"Did I just get old? Or did slashdot really gone down the toilet? Both?"
Generational turn-over. New teens/young adults replace older people with more knowldge = slashdot turns to shit. Welcome to getting older. As you get older you get more knowledge and young people have less life experience/knowledge and hence you have cycles and peaks of greatness and mediocrity. It doesn't help that the net has become so mainstream and children of the next generation know how to use the web so you get morons of all intelligence levels everywhere now. Where as the nerds used to congregate around their favorite sites and not have to worry too much about the IQ level of the readers this is no longer true. The internet is essentially TV now.
Let's be realistic, there are easy ways to deal with "hackers" on the internet = add more capacity then any hacker can hope to DDOS you with. The others deal with patching security issues in software/making hacking expensive (i.e. make it more trouble then it is worth). The whole idea of cyber war is idiotic to begin with. If you don't want anything made public don't put it on a public network.
The fact that we have people looking for $ who want to make an "industry" out of the uninformed and they are using PR techniques to manipulate people into believing their bullshit.
Problem is cultural works should be mandated by law to go into libraries and forced into the public domain but they don't because of things like the insane extension of copyright and the concept of software licensing applied to cultural works like games.
Take all the abandonware games and all the "IP's" that didn't sell, corporations still sit on them an hoard them leading to deadweight loss (inefficiency). Whole entire tracts of culture and industry are cut off by monopolistic IP laws.
Freespace 2 has been modified and fixed up over the last 10 years, a thing which is impossible under current IP law. To say not being able to repair and update your software is "not compatible with capitalism" is just a lot of garbage. No one would accept being told what to do with their car they purchased. The fact that it is accepted in domains of software is just because the public is not informed and/or too stupid to understand the implications because it doesn't directly effect their lives and annoy them like say having to get permission from a corporation to use your car (insanity).
But somehow this insanity is allowed in software (DRM - steam).
They do but they tend to be more expensive and/or amazon.ca doesn't have as wide range of selection as the US site. I had to order books that I couldn't get elsewhere from the US in the early days and the tariffs/border tax was insane.
... a kind of "AI" that already exists, the idea that somehow a robot Übermensch is going to take over is nonsense, even the most powerful robot cannot escape the laws of nature and a sizable destructive force aimed at the robots body / hardware.
... allowed movies to be rendered inside videogames and so the game industry now uses hollywood visuals and special fx to attract audiences not the actual gameplay, there's been a shit from playing to watching cut-scenes and what amount to in game quick time events. These are popular with people who aren't very good at videogames (most gamers) hence we've seen gameplay dumbed down and removed over the last 10 years.
Gameplay is what you can do in a game, most modern games are just an inch away from bots playing for you. This video essentially sums up whats wrong with modern gaming.
If the vast majority of the people are too dumb, idiotic, brainless to contain their own governments evil then they are culpable regardless of what anyone thinks.
"Modern Flash memory chips have a much higher data density than any optical storage medium and prices have been falling for years."
Yes and how expensive was flash in the CARTRIDGE era? Really fucking expensive and noncompetitive (since we're talking the N64 era here). There was a reason we moved away from cartridges and even now we have hard-drives instead of flash because console companies are fucking cheap-ass. Don't believe it? Just look at the innards of the Wii and new Wii U. The Wii U is basically slightly slower then the PS3 and 360 in many regards (cpu and ram). The deluxe version of the Wii-U has 32GB flash, a PS3 has 500GB. The Xbox 360 has 320GB.
So still even with all that cheap flash the most they are willing to put in a console is a tiny fraction of what you can get from optical + hard disk. You can put 1 BD size game on that 32GB flash, woopdee fucking do.
"They were absolutely right. PC games have required full installation for years, and consoles even require significant portions of many games to be installed to the hard drive first."
Not quite, hard drives and CD/DVD/BD-R media allows for huge amounts of content no cartridge could ever match at the same price, cartridges died for a damn good reason. Being faster doesn't mean much when your game is 100's of times less detailed and has much less content because chips are more expensive and infinitely smaller.
