The Windows 7 and Windows 10 usage has drifted within 5 % of each other since Windows 10 first launched. The idea that a majority of people are not buying Windows 10 because of spyware concerns is far fetched, and I suspect there is little empirical evidence to back it up.
If customers believe that there is value in paying a subscription for their operating system they will do it. But it will be limited to the developed, first world nations. Governments, on the whole, aren't going to care what Operating System their citizens use.
All this does leave a door ajar for a competitor to walk through, but let's be honest: There is no practical competitor for Windows 7/10 for the home market. ReactOS looks like a clunky mess from 15 years ago.
With the price of oil this low, and likely to stay that way for many years, what economic motivation will people have to go with renewable energy now?
It made a lot of sense with oil at 100, 80, 90 dollars a barrel and the price at the pump at ridiculous levels. But when the price of gas and electricity drops in response to oil prices, what will happen to investments in renewables. I'm thinking that they suddenly will not seem as attractive anymore from a purely economic standpoint.
We need at least 60 fps constantly to experience a normal sense of motion. GPUs need to keep getting better because very few of them are able to *maintain* 60fps in modern games when scenes become more complex in certain areas. We also need to look ahead to 4K gaming which no graphics card currently can handle at acceptable framerates. http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html
There is a lot of need for faster cards, and for developers to start making use of the processing abilities of these cards in their games. I'm looking at you MMOs! ( One genre which still makes heavy use of the CPU). Now if the author had said that in gaming the CPU's speed is becoming irrelevant to frame rate, I would tend to agree. http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html
Question is why do these technological advances always come out of the United States? It seems that if Linux originated say in Germany there wouldn't be much of a problem with the NSA demanding a back door. But so much of our technology is tied to the US, and government regulations that it seems inevitable that all the popular software we use has been compromised. Which raises the question that if the NSA can access any computer, what makes us think that hackers have not found the same back doors?
Microsoft never learnt that the reason that Windows had such a large userbase and got so popular was because of piracy. The only reason it spread throughout the world the way it did, was because people could pirate the OS. That cemented a customer base in some businesses, and in the home.
What the developers and consultants can play around with at home they are more likely to recommend and use in the office environments. The office is not going to purchase additional licenses for their consultants to mess with at home. A consultant is not going to go through the expense of purchasing MS licenses for a home deployment when there are alternatives to the cost and expense. When enough consultants feel that way suddenly customers are not going to be pitched a Microsoft solution anymore.
Oh, and the people that just subscribed to a Technet subscription for software will still get the software, only this time MS might get absolutely nothing from that userbase, not even a Technet subscription.
How did they gauge what the impact of this decision would be? Did they talk to their developers and consultants before ending a decades old program that so many had come to depend on?
Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot, again, by trying to force their user base into spending more money instead of adding value. They need to recognise that there is a lot more competition out there, and people aren't starry eyed about Microsoft anymore.
Their move with the Xbox One to lock out the Rest of the World, their missteps with Windows 8 (and from what I am hearing 8.1 as well) are indicative of a company who's leadership is out of touch with its customer base. They are still riding on the successes of Bill Gates and floundering badly in the new era. What is the last great thing that came out of Microsoft?
And now, they are cutting off the people that promote and support their products in the hope of making some more money (from whom?).
What you are forgetting is that before the Fed mandated equal rights, there were NO OTHER OPTIONS.
So far from there being some sort of competition, and free market, ALL the business owners got together and rejected Blacks and other races from their establishments, segregated them and discriminated against them. And they tried to continue doing this even after laws were passed forbidding it.
In South Africa it was the same, do you remember Apartheid?
After that fight and winning those hard won battles, we finally have people coming to an age of understanding, and acceptance, and tolerance. It is finally approaching a point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And now to talk about reversing all that, and removing these rights and leaving it back up to the "Free Market" ? Please. It seems now that race relations are starting to be normalised, there are some who are afraid and want to reverse that trend by removing the protections and safeguards which have allowed it to get this far.
It's ridiculous.The notion is either steeped in idealism or its proponent is being disingenuous.
If you really think that if given the choice the businesses that would reject blacks, gays, hispanics etc. would not outnumber those that would accept them you're kidding yourself. What would pertain in the US would be segregation all over again. Business on one side of the street would be for whites, and on the other for everyone else. This is especially true in a time of hardship and economic turmoil. Minorities are always blamed, xenophobia and racism always rears its head when things are rough.
We're not in the clear with race relations yet at all. Political power in major developed nations is still held by the white majority. To even consider removing and reversing the laws that protect equal rights is unthinkable. It would be a vote for a return to just a mere 40 years ago, to the 60s.
This executive should also see it as lost revenue because HBO Go isn't international, and perhaps if it were people would choose to watch the show in glorious high definition for a fee instead of poke around on torrent sites, start and stop failed transfers, open and close ports and all the other shenanigans that we need to go through...uhh...other people need to go through...ummm....
"The next gen Kinect camera is said to be far superior over the current device and can recognize up to six people in the room. There are implications that through the Kinect device, the Xbox 720 will recognize and change various aspects of the dashboard such as theme and avatar to cater to each user."
