And the great thing about having $350 competition is that it will eventually force you to figure out what it offers and you don't.
I frequently spend money to save time. I order a pizza instead of cooking dinner. I tip the delivery driver rather than go pick it up myself. And I eat from disposable paper plates instead of reusable dishes so I don't have to wash them. I'm perfectly capable of assembling a solid and satisfying meal for about $7 worth of groceries, but it will take me about two hours to do all the things related to it. So instead, I spend $40 on a pizza, because my time is worth more than $16.50 an hour.
Microsoft saves me time. It's easy. What word processor should I use? MS Word. What if I didn't want to? Well... there are many alternatives. If I spent a week evaluating them, I might be able to make a good choice, and that choice would probably have 90% of the functionality of MS Word... but I don't have a week to flush down the toilet just because Microsoft isn't the poster boy for business ethics, and I simply don't understand why I would invest more time for less functionality.
If using a different word processor was going to save me $2500, it might be worth a week of my time, but it's not. At retail prices, it saves me about $100, which makes it worth a couple hours at most... and as a Microsoft partner, I don't pay retail for Microsoft software. At my price, it's not even worth twenty minutes.
> you simply can't compare a system like Windows > to a system like SLES they way that they do
Windows compares patch applications with SUSE, and the Linux crowd complains that it's an invalid comparison because there are more things to patch. Well, that's sort of the POINT. That's precisely what Microsoft are saying: there's too much stuff to patch on Linux.
As far as valid comparisons go, people told me frequently that while Microsoft requires you to reboot if Windows locks up, Linux just makes you shell out to a virtual terminal to fix the problem. So I decided to bite the bullet and try an X desktop. OpenOffice gave me PLENTY of chances to test this out. It locked up when I opened documents. It locked up when I saved documents. It locked up when I searched documents. Sometimes it would lock up when I tried to switch windows. Well, I can shell out and fix the problem all right! All I have to do is KILL THE WINDOW MANAGER, which loses all my unsaved work - which is the only objection I ever had to rebooting in the first damn place. So not having to reboot means precisely squat.
Everyone is lying. The Linux people say something about how Windows sucks because it blue screens all the time, and the Microsoft people say Linux sucks because it crashes all the time, but then the Linux people go "OOH! Did you hear that?! They're LYING!"... as though they weren't writing their own little fantasy about how frequently Windows blue screens. You can't claim the moral high ground AND run a marketing campaign based on technicalities and exaggerations. Pick one. Microsoft did.
Scenario one: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone pops up with a patent and says I have to pay royalties.
Scenario two: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone else steals my idea for their own software and releases a competing product.
Both of these scenarios are clearly wrong, but no patent plan thus far has dealt with any way to prevent both cases. Overuse of software patents creates the first scenario, while lack of software patents creates the second.
What most bothers me is that the people screaming "no software patents" are never going to have one ANYWAY. They are not brilliant original thinkers, they are primarily wage slaves and open source advocates; they want the ability to grab and use *anything* that looks like it might fit when they have to build something. There is nothing wrong with that; brilliant original thinkers are rare, and while we would all like to believe that group includes us, we are all probably wrong.
But some of us really do have a significant potential to create something that takes a long time to invent, but not much time at all to copy. I have a product in development right now that is absolutely revolutionary; nothing out there is even remotely close to it, and I think my target market is going to just go insane wanting it once they see how great it is. (I could be wrong, and... as I mentioned above... I probably am.) But once you see the product, you know exactly how it works. If you have a reasonable competence in the appropriate field, you could build it yourself. I spent four years making it out of nothing, but it would take a competitor maybe a month to bootleg it.
That's why patents exist. A patent is designed to protect *exactly* this situation. The problem is that they are not being used this way.
My solution to the problem is simple: patents should cost a percentage of what they earn the owner. Not a huge percentage; something tiny. The patent owner could simply list all of his licensees and the gross revenue they generated, and pay (say) 20% of his most profitable year over the life of the patent. Each year, he simply calculates his 20% and subtracts what he's already paid.
Essentially, the protection of the patent gives the company which owns it a certain monopoly power, which inevitably raises the market price. Since the company will therefore make more money over the life of the patent, the government should charge some of that revenue back. Over the twenty years that patent is in force, you'll pay between one and twenty percent of your revenue, depending on how lasting and enduring your idea is. If you have a novel little flash-in-the-pan idea, you pay closer to twenty. If you have a brilliant and useful idea, you pay closer to one. This gives the inventor a form of automatic patent fee relief when his invention is truly of lasting value to the world.
Filing fees can stay, so people don't file patents for no good reason, but we should probably reduce them enough for people to *afford* a patent. Between the search and the application and the filing fee and all the attorney fees along the way, getting a patent COSTS, and I'm not exactly struggling. The old man in the basement with a fantastic idea can't even *begin* to think about getting a patent, and that's just plain wrong.