I can't say I agree, Nintendo's flagship properties outside of mario and maybe kart are all suffering. Nintendo has nothing there for the core gamer anymore.
Wii U will end up being Wii redux/Gamecube redux unless they start taking seriously their decline in game quality.
"How are you going to protect against piracy if the platform is open?"
You cant' get rid of piracy, trying to say that consoles don't have piracy is a lie. Anything will be cracked if it exists. PS3 is cracked, 360 is cracked, Wii is cracked long time ago. All of the major consoles have piracy. If gabe understands one thing he knows that piracy isn't the problem, game prices and poor games are the real culprit of bad/low sales. Minecraft and Magicka, two indie games that sold gangbusters, Magicka was projected to sell 30K copies, went on to sell over a million + DLC's. And Magicka was a PC only game. You could say the same thing about dungeon defenders as well, another PC only game.
The reality is that game developers have a game quality control problem and rehash problem but they don't want to admit it.
And that is what star citizen is fundamentally about, although there will be some other elements. Space combat is at the fore-front, not an after thought.
"If one of these games, or better several, are huge hits, then the publishers will howl. Not before."
Todays games hit high sales volumes on them being MOVIES not games, the call of duty/mass effect crowd are their for the hollywood and not the gameplay, this is why they are dumbed down and stripped down to high heaven. Space sims are completely different, they are not for a mass audience of dumb shits. The reason why first person shooter and games like mass effect are so popular is because they cater to the least intelligent among human kind.
"With Eve Online and X3 available, is there real need for rebooting the space sim genre? "
They both suck compared to freespace 1 + 2, xwing and the old wing commander series. Eve has no action oriented gameplay it's fully automated and slow as molasses. X3 is just too simmy and poorly made compared to freespace. Fans want something like this, see here:
"Making the copyright term shorter would do nothing for this group, except reduce the number of times it would be brought up as an argument that does not actually speak against or in favor of their actual sentiment."
Not correct, many industries live of remakes of older works and the copyright allows them to lock up and send lawyers after fan made works. You see this especially in videogames where a videogame company has practically abandoned a property for decades and fans attempt to remake it and then get shut down. Having a 'use it or lose it' system would encourage companies to have to generate new ideas instead of relying on old ones.
We already have that with copyright law and intellectual property, the corporations have essentially defeated certain forms of culture from ever appearing (i.e. no public domain anymore). For instance one might ask why one cannot repair old software or why customers can't own games and get source-code for old (no longer sold) games for instance so fans/customers can fix up and pass them no to future generations. These things should be in a library after x many years. Things like the following:
"A subset of self-proclaimed "geeks" who spend their time guffawing away on social media, "cloud providers" and Orwellian security services want it."
MMO's, steam DRM and online only games like diablo 3 (10 million in sales) says there is definitely some sectors that are pushing their customers towards the cloud whether they want it or not and most people are too tech illiterate to care, lets face this fact.
The word "video games" just hides the fact that videogames are SIMULATIONS/Models (although simplified) of some aspect of the world. No one would be surprised since videogames are basically alternative world simulations and we're heading towards a time (eventually over the long term) where extremely complex behavior will be simulated.
We were pounded by the same propaganda and didn't succumb. I agree with some of what you are saying as problems become more detailed and technical it's hard to figure out the truth.
But when it comes to games that have parts of their code taken hostage on the other side of the net for their SINGLE PLAYER component like diablo 3, most people (gamers) simply want to play and don't want to learn anything about how the tech works or how bad they are being ripped off. Those of us who grew up on PC games through the early PC and console era have seen the horrors, newer generations just accept the status quo by default because they never grew up playing 'those ugly old games'. They don't know/care about dedicated servers/LAN
What's even worse most gamers in the know whine and buy the game anyway because they are addicted and most people are emotionally immature when they are emotionally attached to something like games, they find themselves defending insane points of view just because they have invested so much of themselves in terms of time inside a game or its characters. Now there's nothing wrong with this level of passion if you keep a level head, but modern gamers get robbed then turn around and defend the robber... that's a sign of stupidity.