This is already being considered with the new PS4 and Xbox 720 Kinect cameras. These machines will record in a very wide angle those who are present in the room, and can identify different users.
Rumour is that they can be turned on remotely and law enforcement agencies can co-opt feeds for various purposes. So the Television watching you all the time isn't far off.
If you believe this, though, then shouldn't the head of Maxis that actually made the statements that their servers were doing critical processing for the Single Player experience also take some blame?
If I recall the first position from Maxis was that this was their responsibility, and their design choice, implying it had nothing to do with DRM but was a "design decision" that the team made to enhance the user experience.
What business is it of theirs to go after "illegal" sites? And why can credit card companies be coerced into refusing financial services to entities which have not been found guilty of any charges?
What if Google decides a critical blog is posting "illegal" links or advertisements, can they strong arm Visa, Paypal and Mastercard to cut them off to?
Google should stick to it's business which is search engines/ Android.
This action is absolutely wrong, and it's frightening that a company with as much influence as Google (THE search engine of the internet) could be behind it.
They released a lot of hype, but have said nothing about this "MMO". Bungie is saying that they will bring the first MMO to the Xbox platform (720?), except it will be like nothing we've ever seen before. in my view that means it's not going to be an MMO, rather it will be Bungie redefining the term MMO to suit what's possible in the console environment.
We've seen the shooter MMO before: Firefall, and the ill fated Tabula Rasa and Dust 514 come to mind. Let's not forget DC Universe on the PS3. So what's revolutionary?
Until we see much more, I don't think anyone can opine that the game looks great or the concept is radically different. What we do know, though, is that cash shop purchases over Xbox Live is most probably a gold mine waiting to be tapped:)
Download the episodes and watch them all at once, back to back?
Others will not be able to afford Cable, may have to wait to view the current episode, or have no digital availability in "your region" etc.
Make these shows available worldwide, at the same time digitally and otherwise and piracy will drop.
Or at any rate, those that pirate will not have been customers able or willing to purchase in the first place.
I'd love to know what countries pirate game of thrones the most, whether it is the United States, or countries outside the US.
What the MPAA and the Networks have yet to explain is why:
A) I pay as much or More for my cable television living outside the US?
B) The US Channels including HBO, Showtime (simply not available), Starz, Discovery, National Geographic and educational channels show premium recent shows and the channels I get outside the United States show older series and movies?
C) Why I speak English yet I am lumped in Latin America where many shows are in Spanish with no subtitles, and foreign language films are unwatchable because there are no subtitles.
D) My Cable companies publicised that they tried to negotiate with US firms to allow them to show the US Feeds and were told that they simply were not available outside the US, fullstop. Pay a million, pay 40 million...they aren't available, take this content which we package for you because we have already shown it to our own people.
E) Why does Netflix Latin America lack over 25,000 movies and series titles that are available on Netflix USA, but I pay the same subscription fee?
F) Why is the content on Hulu not available worldwide?
G) Why can I pay 800USD for an iPhone, 250USD for a Kindle Fire, and 800USD for an iPad but I can't purchase the latest apps or add my credit card to the iTunes store because I do not live in the United States?
H) Why can I purchase a Kindle Touch but cannot purchase over 30,000 books because I am not a US citizen? Why when the Kindle was first available was I paying a dollar more for every book purchase from Amazon?
I) Why are unabridged DVD and BluRay collections in some cases available only in the United States? Why is Amazon prevented from shipping them outside the US?
I'd love a follow up question to the so called "authorities" as to why Foreigners are made to pay more for substandard services and products (in my view, showing old movies at current prices is a scam) and this is not considered a violation of Trade agreements. Under WTO agreements you cannot sell a higher quality product to your own citizens and create an inferior product for export (and especially not at the same price).
Answer those questions, and then we can start talking about why non-US citizens (i.e. the other 6.7 BILLION people in the world) may pirate content when they may be able to afford the products.
Sorry, no sympathy for an industry that made record breaking profits last year while crying about how much money it was losing, and doing its best in my view to racketeer profits from overseas markets through an opaque system of IP licensing and distribution.
What has an even larger impact on the bottom line of Developers than Second Hand Games, or Piracy, is Distribution Restrictions which can cause both of these issues.
If you live outside the United States, Canada and Mexico currently there is NO WAY to get a digital copy of Fable III. That means the other 6 BILLION people in the world have no way to get this outside of waiting for the game to reach their stores. Maybe. (I'd be waiting a long time where I live, since there really are no major chains that support PC Gaming).
So I can SEE that the game is available on Direct2Drive, Steam (actually steam hides games that are geo-restricted from you). And I have the Credit Card, and the money to make the purchase...but I cannot.
But I do have 100Mbps internet available to my doorstep. So what do you think myself and other 6 Billion people are going to do after being bombarded by marketing online and at major game review sites on the internet? Charge me a dollar extra if you want to, to compensate for the bandwidth it would take you to beam the game to us rejects out here?
