In general I agree with your point, but in this case what happens if I want to play (say) Team Fortress 2 but none of the other stuff in the box? Is there another way to buy it? Because if not I can see how that might annoy some people.
Straight to the content would be nice, but be careful what you wish for... There's no way advertisers are going to accept the idea that mobile versions of pages have no ads. With the screen area so small what will happen is that ads will appear on separate screens before the content you're trying to view.
Desktop browser ads are mild by comparison. They sit at the top or the side, easily ignored. The worst they ever manage is to waste a bit of bandwidth. I predict people with more powerful phones will soon be spoofing non-phone user agents in an effort to dodge the evil phone versions of ad-supported pages.
If all the server was doing is "authenticating" then yes, quite feasible. Which is why I referred to data moving both ways. If the role of the server is less passive then any crack is not a simple matter of success or fail. No two games will have identical transactions, so it's impossible to be sure you've correctly reverse engineered the behaviour of the server.
No one expects the installer for a single-player-only game to require an internet connection
You say that, but actually storing stuff on a remote server seems like a great way to stop pirates. Not so much during install, but during actual play. Each player has an account name, with small amounts of data moving to and from the server as you play. Suddenly there's no such thing as a "cracked" game anymore. Unless the central server gets hacked, nobody without an account is ever going to play.
Of course, this has the disadvantage that players without always-up net connections cannot play the game, but as this becomes an increasingly rare problem this kind of solution will be increasingly tempting for developers and publishers.
I wasn't referring just to the way some large projects go completely pear-shaped so much as the fundamental way IT is handled. For example, did you know that the civil service have fast stream specialisms for statistics and economics but not for IT in any form? This prevents them from recruiting competent professionals in this field, which in turn prevents them from running their own IT projects even for small, straightforward things. The sheer amount of money wasted by the resulting outsourcing efforts is breathtaking.
As you might expect, IT decision-making isn't much better. Often entire departments suffer from poorly thought-out software and IT strategies because nobody from the Grade 2 down knows anything about computers (or if anyone does it's so far outside their remit they don't get a say).
that's what I come to expect that at the end of the day is government driven
The UK government certainly are absolutely awful where IT projects are concerned, but in this case it's not really fair to blame them since the BBC is autonomous in this respect.
Assuming your aim was to provide information on the subject of educational standards (rather than to promote that site in particular) I would advice being cautious of the content there. That site appears to have a strong political agenda. Not that I dispute their claim to be affiliated to no particular political party, but it appears to represent one of the polar extremes in the debate over educational practice and standards.
Of course, it is difficult to find objective measures of educational productivity. However, one aspect of education which can be measured quite well is readiness of students for the world of work. According to a recent BBC article industry does not share the government's view that standards have improved.
BTW I'm a hardcore Magic: the Gathering player so I'm probably the target demographic.
No, not really.
It's aimed much younger than you. Magic Online does a good job looking after the hardcore Magic Players. But we're happy enough to use existing social networks (StarCity or Salvation message boards, according to preference). We don't need or want Gleemax. The new site is for gamers for whom discovering fellow gamers is a new and exciting experience. It's a way to give them a sense of 24/7 involvement in their hobby.
Emacs is a great editor (pretend I said "Vi" if that's your thing) and has some things that are nice for coding, but I'll take a true IDE in a second.
Not only that, but speaking as someone who loves Emacs, *nix shells and so on... I still run Windows as my desktop OS of choice because Emacs runs fine on Windows, Cygwin deals with my command line needs and (crucially) all the proprietary apps and weird hardware I own just work.
Back when I was a student I ran a dual boot machine and would try running Windows content using Wine and the like. Now? I just don't have the time to wrestle with all the problems that arise. I still run Linux on my server and it's great. But on the desktop I haven't even bothered to install Linux on my newer machine.
If the control scheme expands the market in the way Nintendo hopes to (and, so far, it seems to be), then there will actually be more revenue from Wii exclusives
The games market as a whole will be worth a lot more, but it doesn't follow from this that an individual title will generate more income for a developer.
Current Wii installed base is about 11M worldwide, with the XBox 360 also over the 10M mark and the PS3 clear of 4M. So even if Nintendo's design decisions doubled the Wii's market that's still less than half the size a cross-platform market would have been had things been different.
Nintendo had the "People want to play fun games and don't want to have to take out a loan to do so" attitude and they're winning.
At least, they are if you're an investor.
From a gamer's perspective, I'm a bit puzzled by the way everyone seems to love console wars. Personally I dislike exclusives. If they're on a console I own that leaves some of my friends unable to share in my enjoyment of the game. If they're on a console I don't own that's just annoying.
The Wii's great for gaming in general, because it reminds people in the industry that actual gameplay matters. Unfortunately there are downsides too - by making what would once have been a custom peripheral into the standard controller, Nintendo ensure that most Wii games will never appear on other platforms. That's bad news for game studios, because it means less revenue per title. And anything that reduces the profitability of titles is ultimately bad for gamers too.
But there is one lesson I really, really hope the other manufacturers take away from the Wii's success: keep the costs down!
