Could you at least read the article first before posting a kneejerk reaction?
From the article: "For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately."
She admits herself how rude she behaved to family and friends in the article several times. As it turned out, they were unaware that private messages or postings on Facebook were not really "private". From her own account, those were simple misunderstandings. My real beef was that, if you bothered to read the article, that she seemed to assign the blame for her rude behavior on the data-minding companies, like she was somehow "forced" to be rude in order to protect her privacy.
Again, I quote: "Attempting to opt out forced me into increasingly awkward interactions with my family and friends."
Uh, no, the awkward interaction came because the author *chose to remain on Facebook*, yet placed the burden on her family and friends to keep her pregnancy a secret. Christ, the whole point about Facebook is that you talk with friends about things going on in your life. And when her friends and family inevitably let it slip, she overreacted rather dramatically. It really felt like she was intentionally setting herself up for failure in order to create a more dramatic scenario. Oddly enough, despite the slip-ups and idiocy of ordering baby supplies from Amazon (facepalm), the ad companies still apparently didn't get wind of her pregnancy (it's never mentioned in the article), something the summary misleadingly implies happened.
Damnit, I don't like being in the position of looking like I'm defending the ad companies here, but her "experiment" and accompanying article just seemed really over-the-top. Nothing more than that.
"For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately. When I emailed to ask why he did it, he explained, “I didn’t put it on your wall.” Another family member who reached out on Facebook chat a few weeks later exclaimed, “I didn’t know that a private message wasn’t private!”"
And again:
"But avoiding the big data dragnet meant that I not only looked like a rude family member or an inconsiderate friend, I also looked like a bad citizen."
I'm not the one claiming she acted rudely. She states it herself twice in the article.
Note I'm not defending the behavior of the ad companies here. However, if she was really serious about wanting privacy about that sort of thing, I would think the common-sense course of action would be to stay off Facebook completely. Everyone knows that whatever you do there is mined mercilessly for data, but there's absolutely no reason one has to be on there, other than they *enjoy the features of the service* (this author apparently included). Likewise, there's zero reason you HAVE to shop online or pay for items with a credit card if you don't want to. You also don't have to give your real name or phone number for getting a "discount card" at most shops - that's entirely optional, in my experience (and I don't).
The article just sounded like much ado about nothing to me, that's all. It was her nine-month sociology experiment, and she wrote up the results to be as dramatic as possible - a very first world problem, in other words.
It doesn't say big data still found her anywhere in the article. She made no mention of evidence that they had, despite the Uncle sending a congratulations message on Facebook.
Was there more to story than just the article on Time where she said her measures weren't able to keep the information private?
Yeah, I saw nothing that said big data found her at all. Instead, I gleaned that she ended up acting pretty damn rude to her relatives who inadvertently broke her self-imposed techology exile, although I noted she didn't close down her Facebook account.
She concludes by complaining about the data-collection agencies, essentially blaming them after she behaved rudely to her family and friends, and launches into a weird conspiratorial rant about how her husband spotted a sign behind a checkout counter stating the company "“reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities", and then goes on to talk about how this (plus using Tor) made them feel like criminals. Huh? She then exclaims that Obama's report on data collection practices can't come soon enough, because... uh, what will that report do exactly?
While I'm not exactly on the side of these advertisement companies, the author clearly performed this experiment and wrote the article with a definite agenda in mind, and drew some somewhat odd and conspiratorial-sounding conclusions about the ordeal. It feels like she obfuscated the fact (not helped by the Slashdot summary) that her efforts did indeed pay off, and that apparently no commercial companies found out she was pregnant.
That being said... in most cases (there are exceptions, as the article points out), do women care if an advertisement agency finds out she's pregnant? As soon as I bought a home, I got a lot of homeowner-related advertisement. That was fine with me, as the ads were more relevant to my interests, and it's not something I had intended to be a secret. I understand the principle of the thing, but every technology we gain has its tradeoffs. The web is largely funded by advertisement. We pay with a lack of anonymity and privacy, which seem to be what most people prefer, as evidenced by the success of Facebook. Overall, I still think we benefit a lot more than we lose from the connectivity and persistence of our online world.
The latency from multiplayer over the Internet is still there. This only adds latency viewing the response from your own input. Still, Madden and FIFA games are evolving, with more and more players acting as coaches and managers only, letting AI fully handle actual player simulation. In that scenario, this added latency is not a problem.
All modern videogames hide latency with client-side prediction. At the very least, locally rendered games means your own avatar, the one most important to you, is always snappy and responsive (unless the devs royally screwed up). The reason most streaming technology has generally failed so far is that input latency is extremely frustrating for gamers, making the game feel sluggish and unresponsive. You say "only" in regard to input latency, but that's a pretty huge caveat. Games like you mentioned that don't rely on twitch reflexes seem the best option, but that definitely limits the viable options.
Of course, there's the other big issue - with streaming games, you're essentially just renting the games you want to play, and only for as long as the service exists. Streaming rented games from server farms is a game publisher's wet dream. Subscriber-only games paid for by the month, and absolutely can't be copied or shared with your friends.
Sorry, you want to actually buy your games and play them as long as you want? Hahahaha, yeah, right!
The thing about crowd funding as an alternative to traditional funding is that banks and investors are very good at recognizing that a product is going to fail. The crowd funding community is very early in developing that same sense, but I think it will come.
The interesting thing is that one of the big appeals to crowd funding is it allows ideas to become a reality that would never have passed through the risk-averse traditional funding routes.
Eventually I hope a middle ground will form, comprised of a more savvy average backer, a little more diligence on the part of kickstarter (maybe via some kind of rating/analysis done on projects over a certain size?), but still with some of the same spirit of throwing money at stuff because it sounds cool and you really want it to happen vice because you've got some pretty charts and a pile of math showing it'll be profitable.
Yeah, banks don't offer small business loans until you've been in business for several years and have an income (gross, I think) of several hundred thousand dollars, which shouldn't be too surprising, but that's a pretty high bar for most small projects.
Make no mistake, crowdfunded projects are absolutely high-risk ventures, or they'd be getting funding from more traditional sources. Financing a project from start to finish with only crowd funding is especially risky, especially if the developers don't have an established track record. It's extremely easy to underestimate how much time and effort it takes to bring a project to fruition. I've been a game developer for 15 years, and it's taken me much of that time to be able to properly estimate a development project (and I still occasionally get things badly wrong). And of course, there's the risk of outright failure from fraudulent or extremely incompetent developers.
I'm not really sure what sort of "middle ground" would work, though it's an interesting idea. Maybe a company (Kickstarter, 3rd party?) could offer a service to vet potential projects for a fee and present their findings to potential funders. Things they could investigate:
* Experience of developers with similar projects * Result of previous crowdfunding efforts * Financial history and stability of developers (e.g. credit rating) * History / stability of development team * Quality of development plan * Current project completion * Overall subjective impression
As you mentioned, this would probably be most appropriate for teams trying to raise larger sums of money, where more is at stake.
Well, yeah, of course it's largely speculative, but not completely unfounded. First point: The fact that the founders have fled the company doesn't bode well to me.
As to the games: Dragon Age 2 was not awesome, and most people seem to agree with me on that, not you. And honestly, even though I'm a huge fan of the genre, Dragon Age: Origins was merely OK, not great. I was a bit underwhelmed by it, as I was hoping for something more along the Elder Scroll's breadth and depth of a world. Instead, we got a bunch of tiny levels connected by spots on an overhead map. Sort of lame compared to Oblivion or Skyrim's massive world. Interacting with your companions was a lot of fun, but the overall story was less than engaging, and the gameplay seemed pretty unbalanced / uneven at times, which got frustrating. I'm waiting to see how Inquisition is reviewed before I get too excited. Hopefully it will be good.
