1. I defy you to cite examples of Japanese anime houses (not US dub shops) objecting to the fansubs of unlicensed shows.
If you follow the first link in TFA, it's the Japanese government that has been complaining -- specifically about the copying of anime on P2P networks.
Which is noticeably not a Japanses anime house, anymore than Comcast is a US dub shop.
The issue with game systems is they require a certain amount of momentum. In order to attract developers they need to have a large install base and an active player community. No matter what you make as far as game systems you'll always sell some of them, but your sells will quickly fall off based on the developer uptake and the perceived position of your product in the market place by the masses. In the "console wars" there are three distinct ways to fail. In the first and worst way, you can fail as Sega did, which is to be forced out of hardware production entirely. In the second way your sales can dwindle to almost nothing long before you were planning on releasing the next generation of your product. In the last and least damaging way you can be relegated to a tertiary position relative to the other competitors, which means you may still be profitable, but you'll always be the also ran that everyone picks up just on the principle of completing their collection of systems. Right now Sony is fighting to avoid that final category of failure. In order to be in the other two you need to continually screw up not just one generation, but several generations of product. Look at the nGage, doomed from the start. It's had two releases, and both were a joke. Sure some people bought them, but how many games did you see? Maybe a few dozen tops. The developers knew a stillborn system when they saw it. The original launch of the nGage was the second class of failure. The second launch I'm confident qualifies as the first class, we'll not be seeing anymore from nGage.
What's particularly interesting is that the Gamecube was a failure of the third type in the last generation. The developers expecting more of the same initially shunned it and were left scrambling to catch up when it rocketed to the top, where as the PS3, by all accounts the expected top system this round is fighting not to be a type 3 failure. I don't think they're in danger of a type 2 failure of course, but it could still happen, as a type 2 failure has a lot more to do with third party developers and customers than it does the company making the product (well, ultimately it's their fault, but by the time they realize they have a problem it's usually too late as the system has already shipped).
Using your qualifications, Nintendo won with the Gamecube as well since it was always profitable. Really, the market can support 3 winners. A loser is going to be someone who is forced out of the market. All 3 look strong enough to last another round after this one. I think you're talking about the difference between the battle and the war. Nintendo is looking to be the winner of this round, with Microsoft and Sony fighting over second and third place. Of course things may very well reverse with the next generation of consoles, after all Nintendo was a distant third in the previous generation with Sony the undisputed champion. By your criteria no companies besides Sega and Atari have ever lost (and maybe not even then, Sega is still in business and making games, just not hardware).
Not entirely certain about the Wii, but I know the DS version is based on the Crystal Chronicles FF universe as opposed to the more traditional FF games. Some people hated Crystal Chronicles, but I and several of my friends really enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to the new versions for the Wii and DS (I know there's a Wii version of it planned, but not sure if any of the more traditional FF games such as XIII will be released for it).
Wii players are less likely to want Assassin's Creed or Call of Duty 4. (Oh look, another military FPS! Who would have thought?) So stop trying to sell them the same games you've been selling teenage boys, and start doing some market research. Make games that are compelling to the casual market, and you will win.
Actually that's not even entirely true. One of my favorite games so far has been Metroid Prime 3, which is arguably yet another FPS. The big difference however is that it isn't a retooled and hastily assembled port of some existing FPS, but rather one that was built from the ground up to work well with the control scheme of the Wii. Customers want a game that has a decent design, but more importantly one that respects and understands the controls the Wii can provide. As a counter example look at Lair for the PS3. By all accounts the games motion controls were slapped on last minute at the insistence of Sony and ruined an otherwise promising game. Almost all the reviews said the same thing, the story was decent, the game play premise was also passable, but the game suffered from some moderate lag at times, and worst of all the motion controls you were forced to use were terrible. Similarly I bought redsteel when I picked up my Wii, and although the game was at best mediocre in concept, it faired much worse in the controls. After the 10th time getting killed because my character decided to stop and spinning around while staring at the sky I just quit playing that game and haven't touched it since.
