Random anecdote: I used to go on week-long 50+ mile hikes in the NW's Cascade Mountain range with a group of friends. We used to tell newcomers - the scenery is breathtaking, but without people in the picture, it's not really all that interesting for other people, and won't be as memorable for you in the long run. In other words, don't just take scenery snapshots. Sure enough, the most interesting photo collections tended to be a good mix of scenery and everyday living conditions on the trail, but they almost ALL had human subjects in it.
When you're up in the mountains, you stare at the scenery, but what's really memorable wasn't the scenery, it was being there and experiencing it with friends. I suppose the study was trying to hint at this in some way. As nice as beautiful landscape pics are, they are much less memorable to me than a photograph of me and my friends up on the top of a mountain. In general, people are more interesting to other people than just about anything else.
I know not reading the article (or maybe even the summary) is expected, but jeez... The ENTIRE POINT is that this is a specifically tuned algorithm to convert low res sprites like those used by games (everyone is already acknowledging this). CorelTRACE and their ilk are designed for converted high-res simple images (line art, logos, etc) into vector graphics. They are tuned to ignore a single pixel, which they would consider noise. This algorithm assumes every single pixel is important.
Why in the world are people in such a hurry to dismiss stuff like this as "nothing new"? No one is claiming that vectorization of bitmaps is a new concept. In fact, that rarely happens in research papers - that's the whole point of the huge list of references at the bottom of the paper!
Well, consumers will only be pushed so far. Divx ring a bell? Not talking about the codec, either.
People always talk about the slippery slope as though consumers won't eventually rebel, or that the entire game developent industry is a single cabal. Keep in mind that game development is a highly competitive industry, which means that if one publisher or console maker creates unhappiness among consumers, it leads the door open for a developer who will make their customers happy.
Maybe companies will realize that horrible security breaches will, in fact, severely impact the bottom line. I don't think it's that hard to grasp.
As consumers and the media make a big deal about this (my Mom head about the PSN network breach, so you know this is a pretty big deal), rest assured, Sony's competitors are taking a very hard look at their online security. You can bet the higher-ups at Microsoft and Nintendo are asking underlings "Could anything like this happen to our network?" and "What do we have to do to make sure this never, ever happens to us?"
Capitalism is a highly Darwinian process (at least, it's supposed to be). You can get by for a while on past success and sheer size alone, but alienate too many customers and extinction awaits. American car companies have had to learn that the hard way several times. Now we see that Japanese mega-conglomerates can fall into the same sort of ruts as well, which seems a bit ironic to me.
Maybe you misread, but I'm a game developer, not a game pirate. E.g, I get hurt quite directly by pirated games. I don't pirate games, ever. Even with that background, I don't see how anyone can argue with a straight face that some of the more egregious DRM systems implemented in recent years won't in some cases directly interfere with a user's ability to actually play the game. To me, that's DRM gone too far.
I'm not opposed to all DRM or copy-protection per se. For instance, I don't see a problem with console disks using built-in hardware-based DRM, because generally speaking, it's fairly unobtrusive to the user. Steam is also acceptable to me, as they actually provide a nice benefit with their service. I just don't like relying on DRM servers remaining live in order to play a single-player game. That's a pretty crappy game experience in my definition. I'm not sure how you would consider not being able to play a game as unobtrusive. We're talking about the Sony PSN network here in this thread, remember, not your experience with SC2.
I'm also not trying to paper over how some pirates try to justify their actions as being some sort of fucking moral high ground either. If someone is going to do it, at least have the balls to admit it's because you're cheap, and don't whine and bitch to me if you eventually get in trouble for doing it either.
Growth in one market doesn't necessarily equate to loss in another. This is just gaming moving to fill a new market segment. It doesn't mean that consoles are going to dry up. Also, how exactly is mobile gaming supposed to give anywhere near the experience that a console hooked up to a big-screen TV + surround sound speakers will give you?
