A lot of people are skeptical about the security risks of this. The general claim is that if it's up on the web, a) it can be found anyhow, and b) you should know that it's secure (or insecure).
True, however here is another way of looking at it.
Lets say I buy a brand of lock for my house, which is later to be defective. Perhaps I don't know about this defect, or I don't have the time or expertise to fix it quickly.
Then someone develops a technology that alerts burglars to which houses have that specific brand of lock.
Wouldn't that be cause for some concern?
I think code-searching for vulnerabilities is mildly concerning, even far beyond the usual methods that exist without code search. Note I said mildly. This isn't going to cause the catastrophic collapse of the Internet. It's just one more thing for people to be aware of and (hopefully) take action on.
If you want to target the DVR audience, do what the "Daily Show" did - Rob Cordry had a hilarious skit that included a list of all the people he hates. The list zoomed by so fast that only DVR-capable viewers could watch it. The list of people he hates included an email address: listpausers@yahoo.com - so we emailed it, and got this in reply.
Totally awesome.
In May of this year, GE's "ecomagination" campaign had a very clever TV ad that included a spoof of the commercial itself. The neat thing was that this segment, embedded into the ad itself, was compressed into 1 second of footage that could only be watched by stepping through it frame-by-frame via a DVR.
The "mini-ad" began with a red stage curtain drawn back to reveal the title, "1 Second Theatre", and then featured a little slideshow featuring short (and very funny) biographies of all the animal characters from the "main ad".
Apparently, the show "Lost" has done similar things to augment the show in some ways, but I haven't confirmed this.
These examples are hilarious, innovative, and totally directed to DVR users. It made us pause and watch the content, even when we were used to zooming past the usual mindless, mass-targeted crap that television ads favoured back in the 20th century.
The whole "stretching into a 30 second slide" is totally regressive and proves the advertiser is totally clued out of this fangle "new media" thang. Oh, and will piss off more modern television viewers, not because it's a pain to hit the 30-second advance, but because it's an obvious and badly implemented ploy to get me to see more mindless, mass-targeted crap.
Good point. And also the games that are not on this list. Millions of people playing casual games or web-based casual. Also there are plenty of games overseas that never see the light of day in North America, yet are vastly more popular in terms of subscribership than many of the games listed there.
I call BIG BS on this one. I do not think there is nearly as much combination testing as you think.
Ouch.:-)
Well unfortunately for us, it's pretty true in any type of consumer-level software development. Audio, Processor, Network, Video, OS (patch-level, revision and hotfix), Libraries, Browser, Network, Drivers... your game may touch one or more of these types of components. If you're lucky, you'll come out relatively unscathed. The companies that briskly test on few platforms more often than not get caught and spend even more money in an expensive patch/validation process. One example is the Readme for Age of Empires. Look at all those videocards that they don't support!
Which pretty much sums up the console versus PC debate. But that's not what this article was about.
They asked three industry analysts, three questions:
Is the PC Game industry being marginalized?
Are consoles an alternative to Piracy?
Will Microsoft help PC Gaming? Will Vista help PC gaming?
They all seem to agree that spending on PC games will experience decline. Yet none of them seem to reliably explain why. One of them completely fudged all three of the questions.
The Realities of Online Digital Media
iTunes. People were "obtaining" mp3's back in 1996. But it wasn't until last year that a storefront was erected, with the necessary legal and contractual agreements, to actually go and purchase a piece of digital music online. Media organizations are among the most stolidly conservative entities in the business world, the reason is because they are shit-scared. Why? Well, it's like how Esther Dyson put it : "The gatekeepers...which are dependant on putting content into inefficient containers...are going to lose."
Big game companies are no different than other big media, having built their entire businesses around the processes and tools that made their products yesterday. New stuff (ie innovation), makes them nervous. Which is why we don't see a lot of radical entertainment coming into mainstream gaming.
Contrary to doomsayers, I've noticed that there is a literal explosion in gaming (particularly online), in which the PC is the central delivery platform. MMOGs. Simple, easy-to-run downloadable casual games. Browser-based games. Digital distribution (from Game Tunnel to Manifesto to Steam and everything in between). The consoles can not do any of these things (they will one day, but right now they're not stealing anyones cake when speaking about online games).
Even WoW has greatly expanded the online gaming market to include people who have literally never played a game online before in their lives. The trend is now unstoppable. Where are they going to go when the lustre of Epic grinding has faded away? They'll try new games. What about the casual gamers (meaning, your grandma)? Is the ad revenue generated by casual gaming portal sites added into the spreadsheets of the PC gaming industry?