So in my view the Developers and Publishers can shove it. They create a situation, create a problem and then complain about it, and the RIAA and the MPAA ram legislation and onerous copyright laws through courts; and attach rider agreements to Trade Agreements demanding changes to Copyright Laws in poor and developing countries.
This doesn't get into the "special" business arrangements that Developers have with their customers, where they want to "license" their products. Why we put up with this unfair and onesided arrangement is beyond me.
All the Licenses in the world didn't help me when Sony got hacked and my Credit Card and personal information ended up in the hands of hackers did it? But Lionhead wants to prevent me from selling my game to a friend or to a store when I'm finished with it because it is "Licensed" and not "owned"?
There was a time when Customers had rights. I could record a song off the radio and put it onto a tape and play it in my car. When I was finished reading a book, I could keep it on my shelf and give it to my little brother, or hand it to a friend. Developers, Publishers and the Cartels which represent them are taking those rights away through Technology. DRM, DMCA laws etc.
In my view, I can't think of any party based game that would not benefit from having co-op included. That is, any game where your 'main character' is followed by a group of AI controlled characters could benefit from Co-Op through that campaign.
Having the ability for a human player to jump in is fun. I've heard developers say that the second player feels left out, because the main character makes all the decisions...but that was never my experience. In all these games, there is the quest story..and then the combat. Yes, there may be some feeling of being left out of the story, but normally players communicate about the choices, and come to a compromise. The idea is that with Co-Op play you will most probably be playing with a friend. You just need a few nods to the fact that there could be co-op, to get the thing integrated. We have never seen a game like Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2 since those titles hit the market. And afaik they both sold fairly well. NWN 2 would still be on the radar if ATARI had not apparently decided to kill it off (Now they are going with Cryptic for NWN 3 as a MMORPG model with a "foundry" style mission builder like STO and City of Heroes...which I fear will tank).
Bulletstorm is another title that I think could have benefited from a Co-Op mode, regardless of what the Developers said. Could you imagine teaming up to do kill combos etc. ? It could have been the next Borderlands.
No. The real reason this isn't included in more titles in my view is this: PROFIT. That's all it is. It costs more to implement proper networking code, making the necessary commitments to UI etc. through the campaign, additional Q&A testing. Then there is the game length and difficulty. Many games boast 10 hours of play time, but this isn't actually 10 hours of pure content. This includes how many times the average person will need to REPEAT existing parts of the game to get past them (see Speed Runs). So having two capable Human players play a game, will cut that playtime in most cases (if the game isn't written to scale hit points, tactics, weapons etc. when it recognises two human players). So you actually need to have more GAME in there to support two human players increasing costs again. Then if your game is created for the Console (which most are these days) you need to also pass through an additional layer of QA testing, etc. to make sure it works seamlessly.
All this is why I think the biggest impediment is simply Profit., not about games needing co-op or not. Adding co-op doesn't remove market share, all it does is add to it.
Games I would have liked to play Co-Op : Dragon Age Series, Mass Effect Series, Bulletstorm Campaign, Crysis + Crysis 2 campaigns,Grand Theft Auto campaigns. Now did any of these *need* co-op? no. They would have just been far better for having it, in my view. But where Bioware is concerned, we have Knights of the Old Republic for that eh?:-) Comes right back to PROFIT.
It isn't just cutting prices, it is making content available WORLDWIDE. Outside the US you cannot see Series and view television shows on Hulu. There is NO option for this type of service. If you use Amazon, you can't read all the books, or see all the shows, or listen to all the music. There are Region locks on everything. So even if you as a Non-US citizen WANT to pay, these companies block you.
Effectively saying we don't want your money. But then they turn around and count a download from your region as part of billions of dollars in lost sales due to piracy.
How does that make sense?
There is no physical product to move. You can charge 1 dollar extra to cover any additional bandwidth from outside the US. There are so many things that can be done, but instead there is a blanket refusal to provide the content. Whether it is books (educational or otherwise), Game downloads, Movie Downloads, or Music DOwnloads. People outside the US go through great lengths to be able to PAY for their music on iTunes for example. It's ridiculous.
Newsflash. People aren't going to say "Well I'm not from the US therefore I should not be watching these shows" . They are going to find a way to get this content. And in doing so they are going to fall prey to malware, trojans, and all manner of nasties that are embedded in blackmarket content and methods of obtaining it through websites, torrents etc. And that starts a vicious cycle.
Is it that the powers that be see a gold mine in starting a War On Piracy, the way there is a War on Drugs, and a War on Terrorism? None of which ever solve the underlying issues and have proven to be the worst way to address the problem...but they do enrich certain segments of government and the corporate market.
At any rate the goals of Governments and lobby groups does not seem to be to maximise sales and boost profits, the goal seems to be to criminalise an activity in order to support and promote bad business practice through legislation. In that scenario neither the public nor the artists win.
They *skirted* the law by setting up shop in a sensible country, rather than in the US;-) Whilst the enormous and very willing US market makes it very attractive for these ventures, the legal and political shenanigans represents a risk.
