I didn't play CS much, only locally on LANs, but I really got into the Rainbow Six games. As a specific example, Raven Shield (the third game in the series) was a ton of fun at first. I was fairly good, not great, but was near the top on occaision when things went my way and I knew the map really well. I took a break from it to play something else and when I came back about a month later I was just getting pwned. I mean seriously pwned. It was as though players knew where I was at all times. Hacks. See-through walls. Enemy positions on the level map. Nothing new, just new to me since I wasn't a regular FPS player.
It was a serious problem and I almost stopped playing for good but just before that happened they put in PunkBuster and it all turned around almost instantly. Although hacks are less game modifying in a MMORPG, although equally frustrating, this is going to make a nice difference in the game.
and were pushing the limits of building technology at the time (they would have done that untill about 150-200 years ago and maybe even more recently).
The entire Roman Empire and the Notre Dame Cathedral are two examples that would disagree with you. Sure some buildings in both cases were not bigger than the pyramids but they had a little bit better architecture, wouldn't you say?
As for technology at the time, we really don't know exactly when the Sphinx was built, guesses put it around the same time as the pyramids but it might be much much older. We can't really say how they moved such large stones from such a long ways.
After watching the "I love this company" video I just have to say that Ballmer is in great shape. Love the labored breathing after running around for 30 seconds. Doesn't MS have a gym membership as an employee?
As for the type of people MS hires, let me tell a story. My first career job out of college was with a network security startup (yes, we are still in business, although a few bumps and bruises) and we had a fair number of college graduates. In fact, now that I think about it, we all were recent college grads or graduate students.
We fell on some hard times and the workforce had to be trimmed, but a lot of the people who were laid off found work. We were in a college town so there was a career fair right around then. Some interviewed at MS. Only one, a 21-year-old with no family and no life (he was an asshole too) got hired at MS. He was a good programmer but he was the 'hard worker'. You know what I mean - 12-hour days. Whether he was working for those entire 12 hours or not he was at work and that's what they like.
Sorry, I don't have kids but I don't 'live to work', I 'work to live'. There's a huge difference.
That amendment doesn't have anything to do with journalism. The issue at hand is that come defined as a 'journalist' can keep source confidental without being able to be forced to given them up.
So your amendment says you can't abridge rights, this bill gives a certain group more rights. Other examples are police and firefighters. Policemen and firefighters can break laws to protect the masses (within reason, of course). It's a privelege they are granted. Journalists are granted the privelege of protecting their confidential sources but there's no definition of who is a journalist. The standard definition is too broad and would probably cover bloggers.
Ultimately, they should include bloggers and once a problem happens let the Supreme Court do it's job and decide for sure who is a journalist and who isn't. That's what they are there for.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's very difficult to cover 150 miles in 10 hours, obviously, you need a minimum speed of 15 mph. Their 2.2-mile semifinal course had a best average time of 10:20. That's still just under 13 mph. If the average time was 8 minutes or less I'd be excited.
Don't get me wrong I'm very impressed with the results so far but it might just not be enough. Here's to hoping that they can make up some time elsewhere.
...a company that was happy taking 100 million a year loss for a few years kick starting the xbox doesnt have the $ to get into online music retail.
I think the problem is that with their console business the accountants see the ledgers moving from red to black, even if it takes a while. Eventually it's worth the payoff.
It doesn't seem like with the royalty model the industry is asking for they would get into the black for a long time - if at all. Seems reasonable to not even bother at that point.
Bogus diploma from Harvard/Yale because daddy is a major contributor -> diploma from community college -> Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science (yeah kids, stay in school)
Sounds like somebody doesn't have people skills. So I guess the lesson for the kids is: stay in school and go to college - just don't waste your college just doing school work and playing Everquest/WoW the rest of the time. Party, drink beer, make friends, meet chicks. There's nothing wrong with having fun when you are young.
Is it just me or does anyone see this guy as a sterotypical frenchman? Black clothes and barret, pencil-thin goatee, down by the Eiffel Tower trying to sell his crappy paintings, waxing intellectual about how the french do everything better. Your last paragraph just dropped me. Here's a sweeping, but quite obvious, generalization you should like: the French have no humor. Way to take a movie and extend it to a contry of 250+ million people AND miss the entire point of the movie.
