Of course, the lvl 50 is either a) on a PvP server, where constant gankfest is what he has had for the last 30 levels or b) on a PvE server, where he is immune to attack unless he wanders into an enemy factional capital or attempts to strike one of their NPCs.
Right, but the P2P software is only able to distinguish 234fd235 from 234634fe3, not Toxic -- Brittney $pears.mp3 (the real deal) from Toxic -- Britney Spears.mp3 (three minutes of white noise). Hashes don't protect the weak link in the chain, which is content discovery -- polluting the search space works just as effectively as polluting the bit stream if your protocol doesn't allow people to, for example, aggregate or filter content based on trustworthiness, etc.
If you're a fan of the classic board game Battletech, try MegaMek. Its a net-play enabled clone of the board game, with an AI tacked on if you want to beat the heck out of defenseless silicon. Feature set and stability are good enough to keep a couple of thousand users, including a few persistent campaign servers, coming back for more. Disclosure: I code for it, so don't trust a word I say, try it for yourselves.
This doesn't cripple P2P. It just makes a dent in pirate-2-pirate. There is a difference, you realize. The Blizzard Bittorrent patch downloader will still function perfectly. Indie bands who release their new CDs to Kazaa won't have anybody trying to pollute their download pools. And it probably won't even work, more's the pity.
I wouldn't classify the WTC falling after being hit by a fueled jetliner as a "failure" -- it almost certaintly wasn't contemplated as a requirement, nor would that have been a practical requirement to include unless you had advance knowledge of the attack by a couple of decades. Its like faulting a car maker for failing to include enough armor on the side to stop sniper-fired sabot rounds designed to punch through tanks -- thats not a "failure", that is a project which was well-designed for its intended uses being subjected to conditions it was not designed to withstand. And, critically, the fact that it wasn't designed to withstand that wasn't negligence (not designing a building in Japan to withstand earthquakes is negligent, not designing a building to withstand direct hits by 20,000 lb pounds to the roof is sound engineering).
Now, if you're designing a tank and it blows up on getting hit with a sniper round, or a browser which executes arbitrary code due to a buffer overrun, or a bridge which collapses due to the weight of a couple SUVs more than you planned for, THATS a failure.
Yeah, like adapting a movie to a video game is cake... "just add gameplay". Ignoring the fact that the media forces you to entirely rework the narrative structure of the piece, to fit both technical constraints ("We have two hours to tell this story, the jokes must go") and social conventions ("No scenes are allowed which do not drive the story in a manner observable by a six-year old child") of the new media.
The national security apparatus already has a document-storing technology which allows perfect security given the attacker doesn't have physical access to the hard copy. It can be used side by side your usual computer screen, without exposing any of it to your network/hard disk, and doesn't require a reboot like SpookLinux. It will never be on a recent document list and leaves no temp files. No spyware known to man can read it. And, best of all, it is 100% resistant against keyloggers. Which is probably why the military, the intelligence agencies, the government at large, and private industries in the know spend billions on this tech every year.
Why? Access to short text-only articles is almost instantaneous and andwidth is cheap, unless your students are doing linguistics research and wgetting 10,000 articles at a time to develop corpora.
Not that I've done that, or anything. Please don't ban my IP, WikiGods.
Don't attribute it entirely to Xenophobia. You know what percentage of American games get localized when they get released over here? 30% get a Japanese manual, 10% get translated. Import games are a niche market, just like they are in the US -- even if you've studied English for 8 years at school do you *really* want to try to wade through sophisticated dialogue like that in KOTOR in English (that wizzing sound you hear is the story flying over your head) just because companies have made the decision that localizing for Japanese isn't worth the (significant!) effort and expense?
Its a bit of a chicken and egg situation, too. If you don't design your game from the getgo with Asian language support in mind, you're essentially screwed -- only a complete interface redesign will save you and your outsourcing firm that handles the localization (most are outsourced with a team-member from development put as liason with the outsourcer as his only job) isn't capable of doing that for you. No support for two-byte characters = kiss your rump goodbye.
