Those who suggest ads, really mean, "Someone else foots the bill". Problem is, what do you do when everyone wants everyone else to "foot the bill"?
Same thing that happens when everyone wants everyone else to "foot the bill" for TV programs: ads are pulled, companies lose mindshare, are forgotten and eventually go bankrupt, other companies not too cheap to spend on advertising are born, grow, and everybody is happy again.
You may as well ask why people play D&D. The Sims is, simply put, roleplaying without the stupid dwarves and magic missiles, and *that* is why it attracts so many casual (both male and female) players. It gives you an easy way to live another life, without being a dork about it.
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
Wesnoth has none of that, and neither does Warsow. There's probably others though, they're just the two I've been playing the most lately.
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
So, you haven't researched the freeware gaming scene either, have you? if all you know is whatever flash-based crap Nickelodeon et al push on their webpages, then I'm sorry for you, but they're *not* the only, the best, or even representative of the average game that's available for free.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
Didn't you just say that you wanted something that "just works"? because neither GTA4 nor Oblivion fit that definition, haven't played Project Gotham either but it wouldn't surprise me if it did as well.
Seriously, I support commercial games too, but your arguments are shit. Do your research, see the true jewels of Free, free and commercial gaming, then come back and see what you think.
Given the right leadership and drive, I would really like to see an MMO spring up around an unlicenced universe (not one of the done-to-death and copyrighted to hell ones like Star Wars or LoTR) but one that is perhaps by an obscure author and in the public domain.
Why not one that already belongs to F/OSS? the Wesnoth universe is quite rich, story-wise, and the setting's lack of legendary uber soldiers (read: Jedi) would make it perfect for a MMO, in my opinion.
Perhaps they're trying to simulate the arcade experience, where no matters how many wins you had, if you lost even once you had to insert another quarter and most people took that as a "you've been here way too much, kiddo, go home" reminder:)
2. Skill is representative of time. This is the most common, because almost all humans are capable of both learning and adapting, and so in most cases practice results in elevated mastery. In almost every game, time spend playing is the single biggest advantage that one can have.
Wrong. Because all humans are capable of learning and adapting, practice on competitive games only gives you a temporary edge against newbies, nothing more.
My personal take on it is the old adage, "know yourself, know your enemy and you shall have a thousand victories", and the most common mistake by unskilled players is assuming either is constant. On TF2 for instance, playing as engineer requires not only knowledge of the map itself (which is a factor of playing time), but also knowing where to place sentry guns which, unlike what the unskilled player thinks, isn't fixed but dependant on the strategies applied by the opposing team, and even of yours as well.
That's why in single-player games (and to a large extent, cooperative games such as WoW) time *is* such a big factor, because the opposing AI usually has only a few strategies and reactions that are almost exclusively deterministic, so practice not only gives you an edge on knowing the map and weapons, but also your enemy which is impossible to do against real, skilled humans.
Then play a better RTS. I'd recommend any from the Total War series, haven't played Empire yet but the rest certainly have well defined 'races', much moreso than AoE1 last time I played it.
Another suggestion could be LotR: Battle for Middle-Earth 2, not only does it have different races requiring different focus each, but even different philosophies between the 'good' and the 'evil' races, the former having fewer but stronger units, and the latter requiring large numbers with support from their at times overpowered heroes.
I'm sure there are a few, but none on the UK. Why? simple, ISPs are given entire IP ranges to distribute among their clients, so for there to be an error you'd have to have an internet connection through an ISP belonging to another country, and the ocean makes that a bit impractical for the UK. So if there's any errors, they should be found on the borders of Germany and France, for instance, or Spain and Portugal, not the UK and certainly not between the UK and the US.
Illegal in that they accessed the PCs without the owners permission, they sent spam, and changed the settings on the computer.
"Changed the settings on the computer" sounds a lot more awful than "changed the wallpaper", doesn't it? plus, sending 'spam' is perfectly legal as long as you have the authorization of all those to whom you send it to, and considering that they sent it to their own email addresses, I think that's likely the case.
Further, I don't think that either "white worms" nor accessing other people's PCs with the sole purpose of letting them know their computers are insecure is something unethical. In both cases, the benefits to society at large are bigger for committing the act than for not doing so, as far as I can see.
There's a reason convictions are made by judges instead of mathematicians. The whole purpose of the legal system is to give some 'wiggle room' so that it's the spirit, and not merely the letter of the law that's being followed.
And this being the BBC, one of the most highly regarded broadcasters in the world, plus the fact that the DDoS attacks were made with permission from the attacked website and that they advised afterwards to the botnet members on how to secure their computers gives them a *lot* of leverage. You, on the other hand, with a simple "oh I forgot to put it back" probably wouldn't be so lucky.
