Amazing how folks on Slashdot think that the industry is totally deaf.
"I'm too much of a Mac snob to buy games that would even function on another system." "I pay $15 a month for WoW because I have to but torrent everything else I can get my hands on, because I hate DRM."
Its almost like that sort of attitude among customers might, hmm, drive business decisions or something.
I often wonder at how people in countries with a VAT (and, relatedly, Americans living in localities with high sales taxes) are shocked, shocked that when they compare notes with friends abroad prices are lower.
Australia has a Goods & Services tax. 10% on the top. Considering I paid US$60 for my copy with no sales taxes, I'm guessing about a third of your "no reasons" are in Melbourne by now.
(You know you guys used to have a 35% duty on packaged software? Fun times. Thankfully that got removed in '84.)
Maybe you need to be thinking of charging *more*? Because seriously, no need to be chasing after downmarket customers. No computer programmer "wins" a contract for $25 an hour -- they're losing by accepting it, and they just don't know it yet. I give them about three days before they're in poor spec "Redo everything the right way this time!" hell, and of course Cheapo Charlie the client does not want to pay a penny for it.
You need to encapsulate that in a class. And your main method signature is wrong -- needs to take a String array as an argument, or else the program will say "No such method found (main)" and die.
Honestly, its almost like no one on Slashdot programs in Java some days...;)
24 gigs a month, on Japanese connection with a ridiculously high effective limit. The majority is Amazon Unbox TV shows, which weigh in at about a gig apiece, plus the odd rental movie or digital delivered videogame, and YouTube usage.
Content which isn't a game or movie is so small these days it can't even move the meter. (I laugh in the general direction of worrying about how many kb my homepage has -- honestly more important that the Javascript renders quickly than it download quickly.)
Should hosts of goblins besiege your gates, drive your peasantry inside and force you to seal off from the outside world, you may have already lost the game. Although a dwarven fortress can be made to appear self-contained, with sources of metal, fuel, underground crops and even livestock kept within inaccessible tunnels, very rarely if ever can a fortress sustain such a state indefinitely.... One fell miscalculation of your fuel reserves may leave you without coke to refine further coal, and without a supply of timber for your wood burning furnace this can drive your weaponsmiths to melancholy or berserk rage... Your watersupply and aqueducts can be assaulted unless sealed off, and caverivers almost always send sporadic, bloodthirsty monsters... But should you be waterless, your wounded will die of dehydration and your entire colony will hinge on booze production; a delicate balancing act.
With all these critical industries unproductive, dwarves dying, and friends mourning over the rotting heaps of slain loved ones, its important to remember your dwarves have nothing to do but throw funeral receptions, grief counseling sessions, and the occasional keg stand. This means they've all become one big happy family of friends, manically depressed from the loss of any dwarf.
In short, the attacking army can simply wait until your dwarves emo themselves to death.
Retrieved from "http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Losing"
Look at the details of the exploit: exploitation of a web browser and then privilege escalation by clobbering a trusted processes' stack because it didn't check input. The list of well used programs which have NOT seen buffer overrun attacks is pretty darn small, and it will continue to be small for as long as programmers insist on managing memory.
I'm of the opinion that managing memory is like writing a cryptography library: you should leave the task to someone who is actually capable of doing it. If you think you're capable of doing it, you're deluding yourself.
Of course, your perfect world has a crushing undersupply of videogames in it. The ones that do exist are inferior, in almost all respects other than "freedom", to commercial games (which they are often shamelessly derivative copies of -- OpenInsertNameOfGameHere, anyone?)
Bona fides: I have contributor access to MegaMek, a clone of the Battletech rules that you can play over the Internets. That game wouldn't exist without FASA actually doing the hard work of game design. I am pretty proud of our project for keeping the game vital even after the corporate sponsor went under and then moved in a different direction under new management, but take it from somebody who knows, our production values are a joke compared to anything you've paid for in the last 5 years, the core attraction to our game is the fun and unfree ruleset (and nostalgia value), and by the stats we're one of the best game projects on SF.
I love commercial entertainment. May they be around and healthy, forever, even if that means RMS has a coronary about it.
Every time you hear "Its not piracy, its copyright infringement", industry hears "We should be putting this content on our servers, behind a pay-wall, where the folks who consume what we make will have to pay for it".
