Has Blizzard gone on a hiring-binge of disgruntled NSA employees who were ready, willing, and able to steal technology which if it existed would be the holy grail of the agency? Or are you just talking out of your hindquarters? Two gold pieces say its #2.
Re:Buy the Game and Pay Again to Play It - NOT!!!!
on
Blizzcon Writeup
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· Score: 1
Ah, I just re-read the email. You're right, my bad.
When your friend completes their 10 free days, they will be given an option to upgrade to a full version of World of Warcraft by purchasing a retail copy of the game.
If you never filed a claim under the camel system, you still didn't get your money back if *someone else* filed the claim. Now extend the camel system to cover 400,000 camels for a small insurance firm. And furthermore, one unlucky camel every year doesn't just get lost, he gets ordered by a judge into the custody of a third party along with 99 camels that that trader doesn't own, with the lawyer getting fourty of them on contingency fee, because the camel stamped on some idiot's foot after the idiot tried to fit him through the eye of a needle in a fit of curiosity.
A grant is a grant is a grant -- you get capital, strings are attached but the capital does not have to be repaid. Similar to a scholarship for college (which, incidentally, the Foundation also gives out a lot of) -- the scholarship is complicated, in that it is disbursed to you over a period of time and there are requirements for you to keep it, but from your perspective it really is cash money. There is a grain of truth here: the Foundation requires grant seekers to have their proposal approved, so you don't just put out your hand and say "Give me money!" and Gates says "Oh, have $200 million dollars and, like, do some good with it". This is partially because Gates is an entrepenurial philanthropist and partially because when you give unrestricted grants you get *fleeced*, as the UN, the US, and any number of NGOs have discovered over the years. Not that it always stops them from giving out new ones, but I digress.
You've just got a hole in your head if you think Gates is doing this to make money from "Big Pharma". Lets assume (contrary to fact, which you can verify by a quick trip to the SEC, which will tell you major shareholders of publicly traded companies) that Bill Gates owns 10% of the entirety of the pharmaceutical industry. Lot, stock, and barrel, a dime out of every dollar of profit goes to him. Lets further assume, contrary to fact, that Big Pharma just makes money. And lets assume, contrary to fact, that these grants are actually going 100% to purchase drugs , e.g., do R&D on environmentally friendly pesticides (See here). All of this means that Bill Gates gets back a dime on every dollar he spends. Wow, thats how you become worth $80 billion or whatever it is -- you farm out a couple hundred million a year and get back a couple ten million -- but don't worry, you can make up the difference on volume.
Incidentally, you can see the Foundation's holdings at the SEC. Its a fairly standard portfolio heavy on the blue chips, including a lot of medical stock -- but not enough to either make a drop in the bucket next to either these folks' market capitalizations or Bill Gates' personal wealth (the vast majority of which, by the way, is MSFT stock).
Re:Buy the Game and Pay Again to Play It - NOT!!!!
on
Blizzcon Writeup
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· Score: 0
If you've got a friend with the game, they just got a password in the email which gives them the ability to give you a week-long free trial, and then if you choose to play you don't have to buy the CDs because you already installed your friend's, so its just the $15 per month. They can only use this password once, but as soon as you actually fork over your first month's payment to Blizzard they get a free month of time, so its a win-win.
Once upon a time I worked with a group that wanted (with the support of a very large UN funded NGO) to develop a literacy program for a cheap gaming machine.
Slightly off-topic, but I don't care how cheap you can make the hardware, there is almost no conceivable set of circumstances I could envision where you wouldn't be better served by books and bodies available for far, far cheaper, at least if we're talking about raising the general level of literacy in relatively poor countries as opposed to dealing with the illiterate outliers in relatively wealthy countries.
Summary of TFA: "You might have seen this trick before. A friend points you to a link to an.exe file. You click on it and, ignoring the security message which pops up, attempt to run it. Bad stuff happens. BUT WAIT! Now bad stuff includes a 'root kit', too! Doesn't that sound scary and hacker-y?"
