It's not. It's supposed to hold sway over EA, who are profiting from their depiction of the ongoing war that has cost members of these families their lives. EA is doing the decent thing, and listening to their concerns, and trying to be sensitive to them.
You get the same exact game, with slightly changed names in a few of the game modes. You're not losing any component of the game, they're not removing sections of it, they're just changing a name. Why do you care so much about a few bytes of text that is irrelevant to the actual game play?
And once again: If the people who are *directly* affected by this war are not allowed to express concerns about people profiting from depictions of it, what makes you think that EA (or anybody else) should give 2 hoots about the opinion of some random nut on/.?
So would you support my right to create a game called "Hate Crime! - the game where hate crimes come to life!" In which you, as an up-and-coming member of a white supremacist group, get to kill Matthew Shepard, drag James Byrd, Jr. behind your truck, firebomb an Atlanta church, and rape a few minority women in the inner city?
A game like that would *inevitably* (and RIGHTFULLY) draw huge amounts of criticism. Would you tell the people protesting publication of that game to shut up because they're whining idiots, and since some people want to see that content, nobody has a right to be offended, and express that offense?
EA has other game titles. It is entirely likely that many of the people who are upset about this aspect of MoH will (or would have) purchased other titles EA distributes. As such, this is a business decision - it does not change the game mechanics or content one bit, other than changing the text displayed on your tv screen, and it handily avoids offending a large number of people who might otherwise refuse to buy other EA titles.
If it's not forced, nobody's "imposing" it. If the content is all imaginary, then fucking "imagine" a different name than the one EA gave the other side, out of deference to the sensitivities of other people who likely DO buy a lot of their games, just not THIS ONE.
You are crazy if you think this is anything other than EA saying: "Which will cost us more: leave the name in, and sell a few more copies of this title to a few whiny bitches on slashdot who will probably just pirate the game anyway, or take the name out, and sell hundreds of thousands of other games to the people who might boycott our games if we offend them."
I'll tell you what then - whenever you see and hear "Opposition Forces" in all the game text and audio, shout at the television: "OH NOES ITS TEH TALIBANZ IN MUH TEEVEEZ!"
Your passionate proposal for protecting the freedoms and rights of homosexuals and racial minorities is laudable.
Thought exercise: You realize that people in the service & their families are the overwhelming *minority* in the population, too, right? What makes it okay to say "Shut up whiners," to them, when we're routinely told that we can't use certain words and phrases because they'd offend other minorities on account of certain language being "hate speech"? Seems like you should extend your concern over offense to the minority of servicemembers & their families, too.
If you value the rights and freedoms of minorities, that should extend to the sensitivities of all minorities, not just the ones you agree with. And especially so when the minority in question is the very people whose mission is to safeguard those freedoms you want everybody to have.
Stop ruining it for the rest of us who do want the content.
"ruining it"? Game play has not changed one iota, regardless of what the "sides" are named. Would you refuse to buy the game if it were named "Silver Star" instead of "Medal of Honor"?
No no no, you don't understand. When it was named "Taliban," it was AUTHENTIC - it was just like living the lives of the soldiers in Afghanistan, who GP apparently believes spend all day sitting on a couch eating chips & drinking mountain dew, while holding a game controller and listening to shitty metal.
You mean except for how that general was going to get the game banned from all EA game stores on military bases?
You realize that the stores on-base are a SMALL fraction of the overall market where this game could be sold right? Your argument is like someone saying that Apple refusing to allow porn apps on their store means nobody can get porn now, and Apple is killing the porn industry.
You mean people who were never the target audience of the game and weren't going to be buying or playing it? Yes, it's great that they are bowing to a bunch of whiners at the expense of the actual customers.
If you must be a purchaser or the producer to have an opinion about it, and express that opinion, especially when the product arguably exploits the memory of your dead husband/wife/cousin/brother/sister/mother/father/whatever for a company's profit, I'd suggest your support of EA's free speech at the expense of the speech of others is extremely curious.