Add to this a burden on patent holders to demonstrate probable intent to infringe before prosecuting infringement... and the patent system is pretty much fixed. I don't think that's a massive change. I don't think anyone who really deserves a patent on something will complain about it.
What we really want from the patent system is protection for useful inventions from inventors, not for endless strings of crap from major corporations. Make the endless strings of crap pay more, and the corporations will be less interested in patenting them. Place a r
Kameo is an adventure/RPG. Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion was supposed to be out, but has been delayed (dammit). I view the Tony Hawk games as adventure games more than sports games since THUG and THUG2, but it's a limited-appeal kind of adventure. Perfect Dark Zero is confirmed for launch according to other reports (not familiar with the title, but I seem to recall it's an FPS).
Sports and racing games have it easy, because they've already got a number of things developed and ready to shove into the game... as soon as the hardware catches up. When they develop the feature, QA vetoes it because load times are glacial and framerate drops into single-digits. Now that the new platform is adding more horsepower, some of these features can go straight into the next release, and several more can be tweaked and optimised for next year's sequel.
Adventure/RPG games take much longer to build. Even an FPS game needs more detailed level design than a football game. Face it, we're just more demanding than the average Madden player - not because our game is somehow "better", but because the things Madden does well don't happen to interest us. What *does* interest us is the idea of a whole world to explore and conquer. That's a pretty damn tall order, and I for one am just glad we get games like this at all.
But the parent is NOT flamebait. Bad moderator. Go sit in the corner.
> what attracts you to a store over buying online?
People.
The fundamental reason I want to play RPGs instead of WoW is because I will be sitting at a real table with real people that I can see.
I'm perfectly happy to play yet another DM's personal clone of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no matter how bad it is, if I get to sit at a table with other human beings having FUN. It's the same reason I like playing round-robin multiplayer video games; I don't want to yell and scream over a microphone, I want to play a while and then pass the controller. It's not about the game, it's about the people, and the game is just an excuse for all of us to sit in one place and hang out with no serious purpose.
The same thing happens with a store. I'm perfectly happy to walk into a store and buy more dice I don't need just to hang out and chat with the owner. I'm even willing to help pack boxes and stock shelves and set up displays.
It's an unspoken arrangement. I'm not just a customer, he's not just a merchant, we're members of the same underground subculture. I expect that he will occasionally give me a discount or even pass me something for free, or just track down the hard-to-find rulebook I keep complaining about wanting. He expects that if I want to buy something game-related, I buy it from him, without whining about the prices being a little higher than they are online.
Now, if I could just find some seriously hardcore gamers in the Seattle area...
I entirely agree with this. Not that I'm in the same boat; my cable is loaded for bear with every damn channel I can get, and I have both TiVo and the dual-tuner Comcast DVR. If I want to see a show that's on cable, I can see it. With TiVo happily recording suggestions and my Comcast DVR dutifully snapping up every series I already want to watch, I am never at a loss for something to watch. (Finding *time* to watch things is a different story.)
What bugs me is the horrific quality of imported shows. I want subtitles, not bad actors overdubbing the original audio. I want on-screen translations of the written material. I want *accurate* translations. When the subtitles for an exchange say "Let me go, let me go" and "Be quiet", I'm rather annoyed when I notice that the *audio* should translate to "I'm not gay, I'm not gay" and "Neither am I".
I honestly have no interest in getting all my programs for free. I simply refuse to pay exorbitant prices (sometimes amounting to $20 an episode or more) for bad translations of those programs. If the industry wants me to pay for an episode of some show, it needs to be a high-quality recording with accurate subtitles and on-screen translations of written material. Until I can reliably get that somewhere, I have no real choice but to get bittorrents from other fans.
The market is here, we're just not willing to settle for a bad product. It's valuable to me if I can get a DVD of some series with a quick online order, but *only* if the DVD is of a reasonable quality for the price.
> is it any suprise that MS can write software for > its own OS which takes every possible advantage > of its native environment to run with speed?
If my software runs ten times better than someone else's, I tend to think it's because the other guy is a complete moron. The alternative, of course, is that I am an insanely great programmer... which I consider far less likely. There are not that many insanely great programmers, but there are an *awful* lot of complete morons out there writing code. So it is obviously easier for Sun to hire several morons than for Microsoft to hire several insanely great programmers.
I honestly don't know why people view Nintendo as such an innovator with controllers. The DS touch screen is the only real innovation I've seen from Nintendo; everything else is pretty derivative of existing PC controllers. I could actually handwave the DS touch screen as derivative of the KAOSS pad from Korg, if I wanted to be extreme about it... but I can't in good conscience argue that pro audio gear constitutes a precedent for game controllers.;)
The observation that people already use "body english" in games is precisely what gives people the idea that it should be used as a control mechanism. This simply does not follow. The problem with gyroscopic controllers is that human beings have large muscle groups for infrequent and imprecise movements, and small muscle groups for frequent precision movements. Tilt controllers use the large muscle groups of the elbow and shoulder, rather than the small muscle groups of the hand and wrist, so prolonged usage is tiring and precision movement is difficult.