In my view this is a complete non-issue surrounding transactions that have taken place for decades before the rise of cell phones and facebook. Methinks someone just wants their cut and is using children to attempt to legislate a mechanism of control.
If these companies were to move their operations to , let's say Sweden, would the FTC even have jurisdiction over in-game transactions?
Another problem with the Total Multiplayer model is that if everything is controlled by EA's servers, you can't use mods. That's a huge plus for PC based gaming, being able to modify many titles to adjust the gameplay to what you want. For example I've modified most of the Tom Clancy games to unlimited ammo for my friends and I. Why? We just prefer playing them that way. Is it wrong? If we enjoy it then not at all. I have also used 'Realism' mods in those games as well. Look at a game like Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2. Or Elder Scrolls series. Fallout New Vegas. Without that Speed mod for Fallout New Vegas , I would never have gotten as far as I did, because I find travel time to be highly annoying. Similarly with Dragon Age.There are lots of mods, one key mod is Skip the Fade where you can skip a highly annoying part of the story. Having everything controlled by the Publisher removes all that player choice from the games. (Now please note, I am not talking about cheating in multiplayer to gain an advantage over other players.That's wrong).This is a grab for more money, and more profit by tacking on microtransactions to every single game that is published. But the consumer loses. We have seen that even a great title like Halo Wars is likely to be shut down. I can still go back and replay Neverwinter Nights 1 adventures if I want to. I can still fire up Oblivion. If all these games were controlled by Publisher's servers, they would not still be around because it would no longer be profitable to maintain the servers. Again, this is a lose lose scenario for the consumer.
ISPs spend more money and more R&D finding new ways to detect file sharing than on finding and stopping DDOS attacks, Malware or Spyware.
It has been proven that the losses which the RIAA quote are fanciful at best and totally false at worst.Yet no one mentions the very real and measurable losses that Spyware, malware, and DDOS attacks cause businesses and home users worldwide.
There was a time when the hardware and software to do inspections of networks to determine if file sharing protocols were used, what was being shared across torrent networks, to identify music in videos for copyright infringement and a host of other methods did not exist. R&D was done, probably hundreds of millions were spent, and now these technologies exist and are in use today (and much to the dismay of toddlers and grandmothers sued out of house and home they work). So the argument that 'It's too hard...' or 'We can't easily find them' isn't valid.
Websites distributing Viruses, Spyware and Malware can stay up for a decade with no media attention, and no law enforcement attention. But try posting a site that offers a few albums for download and the cease and desist notices fly fast and furious.
The issue of DDOS, Spyware, Malware and Viruses transmitted over the internet is a far more immediate issue facing internet users internationally, and yet it receives almost no attention by the government.
This is the type of law and the type of legislation which scares the MPAA and the RIAA. The fact that other nations have not followed the United States' and the EU's adoption of draconian copyright law which removes the rights of the Consumer does not fall in line with the business strategies of these international cartels.
ACTA is meant to supercede any existing copyright laws of a country which signs to the treaty. So Canada, India and others can have whatever fair and just laws they wish, it will not matter once they are made to sign the ACTA agreement.
What's happening is very insidious, and it is something that citizens must guard very carefully against. The period of economic growth and innovation which we have seen via the Internet is based in no small part on Fair Use.
Three things threaten this: 1) Problems with The Patent System 2) Unfair and Draconian Copyright laws. 3) Any loss of net neutrality.
Countries such as Germany mandate that their roads, the famous Autobahn, must constitute a certain percentage of pitch from Trinidad. The Asphalt from the pitch lake is internationally acclaimed for its high percentage of asphalt resins and world renowned for its quality.It is also the world's largest and most consistent deposit of natural asphalt.
It is used in New York's Kennedy and La Guardia airports,to line the George Washington Bridge,and as previously stated in the German Autobahn system to name a few.
In the face of all this the cavalier and in some sense derogatory terminology used by the poster is both unfortunate and inaccurate. One suspects the author has never actually visited the Pitch Lake in Trinidad. It doesn't smell, it is not filled with noxious fumes. The area is quite pleasant and forested.
The pitch lake represents a little understood and fascinating eco-system, and it's great that it is finally being researched. It is incredible when one imagines how much of our past can be found in its depths,claimed from the earth tens of thousands of years ago, resting somewhere within it.
Slashdot Mirror
The Windows 7 and Windows 10 usage has drifted within 5 % of each other since Windows 10 first launched. The idea that a majority of people are not buying Windows 10 because of spyware concerns is far fetched, and I suspect there is little empirical evidence to back it up.
If customers believe that there is value in paying a subscription for their operating system they will do it. But it will be limited to the developed, first world nations. Governments, on the whole, aren't going to care what Operating System their citizens use.
All this does leave a door ajar for a competitor to walk through, but let's be honest: There is no practical competitor for Windows 7/10 for the home market. ReactOS looks like a clunky mess from 15 years ago.
I was just thinking the same thing. Crowdfund two or three of the most popular and see what happens to their rhetoric.
If Iran ramps up production, and there is even MORE supply, how will that help the price of Oil to rise?