I do agree that EA should be free to offer the game as they see fit on the market, but I also support peoples' right to have (and express) an opinion about it. This is not the only game EA makes, and they have a wider market to consider - if they offend someone who wouldn't buy the shooter, have they also lost many other game sales of their other titles down the line? Perhaps, and that's their decision to weigh.
On a personal level, I wouldn't buy this game for two reasons: First, I think most FPS games I've played are totally fucking boring. I don't like them, in general. Second, I do think making a game out of an ongoing conflict is a step or two more tasteless than making a game out of a historical conflict. I do believe you should be able to buy what I consider to be a boring, tasteless game if you want to, but you need to understand that this is not the only game EA makes, and they're weighing the demand for this feature versus the likely loss of additional future revenues, and making the decision that best suits their finances - many of the so-called whiners are also EA customers, just not for this particular title, and if EA offends them, perhaps not for any other future title that EA makes.
When I told my prof we should just set up a Git server instead
Thanks for this even-handed analysis, borne out of your long years of experience in the industry. It is clear that your vision and insight is hard-earned, and that you're not just parroting the standard slashdot groupthink in a karma whoring of immense proportions.
If you understand software then you'll understand that open source is the way to go,
Let's ask your prof if YOU understand software.
Open Source means better more secure software period!
Open Source is not magical pixie dust you can sprinkle on any project to turn it into a successful, well-designed software system. There are a lot of really great open source systems out there, and there are also a lot of steaming turds out there in the open source world - much like the closed source world, actually. It's simply a different development model, it does not automatically guarantee success, stability, or security.
Pointing out that your solution doesn't solve a very difficult (perhaps even intractable) problem in any appreciable way doesn't make it a troll.
"Hey guys, I have a solution to global warming! Everybody should just leave their refrigerators open all the time, and their air conditioners running with windows open - that way we can cool the atmosphere!"
"Uh no, that won't work, and could even make the problem worse."
"You're just trolling! At least I'm thinking of ways to fix the problem!"
In fact, I did suggest an alternative: Charge a full, fair price to everybody, and don't give people added incentive to pirate your software.
That is to say, I am the exception that proves the rule.
I think what you mean to say is that you're generalizing about how other people behave in an organization which you admit you're more or less totally disconnected from (second shift, no direct supervisor, whole cube farm to yourself - how exactly do you know all your co-workers are running around all day showing their hot new iPhone apps to each other... if you're never there?), in order to make yourself feel like a special snowflake who manages to buck the system that so many other people fall victim to.
as for humanity killing itself off; I suggest you take a more detailed look at the annals of human history.
Really? We've been wiped out before because of the behavior of unscrupulous people? To your point about the cold war - being wiped out in a nuclear holocaust" actually would have required VERY FEW unscrupulous people in just a few positions of power to make it happen. And yet, even with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was probably the closest we came to all-out nuclear war, it didn't happen. Why? If the world is rife with unscrupulous, awful people who only care about themselves and their pride and their appearance, it should have. Fortunately, the majority of people (including a few in power with cooler heads) were more sane than the unscrupulous ones engaging in holocaust brinksmanship.
"better solution"? There isn't one. It's an unfortunate mess because some people will take shit that doesn't belong to them no matter how hard you try. So you forget about those people, charge the full fair price you want to get regardless of the way somebody installed your app, and accept that some people are going to pirate your application no matter what you do.
If you want to try and collect marketing feedback from people pirating, that's fine, but I see no reason to encourage people to pirate in order to get a 50%-off coupon.
As far as "most people not knowing" - most people didn't know how to Jailbreak their iPhone either... until somebody made a webpage that would do it all automatically for you. If something is possible, it will tend to get easier over time. There's a difference between knowing random trivia ("who's the head of MSFT?" "I don't know, that's irrelevant to me, I'm a school teacher.") and "click this link to install App X with a 50% discount!"
Unless you make your app phone home, how exactly do you propose to detect that the app is pirated, anyway? Think a Pirate is going to be happy with your app phoning home to say "Am I legit?" Probably not.
And once it becomes common knowledge that you can pirate the app and only pay 50% of the cost, you don't think you've created an incentive for people to pirate, then pay less for a full copy and "forgiveness"?
