No doubt about that I don't disagree but PC's were an open platform and they are being closed and suffocated by emulating what other trend setters are doing.
The great thing about the PC was being able to mod the games with new textures, levels, models, etc enhancing the longevity of the game. I doubt you'd want to see Counterstrike and DOTA (defense of the ancients) be killed because companies have dreamed up all sorts of bullshitery to try to lock down their "IP" and all sorts of other nonsense.
Let's not forget lots of great things happened on the PC because of it's open-ness that couldn't happen anywhere else and we have a right to be pissed about it being taken away.
... but I agree with stallman. Jobs figured out that you can make aesthetically pleasing stuff and make a lot of profit off simplifying hardware design for everyday people BUT this has a negative effect on those who actually use computers and computing devices as something beyond a toaster or glorified television. Jobs just turned computing devices into consumer items. The downside is that his companies success with walled gardens is giving a lot of other companies and developers the same idea of creating walled gardens where you never own anything, can't modify it, etc. A kind of kind of feudalistic computing.
I've watched gaming go downhill over the last 10 years with the rise shit like world of warcraft showing everyone the path to walled garden land because there are enough stupid people who don't give a shit about gaming that will just take it up the ass because they aren't passionate about games. So we get things like Starcraft 2 chained to online, no LAN, we get permanent online DRM being pushed and crap like onlive. At this point I really want to burn down the software industry. I remember a time when blizzard wasn't as evil as it is today and you actually were treated like a customer rather then a magpie with a wallet.
In the same way, people who work in computing, and do computing and are passionate about computing need freedom from corporate tyranny to innovate. Each generation of tinkering kids becomes the next set of developers/entrepreneurs/innovators. To lock everything behind a walled garden just creates a big mess and ensures solutions are suffocated or co-opted for someones personal greed with a net negative for humanity as a whole.
All great innovations are built upon mountains of others that came before them, locking them down is just a surefire way to suffocate progress.
"Plus...ummm, doesn't "search" work on folders too? Ooops!"
Not everyone wants their email in the cloud. If you have a LOT of email and are downloading email to your desktop folders definitely make sense since many kinds of email are already sorted by topic or sender. Especially if you are mailing lists you can put those emails right into a folder so if you want to say search "programming discussion list" you can search JUST those emails. So you can have the search function ONLY search a limited number of emails instead of ALL emails.
By sorting them into folders, if your emails grow huge over time then search begins to slow down. So folders prevent having search having to go through ALL emails. Which if you have a lot of email takes quite a bit of time on a desktop.
The downside about things like gmail / cloud is that you're email is available may be available to third parties that you don't like without your knowledge.
... putting emails in folders means you restrict the search to just emails in those folders, if you get a lot of email folders definitely make sense. Especially if you are on a mailing list.
" the guy was deluded during the dot-boom of the 90's, thinking that computers would magically make millions of workers redundant."
Clearly you've not read the book. I love this right wing talking point BS, we can identify trends that have already had an impact. One can look at stagnant wages for the last 30 years and increasing unemployment trend line if you've actually LOOKED at the data, which obviously you haven't since you're so tied up in your ideology to you know, look at evidence.
" suspicion that these students nearing adulthood actually have any rights while ensuring the parents have no actual responsibility for their child's eventual success or failure."
The issues are way more complex then you're painting it. The whole idea that a childs scholastic failure is the result of the parents has a whole tonne of social assumptions and expectations built into it as well as ideology, socioeconomic model. Not to mention the general douchebaggish nature of the human race generally speaking.
Let us not forget that for most of human history most human beings were intelligent enough to survive on planet earth, it takes a capitalist society though to take that away from them to serve a wage caste society in which they have to sell their labor and try to increase the value of their labor through school to survive because - they don't have any say in the system. With scientific and technological advancements changing the labor landscape and reducing the value of human labor we have an abundant surplus population with no model of how to deal with them all. So parents and people like yourself keep chugging along with the societies dominant ideology as if nothing fundamental had changed about the nature of human work with regards to scientific and technological advancement. Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with them regardless of your political stripe.
There are huge changes the world is going through right now economically and socially and a good portion of people are still stuck in old habits of thinking and looking at the world according to how they were raised.
" into a single number or statistic that lets people know if something is wrong."