Its not industry's fault if your business model is broken.
... but the Germans used to aim rockets with a map, a coordinate system, and a bit of high school mathematics. I'm guessing that math still works, even on orbital platforms.
... but for some of us, the difference between $50 and $56 is not so much a lunch out as it is staying an extra four minutes past quitting time. I don't normally worry too much about exactly when I get my brand new toys, but for the ones I've been eagerly anticipating for forever, sure, bill me for the FedEx. (Better still, figure out how to let me download you in advance. I love digital delivery and I spend my entertainment budget appropriately, industry watchers!)
So you've got an entire corps of ghosts -- super-intelligent, psionic assassins with a mortality rate of probably 50% and 80% when they go out to do nuke spotting... and nobody ever realized that if you are firing nuclear weapons, you don't really *need* laser-precision accuracy? Because they're, you know, nuclear weapons? What's the worst thing that happens, you overshoot the ultralisk by 50 yards and only burn it to ash instead of annihilating it on a subatomic level?
I sort of prefer spelling it "ruby". You may have heard of it -- it is like Perl. It supports descriptive identifiers, comments, and (mostly) sane code organization. Unlike Perl, its programmers are encouraged to use these language facilities, rather than laughing them off as crutches for the weak.
If I sound bitter, blame 60k lines of Perl accompanied by 100 lines of comments written in barely literate Japanese and spread over 200 files. Yes, that does mean that many files had no comments whatsoever. After all, the reason e_st_item.pl exists should be obvious, right? (Screen for student course registration screen #3, in English.)
You should be encumbered when you carry 14 hammers. They should mess up your ability to stab the Demon Prince Ba'al in the forehead with the Swift Sword of the Whale which you've socketed with four soulstones. And while you're at it, shouldn't all that copious gore cause you to slip? Maybe you can sue Ba'al for not hiring an industrial engineer to spread sawdust on a floor which he could reasonably have expected to be covered in minion guts.
Of course, if we're going for maximum realism, Ba'al probably has a better lawyer than you do.
Seriously: if abstraction results in extra fun, abstract away. Diablo is a game about item collection, at its core. If you have any pretense of realism you have to start throwing away items as soon as you get new ones, which gets in the way of player strategizing and causes them to feel regret (Noooo this hammer would have gone perfect with the breastplate I left to rot in the dungeon!)
I keep pounding this drum: the future is already here, at least in China.
Problem: the core gaming audience won't pay for games. (Maybe its because they're poor, although darn, they cough up money for their iPods, sneakers, designer clothes, meals, computers, and...)
Solution: don't sell games.
Sell items -- $1 for a Sword of Extra Harming. Sell server access -- $12 for a month of WoW. And when it ceases to be profitable, turn the whole system off and let the customers whine if that makes them feel better. They'll be back, because your business model is the only one in town. (Ever wonder why you can find a zillion Japanese games in the US, but the only Chinese/Korean imports are item selling games? It is not because Korea couldn't do a console RPG to save their lives -- it is because no Korean businessman is going to front $100 million to develop the Korean Final Fantasy when they can actually make money on Item Selling MMORPG #416.)
Slashdot should be careful of what it wishes for. It is very possible that in 2020 you'll never be accused of stealing a game ever again, simply because there are no games which can be owned in any sense of the word we're familiar with.
... and he was SO PROUD he picked the Japanese for himself because he could read "horse" and thought it must mean something virile. Horse + deer = baka, which means... heck that is practically English already, if you don't know ask any geek under the age of 30.
Last I heard he had it removed and replaced with "samurai" or something, which I sincerely hope he got checked prior to inking.
Slashdot Mirror
Amazing how folks on Slashdot think that the industry is totally deaf.
"I'm too much of a Mac snob to buy games that would even function on another system."
"I pay $15 a month for WoW because I have to but torrent everything else I can get my hands on, because I hate DRM."
Its almost like that sort of attitude among customers might, hmm, drive business decisions or something.
I often wonder at how people in countries with a VAT (and, relatedly, Americans living in localities with high sales taxes) are shocked, shocked that when they compare notes with friends abroad prices are lower.