Note that not one of the above examples spells monetary goodness for retail stores. But that's the nature of digital media - the suppliers who put stuff on shelves are eventually going to lose and will smartly move to service-based and value-added outlets.
Not Piracy, it's Standardization
Yes modded consoles really stop piracy. Prepare for DEATH when the latest consoles get hacked.
Consoles are less about piracy than they are about a standardized implementation base, which reduces the headaches of supporting a divergent hardware base. This is where the console is vastly superior to the PC. This is where costs are lowered in the release phase of a game (meaning, technical support and patching), and filtered back into the development phase of the game.
Vista
Perhaps, Microsoft will help PC gaming. A greater emphasis on the OS-level can do nothing but achieve this. I don't think the XNA-XBLA route will be particularly significant for AAA, but the casual space should benefit.
A good reason that Microsoft just recently pushed XBLA + XNA for indies is because they control the tools, the media and the channel. They can afford to grab the mindshare because they'll profit from it any way you slice it up. More developers mean more games. More games mean more consoles. It's win-win for them.
Six years ago people were ringing the bell for the PC's demise. Three years ago, yet again. Two...One...oh whoops, the PC is still here. It's all about the games, and how we want to play them. Right now, consoles and PCs seem to make their respective audiences very happy.
If you want to play Portal right now, you could try it's predecessor, Narbacular Drop.
This won the student showcase prize at the Independant Games Festival, and the designers used it to demonstrate the concept of the 'Portal mod' to Valve.
I can accept that "this type of talk" is a cliche to you. Yes, we've heard the very loud complaints about innovation before. We'll probably hear it again. And I'm with you on this. I'm honestly sick of hearing it, and the WalMart shoppers just aren't interested.
The only trouble is, I honestly don't think we were hearing it here. I don't think that it was the emotional rant about "AAA" that you're ascribing to it. It seems to me that it was more a product of an inductive observation about where the industry is, and where it's going to go. The dinosaur piece is a throwaway to give the talk a bit of colour.
I didn't get that he was lamenting a dearth of creativity in the industry. What I got was a realistic appraisal of bigger and bigger (and bigger and bigger and bigger) game budgets, largely funneled into hand-crafted content creation. This is a totally logical and factual truth, not a rant. From this situation, fewer so-called mainstream products are produced by fewer players whose products begin to look a bit cookie-cutter. The innovation is reduced to a game of incrementals, and the dance they do is to convince you that the "next one is really much, much better".
So the rest of the industry will circumvent these bigger players, flowing to the left and right around the "big rocks" that constrict the flow.
I'll definitely agree with you about the early film analogy. We're in the stone age in terms of games, and I strongly believe we're on the cusp of a literal explosion in gaming applications into all manner of devices, applications, platforms and media.
Google, Inc., (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it has reached an agreement with sanitation engineers worldwide, to greatly expand the reach of contextual advertising based on the contents of ordinary household trash. Leveraging powerful new search algorithms, RFID-based product wrappers, and their patented "Garbage Gumshoe" technology, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to target advertisers based on the shit that consumers use, enjoy, and dispose of.
"This partnership will provide a powerful marketing tool for Google advertisers," said Google's head of Sanitary Operations. "By providing access to the shit we throw away, Google advertisers will have an easy way to target, schedule, and measure every consumer's consuming consumptions. What better way to get to know our market than by products that we've already bought? Excuse me, I must go take a shower now."
After years of manual trials with community-based search labour (see dumpster divers), the new platform is now in full production, giving Google contextual advertisers the "dirt" on our spending habits.
All joking aside, WoW will not be beaten... in this generation.
WoW came along and grew the MMORPG industry to include people that had never played an online game before. Fantastic achievement and kudos to them.
Yet I can't help but think that we are really only at the very beginning. There are infinite ways in which the genre can be improved and expanded. Once these games come to the fore, WoW will look primitive and inane next to them. We'll say to each other, "Did we really used to play that?!"
I'm sure people were saying Quake would never be beaten, too. What are they saying about Quake now? The natural allure of novelty is what created the critical mass in the first place. Innovation will do it again, and again, and...
Wow will be beaten. It will happen in this generation. To say otherwise is to not only misunderstand WoW's brick-wall of an end-game, but also the nature of what makes videogames popular. A sprawling and lush creation with similar appeal and scope will inevitably come along. If it answers the numerous gripes and limitations in WoW's design, it will gobble up WoW players without limit. It's all about building critical mass.