You don't need numbers for memory leaks, applications usually slow down/crash because they are poorly programmed. Firefox's memory leaks become definitely obvious just by observing how the program slows down over time. Indeed interpreting memory data is difficult but that doesn't mean there aren't obvious give-aways from the user perspective of badly used resources or resources that become hijacked, especially when dealing with browsers/websites and flash over the past 10 years.
"Expecting individuals to make their game choices based on long-term considerations of consumer rights? I'm skeptical that it could ever work on it's own, it's like trying to herd cats."
Oh I agree but that is the whole point - if people weren't so dumb and clueless we wouldn't be speaking about this. This is the whole problem with the free market to begin with - human beings don't do what's in their best interest or make the best decisions.
A free market fundamentalist type would tell you that the 'people' have chosen this model and they are free not to participate (i.e. punish game companies) but we all know in the real world this never happens. The only other solution would be political/law and that's just as difficult as trying to herd gamers to boycott/defend their rights.
" and the DRM & DLC is a necessary evil to prevent the games from being hacked or all becoming console/ipad-only to avoid the swiss-cheese security model of the desktop computer."
There's this thing, it's called dedicated servers. This is exactly what I hate about modern gamers - they are so clueless about gaming history. Call of duty didn't avoid cheating with their unified online service, neither did battle.net, try again. Many of your arguments are tenuous at best when concerning DLC and DRM.
Not only that most customers are clueless morons. In the game industry they support - MMO's, DRM, and DLC. I remember when everyone was pissed that game companies had the nerve to charge you full price for an MMO while it was an online game and they charge you monthly. The fact that most people are so clueless and take it up the arse has pushed the game industry in hugely negative direction with games being chained to online and DLC'd to death.
... a trusted users system. I know people on slashdot that are intelligent and have reasonable judgement we really need these people to float to the top and given more weight. Trying to test out new systems to have these people float to the top would be nice. Politics usually seems to be slashdots worse subject - you get all sorts of nonsense in posts that are mere repeats of mainstream media talking points that are often false and misleading.
Which is appropriate given how corporations have stolen the public domain and introduced all sorts of crapware DRM into software people pay for. Unfortunate that you chose this example - this is an example of slashdot working.
See below links for abundant evidence of abuse of copyright law.
Abolishing them. A new model to make these things will be found, what we really need is innovation in business models. Therefore it's best just to get rid of the system as it is today and let the market sort it out. Things like this should be impossible.
If kids want to remake an old game they love from scratch why should we allow this kind of cult of property sillyness where you have to get permission to do what you want even though it is all your own work just because it copies an IDEA?
Right now the legal system is clogged up with bullshit we have a massive legal bureaucracy that is a huge drag on society.
Your post is fantastic in how it displays your own ignorance. Anyone who is in the know has known for a long time that Republicans and democrats are owned by corporate money. Not only that but this just displays corporate corruption, something which the left has been against for a long long time. Someone can call themselves anything but that doesn't mean they are what they say they are.
"unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism)"
Sorry but anti-corporatism is hardly UNSCIENTIFIC. With all the military pork and the endless extension of copyright you pro-market. pro-coporate fuckups are some of the dumbest shits on the planet. Nice way to characterize the left as anti-science with your right wing talking points. If anything the left is vastly much more pro-science then the right. This whole idea that you can easily sweep anti-science under the "left" political rubric is a bunch of bullshit. Vaccine people are just insane/crazy, I have never ever associated anti-vaccine people with the left or liberals. This is mere right-wing propaganda to try to demonize the left as "just as bad in their own way" the stupid fox news 'fair and balanced' bullshit. Human beings have always wanted to deny what they feel is inconvenient and it has little to do with political stripe and everything to do with being STUPID. I know people on the right that are intelligent and I know people on the left that are intelligent, but trying to make a political statement out of human stupidity as an act of insight is rather ludicrous.
Most of your criticism of the left/liberal ideology is based on right wing talking points and media propaganda and not fact.
There are numerous mother fucking good reasons anti-corporatism exists... here are some just to name a few.
"This basically states that if you are understanding science properly, you are understanding God's works properly."
This is circular reasoning not based on any kind of evidence at all. There's tonnes wrong with what you just said because it's tied into the source of Aquinas beliefs which can be measured and tested for veracity.
Let's just remember that the word "scientist" is a title only, like the word "firefighter" this does not mean anything in particular about the person in general.
