I gave it a view a few days ago (don't worry at the seeming length - half of it is Q&A), and found it thought provoking. While it's more a statement of what is and soon will be, with less on action items, the general themes will resonate here on/., I think.
Lot of interesting talks at CCC this year, more broadly: do dig through their list on youtube - lots of neat stuff in there.
This talk on timing attacks on websites was pretty darned neat (starts mild, ramps up to "cool!").
Because they are, by and large, human derived. It's a system that, like most 'native' systems, arose from daily human uses and generally reflect daily human needs, and the scales appropriate to them.
Brad Wardell, as always, is full of shit. The vast majority of Valve developers do not work on Steam. If I understand it correctly, the Steam team is actually rather small, given it's impact.
And please, Brad is telling us that a crew of, say, designers and level designers has not been working on HL2 dlc because... they are working on Steam?! Yeah. Sure. Those poly-pushing level monkies are all hard at work coding up Steam transaction backend software.
A total tangent, but is narrator's accent Philly or NJ? Or something else? To me, he sounds like a guy burn in the NE, moved to Philly as a kid, then went to school in the west coast.
This is blazingly untrue. Most users don't have a synchronous line, yet with only moderate effort ("stay connected after you're done" and "actually pay attention to how much you have downloaded and take it easy") these millions have no reall issue maintaining a ratio. You're Doing It Wrong.
Key to this discussion is the point that Washington State does not have an income tax, relying instead on a sales tax for revenue. So, much of the furor is not simply a matter of the rich wanting to avoid a soaking, but as well the broader issue of weather Washingtonians want to replace a sales tax with an income tax at all. (I, for example, prefer sales tax vs. income tax).
Wow, tough crowd. But I still the think point is valid: from here on out, anything bad that happens to Assange can now be conveniently blamed on Dark Powers etc etc, weather or not it's the case. Kind of like the mid-2000's "disagree with the war == you hate freedom" - an instant shortcut around discourse or truth. Anything even remotely troublesome that may happen to him or wikileaks will instantly result in a flurry of Pentagon-blaming hand-waving tweets from his twitter feed, weather true or not. Man, I wish I was that bulletproof.
Kudos, and I'm glad you understand the implicit distinction I was making in reference to DRM. Hugely invasive or demanding DRM is a pain, and does a severe disservice to the customer. However, I fully advocate some basic, simple bits of copy protection simply to cover the most casual of casual piracy. Anything beyond that generally does nothing, and just pisses of the user.
I responded to the post specifically due to the example of Tribes 1's total and complete lack of anything resembling copy protection: it was maximally copyable in a way that was very rare even at the time (late 90s). It was this, and only this, degree of copy freedom that resulted in what I think are legitimate lost sales for the game.
Responding to others above, I want to be clear that I fully am aware that piracy can't be fully, or even partially, stopped. This point is blazingly obvious, so it's unfortunate to see people wasting their breath stating what we all know. That issue isn't the point. Further, as I stated in my post, I fully understand that a pirated copy does not represent a lost sale. Personally, I might ballpark it and say it might be a one in five or one in seven kind of deal (although of course that's just a wild gut guess based on jack shit).
However, my worry is that by painting the discussion in such extremes ("you can't stop piracy," "a pirated copy is not a lost sale"), we miss the inbetweensy bit that this post opened with: that there are classes of pirates, defined by the knowledge and effort they can apply to get a game. It's the first class that is the teeming masses (moreso back in the late 90s, when it was less easy for the average joe to get the goods vs. today) who, presented with a simple barrier, will wander off or, sometimes, buy the game (that one in five or one in seven deal I mentioned). If you don't even protect your product for this group of users, you end up in Tribe's boat.
I don't know that I would call it an outright failure, but the PC game "Starsiege: Tribes" from Dynamix certainly got walloped by piracy. I chatted with one of the engineers after the game's launch, and he sadly reported their server stats showing 300k+ people playing the game, with just 70-80k or so sales. They had a complete and utter lack of any DRM (not even a simple disk check), making the game wildly easy to copy. Hell, the install process was just a straightup file copy from CD to HD.
No two ways about it, the game sold poorly, but was quite successful with players. I certainly don't mean to imply be any stretch that every player represented a lost sale, but I definitely believe that the complete ease with which the game could be copied (ie, right click on the install folder, and select "ICQ this to my buddy") led to very disappointing sales.