They said, "coming eventually". "Coming soon" probably means "eventually" which probably means, "never".:-)
/K
A reasonable overview of OpenGL
on
OpenGL Distilled
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I'm reading this right now, and it is substantive and helpful. The downside is that it can get rather terse at times, without as much explanation as I felt was deserved. I suppose that's why they called it, "distilled".:)
Anyhow, the bulk of the book is not for the faint of heart. Be dialled when you read this, you're not getting any hand-holding.
It's interesting the review above was written by one of the technical reviewers of the book, the result being more of an overview than a pure objective review (with positives, negatives). Or maybe I'm asking too much.
On top of that, it's self-promoted garbage. I've seen good articles from "Mr. ExtremeTech", but what is this doing on/.
I see tripe like this get posted often, yet I've experienced (and heard about), more relevant submissions based around actual games news rejected out of hand.
I know it's routine for Slashdot to ignore complaints, but really, there needs to be some improvement. Like a conference call or a meeting or something.:)
I definitely agree with those experts. My own observation was that Battlefield 2's introduction of the dynaclass system was an interesting evolution in the characteristically static realm of online shooters. You could choose your "class" every time you spawned, allowing yourself the freedom of experimentation without the punishing nature of a repetitive level grind (commonly found in MMORPGs). Dynaclasses also provided a mechanism for filling vacant roles within the game arena, another mode that well suited the fast-response nature of a combat-centric game.
And the skill part of it? Well, that's entirely up to you.:-)
That's still a far cry from "stealing". Poor choice of words, yes. But they're allowed to make a game using Warforged, because they're a key race within Eberron.
Believe me, Baker has gotten plenty of the credit for the creation of Eberron. In fact, he's credited on the front page of Turbine's DDO Website.
I'm not sure what you have against DDO, but you're making a far bigger deal out of this than it deserves. Sorry, but that's my opinion.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot of people are skeptical about the security risks of this. The general claim is that if it's up on the web, a) it can be found anyhow, and b) you should know that it's secure (or insecure).
True, however here is another way of looking at it.
Lets say I buy a brand of lock for my house, which is later to be defective. Perhaps I don't know about this defect, or I don't have the time or expertise to fix it quickly.
Then someone develops a technology that alerts burglars to which houses have that specific brand of lock.
Wouldn't that be cause for some concern?
I think code-searching for vulnerabilities is mildly concerning, even far beyond the usual methods that exist without code search. Note I said mildly. This isn't going to cause the catastrophic collapse of the Internet. It's just one more thing for people to be aware of and (hopefully) take action on.
Slashdot readers beat 'em to it!
The previous story /. precipitated comments that did exactly that.
Oh, how about this?
I think I was sort of going for humour, but I can see how it might have been misconstrued.
Perl on the other hand. Now that is funny! *duck* :-)
Sorta like your post.
For online services : Don't put up code that states explicitly, not for production .
For users : Stay away from online services that put up code that states "not for production". :-)
cpan.org
...
twiki.org
osuosl.org
LOL your search has now uncovered the hidden angst of a million programmers :
I would have tried it anyhow, considering that it was cited in the article summary.
(Sorry couldn't resist) :-)
Thanks for that. You made me spit out my tea lol.... :)
Wow, what a stupid thing for advertisers to do.
If you want to target the DVR audience, do what the "Daily Show" did - Rob Cordry had a hilarious skit that included a list of all the people he hates. The list zoomed by so fast that only DVR-capable viewers could watch it. The list of people he hates included an email address: listpausers@yahoo.com - so we emailed it, and got this in reply.
Totally awesome.
In May of this year, GE's "ecomagination" campaign had a very clever TV ad that included a spoof of the commercial itself. The neat thing was that this segment, embedded into the ad itself, was compressed into 1 second of footage that could only be watched by stepping through it frame-by-frame via a DVR.
The "mini-ad" began with a red stage curtain drawn back to reveal the title, "1 Second Theatre", and then featured a little slideshow featuring short (and very funny) biographies of all the animal characters from the "main ad".
Apparently, the show "Lost" has done similar things to augment the show in some ways, but I haven't confirmed this.
These examples are hilarious, innovative, and totally directed to DVR users. It made us pause and watch the content, even when we were used to zooming past the usual mindless, mass-targeted crap that television ads favoured back in the 20th century.
The whole "stretching into a 30 second slide" is totally regressive and proves the advertiser is totally clued out of this fangle "new media" thang. Oh, and will piss off more modern television viewers, not because it's a pain to hit the 30-second advance, but because it's an obvious and badly implemented ploy to get me to see more mindless, mass-targeted crap.
I would hardly call this a niche market yet.