That doesn't mean Nintendo hasn't "solved" this problem. Perhaps their version is very sensitive, and only needs to be moved slightly. Perhaps instead of the old tilt-sensitive technology, we have something more along the lines of the Fly pentop computer... perhaps something that inherently recognises gestures. There's certainly some interesting technological research coming out these days, and Nintendo may be positioning themselves as the Apple of the console world - much smaller market share than Sony or Microsoft, but an absolutely solid lock on that market share that no amount of marketing or proselytising can shake.
What tends to make weapons easier to aim with a mouse than with a joystick is the mouse ballistics. Move it fast, and the mouse automatically decreases the resolution so your onscreen cursor covers a lot of ground. Slow it down, the resolution increases for pixel-perfect accuracy.
Joysticks don't lend themselves well to this sort of thing, especially the new thumbstick variety that have all of an inch of throw between zero and max. The Xbox controller has worked better for me in that respect, but it's more me than the controller, because I have friends who feel far more comfortable with the PS2 controller. Different strokes and all that.
I think the bottom line here is that we need more standardised controller customisation in console games. We should be able to set the sensitivity of our thumbsticks, and the ballistic level if we're satisfied with how that works, and reverse the X and/or Y axis. Every button should be reassignable. The strength of the vibration function should be customisable. And all of this should be provided in a standard library from the console manufacturer, so every game for that console has the exact same capability.
The Revolution's gyroscopic controller notion is stupid, as all of us who remember "le Stick" can attest. The idea resurfaces every few years as "the next big thing", fails miserably in the marketplace because it's STUPID, and goes back underground until some other moron digs it up.
Try using a tilt-sensitive controller for several hours, and let me know how cool it is then. It doesn't matter how well-engineered the controller is now, the human body still has the same design, and will still have the exact same problems.
I think Apple has it going on at both ends. On the one hand, they've always been the media-friendly PC for journalists and editors. On the other, their Unix-based core is beginning to attract a lot of very tech-savvy and credible gurus who wouldn't previously have been seen anywhere except on a command line.
This is giving them a very solid appearance of being all things to all people. They cover one end, they cover the other end, it looks like they cover everything. Microsoft still holds the fat part of the bell curve, but the skinny ends belong to the Mac, and a couple slices at the boundaries belong to Unix derivatives.
Of course, the real situation is precisely what I've always said it is: most people are in the fat part of the bell curve. That doesn't mean we don't need Linux and the Mac (after all, Microsoft doesn't cover the skinny ends so well), but it does mean they're not much of a threat to the MS juggernaut.
I had a similar problem on RAC, but the major thing I kept running into was people who *wanted* things built at those prices; I just couldn't find enough jobs that were willing to pay a decent price for what they wanted. It's one thing if you have some third-world coder underbidding you, but it's another thing when you have a large company on American soil demanding that coders bid no higher than $500 for a month's work... the underbidding coder is a real coder who is really willing to do real work for less money, and that's what free markets are all about. The company setting a maximum bid is just being cheap.
That's where RAC falls down, IMO. If I say "I will pay no more than 50 cents a gallon for my gas", I still get exposed to the prices that other people pay and charge for gas when I drive around my neighborhood. That exposure is what teaches me to revise my estimate of what gas should cost, because I am clearly stupid. When you set a maximum bid for your project on RAC, you don't get exposed to what people really charge because they just plain don't bid on it... so you don't know you're stupid, and you just keep being stupid.
Used car salesmen aren't so widely disliked because of what they sell, but because of how they sell it.
Same with marketers. We all know "under ten dollars" means "$9.99", because that's what it ALWAYS means. Why don't they just say "ten bucks"? Because people always round down. $9.99 looks like $9 to most people, so it seems a whole lot cheaper than $10. Look at gas stations; a gallon of gas isn't 2.87, it's 2.879, because people don't count that last 9/10 of a cent. But they still pay it. That's what marketing is all about. You manipulate the world to make people think one thing and pay another.
Nobody is complaining that the miniature blender isn't worth an extra dollar, or that the gallon of gas isn't worth the extra penny. They're complaining that someone is trying to trick them, which is precisely what is happening. We're wise to it. We don't *fall* for the trick. We just perceive that a trick is being played, and we don't like it.
So when we can't see the trick, it doesn't make the marketer look honest and forthright. It just makes us feel increasingly suspicious, because we know marketers play tricks, and if we can't see what the trick *is*... chances are we're about to get screwed.
Somewhere along the line, marketing stopped being about finding people who want something, and started being mostly about making people buy things they don't want.
This industry reinvention has made it very difficult for most marketers to handle a good product, because they can't find the right people who don't want it.
I bought 1.0 in a store about a month after 2.0 came out. Seeing that there was no version information on the box, I contacted Propellerheads beforehand to make sure I could upgrade for free if it was the 1.0 version, and they told me I had to do so through Steinberg. Steinberg assured me it would be upgraded at no cost to me, except a small handling charge, and all I had to do was send them the receipt.