As a natural language researcher, "language evolves" doesn't worry me, because if you could give me an algorithm that could do passable translation for English on September 4th, 2012 I think you could probably keep that trained by just feeding the right corpus through it (Google: best thing ever for getting a corpus of languages as they are actually used, by the way -- you know people actually spent their lives just collecting books and books of BBC broadcasts so they could study how English was actually spoken?) and patch/flash upgrade your device as frequently as you need to (language doesn't evolve THAT fast, by the way, and in a lot of problem domains its essentially static relative to "phrases in daily use"). The real problem is that machine translation is just intractably hard and I expect it to remain so, forever.
Shocking, I know, but the world has had both a) translators who have made mistakes or intentional errors and b) mechanical errors which greviously change the content of messages and we have somehow managed to muddle through. I'm not exactly an expert on the law in either Japan or the US (where I translate as part of my job, but its not my primary function), but my sense of it is that the translator has fiduciary duty to their client so you're almost certainly open to a tort if you intentionally try to screw them up, but I'm not worried about being (personally) ruined if I put the decimal in the wrong place the next time an IBM exec comes over to talk turkey. If you replaced me with a computer (*chuckle* my main job is actually natural language research, and put it this way I'm not worried about my translator friends being unemployed at any point in their lives), then the person who decided "Lets translate it with a computer" is on the hook to the extent that they could have known X bad thing would happen ("WTF do you mean you left the peace negotations up to Babelfish, you should have known they had quality issues") but if they've properly carried out their duty of care the big cause of action would be against whoever developed the translation software.
By the way, bet you dollars to yen that if you take a look at any commercial piece of translation software the EULA disclaims all liability in general and then lists at least ten industries in which it is absolutely, specifically, positively not intended for use. So they'll pass the buck back to your translator who OK'ed the machine translation, or the person who decided to rely exclusively on machine translation despite the clear, boldface warning on the top line of the EULA to not do so.
About the same time they fold in the hot air emissions from a scientist who is claiming that he has 100% understanding of every influence on a problem domain the size of the globe and if he only had more budg... computer power, he would solve a pressing world problem.
But even Google and the NSA combined don't have infinite storage, so then what?
You're so sure of that, and yet you still haven't realized that Google *is* the NSA. Now if you'll excuse me, time to go onto the dev version and I'm Feeling Lucky a certain Saudi construction magnate with a liver problem.
Multiple console ownership in an audience comprised of gaming geeks -- you don't say... What stunning revalation will he come up with next, only 10% of Harry Potters read only Potter, the rest read other fantasy as well, better watch out JK Rowling those billions aren't billions unless you can enjoy them alone?
This would be a good thing for a company with a bit of vision (I'm thinking, say, Three Rings) to do as a premium service. For $1-5, and available for sale as soon as the game reaches the point where it *will* be released (eventually), you can register your character's nickname across one/all servers and have it human-reviewed for compliance with the naming policy. If you don't get your name GM reviewed, and its not on our pre-cleared suggested names lists (I would assume all names the name-generator can pick are pre-cleared, assuming its not creating them by sticking syllables together), then be advised that we might have to force you to change it if it violates our naming policy. It would also be a good way to judge interest in the game, since people *paying* for their nicks 6 months ahead of release is a good indication that they'll be dropping additional money for the game down the line.
I used to be in data entry (past tense, thank God, but it got me through college). Direct salary for a job as easy as this would be about $10 where I used to live (I'd probably avoid outsourcing this particular job to India -- can you trust the average inhabitant of Bangalore to catch JoeLeeberman or Milfck?), and indirect costs were generally quoted to me as 100% of salary (you need a phone, computer, benefits, etc). I figure you can quota your reps at about 50-100 reviews per hour (probably with a custom-designed interface that allows acceptance with one keystroke and rejection with between one and two depending on the rejection code) without killing them after a couple of weeks doing the project. Obviously, you won't be anywhere close to real-time response during launch (all the more reason to open it beforehand) and its probably not something where you'd want to ever guarantee that given that people create accounts 24-7 and there is no reason to higher three shifts for this) but you're providing a service your players will appreciate which makes excellent business sense, too (drives buzz, gets your foot in the door, lowers people's resistance to buying into your game, and probably makes a net profit).
