There are all kinds of popular Java frameworks meant to solve different problems. Try to get a basic sense of what's out there and what each of the leading options is good for, e.g. that something like Hibernate is used for data persistence and something like Java Server Faces is more of a presentation technology. (Or whatever's popular now; I haven't worked a Java project in a few years and I'm starting to get out of date.)
Probably you also should start to learn one or more of the common Java IDEs. Eclipse is near ubiquitous, but you may prefer one of the other options.
It's the closest homeowner equivalent of vendor lock-in. If I have a natural gas oven or water heater, the price of not buying natural gas is high even if natural gas is overpriced relative to electricity or other forms of energy.
I think you vastly overestimate the difficulty in learning new languages.
Learn C++. Once you've done that, you can program in C, C#, Objective-C, php, perl, Java, Python, VB and a lot of other languages after about a day of learning syntax.
Speaking as someone who did learn C++ first and has done work in most of the other languages you list since...
What you're saying is technically true, yet misses a bigger picture.
Being a good/experienced Java (or whatever) developer isn't just about being able to write Java code or knowing the Java language and syntax. You're right, that part is easy for someone who knows any similar language. The much harder part, or at least, the part that rarely translates for shit, is knowing all the standard libraries, frameworks, best practices, etc. that have grown up around the languages.
A developer who knows C++ and not Java can be working on, let's say, a Java web project using something like Spring, JSF, and Hibernate (or whatever) and writing code in a day. What he won't be doing in a day is writing very good code, or at least, as good of code as someone who has a few years experience with those frameworks. Until he gets up to speed, which won't happen in a day, he'll make subtle mistakes or write 100 lines of difficult to understand code when 1 line properly leveraging the framework would have sufficed and been much more readable/maintainable.
There are other kinds of painful context switches as a developer, too. A good developer who tends to write custom desktop applications for businesses is going to (correctly) prioritize very different things writing his code than someone who works on embedded devices, heavy-traffic consumer-facing web applications, or video games. In each of these cases a developer new to these things will probably spend a lot of effort on things that matter very little, and not enough on things that, for the task at hand, matter a lot.
So, yes, moving from language to language isn't hard, but it isn't the whole story, either.
Eh... I don't think the GP's post was quite as unfair as you think.
Don't get me wrong, I've worked with some amazingly brilliant and hardworking Indian developers, but at the same time, it really isn't a rare thing to see an outsourcing firm sell an experienced dev team that really really isn't. Often they will have one legitimately solid guy come, meet the company, and sketch out the initial design, and then you'll never see that guy again. Some variant of that's happened with every outsourced project that I've been involved with across a decent handful of companies and industries.
It's a shame that unscrupulous outsourcing companies are giving a whole country full of developers (incidentally, I'd argue that's nationalist and not racist, but maybe that's splitting hairs) a bad name, but most managers making the decisions don't know enough to tell the difference between the two.
I realize you're intentionally picking something out there, but... yeah, if the system works, it should withstand even that successfully, whether at the legislative, executive, or judicial level. If it doesn't, then we have bigger problems than an age of consent law.
(This also holds for the district of felons problem elsewhere in the thread.)
It's part of the genius of democracy, such as it is, that it works (for some value of works relative to other systems of government) even if some people want some pretty terrible things.
I mean, if the summary is right that this dude's district is chock full of Microsoft people, isn't it basically his job to propose legislation that his constituents favor?
Now, if the rest of the state's representatives actually go along with it, you have a different story.
Why is Apple demonized for not willing to subsidize their competitors advertising?
See, I read this the opposite way.
It's easy for Apple to point at this and say: "The iPhone is so big/successful/important that the award-winning apps for other platforms inevitably end up ported to the iPhone. The iPhone gives you all these great iPhone-exclusive apps, AND all the best apps from any other platform!"
Witness the response even the vaunted Apple received to its iPad. It's being widely criticized as being an over-sized iPod Touch. Will it be a huge success? If it were from any other company than Apple, I'd say no way.