The real problem is just people confuse how the are made to feel by propaganda with knowledge.
Well yes but THINK about having millions of people playing a SINGLE PLAYER GAME ONLINE, that means huge swaths of computers wouldn't have open ports/be communicating with servers at all if not for 'online drm'. Diablo 3 being a case in point, all these security issues are caused by gaming corporations wanting absolute control over everyone and everything in gaming.
The point is the whole centralization and DRM make security issues much bigger since companies tend to want control and as much information as possible about users and are careless with data. All that could be avoided if the multiplayer aspects of videogames didn't require being chained to online and all sorts of needing accounts, user info and other nonsense.
In Quake 3 you didn't need to sign up anywhere to play the damn game and you never had to give out emails or information to anybody. Not only that requiring users to be online when they play single player just creates a huge attack surface.
You believe all the propaganda they pushed to get you to accept DRM. Cheats have always been a natural part of playing games provided the player can control who you can play with. Cheaters could cheat to their hearts content in private games and not effect anyone else. Private servers/LAN allow people to choose who they play with, when and where. These centralized servers create huge security and points of failure.
Not only that but cheating in a single player game you paid for - there's nothing wrong with it because it hurts no one. You are victim of gaming PR and propaganda. You accept broken and inferior products that's not a sign of a healthy mind.
Slashdot Mirror
"Did I just get old? Or did slashdot really gone down the toilet? Both?"
Generational turn-over. New teens/young adults replace older people with more knowldge = slashdot turns to shit. Welcome to getting older. As you get older you get more knowledge and young people have less life experience/knowledge and hence you have cycles and peaks of greatness and mediocrity. It doesn't help that the net has become so mainstream and children of the next generation know how to use the web so you get morons of all intelligence levels everywhere now. Where as the nerds used to congregate around their favorite sites and not have to worry too much about the IQ level of the readers this is no longer true. The internet is essentially TV now.
... by people looking for money.
Let's be realistic, there are easy ways to deal with "hackers" on the internet = add more capacity then any hacker can hope to DDOS you with. The others deal with patching security issues in software/making hacking expensive (i.e. make it more trouble then it is worth). The whole idea of cyber war is idiotic to begin with. If you don't want anything made public don't put it on a public network.
The fact that we have people looking for $ who want to make an "industry" out of the uninformed and they are using PR techniques to manipulate people into believing their bullshit.
Problem is cultural works should be mandated by law to go into libraries and forced into the public domain but they don't because of things like the insane extension of copyright and the concept of software licensing applied to cultural works like games.
"I've read a lot of your comments on intellectual property reform and I can't help but feel that it just isn't compatible with capitalism."
This is a lot of nonsense, public domain has been effectively destroyed by intellectual property. If you don't believe it look here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
and here:
http://homepages.law.asu.edu/~dkarjala/opposingcopyrightextension/commentary/MacaulaySpeeches.html
Take all the abandonware games and all the "IP's" that didn't sell, corporations still sit on them an hoard them leading to deadweight loss (inefficiency). Whole entire tracts of culture and industry are cut off by monopolistic IP laws.
FS2 open trailer
http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/
Things like the below only occur at the rare benevolence/luck of when a dev is allowed to release source-code.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhAR8rWPluQ
Freespace 2 has been modified and fixed up over the last 10 years, a thing which is impossible under current IP law. To say not being able to repair and update your software is "not compatible with capitalism" is just a lot of garbage. No one would accept being told what to do with their car they purchased. The fact that it is accepted in domains of software is just because the public is not informed and/or too stupid to understand the implications because it doesn't directly effect their lives and annoy them like say having to get permission from a corporation to use your car (insanity).
But somehow this insanity is allowed in software (DRM - steam).
They do but they tend to be more expensive and/or amazon.ca doesn't have as wide range of selection as the US site. I had to order books that I couldn't get elsewhere from the US in the early days and the tariffs/border tax was insane.