Then there are some products which genuinely don't translate culturally well. Say, NFL Football Whatever 200X. Great, a game that Japan, speaking in general, has no interest in, and which can't rely on basic assumptions like "audience knows the rule of football". Those are never going to do well. When you start going through the list of the top-sellers, there are a LOT of games which have approximately 0% chance of success in Japan due to that reason (not just sports, although they're big business and pretty poor sellers unless about baseball/golf/etc, but also some military sims, etc -- Medal of Honor: Rising Sun had some *very* memorable comments in video games on how it was hard to appreciate the gameplay while shooting grandpa).
This is a two-way street, by the way. Plenty of fairly good Japanese games will never see the light of day in the US for a host of reasons (I'm thinking of one popular strategy game in which I leveled a Cleric all the way to Christ and killed Satan with "Sermon on the Mount" before getting killed by a Goblin because Christ is weak to wood attacks...)
Cartels work because they transform several firms (PCs) into an effective monopoly on the product, allowing them to hold down supply of the product ("don't sell as many armors as you can -- sell less, but for more money, and only at the price we set or higher"). If you don't have a true monopoly, or if the cartel cheats, you just end up getting burned by the Invisible Hand of Flaming Death.
MMORPGs are almost immune to cartels *if* they don't have systems which allow denial of resources. You can't prevent other people from skilling up mining in WoW. You can't kill other miners. Its unrealistic to beat people to the mines all the time. Therefore, you can't cartel effectively to increase the price of, say, Mithril Bars.
What you CAN do, however, if you've got a lot of money and a lot of time is "corner the market". Mithril bars are 4g for a stack of 20. If you have 200g, and there are 20 stacks on the market, and you have a day or so free, you can sit there, buy up every stack at 4, and resell at 6. The increase in price will cause people to either stop using them, or buy from you, or attempt to get into the mithril market themselves. But since there is a barrier to entry into the mithril market (several hours skilling up to Mining 150), and the relative value of Mithril to questing crafters is enough to support 6g if they can't get it for cheaper, this is a decent way to make money.
Its MUCH better, though, if you do it to high-level green items. The supply is critically limited, the demand is high, and *people are stupid*. Made 100g this week off of buying Arcane Robes for 3g each (the game's "suggested price" x 2) and selling them for 30g each (high level green mage robes for mages with great INT/STA stats are in high, high demand).
Exactly. You can't have your cake and eat it to -- you can support Firefox because it properly implements open web standards, or you can support Firefox because software monocultures paint a big "Hit me!" sign for malware writers, but you can't do both at the same time because open standards are a big "Hit me!" sign for malware writers.
The more robust technology becomes, the more we allow creative people to do creative things with it, the more annoying some of those creative things are going to be. We can arbitrarily ban certain actions which we think are more exploitable than useful, and maybe thats even a good idea, until you try to write an interface that can't get the user's attention when it needs to because interfaces which can get attention are annoying when the attention is wasted and the machine can't tell the difference.
Given that they can use Javascript to grab repeated 10k chunks from the memory allocated to Firefox, you could easily conduct a super-phising attack by embedding a javascript loop which started when the target page was loaded, and then used simple heuristics to find personal information (I'm thinking "credit card number" is the obvious chioce -- and even worse, credit card numbers will be stored RIGHT NEXT to the other information filled in the same form due to locality of reference) on the client side. Then, after you use the *client's* processing power to data-mine THEIR OWN memory for you, you transfer the 500 bytes of valuable data you get back to the server via, say, a GET request, and laugh all the way to the bank. Or, if you want to be a REAL bastard, you have the client send a get request to an unprotected comment script somewhere on the internet on a server which is not controlled by you, and then you just look up all the credit card numbers applied in the comments to "Grandma Ester's Fried Chicken Recipe".
On a scale of one to ten I'd put this vulnerability as an eight if anyone bothers to exploit it intelligently. This is very, very, very close to the relative badness of arbitrary code execution.
I suppose you could solo from 20-60... but I don't know why anybody in their right mind would. I got into a guild in my early twenties, instanced once or twice a week with them, and did small group questing with them whenever else I wanted to play. Made some friends (important once you're sixty and need 4 people to be minimally effective and far more to do anything really important) and had a blast doing it. Plus the play experience of instancing, say, Uldaman is just SO much more fun then spending the same three hours grinding NPCs in the overworld, even though the XP/cash rewards are probably better for the grinding (loot is better in instances).