I loved Mass Effect - no doubt about that. Mass Effect 3 was fun, but of course the ending was horrible, and negated all the choices made in the game up till then, ultimately leaving a somewhat sour taste in my mouth after all the time (and money) I put into those games. The introduction of ammo in 2 and 3... er, "heat clips" was retarded when the canon already established it wasn't necessary, but other than that, it was a great series.
TOR was a disaster, and indicated extreme laziness/complacency on the part of the devs (granted, not the original Bioware studio, but they did keep the same name), who felt they could just clone WoW, inject the Star Wars story, and call it good. Guild Wars 2 at least took a chance and pushed the genre forward with some real innovation in gameplay, so I don't think that's indicative of MMOs in general. BTW, the Elder Scrolls Online will likely suffer the same fate as TOR, since it's design is stuck about a decade in the past - essentially a single-player game bolted onto an MMO framework.
I compare these efforts to Knights of the Old Republic, which was perhaps one of the most engaging RPGs I've played, and certainly one with the most memorable story. The big story twist was awesome, unlike ME3. Or even compared with their older RPGs, they just don't seem to have the depth and consistency I remember.
So, yeah, "rapid decline" is really the wrong phrase to use. I probably should have said "I'm worried we're seeing the beginning of a decline", to be a bit more fair, since I'd have to assess their recent game record as "spotty". I'm honestly hoping I'm wrong on this, because I've really enjoyed Bioware's RPGs in the past, and I'd love to keep enjoying them for years to come.
I'll take safer streets and a good economic environment over all this high-tech fluff, if you please. Yes, smartphones are convenient and all, but "smart cities"? What's the point, really? Let's leave this to entrepreneurs to figure out how to do the bleeding edge stuff. Government is never best at that sort of thing. This guy is basically taking about art, not utility. At the moment, that seems an egregious waste of scant tax dollars when the government is already barely able to fulfill it's most basic obligations, and has been running deficits for years.
Granted, this was talking about a city in England. Maybe they have money to burn. Here in the US, our government has been running in the red for years, and it's not looking like that will change anytime soon.
If you've ever been a part of a really great team, then you know that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. It's an almost impossible thing to engineer, and extremely difficult to sustain it over a long period. A buyout has a high likelyhood of destroying the magic of that team due to outside interference. A company provides a place to nurture and develop highly effective teams, and has a big part in defining the overall culture at its workplace. I don't think that's an illusion by any means. It's a very real and tangible thing.
After a buyout... yes, many people end up in the parent company, but if they really wanted to be a part of that parent company, they probably would have applied there in the first place. And for those that leave... finding a new job is an incredibly stressful thing, as nearly anyone can attest to. The only benefit is a short term infusion of cash, which gives the company perhaps one cool new project before the honeymoon is over and things start going down the toilet.
EA has swallowed up and destroyed many incredible companies (Bioware is the latest example of a company in rapid decline). For myself, I speak as a fan, as I see the products I previously enjoyed now declining in quality until I give up on them completely. This happens time and time again after acquisition. It's hard not to attribute the cause to the buyout.
I use Ubuntu as my desktop, because while I like Arch and Slackware, I'm too old to spend time futzing with getting backups to work or writing custom trayer configurations or whatever. (And when I finally got everything I wanted on Arch, half of GNOME or KDE was installed anyway, so I didn't really see the point.)
Anyway, you know what I wish Canonical would work on? Ubuntu for Computers. I don't need yet another mobile operating system; Android is there, iOS is there, Windows Phone is there, FirefoxOS is there. There's nothing that Ubuntu Touch is going to offer that isn't done better somewhere else. All it's doing is cannibalizing resources from Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Working on Mir just creates divisions within the open source community; there's nothing wrong with Wayland.
So yeah, Canonical, don't just jump on the mobile bandwagon. You have a core product, focus on it.
Wasn't the entire point of Unity that it was more mobile / touch focused? I think this is when they began to alienate a lot of their users, and spawned the rise of Mint. We've seen two companies now (Canonical and Microsoft) that have alienated many of their core desktop users by trying to slap on a touch/mobile focused desktop, replacing the more powerful and desktop-focused mouse+keyboard user interface that have been refined over the course of decades.
I agree with you. Ubuntu/Linux offers a distinct and practical product in the PC world. I'm not really seeing what they would offer in the mobile space. Are they really thinking they can build up a unique ecosystem of their own to compete with Android or iOS? Hell, even MS can't seem to dent that market.
We're moving to a stratified computing society, with big servers running the infrastructure, desktop PCs doing the bulk of the real production work or gaming, laptops for mobile or light work, and tablets and phones for casual computing or data consumption and communication. Eventually, people will figure out that you DON'T want to share the same user interface between a desktop computer and a tablet. Touch is fantastic for data consumption on small devices, but a disaster for production work on a PC.
Hopefully the loss of market share of both Ubuntu and Windows 8 will make that fact clear to those making the decision. At least Apple has had the good sense not to discard their desktop operating system functionality in favor of an iOS-like interface.
XP is used in many commercial products which cannot easily be replaced by the end user. For example: http://rightfast.com/index.php...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's nothing wrong with XP in an embedded environment (such as in a bank's ATM). Exploits in most operating systems are almost always related to application-level attack surfaces, such as IE and Flash (as was this particular vulnerability). In a point of sale unit, there is no one surfing the web with the browser. As long as the front-facing application and hardware are properly locked down, there should be no problems. Note that Target's POS data breach was NOT done through the machines themselves, but through the backend network itself. Granted, lack of address space randomization makes it an easier target, but note carefully that the exploit discussed in the article was available on ALL platforms and IE versions, not just XP/IE6.
Where a company or user will get into trouble is if they're using Windows XP + IE6 in a user-controlled, internet-facing computer. And let's be clear here, it's been IE6 and not really XP that was the problem since the latest patches and the firewall was turned on by default. If they rely on IE6, then there's a good bet that they also rely on Flash or a Java plugin as well, and that's just tripling your attack surface, especially if they're not kept up to date as well for reasons of compatibility or laziness.
There's sort of a media feeding frenzy about Windows XP and it's end-of-life. Yes, people should move on to a supported OS as soon as it's practical, but XP users can greatly reduce their risk simply by using up-to-date applications. Use Chrome or Firefox when browsing, and if possible remove Flash and Java (I actually removed Flash about half a year ago for security reasons, and found that, for the most part, I don't really need it anymore). Note that this exploit was performed with the help of Flash as well - nothing to do with XP.
Ah, John, you make deals with the devil... are you then surprised when he comes calling for repayment? It's unfortunate that so many smaller, independent studios are absorbed by larger companies, who then proceed to strip-mine them of their IP and talent, leaving a dessicated corpse of a company in their wake to be discarded at their convenience.
I'm sure their partership with Facebook will be *completely* different.
'Spider-Man 3' (2007) tried to get with the times by giving Maguire a black suit (courtesy of an alien symbiote) and a little bit of an attitude, an effort that pretty much everybody seems to view as a failure.
No, Spider-Man 3 was a near-faithful movie version of the alien-suit saga, a pivotal point in Spider-Man's career where the suit was making Peter stronger and a better fighter, but also more callous and brutal. To say the black suit was the director's attempt at an edgy Spider-Man is like saying the death of the witch king in Return of the King was Peter Jackson's attempt at feminist ideology.
