I'm hanging out with one character in the shadow shard, the much-maligned place that it is. I have group fly and am hoping to even run the TFs there. Tons of people flood the new zones - the hollows is the most popular place for its level, and Striga is also quite popular, especially the TF.
Of course, this has nothing to do with SPAM, but since the Musical was previously announced on Slashdot, I thought readers would be interested in this followup.
There's a lot of content you can access at 50. You can exemp down to play with anyone doing anything (although doing TFs on exemp can be frustrating if anyone has a bad link). And now there's the Arena - I've had it keep me up until 4am twice this week so far. And then there's alts. I have all 8 slots on Virtue filled and I want more. *Especially* with PvP, which motivates me even more to want to play with different builds. There's also badge collecting, souvenir collecting, and I5 will add skills - the "non combat system". I don't know what they'll do, but undoubtedly it's another thing you can play with.
And there's content - I4 is actually the *least* content filled expansion which I'm willing to forgive, because PvP is such a big thing. But there has been a new area every other issue - or several - and more.
(1) I did it to keep up with the Joneses. Given the choice between getting the HOs or sucking, I will get the HOs. But I'd prefer it not be an issue, and on the CoH forums, I publically advocate nerfing HOs even if it nerfs mine too. There are people with 100+ raids under their belt but I've done enough that I obviously have a stake.
(2) For me at least, it's a bit of a joke. My Hami raider is a fire/dev (Plasma on Virtue, in case there are any virtue players hangin' out;)), and a lot of these raids consist of my (muted) laptop running on my desk with me auto-following a targeter with my fire blast on autofire. Look. I. Am. So. Leet. I don't really think the fact that I can autofollow a raid leader and autofire a blast qualifies me for much of anything; it's just convenient that I have the computing power and work environment (aka, my home office) that allows me to have a game running while I work.
I want PvP to be *inclusive*, and inclusive does not work if people need a huge cache of hami-Os to be competitive. And the different with/without them is just astounding.
The Arena is fun, I'll give it that. The intuitive easy gameplay remains. There's a bit of a fly in the ointment, in the sense that right now, there's "loot" unbalancing the game. Specifically, "Hamidon Enhancements". Enhancements boost a power in CoH, and come in 3 varieties: the +8.3%, the +16.6%, and +33.3% variety, available as you get higher level. The raid reward enhancement (for killing the Hamidon) is +50% to *2* aspects. So the best enhancement available to most L22+ players is, say +33% accuracy or +33% damage. A "Hami-O", as they're called, could be +50%dmg&+50% acc.
I have about 30 myself. Experimentation has shown that when I'm fighting in a lower weight class, the power of the hami-Os may scale down, but they're still obviously WAY too good and I absolutely terrorize people I shouldn't be able to.
So for the casual player vs the hami-O laden veteran, there's a serious mismatch.
Otherwise, it's a blast.
There are definitely some great new options in the costume department - lots of jackets, several types of martial arts gear - pants, shirts, even kung fu shoes.
There's a lot of crying over nerfs right now, as scrappers took a hit to their defenses in I4 for the most part, but game balance has improved if you ask me.
Really, while the arena is great, it is obviously also laying ground and gathering data for City of Villains, which has Villain vs Hero pvp as a real theme. It's not mandatory, but it will obviously play an important part for those who are interested. This is a good first step to making sure that is not unbalanced.
What frightens me is that the Chinese simply don't realize they're being censored. Recently when Zhao Ziyang passed away in China, news of this was muted and response to it suppressed. And that's for something the Chinese clearly wanted a modicum of information to be released for.
The thing is, the vast majority of the Chinese have no idea they're being censored. It's not as though a huge red screen pops up saying, "THIS INFORMATION IS CENSORED BY YOUR GOVERNMENT". If we were being censored, how would we know?
We see little things - like Bush using "planted" reporters to rig questioning at the White House. How long before another step is taken?
The author ignores a number of inconvenient facts.
First, and foremost, SCO's bluster about Linux and copyright infringement predates their lawsuit against IBM. Whether or not IBM violated its contract with SCO is not the community's beef with SCO; the community is up in arms because SCO had the gall to suggest that Linux was a big ripoff of SCO's proprietary unix code and began to do things like sell linux licenses, as if it had some right to collect that money. So this is not merely a "simple contract dispute".
The assertions about due diligence are equally off-base, as the Open Source Risk Management company is offering insurance against claims of copyright infringement. It is basically absurd to suggest they could get millions and millions of dollars of insurance underwritten without due diligence against the product they were insuring - which, in this case, is the code that comprises Linux.
