"If the masses want something that YOU don't, it doesn't make them dumb"
Single player lag is such an awesome feature, that didn't exist in Diablo 1 + 2 because of morons like you who don't understand technology. Only a tech illiterate would say something like what you said.
... by you know having LAN and private servers again so hacks don't take down the community. Security wouldn't be an issue for Diablo 3 if you could play the fucking game offline. But corporate greed and the dumb masses that feed the move to "online only" games this will become more frequent.
Hard drive companies have had advance replacement for a while. One of the reason I went seagate before the warranty shenanigans was for the 5 year and I've replaced quite a few drives over the years. Most people I reckon don't use their hard drives 24/7 so don't end up using the warranty before it is up, if you use your hdd's a lot warranty matters since the failure rate is much higher on drives in constant use.
It's only a hassle if you can't be bothered to use your credit card to have an advance replacement shipped to you, which is like $9. You get the replacement drive in a day or two with a box that is pre-paid to ship back the defective unit.
... around our right to own things. First it came in the form of DRM for games and whatnot and now other companies want to remove the publics right to own anything and license/monitor/datamine everything. The whole "online requirement" is all about customer datamining. The same thing Steam has been doing, it provides valve exact customer data.
"Look, I'm a socialist and all in favour of nationalising financial institutions but I bet you're not, at least if you're from the US."
I'm not a free market fuckup like most on slashdot, I'm neither a socialist. I don't subscribe to ideology. I look at the evidence and make a judgement.
"Reading through the comments on this story makes me sad. 90% of the posts are casting aspersions at Musk,"
And rightfully so, places like Paypal and visa skim (charge others) for being mere middlemen in financial transactions. The idea that they are providing 'a service' is nonsense. The reality is electronic exchange of money should be a public utility so we can get credit card companies and parasites like paypal off the economy.
Everytime we buy something with a credit card a merchant is being charged a percentage by visa/these middlemen companies. Musk isn't doing the world any favors he's a corporate parasite. Jobs just took advantage of humanities love for aesthetics and general dumbness of the population when it comes to technology.
Only someone tech illiterate and historically illiterate would write what you wrote.
"The Open source zealots themselves. Ferrociously brandishing huge sticks of self-flagulation against the very thought of their pure and holy shrine being poluted by this closed source sourcery"
If we had more zealots we would not be moving in the direction of computer feudalism where you never own the games and software you buy. While people like yourself may not like them, I hate all the mouth-breathing kids and adults that feed corporations because of their addiction to their software and then justify the removal of our rights to own and modify our own stuff. Think of all the old software that is abandonware that you can't repair, update or modify because of closed source. Tonnes of gaming is lost because of the bullshit copyright laws and software licensing crap of never owning shit you pay for.
The market simply doesn't work period, since people are too stupid to make good decisions. So you end up with the modern DRM/corporate nanny (getting permission to use software you paid for?) clusterfuck.
... your health and energy levels then anything else. A person who has no energy or health is not going to remain a good programmer as they age since it is demanding profession. Like any other jobs there are those who are just there for the paycheck and those who grasp programming as a craft and it is a part of who they are.
As someone who's seen and done a lot, the problem with young programmers is lack of perspective - just because you can put in a lot of hours or make the computer do things does not mean you know how to code. Especially when it comes to large projects. This is a huge problem in the game industry with 'rock-star' young programmers many of whom hack together awful code to get games out the door. So many projects are giant screw ups because of inexperience. Learning how to build anything non-trivial is a learning experience.
"If I always followed my rational mind, I would miss out of the greatest opportunities in my lifetime"
Nope, you just don't know enough about modern neuroscience. All of you who responded to the OP are scientifically illiterate about what rationality requires, rationality requires emotion. Link:
"The problem is that in order to do it you have to convince them that all truth is accessible via the scientific method, that the only knowledge which has value is that which can be objectively tested. If you really think about it, that's a very profound and expansive claim"
It isn't because religious knowledge is passed from one generation to the next NATURALLY, people get ideas about god from words in text and their imagination, which is totally natural and environmental at base. The very act of how they became aware of their own religion and its rules is the same way science works, they are just too unintelligent to put 2+2 together. They gather the ideas about the character of their god from TEXT and words of other human beings.
... the man who's the epitomy of taking away gamers rights and pusher of permission based software and closed platforms, dislikes Microsoft copying his business model. If anything the game industry is like the pot calling the kettle black. They and apple are the ones who first pushed the model (MMO's, free2play, steam DRM crapware).