Because, presumably, you haven't marked up your product by 100%, expecting to then cut the price in half. So instead, you're cutting your revenues in half and hoping that -somehow- condoning piracy will increase your sales to a point that would offset the 50% discount you're giving.
At what point does the community victimize itself, though?
Thought exercise. I write Americano's Super Cool Android App - being super cool, it does something really neat, like allows you to control your home automation system from your handheld device. I put it up on the Android Marketplace, and ask for a humble $1.99 for a copy of my work. A bargain!
Now, let's say 1000 people buy the app - I've just sold $2000 worth of software. Fucking great! Life is good, it's time to start working on an update that fixes a couple minor bugs and adds some new features. But then I notice that... nobody's buying my app anymore. Somebody's distributing a pirated copy. Life sucks. I'm bummed.
I'd say that there IS a point where most developers are going to say "You know what, everybody's making unathorized copies, that's not cool, I'm not going to keep writing this software and supporting it for a few thousand people out of my own pocket." So I stop writing the software. I stop supporting it. I decide to take up another hobby, let's say Stamp Collecting. If piracy rates are so high that nobody can expect to at least break even writing the software, you're going to drive away a lot of people who would otherwise contribute to your ecosystem. The number of people who CAN write software is larger than the number of people who WILL write software in their spare time with no external motivator (i.e., make some money at the same time).
So in the case I described above, sure, nobody's "taken" anything from me, but the piracy is driving away a developer, and your software ecosystem is slightly poorer for that loss. So at what point does anybody notice that it has a cumulative effect? If you want to help cement iOS as the dominant platform, letting Android become known as "The Platform where developers can't make any money because of rampant piracy," is a good way to go about achieving that.
That's an interesting approach, and it *might* generate some actual useful feedback, but it also pretty much tells your users "If you pirate this app, I'll give you a 50% discount."
For what it's worth, I'm starting to see quite a few apps with built-in Dropbox support on the iOS store these days. If you don't mind the whole "cloud" thing, it's not a bad solution for storing your documents & working with them across your iOS device & other platforms. Obviously, I'd never store my double-secret-probation banking data that way, but for taking some quick notes, and putting them somewhere where you'll be able to access them easily from other devices (and other apps), it's a handy solution.
(I have created presentation materials that have won multi million dollar contracts for my company. I really dont care about rubbing elbows or driving mazzarattis. I work second shift, and CHOSE it.)
Then you've disproven your own wild generalizations. You're a self-professed cube troll who isn't focused on your appearance, and yet... you still managed to win multi million dollar contracts. And you managed to get the opportunity to create the materials to win those contracts in the first place, showing that your managers value *performance* and *ability* over *appearance*.
And I find it amusing how this discussion of piracy on Android phones has suddenly become a "assholes with iPhones need to pirate shit to show off" rant.
The majority of people get ahead in the world by being scrupulous: making & keeping promises & commitments, behaving courteously, treating others with respect. If "many people" needed to be unscrupulous to just to get ahead, humanity would have killed itself off a long time ago.
What a bunch of hand-waving, generalizing bullshit. Who runs around a corporate office showing off their new phone? And who the fuck gets excited over "Bob's new Android phone?" I've never seen it happen, and I work with a lot of gadget-loving IT guys.
They judge mostly by appearances, since that is what they know.
Yes... the problem is, in your example, Person A is the engineer who appears to run around the office showing off his new fart app and getting very little done, while person B is the engineer who appears to be diligent & who is constantly busy getting things done and doesn't spend 3 hours a day dicking around with his personal phone in the office.
Guess who I'm going to pick to work on that new project? (Hint: Not the dude with the fart app. He's already too busy wasting time to do the job.)
What he said: "Hire Americans, and they can afford things. Otherwise, expect us to live our lives by any means necessary."
This statement was made in the context of an article about piracy of Android apps, and how many of the pirates appeared to be in the US. His response: If you don't want piracy, Americans need jobs. That way they will stop pirating.
He never mentions that it is possible to, you know, live without the apps, he clearly is stating that he considers them "fundamental," to living, and thus they will be acquired "by any means necessary."