Mobile gaming killing consoles just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I have a feeling that gaming consoles have a pretty long life ahead of them.
As a game developer, I'd be willing to write off people like you. You're not a customer. In return, I don't have to listen to you whine about what you don't like about the game either, right?
Sadly, I'm also a guy who codes for a living. In other words, no one listens to my advice on how to run the business. Still, even though I love my job, I'm still dreaming of going completely indie some day and controlling everything. I hope I have the gumption to stick to my principles even when people still pirate my game more than legit customers purchase it. Honestly, I just don't see how you'd stop it without massively inconveniencing your customers to the point that the pirated game is better than the retail version.
I still think there are enough people who want to reward devs who make products they really like - enough so that I could still make a decent living if the product was good enough.
I'd be a more concerned if we actually collectively wrung our hands over the death of a madman who deliberately plotted and succeeded in smashing passenger airplanes into skyscrapers, killing thousands of innocent civilians. The US isn't exactly pure as the wind-driven snow, but I think we safely hold the moral high ground when compared to Islamic terrorists.
OTOH, isn't a free nation of laws suppose to hold the law above all risks?
What law did we break? I'm not trying to be snarky (no tilde, see?). I'm just not sure any laws were broken, other than perhaps Pakistani law. And there are even stories circulating now that we had some backroom deals to handle this sort of issue with Pakistan.
Because, like Adobe formats before it (like PDF or Flash), graphics card drivers were designed well before any serious thought was given to security issues. Even now, graphics drivers are 100% focused on speed, speed, speed, and security concerns are probably barely even on the radar. As GPUs move closer to general-purpose computing devices with true logic paths, this problem is only going to get worse. In other words, it's probably a softer target than a Javascript runtime environment is, and that's saying something, given how many Java-based exploits there are.
One of the big problems of coders is that most of us don't give much thought to how technology can be abused. It either takes a security consultant or a lot of experience dealing with folks that actively attempt to exploit your products to get in the correct mindset for net-based development. I'm an MMO developer, and any new feature we come up with has to be prefaced with "how could this be abused or exploited?" Sort of frustrating, but that's the way it goes.
It's going to take a different inherent mentality when dealing with Internet technologies going forward in order to keep things actually secure, but honestly, I'm not really sure if or when that's actually going to happen. People are too dazzled by shiny new technology still, and just rush forward without seriously considering security.
I agree that's probably the primary motivator. I think it also probably offsets any costs incurred by credit card companies on very small purchases. Don't they have some sort of minimum fee with small transactions?
Classification systems are about organizational and information purposes. They can be *mis-used* for censorship, of course. I don't think it's a bad thing that videogames have a coherent classification system that informs parents as to their general conduct and age-appropriateness. Where I tend to have a problem is with government-enforced classification (along with related laws), which is indeed censorship.
Should one oppose a loosening of censorship laws on the grounds that all censorship is obscene? Or does that legitimize it? I'm tempted to say that you'll likely alienate those who you'd want as allies by rigorously opposing a pragmatic middle-ground on principle, which may let you claim a moral victory while costing you the war.
Because George Bush wasn't involved in some well-publicized PS3 hacking recently, maybe? Seriously, you can't comprehend why people who DON'T frequent forums like slashdot could possibly think he might have been involved?
In particular, a first-person game has a particularly difficult problem to solve if it wants to support local co-op. To start, it means split-screen rendering, in which the local scene is rendered to multiple cameras instead of just one (it's an oversimplication, but close enough that it suffices). Rendering multiple scenes costs significantly more, meaning the frame rate could be halved in the worst cases, as well as increasing memory requirements for a given scene's complexity. In order to attain acceptable frame rates in split screen mode, the world's geometric and texture complexity must be reduced to allow for this worst-case scenario, which obviously sacrifices the single-player-per-machine experience. There are other, more complex problems as well. I'm not a graphics programmer (I do AI, audio, cinematics, etc) , but my understanding is that post-processing effects are typically designed to work on the entire screen at once - a split-screen scenario probably complicates this as well. The audio engine must take into account multiple listener positions. All this, not to mention game design implications, which are significant as well for co-op games... Frankly, it's no surprise that so few first-person games support local-multiplayer modes.