The thing that they all have in common is that they're all property that has value.
I think you're incorrect and that laws pertaining to property have no effect on copyright, patents et al, but IANAL so dunno really.
Like it or not, intellectual property is the correct term. It's all about protecting the value of something intangible so that development costs can be recuperated.
When you purchase a house, the legal benefits you get from it being your property are *not* about recuperating the development costs of it, so if that's your only basis for claiming it is property then you're wrong.
And incredibly, the remaining ~95% of your post is just "anti-anti-IP" arguments, irrelevant when discussing the validity of the term itself rather than of the objects it refers to.
What if they could take your program or product, have it made in China for a tenth of your cost and sell it for their own profit.
Then so can their competitors, driving the price towards the manufacturing cost and content producers to make new stuff so they regain their competitive advantage, and the cycle starts anew. Capitalism 101.
I don't create the products I create for 'social good.' I create them to make money.
I create the products I create for my own use, and if they benefit society too, good for them. More than 90% of the world's software is made for personal/internal use, whether by individuals or corporations, and that's a well proven fact.
See why the term "Intellectual Property" should be thrown out? you misinterpret the GP's argument against the term as being against anything under that term, then proceed to defend it with examples from software, videogames and movies. What's worse, you could've also used ones from books, music, photographies, drawings, pharmaceutics, business methods, mechanical devices, CPU designs and even goddamned logos!
If you truly believe issues pertaining to all those should be discussed under only one umbrella, then defend the term "Intellectual Property". If, on the other hand, you agree with us that the issues affecting software are drastically different than those pertaining to pharmaceutics and company names, then you'll agree with us that using the term is, in itself, stupid.
Considering this post, Britney Spears' latest album, the molecular components of Viagra and IBM's latest business model are all considered "IP", I'm not surprised.
Unless you have a big, expensive support contract, security patches are often provided only for the latest couple versions so refusing to use a newer version means refusing to fix those issues, compromising the security of your system. And refusal to update is, if I recall correctly, the leading cause for exploits on the Windows world so it isn't something to be encouraged.
Art and other great creative works are hundreds or thousands of times harder to produce than flipping burgers, or else everyone would be doing it. So they should get a greater return on investment than your regular 9-5.
Sweet. Now explain to me why it is so for Mathematics, which are thousands of times harder to produce and millions of times more useful than these so-called 'great creative works' yet have no such protections on most of the civilized world.
Life of author + 25 years is very reasonable.
Too bad most actual, scientific studies prove you wrong.
There's a reason we don't train our soldiers to jump all around while trying to snipe in real life.
Probably the fact that most real-life encounters aren't in the 2-10m range, unlike videogames. I remember someone commenting a long time ago, that at the distances most people use sniper rifles on videogames, a regular soldier would use a normal rifle, and at the distances people use assault rifles online, a real soldier would use an SMG or a gun. That, and not mouse control, is likely what accounts for most of the difference in accuracy between computer games and real-life, along with lacking the fear of death of course.
Now, if you believe a normal gamer with a mouse could score three headshots in a row against moving targets at the game-equivalent of 800m of distance while jumping sideways...
Having played both, Halo is superior to HL1 but inferior to HL2. Is there a story to Half-Life? of course there is, it's just easy to miss it because it's told much more 'realistically' than in other games where the entire world revolves around your character, such as Halo or HL2. The problem was that half the puzzles were too simplistic and the jumping sections made me wish for bloody murder upon Valve developers.
Halo, however, is inferior to HL2 simply because it has no atmosphere at all. It feels like a series of interconnected levels rather than an actual, living world while HL2, even with the more 'cinematic' story and all those f'in physics puzzles, managed to preserve a very convincing atmosphere during the entirety of it and that made for a much richer game, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, a Windows XP user can still install and run a 10 year old software package. We've failed to deliver the same level of software longevity to Linux users and have instead squeezed them into narrow window of constant upgrades and lockstep application/OS upgrade tie-in.
Yeah, that's one of the problems of this whole "security" thing. Why can't I just buy an antivirus, instead of bothering to upgrade my apps every single time for "security updates"? that works so well on Windows...
Lazy, clueless? Why does simplicity always have to equated with stupidity or lazyness?
Well, it can also be associated with "limited capabilities".
Why put up with repositories, RPM files, dependency hell, etc... when installation can be that simple?