"Their idea may be right, but their presentation lacks and just drives away people."
Most religious people aren't interested in discussion, they already believe they are right because the confuse how they feel with knowledge. You cant counter someones feelings with facts unless they are honest and intelligent enough to understand how truth works.
... lets face it, it's just trying to cause controversy where there is none for hits and ad revenue. For anyone who can think seriously, the video game industries costs grew too fast as CPU and 3D hardware power relentlessly advanced at breakneck speed between 1995 and 2007 (about the time we hit ghz speed limit) that increased the costs of developing games on all platforms. Teams of 10-30 people grew to teams of 400+ that is a huge sea change in how games are made and developed and many companies are still on the edge of failure (just look at THQ's stock price). Compare early games like Doom, Descent and wolf 3D to any modern game graphics wise and you'll begin to understand enormous costs increase in terms of time, talent and money. The time it took to create the art assets for those games vs a modern game is enormous.
The fidelity that allowed better visuals attracted a new audience to games that would not have been interested in games in previous eras: People who are essentially tenuous/non-gamers. So you have a generational divide of people who's first console or PC games were games from 2002 ish onward and have never played any games from previous generations on both console and PC.
All games on all plaforms that go for AAA visuals and audio have been suffering growing pains, many games have suffered quality reduction in gameplay while gaining story and great audio visuals. There is a massive divide: Players that want movies rendered on their computers, and players that want actual games.
These articles are just nonsense because the whole industry still is undergoing massive structural changes in order to develop procedural generation tools to drive down the costs of making high fidelity AAA games and even Nintendo is struggling to put out quality games (witness the reaction to metroid other M).
Lots of fad type successes like minecraft and angry birds were clones of games that already existed, and minecraft is more software you can just tool around in then a game. Angry birds is a rip off of tonnes of games that were done better long before it was made.
What goes into many games success is sheer chance and randomness of the aesthetic presentation, Angry birds as the typpe of game it is was done before with different art and graphics. Trying to argue that angry birds 'is the future of games' is nonsense because they aren't even the same audience. People who play angry birds a tenuous / casual gamers, or angry birds is the type of game you load up while waiting in a doctors office/line to get on a plane/etc. It's no a sign of some massive sea change in gaming.
The Wii had a plethora of bad games, it ended up being Gamecube Redux in terms of software and Nintendo's first party games have been getting lower in quality every generation outside of mario. Starfox has been butchered by miyamoto, Zelda has learned nothing from other action games in how to do dungeon crawling right. Nintendo is stuck in the past.
If I were Nintendo I would split the Zelda franchise into hardcore and casual. Zelda has not grown as other gamers have grown up. The combat systems in zelda are not deep, challenging and exciting to play with. The enemies are all stuck at a childishly easy level of difficulty. Even great games like Ocarina of time have not aged well because so many lessons have been learned since then on how to make better games.
I speak as along time fan who grew up on the NES, GENESIS and SNES. The magic of nintendo is gone, other developers do same or similar games much better. I'd say the only thing Nintendo has going is inertia, Mario, Mariokart and Pokemon.
I've been doing a lot of retro gaming recently and playing older ARCADE classics. Many modern games have forgotten that challenge and designing a videogame to be a GAME first and not a really crappy movie with next to no gameplay catering to tenuous ganers or non-gamers.
The myth that videogames have gone 'mainstream' is incorrect, graphical hardware horsepower has attracted an audience that doesn't games as videogames but cinematic experiences and that means gameplay has been getting killed over the last 10 years.
... about technology and the practices of these companies. The game industry is probably the worst at the moment we have neofeudalism arriving via STEAM and DRM where you PAY and never get to use the game without the "lords" permission. There is no end of life for MMO's for all those who paid obscene amounts of money monthly into a game they will NEVER OWN. The public domain is in the toilet (currently copyright is lifetime + 70 years, like wtf?).
Game companies behind things like World of warcraft, Everquest, etc, are pretty much scum. The uninformed masses who willingly forked out monthly payments for a game that technically be done without centralized servers is why we are here. Most people are too stupid and uninformed and corporations are remaking laws because 90% of society is too fucking stupid and ignorant of how technology works and lets be honest most don't give a shit because where the worst things are happening doesn't effect them. They can't psychologically FEEL the mass spying the internet enables. Just witness all the stupid kids who post naked pics of themselves on their phones not realizing it will be leaked to the net which enables new forms of harrassment/bullying. Or all the secrets people think they are potsing 'anonymously' online on reddit or other web forums.