I think this is correct and pretty key. Apple is in a position right now where any consumer electronic device they create has a buzz about it and draws interest regardless of how good it is or if they've even admitted it exists yet. If a Microsoft (or a no-name company) had released a product identical to the iPhone in Apple's place, I'm sure it wouldn't be a complete bust but it wouldn't have had the same kind of frothy early adoption.
I'm curious to see how long they can keep it going.
Actually, while you are technically correct. When I look at that chart, from late 2001 (IE6 release) to late 2004(FF 1.0 release) IE6, Netscape and Opera really do look like the only well known choices for windows users. I suspect that the GP was specifically excluding Opera with the 'free browser' comment, and Netscape was really in a bad way around that time (which is why we've got firefox today). I'm not familiar with all the browsers in that time-frame, but many are not for windows, and it seems likely that those that were were no better than IE6. It looks to me like the spirit of the GPs argument is valid.
You've correctly understood what I meant; thanks for restating it more clearly.
I was doing a lot of web development work at that time; for graphical intranet-ish apps, the companies I was working for weren't interested in buying Opera, and Netscape was just terrible and really inconsistent from version to version.
So I guess what I'm really saying is, to have an app that's built to run in IE6, you don't necessarily have to have had managers who were slavishly devoted to Microsoft or stupid about standards -- for a span of years there, IE6 (for all its many flaws) was the standard because it (largely by default) was just that much better than any of the free-as-in-beer competition. Basically, you just need the app to have been written at a certain time by someone who decided to not support Netscape because it both had almost no market share and essentially required you to use different arcane hacks depending on the version of Netscape to get your page to display half-right.
Thanks! Hey, were you doing web development and did you try supporting Netscape during those early-2000s years? I have to think not, because if you did you'd realize it was so fucking awful that it doesn't count. I'm glad we ultimately got Firefox out of that mess, but let's not pretend that the later years of Netscape were something other than what they were.
Lynx also doesn't really count. I mean, it's good for what it is, but a non-graphical web browser isn't really relevant to this discussion.
Your post isn't internally consistent. First, you say that you're willing to not support multiple browsers to save time, then you say that organizations that did just that are arrogant and ignorant and deserve to suffer?
Or were you ignoring the fact that for several years IE6 was basically the only choice for a free browser? That's not the case anymore, but. . .
Re:I actually kind of miss the old combat system
on
Review: Mass Effect 2
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· Score: 1
ME1 suffered from horribly linear missions
I'm not sure what your standard of comparison for linearness is, assuming (and this may not be a safe assumption) that you like games that have a story.
Pretty much all the sidequests and unexplored planets can be done in any order you like. A bunch of the sidequests can be done a number of different ways depending on choices you make. The main plot planets can mostly be done in whatever order you like. Lots of the parts of the story planets can be done in different ways -- for example, all the different routes you can take to getting a garage pass in Noveria, or how differently things play out if you do things differently or in a different order once reaching the labs there. Try going to the Hot Labs first or last and you'll have a fairly different experience, seeing or not seeing a bunch of different sidequests, etc.
I'm about as far in -- did you get to the bit with a trial yet? That, to me, feels like a choice on the ME1 level -- especially getting an e-mail afterwards cluing me in that I hadn't been as slick about something as I thought I had.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the game requires online saves (and there's some doubt) it'll only be a few months before pirate servers exist that you can run on your own machine to store the saves.
That's sort of the point of TFA, though -- that to be effective (from the developer's perspective) DRM doesn't have to be effective forever, it just has to be effective for a while. After Assassin's Creed 2 (or whatever) has been out for a few months, most of the people who will ever buy it already have.
Did piracy decrease?
Yes.
I'd be really curious to see the data on that, since anecdotally, everyone I know who bought music ten years ago still does, and everyone I knew who downloaded music illegally ten years ago still does. In other words, rather than piracy decreasing, nothing has changed.