Repositories, same reason why Apple has the AppleStore: because having someone else we can trust check the applications is a nice convenience. Dependency hell is unavoidable in this day and age, unless you use static linking which leads to a whole 'nother bunch of problems which are even worse. And RPM files, well, they could also be DEBs or DMGs or whatever, can't see why the final three letters of the filename would be a problem.
Sacrilegious as it may be of me to say this Windows install packages are often less complicated to use than Linux RPM packages can be. The poor UI design of many Linux package managers doesn't help either.
RPMs are about equal to MSIs, which are considered by any sane admin to be a superior choice to the more common and dreadful EXEs. And seriously, poor UI design? of what's essentially a text box and a large, friendly button labeled "Install"? which is what you get when you double click on a RPM/DEB. Though no mention at all of DEBs despite Ubuntu being (by far) the most popular Linux distro makes me suspect a little...
Well, I'd recommend the Total War series which is "not very hard to learn, you gotta be Alexander The Great incarnate to master". On multiplayer and quick battles you get a specific budget to purchase your units with before battle, besides that there's zero base building or resource management. Yet, the battles themselves are the most realistic ones I've ever played on a RTS, and the only one where actual, real-life tactics work and are a necessity to winning.
Only problem with it is that the single player campaigns lay a Civilization-like meta-game on top of it, which is easily as complex as Civ itself and therefore fails your "easy to learn" criteria quite miserably.
Tom Clancy's EndWar does just that, and many reviewers say that while it's a very cool way to play an RTS, it is also infinitely slower compared to good ol' mouse 'n keyboard.
Besides, sooner or later you'll still end up assigning "hotkeys" (or codes or whatever) to groups of units, otherwise coordinating complex attacks would be hellish. You don't want to attack with *all* your units every time, y'know. And then there's coordinates, which are obviously much accurate and/or faster with a mouse than voice.
Interestingly enough, that's one of the questions a computer will never be able to answer accurately, as Alan Turing proved. Well, except for your first case, go Windows!
Slashdot Mirror
Rule number 1 of online games: never trust the client.
Pretty common knowledge by now, honestly.
Those who suggest ads, really mean, "Someone else foots the bill". Problem is, what do you do when everyone wants everyone else to "foot the bill"?
Same thing that happens when everyone wants everyone else to "foot the bill" for TV programs: ads are pulled, companies lose mindshare, are forgotten and eventually go bankrupt, other companies not too cheap to spend on advertising are born, grow, and everybody is happy again.
You may as well ask why people play D&D. The Sims is, simply put, roleplaying without the stupid dwarves and magic missiles, and *that* is why it attracts so many casual (both male and female) players. It gives you an easy way to live another life, without being a dork about it.
As a customer, I want a game that just works. Not a game with five dozen incompatible interfaces, two half broken configuration interfaces, inscrutable documentation written by an engineer who never took a writing class in his entire six years in college, untalented artwork, and random crashes justified by the credo "if you don't like it, dig through 100,000 lines of poorly commented code to fix it yourself".
Wesnoth has none of that, and neither does Warsow. There's probably others though, they're just the two I've been playing the most lately.
For the non open-source "free" games, I want a game I can play, not one that's a one screen flash-animation that's really just an add for whatever is the latest kid-fluff being pushed on Nickelodeon.
So, you haven't researched the freeware gaming scene either, have you? if all you know is whatever flash-based crap Nickelodeon et al push on their webpages, then I'm sorry for you, but they're *not* the only, the best, or even representative of the average game that's available for free.
As a customer, I want my GTA, Oblivion, Project Gotham, and a dozen other high quality games that could only be developed by paying real programmers, artists, and writers real money to work on them. So I am perfectly willing to shell out real money to pay for them to do so.
Didn't you just say that you wanted something that "just works"? because neither GTA4 nor Oblivion fit that definition, haven't played Project Gotham either but it wouldn't surprise me if it did as well.
Seriously, I support commercial games too, but your arguments are shit. Do your research, see the true jewels of Free, free and commercial gaming, then come back and see what you think.
Given the right leadership and drive, I would really like to see an MMO spring up around an unlicenced universe (not one of the done-to-death and copyrighted to hell ones like Star Wars or LoTR) but one that is perhaps by an obscure author and in the public domain.
Why not one that already belongs to F/OSS? the Wesnoth universe is quite rich, story-wise, and the setting's lack of legendary uber soldiers (read: Jedi) would make it perfect for a MMO, in my opinion.
Perhaps they're trying to simulate the arcade experience, where no matters how many wins you had, if you lost even once you had to insert another quarter and most people took that as a "you've been here way too much, kiddo, go home" reminder :)
2. Skill is representative of time. This is the most common, because almost all humans are capable of both learning and adapting, and so in most cases practice results in elevated mastery. In almost every game, time spend playing is the single biggest advantage that one can have.