I'm sorry this is so hard for you to parse, but it's really quite clear. I'm injecting no hidden meaning into his statement, he never even considers the notion that people without the money to buy the app could simply do without.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not. It's supposed to hold sway over EA, who are profiting from their depiction of the ongoing war that has cost members of these families their lives. EA is doing the decent thing, and listening to their concerns, and trying to be sensitive to them.
You get the same exact game, with slightly changed names in a few of the game modes. You're not losing any component of the game, they're not removing sections of it, they're just changing a name. Why do you care so much about a few bytes of text that is irrelevant to the actual game play?
And once again: If the people who are *directly* affected by this war are not allowed to express concerns about people profiting from depictions of it, what makes you think that EA (or anybody else) should give 2 hoots about the opinion of some random nut on /.?
Considering it's the families of dead soldiers speaking out... who would you suggest is more suited to speak on their behalf?
So you're saying that the feature set of a product is more important than how it was developed?
Color me shocked.
So then why are you so upset about the change again, and whining ceaselessly about it here?
So would you support my right to create a game called "Hate Crime! - the game where hate crimes come to life!" In which you, as an up-and-coming member of a white supremacist group, get to kill Matthew Shepard, drag James Byrd, Jr. behind your truck, firebomb an Atlanta church, and rape a few minority women in the inner city?
A game like that would *inevitably* (and RIGHTFULLY) draw huge amounts of criticism. Would you tell the people protesting publication of that game to shut up because they're whining idiots, and since some people want to see that content, nobody has a right to be offended, and express that offense?
EA has other game titles. It is entirely likely that many of the people who are upset about this aspect of MoH will (or would have) purchased other titles EA distributes. As such, this is a business decision - it does not change the game mechanics or content one bit, other than changing the text displayed on your tv screen, and it handily avoids offending a large number of people who might otherwise refuse to buy other EA titles.
Once again: PERSPECTIVE. You lack it.
If it's not forced, nobody's "imposing" it. If the content is all imaginary, then fucking "imagine" a different name than the one EA gave the other side, out of deference to the sensitivities of other people who likely DO buy a lot of their games, just not THIS ONE.
You are crazy if you think this is anything other than EA saying: "Which will cost us more: leave the name in, and sell a few more copies of this title to a few whiny bitches on slashdot who will probably just pirate the game anyway, or take the name out, and sell hundreds of thousands of other games to the people who might boycott our games if we offend them."
I'll tell you what then - whenever you see and hear "Opposition Forces" in all the game text and audio, shout at the television: "OH NOES ITS TEH TALIBANZ IN MUH TEEVEEZ!"
Maybe that'll make you feel better.
Your passionate proposal for protecting the freedoms and rights of homosexuals and racial minorities is laudable.
Thought exercise: You realize that people in the service & their families are the overwhelming *minority* in the population, too, right? What makes it okay to say "Shut up whiners," to them, when we're routinely told that we can't use certain words and phrases because they'd offend other minorities on account of certain language being "hate speech"? Seems like you should extend your concern over offense to the minority of servicemembers & their families, too.
If you value the rights and freedoms of minorities, that should extend to the sensitivities of all minorities, not just the ones you agree with. And especially so when the minority in question is the very people whose mission is to safeguard those freedoms you want everybody to have.
"ruining it"? Game play has not changed one iota, regardless of what the "sides" are named. Would you refuse to buy the game if it were named "Silver Star" instead of "Medal of Honor"?
Perspective. You lack it.
No no no, you don't understand. When it was named "Taliban," it was AUTHENTIC - it was just like living the lives of the soldiers in Afghanistan, who GP apparently believes spend all day sitting on a couch eating chips & drinking mountain dew, while holding a game controller and listening to shitty metal.
You realize that the stores on-base are a SMALL fraction of the overall market where this game could be sold right? Your argument is like someone saying that Apple refusing to allow porn apps on their store means nobody can get porn now, and Apple is killing the porn industry.
If you must be a purchaser or the producer to have an opinion about it, and express that opinion, especially when the product arguably exploits the memory of your dead husband/wife/cousin/brother/sister/mother/father/whatever for a company's profit, I'd suggest your support of EA's free speech at the expense of the speech of others is extremely curious.