I don't discount the argument that the music industry's shitty policies and lack of a legal online presence at one point drove some consumers to piracy that otherwise wouldn't have been, but I really doubt that now-present reasonable legal alternatives are bringing those people back from piracy, either.
Considering that DRM never works yet always pisses off some consumers, wouldn't the sweet spot then be no DRM?
So you're saying that no one has EVER bought a game because DRM kept them from playing them without buying it? Not one time?
That's ludicrous -- just because the kind of people who post on Slashdot know how to dig up pirate torrents doesn't mean most people know how, and it certainly doesn't mean that everyone who has ever wanted to play a game knows.
Back in '96 I took a social psych class. If you're not familiar, the one sentence reductionist oversimplified explanation of the core theories of social psych is that people are influenced by the talk around them.
One of the (somewhat prophetic?) things I remember my professor talking about was the struggle between freedom of information and scholarship in China. In his view, China either had to choose to shut out internet access to the rest of the world (in which case their scholars would be significantly handicapped relative to everyone else) or allow it (in which case the Chinese people would become more influenced by the ideas of the rest of the world than they had been in the recent past.) The Great Firewall of China being something of a halfway measure that either didn't exist in those days or we didn't know about.
Along similar lines, he liked to say that a decent number of students had come from China to study at our school of Engineering, and that despite anyone's best efforts to focus them on purely scholastic matters, they would go home forever changed by having lived in a country with Steak and Shake.
It's interesting to see this tension at work still as there's talk of Google pulling out of China.
And I doubt OpenGL is not suited to fast game-style graphics rendering, because GAMES ON OSes OTHER THAN WINDOWS EXIST. See Halo on Mac, Everything Blizzard on the Mac, Quake 4, etc.
And yet you weren't able to give an example of something released less than 4-5 years or more ago. 5 years in games is an eternity.
That doesn't exactly make a strong statement on the graphical needs of modern games.
I kind of hate that the term "griefer" has been so watered down (not necessarily by the poster I'm replying to, the post just made me think of it) as to have become essentially meaningless.
Once upon a time you had to be a serious asshole to be called a griefer, not just someone who kills or steals from you when you don't want to die in a game that allows it. Worse than that is that you now could hear anyone who beats anyone else in any kind of game a griefer, even in games where it has no sensical context -- win a game of Starcraft, somebody's calling you a griefer.
Apple doesn't criticize its competitors any more or less than everyone else does. Microsoft bashes Linux and mocks Apple.
Yeah, those ubiquitous Microsoft TV commericals that are just 30 seconds of ragging on Linux without talking about their own product at all are hilarious! ... or it could be that only Apple really has commercials like that, and you're completely full of shit.
Sorry, you can argue the merits of the products and operating systems if you want, but you can't argue the last few years of advertising campaigns to anyone who has even remotely been paying attention.
Really good additions -- I knew I was forgetting something important. I'd put basic version control ahead of everything on my list but SQL.
You really didn't have to. There are an awful lot of apps built in that era that render "correctly" in IE6 and look so different in, say, Firefox that they're essentially unusable.
Correcting/updating all that formatting isn't as bad as a full rewrite of the apps, but it's a seriously non-trivial amount of work.
What I want to know is, will the managers or admins who chose solutions that locked them into an obsolete browser will be fired? Subordinating your business interests to the business interests of your vendor seems like a pretty stupid move, and one that should have consequences.
Clearly you're not a web developer or haven't been one for around ten years. There was a several year period (between when Netscape turned to utter shit and the rise of Firefox) where IE was the only reasonable choice for a graphical free (as in beer) web browser.
It doesn't take an idiot to make an app that only works in one browser when there only is one browser.
My assumption is that at some point you'd like to try to make a living as a Java developer. If that's not the case, please disregard this post.
How much do you know about databases? If the answer is nothing, you'll want to get up to speed on at least basic SQL. Pretty much every Java project you ever work on in the business world will make use of a database. 80-90% of the syntax is pretty standard from database to database, although nearly every professional Java project I've worked on used Oracle.