Well, we can throw billions of dollars at AI research to program topgun.exe... or we can spend a couple million dollars and learn how to rig up a jet simulator to a jet by means of an encrypted signal.
We've got UAVs at the moment which can fly, maneuver, photograph, and fire -- all require quite a bit of intelligence (one human operator, done), none require actually exposing the human operator to physical stresses or that pesky "getting shot down" thing (not that that is really a big issue anymore -- most of the deaths in the Air Force nowadays are due to operator error, faulty equipment, and training mishaps, not The Bad Guys). The only difference between the UAVs and our mainline fighters is that we haven't revamped the fighters yet for, well, mainly non-technical reasons (institutional intertia, etc).
By contrast, we've got NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING, which comes close to being intelligent enough that it could be allowed autonomous control of an airplane. And, honestly, there is very little sense in developing the capability -- the networked plane is cheaper and more effective for the forseeable future unless somebody is able to trump our commanding technological lead by a factor of several thousand, in which case we aren't going to war with them anyway.
While your general point is correct, this sentence fills up the entirety of a Japanese telephone display (two displays, if you try it in English). Without scrolling you get about 50 characters on my model -- Japanese consumes them at roughly 60% of the rate of English depending on topic and linguistic choices (to l33t, or not to l33t, that I believe is the question). You aren't going to be reading book-length texts on your keitai anytime soon. And, dear Lordy, they'd kill you with the expense -- I pay 1/3 of a yen (about 1/3 of an American cent) for 128 *bytes* of "packet usage" at the moment, which would make it cheaper for me to buy the LotR DVD than try reading the first chapter.
Please, please, please do not use "finger-movement passwords". There are OSS programs which take the QWERTY keyboard layout and apply a variety of non-random walks over it to generate password dictionaries -- they're even less secure than picking a random word out of an unabridged English dictionary. Why? Simple -- the entropy sucks, royally (keyspace quickly collapses because knowing character n of the password makes the number of choices for n+1 really, really small).
There "may or may not be", make of that what you will, vastly more sophiscated efforts thrown at this by certain interested parties with large staffs of people with decades of practical hacking experience whose sole job is gaining access to data.
Finger-movement passwords are just another security-through-obscurity: you've got to pray that they don't check for one, because if they check for one you'll be busted.
I know a Mario. Born two years before the plumber made the name word famous. It would have been a nice thing in school, too, excep for the fact that...
she is a Japanese girl.
The name is substantially less popular for young girls nowadays...
Hello from Gifu-ken. Good luck, my friend, you're screwed. Localizing a medium-scale Java program from E->J is a huge undertaking, and Java is practically built around the assumption that the code will go international (native Unicode strings, etc).
Some of your challenges:
1) User expectations. Become friends with your testers (I hope you got a testing department?) and continuously ask them to evaluate whether the software works like expected. Obvious things to watch out for: date, number formatting issues, and the fact that alphabetic sort is expected to be by the table of fifty sounds, not the abc order.
2) Input verification. Strip half-width kana, save yourself a LOT of pain later. Make sure you use a consistent internal representation of Japanese (if I see another person trying to compare Shift-JIS and Unicode for equality by casting to integers and using the equals operator I will stab my own eye out with a pencil).
3) Canonicalization issues in data. Be prepared to weep tears of blood for this. My bank still hasn't figured out how to do it right, so I can't access my account online because my name is written in romaji in their database but their web site accepts only hiragana. Be especially careful with using consistent romanization. This probably means waging total war on both your users and existing data -- have fun!
4) Conversion of postal addresses. You would think this is easy, but people screw it up anyhow. Make sure any input UI asks for addresses in the order expected locally and parses them correctly! I have some business contacts in the US who have my city listed as my apartment building due to software which made assumptions about address ordering for them.
5) Suicide. Japan doesn't have a love affair with it -- thats a myth. You'll want to commit it by the end of this project -- thats a fact.
As long as we're talking about Battletech, the game has a free, OSS implementation for the basic board rules in MegaMek , which is actually supported by the IP holders. They've even been nice enough to give us developers official rulings on some of the edge cases that nobody bothered to think of before (like firing a leg mounted SRM-2 from underwater at a dry target).
Its not perfect, but it is a good deal of fun for fans of the board game. And a good way to waste a couple of hours if you want to join the development team.