I do agree that EA should be free to offer the game as they see fit on the market, but I also support peoples' right to have (and express) an opinion about it. This is not the only game EA makes, and they have a wider market to consider - if they offend someone who wouldn't buy the shooter, have they also lost many other game sales of their other titles down the line? Perhaps, and that's their decision to weigh.
On a personal level, I wouldn't buy this game for two reasons: First, I think most FPS games I've played are totally fucking boring. I don't like them, in general. Second, I do think making a game out of an ongoing conflict is a step or two more tasteless than making a game out of a historical conflict. I do believe you should be able to buy what I consider to be a boring, tasteless game if you want to, but you need to understand that this is not the only game EA makes, and they're weighing the demand for this feature versus the likely loss of additional future revenues, and making the decision that best suits their finances - many of the so-called whiners are also EA customers, just not for this particular title, and if EA offends them, perhaps not for any other future title that EA makes.
Thanks for this even-handed analysis, borne out of your long years of experience in the industry. It is clear that your vision and insight is hard-earned, and that you're not just parroting the standard slashdot groupthink in a karma whoring of immense proportions.
Let's ask your prof if YOU understand software.
Open Source is not magical pixie dust you can sprinkle on any project to turn it into a successful, well-designed software system. There are a lot of really great open source systems out there, and there are also a lot of steaming turds out there in the open source world - much like the closed source world, actually. It's simply a different development model, it does not automatically guarantee success, stability, or security.
Pointing out that your solution doesn't solve a very difficult (perhaps even intractable) problem in any appreciable way doesn't make it a troll.
"Hey guys, I have a solution to global warming! Everybody should just leave their refrigerators open all the time, and their air conditioners running with windows open - that way we can cool the atmosphere!"
"Uh no, that won't work, and could even make the problem worse."
"You're just trolling! At least I'm thinking of ways to fix the problem!"
In fact, I did suggest an alternative: Charge a full, fair price to everybody, and don't give people added incentive to pirate your software.
Wikileaks!
I think what you mean to say is that you're generalizing about how other people behave in an organization which you admit you're more or less totally disconnected from (second shift, no direct supervisor, whole cube farm to yourself - how exactly do you know all your co-workers are running around all day showing their hot new iPhone apps to each other... if you're never there?), in order to make yourself feel like a special snowflake who manages to buck the system that so many other people fall victim to.
Really? We've been wiped out before because of the behavior of unscrupulous people? To your point about the cold war - being wiped out in a nuclear holocaust" actually would have required VERY FEW unscrupulous people in just a few positions of power to make it happen. And yet, even with the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was probably the closest we came to all-out nuclear war, it didn't happen. Why? If the world is rife with unscrupulous, awful people who only care about themselves and their pride and their appearance, it should have. Fortunately, the majority of people (including a few in power with cooler heads) were more sane than the unscrupulous ones engaging in holocaust brinksmanship.
"better solution"? There isn't one. It's an unfortunate mess because some people will take shit that doesn't belong to them no matter how hard you try. So you forget about those people, charge the full fair price you want to get regardless of the way somebody installed your app, and accept that some people are going to pirate your application no matter what you do.
If you want to try and collect marketing feedback from people pirating, that's fine, but I see no reason to encourage people to pirate in order to get a 50%-off coupon.
As far as "most people not knowing" - most people didn't know how to Jailbreak their iPhone either... until somebody made a webpage that would do it all automatically for you. If something is possible, it will tend to get easier over time. There's a difference between knowing random trivia ("who's the head of MSFT?" "I don't know, that's irrelevant to me, I'm a school teacher.") and "click this link to install App X with a 50% discount!"
Unless you make your app phone home, how exactly do you propose to detect that the app is pirated, anyway? Think a Pirate is going to be happy with your app phoning home to say "Am I legit?" Probably not.
And once it becomes common knowledge that you can pirate the app and only pay 50% of the cost, you don't think you've created an incentive for people to pirate, then pay less for a full copy and "forgiveness"?
Because, presumably, you haven't marked up your product by 100%, expecting to then cut the price in half. So instead, you're cutting your revenues in half and hoping that -somehow- condoning piracy will increase your sales to a point that would offset the 50% discount you're giving.