Wrong. Because all humans are capable of learning and adapting, practice on competitive games only gives you a temporary edge against newbies, nothing more.
My personal take on it is the old adage, "know yourself, know your enemy and you shall have a thousand victories", and the most common mistake by unskilled players is assuming either is constant. On TF2 for instance, playing as engineer requires not only knowledge of the map itself (which is a factor of playing time), but also knowing where to place sentry guns which, unlike what the unskilled player thinks, isn't fixed but dependant on the strategies applied by the opposing team, and even of yours as well.
That's why in single-player games (and to a large extent, cooperative games such as WoW) time *is* such a big factor, because the opposing AI usually has only a few strategies and reactions that are almost exclusively deterministic, so practice not only gives you an edge on knowing the map and weapons, but also your enemy which is impossible to do against real, skilled humans.
Then play a better RTS. I'd recommend any from the Total War series, haven't played Empire yet but the rest certainly have well defined 'races', much moreso than AoE1 last time I played it.
Another suggestion could be LotR: Battle for Middle-Earth 2, not only does it have different races requiring different focus each, but even different philosophies between the 'good' and the 'evil' races, the former having fewer but stronger units, and the latter requiring large numbers with support from their at times overpowered heroes.
I'm sure there are a few, but none on the UK. Why? simple, ISPs are given entire IP ranges to distribute among their clients, so for there to be an error you'd have to have an internet connection through an ISP belonging to another country, and the ocean makes that a bit impractical for the UK. So if there's any errors, they should be found on the borders of Germany and France, for instance, or Spain and Portugal, not the UK and certainly not between the UK and the US.
Illegal in that they accessed the PCs without the owners permission, they sent spam, and changed the settings on the computer.
"Changed the settings on the computer" sounds a lot more awful than "changed the wallpaper", doesn't it? plus, sending 'spam' is perfectly legal as long as you have the authorization of all those to whom you send it to, and considering that they sent it to their own email addresses, I think that's likely the case.
Further, I don't think that either "white worms" nor accessing other people's PCs with the sole purpose of letting them know their computers are insecure is something unethical. In both cases, the benefits to society at large are bigger for committing the act than for not doing so, as far as I can see.
There's a reason convictions are made by judges instead of mathematicians. The whole purpose of the legal system is to give some 'wiggle room' so that it's the spirit, and not merely the letter of the law that's being followed.
And this being the BBC, one of the most highly regarded broadcasters in the world, plus the fact that the DDoS attacks were made with permission from the attacked website and that they advised afterwards to the botnet members on how to secure their computers gives them a *lot* of leverage. You, on the other hand, with a simple "oh I forgot to put it back" probably wouldn't be so lucky.
The thing that they all have in common is that they're all property that has value.
I think you're incorrect and that laws pertaining to property have no effect on copyright, patents et al, but IANAL so dunno really.
Like it or not, intellectual property is the correct term. It's all about protecting the value of something intangible so that development costs can be recuperated.
When you purchase a house, the legal benefits you get from it being your property are *not* about recuperating the development costs of it, so if that's your only basis for claiming it is property then you're wrong.
And incredibly, the remaining ~95% of your post is just "anti-anti-IP" arguments, irrelevant when discussing the validity of the term itself rather than of the objects it refers to.
By getting a new job. Sucks to be me, Joe Carriage Driver in the post-Ford era, but Sun-Tzu said it best: you cannot stop progress.
What if they could take your program or product, have it made in China for a tenth of your cost and sell it for their own profit.
Then so can their competitors, driving the price towards the manufacturing cost and content producers to make new stuff so they regain their competitive advantage, and the cycle starts anew. Capitalism 101.
I don't create the products I create for 'social good.' I create them to make money.
I create the products I create for my own use, and if they benefit society too, good for them. More than 90% of the world's software is made for personal/internal use, whether by individuals or corporations, and that's a well proven fact.
See why the term "Intellectual Property" should be thrown out? you misinterpret the GP's argument against the term as being against anything under that term, then proceed to defend it with examples from software, videogames and movies. What's worse, you could've also used ones from books, music, photographies, drawings, pharmaceutics, business methods, mechanical devices, CPU designs and even goddamned logos!
If you truly believe issues pertaining to all those should be discussed under only one umbrella, then defend the term "Intellectual Property". If, on the other hand, you agree with us that the issues affecting software are drastically different than those pertaining to pharmaceutics and company names, then you'll agree with us that using the term is, in itself, stupid.
Considering this post, Britney Spears' latest album, the molecular components of Viagra and IBM's latest business model are all considered "IP", I'm not surprised.