That said games are not 'explicitly' made for storytelling they are made for interaction. That interaction separates us from movies but they can still tell a story nonetheless. Movies are simply moving pictures and weren't intendid to tell stories. Most role-playing games (before FMV was popular or affordable) were played out stories. Some weren't particularly good stories but they were stories. Affecting a generation? Do movies or books affect a generation? Without 'Star Wars' or 'Harry Potter' does the world stop turning? Does a generation cease to exist or at least change dramatically? No.
I honestly think the French are bitter because they really don't contribute anything to world-wide pop culture and hate things that do. I can name musical groups, movies, TV shows, etc., from many other contries but not France. Weird. Wait, 'Amelie', there's one - great job, France.
I just bought the first Sly Cooper game a week ago for cheap on a whim. It's a platinum title so it's only $20. The second Sly is also only $20 but I haven't picked that one up yet.
I'll be honest to the folks at/. - it's not a game for the hardcore. It's not very difficult and doesn't involve much other than jumping and swinging your cane. Now, I'm not a hardcore gamer so I thought it was a lot of fun. It's like Crash Bandicoot (except without the insane loading times) where you have an area that contains levels, and you need to collect a key from each level. In each level you also need to collect bottles that have clues which will open a safe which contains a page of your ultimate goal: the competion of the Cooper family thieving book - The Theivius Raccoonus. The story behind it is that 5 bad guys killed your father and divided the book amongst themselves, and you want revenge (and the book).
First, the game is pretty. The levels themselves are standard 3D you'd find in any game but the characters (Sly and other NPCs) are all cel-shaded to give them the 3D but animated look. The levels are interesting overall and run particularly smooth. There's a few interesting challenges to overcome and a couple of the levels contain scripted events which really liven things up. The bosses were really easy however. When I go into a boss fight I expect difficulty and it wasn't there. Another problem I had was the idea of 'lives' in the game. You don't have health but can get 'hit' or damaged if you have a 'charm' (a horseshoe, which you can pick up for collect 100 coins). But you can also collect lives but there really isn't a penalty for running out. If you run our you are just asked if you can continue. It's odd.
Apparently a lot of these things are fixed in the sequel, from article it says there aren't really levels and there's a lot of free-roaming areas. I'm probably going to pick it up soon and then get the third installment when it comes out.
I was going to play my violin for the games industry but it's so small I lost it. Oh well.
The next article will be: "School is back in and it is costing kids time to play games, up to 6 hours a day! And this doesn't even include other activities - like sports! Is that going to impact the sales of games?"
To be honest as a post-college working stiff, I like the fact that after 10 pm on weeknights the WoW servers are quiet and tolerable:)
I can give you a great UI, no problem, as most HCI people probably can as well. However, we need to be funded to do so too. The plain fact is that it costs a lot of time and money to innovate and companies aren't willing to take a chance on something just because a few 'l33t' users think it'd be great.
As a GUI designer/programmer I try to get in the best UI I can, but to be honest, you can't go too far out of your way to be 'novel' or 'unique'. Do I like designing for the least-common denominator? No. But my company allows me to do some interesting things where others aren't, but nothing too extreme.
The quote I always hear is 'make it sexy' but in the subtext they are also saying 'but not slutty'. So the analogy is make a GUI people want to marry, not one that's a one-night stand.
Well, at least I got you off the the OpenOffice example. As for AIM, I dunno what was reverse engineered there so I can't really say one way or another. But as I said, AIM and OpenOffice are about interoperability whereas the appeal failed because 'Appellants failed to establish... as to the applicability of the interoperability exception.' What that says to me is that bnetd couldn't interoperate the way that Blizzard did and therefore was not interoperability.
As for the Blizzard EULA, from what I understand, they strictly stated in their EULA that if you want play an Internet game (non-LAN) you need to go through their service, which allows them to authenticate their registration. Bnetd allows users to bypass these requirements. I'll be honest and say that I feel you should be able to do whatever you want with the software you buy but the reverse engineering excuse is a trojan horse, there's more to it then what is on the surface, but leave it to the/. crowd to make it seem like Blizzard is just a bunch of assholes for protecting their stuff. I bet this might've gone a little better if bnetd somehow checked the registration keys so as to see if they were at least unique. Maybe a database where you register with bnetd before playing? The courts would at least admit bnetd was trying to curb the problem.