I think you'll find Sony's move is too little too late. At this point they're just hoping to stay in the game long enough to slide into a third place finish, or if they're really really lucky rally back and tie for second. It's a shame too, I used to be a big fan of the PS2 and was really looking forward to the PS3, but then they announced the price and I said screw that. At this point I'm happy with my Wii (pre-ordered, so I had mine on launch day), and I've been eyeballing a 360 so I might grab one of those, particularly it they have another price drop, but even with the reduced price the PS3 just isn't appealing at this point.
Yes, Nintendo won even if people stop buying games for it. It's the third party developers that get screwed at that point. That being said I don't think that will be the case though. The Wii is in an adjustment period. The DS went through the same thing. Developers are still trying to adapt to the system and find out what does and does not work with it. When the DS first came out the only decent games were for the most part created by Nintendo with most of the third party games being mediocre. The Wii is going through the same thing now. Almost all the good games are by Nintendo with the third party items (for the most part) being decidedly mediocre. With luck however the developers will pull through and we'll start to see games from third parties soon every bit as polished and fun as Nintendo's own offerings.
This seems to be more an issue with something like SSL in which the security of the system is reliant on not being able to guess the next number out of the PRNG.
Yes, that's what I was using. When I say WINE I mean WINE/WINEX/Cedega, and I usually try with a couple different versions (that is actual WINE, and Cedega), because sometimes one works better than the other for a particular game.
It's widescreen, 16:10 ratio. I could lower my resolution of course, but I'd hate to do so as the game is absolutely gorgeous at that resolution and gives me lots and lots of screen real estate to position my addons. I'm an addon junky, although I tend to lean towards minimalist addons. Most of them only serve small functions and usually add content to the tooltip or provide small unobtrusive windows. I'm particularly a fan of FuBar.
I've got a pretty beefy system, but I think I know where the problem is. I've got a 1920x1200 native resolution monitor and I normally run at that resolution, but the GeForce 8600 card I have only has 256M of on board memory. In Windows, if I exceed what can be buffered on the card it seems to fallback to system RAM which leads to pretty steep FPS dropoff, but otherwise causes no problems (I can particularly see this when I crank my AA settings, running at lower res I can crank AA as high as I want and it clips along just fine, but when I crank the resolution to 1920 and set even 2xAA it slows to a crawl). For some reason however in WINE when I exceed the on board memory I get texture corruption, although no FPS slowdown. It seems to be ignoring any textures that don't fit within the cards memory rather than taking a performance hit and swapping to system RAM. As for the FPS reduction I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that was because at the time I last tried it the nVidia driver was brand new and still considered beta for the card I had.
That's actually one of the things I'm planning on testing out soon. I tried running WoW in WINE in the past but had about a 20 fps drop and strange graphical glitches. I've since updated my nVidia driver and I'm hoping that in combination with some of the tweaks (proper dual core support for starters) that Blizzard released in the last patch should clear that up.
Much as I would love to be Windows free, there are still many games that WINE simply cannot run, and more still that it cannot run with acceptable performance.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these bad boys running on emulated hardware running COBOL.NET applications under Mono! Gah! Now you've done it! Already some poor government contractor is being asked to implement just that very system. You should never describe a system so completely absurd that no one in their right mind would implement it, because when you do some government organization rushes out to implement it. Please, won't someone think of the contractors?
Surely it's possible, it just may not be much fun or very practical. Unless perhaps that old hardware has some black boxes that talk to spirits or do other magic things.
Sounds like it requires some specialized hardware. I think the point was more that you can't just drop it onto a current system and expect it to run. I'm sure if you stubbed out the parts requiring the special hardware and replaced them with software implementations you could probably get it to work, but that would require some effort in essentially updating the OS. Perhaps we'll see a MULTICS Modern release before too long.
Yeah, I always hated questing in STV because it takes FOREVER to get from one end to the other, particularly at those levels when you don't have a mount yet. FYI, my two mains were a druid, and a shaman, so I'm very familiar with that particular bug, although I'm a bit disappointed they fixed the bug that let you take out your weapon/shield while in ghost wolf. Was always funny to be running around with a shield and a axe floating just off your paws.