Steinberg subjected me to an utter customer service nightmare for over a year before I gave up. Their greatest concern wasn't that I had bought an old version of the software in a retail outlet, or that I felt I deserved the 2.0 upgrade, but that SOFTWARE PIRACY IS EVERYWHERE!
They observed from day one that I could get a substantial discount on the 2.0 upgrade from their web site, but apparently the idea that I shouldn't have to pay for an upgrade to software I just bought is too similar to the idea that I shouldn't have to pay for the software at all.
Copylefts aren't the same as public domain, because you can't create derivative works under your own license.
This flaw is another several nails in the coffin. People care about the right to make copies and add fixes, but nobody really cares about the ability to create a transformative work that advances the state of the art under your *own* terms rather than someone else's.
Re:Let me deal with your objections one by one
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Do You Code Sign?
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It seems to me that Bruce is trying to tell people the *difference* between "signed" and "secure", not demand that code signing be made more secure.
Cliff's argument is essentially that Bruce expects the wrong things from code signing, but I don't think he expects those things. I think he simply wants the public to know that these things aren't there. As far as whether they are *supposed* to be there, I think Cliff has quite rightly perceived that they're not, but then misinterpreted Bruce's "code signing is not secure" as meaning "code signing is bad".
Code signing is designed to prove that this code is in fact the code that was released, and that it has not been modified. It's supposed to provide two levels of security: it verifies to the end user that the code has not been modified with a virus or trojan horse after leaving the originating company, and it verifies to a support technician that the code has not been altered by the end user.
It is NOT supposed to guarantee that the code is what you want, or that it is being used safely, or that it interacts properly with other code, or even that the company is trustworthy. It simply says "this is exactly the software company X shipped".
The idea here is that if the software turns out not to do what company X says it does, you can hold company X responsible. It does not at any point mean that company X says anything other than "this is our code"; additional statements are left to normal communication channels.
Bruce's points are valid because they are based on the broader question of security, as is the point raised earlier about trusting all code signed by Microsoft (regardless of who is providing it), but these points do not invalidate code signing because code signing was never intended to address them. It would be rather odd to suggest that Bruce doesn't know this, so I propose that his intent is not to invalidate but to elucidate and educate.
I don't personally have any need for this variety of security, so I don't sign my code. If I needed it, however, I would indeed sign my code. I wouldn't expect code signing to be my whole security strategy, though.
I own other prior art on this, the "Space Madness" system of the BBS door game Ultimate Universe. (Which really *is* still in development, I promise, there's just no firm release schedule.) There's not really a whole lot of leg on which this "invention" may stand.
> Microsoft on the other hand owes its > place in the market to...the outrageously bad quality of early software.
When Microsoft was young, software sucked so hard that Microsoft's looked INCREDIBLE. The people claiming otherwise - which included me - were using seriously complicated and brittle conglomerations of small utilities that the average person would never in a million years understand. Quick: what's the difference between sed and awk? Try explaining it to a non-technical user.
Microsoft beat Apple because Apple was expensive, and they beat the various PC software vendors because those vendors were delivering crap.
That's the same way Google is winning: they're delivering better software than most at cheaper prices than Microsoft. And once Google climbs far enough up the mountain, they'll reach a point of diminishing innovation where they'll only be making tiny incremental improvements, and people will complain that Google is just a bunch of money-grubbing jerks.
It's not mine, either. My interpretation of open source is that if you have any business with the source code, the source code is available. So if I sell a software product, and I offer the source code to that product to existing customers for an additional fee, I would call that open source.
The community at large does not agree.
> What you are describing is Free Software. Open > Source means that anyone can ask for the > source code and get it
"Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: 1. Free Redistribution..."
The OSI definition is by no means universal, but I think most people would agree it reflects the prevalent community expectations with reasonable accuracy.
> Open Source does not mean free (as in beer) > - it means free (as in speech).
Free as in speech *implies* free as in beer over the long run, because the freedom to redistribute is like a slow leak in a tire: over a small period of time, the loss is negligible, but given ENOUGH time the loss is total. There are ways to *delay* or *displace* the loss, but there's always a loser.
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And the great thing about having $350 competition is that it will eventually force you to figure out what it offers and you don't.
I frequently spend money to save time. I order a pizza instead of cooking dinner. I tip the delivery driver rather than go pick it up myself. And I eat from disposable paper plates instead of reusable dishes so I don't have to wash them. I'm perfectly capable of assembling a solid and satisfying meal for about $7 worth of groceries, but it will take me about two hours to do all the things related to it. So instead, I spend $40 on a pizza, because my time is worth more than $16.50 an hour.
Microsoft saves me time. It's easy. What word processor should I use? MS Word. What if I didn't want to? Well... there are many alternatives. If I spent a week evaluating them, I might be able to make a good choice, and that choice would probably have 90% of the functionality of MS Word... but I don't have a week to flush down the toilet just because Microsoft isn't the poster boy for business ethics, and I simply don't understand why I would invest more time for less functionality.