Agreed, it stayed pretty close to canon, from what I can remember. I was a youngster subscribing to the comics during the course of that sage, and it was definitely taking a darker edge to the story.
Unfortunately, the director had this bizarre tendency to have the actors suddenly break out in song and dance - what, three times over the course of the movie? In a previous movie, it was cute once, so they tripled down, slowing the pacing of the movie and breaking the suspension of disbelieve (which is already pretty generous when you go to see a super-hero movie). It's been years since I watched it, but I always thought that if they had just edited it down to the core scenes, the movie wouldn't have been so painful to watch.
In real life, there are plenty of doors for which you will never find the key lying around. More importantly there, are millions (billions?) of doors that are of no interest to you, ever. In a video game, it would be very difficult to set up a series of long term societal detriments for going around trying to open every door, or to easily express to the player why the character they're playing has no interest in one door vs. another, or why what's behind most doors is not of interest to the gameplay or the plot of the game. But it'd also be extremely strange to walk down a city street environment and have there be no doors into any of the surrounding buildings. So we put up false doors as window dressing so the environment looks familiar, but then we build a visual metaphor that lets players see at a glance which doors are unimportant so they don't bother to try them. This can be by leaving them as a flat texture instead of modeled, making openable doors a different color or have specific lighting or highlights, making openable doors have handles and unopenable ones not have handles, or as the article suggests, putting rubble or something (depending on the context of the game) in front of unopenable doors. You can even make unopenable doors make a specific sound effect when approached, such as the sound of a handle jiggling on a locked door, or the sound of the character specifically saying "It won't open," etc. (although only communicating it once the door is approached can be tedious for the player).
You're exactly right. Game developers can either spend a nightmarish amount of time trying to solve the locked door "problem", or they could make it a static prop that plays a "jiggle the doorknob, but it's locked" sound effect and then put that saved time and effort into the actual gameplay and mechanics. People sometimes forget that game developers have to pick and choose their battles, and any time spent on non-gameplay fluff should never detract from rock-solid core game mechanics.
You may not keep your day job for long, but you can wreck the hell out of some doors and go out in a blaze of glory.
Someone actually did that next door to where I work a few years ago. It was quite a sight to arrive at work in the morning only to see the office park swarming with police. I had accidentally allowed my car tabs to expire and hadn't renewed them yet, and all I could think of was "please don't look at my license plate... please don't look at my license plate..." as officers with their guns unholstered shoo'ed us away from the area. It was an interesting morning.
That's not really a very high bar right there. Invest a little bit in stealth, archery, alchemy, or blacksmithing, and you can easily break the game.
Is it close enough to bug free that immersion isn't lost?
Actually, are you sure you played the same Skyrim as everybody else?
I tend to give Skyrim a pass on some of those balance issues because there's about a million ways to play the game, so it's likely that someone will find a golden path or two. I don't recall the game being quite as easy to break as you make it out to be, but then, I didn't actively seek out those methods, and just had myself a few hundred hours of fun. In a sandbox type game, if you really want to ruin your own fun by breaking the game with obscure tricks and mechanics, it's on your head. I was much more disappointed in Oblivion, where you could literally break the game mechanics simply by not leveling up, and with it's retarded scaling mechanics which sort of slapped you in the face. I'm a tad less forgiving about the sheer number of bugs in the game, but again, the game is so damn ambitious, it's hard not to be a bit lenient there as well. They certainly deserved to be called out for releasing a flat-out broken PS3 port, though.
Regarding Bioware... After the lame ME3 ending, the disappointments of the Dragon Age franchise, and the simple fact that they're beholden to EA... Honestly, I just don't have a lot of hope that they'll be able to bounce back. It's too bad, but the probably outcome is a slow spiral into mediocrity, and then eventual dissolution of the company itself after the cream of the company has already fled to more promising jobs (the founders have already fled). That's been such a continual pattern by companies EA has acquired over the years, it's a wonder to me that people still believe it won't happen to the next company they swallow up.
That would be ideal, and there's nothing stopping the OpenSSL project from doing that.
Except for a lack of manpower and funding, which this fork is splintering even further. And the vague way that they say they're cleaning up OpenSSL when what they're doing is in fact forking it honestly strikes me as misleading. I don't mind that their out to make an OpenBSD specific fork of OpenSSL per se, just that if I'm going to fund something I'd rather fund getting it fixed for everyone.
Unfortunately, the OpenSSL team has demonstrated that they're unable to properly maintain a large codebase. Lack of funding does not turn your coding into a nightmare. That comes from a lack of leadership and coding discipline. The OpenSSL team decided that it could no longer rely on them to turn that project around, and has made the only decision that really makes any sense for them, considering their position.
The big question for me is how serious they are about supporting / developing proper compatibility layers. I was concerned when I hear about them ripping out compatibility code, but in thinking about it, I'd probably take the same approach. First start with your own native platform and write straight C / posix as much as possible, and then add a proper compatibility layer (meaning NOT just a bunch of platform #ifdefs scattered around the code) later.
We'll see how it shakes out, but I wish them luck in their endeavors. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. In the meantime, however, we should keep in mind that a lot of people still rely on OpenSSL, and will continue to do so until there is a viable alternative. Maybe this will motivate the OpenSSL team to clean up their own act in an attempt to avoid becoming irrelevant. Competition is, I think, a good thing, even among FOSS software project.
you're confused, this is OpenBSD patching openssl that comes with that distribution. However many of their patches will help the openssl project if someone on that team can be made to have an interest in actually improving the security of openssl.
The fact that they're starting by reformatting code and ripping out anything that's not OpenBSD/posix-compatible (e.g. Windows compatibility) seems to indicate that it's highly unlikely that this effort will be backported to OpenSSL, with the exception of very specific security fixes, perhaps. What they're doing makes a lot of sense if they're planning to fork the project and maintain it exclusively for the OpenBSD project, but I'm guessing we won't see much backpatching upstream.
If they had made these changed while preserving platform independence, it may have been a different story. They're simply doing what's best for their platform of course, so I don't begrudge them that. Obviously, the OpenBSD team isn't interested in making sure they remain compatible with Windows, etc.
I think the OpenSSL library will need it's own refactoring effort, unfortunately.
You might want to add, "I am not an economist but..." before you write these things. "which may mean lower profits, leading to reduced employment" is as ridiculous as saying that adding a powered usb port will draw less power from your CPU and speed computation.
We have no idea what this will do for employment, there's simply too much going on. Increasing beer prices ever so slightly (I doubt this adds more than a cent or two per can, but whatever) would decrease beer consumption (also ever so slightly) and might increase productivity in other industries. Also, increasing food safety could decrease time off economy wide. It's impossible to know. But I doubt any effect would be large.
When I talk about "lower profits and reduced employment", I simply mean that in a general sense. I wasn't trying to indicate that you'd see a massive drop in employment or profits simply because of this one regulation. My point, which I apparently made somewhat poorly, was that the sum total of these regulations tends to have a negative effect on a company's profits due to the overhead of complying with said regulations. To use your analogy, of course you wouldn't see a significant power drain with a single powered usb port, but your computer can only support a limited number of powered usb ports before the power drain becomes unsustainable.
That's not an argument against all regulations, because as I stated, many are critical for safety reasons. Rather, I was simply pointing out that it's a good thing to look with a critical eye at any new regulation to see whether or not it's truly necessary because of the net economic drain it imposes.