Or should that perhaps be: "it would be good if it could decide".
Individual purchasing decisions in a free market are a great way to arrange transactions affecting individuals. What bothers me about net neutrality is that some decisions about network architecture may be made on a "typical consumer" basis. If the typical consumer turns out not to care about (or even not to understand) net neutrality then the option for an individual to choose net neutrality could disappear (or effectively disappear due to costing orders of magnitude too much).
This is the kind of situation where it seems to me that governments and/or other non-commercial bodies have a role to play. Internet connectivity is (was?) a kind of communications standard. Screwing around with that traffic (whether by shaping, filtering or whatever) undermines that standard. And in many cases (at least theoretical if not yet practical) the company responsible is effectively running a monopoly from the perspective of individual consumers, so there is a valid case for government involvement to protect the consumers involved.
If that happened I think it might even create business opportunities. Then instead of stealthily crippling everyone's internet, companies could openly offer limited internet packages sold based on features other than bandwidth. For example, I'd love to have $10 off my monthly bill in exchange for a formal "no torrents" restriction, since I don't ever use them.
The ironic thing being that this is precisely why we care about whether NP=P or not. Because without a polynomial time algorithm, large problems remain intractable even after you massively parallelize them!
The implication here is that there is no (known) equilibrium mixed strategy for bluffs (because if there were then Polaris could be coded to use it).
Is that really true?! It seems very counterintuitive.
Certainly there's nothing special in general about games involving bluff. One of Von Neumann's first game theory case studies involved a simplified version of poker precisely to demonstrate how to automate bluffing.
The main thing I've been unimpressed with from this E3 is lack of decent press coverage. Pretty much no commentary, insight or news of any kind has come out of the event. Instead, I've seen at least half a dozen reports from E3 which could just about pass for press releases by the companies doing the demos.
I think they should rename it E2. Yes, it's electronic entertainment, but it's no longer an "expo".
It'll definitely get there, it'll just take a bit longer.
That's the kind of price I'm after too, except that because I'm in the UK I'll either have to import one from the US or wait even longer since for some incomprehensible reason prices are always higher here.
whereas the 'experts' consulted by theregister are not even identified.
Did you read the article to the end? The writer himself used to work as a bomb disposal specialist.
Personally, I have no idea whether what he says is correct, but this guy isn't just offering some random opinion based on nothing whatsoever. I'm inclined to consider his viewpoint relevant.
Real life costs money, and if someone offers you money to do something which, lets face it in this case, is a pretty trivial and short term thing, what's the big deal?
Have you actually read what these bloggers wrote?
Like you say, there are bills to pay. So there's no problem if Microsoft want to pay these people as writers to write pieces for them on a particular topic. The problem starts when those pieces end up as content in a place which is normally home to opinion. The value of opinion pieces all lies in their honesty. If you think you're reading opinion when you're really reading an advert, you're being misled. And that's bad.
Most of the time when celebrities do ads for money there's no conflict with their actual profession. In fact since they're often actors it's just another script to them.
Slashdot Mirror
In general I agree with your point, but in this case what happens if I want to play (say) Team Fortress 2 but none of the other stuff in the box? Is there another way to buy it? Because if not I can see how that might annoy some people.
Straight to the content would be nice, but be careful what you wish for... There's no way advertisers are going to accept the idea that mobile versions of pages have no ads. With the screen area so small what will happen is that ads will appear on separate screens before the content you're trying to view.
Desktop browser ads are mild by comparison. They sit at the top or the side, easily ignored. The worst they ever manage is to waste a bit of bandwidth. I predict people with more powerful phones will soon be spoofing non-phone user agents in an effort to dodge the evil phone versions of ad-supported pages.
If all the server was doing is "authenticating" then yes, quite feasible. Which is why I referred to data moving both ways. If the role of the server is less passive then any crack is not a simple matter of success or fail. No two games will have identical transactions, so it's impossible to be sure you've correctly reverse engineered the behaviour of the server.
Of course, this has the disadvantage that players without always-up net connections cannot play the game, but as this becomes an increasingly rare problem this kind of solution will be increasingly tempting for developers and publishers.
I wasn't referring just to the way some large projects go completely pear-shaped so much as the fundamental way IT is handled. For example, did you know that the civil service have fast stream specialisms for statistics and economics but not for IT in any form? This prevents them from recruiting competent professionals in this field, which in turn prevents them from running their own IT projects even for small, straightforward things. The sheer amount of money wasted by the resulting outsourcing efforts is breathtaking.
As you might expect, IT decision-making isn't much better. Often entire departments suffer from poorly thought-out software and IT strategies because nobody from the Grade 2 down knows anything about computers (or if anyone does it's so far outside their remit they don't get a say).
that's what I come to expect that at the end of the day is government driven
The UK government certainly are absolutely awful where IT projects are concerned, but in this case it's not really fair to blame them since the BBC is autonomous in this respect.
Presumably the moderator in question has the name of his OS in his gamertag.
Ken Kutaragi.