If using a different word processor was going to save me $2500, it might be worth a week of my time, but it's not. At retail prices, it saves me about $100, which makes it worth a couple hours at most... and as a Microsoft partner, I don't pay retail for Microsoft software. At my price, it's not even worth twenty minutes.
> you simply can't compare a system like Windows
> to a system like SLES they way that they do
Windows compares patch applications with SUSE, and the Linux crowd complains that it's an invalid comparison because there are more things to patch. Well, that's sort of the POINT. That's precisely what Microsoft are saying: there's too much stuff to patch on Linux.
As far as valid comparisons go, people told me frequently that while Microsoft requires you to reboot if Windows locks up, Linux just makes you shell out to a virtual terminal to fix the problem. So I decided to bite the bullet and try an X desktop. OpenOffice gave me PLENTY of chances to test this out. It locked up when I opened documents. It locked up when I saved documents. It locked up when I searched documents. Sometimes it would lock up when I tried to switch windows. Well, I can shell out and fix the problem all right! All I have to do is KILL THE WINDOW MANAGER, which loses all my unsaved work - which is the only objection I ever had to rebooting in the first damn place. So not having to reboot means precisely squat.
Everyone is lying. The Linux people say something about how Windows sucks because it blue screens all the time, and the Microsoft people say Linux sucks because it crashes all the time, but then the Linux people go "OOH! Did you hear that?! They're LYING!"... as though they weren't writing their own little fantasy about how frequently Windows blue screens. You can't claim the moral high ground AND run a marketing campaign based on technicalities and exaggerations. Pick one. Microsoft did.
Let me provide you a couple of scenarios.
Scenario one: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone pops up with a patent and says I have to pay royalties.
Scenario two: I'm writing software. I come up with a brilliant idea and put it in my software. When I release it, someone else steals my idea for their own software and releases a competing product.
Both of these scenarios are clearly wrong, but no patent plan thus far has dealt with any way to prevent both cases. Overuse of software patents creates the first scenario, while lack of software patents creates the second.
What most bothers me is that the people screaming "no software patents" are never going to have one ANYWAY. They are not brilliant original thinkers, they are primarily wage slaves and open source advocates; they want the ability to grab and use *anything* that looks like it might fit when they have to build something. There is nothing wrong with that; brilliant original thinkers are rare, and while we would all like to believe that group includes us, we are all probably wrong.
But some of us really do have a significant potential to create something that takes a long time to invent, but not much time at all to copy. I have a product in development right now that is absolutely revolutionary; nothing out there is even remotely close to it, and I think my target market is going to just go insane wanting it once they see how great it is. (I could be wrong, and... as I mentioned above... I probably am.) But once you see the product, you know exactly how it works. If you have a reasonable competence in the appropriate field, you could build it yourself. I spent four years making it out of nothing, but it would take a competitor maybe a month to bootleg it.
That's why patents exist. A patent is designed to protect *exactly* this situation. The problem is that they are not being used this way.
My solution to the problem is simple: patents should cost a percentage of what they earn the owner. Not a huge percentage; something tiny. The patent owner could simply list all of his licensees and the gross revenue they generated, and pay (say) 20% of his most profitable year over the life of the patent. Each year, he simply calculates his 20% and subtracts what he's already paid.
Essentially, the protection of the patent gives the company which owns it a certain monopoly power, which inevitably raises the market price. Since the company will therefore make more money over the life of the patent, the government should charge some of that revenue back. Over the twenty years that patent is in force, you'll pay between one and twenty percent of your revenue, depending on how lasting and enduring your idea is. If you have a novel little flash-in-the-pan idea, you pay closer to twenty. If you have a brilliant and useful idea, you pay closer to one. This gives the inventor a form of automatic patent fee relief when his invention is truly of lasting value to the world.
Filing fees can stay, so people don't file patents for no good reason, but we should probably reduce them enough for people to *afford* a patent. Between the search and the application and the filing fee and all the attorney fees along the way, getting a patent COSTS, and I'm not exactly struggling. The old man in the basement with a fantastic idea can't even *begin* to think about getting a patent, and that's just plain wrong.
Add to this a burden on patent holders to demonstrate probable intent to infringe before prosecuting infringement... and the patent system is pretty much fixed. I don't think that's a massive change. I don't think anyone who really deserves a patent on something will complain about it.
What we really want from the patent system is protection for useful inventions from inventors, not for endless strings of crap from major corporations. Make the endless strings of crap pay more, and the corporations will be less interested in patenting them. Place a r
Kameo is an adventure/RPG. Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion was supposed to be out, but has been delayed (dammit). I view the Tony Hawk games as adventure games more than sports games since THUG and THUG2, but it's a limited-appeal kind of adventure. Perfect Dark Zero is confirmed for launch according to other reports (not familiar with the title, but I seem to recall it's an FPS).