If anything the internet psychologically removes peoples barriers for self expression but at the same time it doesn't trigger the psychological threat. Everyone gets up in arms about 'dangers of strangers on the streets and their kids' but people blindly express themselves openly and freely on the net.
The human mind did not evolve to deal with technology and hence society is being carried by inertia o the illiterate and uninformed.
... the real reason is you can have computers delay and analyze all incoming requests then pass the data on to the 'real computer' or you can keep your computers off the net and whitelist what it can communicate with. The only failure being the human element (who has access to your computers).
You can have high performance or tight security, pick one. The more "secure" you make a computer the more time you spend in observing and analyzing requests.
... because it goes against the laws of nature. Lets face it. There is no way you're going to be able to take away all the computers now in existence for creating and copying content. Not only that anyone who makes war on general computing will eventually leave a giant market open to competitors who's machines are not locked down. This happened with DVD players, why wouldn't it happen with computers?
Terrorism has no fixed definition in the minds of politicians and the military. Whether they call him "enemy of the state" or whatever they choose to call it doesn't matter at this point. The definition of terrorist is so broad as to be meaningless. It's a weasel word. Every time in human history good people have been painted and called all sorts of things by the powers that be. Your comment shows you are deeply unaware of history.
It's easy to paint someone or a group as bad and then put them on trumped up charges. Hell look at all the stupid people who believe the charges against assange. It proves these people are illiterate and ignorant of history and all the struggles regular human beings have made to make the world a better place.
Assange is just a modern Ellsberg, telling the world the truth about rotten corrupt organizations.
They don't need to crunch everything they only need to monitor most likely sources of communication. Think IM, email, etc. With deep packet inspection, etc. They only have to catch stuff from apps people are using. Otherwise they are making their lives more difficult trying to chew through irrelevant data.
Slashdot Mirror
"If the masses want something that YOU don't, it doesn't make them dumb"
Single player lag is such an awesome feature, that didn't exist in Diablo 1 + 2 because of morons like you who don't understand technology. Only a tech illiterate would say something like what you said.
... by you know having LAN and private servers again so hacks don't take down the community. Security wouldn't be an issue for Diablo 3 if you could play the fucking game offline. But corporate greed and the dumb masses that feed the move to "online only" games this will become more frequent.
Hard drive companies have had advance replacement for a while. One of the reason I went seagate before the warranty shenanigans was for the 5 year and I've replaced quite a few drives over the years. Most people I reckon don't use their hard drives 24/7 so don't end up using the warranty before it is up, if you use your hdd's a lot warranty matters since the failure rate is much higher on drives in constant use.
It's only a hassle if you can't be bothered to use your credit card to have an advance replacement shipped to you, which is like $9. You get the replacement drive in a day or two with a box that is pre-paid to ship back the defective unit.
... around our right to own things. First it came in the form of DRM for games and whatnot and now other companies want to remove the publics right to own anything and license/monitor/datamine everything. The whole "online requirement" is all about customer datamining. The same thing Steam has been doing, it provides valve exact customer data.
"Look, I'm a socialist and all in favour of nationalising financial institutions but I bet you're not, at least if you're from the US."
I'm not a free market fuckup like most on slashdot, I'm neither a socialist. I don't subscribe to ideology. I look at the evidence and make a judgement.
"Reading through the comments on this story makes me sad. 90% of the posts are casting aspersions at Musk,"
And rightfully so, places like Paypal and visa skim (charge others) for being mere middlemen in financial transactions. The idea that they are providing 'a service' is nonsense. The reality is electronic exchange of money should be a public utility so we can get credit card companies and parasites like paypal off the economy.
Everytime we buy something with a credit card a merchant is being charged a percentage by visa/these middlemen companies. Musk isn't doing the world any favors he's a corporate parasite. Jobs just took advantage of humanities love for aesthetics and general dumbness of the population when it comes to technology.
Only someone tech illiterate and historically illiterate would write what you wrote.
"The Open source zealots themselves. Ferrociously brandishing huge sticks of self-flagulation against the very thought of their pure and holy shrine being poluted by this closed source sourcery"
If we had more zealots we would not be moving in the direction of computer feudalism where you never own the games and software you buy. While people like yourself may not like them, I hate all the mouth-breathing kids and adults that feed corporations because of their addiction to their software and then justify the removal of our rights to own and modify our own stuff. Think of all the old software that is abandonware that you can't repair, update or modify because of closed source. Tonnes of gaming is lost because of the bullshit copyright laws and software licensing crap of never owning shit you pay for.