Most games that sell poorly are poorly made games: the market is the final judge of quality. However, I also firmly believe that had Tribes had some basic form of copy protection, the sales would have been much much stronger. I hate that I am now sounding like I advocate loads of DRM, but Tribes represented an almost pathological case with its utter lack of any protection, and I think this wound up hurting sales very markedly.
Neat snippet from the article: "At Walt Disney World, Kodak engineered Epcot's pavement to be a certain hue of pink so that the grass would look greener through the reverse of this effect."
Sadly, however, the students would be at the most ready and receptive to go through an install process at the *end* of the course, instead of the beginning. I fear that on the start, it would just be a confusing jumble of arcane looking commands to type in verbatim, with no foundation yet present to appreciate what is going on.
This is of course neat to see, but I think it's clearly a rotoscoped sequence transferred to a printout (which is pretty cool too). Not to quibble, but this might be a better example of full-on ASCII animation: http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ - The classic ASCII anim of Episode IV.
More generally, I guess the new term arose from having a huge mass of people suddenly wodged together - many of whom were/are not terribly computer-ey - creating terms themselves to describe what they experience (ie, sixty zillion Warcraft users interacting daily). A king of eternal September in a way.
I know I have pretty much become an old man at this point in my life, but how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
However, I have to feely admit one point: replacing the word with 'glitch' makes it easier to use as a verb, as in "that instance is glitched" vs "that instance is bugged" - in the sense that the latter use could mean "we put that bug in the bug DB already." Ah well, back to feeding ferrite core beads to pigeons...
Humanity does not, in the end, grow exponentially. Wealthy developed nations hit a minimal/no growth point, and in some cases contract to achieve that. The earth's population is predicted to peak at 9 billion around 2050, and then pretty much hang there. Developed country after developed country keeps hitting this wall, where the birthrate drops to or below maintenance rate. America stands apart from this, for the time, due largely to immigration. However, a good extreme example of this trend is Japan.
I recently was struck by a broader instance of this, in relation to popular media in general. Outside of targeted forms of media (television shows or movies that focus on a specific demographic), I think this trend is as present in TV and film as well. Its as if we've gotten used to a mode of depiction, despite what we see daily at work, on the street, and in our neighborhoods. American is well on the path to be, by around 2040, a "minority majority" country, where the majority of citizens are not white. Despite this, I agree that entertainment media do not currently reflect this.
I work in the video game industry, and to be honest, the games I have worked on don't even reflect the ethnic or lifestyle-minority makeup of my office, let alone the country at large (the presence of females in my offics vs. the games we have produced, on the other hand, is a different story).
Speaking for myself and where I work, this isn't any conscious method of producing entertainment - its just a weird (and, I feel, unfortunate) habit of depicting people in games. It reflects work yet to be done, I think, that popular media often has to make a conscious effort to more accurately depict the world around us, and its unfortunate that it takes a conscious effort to do so.
As the original gamer generation(s) age, they have an ever expanding sense of what a videogame can acceptably look like. While a gamer of a more recent generation may (tho not always, of course, god bless them) find it difficult to make the visual transition to ye olde games, older gamers in particular often find they are as happy with decades-old depictions of a gameplay evironment as some more cutting edge.
With that in mind, may I recommend a brief smattering of games from genres or eras that we often forget:
The good old days of insane fast paced simple, straightforward multiplayer FPS, Sauerbraten: http://www.sauerbraten.org/
Incredibly deep dungeon creation/management simulation, in glorious ANSI, Dwarf Fortress: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Straight-up honed turn-based hack-n-slash roguelike, Angband: http://rephial.org/
Kooky realtime multiplayer roguelike dungeon crawl (yes, multiplayer and realtime) MAngband: http://www.mangband.org/
After decades of gaming, I think many of us come to realize that its the quality of gameplay that matter far more than fidelity of depiction. ASCII kobolds and twitch rocketlauncher firing FTW!
Slashdot Mirror
I gave it a view a few days ago (don't worry at the seeming length - half of it is Q&A), and found it thought provoking. While it's more a statement of what is and soon will be, with less on action items, the general themes will resonate here on /., I think.
Lot of interesting talks at CCC this year, more broadly: do dig through their list on youtube - lots of neat stuff in there. This talk on timing attacks on websites was pretty darned neat (starts mild, ramps up to "cool!").