Sports and racing games have it easy, because they've already got a number of things developed and ready to shove into the game... as soon as the hardware catches up. When they develop the feature, QA vetoes it because load times are glacial and framerate drops into single-digits. Now that the new platform is adding more horsepower, some of these features can go straight into the next release, and several more can be tweaked and optimised for next year's sequel.
Adventure/RPG games take much longer to build. Even an FPS game needs more detailed level design than a football game. Face it, we're just more demanding than the average Madden player - not because our game is somehow "better", but because the things Madden does well don't happen to interest us. What *does* interest us is the idea of a whole world to explore and conquer. That's a pretty damn tall order, and I for one am just glad we get games like this at all.
But the parent is NOT flamebait. Bad moderator. Go sit in the corner.
> what attracts you to a store over buying online?
People.
The fundamental reason I want to play RPGs instead of WoW is because I will be sitting at a real table with real people that I can see.
I'm perfectly happy to play yet another DM's personal clone of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, no matter how bad it is, if I get to sit at a table with other human beings having FUN. It's the same reason I like playing round-robin multiplayer video games; I don't want to yell and scream over a microphone, I want to play a while and then pass the controller. It's not about the game, it's about the people, and the game is just an excuse for all of us to sit in one place and hang out with no serious purpose.
The same thing happens with a store. I'm perfectly happy to walk into a store and buy more dice I don't need just to hang out and chat with the owner. I'm even willing to help pack boxes and stock shelves and set up displays.
It's an unspoken arrangement. I'm not just a customer, he's not just a merchant, we're members of the same underground subculture. I expect that he will occasionally give me a discount or even pass me something for free, or just track down the hard-to-find rulebook I keep complaining about wanting. He expects that if I want to buy something game-related, I buy it from him, without whining about the prices being a little higher than they are online.
Now, if I could just find some seriously hardcore gamers in the Seattle area...
> You actually do have another real choice. Don't watch it.
IMO, a choice that does not result in the desired outcome is not a "real" choice.
This is, of course, a subjective distinction.
I entirely agree with this. Not that I'm in the same boat; my cable is loaded for bear with every damn channel I can get, and I have both TiVo and the dual-tuner Comcast DVR. If I want to see a show that's on cable, I can see it. With TiVo happily recording suggestions and my Comcast DVR dutifully snapping up every series I already want to watch, I am never at a loss for something to watch. (Finding *time* to watch things is a different story.)
What bugs me is the horrific quality of imported shows. I want subtitles, not bad actors overdubbing the original audio. I want on-screen translations of the written material. I want *accurate* translations. When the subtitles for an exchange say "Let me go, let me go" and "Be quiet", I'm rather annoyed when I notice that the *audio* should translate to "I'm not gay, I'm not gay" and "Neither am I".
I honestly have no interest in getting all my programs for free. I simply refuse to pay exorbitant prices (sometimes amounting to $20 an episode or more) for bad translations of those programs. If the industry wants me to pay for an episode of some show, it needs to be a high-quality recording with accurate subtitles and on-screen translations of written material. Until I can reliably get that somewhere, I have no real choice but to get bittorrents from other fans.
The market is here, we're just not willing to settle for a bad product. It's valuable to me if I can get a DVD of some series with a quick online order, but *only* if the DVD is of a reasonable quality for the price.
> is it any suprise that MS can write software for
> its own OS which takes every possible advantage
> of its native environment to run with speed?
If my software runs ten times better than someone else's, I tend to think it's because the other guy is a complete moron. The alternative, of course, is that I am an insanely great programmer... which I consider far less likely. There are not that many insanely great programmers, but there are an *awful* lot of complete morons out there writing code. So it is obviously easier for Sun to hire several morons than for Microsoft to hire several insanely great programmers.
I honestly don't know why people view Nintendo as such an innovator with controllers. The DS touch screen is the only real innovation I've seen from Nintendo; everything else is pretty derivative of existing PC controllers. I could actually handwave the DS touch screen as derivative of the KAOSS pad from Korg, if I wanted to be extreme about it... but I can't in good conscience argue that pro audio gear constitutes a precedent for game controllers. ;)
The observation that people already use "body english" in games is precisely what gives people the idea that it should be used as a control mechanism. This simply does not follow. The problem with gyroscopic controllers is that human beings have large muscle groups for infrequent and imprecise movements, and small muscle groups for frequent precision movements. Tilt controllers use the large muscle groups of the elbow and shoulder, rather than the small muscle groups of the hand and wrist, so prolonged usage is tiring and precision movement is difficult.
That doesn't mean Nintendo hasn't "solved" this problem. Perhaps their version is very sensitive, and only needs to be moved slightly. Perhaps instead of the old tilt-sensitive technology, we have something more along the lines of the Fly pentop computer... perhaps something that inherently recognises gestures. There's certainly some interesting technological research coming out these days, and Nintendo may be positioning themselves as the Apple of the console world - much smaller market share than Sony or Microsoft, but an absolutely solid lock on that market share that no amount of marketing or proselytising can shake.