Most people develop compartmentalization skills because most people in america were raised by religious parents or grandparents at some point in the past. It's easier to just paper over logical fallacies and inaccuracies for the sake of social convenience. Since most people belief (even if falsely) that 'social harmony' comes before rational acceptance of truth.
It wasn't the sequels that did them in, it was that each game in the series progressively was getting worse because game development kept getting more expensive and difficult (shinier graphics = more time and money). So final fantasy went from being decent games developers could spend time to polish (last one being roughly FF7, but even FF7 you can notice declines in quality from earlier games) to stories wrapped in garbage gameplay.
Japanese developers have not dealt with the move to high definition games. Their teams were good and experienced at making 2D JRPG's they never made a good transition to 3D very well at all. This isn't something that is just about final fantasy, every single JRPG suffered as developers moved to 3D. Few games did it correctly and those that did do it correctly were lost in the shuffle - Rogue galaxy is one of those games that is actually one of the last best JRPG's I've played.
"Also, neither Magicka nor Torchlight were very good RPGs, no idea why you chose those as examples"
Yes they are good games because 1) They focus on the fun 2) They get that RPG's require a good combat and/or loot system 3) Story and cinematics aren't relied upon for critical acclaim (which most western RPG's do rely on).
The great thing about diablo 1 + 2 was the challenging monsters and the phat loot. All western RPG's have done is bring hollywood to games. Mass effect minus the audio/video and story - the actual game elements (where you participate and have to shoot, not just watch in game cutscenes) is not innovative or creative at all.
So when you say "they have innovated" you're confusing everyone lauds critical acclaim on them for their CINEMATICS not their actual gameplay, they are reviewing the game as a movie - not a game. Huge difference.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt about that I don't disagree but PC's were an open platform and they are being closed and suffocated by emulating what other trend setters are doing.
The great thing about the PC was being able to mod the games with new textures, levels, models, etc enhancing the longevity of the game. I doubt you'd want to see Counterstrike and DOTA (defense of the ancients) be killed because companies have dreamed up all sorts of bullshitery to try to lock down their "IP" and all sorts of other nonsense.
Let's not forget lots of great things happened on the PC because of it's open-ness that couldn't happen anywhere else and we have a right to be pissed about it being taken away.
... but I agree with stallman. Jobs figured out that you can make aesthetically pleasing stuff and make a lot of profit off simplifying hardware design for everyday people BUT this has a negative effect on those who actually use computers and computing devices as something beyond a toaster or glorified television. Jobs just turned computing devices into consumer items. The downside is that his companies success with walled gardens is giving a lot of other companies and developers the same idea of creating walled gardens where you never own anything, can't modify it, etc. A kind of kind of feudalistic computing.
I've watched gaming go downhill over the last 10 years with the rise shit like world of warcraft showing everyone the path to walled garden land because there are enough stupid people who don't give a shit about gaming that will just take it up the ass because they aren't passionate about games. So we get things like Starcraft 2 chained to online, no LAN, we get permanent online DRM being pushed and crap like onlive. At this point I really want to burn down the software industry. I remember a time when blizzard wasn't as evil as it is today and you actually were treated like a customer rather then a magpie with a wallet.
In the same way, people who work in computing, and do computing and are passionate about computing need freedom from corporate tyranny to innovate. Each generation of tinkering kids becomes the next set of developers/entrepreneurs/innovators. To lock everything behind a walled garden just creates a big mess and ensures solutions are suffocated or co-opted for someones personal greed with a net negative for humanity as a whole.
All great innovations are built upon mountains of others that came before them, locking them down is just a surefire way to suffocate progress.
"Plus...ummm, doesn't "search" work on folders too? Ooops!"
Not everyone wants their email in the cloud. If you have a LOT of email and are downloading email to your desktop folders definitely make sense since many kinds of email are already sorted by topic or sender. Especially if you are mailing lists you can put those emails right into a folder so if you want to say search "programming discussion list" you can search JUST those emails. So you can have the search function ONLY search a limited number of emails instead of ALL emails.
By sorting them into folders, if your emails grow huge over time then search begins to slow down. So folders prevent having search having to go through ALL emails. Which if you have a lot of email takes quite a bit of time on a desktop.
The downside about things like gmail / cloud is that you're email is available may be available to third parties that you don't like without your knowledge.
... putting emails in folders means you restrict the search to just emails in those folders, if you get a lot of email folders definitely make sense. Especially if you are on a mailing list.