And I do understand how legal precedents work, I think that you do not. Each one that bnetd tried to use in their favor was rebuked (Lexmark was a huge loss), so obviously the precedents weren't in their favor. And to say piracy had nothing to do with their legal position is atrocious. In the PDF, many times the judge talks about piracy although doesn't use the term 'piracy' - he uses a little more legalese.
I don't read EULAs first of all. I doubt many people do. Yes the ruling was about reverse engineering but at the heart of it all it's about piracy.
For example, if bnetd wanted to create the server AND reverse engineer the client-side code - the game itself (but not infringe on copyright of course) - they can and should, more power to them. Why can't I just reverse engineer one piece of WinXP and insert it in, therefore making it not need a registration key? Because it's illegal. But I certainly can reverse engineer WinXP in it's entirety. As for MS Office, a reverse engineer of the doc format doesn't allow you to use the software unintendid. Same thing for AIM.
Just don't bullshit everyone into thinking that a partial reverse engineer is ok, when it is clearly doing something nefarious and then hate on Blizzard for protecting an income stream that is clearly getting ripped off. What is it with all you/. people hating on companies that are successful and turn a profit?
bnetd did not steal or provide a method to steal anything.
Does it allow you to play the game without paying for it? I don't use bnetd but from what I have read it doesn't require a key or some other registration verification. So in essence you can use software without paying for it.
REVERSE-ENGINEERED *shiver* a private format. Sound familiar?
No, not the same at all. Same game, but different ballpark. Interoperability seems to be more defendable then just not liking the original service. Besides the doc format doesn't require a registration key to use it. If by simply having a doc file you could use MS Office without a registration key then OpenOffice would have been wrong to reverse engineer the doc format. But it doesn't so it's a moot comparison.
You are comparing something that communicates with another product (GAIM, OpenOffice) with something that let's you use a product without paying for it.
You are comparing interoperability with theft. So no, I'm not scared. Don't steal software and you won't see a problem.
It's not 'Johnny and Robin' who are the hard sell, it's Terry Gilliam as a director. He makes movies that are strange that have no mass-market appeal. Odds are after marketting ups the $15 mil to $25 mil he wouldn't even get close to making half of that.
He spent $88 mil making 'Brothers Grimm' with $30 mil on marketting. He isn't going to make that back since it's not getting great reviews (39% on Rotten Tomatoes). The plain fact is Terry Gilliam makes movies to entertain himself and not everyone else. Sure they are pretty and fun and crazy and, god forbid, interesting but if you can't make money in this game you are done.
As for Uwe Boll, he hasn't had a failure as big a Gilliam... yet. Although 'House of the Dead' and 'Alone in the Dark' were both financial failures. Even just breaking even is a success.
Thank you, I'm glad someone get's it. My orginal post was to show that the C64 had significant features that were used for more than just games and therefore can't be considered a game machine.
It's funny that you mention GEOS because when I finally got another computer, a 486, it had Win3.1 on it. I thought at the time that it was really just GEOS but on a better PC.
The Apple II and C64 were not game machines. They were home computers that could be used to play games. I had a C64c growing up and my sister and I typed out all of my school stuff with it. My dad did spreadsheets for work.
Comparing the XBox 360 with the Commodore 64/Apple II is stupid. They aren't comparing the 360 vs. my home computer even though it plays games. Why? Because then their stupid article won't be taken seriously by the 16-year-olds who have never even seen an Apple II.
I'm waiting for the XBox 360 vs. graphing calculator articles. "The 360 is expensive but a great grpahing calculator can cost a fair amount of money. And really aren't all 3D games just complex math anyways?!"
Well, heh, I haven't worked out the technology exactly yet, but I would imagine that if you had more than one person that you wanted to use the gun you would have more than one ring, or said ring was more of a stretchy 'band' that fit around anyones finger. You could probably also have either the gun be 'attuned' to many rings, or have many rings 'attuned' to one gun.
I have a gun in my house. I will always have a gun (most likely more than one) in my house. I don't have any children yet so I don't have to worry about that issue currently. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to restrict guns but I wouldn't mind an alternative so that the anti-gun.