You don't actually have to stay in them -- thats just shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district, where some sort of nerdon particles emantating from the dense collection of electronics draws geeks like moths to a flame. Its like lining up for Star Wars -- standing in the line is a chance to hang out with your buddies, meet people, and generally express your geekhood. Japan is king of the "rediculous redundancy in distribution" game, which means rather than going to one of the big super-stores you can travel to one of the *seven* one room video game stores within *two blocks* of a *station in a city with less than 50,000 people*. Half of the reason prices are so bad is that the distribution cost is just stupidly irrational, but on the plus side if a store goes out of stock on a popular item they'll have more in the morning and if you can't wait that long its a two-block walk to the next store to check (or a $2 train ticket to the next decently sized town, and check the store which is invariably 100 feet from the train station.
Firefox succeeds again in preventing another user from self-destructive behavior through ignorance. Just think, IE would have let you continue to have a subscription in the lottery. Thats got to cause at least as much economic damage over the long run as Gator.
More people need to go into business like Three Rings Design. They put together an MMORPG that I was willing to pay one full retail box of sticker price (ended up paying less) to play for a summer. I moved on from the game, but its fantastic and was worth every penny of the subscription fee ($25 for the summer -- perfect for the casual gaming market, by the way, one which it succeeded in tapping to a major degree).
The indie half of the game industry needs to *grow up* if they're going to be conventionally successful. Puzzle Pirates had a $600k budget -- if you want to break into the restauraunt business you don't start with a lemonade stand, and I can't imagine why anyone thinks they're going to be successful starting from a garage in this day and age. Distribute online, take the publisher out of the loop and get 95% of every sale instead of 15%. THEN, when you have 5000 paying customers like Puzzle Pirates did the last time I checked, the publishers will come to *you* trying to get the hot new IP fix that they crave and cannot make in house, and you will get to dictate the terms because a) any publisher can make you bloody rich and b) you have the demonstrable ability to make any publisher who takes your game to wide-release a godawful amount of money.
See Stardock for another example of a company which proves you don't have to have a $20 million budget to act like "#$&"$# professionals.
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Only $10,000? Dang, man, you're lucky.
Of course, the lvl 50 is either a) on a PvP server, where constant gankfest is what he has had for the last 30 levels or b) on a PvE server, where he is immune to attack unless he wanders into an enemy factional capital or attempts to strike one of their NPCs.
Right, but the P2P software is only able to distinguish 234fd235 from 234634fe3, not Toxic -- Brittney $pears.mp3 (the real deal) from Toxic -- Britney Spears.mp3 (three minutes of white noise). Hashes don't protect the weak link in the chain, which is content discovery -- polluting the search space works just as effectively as polluting the bit stream if your protocol doesn't allow people to, for example, aggregate or filter content based on trustworthiness, etc.
If you're a fan of the classic board game Battletech, try MegaMek. Its a net-play enabled clone of the board game, with an AI tacked on if you want to beat the heck out of defenseless silicon. Feature set and stability are good enough to keep a couple of thousand users, including a few persistent campaign servers, coming back for more. Disclosure: I code for it, so don't trust a word I say, try it for yourselves.
I'm guessing mortal, since God, being omniscient, can spell "mere" correctly.
This doesn't cripple P2P. It just makes a dent in pirate-2-pirate. There is a difference, you realize. The Blizzard Bittorrent patch downloader will still function perfectly. Indie bands who release their new CDs to Kazaa won't have anybody trying to pollute their download pools. And it probably won't even work, more's the pity.
Now, if you're designing a tank and it blows up on getting hit with a sniper round, or a browser which executes arbitrary code due to a buffer overrun, or a bridge which collapses due to the weight of a couple SUVs more than you planned for, THATS a failure.
Yeah, like adapting a movie to a video game is cake... "just add gameplay". Ignoring the fact that the media forces you to entirely rework the narrative structure of the piece, to fit both technical constraints ("We have two hours to tell this story, the jokes must go") and social conventions ("No scenes are allowed which do not drive the story in a manner observable by a six-year old child") of the new media.
Learn more about this revolutionary security product at one of our major defense contractors.
Not that I've done that, or anything. Please don't ban my IP, WikiGods.