Good point. And also the games that are not on this list. Millions of people playing casual games or web-based casual. Also there are plenty of games overseas that never see the light of day in North America, yet are vastly more popular in terms of subscribership than many of the games listed there.
I call BIG BS on this one. I do not think there is nearly as much combination testing as you think.
Ouch. :-)
Well unfortunately for us, it's pretty true in any type of consumer-level software development. Audio, Processor, Network, Video, OS (patch-level, revision and hotfix), Libraries, Browser, Network, Drivers... your game may touch one or more of these types of components. If you're lucky, you'll come out relatively unscathed. The companies that briskly test on few platforms more often than not get caught and spend even more money in an expensive patch/validation process. One example is the Readme for Age of Empires. Look at all those videocards that they don't support!
Which pretty much sums up the console versus PC debate. But that's not what this article was about.
They asked three industry analysts, three questions:
- Is the PC Game industry being marginalized?
- Are consoles an alternative to Piracy?
- Will Microsoft help PC Gaming? Will Vista help PC gaming?
They all seem to agree that spending on PC games will experience decline. Yet none of them seem to reliably explain why. One of them completely fudged all three of the questions.The Realities of Online Digital Media
iTunes. People were "obtaining" mp3's back in 1996. But it wasn't until last year that a storefront was erected, with the necessary legal and contractual agreements, to actually go and purchase a piece of digital music online. Media organizations are among the most stolidly conservative entities in the business world, the reason is because they are shit-scared. Why? Well, it's like how Esther Dyson put it : "The gatekeepers...which are dependant on putting content into inefficient containers...are going to lose."
Big game companies are no different than other big media, having built their entire businesses around the processes and tools that made their products yesterday. New stuff (ie innovation), makes them nervous. Which is why we don't see a lot of radical entertainment coming into mainstream gaming.
Contrary to doomsayers, I've noticed that there is a literal explosion in gaming (particularly online), in which the PC is the central delivery platform. MMOGs. Simple, easy-to-run downloadable casual games. Browser-based games. Digital distribution (from Game Tunnel to Manifesto to Steam and everything in between). The consoles can not do any of these things (they will one day, but right now they're not stealing anyones cake when speaking about online games).
Even WoW has greatly expanded the online gaming market to include people who have literally never played a game online before in their lives. The trend is now unstoppable. Where are they going to go when the lustre of Epic grinding has faded away? They'll try new games. What about the casual gamers (meaning, your grandma)? Is the ad revenue generated by casual gaming portal sites added into the spreadsheets of the PC gaming industry?
Note that not one of the above examples spells monetary goodness for retail stores. But that's the nature of digital media - the suppliers who put stuff on shelves are eventually going to lose and will smartly move to service-based and value-added outlets.
Not Piracy, it's Standardization
Yes modded consoles really stop piracy. Prepare for DEATH when the latest consoles get hacked.
Consoles are less about piracy than they are about a standardized implementation base, which reduces the headaches of supporting a divergent hardware base. This is where the console is vastly superior to the PC. This is where costs are lowered in the release phase of a game (meaning, technical support and patching), and filtered back into the development phase of the game.
Vista
Perhaps, Microsoft will help PC gaming. A greater emphasis on the OS-level can do nothing but achieve this. I don't think the XNA-XBLA route will be particularly significant for AAA, but the casual space should benefit.
A good reason that Microsoft just recently pushed XBLA + XNA for indies is because they control the tools, the media and the channel. They can afford to grab the mindshare because they'll profit from it any way you slice it up. More developers mean more games. More games mean more consoles. It's win-win for them.
Six years ago people were ringing the bell for the PC's demise. Three years ago, yet again. Two...One...oh whoops, the PC is still here. It's all about the games, and how we want to play them. Right now, consoles and PCs seem to make their respective audiences very happy.
If you want to play Portal right now, you could try it's predecessor, Narbacular Drop.
This won the student showcase prize at the Independant Games Festival, and the designers used it to demonstrate the concept of the 'Portal mod' to Valve.
I can accept that "this type of talk" is a cliche to you. Yes, we've heard the very loud complaints about innovation before. We'll probably hear it again. And I'm with you on this. I'm honestly sick of hearing it, and the WalMart shoppers just aren't interested.
The only trouble is, I honestly don't think we were hearing it here. I don't think that it was the emotional rant about "AAA" that you're ascribing to it. It seems to me that it was more a product of an inductive observation about where the industry is, and where it's going to go. The dinosaur piece is a throwaway to give the talk a bit of colour.