BTW, I don't have a girlfriend, I have a wife. Shes not a great shot but then again she doesn't really have to be - it's not a little gun (.357 S&W). It's similar to this
except a little older.
... good RFID uses in a while. Sure you hear the tin-foil hat stuff all the time, but where's the grocery store where I don't have to stand in line, I just pass my cart between two scanners and everything in the cart appears on the screen?
One that really interested me was where a handgun would only fire if the user was wearing a ring on their finger. Of course the ring would have an RFID chip embedded in it. Police officers have a high incidence of being shot with their own gun, whereas if the gun wouldn't fire without the ring, officers could feel much safer.
Parents who want a gun in the house but are worried about having children around it would feel that there is another line of defense that would keep their kid from accidentally shooting themselves. I don't have children but I'd pay extra for the added level of security.
... that you'd be smart if you didn't waste your time doing machinima. I'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not something is funny or interesting, what I am going to talk about is ownership.
I can't remember when I read it but Gabe at Penny Arcade explained why you should not use sprite animations in a comic strip. He wasn't talking about drawing your own sprites, he was referring to making a comic from Mega Man sprites or some other game. The fact is you don't own the sprites and while it's possibly fair use to use them to not make any money, what do you do if you actually do make a good comic? Say you get 5000-10000 readers per day or more? What are you going to sell? Penny Arcade and PvP, as examples, sell a lot of different merchandise, from key chains to t-shirts to laser etched prints.
Red vs. Blue sells t-shirts that are mostly softball team shirts (small icon on the front-left, name of character and a number of the back) and probably do ok. But they can never have a shirt with the characters on it because they don't own the characters.
I don't know the licensing scheme with 'The Strangerhood' characters but that show is just lame anyways. If you bought a shirt from that series you are unquestionably without taste.
As someone who has finished the PC version of Halo, I have to say I don't know why it has such a following. The story is ok, but a little convoluted, I haven't heard anyone argue that the levels aren't repetitive and boring, and the graphics, for their time, were a move forward but nothing spectacular.
The only true redeeming quality was the fact that you could have good online multiplayer in a console. Other than that, I only expected Halo 2 to have slightly better graphics since it's on the same system and the same convoluted storyline.
I think the selling point of the Halo series is not the storyline but the online console multiplayer capabilities.
Thanks for explaining it from a development side. I am not planning on buying any of the next gen consoles but I definitely felt that the A-list titles for the 360 were lacking. I wasn't hearing anything spectacular being available at launch so I wasn't getting excited about console.
It's all about the games - not the media options or the physical design. XBox has Halo and... ? Then they try to woo console buyers away from Sony with Perfect Dark? Yeah, good job on 'stealing' a dead N64 franchise.
And, don't get me wrong, I really don't care who wins, I just want a console with some great games, great graphics, and that is cheap enough that it doesn't hurt.
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
Windows 95? I guess Windows ME would be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Is this really a problem? Some people on here think that we are 'keeping them down' and some think women 'just aren't hardcore gamers.' I don't agree with either.
My wife and I dated in college. As computer savy as she is, and let's be honest, she can USE a computer not build one or install one, she has really no interest. As a software engineer she always expected me to know what's wrong with windows (frankly, no one knows what's wrong with windows - just reinstall). She now plays WoW but doesn't really care about any other games but I guess I don't really either.
She majored in Interior Design/Decorating which had about a 95%+ female class. The few guys that were in there were gay (and when I say 'gay' I mean 'gay', there is no stereotyping here). In my CS department they were trying to reach out to get more women interested, but were they doing that in her department for men? No. They just accepted that it's just not something men are interested in doing as careers and moved on. Everyone can debate about whether or not it's societal or 'just the way it is' but the plain fact is when a department honestly tries for diversity and fails due to lack of interest then you just have to let it go.
I never repressed any minorities or women (women are NOT a minority) and I don't know anyone in my department that did. And when there were women in our classes they were treated exceptionally well by all of us CS nerds.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't play CS much, only locally on LANs, but I really got into the Rainbow Six games. As a specific example, Raven Shield (the third game in the series) was a ton of fun at first. I was fairly good, not great, but was near the top on occaision when things went my way and I knew the map really well. I took a break from it to play something else and when I came back about a month later I was just getting pwned. I mean seriously pwned. It was as though players knew where I was at all times. Hacks. See-through walls. Enemy positions on the level map. Nothing new, just new to me since I wasn't a regular FPS player.