Not necessarily. You can determine that it's an encrypted stream, and you can probably do some statistics based on connection patterns to guess that it's bittorrent, but outside of that you can't tell much. You also can't tell if it's 1, or 10 bittorrent files being transferred. On the other hand if someone is connected to the same seeder as you are then there's a chance they'll receive your IP, and thus know what it is you're helping distribute, which seeing as this is the approach that the MAFIAA has taken to date doesn't really help much against them. Rather as some have pointed out, this is a defense against ISPs doing some underhanded traffic shaping.
Except that you're missing a key point with bittorrent, which is that all it's network swarms are effectively short-lived. Any given torrent would probably only last a few days. Some of the really popular ones might make it into a few months, and some of the really obscure ones maybe not even a day, but they all disappear eventually. Also the lifespan of a particular torrent to a certain extent can be extrapolated by the demand for the torrent. In your example your files would have a demand of essentially one (yourself) and would as such probably not last very long at all. Now, I'm not saying a distributed filesystem can't work. What I'm saying is that bittorrent is a poor fit for one. You could come up with one similar to bittorrent, but it wouldn't be bittorrent, nor would it be a modified form of bittorrent.
I think with regards to a distributed FS, one of the other posters was on to something. Come up with a redundancy amount, say 10x or 20x, and require that each file you upload to the network means you contribute the size of the file times the redundancy factor back in storage. Of course, the really hard part of this is ensuring everyone contributes back what they're supposed to. Bittorrent works because in order to break the bandwidth sharing you need the other peers to co-operate, any single peer can't do it. Enforcing a HD contribution however would be much harder because each peer essentially has to trust the amount of storage reported by every other peer. There's probably a way to do it, but I'd actually have to sit down and do some hard thinking to figure it out, and frankly I'm not up to that right now.
Ah, a fellow alt-a-holic. I get flak from my guild sometimes because I've got so many alts and while they hit 70 a long time ago I'm just now getting to level 68. Eh, who cares, I have more fun with all my different characters, and like you I can only play a few hours randomly throughout the week. That being said I do intend to faction grind at some point because I want the high faction crafting recipes. Also need to transfer my Tauren Druid at some point. I abandoned him because I got sick of playing on a PvP server, and was having problems leveling him past 63, because I'd get ganked about 2 min after I signed on (high population older server, lots and lots of bored level 70s) by a pack of rogues (inside cities even!). Happy to report my time spent on the PvE servers has been much more enjoyable.
Yeah, our guild has already started a fund to buy the guild bank slots (which reminds me, when I get home I need to send out guild money bank 20g). Hadn't heard about the 12 item per mail thing before now, but that's very nice as well. Also notice that you can control click recipes to see the item now which is rather nice. Now if only there was some way to preview what a mount looks like.
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If you follow the first link in TFA, it's the Japanese government that has been complaining -- specifically about the copying of anime on P2P networks.
Which is noticeably not a Japanses anime house, anymore than Comcast is a US dub shop.
The issue with game systems is they require a certain amount of momentum. In order to attract developers they need to have a large install base and an active player community. No matter what you make as far as game systems you'll always sell some of them, but your sells will quickly fall off based on the developer uptake and the perceived position of your product in the market place by the masses. In the "console wars" there are three distinct ways to fail. In the first and worst way, you can fail as Sega did, which is to be forced out of hardware production entirely. In the second way your sales can dwindle to almost nothing long before you were planning on releasing the next generation of your product. In the last and least damaging way you can be relegated to a tertiary position relative to the other competitors, which means you may still be profitable, but you'll always be the also ran that everyone picks up just on the principle of completing their collection of systems. Right now Sony is fighting to avoid that final category of failure. In order to be in the other two you need to continually screw up not just one generation, but several generations of product. Look at the nGage, doomed from the start. It's had two releases, and both were a joke. Sure some people bought them, but how many games did you see? Maybe a few dozen tops. The developers knew a stillborn system when they saw it. The original launch of the nGage was the second class of failure. The second launch I'm confident qualifies as the first class, we'll not be seeing anymore from nGage.