Its a bit of a chicken and egg situation, too. If you don't design your game from the getgo with Asian language support in mind, you're essentially screwed -- only a complete interface redesign will save you and your outsourcing firm that handles the localization (most are outsourced with a team-member from development put as liason with the outsourcer as his only job) isn't capable of doing that for you. No support for two-byte characters = kiss your rump goodbye.
Then there are some products which genuinely don't translate culturally well. Say, NFL Football Whatever 200X. Great, a game that Japan, speaking in general, has no interest in, and which can't rely on basic assumptions like "audience knows the rule of football". Those are never going to do well. When you start going through the list of the top-sellers, there are a LOT of games which have approximately 0% chance of success in Japan due to that reason (not just sports, although they're big business and pretty poor sellers unless about baseball/golf/etc, but also some military sims, etc -- Medal of Honor: Rising Sun had some *very* memorable comments in video games on how it was hard to appreciate the gameplay while shooting grandpa).
This is a two-way street, by the way. Plenty of fairly good Japanese games will never see the light of day in the US for a host of reasons (I'm thinking of one popular strategy game in which I leveled a Cleric all the way to Christ and killed Satan with "Sermon on the Mount" before getting killed by a Goblin because Christ is weak to wood attacks...)
MMORPGs are almost immune to cartels *if* they don't have systems which allow denial of resources. You can't prevent other people from skilling up mining in WoW. You can't kill other miners. Its unrealistic to beat people to the mines all the time. Therefore, you can't cartel effectively to increase the price of, say, Mithril Bars.
What you CAN do, however, if you've got a lot of money and a lot of time is "corner the market". Mithril bars are 4g for a stack of 20. If you have 200g, and there are 20 stacks on the market, and you have a day or so free, you can sit there, buy up every stack at 4, and resell at 6. The increase in price will cause people to either stop using them, or buy from you, or attempt to get into the mithril market themselves. But since there is a barrier to entry into the mithril market (several hours skilling up to Mining 150), and the relative value of Mithril to questing crafters is enough to support 6g if they can't get it for cheaper, this is a decent way to make money.
Its MUCH better, though, if you do it to high-level green items. The supply is critically limited, the demand is high, and *people are stupid*. Made 100g this week off of buying Arcane Robes for 3g each (the game's "suggested price" x 2) and selling them for 30g each (high level green mage robes for mages with great INT/STA stats are in high, high demand).
The more robust technology becomes, the more we allow creative people to do creative things with it, the more annoying some of those creative things are going to be. We can arbitrarily ban certain actions which we think are more exploitable than useful, and maybe thats even a good idea, until you try to write an interface that can't get the user's attention when it needs to because interfaces which can get attention are annoying when the attention is wasted and the machine can't tell the difference.
On a scale of one to ten I'd put this vulnerability as an eight if anyone bothers to exploit it intelligently. This is very, very, very close to the relative badness of arbitrary code execution.
I suppose you could solo from 20-60... but I don't know why anybody in their right mind would. I got into a guild in my early twenties, instanced once or twice a week with them, and did small group questing with them whenever else I wanted to play. Made some friends (important once you're sixty and need 4 people to be minimally effective and far more to do anything really important) and had a blast doing it. Plus the play experience of instancing, say, Uldaman is just SO much more fun then spending the same three hours grinding NPCs in the overworld, even though the XP/cash rewards are probably better for the grinding (loot is better in instances).
We've got UAVs at the moment which can fly, maneuver, photograph, and fire -- all require quite a bit of intelligence (one human operator, done), none require actually exposing the human operator to physical stresses or that pesky "getting shot down" thing (not that that is really a big issue anymore -- most of the deaths in the Air Force nowadays are due to operator error, faulty equipment, and training mishaps, not The Bad Guys). The only difference between the UAVs and our mainline fighters is that we haven't revamped the fighters yet for, well, mainly non-technical reasons (institutional intertia, etc).
By contrast, we've got NOTHING, and I mean NOTHING, which comes close to being intelligent enough that it could be allowed autonomous control of an airplane. And, honestly, there is very little sense in developing the capability -- the networked plane is cheaper and more effective for the forseeable future unless somebody is able to trump our commanding technological lead by a factor of several thousand, in which case we aren't going to war with them anyway.