The market simply doesn't work period, since people are too stupid to make good decisions. So you end up with the modern DRM/corporate nanny (getting permission to use software you paid for?) clusterfuck.
"Sure, which is why we have the state to keep monopolies in check, and crack down on anti-competitive business practices."
II'm not sure what is more tragic, that you believe this or I'm replying to someone that believes this.
... your health and energy levels then anything else. A person who has no energy or health is not going to remain a good programmer as they age since it is demanding profession. Like any other jobs there are those who are just there for the paycheck and those who grasp programming as a craft and it is a part of who they are.
As someone who's seen and done a lot, the problem with young programmers is lack of perspective - just because you can put in a lot of hours or make the computer do things does not mean you know how to code. Especially when it comes to large projects. This is a huge problem in the game industry with 'rock-star' young programmers many of whom hack together awful code to get games out the door. So many projects are giant screw ups because of inexperience. Learning how to build anything non-trivial is a learning experience.
Like always potential + hard work = rewards.
"Why not? Scale brings efficiency"
And also monopoly and anti-competitiveness. In the real world things aren't so rosy.
"I wouldn't say coding is hard. However, it does require a certain level of mental discipline and the ability to organise one's thoughts."
Most thought is unconscious. See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
"If I always followed my rational mind, I would miss out of the greatest opportunities in my lifetime"
Nope, you just don't know enough about modern neuroscience. All of you who responded to the OP are scientifically illiterate about what rationality requires, rationality requires emotion. Link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYmi0DLzBdQ
"The problem is that in order to do it you have to convince them that all truth is accessible via the scientific method, that the only knowledge which has value is that which can be objectively tested. If you really think about it, that's a very profound and expansive claim"
It isn't because religious knowledge is passed from one generation to the next NATURALLY, people get ideas about god from words in text and their imagination, which is totally natural and environmental at base. The very act of how they became aware of their own religion and its rules is the same way science works, they are just too unintelligent to put 2+2 together. They gather the ideas about the character of their god from TEXT and words of other human beings.
... the man who's the epitomy of taking away gamers rights and pusher of permission based software and closed platforms, dislikes Microsoft copying his business model. If anything the game industry is like the pot calling the kettle black. They and apple are the ones who first pushed the model (MMO's, free2play, steam DRM crapware).
"Their idea may be right, but their presentation lacks and just drives away people."
Most religious people aren't interested in discussion, they already believe they are right because the confuse how they feel with knowledge. You cant counter someones feelings with facts unless they are honest and intelligent enough to understand how truth works.
... lets face it, it's just trying to cause controversy where there is none for hits and ad revenue. For anyone who can think seriously, the video game industries costs grew too fast as CPU and 3D hardware power relentlessly advanced at breakneck speed between 1995 and 2007 (about the time we hit ghz speed limit) that increased the costs of developing games on all platforms. Teams of 10-30 people grew to teams of 400+ that is a huge sea change in how games are made and developed and many companies are still on the edge of failure (just look at THQ's stock price). Compare early games like Doom, Descent and wolf 3D to any modern game graphics wise and you'll begin to understand enormous costs increase in terms of time, talent and money. The time it took to create the art assets for those games vs a modern game is enormous.
The fidelity that allowed better visuals attracted a new audience to games that would not have been interested in games in previous eras: People who are essentially tenuous/non-gamers. So you have a generational divide of people who's first console or PC games were games from 2002 ish onward and have never played any games from previous generations on both console and PC.
All games on all plaforms that go for AAA visuals and audio have been suffering growing pains, many games have suffered quality reduction in gameplay while gaining story and great audio visuals. There is a massive divide: Players that want movies rendered on their computers, and players that want actual games.
These articles are just nonsense because the whole industry still is undergoing massive structural changes in order to develop procedural generation tools to drive down the costs of making high fidelity AAA games and even Nintendo is struggling to put out quality games (witness the reaction to metroid other M).
Lots of fad type successes like minecraft and angry birds were clones of games that already existed, and minecraft is more software you can just tool around in then a game. Angry birds is a rip off of tonnes of games that were done better long before it was made.
What goes into many games success is sheer chance and randomness of the aesthetic presentation, Angry birds as the typpe of game it is was done before with different art and graphics. Trying to argue that angry birds 'is the future of games' is nonsense because they aren't even the same audience. People who play angry birds a tenuous / casual gamers, or angry birds is the type of game you load up while waiting in a doctors office/line to get on a plane/etc. It's no a sign of some massive sea change in gaming.