Unless you have a big, expensive support contract, security patches are often provided only for the latest couple versions so refusing to use a newer version means refusing to fix those issues, compromising the security of your system. And refusal to update is, if I recall correctly, the leading cause for exploits on the Windows world so it isn't something to be encouraged.
Art and other great creative works are hundreds or thousands of times harder to produce than flipping burgers, or else everyone would be doing it. So they should get a greater return on investment than your regular 9-5.
Sweet. Now explain to me why it is so for Mathematics, which are thousands of times harder to produce and millions of times more useful than these so-called 'great creative works' yet have no such protections on most of the civilized world.
Life of author + 25 years is very reasonable.
Too bad most actual, scientific studies prove you wrong.
There's a reason we don't train our soldiers to jump all around while trying to snipe in real life.
Probably the fact that most real-life encounters aren't in the 2-10m range, unlike videogames. I remember someone commenting a long time ago, that at the distances most people use sniper rifles on videogames, a regular soldier would use a normal rifle, and at the distances people use assault rifles online, a real soldier would use an SMG or a gun. That, and not mouse control, is likely what accounts for most of the difference in accuracy between computer games and real-life, along with lacking the fear of death of course.
Now, if you believe a normal gamer with a mouse could score three headshots in a row against moving targets at the game-equivalent of 800m of distance while jumping sideways...
Having played both, Halo is superior to HL1 but inferior to HL2. Is there a story to Half-Life? of course there is, it's just easy to miss it because it's told much more 'realistically' than in other games where the entire world revolves around your character, such as Halo or HL2. The problem was that half the puzzles were too simplistic and the jumping sections made me wish for bloody murder upon Valve developers.
Halo, however, is inferior to HL2 simply because it has no atmosphere at all. It feels like a series of interconnected levels rather than an actual, living world while HL2, even with the more 'cinematic' story and all those f'in physics puzzles, managed to preserve a very convincing atmosphere during the entirety of it and that made for a much richer game, in my opinion.
Meanwhile, a Windows XP user can still install and run a 10 year old software package. We've failed to deliver the same level of software longevity to Linux users and have instead squeezed them into narrow window of constant upgrades and lockstep application/OS upgrade tie-in.
Yeah, that's one of the problems of this whole "security" thing. Why can't I just buy an antivirus, instead of bothering to upgrade my apps every single time for "security updates"? that works so well on Windows...
Lazy, clueless? Why does simplicity always have to equated with stupidity or lazyness?
Well, it can also be associated with "limited capabilities".
Why put up with repositories, RPM files, dependency hell, etc... when installation can be that simple?
Repositories, same reason why Apple has the AppleStore: because having someone else we can trust check the applications is a nice convenience. Dependency hell is unavoidable in this day and age, unless you use static linking which leads to a whole 'nother bunch of problems which are even worse. And RPM files, well, they could also be DEBs or DMGs or whatever, can't see why the final three letters of the filename would be a problem.
Sacrilegious as it may be of me to say this Windows install packages are often less complicated to use than Linux RPM packages can be. The poor UI design of many Linux package managers doesn't help either.
RPMs are about equal to MSIs, which are considered by any sane admin to be a superior choice to the more common and dreadful EXEs. And seriously, poor UI design? of what's essentially a text box and a large, friendly button labeled "Install"? which is what you get when you double click on a RPM/DEB. Though no mention at all of DEBs despite Ubuntu being (by far) the most popular Linux distro makes me suspect a little...
Well, I'd recommend the Total War series which is "not very hard to learn, you gotta be Alexander The Great incarnate to master". On multiplayer and quick battles you get a specific budget to purchase your units with before battle, besides that there's zero base building or resource management. Yet, the battles themselves are the most realistic ones I've ever played on a RTS, and the only one where actual, real-life tactics work and are a necessity to winning.
Only problem with it is that the single player campaigns lay a Civilization-like meta-game on top of it, which is easily as complex as Civ itself and therefore fails your "easy to learn" criteria quite miserably.
Tom Clancy's EndWar does just that, and many reviewers say that while it's a very cool way to play an RTS, it is also infinitely slower compared to good ol' mouse 'n keyboard.
Besides, sooner or later you'll still end up assigning "hotkeys" (or codes or whatever) to groups of units, otherwise coordinating complex attacks would be hellish. You don't want to attack with *all* your units every time, y'know. And then there's coordinates, which are obviously much accurate and/or faster with a mouse than voice.
Interestingly enough, that's one of the questions a computer will never be able to answer accurately, as Alan Turing proved. Well, except for your first case, go Windows!