If the Chinese economy dwindles and there is even less DEMAND, how will that help the price of oil to rise?
Iran pumping more = even more Supply.
China economy faltering = even less Demand.
So why would the price of oil increase?
With the price of oil this low, and likely to stay that way for many years, what economic motivation will people have to go with renewable energy now?
It made a lot of sense with oil at 100, 80, 90 dollars a barrel and the price at the pump at ridiculous levels. But when the price of gas and electricity drops in response to oil prices, what will happen to investments in renewables. I'm thinking that they suddenly will not seem as attractive anymore from a purely economic standpoint.
We need at least 60 fps constantly to experience a normal sense of motion. GPUs need to keep getting better because very few of them are able to *maintain* 60fps in modern games when scenes become more complex in certain areas. We also need to look ahead to 4K gaming which no graphics card currently can handle at acceptable framerates. http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html
There is a lot of need for faster cards, and for developers to start making use of the processing abilities of these cards in their games. I'm looking at you MMOs! ( One genre which still makes heavy use of the CPU). Now if the author had said that in gaming the CPU's speed is becoming irrelevant to frame rate, I would tend to agree. http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html
It's wrong, no doubt about that. And I think it will fail if challenged in court.
But does the person being investigated have the money to fight this aspect of the case?
I see this as a widening of the censorship net around Information Technology.
Precedent can sometimes be a dangerous thing.
Question is why do these technological advances always come out of the United States? It seems that if Linux originated say in Germany there wouldn't be much of a problem with the NSA demanding a back door.
But so much of our technology is tied to the US, and government regulations that it seems inevitable that all the popular software we use has been compromised. Which raises the question that if the NSA can access any computer, what makes us think that hackers have not found the same back doors?
Microsoft never learnt that the reason that Windows had such a large userbase and got so popular was because of piracy. The only reason it spread throughout the world the way it did, was because people could pirate the OS. That cemented a customer base in some businesses, and in the home.
What the developers and consultants can play around with at home they are more likely to recommend and use in the office environments. The office is not going to purchase additional licenses for their consultants to mess with at home. A consultant is not going to go through the expense of purchasing MS licenses for a home deployment when there are alternatives to the cost and expense. When enough consultants feel that way suddenly customers are not going to be pitched a Microsoft solution anymore.
Oh, and the people that just subscribed to a Technet subscription for software will still get the software, only this time MS might get absolutely nothing from that userbase, not even a Technet subscription.
How did they gauge what the impact of this decision would be? Did they talk to their developers and consultants before ending a decades old program that so many had come to depend on?
Microsoft is shooting itself in the foot, again, by trying to force their user base into spending more money instead of adding value. They need to recognise that there is a lot more competition out there, and people aren't starry eyed about Microsoft anymore.
Their move with the Xbox One to lock out the Rest of the World, their missteps with Windows 8 (and from what I am hearing 8.1 as well) are indicative of a company who's leadership is out of touch with its customer base. They are still riding on the successes of Bill Gates and floundering badly in the new era. What is the last great thing that came out of Microsoft?
And now, they are cutting off the people that promote and support their products in the hope of making some more money (from whom?).
What you are forgetting is that before the Fed mandated equal rights, there were NO OTHER OPTIONS.
So far from there being some sort of competition, and free market, ALL the business owners got together and rejected Blacks and other races from their establishments, segregated them and discriminated against them. And they tried to continue doing this even after laws were passed forbidding it.
In South Africa it was the same, do you remember Apartheid?
After that fight and winning those hard won battles, we finally have people coming to an age of understanding, and acceptance, and tolerance. It is finally approaching a point where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
And now to talk about reversing all that, and removing these rights and leaving it back up to the "Free Market" ?
Please. It seems now that race relations are starting to be normalised, there are some who are afraid and want to reverse that trend by removing the protections and safeguards which have allowed it to get this far.
It's ridiculous.The notion is either steeped in idealism or its proponent is being disingenuous.
If you really think that if given the choice the businesses that would reject blacks, gays, hispanics etc. would not outnumber those that would accept them you're kidding yourself. What would pertain in the US would be segregation all over again. Business on one side of the street would be for whites, and on the other for everyone else. This is especially true in a time of hardship and economic turmoil. Minorities are always blamed, xenophobia and racism always rears its head when things are rough.
We're not in the clear with race relations yet at all. Political power in major developed nations is still held by the white majority.
To even consider removing and reversing the laws that protect equal rights is unthinkable. It would be a vote for a return to just a mere 40 years ago, to the 60s.
This executive should also see it as lost revenue because HBO Go isn't international, and perhaps if it were people would choose to watch the show in glorious high definition for a fee instead of poke around on torrent sites, start and stop failed transfers, open and close ports and all the other shenanigans that we need to go through...uhh...other people need to go through...ummm....
http://gamer.blorge.com/2013/02/11/xbox-720-wont-turn-on-without-kinect-connected/
"The next gen Kinect camera is said to be far superior over the current device and can recognize up to six people in the room. There are implications that through the Kinect device, the Xbox 720 will recognize and change various aspects of the dashboard such as theme and avatar to cater to each user."