What tends to make weapons easier to aim with a mouse than with a joystick is the mouse ballistics. Move it fast, and the mouse automatically decreases the resolution so your onscreen cursor covers a lot of ground. Slow it down, the resolution increases for pixel-perfect accuracy.
Joysticks don't lend themselves well to this sort of thing, especially the new thumbstick variety that have all of an inch of throw between zero and max. The Xbox controller has worked better for me in that respect, but it's more me than the controller, because I have friends who feel far more comfortable with the PS2 controller. Different strokes and all that.
I think the bottom line here is that we need more standardised controller customisation in console games. We should be able to set the sensitivity of our thumbsticks, and the ballistic level if we're satisfied with how that works, and reverse the X and/or Y axis. Every button should be reassignable. The strength of the vibration function should be customisable. And all of this should be provided in a standard library from the console manufacturer, so every game for that console has the exact same capability.
The Revolution's gyroscopic controller notion is stupid, as all of us who remember "le Stick" can attest. The idea resurfaces every few years as "the next big thing", fails miserably in the marketplace because it's STUPID, and goes back underground until some other moron digs it up.
Try using a tilt-sensitive controller for several hours, and let me know how cool it is then. It doesn't matter how well-engineered the controller is now, the human body still has the same design, and will still have the exact same problems.
Um... no. The 40% which is under 15 is ALSO under 20, so 40% of the population is over 20, 40% is under 15, and 20% is aged 15-19.
Example:
5 8 11 14 15 17 20 23 25 30
What percentage of these numbers are under 20? 60% - 5, 8, 11, 14, 15, and 17.
What percentage of these numbers are under 15? 40% - 5, 8, 11, and 14.
I think Apple has it going on at both ends. On the one hand, they've always been the media-friendly PC for journalists and editors. On the other, their Unix-based core is beginning to attract a lot of very tech-savvy and credible gurus who wouldn't previously have been seen anywhere except on a command line.
This is giving them a very solid appearance of being all things to all people. They cover one end, they cover the other end, it looks like they cover everything. Microsoft still holds the fat part of the bell curve, but the skinny ends belong to the Mac, and a couple slices at the boundaries belong to Unix derivatives.
Of course, the real situation is precisely what I've always said it is: most people are in the fat part of the bell curve. That doesn't mean we don't need Linux and the Mac (after all, Microsoft doesn't cover the skinny ends so well), but it does mean they're not much of a threat to the MS juggernaut.
I had a similar problem on RAC, but the major thing I kept running into was people who *wanted* things built at those prices; I just couldn't find enough jobs that were willing to pay a decent price for what they wanted. It's one thing if you have some third-world coder underbidding you, but it's another thing when you have a large company on American soil demanding that coders bid no higher than $500 for a month's work... the underbidding coder is a real coder who is really willing to do real work for less money, and that's what free markets are all about. The company setting a maximum bid is just being cheap.
That's where RAC falls down, IMO. If I say "I will pay no more than 50 cents a gallon for my gas", I still get exposed to the prices that other people pay and charge for gas when I drive around my neighborhood. That exposure is what teaches me to revise my estimate of what gas should cost, because I am clearly stupid. When you set a maximum bid for your project on RAC, you don't get exposed to what people really charge because they just plain don't bid on it... so you don't know you're stupid, and you just keep being stupid.
Used car salesmen aren't so widely disliked because of what they sell, but because of how they sell it.
Same with marketers. We all know "under ten dollars" means "$9.99", because that's what it ALWAYS means. Why don't they just say "ten bucks"? Because people always round down. $9.99 looks like $9 to most people, so it seems a whole lot cheaper than $10. Look at gas stations; a gallon of gas isn't 2.87, it's 2.879, because people don't count that last 9/10 of a cent. But they still pay it. That's what marketing is all about. You manipulate the world to make people think one thing and pay another.
Nobody is complaining that the miniature blender isn't worth an extra dollar, or that the gallon of gas isn't worth the extra penny. They're complaining that someone is trying to trick them, which is precisely what is happening. We're wise to it. We don't *fall* for the trick. We just perceive that a trick is being played, and we don't like it.
So when we can't see the trick, it doesn't make the marketer look honest and forthright. It just makes us feel increasingly suspicious, because we know marketers play tricks, and if we can't see what the trick *is*... chances are we're about to get screwed.
Fool me once, and all that.
Somewhere along the line, marketing stopped being about finding people who want something, and started being mostly about making people buy things they don't want.
This industry reinvention has made it very difficult for most marketers to handle a good product, because they can't find the right people who don't want it.
I bought 1.0 in a store about a month after 2.0 came out. Seeing that there was no version information on the box, I contacted Propellerheads beforehand to make sure I could upgrade for free if it was the 1.0 version, and they told me I had to do so through Steinberg. Steinberg assured me it would be upgraded at no cost to me, except a small handling charge, and all I had to do was send them the receipt.