This is all a tempest in a teapot. The FDA is proposing rules for complying with a 2011 law passed by congress to ensure food safety. Brewers had been exempt from the rule because they were able to buy off congresscritters in the past. Now they will have to keep records and conduct training to make sure that they aren't shipping contaminated waste grain to feed cows. People who love to eat cows should welcome the fact that they can be assured that their cows haven't been fed contaminated feed. All of the hysteria about driving brewers out of business is just hyperbole. Before these rules, brewers could ship contaminated, spoiled grain to feed cows without any accountability. Now they will be accountable to make sure that they don't feed cows garbage... seems reasonable. You can read the FDA regulation (and avoid the hysterical hype) here: http://www.fda.gov/Food/Guidan...
I haven't heard of anyone talking about driving brewers out of business wholesale, but any increase in operating cost is going to have negative repercussions for a business, which may mean lower profits, leading to reduced employment. That's just the way these things work. Note that this could also have a ripple effect, such as increasing the price of milk, since farmers have been able to rely on this cheap and nutritious feed for a long time.
You mentioned "they could have" in your response, but I could counter with "they never have so far", which seems a more powerful argument. This practice has been going on for over a century with apparently no real trouble, and suddenly the brewers are going to poison the farmer's cattle? It seems a bit far-fetched, since after all, these are the by-products of human-consumable beverages. I'd be more apt to support this if there was a documented history of problems with this practice.
Government, by it's nature, tends to want to create more and more rules and regulations. I think that's part of the natural desire to proactively protect against problems, but it's also has slightly less noble purposes as well. More regulations essentially means the government has to grow to enforce those regulations. It's in the FDA's own self-interest to pass as many rules and regulations as it can, because then it's "business" grows. That means those in the FDA can move up their own "corporate ladder", so to speak.
Government regulations have to be viewed as a necessary evil. All but the most die-hard libertarians or anarchists would say we need no regulations, but there's always a careful balancing act that must be made between the imposed overhead of these regulations and the benefits they provide in terms of safety, reliability, and consumer rights. So, I think it's worth questioning whether the imposed cost of this new proposal is worth the imposed overhead and costs.
If you fail to deliver on your promised, you won't be able to easily earn back people's trust
So the next kickstarter campaign is in your girlfriend's name.
Do you want me to find examples of people who have gone back to the kickstarter well and never really delivered?
No, not really. Honestly, I don't really care why you seem to dislike crowdsourcing so much. I'm not the person to defend it, as I neither use it nor contribute to other projects. It just seems like you have to consider the source of those projects very carefully - that's up to the individual contributors, but that seems like common sense to me.
Incidentally, although I'm an indie developer (as one would define it),
Great. Then maybe you can explain why it seems impossible for new companies to produce something at the level of Half-Life, the Burnout series, etc etc. Games that people want to put over 100 hours into. Valve and Criterion were relatively small and little-known "indie" companies when those games were made. Why do game developers seem so allergic to giving good value for the price of their game. And why do so many have such low opinions of their own games that they go F2P? Are there no developers who realize just how badly that genre sucks?
You're essentially asking "Why aren't all games as good as the best ones ever made?" Is that something I can even answer? Why aren't all composers Mozart? Why aren't all directors Steven Spielberg?
80% of everything is crap, and that includes games. Of the 20% that isn't crap, only a small percentage will rise to the very top, and probably make everything else look bad by comparison, even though they're probably not.
Making games is harder than most gamers think, incidentally. To make a top-notch game, you need a fusion of talented programmers, game designers, artists, plus (and this is probably the rarest) enough financial backing and managerial foresight to see a project all the way through to it's true completion, not just when the contract says it's due. Incidentally, that's not the same as giving developers unlimited time and money, because that can bankrupt companies. To me, it's a miracle that as many high-quality games are released as there are, since I've seen how incredibly hard they are to make first-hand.
Oh don't worry, Bungie lost it's vitality alright when they sold to Microsoft. Many people don't realize that Bungie is this old because before becoming an Xbox developer they were Mac exclusive developpers.
Yeah, they were getting the life sucked out of them by Microsoft, being asked to do nothing but Halo sequels. They seem to have regained some vitality since splitting with MS though, which is what I was sort of inferring.
Yeah, you're correct that "venture capitalism" is a bad analogy. It is true that you're betting your own capital, but your only potential return is a good game, and maybe some extra freebies. Minupla below gives a much better analogy as "patronage", as there's often a desire to see a specific vision come to fruition. It's not a perfect analogy, but probably a bit better than mine. Of course, any comparison or analogy is going to be flawed in some way, because crowd-funding is a rather unique mechanism for funding development.
Incidentally, although I'm an indie developer (as one would define it), I'm not taking money from crowdfunding. I saved up for many years working for established game development companies and am now self-funding my own game at a tremendous cost and my own financial risk. I've never been to an indie developer conference, in fact. I'm a professional game developer who just happens to be working on my own right now, and I'm betting my financial future on the fact that my game will be fun and engaging to play.
Keep in mind that crowdfunding is not a "get money for free" scheme. You have to pay all those people back with promised products of some sort, which work against your own future earnings. If you fail to deliver on your promised, you won't be able to easily earn back people's trust, and your venture will likely fail. I'm sure there are some people who have taken advantage of the system, but there are also other developers who are working long days and nights on their own in order to produce a viable product that others will enjoy.
Neither console is really "next-gen", that would have been 4K resolution.
I would have been happy with true 1080p resolution. How many people actually have 4K TVs at this point? Not nearly enough to support that in a console designed for the masses, at least. 4K is pretty demanding even for PC videocards. That would have pushed the cost up by several hundred bucks with absolutely no benefit for the majority of customers.
Still, it's not like we could have expected the same massive leaps in visual quality from previous generations. After all, the 360/PS3 generation was already closing in on photo-realistic quality given ideal circumstances, so there's no helping that. From here on out, improvements to visual quality will be less noticeable even for relatively large increases in processing power. 4K takes approximately 16x the processing power to achieve (at least in terms of fill rate), but of course it really doesn't look 16x as good as 1080 resolution.
Despite my grumblings, for me it's still about the games and not really the eye candy, even though comparing transistor counts and internal resolution seems to get the press all hot and bothered. I'll probably buy the first console has an epic, must-play RPG on it, as that's definitely my favorite genre.
Some old icons in the industry are now past their prime. Blizzard, Bioware, and id, longstanding favorites of mine, have all sold out. I'll no longer expect anything great from them, although I'm always willing to be surprised. Instead, younger and hungrier development shops will take their place... maybe ArenaNet and Bungie.
Uhh... Bungie is only 3 months younger than Blizzard. If you want to be pedantic, though, Blizzard Entertainment proper is actually the younger studio.
Yeah, you're right. After I posted that, I realized that "younger" wasn't really the proper term for describing Bungie, as they've been around for quite a while now too. Maybe it's just because it feels to me like Blizzard has lost it's vitality since getting swallowed up by Activision, while I don't necessarily get that feeling from Bungie.
People need to stop distracting themselves while driving. Better yet, make sure that anyone who causes damage, injury, or deaths due to their negligence while driving is fully prosecuted under the law. It's no different than driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Driving a vehicle requires responsibility as a driver.
Let's not kid ourselves. People will just root their phones and bypass any restrictions put in place to block access to the phone while driving. And how the hell would a phone know the difference between a passenger sitting in a car and a driver?
At it's heart, this really isn't a technology problem, but a societal one. We need to crack down on this sort of stuff, so people understand that it's simply not worth the risk to break the law. It would be awesome if software or hardware could fix all those meatware-related problems, but that's not the world we live in.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you at least read the article first before posting a kneejerk reaction?
From the article: "For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately."