What's particularly interesting is that the Gamecube was a failure of the third type in the last generation. The developers expecting more of the same initially shunned it and were left scrambling to catch up when it rocketed to the top, where as the PS3, by all accounts the expected top system this round is fighting not to be a type 3 failure. I don't think they're in danger of a type 2 failure of course, but it could still happen, as a type 2 failure has a lot more to do with third party developers and customers than it does the company making the product (well, ultimately it's their fault, but by the time they realize they have a problem it's usually too late as the system has already shipped).
Not entirely certain about the Wii, but I know the DS version is based on the Crystal Chronicles FF universe as opposed to the more traditional FF games. Some people hated Crystal Chronicles, but I and several of my friends really enjoyed it, so I'm looking forward to the new versions for the Wii and DS (I know there's a Wii version of it planned, but not sure if any of the more traditional FF games such as XIII will be released for it).
Actually that's not even entirely true. One of my favorite games so far has been Metroid Prime 3, which is arguably yet another FPS. The big difference however is that it isn't a retooled and hastily assembled port of some existing FPS, but rather one that was built from the ground up to work well with the control scheme of the Wii. Customers want a game that has a decent design, but more importantly one that respects and understands the controls the Wii can provide. As a counter example look at Lair for the PS3. By all accounts the games motion controls were slapped on last minute at the insistence of Sony and ruined an otherwise promising game. Almost all the reviews said the same thing, the story was decent, the game play premise was also passable, but the game suffered from some moderate lag at times, and worst of all the motion controls you were forced to use were terrible. Similarly I bought redsteel when I picked up my Wii, and although the game was at best mediocre in concept, it faired much worse in the controls. After the 10th time getting killed because my character decided to stop and spinning around while staring at the sky I just quit playing that game and haven't touched it since.
I think you'll find Sony's move is too little too late. At this point they're just hoping to stay in the game long enough to slide into a third place finish, or if they're really really lucky rally back and tie for second. It's a shame too, I used to be a big fan of the PS2 and was really looking forward to the PS3, but then they announced the price and I said screw that. At this point I'm happy with my Wii (pre-ordered, so I had mine on launch day), and I've been eyeballing a 360 so I might grab one of those, particularly it they have another price drop, but even with the reduced price the PS3 just isn't appealing at this point.
Yes, Nintendo won even if people stop buying games for it. It's the third party developers that get screwed at that point. That being said I don't think that will be the case though. The Wii is in an adjustment period. The DS went through the same thing. Developers are still trying to adapt to the system and find out what does and does not work with it. When the DS first came out the only decent games were for the most part created by Nintendo with most of the third party games being mediocre. The Wii is going through the same thing now. Almost all the good games are by Nintendo with the third party items (for the most part) being decidedly mediocre. With luck however the developers will pull through and we'll start to see games from third parties soon every bit as polished and fun as Nintendo's own offerings.
This seems to be more an issue with something like SSL in which the security of the system is reliant on not being able to guess the next number out of the PRNG.
Yes, that's what I was using. When I say WINE I mean WINE/WINEX/Cedega, and I usually try with a couple different versions (that is actual WINE, and Cedega), because sometimes one works better than the other for a particular game.
It's widescreen, 16:10 ratio. I could lower my resolution of course, but I'd hate to do so as the game is absolutely gorgeous at that resolution and gives me lots and lots of screen real estate to position my addons. I'm an addon junky, although I tend to lean towards minimalist addons. Most of them only serve small functions and usually add content to the tooltip or provide small unobtrusive windows. I'm particularly a fan of FuBar.
I've got a pretty beefy system, but I think I know where the problem is. I've got a 1920x1200 native resolution monitor and I normally run at that resolution, but the GeForce 8600 card I have only has 256M of on board memory. In Windows, if I exceed what can be buffered on the card it seems to fallback to system RAM which leads to pretty steep FPS dropoff, but otherwise causes no problems (I can particularly see this when I crank my AA settings, running at lower res I can crank AA as high as I want and it clips along just fine, but when I crank the resolution to 1920 and set even 2xAA it slows to a crawl). For some reason however in WINE when I exceed the on board memory I get texture corruption, although no FPS slowdown. It seems to be ignoring any textures that don't fit within the cards memory rather than taking a performance hit and swapping to system RAM. As for the FPS reduction I'm not entirely sure, but I suspect that was because at the time I last tried it the nVidia driver was brand new and still considered beta for the card I had.
