Are you suggesting that having people that understand the law making laws is a bad thing? So your solution is to... Have people that don't understand law at all be the ones responsible for making our laws?
I never implied that you need to spend 100 hours a week at a game to enjoy it. I said that if you want to kill the hardest monsters in the game at the time they are released, then you do need to spend more time playing. You can still kill that same exact monster, months later when the next expansion comes out where you are now a few levels higher, and have access to better weapons/armor faster. If you decide that not being able to kill the hardest monsters make the game "unfun", then MMORPGs are probably not for you, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I'm just saying that 3 months into an expansion, if you are playing 5 hours a week (3 months * 4 weeks/month * 5 hours per week = 60 hours total), and you expect to beat the hardest monsters, then what happens to the guys who do play 100 hours a week? The game releases on Monday, and they beat it on Thursday, and have nothing left to do until the next expansion.
Just like in WoW, the old AQ40 took 40 players that were all massively geared up to try and complete, but a couple expansions later, we went back with 5 guys and destroyed the place. The problem with WoW and their exponentially increasing gear is that while we could go back and kill everything with 5 people, non of the stuff that dropped were worth anything anymore. Unlike everquest where you would still likely need 30 people in decent gear, and the stuff that dropped would still be relevant, and possibly upgrade some of the people there. Wow makes all gear from previous expansions useless, and the difference in character power is so massively changed that the once challenging to the best players becomes trivial for the worst players, so noone wants to revisit the old content anymore.
That might be true, if he actually had heirs. Mr. Gates has already stated that he is not leaving anything to his kids, and he has enough money to last him until he dies, so it kind of makes your argument kind of silly.
Well even if it's more fragmented than flash, at least at some point we will be able to bury that abomination flash at some point now, and it should have much less security issues than flash ever had. Carrying around that code base was malware waiting to happen, and it never worked on any of the i-Devices.
Well someone will find a way to trivially dump it to disk anyhow, but I thought the plan was to allow the media element to hand over an encrypted stream to the CDM that would then return an unencrypted stream that they would then decode (or pass on to a codec) themselves and display it in the appropriate area. Which the EME illustration shows that's how they envision it as well, except for that pesky little dotted area they label "optional" that allows the CDM to apparently hook into or bypass the media stack and display it themselves directly. That sucks because then that means the CDM not only has to do it'd decryption, but it also has to understand the underlying codec as well. That's just going to lead to poorly implemented codecs buried inside CDMs, but knowing hollywood that is exactly what they will demand to happen. The "optional" part will be the norm.
The answer is simple. Hire older programmers who are still at the top of the game. You will pay a bit more, and it's not fool proof, but at least you are hiring programmers who have demonstrated that they continue to remain at the top over time. Hiring younger programmers who are recently out of college and know the latest technology buzz is fairly easy. Most of them stop their learning there once they get out into the real world and have to decide their priorities.
Ah I see it came from the illustration. My bad. I see that they are envisioning CDMs that do more than just decrypt as well, and take over part of the media stack as well, which would be bad.
Any given CDM is. Unless you expect a Windows binary to run on OS X or Linux.
Perhaps, but that is still an improvement from not being able to run any CDM on OS/X or linux, ever because they don't implement COM which ActiveX relies on.
Yes it is. Oh sure, you could make it open source but you'll never get the sources for one that does anything useful.
Again, perhaps. Unless the CDM hands off the actual decryption process to a lower level API like a TPM.
Much like how flash does now, where it's given a spot on the page but is otherwise independent of the browser.
Zero improvement.
Flash doesn't play content through the standard media elements. <video>,<audio>
Additionally, since the function of the CDM is for content decryption, I'm not even sure how it would be reasonable to expect it to understand the varying codecs itself to render a frame. Decoding a video frame would be the responsibility of the media element itself, not the CDM.
I see you quoted "CDM implementations may return decrypted frames or rendered them directly.", however, that did not come from the specification, so I'm not sure where you got it from.
The CDM isn't tied to a particular OS. The CDM isn't necessarily proprietary. CDM code can be cross platform (different OSes and different processors (Intel/ARM)). Additionally, the media will play within the context of the web page and should follow standard markup (styles, width, height, z-index, etc).