Australia has a Goods & Services tax. 10% on the top. Considering I paid US$60 for my copy with no sales taxes, I'm guessing about a third of your "no reasons" are in Melbourne by now.
(You know you guys used to have a 35% duty on packaged software? Fun times. Thankfully that got removed in '84.)
Smartest programmer in world works for his own darn self.
Maybe you need to be thinking of charging *more*? Because seriously, no need to be chasing after downmarket customers. No computer programmer "wins" a contract for $25 an hour -- they're losing by accepting it, and they just don't know it yet. I give them about three days before they're in poor spec "Redo everything the right way this time!" hell, and of course Cheapo Charlie the client does not want to pay a penny for it.
Nothing to make my day like a good genocide joke.
You need to encapsulate that in a class. And your main method signature is wrong -- needs to take a String array as an argument, or else the program will say "No such method found (main)" and die.
Honestly, its almost like no one on Slashdot programs in Java some days... ;)
24 gigs a month, on Japanese connection with a ridiculously high effective limit. The majority is Amazon Unbox TV shows, which weigh in at about a gig apiece, plus the odd rental movie or digital delivered videogame, and YouTube usage.
Content which isn't a game or movie is so small these days it can't even move the meter. (I laugh in the general direction of worrying about how many kb my homepage has -- honestly more important that the Javascript renders quickly than it download quickly.)
... the cops shoot you in the head if you criticize the government.
Sorry, just doesn't have the humor value some days.
[One way to lose is through] Siege
Should hosts of goblins besiege your gates, drive your peasantry inside and force you to seal off from the outside world, you may have already lost the game. Although a dwarven fortress can be made to appear self-contained, with sources of metal, fuel, underground crops and even livestock kept within inaccessible tunnels, very rarely if ever can a fortress sustain such a state indefinitely. ... One fell miscalculation of your fuel reserves may leave you without coke to refine further coal, and without a supply of timber for your wood burning furnace this can drive your weaponsmiths to melancholy or berserk rage... Your watersupply and aqueducts can be assaulted unless sealed off, and caverivers almost always send sporadic, bloodthirsty monsters ... But should you be waterless, your wounded will die of dehydration and your entire colony will hinge on booze production; a delicate balancing act.
With all these critical industries unproductive, dwarves dying, and friends mourning over the rotting heaps of slain loved ones, its important to remember your dwarves have nothing to do but throw funeral receptions, grief counseling sessions, and the occasional keg stand. This means they've all become one big happy family of friends, manically depressed from the loss of any dwarf.
In short, the attacking army can simply wait until your dwarves emo themselves to death.
Retrieved from "http://www.dwarffortresswiki.net/index.php/Losing"
Look at the details of the exploit: exploitation of a web browser and then privilege escalation by clobbering a trusted processes' stack because it didn't check input. The list of well used programs which have NOT seen buffer overrun attacks is pretty darn small, and it will continue to be small for as long as programmers insist on managing memory.
I'm of the opinion that managing memory is like writing a cryptography library: you should leave the task to someone who is actually capable of doing it. If you think you're capable of doing it, you're deluding yourself.
Of course, your perfect world has a crushing undersupply of videogames in it. The ones that do exist are inferior, in almost all respects other than "freedom", to commercial games (which they are often shamelessly derivative copies of -- OpenInsertNameOfGameHere, anyone?)
Bona fides: I have contributor access to MegaMek, a clone of the Battletech rules that you can play over the Internets. That game wouldn't exist without FASA actually doing the hard work of game design. I am pretty proud of our project for keeping the game vital even after the corporate sponsor went under and then moved in a different direction under new management, but take it from somebody who knows, our production values are a joke compared to anything you've paid for in the last 5 years, the core attraction to our game is the fun and unfree ruleset (and nostalgia value), and by the stats we're one of the best game projects on SF.
I love commercial entertainment. May they be around and healthy, forever, even if that means RMS has a coronary about it.
Every time you hear "Its not piracy, its copyright infringement", industry hears "We should be putting this content on our servers, behind a pay-wall, where the folks who consume what we make will have to pay for it".
Its not industry's fault if your business model is broken.
Bah, neither NEXT-GAME nor OBSCURE-GAME lets me have sex with Harry Potter in a bunny suit, so I play TERRIBLY-OVERHYPED-NON-GAME.