It can recognise you....
*twilight zone theme song*
This is already being considered with the new PS4 and Xbox 720 Kinect cameras. These machines will record in a very wide angle those who are present in the room, and can identify different users.
Rumour is that they can be turned on remotely and law enforcement agencies can co-opt feeds for various purposes. So the Television watching you all the time isn't far off.
If you believe this, though, then shouldn't the head of Maxis that actually made the statements that their servers were doing critical processing for the Single Player experience also take some blame?
If I recall the first position from Maxis was that this was their responsibility, and their design choice, implying it had nothing to do with DRM but was a "design decision" that the team made to enhance the user experience.
What business is it of theirs to go after "illegal" sites? And why can credit card companies be coerced into refusing financial services to entities which have not been found guilty of any charges?
What if Google decides a critical blog is posting "illegal" links or advertisements, can they strong arm Visa, Paypal and Mastercard to cut them off to?
Google should stick to it's business which is search engines/ Android.
We must also remember that Mastercard LOST their case against Wikileaks and afaik must pay about 21 Million USD to them.
http://mashable.com/2012/07/12/wikileaks-wins-battle-against-visa-mastercard/
This action is absolutely wrong, and it's frightening that a company with as much influence as Google (THE search engine of the internet) could be behind it.
They released a lot of hype, but have said nothing about this "MMO".
Bungie is saying that they will bring the first MMO to the Xbox platform (720?), except it will be like nothing we've ever seen before. in my view that means it's not going to be an MMO, rather it will be Bungie redefining the term MMO to suit what's possible in the console environment.
Champions Online, Marvel Universe Online and a few others tried to go the MMO route on the Xbox 360 and all backed off it for numerous reasons including scalability, Xbox Live support, and others ( http://www.ign.com/articles/2010/03/24/champions-online-no-longer-coming-to-the-360 ) .
We've seen the shooter MMO before: Firefall, and the ill fated Tabula Rasa and Dust 514 come to mind. Let's not forget DC Universe on the PS3. So what's revolutionary?
Until we see much more, I don't think anyone can opine that the game looks great or the concept is radically different. What we do know, though, is that cash shop purchases over Xbox Live is most probably a gold mine waiting to be tapped :)
Download the episodes and watch them all at once, back to back?
Others will not be able to afford Cable, may have to wait to view the current episode, or have no digital availability in "your region" etc.
Make these shows available worldwide, at the same time digitally and otherwise and piracy will drop.
Or at any rate, those that pirate will not have been customers able or willing to purchase in the first place.
I'd love to know what countries pirate game of thrones the most, whether it is the United States, or countries outside the US.
What the MPAA and the Networks have yet to explain is why:
A) I pay as much or More for my cable television living outside the US?
B) The US Channels including HBO, Showtime (simply not available), Starz, Discovery, National Geographic and educational channels show premium recent shows and the channels I get outside the United States show older series and movies?
C) Why I speak English yet I am lumped in Latin America where many shows are in Spanish with no subtitles, and foreign language films are unwatchable because there are no subtitles.
D) My Cable companies publicised that they tried to negotiate with US firms to allow them to show the US Feeds and were told that they simply were not available outside the US, fullstop. Pay a million, pay 40 million...they aren't available, take this content which we package for you because we have already shown it to our own people.
E) Why does Netflix Latin America lack over 25,000 movies and series titles that are available on Netflix USA, but I pay the same subscription fee?
F) Why is the content on Hulu not available worldwide?
G) Why can I pay 800USD for an iPhone, 250USD for a Kindle Fire, and 800USD for an iPad but I can't purchase the latest apps or add my credit card to the iTunes store because I do not live in the United States?
H) Why can I purchase a Kindle Touch but cannot purchase over 30,000 books because I am not a US citizen? Why when the Kindle was first available was I paying a dollar more for every book purchase from Amazon?
I) Why are unabridged DVD and BluRay collections in some cases available only in the United States? Why is Amazon prevented from shipping them outside the US?
I'd love a follow up question to the so called "authorities" as to why Foreigners are made to pay more for substandard services and products (in my view, showing old movies at current prices is a scam) and this is not considered a violation of Trade agreements. Under WTO agreements you cannot sell a higher quality product to your own citizens and create an inferior product for export (and especially not at the same price).
Answer those questions, and then we can start talking about why non-US citizens (i.e. the other 6.7 BILLION people in the world) may pirate content when they may be able to afford the products.
Secondly, take a look at this Oatmeal comic which brings the point home as well: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones
Sorry, no sympathy for an industry that made record breaking profits last year while crying about how much money it was losing, and doing its best in my view to racketeer profits from overseas markets through an opaque system of IP licensing and distribution.
What has an even larger impact on the bottom line of Developers than Second Hand Games, or Piracy, is Distribution Restrictions which can cause both of these issues.