At least now you know to look for games that specifically call this feature out (typically called *local* co-op play, or something like that).
I don't think there's any worry that Iran will nuke the United States. That would just be completely stupid on their part.
I fear Iran more than I ever did the Russians because I never believed the Russians were crazy or suicidal. I have no such assurance in the case of Iran or N Korea. We've had lots and lots of evidence pointing to the fact that Islamist extremists can be quite suicidal for the right cause. The Mutually Assured Destruction model of deterrence (which has actually worked quite well so far) doesn't really work when one of the parties is willing to entertain the notion of certain death in exchange for the assurance of a glorious, virgin-laden afterlife.
I think you misunderstand the function of a lossy codec's decoder. The decoder isn't guaranteed to reproduce the exact input data no matter what. It's producing output based on an approximation of the original data. If the reference decoder can be tweaked to produce a better representation of the original data, then great! The bitstream (the format) stability is what's important. Updating the reference decoder is a good thing as they make optimizations and improvements to quality. Likewise updating an encoder to more efficiently encode and improve visual quality.
Also, ALL complex software is liable to having bugs in it. So, you're saying that declaring something as a reference means it can't have any bugs? Your argument here is sort of odd... I don't get what your beef is.
Yeah, I wasn't being sarcastic when I said "You've nicely demonstrated..." I thought it was a great example, and was attempting to clarify that point a bit. Re-reading my post, I can see how it might be taken otherwise.
I wish I hadn't commented, or I'd be giving you mod points.
And, as you well know, there were also groups of activist citizens that publicly opposed the shabby treatment of the Native Americans during much of our history as well.
You think that removing something you feel is offensive is not censorship. If not, then what is?
It depends. I would wholeheartedly agree with a school library choosing not to stock certain types of material, such as a book that glorifies rape, torture, or murder without any redeeming context. There are plenty of offensive things in today's society that are simply done for shock value. Mark Twain is an author of significant historical significance.
Personally, I would think the thing to do is to make sure to study the book at a grade level appropriate to understanding the context of the language - and with a good deal of discussion surrounding the use of the offensive language. Wouldn't that be a fantastic way to create opportunities for worthwhile discussions in class?
As another example, the celebrated King David is noted for being a ruthless bloodthirsty guy who had an affair and tried to cover it up by murdering the woman involved's husband).
And who, according to the Bible, lost his throne and suffered much grief because of this terrible crime. You've nicely demonstrated why censorship is fraught with peril, as you may inadvertently remove the value of lessons we can learn via others' mistakes.
Programming tasks often seem trivial to those who don't actually have to do them.
A programmer I once worked with drove me nuts when any task he didn't have to do should "only take a few minutes". At one point, being unfamiliar with the system he set up, I got his help on the problem, and lo-and-behold, a few minutes turned into half a day of work...
Good for them, but I'm still saying way the hell away. This may appeal to the casual market, but I can't see myself ever wanting to use this service. It can never be as optimal a gaming experience as a local machine.
Creating inefficient tools isn't a good way to promote socialization. I played Everquest in the early days, and frankly, I just didn't bother with the marketplace. It wasn't worth the hassle. Similarly, in Guild Wars, because there's no marketplace, I just don't bother trading with other players. In Everquest II, there was a fantastic market system and I made use of it. This made absolutely NO difference in how much I socialized with other players in-game.
Some MMOs in development are trying some different approaches to get people playing together. For instance, eliminating the idea of kill stealing. Full XP to everyone. Or making sure in-world content scales to current populations.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I agree with you.