Assuming your aim was to provide information on the subject of educational standards (rather than to promote that site in particular) I would advice being cautious of the content there. That site appears to have a strong political agenda. Not that I dispute their claim to be affiliated to no particular political party, but it appears to represent one of the polar extremes in the debate over educational practice and standards.
Of course, it is difficult to find objective measures of educational productivity. However, one aspect of education which can be measured quite well is readiness of students for the world of work. According to a recent BBC article industry does not share the government's view that standards have improved.
It's aimed much younger than you. Magic Online does a good job looking after the hardcore Magic Players. But we're happy enough to use existing social networks (StarCity or Salvation message boards, according to preference). We don't need or want Gleemax. The new site is for gamers for whom discovering fellow gamers is a new and exciting experience. It's a way to give them a sense of 24/7 involvement in their hobby.
Back when I was a student I ran a dual boot machine and would try running Windows content using Wine and the like. Now? I just don't have the time to wrestle with all the problems that arise. I still run Linux on my server and it's great. But on the desktop I haven't even bothered to install Linux on my newer machine.
Current Wii installed base is about 11M worldwide, with the XBox 360 also over the 10M mark and the PS3 clear of 4M. So even if Nintendo's design decisions doubled the Wii's market that's still less than half the size a cross-platform market would have been had things been different.
From a gamer's perspective, I'm a bit puzzled by the way everyone seems to love console wars. Personally I dislike exclusives. If they're on a console I own that leaves some of my friends unable to share in my enjoyment of the game. If they're on a console I don't own that's just annoying.
The Wii's great for gaming in general, because it reminds people in the industry that actual gameplay matters. Unfortunately there are downsides too - by making what would once have been a custom peripheral into the standard controller, Nintendo ensure that most Wii games will never appear on other platforms. That's bad news for game studios, because it means less revenue per title. And anything that reduces the profitability of titles is ultimately bad for gamers too.
But there is one lesson I really, really hope the other manufacturers take away from the Wii's success: keep the costs down!
I find your lack of original commentary disturbing.
Individual purchasing decisions in a free market are a great way to arrange transactions affecting individuals. What bothers me about net neutrality is that some decisions about network architecture may be made on a "typical consumer" basis. If the typical consumer turns out not to care about (or even not to understand) net neutrality then the option for an individual to choose net neutrality could disappear (or effectively disappear due to costing orders of magnitude too much).
This is the kind of situation where it seems to me that governments and/or other non-commercial bodies have a role to play. Internet connectivity is (was?) a kind of communications standard. Screwing around with that traffic (whether by shaping, filtering or whatever) undermines that standard. And in many cases (at least theoretical if not yet practical) the company responsible is effectively running a monopoly from the perspective of individual consumers, so there is a valid case for government involvement to protect the consumers involved.
If that happened I think it might even create business opportunities. Then instead of stealthily crippling everyone's internet, companies could openly offer limited internet packages sold based on features other than bandwidth. For example, I'd love to have $10 off my monthly bill in exchange for a formal "no torrents" restriction, since I don't ever use them.
The ironic thing being that this is precisely why we care about whether NP=P or not. Because without a polynomial time algorithm, large problems remain intractable even after you massively parallelize them!
Now that would be news worthy of Slashdot... if Spore turned out to be written in OCaML!
Or even better, some pure lazy functional language. That way, the game doesn't even have any art in it until you start playing and look at something!
The implication here is that there is no (known) equilibrium mixed strategy for bluffs (because if there were then Polaris could be coded to use it).
Is that really true?! It seems very counterintuitive.
Certainly there's nothing special in general about games involving bluff. One of Von Neumann's first game theory case studies involved a simplified version of poker precisely to demonstrate how to automate bluffing.
The main thing I've been unimpressed with from this E3 is lack of decent press coverage. Pretty much no commentary, insight or news of any kind has come out of the event. Instead, I've seen at least half a dozen reports from E3 which could just about pass for press releases by the companies doing the demos.
I think they should rename it E2. Yes, it's electronic entertainment, but it's no longer an "expo".
It'll definitely get there, it'll just take a bit longer.
That's the kind of price I'm after too, except that because I'm in the UK I'll either have to import one from the US or wait even longer since for some incomprehensible reason prices are always higher here.
Did you read the article to the end? The writer himself used to work as a bomb disposal specialist.
Personally, I have no idea whether what he says is correct, but this guy isn't just offering some random opinion based on nothing whatsoever. I'm inclined to consider his viewpoint relevant.
You say that, but the most recent terrorists in London were incompetent and could have learned a lot from such a camp.
(Not that I'm advocating banning such camps, just pointing out not all terrorists have access to proper training.)
Like you say, there are bills to pay. So there's no problem if Microsoft want to pay these people as writers to write pieces for them on a particular topic. The problem starts when those pieces end up as content in a place which is normally home to opinion. The value of opinion pieces all lies in their honesty. If you think you're reading opinion when you're really reading an advert, you're being misled. And that's bad.
Most of the time when celebrities do ads for money there's no conflict with their actual profession. In fact since they're often actors it's just another script to them.