It was a serious problem and I almost stopped playing for good but just before that happened they put in PunkBuster and it all turned around almost instantly. Although hacks are less game modifying in a MMORPG, although equally frustrating, this is going to make a nice difference in the game.
and were pushing the limits of building technology at the time (they would have done that untill about 150-200 years ago and maybe even more recently).
The entire Roman Empire and the Notre Dame Cathedral are two examples that would disagree with you. Sure some buildings in both cases were not bigger than the pyramids but they had a little bit better architecture, wouldn't you say?
As for technology at the time, we really don't know exactly when the Sphinx was built, guesses put it around the same time as the pyramids but it might be much much older. We can't really say how they moved such large stones from such a long ways.
After watching the "I love this company" video I just have to say that Ballmer is in great shape. Love the labored breathing after running around for 30 seconds. Doesn't MS have a gym membership as an employee?
As for the type of people MS hires, let me tell a story. My first career job out of college was with a network security startup (yes, we are still in business, although a few bumps and bruises) and we had a fair number of college graduates. In fact, now that I think about it, we all were recent college grads or graduate students.
We fell on some hard times and the workforce had to be trimmed, but a lot of the people who were laid off found work. We were in a college town so there was a career fair right around then. Some interviewed at MS. Only one, a 21-year-old with no family and no life (he was an asshole too) got hired at MS. He was a good programmer but he was the 'hard worker'. You know what I mean - 12-hour days. Whether he was working for those entire 12 hours or not he was at work and that's what they like.
Sorry, I don't have kids but I don't 'live to work', I 'work to live'. There's a huge difference.
That amendment doesn't have anything to do with journalism. The issue at hand is that come defined as a 'journalist' can keep source confidental without being able to be forced to given them up. So your amendment says you can't abridge rights, this bill gives a certain group more rights. Other examples are police and firefighters. Policemen and firefighters can break laws to protect the masses (within reason, of course). It's a privelege they are granted. Journalists are granted the privelege of protecting their confidential sources but there's no definition of who is a journalist. The standard definition is too broad and would probably cover bloggers. Ultimately, they should include bloggers and once a problem happens let the Supreme Court do it's job and decide for sure who is a journalist and who isn't. That's what they are there for.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: it's very difficult to cover 150 miles in 10 hours, obviously, you need a minimum speed of 15 mph. Their 2.2-mile semifinal course had a best average time of 10:20. That's still just under 13 mph. If the average time was 8 minutes or less I'd be excited.
Don't get me wrong I'm very impressed with the results so far but it might just not be enough. Here's to hoping that they can make up some time elsewhere.
...a company that was happy taking 100 million a year loss for a few years kick starting the xbox doesnt have the $ to get into online music retail.
I think the problem is that with their console business the accountants see the ledgers moving from red to black, even if it takes a while. Eventually it's worth the payoff.
It doesn't seem like with the royalty model the industry is asking for they would get into the black for a long time - if at all. Seems reasonable to not even bother at that point.
Bogus diploma from Harvard/Yale because daddy is a major contributor -> diploma from community college -> Ph.D. in mathematics and computer science (yeah kids, stay in school)
Sounds like somebody doesn't have people skills. So I guess the lesson for the kids is: stay in school and go to college - just don't waste your college just doing school work and playing Everquest/WoW the rest of the time. Party, drink beer, make friends, meet chicks. There's nothing wrong with having fun when you are young.
Is it just me or does anyone see this guy as a sterotypical frenchman? Black clothes and barret, pencil-thin goatee, down by the Eiffel Tower trying to sell his crappy paintings, waxing intellectual about how the french do everything better. Your last paragraph just dropped me. Here's a sweeping, but quite obvious, generalization you should like: the French have no humor. Way to take a movie and extend it to a contry of 250+ million people AND miss the entire point of the movie.