1) Cut price in half.
2) ??????
3) Profit!!
More reading comprehension fail.
I'll stop now, this is like talking to a brick wall, except the brick wall might be capable of grasping the point eventually.
At what point does the community victimize itself, though?
Thought exercise. I write Americano's Super Cool Android App - being super cool, it does something really neat, like allows you to control your home automation system from your handheld device. I put it up on the Android Marketplace, and ask for a humble $1.99 for a copy of my work. A bargain!
Now, let's say 1000 people buy the app - I've just sold $2000 worth of software. Fucking great! Life is good, it's time to start working on an update that fixes a couple minor bugs and adds some new features. But then I notice that... nobody's buying my app anymore. Somebody's distributing a pirated copy. Life sucks. I'm bummed.
I'd say that there IS a point where most developers are going to say "You know what, everybody's making unathorized copies, that's not cool, I'm not going to keep writing this software and supporting it for a few thousand people out of my own pocket." So I stop writing the software. I stop supporting it. I decide to take up another hobby, let's say Stamp Collecting. If piracy rates are so high that nobody can expect to at least break even writing the software, you're going to drive away a lot of people who would otherwise contribute to your ecosystem. The number of people who CAN write software is larger than the number of people who WILL write software in their spare time with no external motivator (i.e., make some money at the same time).
So in the case I described above, sure, nobody's "taken" anything from me, but the piracy is driving away a developer, and your software ecosystem is slightly poorer for that loss. So at what point does anybody notice that it has a cumulative effect? If you want to help cement iOS as the dominant platform, letting Android become known as "The Platform where developers can't make any money because of rampant piracy," is a good way to go about achieving that.
That's an interesting approach, and it *might* generate some actual useful feedback, but it also pretty much tells your users "If you pirate this app, I'll give you a 50% discount."
For what it's worth, I'm starting to see quite a few apps with built-in Dropbox support on the iOS store these days. If you don't mind the whole "cloud" thing, it's not a bad solution for storing your documents & working with them across your iOS device & other platforms. Obviously, I'd never store my double-secret-probation banking data that way, but for taking some quick notes, and putting them somewhere where you'll be able to access them easily from other devices (and other apps), it's a handy solution.
Then you've disproven your own wild generalizations. You're a self-professed cube troll who isn't focused on your appearance, and yet... you still managed to win multi million dollar contracts. And you managed to get the opportunity to create the materials to win those contracts in the first place, showing that your managers value *performance* and *ability* over *appearance*.
And I find it amusing how this discussion of piracy on Android phones has suddenly become a "assholes with iPhones need to pirate shit to show off" rant.
The majority of people get ahead in the world by being scrupulous: making & keeping promises & commitments, behaving courteously, treating others with respect. If "many people" needed to be unscrupulous to just to get ahead, humanity would have killed itself off a long time ago.
What a bunch of hand-waving, generalizing bullshit. Who runs around a corporate office showing off their new phone? And who the fuck gets excited over "Bob's new Android phone?" I've never seen it happen, and I work with a lot of gadget-loving IT guys.
Yes... the problem is, in your example, Person A is the engineer who appears to run around the office showing off his new fart app and getting very little done, while person B is the engineer who appears to be diligent & who is constantly busy getting things done and doesn't spend 3 hours a day dicking around with his personal phone in the office.
Guess who I'm going to pick to work on that new project? (Hint: Not the dude with the fart app. He's already too busy wasting time to do the job.)
What he said: "Hire Americans, and they can afford things. Otherwise, expect us to live our lives by any means necessary."
This statement was made in the context of an article about piracy of Android apps, and how many of the pirates appeared to be in the US. His response: If you don't want piracy, Americans need jobs. That way they will stop pirating.
He never mentions that it is possible to, you know, live without the apps, he clearly is stating that he considers them "fundamental," to living, and thus they will be acquired "by any means necessary."
I'm sorry this is so hard for you to parse, but it's really quite clear. I'm injecting no hidden meaning into his statement, he never even considers the notion that people without the money to buy the app could simply do without.