... to lookup product information and prices. Usually when searching for any given product amazon will have reviews/info on said product.
... a kind of "AI" that already exists, the idea that somehow a robot Übermensch is going to take over is nonsense, even the most powerful robot cannot escape the laws of nature and a sizable destructive force aimed at the robots body / hardware.
... allowed movies to be rendered inside videogames and so the game industry now uses hollywood visuals and special fx to attract audiences not the actual gameplay, there's been a shit from playing to watching cut-scenes and what amount to in game quick time events. These are popular with people who aren't very good at videogames (most gamers) hence we've seen gameplay dumbed down and removed over the last 10 years.
Gameplay is what you can do in a game, most modern games are just an inch away from bots playing for you. This video essentially sums up whats wrong with modern gaming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1ZtBCpo0eU
... why don't you ask them? I'm dumbfounded how this got to front page of slashdot, seems like a "no duh" kind of question.
"You confuse people with states"
If the vast majority of the people are too dumb, idiotic, brainless to contain their own governments evil then they are culpable regardless of what anyone thinks.
"Modern Flash memory chips have a much higher data density than any optical storage medium and prices have been falling for years."
Yes and how expensive was flash in the CARTRIDGE era? Really fucking expensive and noncompetitive (since we're talking the N64 era here). There was a reason we moved away from cartridges and even now we have hard-drives instead of flash because console companies are fucking cheap-ass. Don't believe it? Just look at the innards of the Wii and new Wii U. The Wii U is basically slightly slower then the PS3 and 360 in many regards (cpu and ram). The deluxe version of the Wii-U has 32GB flash, a PS3 has 500GB. The Xbox 360 has 320GB.
So still even with all that cheap flash the most they are willing to put in a console is a tiny fraction of what you can get from optical + hard disk. You can put 1 BD size game on that 32GB flash, woopdee fucking do.
"They were absolutely right. PC games have required full installation for years, and consoles even require significant portions of many games to be installed to the hard drive first."
Not quite, hard drives and CD/DVD/BD-R media allows for huge amounts of content no cartridge could ever match at the same price, cartridges died for a damn good reason. Being faster doesn't mean much when your game is 100's of times less detailed and has much less content because chips are more expensive and infinitely smaller.
I can't say I agree, Nintendo's flagship properties outside of mario and maybe kart are all suffering. Nintendo has nothing there for the core gamer anymore.
Wii U will end up being Wii redux/Gamecube redux unless they start taking seriously their decline in game quality.
"How are you going to protect against piracy if the platform is open?"
You cant' get rid of piracy, trying to say that consoles don't have piracy is a lie. Anything will be cracked if it exists. PS3 is cracked, 360 is cracked, Wii is cracked long time ago. All of the major consoles have piracy. If gabe understands one thing he knows that piracy isn't the problem, game prices and poor games are the real culprit of bad/low sales. Minecraft and Magicka, two indie games that sold gangbusters, Magicka was projected to sell 30K copies, went on to sell over a million + DLC's. And Magicka was a PC only game. You could say the same thing about dungeon defenders as well, another PC only game.
The reality is that game developers have a game quality control problem and rehash problem but they don't want to admit it.
I know to think it's probably one of the most un-known and underplayed game in gaming :P
And that is what star citizen is fundamentally about, although there will be some other elements. Space combat is at the fore-front, not an after thought.
"If one of these games, or better several, are huge hits, then the publishers will howl. Not before."
Todays games hit high sales volumes on them being MOVIES not games, the call of duty/mass effect crowd are their for the hollywood and not the gameplay, this is why they are dumbed down and stripped down to high heaven. Space sims are completely different, they are not for a mass audience of dumb shits. The reason why first person shooter and games like mass effect are so popular is because they cater to the least intelligent among human kind.