Random anecdote: I used to go on week-long 50+ mile hikes in the NW's Cascade Mountain range with a group of friends. We used to tell newcomers - the scenery is breathtaking, but without people in the picture, it's not really all that interesting for other people, and won't be as memorable for you in the long run. In other words, don't just take scenery snapshots. Sure enough, the most interesting photo collections tended to be a good mix of scenery and everyday living conditions on the trail, but they almost ALL had human subjects in it.
When you're up in the mountains, you stare at the scenery, but what's really memorable wasn't the scenery, it was being there and experiencing it with friends. I suppose the study was trying to hint at this in some way. As nice as beautiful landscape pics are, they are much less memorable to me than a photograph of me and my friends up on the top of a mountain. In general, people are more interesting to other people than just about anything else.
I know not reading the article (or maybe even the summary) is expected, but jeez... The ENTIRE POINT is that this is a specifically tuned algorithm to convert low res sprites like those used by games (everyone is already acknowledging this). CorelTRACE and their ilk are designed for converted high-res simple images (line art, logos, etc) into vector graphics. They are tuned to ignore a single pixel, which they would consider noise. This algorithm assumes every single pixel is important.
Why in the world are people in such a hurry to dismiss stuff like this as "nothing new"? No one is claiming that vectorization of bitmaps is a new concept. In fact, that rarely happens in research papers - that's the whole point of the huge list of references at the bottom of the paper!
Well, consumers will only be pushed so far. Divx ring a bell? Not talking about the codec, either.
People always talk about the slippery slope as though consumers won't eventually rebel, or that the entire game developent industry is a single cabal. Keep in mind that game development is a highly competitive industry, which means that if one publisher or console maker creates unhappiness among consumers, it leads the door open for a developer who will make their customers happy.
Maybe companies will realize that horrible security breaches will, in fact, severely impact the bottom line. I don't think it's that hard to grasp.
As consumers and the media make a big deal about this (my Mom head about the PSN network breach, so you know this is a pretty big deal), rest assured, Sony's competitors are taking a very hard look at their online security. You can bet the higher-ups at Microsoft and Nintendo are asking underlings "Could anything like this happen to our network?" and "What do we have to do to make sure this never, ever happens to us?"
Capitalism is a highly Darwinian process (at least, it's supposed to be). You can get by for a while on past success and sheer size alone, but alienate too many customers and extinction awaits. American car companies have had to learn that the hard way several times. Now we see that Japanese mega-conglomerates can fall into the same sort of ruts as well, which seems a bit ironic to me.
Maybe you misread, but I'm a game developer, not a game pirate. E.g, I get hurt quite directly by pirated games. I don't pirate games, ever. Even with that background, I don't see how anyone can argue with a straight face that some of the more egregious DRM systems implemented in recent years won't in some cases directly interfere with a user's ability to actually play the game. To me, that's DRM gone too far.
I'm not opposed to all DRM or copy-protection per se. For instance, I don't see a problem with console disks using built-in hardware-based DRM, because generally speaking, it's fairly unobtrusive to the user. Steam is also acceptable to me, as they actually provide a nice benefit with their service. I just don't like relying on DRM servers remaining live in order to play a single-player game. That's a pretty crappy game experience in my definition. I'm not sure how you would consider not being able to play a game as unobtrusive. We're talking about the Sony PSN network here in this thread, remember, not your experience with SC2.
I'm also not trying to paper over how some pirates try to justify their actions as being some sort of fucking moral high ground either. If someone is going to do it, at least have the balls to admit it's because you're cheap, and don't whine and bitch to me if you eventually get in trouble for doing it either.
Growth in one market doesn't necessarily equate to loss in another. This is just gaming moving to fill a new market segment. It doesn't mean that consoles are going to dry up. Also, how exactly is mobile gaming supposed to give anywhere near the experience that a console hooked up to a big-screen TV + surround sound speakers will give you?
Mobile gaming killing consoles just doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I have a feeling that gaming consoles have a pretty long life ahead of them.