Oh and not mention that Sony did their fair share of insuring that EQ1 died. From the original word saying that EQ2 was the future, and EQ1 development was done. The next patch was supposed to allow EQ1 characters to play in a shared zone with EQ2 for a bit, and then you could take some of your gear with you as you switched over. Eventually that turned out to be nothing more than a legacy pair of "jboots", and nothing more came of it. A lot of people jumped over to get a head start on EQ2 characters thinking EQ1 was dead. Of course, that never happened, but it caused a lot of the high end guilds to move entirely, or have enough move that they were no longer able to survive on their own and consolidating with other high end guilds.
EQ started to die out because it was an old engine, and everquest 2 was supposed to be everything everquest 1 was, with better graphics, better combat, etc etc. Guilds started imploding with people leaving to play EQ2 and WoW. Both of which were better in a lot of ways (graphics, user friendlyness, group friendly).
I left to play WoW beta, but then was dragged into EQ2 by a bunch of friends against my better judgement (I wanted to head to WoW instead).
The fate of EQ2 was different. It was buggy on release, it was a lag fest for even people with the very best machines at the time, and the content wasn't there. It took ~20 days to go from nothing to being max level. 2 months after release, I had every master spell, and was killing every boss on the server whenever they would pop up, and there was no reason to continue the grind. They had too little content, too little to do, and tons of bugs. Master spells that were silly marginally better than their non-master versions, and in many cases actually worse in every way. There was absolutely nothing left to do in the game. Seen it all, done it all. As a MMO that was major fail. When 2 months into the game, you have everything (best armor, best weapons, best spells, best crafting), and have killed every boss, and there isn't an expansion in sight, you move on.
As for vanguard, it too had serious performance issues. I bought my first SSD back when they were silly expensive ($1000) just to play that game - whenever a new played would appear in view, it loaded the textures from disk, and if you had many new players appearing you could lose control of your character for seconds at a time -- the SSD reduced that, and subsequent patches helped as well. They ran out of content, and they ruined part of the fun that was EQ1 -- namely wrecking a lot of the guild vs guild rivalry by making most encounters instanced. Granted, getting there took 8 months to do, and we were clearing content as it was released, but then a few major issues came up. You had to pick a path for the guild, with an unknown benefit for each path, our guild picked one, and after months of grinding, it was finally released by the devs that the reward for our path was a flying unicorn that shot rainbows out of its ass, and the other path you got a black stallion, and with still a month of grinding left to do, it was a major let down. Then the guild basically collapsed shortly after the devs themselves were fired, and said there was to be no more development work done on vanguard at all -- just bug fixes and maintenance. Our guild collapsed and merged with another guild that was pretty close to progression with us, but had taken the other path. Vanguard was killed by sony execs who didn't want it competing with EQ2. It lacked the resources to make a world class game, while most of the resources were shifted to that piece of garbage EQ2.
Because ActiveX didn't have cross browser/cross platform hooks or ways of working that way. There was no way for an ActiveX control to work on a mac or unix.
ActiveX was an API, and while open(ish), you couldn't implement it without carrying forward a ton of proprietary stuff (COM).
But that is the point. You don't have to, and for a large part of it, everquest didn't, and it was pretty popular. New expansions didn't invalidate older accomplishments, but it did let more casual players catch up much quicker. The day planes of power came out, I didn't throw away my epic weapon from the previous expansion. Even at the very end of the expansion, half my gear was still from the prior expansion, and a couple pieces from the expansion prior to that.
For example, when I left, it was on it's 7th expansion (Gates of Discord). We were still raiding content as far back as the Ruins of Kunark occasionally. People were running the expert dungeons from the 5th expansion. We were actively raiding content from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th expansion. While most of those were for quickly gearing up new members of the guild, even veterans were occasionally picking up gear better than what they had. Rings of Destruction from the Avatar of War for casters. Blades of Carnage best in slot/tied for best in slot for 4 expansions?. The coldain king's boots were best in slot for 3 expansions, or close enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, works great so far too. Now I can finally drop all the other crap. No more transcoding all the videos to three different formats! YAY
Then feel free to not use the service.
Email spam filters are evil too! My ISP is reading my emails, OMG!
Are you suggesting that having people that understand the law making laws is a bad thing? So your solution is to... Have people that don't understand law at all be the ones responsible for making our laws?