While not every Java project is a web project, it wouldn't hurt to have a basic understanding of HTML, CSS, and at least one web server commonly used to host JSP such as Tomcat or WebSphere. Even if these pieces don't end up being your job, the basics are helpful.
There are all kinds of popular Java frameworks meant to solve different problems. Try to get a basic sense of what's out there and what each of the leading options is good for, e.g. that something like Hibernate is used for data persistence and something like Java Server Faces is more of a presentation technology. (Or whatever's popular now; I haven't worked a Java project in a few years and I'm starting to get out of date.)
Probably you also should start to learn one or more of the common Java IDEs. Eclipse is near ubiquitous, but you may prefer one of the other options.
Good luck!
It's the closest homeowner equivalent of vendor lock-in. If I have a natural gas oven or water heater, the price of not buying natural gas is high even if natural gas is overpriced relative to electricity or other forms of energy.
I think you vastly overestimate the difficulty in learning new languages.
Learn C++. Once you've done that, you can program in C, C#, Objective-C, php, perl, Java, Python, VB and a lot of other languages after about a day of learning syntax.
Speaking as someone who did learn C++ first and has done work in most of the other languages you list since...
What you're saying is technically true, yet misses a bigger picture.
Being a good/experienced Java (or whatever) developer isn't just about being able to write Java code or knowing the Java language and syntax. You're right, that part is easy for someone who knows any similar language. The much harder part, or at least, the part that rarely translates for shit, is knowing all the standard libraries, frameworks, best practices, etc. that have grown up around the languages.
A developer who knows C++ and not Java can be working on, let's say, a Java web project using something like Spring, JSF, and Hibernate (or whatever) and writing code in a day. What he won't be doing in a day is writing very good code, or at least, as good of code as someone who has a few years experience with those frameworks. Until he gets up to speed, which won't happen in a day, he'll make subtle mistakes or write 100 lines of difficult to understand code when 1 line properly leveraging the framework would have sufficed and been much more readable/maintainable.
There are other kinds of painful context switches as a developer, too. A good developer who tends to write custom desktop applications for businesses is going to (correctly) prioritize very different things writing his code than someone who works on embedded devices, heavy-traffic consumer-facing web applications, or video games. In each of these cases a developer new to these things will probably spend a lot of effort on things that matter very little, and not enough on things that, for the task at hand, matter a lot.
So, yes, moving from language to language isn't hard, but it isn't the whole story, either.
Eh... I don't think the GP's post was quite as unfair as you think.
Don't get me wrong, I've worked with some amazingly brilliant and hardworking Indian developers, but at the same time, it really isn't a rare thing to see an outsourcing firm sell an experienced dev team that really really isn't. Often they will have one legitimately solid guy come, meet the company, and sketch out the initial design, and then you'll never see that guy again. Some variant of that's happened with every outsourced project that I've been involved with across a decent handful of companies and industries.
It's a shame that unscrupulous outsourcing companies are giving a whole country full of developers (incidentally, I'd argue that's nationalist and not racist, but maybe that's splitting hairs) a bad name, but most managers making the decisions don't know enough to tell the difference between the two.
None of this is a matter of morality
Did you read the post that that post was a reply to? Because that one said that it was a matter of morality. So, yeah, replying to that is relevant.
Context, people!
I realize you're intentionally picking something out there, but... yeah, if the system works, it should withstand even that successfully, whether at the legislative, executive, or judicial level. If it doesn't, then we have bigger problems than an age of consent law.
(This also holds for the district of felons problem elsewhere in the thread.)
It's part of the genius of democracy, such as it is, that it works (for some value of works relative to other systems of government) even if some people want some pretty terrible things.
I mean, if the summary is right that this dude's district is chock full of Microsoft people, isn't it basically his job to propose legislation that his constituents favor?
Now, if the rest of the state's representatives actually go along with it, you have a different story.
While h264 is somewhat more efficient than ogg theora, it ain't 2x more efficient.