But in none of your cases are you actually prying the object of value from the victim. This is closer to walking into a movie theatre, seeing the movie, and leaving without paying (doesn't cost the theatre anything, they can still show the movie and likely didn't need your seat) or going into a bookstore and using a special, magic copier on the book that takes a perfectly 100% indistinguishable-from-regular-book copy in seconds, for free, and then walking out with just that ("But I'm not stealing, I gave them their copy back!").
So, essentially, its a Ponzi scheme with a graphical client slapped on top to distract you from the fact that the only way you can make money is for demand for goods to continue increasing via a constantly expanding playerbase.
And this is *bloody annoying*. I have two iTunes accounts, one for America and one for Japan (where I live). Not only do I need two iTunes accounts, each of them has to be tied to a credit card in the respective country (which caused me no end of trouble with my bank trying to keep an American address registered on my bank account for online non-physical purchases), and both of them had to point to seperate email accounts as well. I understand the reasoning, in an abstract way, but I'd gladly put up with paying the (higher by 100%) Japanese prices for *all* of my songs if Apple/the industry could just figure out a way to have the computers route the money internationally instead of putting that onus on me.
Doesn't scale, issues with quality control, your GMs are hourly employees who are not competent to make design decisions like "How powerful should a Sword of Foozle Slaying be for a level 12 Paladin?"
The secret to creating new, exciting content in MMORPGs is to develop systems and practices that either generate content algorithmically or cause people to generate it themselves. One obvious and well-worn path is PVP. Another is giving people guild mechanisms. A third is something like Puzzle Pirates portrait painter, which algorithmically paints a portrait of your character as a luxury item (and, since your character has a fairly unique look and the portrait resembles but doesn't replicate the look, the portraits are experienced almost as well as "real" human-produced art). There are, of course, downsides to all of these, and none is a panacea, but you can have all of them work as well with 1,000 players as with 10,000.
Democracy is about working together to be treated fairly.
However, I don't want to be treated *fairly*. I want to be treated *well*. Maybe its the./ Conceit, but I think I'm better/more employable than the guy in the next cubicle (figuratively speaking, considering the next cubicle is a printer) and don't want to have my ability to bargain *for me* compromised just so he gains immunity to firing. I also don't want to get X% of my pay jacked in an additional tax to support a bunch of layabout "leaders" who will spend the majority of their time spending my union dues on lavish offices and political causes which I don't support anyway.
For a criminal who has been incarcerated a dozen times in 5 institutions since he was 16, for a period of perhaps 2/3 of his adult life, you might not notice or even care that your release date went by. You'll get out when you get out, same as you always do, you'll be back when you "catch a case", same as you always do. These people by definition don't exactly conform to society's standards regarding, say, how much worth they place is their own freedom or how many people on the outside genuinely care about them enough to want them back *today*. Talk to a lawyer some time who does, say, indigent defense about the general characteristics of their clients.
I've considered explaining I've just returned from twenty years in the Australian outback, but I can't do the accent.
Just say "Sorry mate, I'd love to show you my Australian accent but I only saw two people in my twenty years there, and one of them was mute after that unfortunate incident with the wildlife. Care for a biscuit?"
You work for EA for six months and then tell me 5% of your coworkers having clinical depression and suicidal tendencies sounds high. I'm guessing about 9/10 of those blind folks became blind as a result of a work-related injury, like pencil-in-the-eye after they heard of how much crunch was expected of them (of course, one pencil only makes you half-blind -- they then stabbed the other eye because only one punctured eyeball isn't enough to get a day off of work).
Re:This suggests a great Linux-boosting strategy
on
Quake 4 Linux
·
· Score: 1
So they can convince other developers that there is no market for payed software on Linux, thus gimping the number of games available even further, and giving them the monopoly! BRILLIANT!
Slashdot Mirror
Has Blizzard gone on a hiring-binge of disgruntled NSA employees who were ready, willing, and able to steal technology which if it existed would be the holy grail of the agency? Or are you just talking out of your hindquarters? Two gold pieces say its #2.
When your friend completes their 10 free days, they will be given an option to upgrade to a full version of World of Warcraft by purchasing a retail copy of the game.