She admits herself how rude she behaved to family and friends in the article several times. As it turned out, they were unaware that private messages or postings on Facebook were not really "private". From her own account, those were simple misunderstandings. My real beef was that, if you bothered to read the article, that she seemed to assign the blame for her rude behavior on the data-minding companies, like she was somehow "forced" to be rude in order to protect her privacy.
Again, I quote: "Attempting to opt out forced me into increasingly awkward interactions with my family and friends."
Uh, no, the awkward interaction came because the author *chose to remain on Facebook*, yet placed the burden on her family and friends to keep her pregnancy a secret. Christ, the whole point about Facebook is that you talk with friends about things going on in your life. And when her friends and family inevitably let it slip, she overreacted rather dramatically. It really felt like she was intentionally setting herself up for failure in order to create a more dramatic scenario. Oddly enough, despite the slip-ups and idiocy of ordering baby supplies from Amazon (facepalm), the ad companies still apparently didn't get wind of her pregnancy (it's never mentioned in the article), something the summary misleadingly implies happened.
Damnit, I don't like being in the position of looking like I'm defending the ad companies here, but her "experiment" and accompanying article just seemed really over-the-top. Nothing more than that.
I'm guessing you didn't read the article.
"For example, seven months in, my uncle sent me a Facebook message, congratulating me on my pregnancy. My response was downright rude: I deleted the thread and unfriended him immediately. When I emailed to ask why he did it, he explained, “I didn’t put it on your wall.” Another family member who reached out on Facebook chat a few weeks later exclaimed, “I didn’t know that a private message wasn’t private!”"
And again:
"But avoiding the big data dragnet meant that I not only looked like a rude family member or an inconsiderate friend, I also looked like a bad citizen."
I'm not the one claiming she acted rudely. She states it herself twice in the article.
Note I'm not defending the behavior of the ad companies here. However, if she was really serious about wanting privacy about that sort of thing, I would think the common-sense course of action would be to stay off Facebook completely. Everyone knows that whatever you do there is mined mercilessly for data, but there's absolutely no reason one has to be on there, other than they *enjoy the features of the service* (this author apparently included). Likewise, there's zero reason you HAVE to shop online or pay for items with a credit card if you don't want to. You also don't have to give your real name or phone number for getting a "discount card" at most shops - that's entirely optional, in my experience (and I don't).
The article just sounded like much ado about nothing to me, that's all. It was her nine-month sociology experiment, and she wrote up the results to be as dramatic as possible - a very first world problem, in other words.
It doesn't say big data still found her anywhere in the article. She made no mention of evidence that they had, despite the Uncle sending a congratulations message on Facebook.
Was there more to story than just the article on Time where she said her measures weren't able to keep the information private?
Yeah, I saw nothing that said big data found her at all. Instead, I gleaned that she ended up acting pretty damn rude to her relatives who inadvertently broke her self-imposed techology exile, although I noted she didn't close down her Facebook account.
She concludes by complaining about the data-collection agencies, essentially blaming them after she behaved rudely to her family and friends, and launches into a weird conspiratorial rant about how her husband spotted a sign behind a checkout counter stating the company "“reserves the right to limit the daily amount of prepaid card purchases and has an obligation to report excessive transactions to the authorities", and then goes on to talk about how this (plus using Tor) made them feel like criminals. Huh? She then exclaims that Obama's report on data collection practices can't come soon enough, because... uh, what will that report do exactly?
While I'm not exactly on the side of these advertisement companies, the author clearly performed this experiment and wrote the article with a definite agenda in mind, and drew some somewhat odd and conspiratorial-sounding conclusions about the ordeal. It feels like she obfuscated the fact (not helped by the Slashdot summary) that her efforts did indeed pay off, and that apparently no commercial companies found out she was pregnant.
That being said... in most cases (there are exceptions, as the article points out), do women care if an advertisement agency finds out she's pregnant? As soon as I bought a home, I got a lot of homeowner-related advertisement. That was fine with me, as the ads were more relevant to my interests, and it's not something I had intended to be a secret. I understand the principle of the thing, but every technology we gain has its tradeoffs. The web is largely funded by advertisement. We pay with a lack of anonymity and privacy, which seem to be what most people prefer, as evidenced by the success of Facebook. Overall, I still think we benefit a lot more than we lose from the connectivity and persistence of our online world.
The latency from multiplayer over the Internet is still there. This only adds latency viewing the response from your own input. Still, Madden and FIFA games are evolving, with more and more players acting as coaches and managers only, letting AI fully handle actual player simulation. In that scenario, this added latency is not a problem.
All modern videogames hide latency with client-side prediction. At the very least, locally rendered games means your own avatar, the one most important to you, is always snappy and responsive (unless the devs royally screwed up). The reason most streaming technology has generally failed so far is that input latency is extremely frustrating for gamers, making the game feel sluggish and unresponsive. You say "only" in regard to input latency, but that's a pretty huge caveat. Games like you mentioned that don't rely on twitch reflexes seem the best option, but that definitely limits the viable options.
Of course, there's the other big issue - with streaming games, you're essentially just renting the games you want to play, and only for as long as the service exists. Streaming rented games from server farms is a game publisher's wet dream. Subscriber-only games paid for by the month, and absolutely can't be copied or shared with your friends.
Sorry, you want to actually buy your games and play them as long as you want? Hahahaha, yeah, right!
The thing about crowd funding as an alternative to traditional funding is that banks and investors are very good at recognizing that a product is going to fail. The crowd funding community is very early in developing that same sense, but I think it will come.
The interesting thing is that one of the big appeals to crowd funding is it allows ideas to become a reality that would never have passed through the risk-averse traditional funding routes.
Eventually I hope a middle ground will form, comprised of a more savvy average backer, a little more diligence on the part of kickstarter (maybe via some kind of rating/analysis done on projects over a certain size?), but still with some of the same spirit of throwing money at stuff because it sounds cool and you really want it to happen vice because you've got some pretty charts and a pile of math showing it'll be profitable.
Yeah, banks don't offer small business loans until you've been in business for several years and have an income (gross, I think) of several hundred thousand dollars, which shouldn't be too surprising, but that's a pretty high bar for most small projects.
Make no mistake, crowdfunded projects are absolutely high-risk ventures, or they'd be getting funding from more traditional sources. Financing a project from start to finish with only crowd funding is especially risky, especially if the developers don't have an established track record. It's extremely easy to underestimate how much time and effort it takes to bring a project to fruition. I've been a game developer for 15 years, and it's taken me much of that time to be able to properly estimate a development project (and I still occasionally get things badly wrong). And of course, there's the risk of outright failure from fraudulent or extremely incompetent developers.
I'm not really sure what sort of "middle ground" would work, though it's an interesting idea. Maybe a company (Kickstarter, 3rd party?) could offer a service to vet potential projects for a fee and present their findings to potential funders. Things they could investigate:
* Experience of developers with similar projects
* Result of previous crowdfunding efforts
* Financial history and stability of developers (e.g. credit rating)
* History / stability of development team
* Quality of development plan
* Current project completion
* Overall subjective impression
As you mentioned, this would probably be most appropriate for teams trying to raise larger sums of money, where more is at stake.
Well, yeah, of course it's largely speculative, but not completely unfounded. First point: The fact that the founders have fled the company doesn't bode well to me.