Steinberg subjected me to an utter customer service nightmare for over a year before I gave up. Their greatest concern wasn't that I had bought an old version of the software in a retail outlet, or that I felt I deserved the 2.0 upgrade, but that SOFTWARE PIRACY IS EVERYWHERE!
They observed from day one that I could get a substantial discount on the 2.0 upgrade from their web site, but apparently the idea that I shouldn't have to pay for an upgrade to software I just bought is too similar to the idea that I shouldn't have to pay for the software at all.
Copylefts aren't the same as public domain, because you can't create derivative works under your own license.
This flaw is another several nails in the coffin. People care about the right to make copies and add fixes, but nobody really cares about the ability to create a transformative work that advances the state of the art under your *own* terms rather than someone else's.
It seems to me that Bruce is trying to tell people the *difference* between "signed" and "secure", not demand that code signing be made more secure.
Cliff's argument is essentially that Bruce expects the wrong things from code signing, but I don't think he expects those things. I think he simply wants the public to know that these things aren't there. As far as whether they are *supposed* to be there, I think Cliff has quite rightly perceived that they're not, but then misinterpreted Bruce's "code signing is not secure" as meaning "code signing is bad".
Code signing is designed to prove that this code is in fact the code that was released, and that it has not been modified. It's supposed to provide two levels of security: it verifies to the end user that the code has not been modified with a virus or trojan horse after leaving the originating company, and it verifies to a support technician that the code has not been altered by the end user.
It is NOT supposed to guarantee that the code is what you want, or that it is being used safely, or that it interacts properly with other code, or even that the company is trustworthy. It simply says "this is exactly the software company X shipped".
The idea here is that if the software turns out not to do what company X says it does, you can hold company X responsible. It does not at any point mean that company X says anything other than "this is our code"; additional statements are left to normal communication channels.
Bruce's points are valid because they are based on the broader question of security, as is the point raised earlier about trusting all code signed by Microsoft (regardless of who is providing it), but these points do not invalidate code signing because code signing was never intended to address them. It would be rather odd to suggest that Bruce doesn't know this, so I propose that his intent is not to invalidate but to elucidate and educate.
I don't personally have any need for this variety of security, so I don't sign my code. If I needed it, however, I would indeed sign my code. I wouldn't expect code signing to be my whole security strategy, though.
I own other prior art on this, the "Space Madness" system of the BBS door game Ultimate Universe. (Which really *is* still in development, I promise, there's just no firm release schedule.) There's not really a whole lot of leg on which this "invention" may stand.
No, I've been saying that Perl is a focal point for special *people*, which is useful when you need to find those people.
Of course, some special people ride the short bus.
> the CPAN is a fairly large network
The question which determines whether CPAN is a niche community is not whether it is *small*, but whether it is *special*.
So if there is nothing special about CPAN, then it is not a niche community.
Feel free to mount your argument.
> Microsoft on the other hand owes its ...the outrageously bad quality of early software.
> place in the market to
When Microsoft was young, software sucked so hard that Microsoft's looked INCREDIBLE. The people claiming otherwise - which included me - were using seriously complicated and brittle conglomerations of small utilities that the average person would never in a million years understand. Quick: what's the difference between sed and awk? Try explaining it to a non-technical user.
Microsoft beat Apple because Apple was expensive, and they beat the various PC software vendors because those vendors were delivering crap.
That's the same way Google is winning: they're delivering better software than most at cheaper prices than Microsoft. And once Google climbs far enough up the mountain, they'll reach a point of diminishing innovation where they'll only be making tiny incremental improvements, and people will complain that Google is just a bunch of money-grubbing jerks.
> Sourceforge is not especially popular
> in the Perl community
It's not especially popular in the PHP community, either, so I don't see the problem.
> Huh? Blacklisted? Disagreed?
It was a back-reference to a previous post, which was intended to be humorous. Unfortunately, you don't seem to get it.
> Perl programmers don't use sourceforge very
> much because the CPAN fills that role in the
> Perl community
Are you listening to yourself?
"Perl is not a niche community! We just publish most of our projects at our own special place with features that cater to our own special needs."
Um... yeah. Sure. Whatever.
> That's not my interpretation of Open Source.
It's not mine, either. My interpretation of open source is that if you have any business with the source code, the source code is available. So if I sell a software product, and I offer the source code to that product to existing customers for an additional fee, I would call that open source.
The community at large does not agree.
> What you are describing is Free Software. Open
> Source means that anyone can ask for the
> source code and get it
See http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php for the OSI definition, which leads off with:
"Open source doesn't just mean access to the source code. The distribution terms of open-source software must comply with the following criteria: 1. Free Redistribution..."
The OSI definition is by no means universal, but I think most people would agree it reflects the prevalent community expectations with reasonable accuracy.
> Open Source does not mean free (as in beer)
> - it means free (as in speech).
Free as in speech *implies* free as in beer over the long run, because the freedom to redistribute is like a slow leak in a tire: over a small period of time, the loss is negligible, but given ENOUGH time the loss is total. There are ways to *delay* or *displace* the loss, but there's always a loser.