If you live outside the United States, Canada and Mexico currently there is NO WAY to get a digital copy of Fable III. That means the other 6 BILLION people in the world have no way to get this outside of waiting for the game to reach their stores. Maybe. (I'd be waiting a long time where I live, since there really are no major chains that support PC Gaming).
So I can SEE that the game is available on Direct2Drive, Steam (actually steam hides games that are geo-restricted from you). And I have the Credit Card, and the money to make the purchase...but I cannot.
But I do have 100Mbps internet available to my doorstep. So what do you think myself and other 6 Billion people are going to do after being bombarded by marketing online and at major game review sites on the internet? Charge me a dollar extra if you want to, to compensate for the bandwidth it would take you to beam the game to us rejects out here?
So in my view the Developers and Publishers can shove it. They create a situation, create a problem and then complain about it, and the RIAA and the MPAA ram legislation and onerous copyright laws through courts; and attach rider agreements to Trade Agreements demanding changes to Copyright Laws in poor and developing countries.
This doesn't get into the "special" business arrangements that Developers have with their customers, where they want to "license" their products. Why we put up with this unfair and onesided arrangement is beyond me.
All the Licenses in the world didn't help me when Sony got hacked and my Credit Card and personal information ended up in the hands of hackers did it?
But Lionhead wants to prevent me from selling my game to a friend or to a store when I'm finished with it because it is "Licensed" and not "owned"?
There was a time when Customers had rights. I could record a song off the radio and put it onto a tape and play it in my car. When I was finished reading a book, I could keep it on my shelf and give it to my little brother, or hand it to a friend. Developers, Publishers and the Cartels which represent them are taking those rights away through Technology. DRM, DMCA laws etc.
Did I mention they could go shove it?
I don't know if "honey but we made history!" is going to work :-\
In my view, I can't think of any party based game that would not benefit from having co-op included. That is, any game where your 'main character' is followed by a group of AI controlled characters could benefit from Co-Op through that campaign.
Having the ability for a human player to jump in is fun. I've heard developers say that the second player feels left out, because the main character makes all the decisions...but that was never my experience. In all these games, there is the quest story..and then the combat. Yes, there may be some feeling of being left out of the story, but normally players communicate about the choices, and come to a compromise. The idea is that with Co-Op play you will most probably be playing with a friend. You just need a few nods to the fact that there could be co-op, to get the thing integrated. We have never seen a game like Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2 since those titles hit the market. And afaik they both sold fairly well. NWN 2 would still be on the radar if ATARI had not apparently decided to kill it off (Now they are going with Cryptic for NWN 3 as a MMORPG model with a "foundry" style mission builder like STO and City of Heroes...which I fear will tank).
Bulletstorm is another title that I think could have benefited from a Co-Op mode, regardless of what the Developers said. Could you imagine teaming up to do kill combos etc. ? It could have been the next Borderlands.
No. The real reason this isn't included in more titles in my view is this: PROFIT.
That's all it is. It costs more to implement proper networking code, making the necessary commitments to UI etc. through the campaign, additional Q&A testing. Then there is the game length and difficulty. Many games boast 10 hours of play time, but this isn't actually 10 hours of pure content. This includes how many times the average person will need to REPEAT existing parts of the game to get past them (see Speed Runs). So having two capable Human players play a game, will cut that playtime in most cases (if the game isn't written to scale hit points, tactics, weapons etc. when it recognises two human players). So you actually need to have more GAME in there to support two human players increasing costs again. Then if your game is created for the Console (which most are these days) you need to also pass through an additional layer of QA testing, etc. to make sure it works seamlessly.
All this is why I think the biggest impediment is simply Profit., not about games needing co-op or not. Adding co-op doesn't remove market share, all it does is add to it.
Games I would have liked to play Co-Op : Dragon Age Series, Mass Effect Series, Bulletstorm Campaign, Crysis + Crysis 2 campaigns,Grand Theft Auto campaigns. Now did any of these *need* co-op? no. They would have just been far better for having it, in my view. But where Bioware is concerned, we have Knights of the Old Republic for that eh? :-) Comes right back to PROFIT.
It isn't just cutting prices, it is making content available WORLDWIDE. Outside the US you cannot see Series and view television shows on Hulu. There is NO option for this type of service. If you use Amazon, you can't read all the books, or see all the shows, or listen to all the music. There are Region locks on everything. So even if you as a Non-US citizen WANT to pay, these companies block you.
Effectively saying we don't want your money. But then they turn around and count a download from your region as part of billions of dollars in lost sales due to piracy.
How does that make sense?
There is no physical product to move. You can charge 1 dollar extra to cover any additional bandwidth from outside the US. There are so many things that can be done, but instead there is a blanket refusal to provide the content. Whether it is books (educational or otherwise), Game downloads, Movie Downloads, or Music DOwnloads. People outside the US go through great lengths to be able to PAY for their music on iTunes for example. It's ridiculous.
Newsflash. People aren't going to say "Well I'm not from the US therefore I should not be watching these shows" . They are going to find a way to get this content. And in doing so they are going to fall prey to malware, trojans, and all manner of nasties that are embedded in blackmarket content and methods of obtaining it through websites, torrents etc. And that starts a vicious cycle.