As to the games: Dragon Age 2 was not awesome, and most people seem to agree with me on that, not you. And honestly, even though I'm a huge fan of the genre, Dragon Age: Origins was merely OK, not great. I was a bit underwhelmed by it, as I was hoping for something more along the Elder Scroll's breadth and depth of a world. Instead, we got a bunch of tiny levels connected by spots on an overhead map. Sort of lame compared to Oblivion or Skyrim's massive world. Interacting with your companions was a lot of fun, but the overall story was less than engaging, and the gameplay seemed pretty unbalanced / uneven at times, which got frustrating. I'm waiting to see how Inquisition is reviewed before I get too excited. Hopefully it will be good.
I loved Mass Effect - no doubt about that. Mass Effect 3 was fun, but of course the ending was horrible, and negated all the choices made in the game up till then, ultimately leaving a somewhat sour taste in my mouth after all the time (and money) I put into those games. The introduction of ammo in 2 and 3... er, "heat clips" was retarded when the canon already established it wasn't necessary, but other than that, it was a great series.
TOR was a disaster, and indicated extreme laziness/complacency on the part of the devs (granted, not the original Bioware studio, but they did keep the same name), who felt they could just clone WoW, inject the Star Wars story, and call it good. Guild Wars 2 at least took a chance and pushed the genre forward with some real innovation in gameplay, so I don't think that's indicative of MMOs in general. BTW, the Elder Scrolls Online will likely suffer the same fate as TOR, since it's design is stuck about a decade in the past - essentially a single-player game bolted onto an MMO framework.
I compare these efforts to Knights of the Old Republic, which was perhaps one of the most engaging RPGs I've played, and certainly one with the most memorable story. The big story twist was awesome, unlike ME3. Or even compared with their older RPGs, they just don't seem to have the depth and consistency I remember.
So, yeah, "rapid decline" is really the wrong phrase to use. I probably should have said "I'm worried we're seeing the beginning of a decline", to be a bit more fair, since I'd have to assess their recent game record as "spotty". I'm honestly hoping I'm wrong on this, because I've really enjoyed Bioware's RPGs in the past, and I'd love to keep enjoying them for years to come.
I'll take safer streets and a good economic environment over all this high-tech fluff, if you please. Yes, smartphones are convenient and all, but "smart cities"? What's the point, really? Let's leave this to entrepreneurs to figure out how to do the bleeding edge stuff. Government is never best at that sort of thing. This guy is basically taking about art, not utility. At the moment, that seems an egregious waste of scant tax dollars when the government is already barely able to fulfill it's most basic obligations, and has been running deficits for years.
Granted, this was talking about a city in England. Maybe they have money to burn. Here in the US, our government has been running in the red for years, and it's not looking like that will change anytime soon.
If you've ever been a part of a really great team, then you know that the whole is greater than the sum of it's parts. It's an almost impossible thing to engineer, and extremely difficult to sustain it over a long period. A buyout has a high likelyhood of destroying the magic of that team due to outside interference. A company provides a place to nurture and develop highly effective teams, and has a big part in defining the overall culture at its workplace. I don't think that's an illusion by any means. It's a very real and tangible thing.
After a buyout... yes, many people end up in the parent company, but if they really wanted to be a part of that parent company, they probably would have applied there in the first place. And for those that leave... finding a new job is an incredibly stressful thing, as nearly anyone can attest to. The only benefit is a short term infusion of cash, which gives the company perhaps one cool new project before the honeymoon is over and things start going down the toilet.
EA has swallowed up and destroyed many incredible companies (Bioware is the latest example of a company in rapid decline). For myself, I speak as a fan, as I see the products I previously enjoyed now declining in quality until I give up on them completely. This happens time and time again after acquisition. It's hard not to attribute the cause to the buyout.
I use Ubuntu as my desktop, because while I like Arch and Slackware, I'm too old to spend time futzing with getting backups to work or writing custom trayer configurations or whatever. (And when I finally got everything I wanted on Arch, half of GNOME or KDE was installed anyway, so I didn't really see the point.)
Anyway, you know what I wish Canonical would work on? Ubuntu for Computers. I don't need yet another mobile operating system; Android is there, iOS is there, Windows Phone is there, FirefoxOS is there. There's nothing that Ubuntu Touch is going to offer that isn't done better somewhere else. All it's doing is cannibalizing resources from Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Server. Working on Mir just creates divisions within the open source community; there's nothing wrong with Wayland.
So yeah, Canonical, don't just jump on the mobile bandwagon. You have a core product, focus on it.
Wasn't the entire point of Unity that it was more mobile / touch focused? I think this is when they began to alienate a lot of their users, and spawned the rise of Mint. We've seen two companies now (Canonical and Microsoft) that have alienated many of their core desktop users by trying to slap on a touch/mobile focused desktop, replacing the more powerful and desktop-focused mouse+keyboard user interface that have been refined over the course of decades.
I agree with you. Ubuntu/Linux offers a distinct and practical product in the PC world. I'm not really seeing what they would offer in the mobile space. Are they really thinking they can build up a unique ecosystem of their own to compete with Android or iOS? Hell, even MS can't seem to dent that market.
We're moving to a stratified computing society, with big servers running the infrastructure, desktop PCs doing the bulk of the real production work or gaming, laptops for mobile or light work, and tablets and phones for casual computing or data consumption and communication. Eventually, people will figure out that you DON'T want to share the same user interface between a desktop computer and a tablet. Touch is fantastic for data consumption on small devices, but a disaster for production work on a PC.
Hopefully the loss of market share of both Ubuntu and Windows 8 will make that fact clear to those making the decision. At least Apple has had the good sense not to discard their desktop operating system functionality in favor of an iOS-like interface.
XP is used in many commercial products which cannot easily be replaced by the end user. For example: http://rightfast.com/index.php...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that there's nothing wrong with XP in an embedded environment (such as in a bank's ATM). Exploits in most operating systems are almost always related to application-level attack surfaces, such as IE and Flash (as was this particular vulnerability). In a point of sale unit, there is no one surfing the web with the browser. As long as the front-facing application and hardware are properly locked down, there should be no problems. Note that Target's POS data breach was NOT done through the machines themselves, but through the backend network itself. Granted, lack of address space randomization makes it an easier target, but note carefully that the exploit discussed in the article was available on ALL platforms and IE versions, not just XP/IE6.
Where a company or user will get into trouble is if they're using Windows XP + IE6 in a user-controlled, internet-facing computer. And let's be clear here, it's been IE6 and not really XP that was the problem since the latest patches and the firewall was turned on by default. If they rely on IE6, then there's a good bet that they also rely on Flash or a Java plugin as well, and that's just tripling your attack surface, especially if they're not kept up to date as well for reasons of compatibility or laziness.
There's sort of a media feeding frenzy about Windows XP and it's end-of-life. Yes, people should move on to a supported OS as soon as it's practical, but XP users can greatly reduce their risk simply by using up-to-date applications. Use Chrome or Firefox when browsing, and if possible remove Flash and Java (I actually removed Flash about half a year ago for security reasons, and found that, for the most part, I don't really need it anymore). Note that this exploit was performed with the help of Flash as well - nothing to do with XP.
Ah, John, you make deals with the devil... are you then surprised when he comes calling for repayment? It's unfortunate that so many smaller, independent studios are absorbed by larger companies, who then proceed to strip-mine them of their IP and talent, leaving a dessicated corpse of a company in their wake to be discarded at their convenience.
I'm sure their partership with Facebook will be *completely* different.
'Spider-Man 3' (2007) tried to get with the times by giving Maguire a black suit (courtesy of an alien symbiote) and a little bit of an attitude, an effort that pretty much everybody seems to view as a failure.
No, Spider-Man 3 was a near-faithful movie version of the alien-suit saga, a pivotal point in Spider-Man's career where the suit was making Peter stronger and a better fighter, but also more callous and brutal. To say the black suit was the director's attempt at an edgy Spider-Man is like saying the death of the witch king in Return of the King was Peter Jackson's attempt at feminist ideology.