... but the Germans used to aim rockets with a map, a coordinate system, and a bit of high school mathematics. I'm guessing that math still works, even on orbital platforms.
... but for some of us, the difference between $50 and $56 is not so much a lunch out as it is staying an extra four minutes past quitting time. I don't normally worry too much about exactly when I get my brand new toys, but for the ones I've been eagerly anticipating for forever, sure, bill me for the FedEx. (Better still, figure out how to let me download you in advance. I love digital delivery and I spend my entertainment budget appropriately, industry watchers!)
So you've got an entire corps of ghosts -- super-intelligent, psionic assassins with a mortality rate of probably 50% and 80% when they go out to do nuke spotting... and nobody ever realized that if you are firing nuclear weapons, you don't really *need* laser-precision accuracy? Because they're, you know, nuclear weapons? What's the worst thing that happens, you overshoot the ultralisk by 50 yards and only burn it to ash instead of annihilating it on a subatomic level?
"Smart" bombs, indeed.
Except it, you know, exists. And it works on my PC.
TIMTOWTDI
I sort of prefer spelling it "ruby". You may have heard of it -- it is like Perl. It supports descriptive identifiers, comments, and (mostly) sane code organization. Unlike Perl, its programmers are encouraged to use these language facilities, rather than laughing them off as crutches for the weak.
If I sound bitter, blame 60k lines of Perl accompanied by 100 lines of comments written in barely literate Japanese and spread over 200 files. Yes, that does mean that many files had no comments whatsoever. After all, the reason e_st_item.pl exists should be obvious, right? (Screen for student course registration screen #3, in English.)
I don't believe I've ever met a gay Mac user.
You should be encumbered when you carry 14 hammers. They should mess up your ability to stab the Demon Prince Ba'al in the forehead with the Swift Sword of the Whale which you've socketed with four soulstones. And while you're at it, shouldn't all that copious gore cause you to slip? Maybe you can sue Ba'al for not hiring an industrial engineer to spread sawdust on a floor which he could reasonably have expected to be covered in minion guts.
Of course, if we're going for maximum realism, Ba'al probably has a better lawyer than you do.
Seriously: if abstraction results in extra fun, abstract away. Diablo is a game about item collection, at its core. If you have any pretense of realism you have to start throwing away items as soon as you get new ones, which gets in the way of player strategizing and causes them to feel regret (Noooo this hammer would have gone perfect with the breastplate I left to rot in the dungeon!)
I keep pounding this drum: the future is already here, at least in China.
Problem: the core gaming audience won't pay for games. (Maybe its because they're poor, although darn, they cough up money for their iPods, sneakers, designer clothes, meals, computers, and ...)
Solution: don't sell games.
Sell items -- $1 for a Sword of Extra Harming. Sell server access -- $12 for a month of WoW. And when it ceases to be profitable, turn the whole system off and let the customers whine if that makes them feel better. They'll be back, because your business model is the only one in town. (Ever wonder why you can find a zillion Japanese games in the US, but the only Chinese/Korean imports are item selling games? It is not because Korea couldn't do a console RPG to save their lives -- it is because no Korean businessman is going to front $100 million to develop the Korean Final Fantasy when they can actually make money on Item Selling MMORPG #416.)
Slashdot should be careful of what it wishes for. It is very possible that in 2020 you'll never be accused of stealing a game ever again, simply because there are no games which can be owned in any sense of the word we're familiar with.
... I saw two white guys in a day. And was like, whoa -- are you folks following me?
Then I saw another one. I knew it. Never trust white guys.
-- A white guy (but just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean I'm not out to get me!)
... as an arbitrary pile of carbon/oxygen compounds is to Jessica Alba.
(And every conclusory sentence I tried tacking onto that sounded obscene, so I'll let you work out the implication.)
Just moonwalk into every room so you can shoot the monster who pops up as soon as you get in, and you'll be perfectly fine.
... and he was SO PROUD he picked the Japanese for himself because he could read "horse" and thought it must mean something virile. Horse + deer = baka, which means... heck that is practically English already, if you don't know ask any geek under the age of 30.
Last I heard he had it removed and replaced with "samurai" or something, which I sincerely hope he got checked prior to inking.