I didn't get that he was lamenting a dearth of creativity in the industry. What I got was a realistic appraisal of bigger and bigger (and bigger and bigger and bigger) game budgets, largely funneled into hand-crafted content creation. This is a totally logical and factual truth, not a rant. From this situation, fewer so-called mainstream products are produced by fewer players whose products begin to look a bit cookie-cutter. The innovation is reduced to a game of incrementals, and the dance they do is to convince you that the "next one is really much, much better".
So the rest of the industry will circumvent these bigger players, flowing to the left and right around the "big rocks" that constrict the flow.
How? Online distribution, procedural content, lo-fi mmorpgs, aggregated content... :-)
I'll definitely agree with you about the early film analogy. We're in the stone age in terms of games, and I strongly believe we're on the cusp of a literal explosion in gaming applications into all manner of devices, applications, platforms and media.
This is an interesting debate, so lets take it off slashdot - kafka47 at gmail.
Proves that the truth can be more hilarious than fiction. *sigh*
New York -- Sept 4th 2006
Google, Inc., (NASDAQ: GOOG) today announced that it has reached an agreement with sanitation engineers worldwide, to greatly expand the reach of contextual advertising based on the contents of ordinary household trash. Leveraging powerful new search algorithms, RFID-based product wrappers, and their patented "Garbage Gumshoe" technology, Google advertisers will now have a simple, automated way to target advertisers based on the shit that consumers use, enjoy, and dispose of.
"This partnership will provide a powerful marketing tool for Google advertisers," said Google's head of Sanitary Operations. "By providing access to the shit we throw away, Google advertisers will have an easy way to target, schedule, and measure every consumer's consuming consumptions. What better way to get to know our market than by products that we've already bought? Excuse me, I must go take a shower now."
After years of manual trials with community-based search labour (see dumpster divers), the new platform is now in full production, giving Google contextual advertisers the "dirt" on our spending habits.
Unless the market grows even further. Which it will.
All joking aside, WoW will not be beaten... in this generation.
WoW came along and grew the MMORPG industry to include people that had never played an online game before. Fantastic achievement and kudos to them.
Yet I can't help but think that we are really only at the very beginning. There are infinite ways in which the genre can be improved and expanded. Once these games come to the fore, WoW will look primitive and inane next to them. We'll say to each other, "Did we really used to play that?!"
I'm sure people were saying Quake would never be beaten, too. What are they saying about Quake now? The natural allure of novelty is what created the critical mass in the first place. Innovation will do it again, and again, and...
Wow will be beaten. It will happen in this generation. To say otherwise is to not only misunderstand WoW's brick-wall of an end-game, but also the nature of what makes videogames popular. A sprawling and lush creation with similar appeal and scope will inevitably come along. If it answers the numerous gripes and limitations in WoW's design, it will gobble up WoW players without limit. It's all about building critical mass.
They said, "coming eventually". "Coming soon" probably means "eventually" which probably means, "never". :-)
I'm reading this right now, and it is substantive and helpful. The downside is that it can get rather terse at times, without as much explanation as I felt was deserved. I suppose that's why they called it, "distilled". :)
Anyhow, the bulk of the book is not for the faint of heart. Be dialled when you read this, you're not getting any hand-holding.
It's interesting the review above was written by one of the technical reviewers of the book, the result being more of an overview than a pure objective review (with positives, negatives). Or maybe I'm asking too much.
On top of that, it's self-promoted garbage. I've seen good articles from "Mr. ExtremeTech", but what is this doing on /.
I see tripe like this get posted often, yet I've experienced (and heard about), more relevant submissions based around actual games news rejected out of hand.
I know it's routine for Slashdot to ignore complaints, but really, there needs to be some improvement. Like a conference call or a meeting or something. :)
Nothing is new, ever. Get over it.
Lets just talk about classes and skills without you trying to teach me a history lesson. kthx.
Whew that was a lot of reading. :-)
I definitely agree with those experts. My own observation was that Battlefield 2's introduction of the dynaclass system was an interesting evolution in the characteristically static realm of online shooters. You could choose your "class" every time you spawned, allowing yourself the freedom of experimentation without the punishing nature of a repetitive level grind (commonly found in MMORPGs). Dynaclasses also provided a mechanism for filling vacant roles within the game arena, another mode that well suited the fast-response nature of a combat-centric game.
And the skill part of it? Well, that's entirely up to you. :-)
Believe me, Baker has gotten plenty of the credit for the creation of Eberron. In fact, he's credited on the front page of Turbine's DDO Website.
I'm not sure what you have against DDO, but you're making a far bigger deal out of this than it deserves. Sorry, but that's my opinion.