I never implied that you need to spend 100 hours a week at a game to enjoy it. I said that if you want to kill the hardest monsters in the game at the time they are released, then you do need to spend more time playing. You can still kill that same exact monster, months later when the next expansion comes out where you are now a few levels higher, and have access to better weapons/armor faster. If you decide that not being able to kill the hardest monsters make the game "unfun", then MMORPGs are probably not for you, and there is nothing wrong with that.
I'm just saying that 3 months into an expansion, if you are playing 5 hours a week (3 months * 4 weeks/month * 5 hours per week = 60 hours total), and you expect to beat the hardest monsters, then what happens to the guys who do play 100 hours a week? The game releases on Monday, and they beat it on Thursday, and have nothing left to do until the next expansion.
Just like in WoW, the old AQ40 took 40 players that were all massively geared up to try and complete, but a couple expansions later, we went back with 5 guys and destroyed the place. The problem with WoW and their exponentially increasing gear is that while we could go back and kill everything with 5 people, non of the stuff that dropped were worth anything anymore. Unlike everquest where you would still likely need 30 people in decent gear, and the stuff that dropped would still be relevant, and possibly upgrade some of the people there. Wow makes all gear from previous expansions useless, and the difference in character power is so massively changed that the once challenging to the best players becomes trivial for the worst players, so noone wants to revisit the old content anymore.
That might be true, if he actually had heirs. Mr. Gates has already stated that he is not leaving anything to his kids, and he has enough money to last him until he dies, so it kind of makes your argument kind of silly.
That article talks about plants. You realize that algae is a plant, right?
Then perhaps you should stop reading slashdot, and instead go to amazon.com and newegg.com?
I am still grandfathered on my AT&T phone, but I can hit 5GB in a day, then the rest of the month I'm throttled down to less than edge speed.
With less security breaches, and it'll work on all devices, and without draining the battery.
Well even if it's more fragmented than flash, at least at some point we will be able to bury that abomination flash at some point now, and it should have much less security issues than flash ever had. Carrying around that code base was malware waiting to happen, and it never worked on any of the i-Devices.
Well someone will find a way to trivially dump it to disk anyhow, but I thought the plan was to allow the media element to hand over an encrypted stream to the CDM that would then return an unencrypted stream that they would then decode (or pass on to a codec) themselves and display it in the appropriate area. Which the EME illustration shows that's how they envision it as well, except for that pesky little dotted area they label "optional" that allows the CDM to apparently hook into or bypass the media stack and display it themselves directly. That sucks because then that means the CDM not only has to do it'd decryption, but it also has to understand the underlying codec as well. That's just going to lead to poorly implemented codecs buried inside CDMs, but knowing hollywood that is exactly what they will demand to happen. The "optional" part will be the norm.
The answer is simple. Hire older programmers who are still at the top of the game. You will pay a bit more, and it's not fool proof, but at least you are hiring programmers who have demonstrated that they continue to remain at the top over time. Hiring younger programmers who are recently out of college and know the latest technology buzz is fairly easy. Most of them stop their learning there once they get out into the real world and have to decide their priorities.
Yes, I didn't see the the part where they allow CDMs to be able to take over parts of the media stack as well as just decrypt.
Ah I see it came from the illustration. My bad. I see that they are envisioning CDMs that do more than just decrypt as well, and take over part of the media stack as well, which would be bad.
Any given CDM is. Unless you expect a Windows binary to run on OS X or Linux.
Perhaps, but that is still an improvement from not being able to run any CDM on OS/X or linux, ever because they don't implement COM which ActiveX relies on.
Yes it is. Oh sure, you could make it open source but you'll never get the sources for one that does anything useful.
Again, perhaps. Unless the CDM hands off the actual decryption process to a lower level API like a TPM.
Much like how flash does now, where it's given a spot on the page but is otherwise independent of the browser.
Zero improvement.
Flash doesn't play content through the standard media elements. <video>,<audio>
Additionally, since the function of the CDM is for content decryption, I'm not even sure how it would be reasonable to expect it to understand the varying codecs itself to render a frame. Decoding a video frame would be the responsibility of the media element itself, not the CDM.
I see you quoted "CDM implementations may return decrypted frames or rendered them directly.", however, that did not come from the specification, so I'm not sure where you got it from.
The CDM isn't tied to a particular OS.
The CDM isn't necessarily proprietary.
CDM code can be cross platform (different OSes and different processors (Intel/ARM)).