If you never filed a claim under the camel system, you still didn't get your money back if *someone else* filed the claim. Now extend the camel system to cover 400,000 camels for a small insurance firm. And furthermore, one unlucky camel every year doesn't just get lost, he gets ordered by a judge into the custody of a third party along with 99 camels that that trader doesn't own, with the lawyer getting fourty of them on contingency fee, because the camel stamped on some idiot's foot after the idiot tried to fit him through the eye of a needle in a fit of curiosity.
You've just got a hole in your head if you think Gates is doing this to make money from "Big Pharma". Lets assume (contrary to fact, which you can verify by a quick trip to the SEC, which will tell you major shareholders of publicly traded companies) that Bill Gates owns 10% of the entirety of the pharmaceutical industry. Lot, stock, and barrel, a dime out of every dollar of profit goes to him. Lets further assume, contrary to fact, that Big Pharma just makes money. And lets assume, contrary to fact, that these grants are actually going 100% to purchase drugs , e.g., do R&D on environmentally friendly pesticides (See here). All of this means that Bill Gates gets back a dime on every dollar he spends. Wow, thats how you become worth $80 billion or whatever it is -- you farm out a couple hundred million a year and get back a couple ten million -- but don't worry, you can make up the difference on volume.
Incidentally, you can see the Foundation's holdings at the SEC. Its a fairly standard portfolio heavy on the blue chips, including a lot of medical stock -- but not enough to either make a drop in the bucket next to either these folks' market capitalizations or Bill Gates' personal wealth (the vast majority of which, by the way, is MSFT stock).
If you've got a friend with the game, they just got a password in the email which gives them the ability to give you a week-long free trial, and then if you choose to play you don't have to buy the CDs because you already installed your friend's, so its just the $15 per month. They can only use this password once, but as soon as you actually fork over your first month's payment to Blizzard they get a free month of time, so its a win-win.
Slightly off-topic, but I don't care how cheap you can make the hardware, there is almost no conceivable set of circumstances I could envision where you wouldn't be better served by books and bodies available for far, far cheaper, at least if we're talking about raising the general level of literacy in relatively poor countries as opposed to dealing with the illiterate outliers in relatively wealthy countries.
Summary of TFA: "You might have seen this trick before. A friend points you to a link to an .exe file. You click on it and, ignoring the security message which pops up, attempt to run it. Bad stuff happens. BUT WAIT! Now bad stuff includes a 'root kit', too! Doesn't that sound scary and hacker-y?"
As a natural language researcher, "language evolves" doesn't worry me, because if you could give me an algorithm that could do passable translation for English on September 4th, 2012 I think you could probably keep that trained by just feeding the right corpus through it (Google: best thing ever for getting a corpus of languages as they are actually used, by the way -- you know people actually spent their lives just collecting books and books of BBC broadcasts so they could study how English was actually spoken?) and patch/flash upgrade your device as frequently as you need to (language doesn't evolve THAT fast, by the way, and in a lot of problem domains its essentially static relative to "phrases in daily use"). The real problem is that machine translation is just intractably hard and I expect it to remain so, forever.
By the way, bet you dollars to yen that if you take a look at any commercial piece of translation software the EULA disclaims all liability in general and then lists at least ten industries in which it is absolutely, specifically, positively not intended for use. So they'll pass the buck back to your translator who OK'ed the machine translation, or the person who decided to rely exclusively on machine translation despite the clear, boldface warning on the top line of the EULA to not do so.
About the same time they fold in the hot air emissions from a scientist who is claiming that he has 100% understanding of every influence on a problem domain the size of the globe and if he only had more budg... computer power, he would solve a pressing world problem.
You're so sure of that, and yet you still haven't realized that Google *is* the NSA. Now if you'll excuse me, time to go onto the dev version and I'm Feeling Lucky a certain Saudi construction magnate with a liver problem.
Multiple console ownership in an audience comprised of gaming geeks -- you don't say... What stunning revalation will he come up with next, only 10% of Harry Potters read only Potter, the rest read other fantasy as well, better watch out JK Rowling those billions aren't billions unless you can enjoy them alone?