That said games are not 'explicitly' made for storytelling they are made for interaction. That interaction separates us from movies but they can still tell a story nonetheless. Movies are simply moving pictures and weren't intendid to tell stories. Most role-playing games (before FMV was popular or affordable) were played out stories. Some weren't particularly good stories but they were stories. Affecting a generation? Do movies or books affect a generation? Without 'Star Wars' or 'Harry Potter' does the world stop turning? Does a generation cease to exist or at least change dramatically? No.
I honestly think the French are bitter because they really don't contribute anything to world-wide pop culture and hate things that do. I can name musical groups, movies, TV shows, etc., from many other contries but not France. Weird. Wait, 'Amelie', there's one - great job, France.
I just bought the first Sly Cooper game a week ago for cheap on a whim. It's a platinum title so it's only $20. The second Sly is also only $20 but I haven't picked that one up yet.
/. - it's not a game for the hardcore. It's not very difficult and doesn't involve much other than jumping and swinging your cane. Now, I'm not a hardcore gamer so I thought it was a lot of fun. It's like Crash Bandicoot (except without the insane loading times) where you have an area that contains levels, and you need to collect a key from each level. In each level you also need to collect bottles that have clues which will open a safe which contains a page of your ultimate goal: the competion of the Cooper family thieving book - The Theivius Raccoonus. The story behind it is that 5 bad guys killed your father and divided the book amongst themselves, and you want revenge (and the book).
I'll be honest to the folks at
First, the game is pretty. The levels themselves are standard 3D you'd find in any game but the characters (Sly and other NPCs) are all cel-shaded to give them the 3D but animated look. The levels are interesting overall and run particularly smooth. There's a few interesting challenges to overcome and a couple of the levels contain scripted events which really liven things up. The bosses were really easy however. When I go into a boss fight I expect difficulty and it wasn't there. Another problem I had was the idea of 'lives' in the game. You don't have health but can get 'hit' or damaged if you have a 'charm' (a horseshoe, which you can pick up for collect 100 coins). But you can also collect lives but there really isn't a penalty for running out. If you run our you are just asked if you can continue. It's odd.
Apparently a lot of these things are fixed in the sequel, from article it says there aren't really levels and there's a lot of free-roaming areas. I'm probably going to pick it up soon and then get the third installment when it comes out.
Great game. Definitely memorable.
I was going to play my violin for the games industry but it's so small I lost it. Oh well.
:)
The next article will be: "School is back in and it is costing kids time to play games, up to 6 hours a day! And this doesn't even include other activities - like sports! Is that going to impact the sales of games?"
To be honest as a post-college working stiff, I like the fact that after 10 pm on weeknights the WoW servers are quiet and tolerable
I can give you a great UI, no problem, as most HCI people probably can as well. However, we need to be funded to do so too. The plain fact is that it costs a lot of time and money to innovate and companies aren't willing to take a chance on something just because a few 'l33t' users think it'd be great.
As a GUI designer/programmer I try to get in the best UI I can, but to be honest, you can't go too far out of your way to be 'novel' or 'unique'. Do I like designing for the least-common denominator? No. But my company allows me to do some interesting things where others aren't, but nothing too extreme.
The quote I always hear is 'make it sexy' but in the subtext they are also saying 'but not slutty'. So the analogy is make a GUI people want to marry, not one that's a one-night stand.
Well, at least I got you off the the OpenOffice example. As for AIM, I dunno what was reverse engineered there so I can't really say one way or another. But as I said, AIM and OpenOffice are about interoperability whereas the appeal failed because 'Appellants failed to establish... as to the applicability of the interoperability exception.' What that says to me is that bnetd couldn't interoperate the way that Blizzard did and therefore was not interoperability.
/. crowd to make it seem like Blizzard is just a bunch of assholes for protecting their stuff. I bet this might've gone a little better if bnetd somehow checked the registration keys so as to see if they were at least unique. Maybe a database where you register with bnetd before playing? The courts would at least admit bnetd was trying to curb the problem.
As for the Blizzard EULA, from what I understand, they strictly stated in their EULA that if you want play an Internet game (non-LAN) you need to go through their service, which allows them to authenticate their registration. Bnetd allows users to bypass these requirements. I'll be honest and say that I feel you should be able to do whatever you want with the software you buy but the reverse engineering excuse is a trojan horse, there's more to it then what is on the surface, but leave it to the
And I do understand how legal precedents work, I think that you do not. Each one that bnetd tried to use in their favor was rebuked (Lexmark was a huge loss), so obviously the precedents weren't in their favor. And to say piracy had nothing to do with their legal position is atrocious. In the PDF, many times the judge talks about piracy although doesn't use the term 'piracy' - he uses a little more legalese.