While your general point is correct, this sentence fills up the entirety of a Japanese telephone display (two displays, if you try it in English). Without scrolling you get about 50 characters on my model -- Japanese consumes them at roughly 60% of the rate of English depending on topic and linguistic choices (to l33t, or not to l33t, that I believe is the question). You aren't going to be reading book-length texts on your keitai anytime soon. And, dear Lordy, they'd kill you with the expense -- I pay 1/3 of a yen (about 1/3 of an American cent) for 128 *bytes* of "packet usage" at the moment, which would make it cheaper for me to buy the LotR DVD than try reading the first chapter.
There "may or may not be", make of that what you will, vastly more sophiscated efforts thrown at this by certain interested parties with large staffs of people with decades of practical hacking experience whose sole job is gaining access to data.
Finger-movement passwords are just another security-through-obscurity: you've got to pray that they don't check for one, because if they check for one you'll be busted.
she is a Japanese girl.
The name is substantially less popular for young girls nowadays...
Some of your challenges:
1) User expectations. Become friends with your testers (I hope you got a testing department?) and continuously ask them to evaluate whether the software works like expected. Obvious things to watch out for: date, number formatting issues, and the fact that alphabetic sort is expected to be by the table of fifty sounds, not the abc order.
2) Input verification. Strip half-width kana, save yourself a LOT of pain later. Make sure you use a consistent internal representation of Japanese (if I see another person trying to compare Shift-JIS and Unicode for equality by casting to integers and using the equals operator I will stab my own eye out with a pencil).
3) Canonicalization issues in data. Be prepared to weep tears of blood for this. My bank still hasn't figured out how to do it right, so I can't access my account online because my name is written in romaji in their database but their web site accepts only hiragana. Be especially careful with using consistent romanization. This probably means waging total war on both your users and existing data -- have fun!
4) Conversion of postal addresses. You would think this is easy, but people screw it up anyhow. Make sure any input UI asks for addresses in the order expected locally and parses them correctly! I have some business contacts in the US who have my city listed as my apartment building due to software which made assumptions about address ordering for them.
5) Suicide. Japan doesn't have a love affair with it -- thats a myth. You'll want to commit it by the end of this project -- thats a fact.
As long as we're talking about Battletech, the game has a free, OSS implementation for the basic board rules in MegaMek , which is actually supported by the IP holders. They've even been nice enough to give us developers official rulings on some of the edge cases that nobody bothered to think of before (like firing a leg mounted SRM-2 from underwater at a dry target). Its not perfect, but it is a good deal of fun for fans of the board game. And a good way to waste a couple of hours if you want to join the development team.
I think you overstated the excel usage.
You don't actually have to stay in them -- thats just shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district, where some sort of nerdon particles emantating from the dense collection of electronics draws geeks like moths to a flame. Its like lining up for Star Wars -- standing in the line is a chance to hang out with your buddies, meet people, and generally express your geekhood. Japan is king of the "rediculous redundancy in distribution" game, which means rather than going to one of the big super-stores you can travel to one of the *seven* one room video game stores within *two blocks* of a *station in a city with less than 50,000 people*. Half of the reason prices are so bad is that the distribution cost is just stupidly irrational, but on the plus side if a store goes out of stock on a popular item they'll have more in the morning and if you can't wait that long its a two-block walk to the next store to check (or a $2 train ticket to the next decently sized town, and check the store which is invariably 100 feet from the train station.
The indie half of the game industry needs to *grow up* if they're going to be conventionally successful. Puzzle Pirates had a $600k budget -- if you want to break into the restauraunt business you don't start with a lemonade stand, and I can't imagine why anyone thinks they're going to be successful starting from a garage in this day and age. Distribute online, take the publisher out of the loop and get 95% of every sale instead of 15%. THEN, when you have 5000 paying customers like Puzzle Pirates did the last time I checked, the publishers will come to *you* trying to get the hot new IP fix that they crave and cannot make in house, and you will get to dictate the terms because a) any publisher can make you bloody rich and b) you have the demonstrable ability to make any publisher who takes your game to wide-release a godawful amount of money.
See Stardock for another example of a company which proves you don't have to have a $20 million budget to act like "#$&"$# professionals.