Agreed, it stayed pretty close to canon, from what I can remember. I was a youngster subscribing to the comics during the course of that sage, and it was definitely taking a darker edge to the story.
Unfortunately, the director had this bizarre tendency to have the actors suddenly break out in song and dance - what, three times over the course of the movie? In a previous movie, it was cute once, so they tripled down, slowing the pacing of the movie and breaking the suspension of disbelieve (which is already pretty generous when you go to see a super-hero movie). It's been years since I watched it, but I always thought that if they had just edited it down to the core scenes, the movie wouldn't have been so painful to watch.
In real life, there are plenty of doors for which you will never find the key lying around. More importantly there, are millions (billions?) of doors that are of no interest to you, ever. In a video game, it would be very difficult to set up a series of long term societal detriments for going around trying to open every door, or to easily express to the player why the character they're playing has no interest in one door vs. another, or why what's behind most doors is not of interest to the gameplay or the plot of the game. But it'd also be extremely strange to walk down a city street environment and have there be no doors into any of the surrounding buildings. So we put up false doors as window dressing so the environment looks familiar, but then we build a visual metaphor that lets players see at a glance which doors are unimportant so they don't bother to try them. This can be by leaving them as a flat texture instead of modeled, making openable doors a different color or have specific lighting or highlights, making openable doors have handles and unopenable ones not have handles, or as the article suggests, putting rubble or something (depending on the context of the game) in front of unopenable doors. You can even make unopenable doors make a specific sound effect when approached, such as the sound of a handle jiggling on a locked door, or the sound of the character specifically saying "It won't open," etc. (although only communicating it once the door is approached can be tedious for the player).
You're exactly right. Game developers can either spend a nightmarish amount of time trying to solve the locked door "problem", or they could make it a static prop that plays a "jiggle the doorknob, but it's locked" sound effect and then put that saved time and effort into the actual gameplay and mechanics. People sometimes forget that game developers have to pick and choose their battles, and any time spent on non-gameplay fluff should never detract from rock-solid core game mechanics.
Bring an axe to work.
You may not keep your day job for long, but you can wreck the hell out of some doors and go out in a blaze of glory.
Someone actually did that next door to where I work a few years ago. It was quite a sight to arrive at work in the morning only to see the office park swarming with police. I had accidentally allowed my car tabs to expire and hadn't renewed them yet, and all I could think of was "please don't look at my license plate... please don't look at my license plate..." as officers with their guns unholstered shoo'ed us away from the area. It was an interesting morning.
as carefully balanced ... as Skyrim
That's not really a very high bar right there. Invest a little bit in stealth, archery, alchemy, or blacksmithing, and you can easily break the game.
Is it close enough to bug free that immersion isn't lost?
Actually, are you sure you played the same Skyrim as everybody else?
I tend to give Skyrim a pass on some of those balance issues because there's about a million ways to play the game, so it's likely that someone will find a golden path or two. I don't recall the game being quite as easy to break as you make it out to be, but then, I didn't actively seek out those methods, and just had myself a few hundred hours of fun. In a sandbox type game, if you really want to ruin your own fun by breaking the game with obscure tricks and mechanics, it's on your head. I was much more disappointed in Oblivion, where you could literally break the game mechanics simply by not leveling up, and with it's retarded scaling mechanics which sort of slapped you in the face. I'm a tad less forgiving about the sheer number of bugs in the game, but again, the game is so damn ambitious, it's hard not to be a bit lenient there as well. They certainly deserved to be called out for releasing a flat-out broken PS3 port, though.
Regarding Bioware... After the lame ME3 ending, the disappointments of the Dragon Age franchise, and the simple fact that they're beholden to EA... Honestly, I just don't have a lot of hope that they'll be able to bounce back. It's too bad, but the probably outcome is a slow spiral into mediocrity, and then eventual dissolution of the company itself after the cream of the company has already fled to more promising jobs (the founders have already fled). That's been such a continual pattern by companies EA has acquired over the years, it's a wonder to me that people still believe it won't happen to the next company they swallow up.
That would be ideal, and there's nothing stopping the OpenSSL project from doing that.
Except for a lack of manpower and funding, which this fork is splintering even further. And the vague way that they say they're cleaning up OpenSSL when what they're doing is in fact forking it honestly strikes me as misleading. I don't mind that their out to make an OpenBSD specific fork of OpenSSL per se, just that if I'm going to fund something I'd rather fund getting it fixed for everyone.
Unfortunately, the OpenSSL team has demonstrated that they're unable to properly maintain a large codebase. Lack of funding does not turn your coding into a nightmare. That comes from a lack of leadership and coding discipline. The OpenSSL team decided that it could no longer rely on them to turn that project around, and has made the only decision that really makes any sense for them, considering their position.
The big question for me is how serious they are about supporting / developing proper compatibility layers. I was concerned when I hear about them ripping out compatibility code, but in thinking about it, I'd probably take the same approach. First start with your own native platform and write straight C / posix as much as possible, and then add a proper compatibility layer (meaning NOT just a bunch of platform #ifdefs scattered around the code) later.
We'll see how it shakes out, but I wish them luck in their endeavors. It will be interesting to see what comes of this. In the meantime, however, we should keep in mind that a lot of people still rely on OpenSSL, and will continue to do so until there is a viable alternative. Maybe this will motivate the OpenSSL team to clean up their own act in an attempt to avoid becoming irrelevant. Competition is, I think, a good thing, even among FOSS software project.
you're confused, this is OpenBSD patching openssl that comes with that distribution. However many of their patches will help the openssl project if someone on that team can be made to have an interest in actually improving the security of openssl.
The fact that they're starting by reformatting code and ripping out anything that's not OpenBSD/posix-compatible (e.g. Windows compatibility) seems to indicate that it's highly unlikely that this effort will be backported to OpenSSL, with the exception of very specific security fixes, perhaps. What they're doing makes a lot of sense if they're planning to fork the project and maintain it exclusively for the OpenBSD project, but I'm guessing we won't see much backpatching upstream.
If they had made these changed while preserving platform independence, it may have been a different story. They're simply doing what's best for their platform of course, so I don't begrudge them that. Obviously, the OpenBSD team isn't interested in making sure they remain compatible with Windows, etc.
I think the OpenSSL library will need it's own refactoring effort, unfortunately.
You might want to add, "I am not an economist but..." before you write these things. "which may mean lower profits, leading to reduced employment" is as ridiculous as saying that adding a powered usb port will draw less power from your CPU and speed computation.
We have no idea what this will do for employment, there's simply too much going on. Increasing beer prices ever so slightly (I doubt this adds more than a cent or two per can, but whatever) would decrease beer consumption (also ever so slightly) and might increase productivity in other industries. Also, increasing food safety could decrease time off economy wide. It's impossible to know. But I doubt any effect would be large.
When I talk about "lower profits and reduced employment", I simply mean that in a general sense. I wasn't trying to indicate that you'd see a massive drop in employment or profits simply because of this one regulation. My point, which I apparently made somewhat poorly, was that the sum total of these regulations tends to have a negative effect on a company's profits due to the overhead of complying with said regulations. To use your analogy, of course you wouldn't see a significant power drain with a single powered usb port, but your computer can only support a limited number of powered usb ports before the power drain becomes unsustainable.
That's not an argument against all regulations, because as I stated, many are critical for safety reasons. Rather, I was simply pointing out that it's a good thing to look with a critical eye at any new regulation to see whether or not it's truly necessary because of the net economic drain it imposes.