I don't read EULAs first of all. I doubt many people do. Yes the ruling was about reverse engineering but at the heart of it all it's about piracy.
/. people hating on companies that are successful and turn a profit?
For example, if bnetd wanted to create the server AND reverse engineer the client-side code - the game itself (but not infringe on copyright of course) - they can and should, more power to them. Why can't I just reverse engineer one piece of WinXP and insert it in, therefore making it not need a registration key? Because it's illegal. But I certainly can reverse engineer WinXP in it's entirety. As for MS Office, a reverse engineer of the doc format doesn't allow you to use the software unintendid. Same thing for AIM.
Just don't bullshit everyone into thinking that a partial reverse engineer is ok, when it is clearly doing something nefarious and then hate on Blizzard for protecting an income stream that is clearly getting ripped off. What is it with all you
bnetd did not steal or provide a method to steal anything.
Does it allow you to play the game without paying for it? I don't use bnetd but from what I have read it doesn't require a key or some other registration verification. So in essence you can use software without paying for it.
REVERSE-ENGINEERED *shiver* a private format. Sound familiar?
No, not the same at all. Same game, but different ballpark. Interoperability seems to be more defendable then just not liking the original service. Besides the doc format doesn't require a registration key to use it. If by simply having a doc file you could use MS Office without a registration key then OpenOffice would have been wrong to reverse engineer the doc format. But it doesn't so it's a moot comparison.
You are comparing something that communicates with another product (GAIM, OpenOffice) with something that let's you use a product without paying for it.
You are comparing interoperability with theft. So no, I'm not scared. Don't steal software and you won't see a problem.
It's not 'Johnny and Robin' who are the hard sell, it's Terry Gilliam as a director. He makes movies that are strange that have no mass-market appeal. Odds are after marketting ups the $15 mil to $25 mil he wouldn't even get close to making half of that.
He spent $88 mil making 'Brothers Grimm' with $30 mil on marketting. He isn't going to make that back since it's not getting great reviews (39% on Rotten Tomatoes). The plain fact is Terry Gilliam makes movies to entertain himself and not everyone else. Sure they are pretty and fun and crazy and, god forbid, interesting but if you can't make money in this game you are done.
As for Uwe Boll, he hasn't had a failure as big a Gilliam... yet. Although 'House of the Dead' and 'Alone in the Dark' were both financial failures. Even just breaking even is a success.
Thank you, I'm glad someone get's it. My orginal post was to show that the C64 had significant features that were used for more than just games and therefore can't be considered a game machine.
It's funny that you mention GEOS because when I finally got another computer, a 486, it had Win3.1 on it. I thought at the time that it was really just GEOS but on a better PC.
The Apple II and C64 were not game machines. They were home computers that could be used to play games. I had a C64c growing up and my sister and I typed out all of my school stuff with it. My dad did spreadsheets for work.
Comparing the XBox 360 with the Commodore 64/Apple II is stupid. They aren't comparing the 360 vs. my home computer even though it plays games. Why? Because then their stupid article won't be taken seriously by the 16-year-olds who have never even seen an Apple II.
I'm waiting for the XBox 360 vs. graphing calculator articles. "The 360 is expensive but a great grpahing calculator can cost a fair amount of money. And really aren't all 3D games just complex math anyways?!"
Well, heh, I haven't worked out the technology exactly yet, but I would imagine that if you had more than one person that you wanted to use the gun you would have more than one ring, or said ring was more of a stretchy 'band' that fit around anyones finger. You could probably also have either the gun be 'attuned' to many rings, or have many rings 'attuned' to one gun.
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I have a gun in my house. I will always have a gun (most likely more than one) in my house. I don't have any children yet so I don't have to worry about that issue currently. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to restrict guns but I wouldn't mind an alternative so that the anti-gun
BTW, I don't have a girlfriend, I have a wife. Shes not a great shot but then again she doesn't really have to be - it's not a little gun (.357 S&W). It's similar to this except a little older.