Its overuse has pretty much made it a meaningless blogspam word.
How strongly is that the case in FF6? I'm still using 3.6.
*raises hand* It was the UI changes in 4 and on that kinda turned me off.
More difficult to believe the ISI didn't know about this, vs a cave in the boonies.
Because they are, by and large, human derived. It's a system that, like most 'native' systems, arose from daily human uses and generally reflect daily human needs, and the scales appropriate to them.
Brad Wardell, as always, is full of shit. The vast majority of Valve developers do not work on Steam. If I understand it correctly, the Steam team is actually rather small, given it's impact. And please, Brad is telling us that a crew of, say, designers and level designers has not been working on HL2 dlc because ... they are working on Steam?! Yeah. Sure. Those poly-pushing level monkies are all hard at work coding up Steam transaction backend software.
A total tangent, but is narrator's accent Philly or NJ? Or something else? To me, he sounds like a guy burn in the NE, moved to Philly as a kid, then went to school in the west coast.
This is blazingly untrue. Most users don't have a synchronous line, yet with only moderate effort ("stay connected after you're done" and "actually pay attention to how much you have downloaded and take it easy") these millions have no reall issue maintaining a ratio. You're Doing It Wrong.
Key to this discussion is the point that Washington State does not have an income tax, relying instead on a sales tax for revenue. So, much of the furor is not simply a matter of the rich wanting to avoid a soaking, but as well the broader issue of weather Washingtonians want to replace a sales tax with an income tax at all. (I, for example, prefer sales tax vs. income tax).
Wow, tough crowd. But I still the think point is valid: from here on out, anything bad that happens to Assange can now be conveniently blamed on Dark Powers etc etc, weather or not it's the case. Kind of like the mid-2000's "disagree with the war == you hate freedom" - an instant shortcut around discourse or truth. Anything even remotely troublesome that may happen to him or wikileaks will instantly result in a flurry of Pentagon-blaming hand-waving tweets from his twitter feed, weather true or not. Man, I wish I was that bulletproof.
In other news, Julian Assange gets parking ticket, blames vast Pentagon conspiracy to sully his name!
Did *you* bother to watch the video? He was describing a hypothetical example to demonstrate a point, not a case.
Kudos, and I'm glad you understand the implicit distinction I was making in reference to DRM. Hugely invasive or demanding DRM is a pain, and does a severe disservice to the customer. However, I fully advocate some basic, simple bits of copy protection simply to cover the most casual of casual piracy. Anything beyond that generally does nothing, and just pisses of the user.
I responded to the post specifically due to the example of Tribes 1's total and complete lack of anything resembling copy protection: it was maximally copyable in a way that was very rare even at the time (late 90s). It was this, and only this, degree of copy freedom that resulted in what I think are legitimate lost sales for the game.
Responding to others above, I want to be clear that I fully am aware that piracy can't be fully, or even partially, stopped. This point is blazingly obvious, so it's unfortunate to see people wasting their breath stating what we all know. That issue isn't the point. Further, as I stated in my post, I fully understand that a pirated copy does not represent a lost sale. Personally, I might ballpark it and say it might be a one in five or one in seven kind of deal (although of course that's just a wild gut guess based on jack shit).
However, my worry is that by painting the discussion in such extremes ("you can't stop piracy," "a pirated copy is not a lost sale"), we miss the inbetweensy bit that this post opened with: that there are classes of pirates, defined by the knowledge and effort they can apply to get a game. It's the first class that is the teeming masses (moreso back in the late 90s, when it was less easy for the average joe to get the goods vs. today) who, presented with a simple barrier, will wander off or, sometimes, buy the game (that one in five or one in seven deal I mentioned). If you don't even protect your product for this group of users, you end up in Tribe's boat.
I don't know that I would call it an outright failure, but the PC game "Starsiege: Tribes" from Dynamix certainly got walloped by piracy. I chatted with one of the engineers after the game's launch, and he sadly reported their server stats showing 300k+ people playing the game, with just 70-80k or so sales. They had a complete and utter lack of any DRM (not even a simple disk check), making the game wildly easy to copy. Hell, the install process was just a straightup file copy from CD to HD.
No two ways about it, the game sold poorly, but was quite successful with players. I certainly don't mean to imply be any stretch that every player represented a lost sale, but I definitely believe that the complete ease with which the game could be copied (ie, right click on the install folder, and select "ICQ this to my buddy") led to very disappointing sales.