As a game developer, I'd be willing to write off people like you. You're not a customer. In return, I don't have to listen to you whine about what you don't like about the game either, right?
Sadly, I'm also a guy who codes for a living. In other words, no one listens to my advice on how to run the business. Still, even though I love my job, I'm still dreaming of going completely indie some day and controlling everything. I hope I have the gumption to stick to my principles even when people still pirate my game more than legit customers purchase it. Honestly, I just don't see how you'd stop it without massively inconveniencing your customers to the point that the pirated game is better than the retail version.
I still think there are enough people who want to reward devs who make products they really like - enough so that I could still make a decent living if the product was good enough.
I'd be a more concerned if we actually collectively wrung our hands over the death of a madman who deliberately plotted and succeeded in smashing passenger airplanes into skyscrapers, killing thousands of innocent civilians. The US isn't exactly pure as the wind-driven snow, but I think we safely hold the moral high ground when compared to Islamic terrorists.
OTOH, isn't a free nation of laws suppose to hold the law above all risks?
What law did we break? I'm not trying to be snarky (no tilde, see?). I'm just not sure any laws were broken, other than perhaps Pakistani law. And there are even stories circulating now that we had some backroom deals to handle this sort of issue with Pakistan.
Because, like Adobe formats before it (like PDF or Flash), graphics card drivers were designed well before any serious thought was given to security issues. Even now, graphics drivers are 100% focused on speed, speed, speed, and security concerns are probably barely even on the radar. As GPUs move closer to general-purpose computing devices with true logic paths, this problem is only going to get worse. In other words, it's probably a softer target than a Javascript runtime environment is, and that's saying something, given how many Java-based exploits there are.
One of the big problems of coders is that most of us don't give much thought to how technology can be abused. It either takes a security consultant or a lot of experience dealing with folks that actively attempt to exploit your products to get in the correct mindset for net-based development. I'm an MMO developer, and any new feature we come up with has to be prefaced with "how could this be abused or exploited?" Sort of frustrating, but that's the way it goes.
It's going to take a different inherent mentality when dealing with Internet technologies going forward in order to keep things actually secure, but honestly, I'm not really sure if or when that's actually going to happen. People are too dazzled by shiny new technology still, and just rush forward without seriously considering security.
I agree that's probably the primary motivator. I think it also probably offsets any costs incurred by credit card companies on very small purchases. Don't they have some sort of minimum fee with small transactions?
Capitalization makes a difference.
All classification systems are about censorship.
Classification systems are about organizational and information purposes. They can be *mis-used* for censorship, of course. I don't think it's a bad thing that videogames have a coherent classification system that informs parents as to their general conduct and age-appropriateness. Where I tend to have a problem is with government-enforced classification (along with related laws), which is indeed censorship.
Should one oppose a loosening of censorship laws on the grounds that all censorship is obscene? Or does that legitimize it? I'm tempted to say that you'll likely alienate those who you'd want as allies by rigorously opposing a pragmatic middle-ground on principle, which may let you claim a moral victory while costing you the war.
Because George Bush wasn't involved in some well-publicized PS3 hacking recently, maybe? Seriously, you can't comprehend why people who DON'T frequent forums like slashdot could possibly think he might have been involved?
In particular, a first-person game has a particularly difficult problem to solve if it wants to support local co-op. To start, it means split-screen rendering, in which the local scene is rendered to multiple cameras instead of just one (it's an oversimplication, but close enough that it suffices). Rendering multiple scenes costs significantly more, meaning the frame rate could be halved in the worst cases, as well as increasing memory requirements for a given scene's complexity. In order to attain acceptable frame rates in split screen mode, the world's geometric and texture complexity must be reduced to allow for this worst-case scenario, which obviously sacrifices the single-player-per-machine experience. There are other, more complex problems as well. I'm not a graphics programmer (I do AI, audio, cinematics, etc) , but my understanding is that post-processing effects are typically designed to work on the entire screen at once - a split-screen scenario probably complicates this as well. The audio engine must take into account multiple listener positions. All this, not to mention game design implications, which are significant as well for co-op games... Frankly, it's no surprise that so few first-person games support local-multiplayer modes.