... good RFID uses in a while. Sure you hear the tin-foil hat stuff all the time, but where's the grocery store where I don't have to stand in line, I just pass my cart between two scanners and everything in the cart appears on the screen?
One that really interested me was where a handgun would only fire if the user was wearing a ring on their finger. Of course the ring would have an RFID chip embedded in it. Police officers have a high incidence of being shot with their own gun, whereas if the gun wouldn't fire without the ring, officers could feel much safer.
Parents who want a gun in the house but are worried about having children around it would feel that there is another line of defense that would keep their kid from accidentally shooting themselves. I don't have children but I'd pay extra for the added level of security.
... that you'd be smart if you didn't waste your time doing machinima. I'm not going to get into the argument of whether or not something is funny or interesting, what I am going to talk about is ownership.
I can't remember when I read it but Gabe at Penny Arcade explained why you should not use sprite animations in a comic strip. He wasn't talking about drawing your own sprites, he was referring to making a comic from Mega Man sprites or some other game. The fact is you don't own the sprites and while it's possibly fair use to use them to not make any money, what do you do if you actually do make a good comic? Say you get 5000-10000 readers per day or more? What are you going to sell? Penny Arcade and PvP, as examples, sell a lot of different merchandise, from key chains to t-shirts to laser etched prints.
Red vs. Blue sells t-shirts that are mostly softball team shirts (small icon on the front-left, name of character and a number of the back) and probably do ok. But they can never have a shirt with the characters on it because they don't own the characters.
I don't know the licensing scheme with 'The Strangerhood' characters but that show is just lame anyways. If you bought a shirt from that series you are unquestionably without taste.
As someone who has finished the PC version of Halo, I have to say I don't know why it has such a following. The story is ok, but a little convoluted, I haven't heard anyone argue that the levels aren't repetitive and boring, and the graphics, for their time, were a move forward but nothing spectacular.
The only true redeeming quality was the fact that you could have good online multiplayer in a console. Other than that, I only expected Halo 2 to have slightly better graphics since it's on the same system and the same convoluted storyline.
I think the selling point of the Halo series is not the storyline but the online console multiplayer capabilities.
Thanks for explaining it from a development side. I am not planning on buying any of the next gen consoles but I definitely felt that the A-list titles for the 360 were lacking. I wasn't hearing anything spectacular being available at launch so I wasn't getting excited about console.
It's all about the games - not the media options or the physical design. XBox has Halo and... ? Then they try to woo console buyers away from Sony with Perfect Dark? Yeah, good job on 'stealing' a dead N64 franchise.
And, don't get me wrong, I really don't care who wins, I just want a console with some great games, great graphics, and that is cheap enough that it doesn't hurt.
Make the hacker spend 16 hours a day fielding help-desk inquiries in an AOL chat room for computer novices. Force him to do this with a user name at least as uncool as KoolDude and to work on a vintage IBM PC with a 2400-baud dial-up connection. Most painful of all for any geek, make him use Windows 95 for the rest of his life.
Windows 95? I guess Windows ME would be considered cruel and unusual punishment.
Is this really a problem? Some people on here think that we are 'keeping them down' and some think women 'just aren't hardcore gamers.' I don't agree with either.
My wife and I dated in college. As computer savy as she is, and let's be honest, she can USE a computer not build one or install one, she has really no interest. As a software engineer she always expected me to know what's wrong with windows (frankly, no one knows what's wrong with windows - just reinstall). She now plays WoW but doesn't really care about any other games but I guess I don't really either.
She majored in Interior Design/Decorating which had about a 95%+ female class. The few guys that were in there were gay (and when I say 'gay' I mean 'gay', there is no stereotyping here). In my CS department they were trying to reach out to get more women interested, but were they doing that in her department for men? No. They just accepted that it's just not something men are interested in doing as careers and moved on. Everyone can debate about whether or not it's societal or 'just the way it is' but the plain fact is when a department honestly tries for diversity and fails due to lack of interest then you just have to let it go.
I never repressed any minorities or women (women are NOT a minority) and I don't know anyone in my department that did. And when there were women in our classes they were treated exceptionally well by all of us CS nerds.