I used to be in data entry (past tense, thank God, but it got me through college). Direct salary for a job as easy as this would be about $10 where I used to live (I'd probably avoid outsourcing this particular job to India -- can you trust the average inhabitant of Bangalore to catch JoeLeeberman or Milfck?), and indirect costs were generally quoted to me as 100% of salary (you need a phone, computer, benefits, etc). I figure you can quota your reps at about 50-100 reviews per hour (probably with a custom-designed interface that allows acceptance with one keystroke and rejection with between one and two depending on the rejection code) without killing them after a couple of weeks doing the project. Obviously, you won't be anywhere close to real-time response during launch (all the more reason to open it beforehand) and its probably not something where you'd want to ever guarantee that given that people create accounts 24-7 and there is no reason to higher three shifts for this) but you're providing a service your players will appreciate which makes excellent business sense, too (drives buzz, gets your foot in the door, lowers people's resistance to buying into your game, and probably makes a net profit).
I, for one, was totally expecting bird-on-bird action. Because, honestly, what else could have gone on that would be of interest to the average /.er?
But in none of your cases are you actually prying the object of value from the victim. This is closer to walking into a movie theatre, seeing the movie, and leaving without paying (doesn't cost the theatre anything, they can still show the movie and likely didn't need your seat) or going into a bookstore and using a special, magic copier on the book that takes a perfectly 100% indistinguishable-from-regular-book copy in seconds, for free, and then walking out with just that ("But I'm not stealing, I gave them their copy back!").
So, essentially, its a Ponzi scheme with a graphical client slapped on top to distract you from the fact that the only way you can make money is for demand for goods to continue increasing via a constantly expanding playerbase.
And this is *bloody annoying*. I have two iTunes accounts, one for America and one for Japan (where I live). Not only do I need two iTunes accounts, each of them has to be tied to a credit card in the respective country (which caused me no end of trouble with my bank trying to keep an American address registered on my bank account for online non-physical purchases), and both of them had to point to seperate email accounts as well. I understand the reasoning, in an abstract way, but I'd gladly put up with paying the (higher by 100%) Japanese prices for *all* of my songs if Apple/the industry could just figure out a way to have the computers route the money internationally instead of putting that onus on me.
Is it just me, or does that Enchantrix have a bit of an accent?
The secret to creating new, exciting content in MMORPGs is to develop systems and practices that either generate content algorithmically or cause people to generate it themselves. One obvious and well-worn path is PVP. Another is giving people guild mechanisms. A third is something like Puzzle Pirates portrait painter, which algorithmically paints a portrait of your character as a luxury item (and, since your character has a fairly unique look and the portrait resembles but doesn't replicate the look, the portraits are experienced almost as well as "real" human-produced art). There are, of course, downsides to all of these, and none is a panacea, but you can have all of them work as well with 1,000 players as with 10,000.
However, I don't want to be treated *fairly*. I want to be treated *well*. Maybe its the ./ Conceit, but I think I'm better/more employable than the guy in the next cubicle (figuratively speaking, considering the next cubicle is a printer) and don't want to have my ability to bargain *for me* compromised just so he gains immunity to firing. I also don't want to get X% of my pay jacked in an additional tax to support a bunch of layabout "leaders" who will spend the majority of their time spending my union dues on lavish offices and political causes which I don't support anyway.
For a criminal who has been incarcerated a dozen times in 5 institutions since he was 16, for a period of perhaps 2/3 of his adult life, you might not notice or even care that your release date went by. You'll get out when you get out, same as you always do, you'll be back when you "catch a case", same as you always do. These people by definition don't exactly conform to society's standards regarding, say, how much worth they place is their own freedom or how many people on the outside genuinely care about them enough to want them back *today*. Talk to a lawyer some time who does, say, indigent defense about the general characteristics of their clients.
Just say "Sorry mate, I'd love to show you my Australian accent but I only saw two people in my twenty years there, and one of them was mute after that unfortunate incident with the wildlife. Care for a biscuit?"
gauche
You work for EA for six months and then tell me 5% of your coworkers having clinical depression and suicidal tendencies sounds high. I'm guessing about 9/10 of those blind folks became blind as a result of a work-related injury, like pencil-in-the-eye after they heard of how much crunch was expected of them (of course, one pencil only makes you half-blind -- they then stabbed the other eye because only one punctured eyeball isn't enough to get a day off of work).
So they can convince other developers that there is no market for payed software on Linux, thus gimping the number of games available even further, and giving them the monopoly! BRILLIANT!