You should read this:
http://dwightmurphey-collectedwritings.info/SME-TofC-2.htm
I'm sorry but you haven't looked at the evidence. This is just more right wing bullshit your spouting.
http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html
Look at the numbers, technological innovation has created even sharper inequalities.
" the guy was deluded during the dot-boom of the 90's, thinking that computers would magically make millions of workers redundant."
Clearly you've not read the book. I love this right wing talking point BS, we can identify trends that have already had an impact. One can look at stagnant wages for the last 30 years and increasing unemployment trend line if you've actually LOOKED at the data, which obviously you haven't since you're so tied up in your ideology to you know, look at evidence.
" suspicion that these students nearing adulthood actually have any rights while ensuring the parents have no actual responsibility for their child's eventual success or failure."
The issues are way more complex then you're painting it. The whole idea that a childs scholastic failure is the result of the parents has a whole tonne of social assumptions and expectations built into it as well as ideology, socioeconomic model. Not to mention the general douchebaggish nature of the human race generally speaking.
Let us not forget that for most of human history most human beings were intelligent enough to survive on planet earth, it takes a capitalist society though to take that away from them to serve a wage caste society in which they have to sell their labor and try to increase the value of their labor through school to survive because - they don't have any say in the system. With scientific and technological advancements changing the labor landscape and reducing the value of human labor we have an abundant surplus population with no model of how to deal with them all. So parents and people like yourself keep chugging along with the societies dominant ideology as if nothing fundamental had changed about the nature of human work with regards to scientific and technological advancement. Sooner or later we're going to have to deal with them regardless of your political stripe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_Work
There are huge changes the world is going through right now economically and socially and a good portion of people are still stuck in old habits of thinking and looking at the world according to how they were raised.
" into a single number or statistic that lets people know if something is wrong."
You don't need numbers for memory leaks, applications usually slow down/crash because they are poorly programmed. Firefox's memory leaks become definitely obvious just by observing how the program slows down over time. Indeed interpreting memory data is difficult but that doesn't mean there aren't obvious give-aways from the user perspective of badly used resources or resources that become hijacked, especially when dealing with browsers/websites and flash over the past 10 years.
"Expecting individuals to make their game choices based on long-term considerations of consumer rights? I'm skeptical that it could ever work on it's own, it's like trying to herd cats."
Oh I agree but that is the whole point - if people weren't so dumb and clueless we wouldn't be speaking about this. This is the whole problem with the free market to begin with - human beings don't do what's in their best interest or make the best decisions.
A free market fundamentalist type would tell you that the 'people' have chosen this model and they are free not to participate (i.e. punish game companies) but we all know in the real world this never happens. The only other solution would be political/law and that's just as difficult as trying to herd gamers to boycott/defend their rights.
" and the DRM & DLC is a necessary evil to prevent the games from being hacked or all becoming console/ipad-only to avoid the swiss-cheese security model of the desktop computer."
There's this thing, it's called dedicated servers. This is exactly what I hate about modern gamers - they are so clueless about gaming history. Call of duty didn't avoid cheating with their unified online service, neither did battle.net, try again. Many of your arguments are tenuous at best when concerning DLC and DRM.
Sorry sir, doing my best.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymzh7YAlZng#t=0m42s
Not only that most customers are clueless morons. In the game industry they support - MMO's, DRM, and DLC. I remember when everyone was pissed that game companies had the nerve to charge you full price for an MMO while it was an online game and they charge you monthly. The fact that most people are so clueless and take it up the arse has pushed the game industry in hugely negative direction with games being chained to online and DLC'd to death.
... a trusted users system. I know people on slashdot that are intelligent and have reasonable judgement we really need these people to float to the top and given more weight. Trying to test out new systems to have these people float to the top would be nice. Politics usually seems to be slashdots worse subject - you get all sorts of nonsense in posts that are mere repeats of mainstream media talking points that are often false and misleading.
"anything anti-piracy will get modded to -1"
Which is appropriate given how corporations have stolen the public domain and introduced all sorts of crapware DRM into software people pay for. Unfortunate that you chose this example - this is an example of slashdot working.
See below links for abundant evidence of abuse of copyright law.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
"So what is the solution?"