"With Eve Online and X3 available, is there real need for rebooting the space sim genre? "
They both suck compared to freespace 1 + 2, xwing and the old wing commander series. Eve has no action oriented gameplay it's fully automated and slow as molasses. X3 is just too simmy and poorly made compared to freespace. Fans want something like this, see here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhAR8rWPluQ
"Making the copyright term shorter would do nothing for this group, except reduce the number of times it would be brought up as an argument that does not actually speak against or in favor of their actual sentiment."
Not correct, many industries live of remakes of older works and the copyright allows them to lock up and send lawyers after fan made works. You see this especially in videogames where a videogame company has practically abandoned a property for decades and fans attempt to remake it and then get shut down. Having a 'use it or lose it' system would encourage companies to have to generate new ideas instead of relying on old ones.
http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/
"tended to ensure that ideas cannot be censored."
We already have that with copyright law and intellectual property, the corporations have essentially defeated certain forms of culture from ever appearing (i.e. no public domain anymore). For instance one might ask why one cannot repair old software or why customers can't own games and get source-code for old (no longer sold) games for instance so fans/customers can fix up and pass them no to future generations. These things should be in a library after x many years. Things like the following:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhAR8rWPluQ
Are increasingly impossible with "property" laws expanding into every domain it doesn't belong in all to protect someones profits.
"A subset of self-proclaimed "geeks" who spend their time guffawing away on social media, "cloud providers" and Orwellian security services want it."
MMO's, steam DRM and online only games like diablo 3 (10 million in sales) says there is definitely some sectors that are pushing their customers towards the cloud whether they want it or not and most people are too tech illiterate to care, lets face this fact.
"and to think all this comes from video games."
The word "video games" just hides the fact that videogames are SIMULATIONS/Models (although simplified) of some aspect of the world. No one would be surprised since videogames are basically alternative world simulations and we're heading towards a time (eventually over the long term) where extremely complex behavior will be simulated.
We were pounded by the same propaganda and didn't succumb. I agree with some of what you are saying as problems become more detailed and technical it's hard to figure out the truth.
But when it comes to games that have parts of their code taken hostage on the other side of the net for their SINGLE PLAYER component like diablo 3, most people (gamers) simply want to play and don't want to learn anything about how the tech works or how bad they are being ripped off. Those of us who grew up on PC games through the early PC and console era have seen the horrors, newer generations just accept the status quo by default because they never grew up playing 'those ugly old games'. They don't know/care about dedicated servers/LAN
What's even worse most gamers in the know whine and buy the game anyway because they are addicted and most people are emotionally immature when they are emotionally attached to something like games, they find themselves defending insane points of view just because they have invested so much of themselves in terms of time inside a game or its characters. Now there's nothing wrong with this level of passion if you keep a level head, but modern gamers get robbed then turn around and defend the robber... that's a sign of stupidity.
The real problem is just people confuse how the are made to feel by propaganda with knowledge.
Well yes but THINK about having millions of people playing a SINGLE PLAYER GAME ONLINE, that means huge swaths of computers wouldn't have open ports/be communicating with servers at all if not for 'online drm'. Diablo 3 being a case in point, all these security issues are caused by gaming corporations wanting absolute control over everyone and everything in gaming.
The point is the whole centralization and DRM make security issues much bigger since companies tend to want control and as much information as possible about users and are careless with data. All that could be avoided if the multiplayer aspects of videogames didn't require being chained to online and all sorts of needing accounts, user info and other nonsense.
In Quake 3 you didn't need to sign up anywhere to play the damn game and you never had to give out emails or information to anybody. Not only that requiring users to be online when they play single player just creates a huge attack surface.
You believe all the propaganda they pushed to get you to accept DRM. Cheats have always been a natural part of playing games provided the player can control who you can play with. Cheaters could cheat to their hearts content in private games and not effect anyone else. Private servers/LAN allow people to choose who they play with, when and where. These centralized servers create huge security and points of failure.
Not only that but cheating in a single player game you paid for - there's nothing wrong with it because it hurts no one. You are victim of gaming PR and propaganda. You accept broken and inferior products that's not a sign of a healthy mind.