But if it's even as efficient and you need to store it twice (once in each of the two formats)... then, yeah, that's double.
Why is Apple demonized for not willing to subsidize their competitors advertising?
See, I read this the opposite way.
It's easy for Apple to point at this and say: "The iPhone is so big/successful/important that the award-winning apps for other platforms inevitably end up ported to the iPhone. The iPhone gives you all these great iPhone-exclusive apps, AND all the best apps from any other platform!"
Witness the response even the vaunted Apple received to its iPad. It's being widely criticized as being an over-sized iPod Touch. Will it be a huge success? If it were from any other company than Apple, I'd say no way.
I think this is correct and pretty key. Apple is in a position right now where any consumer electronic device they create has a buzz about it and draws interest regardless of how good it is or if they've even admitted it exists yet. If a Microsoft (or a no-name company) had released a product identical to the iPhone in Apple's place, I'm sure it wouldn't be a complete bust but it wouldn't have had the same kind of frothy early adoption.
I'm curious to see how long they can keep it going.
Actually, while you are technically correct. When I look at that chart, from late 2001 (IE6 release) to late 2004(FF 1.0 release) IE6, Netscape and Opera really do look like the only well known choices for windows users. I suspect that the GP was specifically excluding Opera with the 'free browser' comment, and Netscape was really in a bad way around that time (which is why we've got firefox today). I'm not familiar with all the browsers in that time-frame, but many are not for windows, and it seems likely that those that were were no better than IE6. It looks to me like the spirit of the GPs argument is valid.
You've correctly understood what I meant; thanks for restating it more clearly.
I was doing a lot of web development work at that time; for graphical intranet-ish apps, the companies I was working for weren't interested in buying Opera, and Netscape was just terrible and really inconsistent from version to version.
So I guess what I'm really saying is, to have an app that's built to run in IE6, you don't necessarily have to have had managers who were slavishly devoted to Microsoft or stupid about standards -- for a span of years there, IE6 (for all its many flaws) was the standard because it (largely by default) was just that much better than any of the free-as-in-beer competition. Basically, you just need the app to have been written at a certain time by someone who decided to not support Netscape because it both had almost no market share and essentially required you to use different arcane hacks depending on the version of Netscape to get your page to display half-right.
This is very different from a top-down corporate mandate for IE only support.
Sorry, I'm not really seeing a difference.
You are the most ignorant I've seen in quite some time. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/Timeline_of_web_browsers.svg
Thanks! Hey, were you doing web development and did you try supporting Netscape during those early-2000s years? I have to think not, because if you did you'd realize it was so fucking awful that it doesn't count. I'm glad we ultimately got Firefox out of that mess, but let's not pretend that the later years of Netscape were something other than what they were.
Lynx also doesn't really count. I mean, it's good for what it is, but a non-graphical web browser isn't really relevant to this discussion.
Your post isn't internally consistent. First, you say that you're willing to not support multiple browsers to save time, then you say that organizations that did just that are arrogant and ignorant and deserve to suffer?
Or were you ignoring the fact that for several years IE6 was basically the only choice for a free browser? That's not the case anymore, but. . .
ME1 suffered from horribly linear missions
I'm not sure what your standard of comparison for linearness is, assuming (and this may not be a safe assumption) that you like games that have a story.
Pretty much all the sidequests and unexplored planets can be done in any order you like. A bunch of the sidequests can be done a number of different ways depending on choices you make. The main plot planets can mostly be done in whatever order you like. Lots of the parts of the story planets can be done in different ways -- for example, all the different routes you can take to getting a garage pass in Noveria, or how differently things play out if you do things differently or in a different order once reaching the labs there. Try going to the Hot Labs first or last and you'll have a fairly different experience, seeing or not seeing a bunch of different sidequests, etc.
I'm about as far in -- did you get to the bit with a trial yet? That, to me, feels like a choice on the ME1 level -- especially getting an e-mail afterwards cluing me in that I hadn't been as slick about something as I thought I had.