Is it that the powers that be see a gold mine in starting a War On Piracy, the way there is a War on Drugs, and a War on Terrorism? None of which ever solve the underlying issues and have proven to be the worst way to address the problem...but they do enrich certain segments of government and the corporate market.
At any rate the goals of Governments and lobby groups does not seem to be to maximise sales and boost profits, the goal seems to be to criminalise an activity in order to support and promote bad business practice through legislation. In that scenario neither the public nor the artists win.
They *skirted* the law by setting up shop in a sensible country, rather than in the US ;-)
Whilst the enormous and very willing US market makes it very attractive for these ventures, the legal and political shenanigans represents a risk.
In my view this is a complete non-issue surrounding transactions that have taken place for decades before the rise of cell phones and facebook.
Methinks someone just wants their cut and is using children to attempt to legislate a mechanism of control.
If these companies were to move their operations to , let's say Sweden, would the FTC even have jurisdiction over in-game transactions?
Another problem with the Total Multiplayer model is that if everything is controlled by EA's servers, you can't use mods. That's a huge plus for PC based gaming, being able to modify many titles to adjust the gameplay to what you want. For example I've modified most of the Tom Clancy games to unlimited ammo for my friends and I. Why? We just prefer playing them that way. Is it wrong? If we enjoy it then not at all. I have also used 'Realism' mods in those games as well. Look at a game like Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2. Or Elder Scrolls series. Fallout New Vegas. Without that Speed mod for Fallout New Vegas , I would never have gotten as far as I did, because I find travel time to be highly annoying. Similarly with Dragon Age.There are lots of mods, one key mod is Skip the Fade where you can skip a highly annoying part of the story. Having everything controlled by the Publisher removes all that player choice from the games. (Now please note, I am not talking about cheating in multiplayer to gain an advantage over other players.That's wrong).This is a grab for more money, and more profit by tacking on microtransactions to every single game that is published. But the consumer loses. We have seen that even a great title like Halo Wars is likely to be shut down. I can still go back and replay Neverwinter Nights 1 adventures if I want to. I can still fire up Oblivion. If all these games were controlled by Publisher's servers, they would not still be around because it would no longer be profitable to maintain the servers. Again, this is a lose lose scenario for the consumer.
ISPs spend more money and more R&D finding new ways to detect file sharing than on finding and stopping DDOS attacks, Malware or Spyware.
It has been proven that the losses which the RIAA quote are fanciful at best and totally false at worst.Yet no one mentions the very real and measurable losses that Spyware, malware, and DDOS attacks cause businesses and home users worldwide.
There was a time when the hardware and software to do inspections of networks to determine if file sharing protocols were used, what was being shared across torrent networks, to identify music in videos for copyright infringement and a host of other methods did not exist. R&D was done, probably hundreds of millions were spent, and now these technologies exist and are in use today (and much to the dismay of toddlers and grandmothers sued out of house and home they work). So the argument that 'It's too hard...' or 'We can't easily find them' isn't valid.
Websites distributing Viruses, Spyware and Malware can stay up for a decade with no media attention, and no law enforcement attention. But try posting a site that offers a few albums for download and the cease and desist notices fly fast and furious.
The issue of DDOS, Spyware, Malware and Viruses transmitted over the internet is a far more immediate issue facing internet users internationally, and yet it receives almost no attention by the government.
Why is that?
This is the type of law and the type of legislation which scares the MPAA and the RIAA. The fact that other nations have not followed the United States' and the EU's adoption of draconian copyright law which removes the rights of the Consumer does not fall in line with the business strategies of these international cartels.
ACTA is meant to supercede any existing copyright laws of a country which signs to the treaty. So Canada, India and others can have whatever fair and just laws they wish, it will not matter once they are made to sign the ACTA agreement.
What's happening is very insidious, and it is something that citizens must guard very carefully against. The period of economic growth and innovation which we have seen via the Internet is based in no small part on Fair Use.
Three things threaten this:
1) Problems with The Patent System
2) Unfair and Draconian Copyright laws.
3) Any loss of net neutrality.
It is actually a tourist attraction.
Countries such as Germany mandate that their roads, the famous Autobahn, must constitute a certain percentage of pitch from Trinidad. The Asphalt from the pitch lake is internationally acclaimed for its high percentage of asphalt resins and world renowned for its quality.It is also the world's largest and most consistent deposit of natural asphalt.
It is used in New York's Kennedy and La Guardia airports,to line the George Washington Bridge,and as previously stated in the German Autobahn system to name a few.
In the face of all this the cavalier and in some sense derogatory terminology used by the poster is both unfortunate and inaccurate. One suspects the author has never actually visited the Pitch Lake in Trinidad. It doesn't smell, it is not filled with noxious fumes. The area is quite pleasant and forested.
The pitch lake represents a little understood and fascinating eco-system, and it's great that it is finally being researched. It is incredible when one imagines how much of our past can be found in its depths,claimed from the earth tens of thousands of years ago, resting somewhere within it.