Abolishing them. A new model to make these things will be found, what we really need is innovation in business models. Therefore it's best just to get rid of the system as it is today and let the market sort it out. Things like this should be impossible.
http://www.opcoder.com/projects/chrono/
If kids want to remake an old game they love from scratch why should we allow this kind of cult of property sillyness where you have to get permission to do what you want even though it is all your own work just because it copies an IDEA?
Right now the legal system is clogged up with bullshit we have a massive legal bureaucracy that is a huge drag on society.
Your post is fantastic in how it displays your own ignorance. Anyone who is in the know has known for a long time that Republicans and democrats are owned by corporate money. Not only that but this just displays corporate corruption, something which the left has been against for a long long time. Someone can call themselves anything but that doesn't mean they are what they say they are.
"unscientific scaremongering ("Frankenfoods" and anti-corporatism)"
Sorry but anti-corporatism is hardly UNSCIENTIFIC. With all the military pork and the endless extension of copyright you pro-market. pro-coporate fuckups are some of the dumbest shits on the planet. Nice way to characterize the left as anti-science with your right wing talking points. If anything the left is vastly much more pro-science then the right. This whole idea that you can easily sweep anti-science under the "left" political rubric is a bunch of bullshit. Vaccine people are just insane/crazy, I have never ever associated anti-vaccine people with the left or liberals. This is mere right-wing propaganda to try to demonize the left as "just as bad in their own way" the stupid fox news 'fair and balanced' bullshit. Human beings have always wanted to deny what they feel is inconvenient and it has little to do with political stripe and everything to do with being STUPID. I know people on the right that are intelligent and I know people on the left that are intelligent, but trying to make a political statement out of human stupidity as an act of insight is rather ludicrous.
Most of your criticism of the left/liberal ideology is based on right wing talking points and media propaganda and not fact.
There are numerous mother fucking good reasons anti-corporatism exists... here are some just to name a few.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
The courts have been bought and sold for a long time. As long as the rich and corporations can buy laws citizens are not obligated to obey them.
"It has never and will never be that easy, Steve. Your optimism is appreciated though."
You should all watch the following:
http://bit.ly/dYaWUc
"If you're less than 25 years old, Chrome is cool. Firefox is not."
The big thing about chrome is
1) simplicity
2) Speed
3) easy to 'google' your bookmarks.
4) has a good enough adblock
That is enough for most people who just do casual browsing.
"This basically states that if you are understanding science properly, you are understanding God's works properly."
This is circular reasoning not based on any kind of evidence at all. There's tonnes wrong with what you just said because it's tied into the source of Aquinas beliefs which can be measured and tested for veracity.
Let's just remember that the word "scientist" is a title only, like the word "firefighter" this does not mean anything in particular about the person in general.
Most people develop compartmentalization skills because most people in america were raised by religious parents or grandparents at some point in the past. It's easier to just paper over logical fallacies and inaccuracies for the sake of social convenience. Since most people belief (even if falsely) that 'social harmony' comes before rational acceptance of truth.
"Yeah I'm sure it wasn't 13+ sequels."
It wasn't the sequels that did them in, it was that each game in the series progressively was getting worse because game development kept getting more expensive and difficult (shinier graphics = more time and money). So final fantasy went from being decent games developers could spend time to polish (last one being roughly FF7, but even FF7 you can notice declines in quality from earlier games) to stories wrapped in garbage gameplay.
Japanese developers have not dealt with the move to high definition games. Their teams were good and experienced at making 2D JRPG's they never made a good transition to 3D very well at all. This isn't something that is just about final fantasy, every single JRPG suffered as developers moved to 3D. Few games did it correctly and those that did do it correctly were lost in the shuffle - Rogue galaxy is one of those games that is actually one of the last best JRPG's I've played.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_Galaxy
"Also, neither Magicka nor Torchlight were very good RPGs, no idea why you chose those as examples"
Yes they are good games because
1) They focus on the fun
2) They get that RPG's require a good combat and/or loot system
3) Story and cinematics aren't relied upon for critical acclaim (which most western RPG's do rely on).
The great thing about diablo 1 + 2 was the challenging monsters and the phat loot. All western RPG's have done is bring hollywood to games. Mass effect minus the audio/video and story - the actual game elements (where you participate and have to shoot, not just watch in game cutscenes) is not innovative or creative at all.
So when you say "they have innovated" you're confusing everyone lauds critical acclaim on them for their CINEMATICS not their actual gameplay, they are reviewing the game as a movie - not a game. Huge difference.