... expensive internet, and other industries where we get robbed like for instance SHOES and clothing. Do nikes really costs $100+ dollars to make?
"Why aren't people more hyped about the Wii U?"
The Wii had a plethora of bad games, it ended up being Gamecube Redux in terms of software and Nintendo's first party games have been getting lower in quality every generation outside of mario. Starfox has been butchered by miyamoto, Zelda has learned nothing from other action games in how to do dungeon crawling right. Nintendo is stuck in the past.
If I were Nintendo I would split the Zelda franchise into hardcore and casual. Zelda has not grown as other gamers have grown up. The combat systems in zelda are not deep, challenging and exciting to play with. The enemies are all stuck at a childishly easy level of difficulty. Even great games like Ocarina of time have not aged well because so many lessons have been learned since then on how to make better games.
I speak as along time fan who grew up on the NES, GENESIS and SNES. The magic of nintendo is gone, other developers do same or similar games much better. I'd say the only thing Nintendo has going is inertia, Mario, Mariokart and Pokemon.
I've been doing a lot of retro gaming recently and playing older ARCADE classics. Many modern games have forgotten that challenge and designing a videogame to be a GAME first and not a really crappy movie with next to no gameplay catering to tenuous ganers or non-gamers.
The myth that videogames have gone 'mainstream' is incorrect, graphical hardware horsepower has attracted an audience that doesn't games as videogames but cinematic experiences and that means gameplay has been getting killed over the last 10 years.
... about technology and the practices of these companies. The game industry is probably the worst at the moment we have neofeudalism arriving via STEAM and DRM where you PAY and never get to use the game without the "lords" permission. There is no end of life for MMO's for all those who paid obscene amounts of money monthly into a game they will NEVER OWN. The public domain is in the toilet (currently copyright is lifetime + 70 years, like wtf?).
Game companies behind things like World of warcraft, Everquest, etc, are pretty much scum. The uninformed masses who willingly forked out monthly payments for a game that technically be done without centralized servers is why we are here. Most people are too stupid and uninformed and corporations are remaking laws because 90% of society is too fucking stupid and ignorant of how technology works and lets be honest most don't give a shit because where the worst things are happening doesn't effect them. They can't psychologically FEEL the mass spying the internet enables. Just witness all the stupid kids who post naked pics of themselves on their phones not realizing it will be leaked to the net which enables new forms of harrassment/bullying. Or all the secrets people think they are potsing 'anonymously' online on reddit or other web forums.
If anything the internet psychologically removes peoples barriers for self expression but at the same time it doesn't trigger the psychological threat. Everyone gets up in arms about 'dangers of strangers on the streets and their kids' but people blindly express themselves openly and freely on the net.
The human mind did not evolve to deal with technology and hence society is being carried by inertia o the illiterate and uninformed.
... the real reason is you can have computers delay and analyze all incoming requests then pass the data on to the 'real computer' or you can keep your computers off the net and whitelist what it can communicate with. The only failure being the human element (who has access to your computers).
You can have high performance or tight security, pick one. The more "secure" you make a computer the more time you spend in observing and analyzing requests.
""The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.""
Except when it doesn't. The poster above you is correct, see below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYNVNhB-m0o
... because it goes against the laws of nature. Lets face it. There is no way you're going to be able to take away all the computers now in existence for creating and copying content. Not only that anyone who makes war on general computing will eventually leave a giant market open to competitors who's machines are not locked down. This happened with DVD players, why wouldn't it happen with computers?
"They didn't say Assange was a terrorist."
Terrorism has no fixed definition in the minds of politicians and the military. Whether they call him "enemy of the state" or whatever they choose to call it doesn't matter at this point. The definition of terrorist is so broad as to be meaningless. It's a weasel word. Every time in human history good people have been painted and called all sorts of things by the powers that be. Your comment shows you are deeply unaware of history.
It's easy to paint someone or a group as bad and then put them on trumped up charges. Hell look at all the stupid people who believe the charges against assange. It proves these people are illiterate and ignorant of history and all the struggles regular human beings have made to make the world a better place.
Assange is just a modern Ellsberg, telling the world the truth about rotten corrupt organizations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
"No legal training? No problem!"
It doesn't require a law degree to understand when bad laws are passed by lobbyists.
"How are they going to crunch all those data?"
They don't need to crunch everything they only need to monitor most likely sources of communication. Think IM, email, etc. With deep packet inspection, etc. They only have to catch stuff from apps people are using. Otherwise they are making their lives more difficult trying to chew through irrelevant data.