Additionally, the media will play within the context of the web page and should follow standard markup (styles, width, height, z-index, etc).
Oh and not mention that Sony did their fair share of insuring that EQ1 died. From the original word saying that EQ2 was the future, and EQ1 development was done. The next patch was supposed to allow EQ1 characters to play in a shared zone with EQ2 for a bit, and then you could take some of your gear with you as you switched over. Eventually that turned out to be nothing more than a legacy pair of "jboots", and nothing more came of it. A lot of people jumped over to get a head start on EQ2 characters thinking EQ1 was dead. Of course, that never happened, but it caused a lot of the high end guilds to move entirely, or have enough move that they were no longer able to survive on their own and consolidating with other high end guilds.
EQ started to die out because it was an old engine, and everquest 2 was supposed to be everything everquest 1 was, with better graphics, better combat, etc etc. Guilds started imploding with people leaving to play EQ2 and WoW. Both of which were better in a lot of ways (graphics, user friendlyness, group friendly).
I left to play WoW beta, but then was dragged into EQ2 by a bunch of friends against my better judgement (I wanted to head to WoW instead).
The fate of EQ2 was different. It was buggy on release, it was a lag fest for even people with the very best machines at the time, and the content wasn't there.
It took ~20 days to go from nothing to being max level. 2 months after release, I had every master spell, and was killing every boss on the server whenever they would pop up, and there was no reason to continue the grind. They had too little content, too little to do, and tons of bugs. Master spells that were silly marginally better than their non-master versions, and in many cases actually worse in every way. There was absolutely nothing left to do in the game. Seen it all, done it all. As a MMO that was major fail. When 2 months into the game, you have everything (best armor, best weapons, best spells, best crafting), and have killed every boss, and there isn't an expansion in sight, you move on.
As for vanguard, it too had serious performance issues. I bought my first SSD back when they were silly expensive ($1000) just to play that game - whenever a new played would appear in view, it loaded the textures from disk, and if you had many new players appearing you could lose control of your character for seconds at a time -- the SSD reduced that, and subsequent patches helped as well. They ran out of content, and they ruined part of the fun that was EQ1 -- namely wrecking a lot of the guild vs guild rivalry by making most encounters instanced. Granted, getting there took 8 months to do, and we were clearing content as it was released, but then a few major issues came up. You had to pick a path for the guild, with an unknown benefit for each path, our guild picked one, and after months of grinding, it was finally released by the devs that the reward for our path was a flying unicorn that shot rainbows out of its ass, and the other path you got a black stallion, and with still a month of grinding left to do, it was a major let down. Then the guild basically collapsed shortly after the devs themselves were fired, and said there was to be no more development work done on vanguard at all -- just bug fixes and maintenance. Our guild collapsed and merged with another guild that was pretty close to progression with us, but had taken the other path. Vanguard was killed by sony execs who didn't want it competing with EQ2. It lacked the resources to make a world class game, while most of the resources were shifted to that piece of garbage EQ2.
Because ActiveX didn't have cross browser/cross platform hooks or ways of working that way. There was no way for an ActiveX control to work on a mac or unix.
ActiveX was an API, and while open(ish), you couldn't implement it without carrying forward a ton of proprietary stuff (COM).
It might be wrong if they said that every single kid that has high grades will make exactly $7,500 more, but they didn't.
You didn't have to search, you only had to read the second sentence of the article.
Your post had nothing of value.
But that is the point. You don't have to, and for a large part of it, everquest didn't, and it was pretty popular. New expansions didn't invalidate older accomplishments, but it did let more casual players catch up much quicker. The day planes of power came out, I didn't throw away my epic weapon from the previous expansion. Even at the very end of the expansion, half my gear was still from the prior expansion, and a couple pieces from the expansion prior to that.
For example, when I left, it was on it's 7th expansion (Gates of Discord). We were still raiding content as far back as the Ruins of Kunark occasionally. People were running the expert dungeons from the 5th expansion. We were actively raiding content from the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th expansion. While most of those were for quickly gearing up new members of the guild, even veterans were occasionally picking up gear better than what they had. Rings of Destruction from the Avatar of War for casters. Blades of Carnage best in slot/tied for best in slot for 4 expansions?. The coldain king's boots were best in slot for 3 expansions, or close enough.