This is all a tempest in a teapot. The FDA is proposing rules for complying with a 2011 law passed by congress to ensure food safety. Brewers had been exempt from the rule because they were able to buy off congresscritters in the past. Now they will have to keep records and conduct training to make sure that they aren't shipping contaminated waste grain to feed cows. People who love to eat cows should welcome the fact that they can be assured that their cows haven't been fed contaminated feed.
All of the hysteria about driving brewers out of business is just hyperbole. Before these rules, brewers could ship contaminated, spoiled grain to feed cows without any accountability. Now they will be accountable to make sure that they don't feed cows garbage... seems reasonable.
You can read the FDA regulation (and avoid the hysterical hype) here:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/Guidan...
I haven't heard of anyone talking about driving brewers out of business wholesale, but any increase in operating cost is going to have negative repercussions for a business, which may mean lower profits, leading to reduced employment. That's just the way these things work. Note that this could also have a ripple effect, such as increasing the price of milk, since farmers have been able to rely on this cheap and nutritious feed for a long time.
You mentioned "they could have" in your response, but I could counter with "they never have so far", which seems a more powerful argument. This practice has been going on for over a century with apparently no real trouble, and suddenly the brewers are going to poison the farmer's cattle? It seems a bit far-fetched, since after all, these are the by-products of human-consumable beverages. I'd be more apt to support this if there was a documented history of problems with this practice.
Government, by it's nature, tends to want to create more and more rules and regulations. I think that's part of the natural desire to proactively protect against problems, but it's also has slightly less noble purposes as well. More regulations essentially means the government has to grow to enforce those regulations. It's in the FDA's own self-interest to pass as many rules and regulations as it can, because then it's "business" grows. That means those in the FDA can move up their own "corporate ladder", so to speak.
Government regulations have to be viewed as a necessary evil. All but the most die-hard libertarians or anarchists would say we need no regulations, but there's always a careful balancing act that must be made between the imposed overhead of these regulations and the benefits they provide in terms of safety, reliability, and consumer rights. So, I think it's worth questioning whether the imposed cost of this new proposal is worth the imposed overhead and costs.
So the next kickstarter campaign is in your girlfriend's name.
Do you want me to find examples of people who have gone back to the kickstarter well and never really delivered?
No, not really. Honestly, I don't really care why you seem to dislike crowdsourcing so much. I'm not the person to defend it, as I neither use it nor contribute to other projects. It just seems like you have to consider the source of those projects very carefully - that's up to the individual contributors, but that seems like common sense to me.
Great. Then maybe you can explain why it seems impossible for new companies to produce something at the level of Half-Life, the Burnout series, etc etc. Games that people want to put over 100 hours into. Valve and Criterion were relatively small and little-known "indie" companies when those games were made. Why do game developers seem so allergic to giving good value for the price of their game. And why do so many have such low opinions of their own games that they go F2P? Are there no developers who realize just how badly that genre sucks?
You're essentially asking "Why aren't all games as good as the best ones ever made?" Is that something I can even answer? Why aren't all composers Mozart? Why aren't all directors Steven Spielberg?
80% of everything is crap, and that includes games. Of the 20% that isn't crap, only a small percentage will rise to the very top, and probably make everything else look bad by comparison, even though they're probably not.
Making games is harder than most gamers think, incidentally. To make a top-notch game, you need a fusion of talented programmers, game designers, artists, plus (and this is probably the rarest) enough financial backing and managerial foresight to see a project all the way through to it's true completion, not just when the contract says it's due. Incidentally, that's not the same as giving developers unlimited time and money, because that can bankrupt companies. To me, it's a miracle that as many high-quality games are released as there are, since I've seen how incredibly hard they are to make first-hand.
Oh don't worry, Bungie lost it's vitality alright when they sold to Microsoft. Many people don't realize that Bungie is this old because before becoming an Xbox developer they were Mac exclusive developpers.
Yeah, they were getting the life sucked out of them by Microsoft, being asked to do nothing but Halo sequels. They seem to have regained some vitality since splitting with MS though, which is what I was sort of inferring.
Yeah, you're correct that "venture capitalism" is a bad analogy. It is true that you're betting your own capital, but your only potential return is a good game, and maybe some extra freebies. Minupla below gives a much better analogy as "patronage", as there's often a desire to see a specific vision come to fruition. It's not a perfect analogy, but probably a bit better than mine. Of course, any comparison or analogy is going to be flawed in some way, because crowd-funding is a rather unique mechanism for funding development.
Incidentally, although I'm an indie developer (as one would define it), I'm not taking money from crowdfunding. I saved up for many years working for established game development companies and am now self-funding my own game at a tremendous cost and my own financial risk. I've never been to an indie developer conference, in fact. I'm a professional game developer who just happens to be working on my own right now, and I'm betting my financial future on the fact that my game will be fun and engaging to play.
Keep in mind that crowdfunding is not a "get money for free" scheme. You have to pay all those people back with promised products of some sort, which work against your own future earnings. If you fail to deliver on your promised, you won't be able to easily earn back people's trust, and your venture will likely fail. I'm sure there are some people who have taken advantage of the system, but there are also other developers who are working long days and nights on their own in order to produce a viable product that others will enjoy.
Neither console is really "next-gen", that would have been 4K resolution.
I would have been happy with true 1080p resolution. How many people actually have 4K TVs at this point? Not nearly enough to support that in a console designed for the masses, at least. 4K is pretty demanding even for PC videocards. That would have pushed the cost up by several hundred bucks with absolutely no benefit for the majority of customers.
Still, it's not like we could have expected the same massive leaps in visual quality from previous generations. After all, the 360/PS3 generation was already closing in on photo-realistic quality given ideal circumstances, so there's no helping that. From here on out, improvements to visual quality will be less noticeable even for relatively large increases in processing power. 4K takes approximately 16x the processing power to achieve (at least in terms of fill rate), but of course it really doesn't look 16x as good as 1080 resolution.
Despite my grumblings, for me it's still about the games and not really the eye candy, even though comparing transistor counts and internal resolution seems to get the press all hot and bothered. I'll probably buy the first console has an epic, must-play RPG on it, as that's definitely my favorite genre.
Some old icons in the industry are now past their prime. Blizzard, Bioware, and id, longstanding favorites of mine, have all sold out. I'll no longer expect anything great from them, although I'm always willing to be surprised. Instead, younger and hungrier development shops will take their place... maybe ArenaNet and Bungie.
Uhh... Bungie is only 3 months younger than Blizzard. If you want to be pedantic, though, Blizzard Entertainment proper is actually the younger studio.
Yeah, you're right. After I posted that, I realized that "younger" wasn't really the proper term for describing Bungie, as they've been around for quite a while now too. Maybe it's just because it feels to me like Blizzard has lost it's vitality since getting swallowed up by Activision, while I don't necessarily get that feeling from Bungie.
People need to stop distracting themselves while driving. Better yet, make sure that anyone who causes damage, injury, or deaths due to their negligence while driving is fully prosecuted under the law. It's no different than driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. Driving a vehicle requires responsibility as a driver.
Let's not kid ourselves. People will just root their phones and bypass any restrictions put in place to block access to the phone while driving. And how the hell would a phone know the difference between a passenger sitting in a car and a driver?
At it's heart, this really isn't a technology problem, but a societal one. We need to crack down on this sort of stuff, so people understand that it's simply not worth the risk to break the law. It would be awesome if software or hardware could fix all those meatware-related problems, but that's not the world we live in.