That's actually one of the things I'm planning on testing out soon. I tried running WoW in WINE in the past but had about a 20 fps drop and strange graphical glitches. I've since updated my nVidia driver and I'm hoping that in combination with some of the tweaks (proper dual core support for starters) that Blizzard released in the last patch should clear that up.
Much as I would love to be Windows free, there are still many games that WINE simply cannot run, and more still that it cannot run with acceptable performance.
As an added bonus in that setup you only need one Windows machine.
Maybe it had a more magic switch?
Sounds like it requires some specialized hardware. I think the point was more that you can't just drop it onto a current system and expect it to run. I'm sure if you stubbed out the parts requiring the special hardware and replaced them with software implementations you could probably get it to work, but that would require some effort in essentially updating the OS. Perhaps we'll see a MULTICS Modern release before too long.
They missed one of the most classic off switches of all. A link button on the front page of slashdot!
Pretty soon the only large organized internet crime is going to be the government run kind.
Nah, they'll try to get open source declared illegal.
Yeah, I always hated questing in STV because it takes FOREVER to get from one end to the other, particularly at those levels when you don't have a mount yet. FYI, my two mains were a druid, and a shaman, so I'm very familiar with that particular bug, although I'm a bit disappointed they fixed the bug that let you take out your weapon/shield while in ghost wolf. Was always funny to be running around with a shield and a axe floating just off your paws.
Not necessarily. You can determine that it's an encrypted stream, and you can probably do some statistics based on connection patterns to guess that it's bittorrent, but outside of that you can't tell much. You also can't tell if it's 1, or 10 bittorrent files being transferred. On the other hand if someone is connected to the same seeder as you are then there's a chance they'll receive your IP, and thus know what it is you're helping distribute, which seeing as this is the approach that the MAFIAA has taken to date doesn't really help much against them. Rather as some have pointed out, this is a defense against ISPs doing some underhanded traffic shaping.
Except that you're missing a key point with bittorrent, which is that all it's network swarms are effectively short-lived. Any given torrent would probably only last a few days. Some of the really popular ones might make it into a few months, and some of the really obscure ones maybe not even a day, but they all disappear eventually. Also the lifespan of a particular torrent to a certain extent can be extrapolated by the demand for the torrent. In your example your files would have a demand of essentially one (yourself) and would as such probably not last very long at all. Now, I'm not saying a distributed filesystem can't work. What I'm saying is that bittorrent is a poor fit for one. You could come up with one similar to bittorrent, but it wouldn't be bittorrent, nor would it be a modified form of bittorrent.
I think with regards to a distributed FS, one of the other posters was on to something. Come up with a redundancy amount, say 10x or 20x, and require that each file you upload to the network means you contribute the size of the file times the redundancy factor back in storage. Of course, the really hard part of this is ensuring everyone contributes back what they're supposed to. Bittorrent works because in order to break the bandwidth sharing you need the other peers to co-operate, any single peer can't do it. Enforcing a HD contribution however would be much harder because each peer essentially has to trust the amount of storage reported by every other peer. There's probably a way to do it, but I'd actually have to sit down and do some hard thinking to figure it out, and frankly I'm not up to that right now.
Ah, a fellow alt-a-holic. I get flak from my guild sometimes because I've got so many alts and while they hit 70 a long time ago I'm just now getting to level 68. Eh, who cares, I have more fun with all my different characters, and like you I can only play a few hours randomly throughout the week. That being said I do intend to faction grind at some point because I want the high faction crafting recipes. Also need to transfer my Tauren Druid at some point. I abandoned him because I got sick of playing on a PvP server, and was having problems leveling him past 63, because I'd get ganked about 2 min after I signed on (high population older server, lots and lots of bored level 70s) by a pack of rogues (inside cities even!). Happy to report my time spent on the PvE servers has been much more enjoyable.
Yeah, our guild has already started a fund to buy the guild bank slots (which reminds me, when I get home I need to send out guild money bank 20g). Hadn't heard about the 12 item per mail thing before now, but that's very nice as well. Also notice that you can control click recipes to see the item now which is rather nice. Now if only there was some way to preview what a mount looks like.