Most games that sell poorly are poorly made games: the market is the final judge of quality. However, I also firmly believe that had Tribes had some basic form of copy protection, the sales would have been much much stronger. I hate that I am now sounding like I advocate loads of DRM, but Tribes represented an almost pathological case with its utter lack of any protection, and I think this wound up hurting sales very markedly.
Mod parent up.
and so it does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color
Neat snippet from the article:
"At Walt Disney World, Kodak engineered Epcot's pavement to be a certain hue of pink so that the grass would look greener through the reverse of this effect."
Sneaky!
+1 funny AND +1 insightful. There's actually a lot of interesting potential truth in your comedic comment.
Sadly, however, the students would be at the most ready and receptive to go through an install process at the *end* of the course, instead of the beginning. I fear that on the start, it would just be a confusing jumble of arcane looking commands to type in verbatim, with no foundation yet present to appreciate what is going on.
This is of course neat to see, but I think it's clearly a rotoscoped sequence transferred to a printout (which is pretty cool too). Not to quibble, but this might be a better example of full-on ASCII animation:
http://www.asciimation.co.nz/ - The classic ASCII anim of Episode IV.
Pithily put.
More generally, I guess the new term arose from having a huge mass of people suddenly wodged together - many of whom were/are not terribly computer-ey - creating terms themselves to describe what they experience (ie, sixty zillion Warcraft users interacting daily). A king of eternal September in a way.
Bug bug bug BUG "bug" "BUG"!
I know I have pretty much become an old man at this point in my life, but how did we let Warcraft users slowly replace the word "bug" with "glitch" ?! It's a bug!
However, I have to feely admit one point: replacing the word with 'glitch' makes it easier to use as a verb, as in "that instance is glitched" vs "that instance is bugged" - in the sense that the latter use could mean "we put that bug in the bug DB already." Ah well, back to feeding ferrite core beads to pigeons...
Humanity does not, in the end, grow exponentially. Wealthy developed nations hit a minimal/no growth point, and in some cases contract to achieve that. The earth's population is predicted to peak at 9 billion around 2050, and then pretty much hang there. Developed country after developed country keeps hitting this wall, where the birthrate drops to or below maintenance rate. America stands apart from this, for the time, due largely to immigration. However, a good extreme example of this trend is Japan.
I recently was struck by a broader instance of this, in relation to popular media in general. Outside of targeted forms of media (television shows or movies that focus on a specific demographic), I think this trend is as present in TV and film as well. Its as if we've gotten used to a mode of depiction, despite what we see daily at work, on the street, and in our neighborhoods. American is well on the path to be, by around 2040, a "minority majority" country, where the majority of citizens are not white. Despite this, I agree that entertainment media do not currently reflect this.
I work in the video game industry, and to be honest, the games I have worked on don't even reflect the ethnic or lifestyle-minority makeup of my office, let alone the country at large (the presence of females in my offics vs. the games we have produced, on the other hand, is a different story).
Speaking for myself and where I work, this isn't any conscious method of producing entertainment - its just a weird (and, I feel, unfortunate) habit of depicting people in games. It reflects work yet to be done, I think, that popular media often has to make a conscious effort to more accurately depict the world around us, and its unfortunate that it takes a conscious effort to do so.
As the original gamer generation(s) age, they have an ever expanding sense of what a videogame can acceptably look like. While a gamer of a more recent generation may (tho not always, of course, god bless them) find it difficult to make the visual transition to ye olde games, older gamers in particular often find they are as happy with decades-old depictions of a gameplay evironment as some more cutting edge.
With that in mind, may I recommend a brief smattering of games from genres or eras that we often forget:
The good old days of insane fast paced simple, straightforward multiplayer FPS, Sauerbraten: http://www.sauerbraten.org/
Incredibly deep dungeon creation/management simulation, in glorious ANSI, Dwarf Fortress: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Straight-up honed turn-based hack-n-slash roguelike, Angband: http://rephial.org/
Kooky realtime multiplayer roguelike dungeon crawl (yes, multiplayer and realtime) MAngband: http://www.mangband.org/
After decades of gaming, I think many of us come to realize that its the quality of gameplay that matter far more than fidelity of depiction. ASCII kobolds and twitch rocketlauncher firing FTW!