At least now you know to look for games that specifically call this feature out (typically called *local* co-op play, or something like that).
I don't think there's any worry that Iran will nuke the United States. That would just be completely stupid on their part.
I fear Iran more than I ever did the Russians because I never believed the Russians were crazy or suicidal. I have no such assurance in the case of Iran or N Korea. We've had lots and lots of evidence pointing to the fact that Islamist extremists can be quite suicidal for the right cause. The Mutually Assured Destruction model of deterrence (which has actually worked quite well so far) doesn't really work when one of the parties is willing to entertain the notion of certain death in exchange for the assurance of a glorious, virgin-laden afterlife.
I think you misunderstand the function of a lossy codec's decoder. The decoder isn't guaranteed to reproduce the exact input data no matter what. It's producing output based on an approximation of the original data. If the reference decoder can be tweaked to produce a better representation of the original data, then great! The bitstream (the format) stability is what's important. Updating the reference decoder is a good thing as they make optimizations and improvements to quality. Likewise updating an encoder to more efficiently encode and improve visual quality.
Also, ALL complex software is liable to having bugs in it. So, you're saying that declaring something as a reference means it can't have any bugs? Your argument here is sort of odd... I don't get what your beef is.
Yeah, I wasn't being sarcastic when I said "You've nicely demonstrated..." I thought it was a great example, and was attempting to clarify that point a bit. Re-reading my post, I can see how it might be taken otherwise.
I wish I hadn't commented, or I'd be giving you mod points.
And, as you well know, there were also groups of activist citizens that publicly opposed the shabby treatment of the Native Americans during much of our history as well.
You think that removing something you feel is offensive is not censorship. If not, then what is?
It depends. I would wholeheartedly agree with a school library choosing not to stock certain types of material, such as a book that glorifies rape, torture, or murder without any redeeming context. There are plenty of offensive things in today's society that are simply done for shock value. Mark Twain is an author of significant historical significance.
Personally, I would think the thing to do is to make sure to study the book at a grade level appropriate to understanding the context of the language - and with a good deal of discussion surrounding the use of the offensive language. Wouldn't that be a fantastic way to create opportunities for worthwhile discussions in class?
As another example, the celebrated King David is noted for being a ruthless bloodthirsty guy who had an affair and tried to cover it up by murdering the woman involved's husband).
And who, according to the Bible, lost his throne and suffered much grief because of this terrible crime. You've nicely demonstrated why censorship is fraught with peril, as you may inadvertently remove the value of lessons we can learn via others' mistakes.
Programming tasks often seem trivial to those who don't actually have to do them.
A programmer I once worked with drove me nuts when any task he didn't have to do should "only take a few minutes". At one point, being unfamiliar with the system he set up, I got his help on the problem, and lo-and-behold, a few minutes turned into half a day of work...
Good for them, but I'm still saying way the hell away. This may appeal to the casual market, but I can't see myself ever wanting to use this service. It can never be as optimal a gaming experience as a local machine.
they serve their tiny purpose quite effectively without much corruption interfering with their purpose.
They haven't demonstrated any such thing. See: Oil-For-Food Program.
Creating inefficient tools isn't a good way to promote socialization. I played Everquest in the early days, and frankly, I just didn't bother with the marketplace. It wasn't worth the hassle. Similarly, in Guild Wars, because there's no marketplace, I just don't bother trading with other players. In Everquest II, there was a fantastic market system and I made use of it. This made absolutely NO difference in how much I socialized with other players in-game.
Some MMOs in development are trying some different approaches to get people playing together. For instance, eliminating the idea of kill stealing. Full XP to everyone. Or making sure in-world content scales to current populations.
Carrot > Stick.