Finally, the author completely ignores how unclean SCO is with its own source management. They distributed a version of Linux for quite some time, and continued to distribute it even after they had made public claims. If they had discovered claims but continued to distribute the code, one could quite easily argue (and surely IBM will) that they have themselves have placed whatever code is in question under the GPL.
This only touches on the number of issues he manages to gloss over in a few brief pages. By no means do I think that David Boies would have been involved on contingency unless he felt he had some chance of winning, but the fact is, SCO is bleeding money like tomorrow's bacon, and it is hard to imagine how anyone would care to purchase a real product from SCO in the future, given their propensity to do things like, say, sue their customers.
Certainly, at this point, Canopy can only be hoping that the payoff from the lawsuit against IBM and other actions will be sufficient to justify flushing the company. But even *if* SCO managed to prove IBM contributed tainted code, there's a mountain of counterclaims to deal with and SCO has to try to establish damages, and it's hard to see how SCO can justify damages that are a significant multiple of its own market capitalization at the time the offense occurred. It would be like Harold Welte suing Asus for $2B or such. It may sound like a nice round number, and SCO can say that it wants "infinity times infinity" for damages, but that doesn't give it a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing such damages.
As I see it, one of the problems with this is simply determining where "phone" services begin and end. For example, while Vonage or Lingo may be a real 'phone replacement' and for 99.9% of users should be able to do 911 service, how about Skype? If you only use Skypeout and you only use it via a headset on a laptop, is that VoIP? It certainly *is* "Voice over IP", but does that make it a phone service that should need 911 service?
If they start classifying things like Skype as a voice telecommunications service and requiring 911 calls to function, then what's next? 911 requirements for Teamspeak?
Maybe a VoIP "phone" is one which can place a call which eventually gets circuit switched on one end, even if 99% of the transit is packet switched.
It seems to me that what really needs to happen is a revamping of the 911 system to deal with the portability of numbers. You want 911? Fine, go somewhere and configure your address any time you move the phone around. When you dial 911, it transmits your entered address. Possibly the hardware/software acting as your phone also monitors the MAC address of its default gateway after you change the address associated; if the MAC address changes but the address has not, a warning goes out to emergency services that notes that there is reason to believe the address may not be completely reliable (and thus, hopefully an emergency operator can confirm it with you when you call).
Lots of little things rely on the phone network. My house alarm, for example, will freak out completely if I cut my phone service entirely, because it uses the phone line to keep in touch with the alarm monitoring service.
I've got a bit of an erratic history with Bioware games. The first Baldur's Gate left me a bit cold... it felt like a good idea badly executed and hindered by a determination to be a bit nastier to the player than was strictly necessary. Baldur's Gate 2, on the other hand, felt a lot more polished and I must have played it through half a dozen times. Neverwinter Nights was a huge let-down for me; the toolkit demanded more time and effort to use properly than I was willing to put in and the campaign basically sucked. KOTOR, on the other hand, was awesome. Then KOTOR 2 came along (yes, I know it's not strictly Bioware) and it just felt flat. The writing in particular was pretty horrible and the total bugfest didn't help either.
FYI, Bioware *really* had almost nothing to do with KotoR2; it just used their engine. I'm sure obsidian GOT the job because they're in good with Greg & Ray from the days when Black Isle (run by Feargus, who's now running Obsidian) was their publisher/partner. But it wasn't "co-developed"; it was just a double licensing deal with Lucas and Bioware for the IP and Engine, respectively.
Likewise, Obsidian is developing NWN2, but again, Bioware is only "periodically advising", and the deal is with Bioware for the engine (which, unlike KotoR2, is getting a HUGE revamp) and Atari for the D&D license and publication.
That said, I think Baldur's Gate was largely an attempt to simulate this huge, mostly nonlinear PnP game we always wished we could play, and in that, it succeeded. It does a great job of giving you a LOT to explore and do and slowly send you through a plot, without dragging you from place to place. The nonlinearity and the robust implementation of D&D play was the best part. Certainly, BG2 was better, far better, with a great story, it was larger, it was grander, the NPC dialogue was even more priceless, and so on.
NWN has become a "love it or hate it" affair; Bioware did botch the NWN OC in many ways. Everyone had their objections, from "uncompelling story" to just "too many boxes/chests to open". People apparently were not real fond of the 1 character+1 henchman setup. I certainly enjoyed it but it was nowhere near as compelling as BG2. However, where NWN shined was in the toolset. You may not have liked the learning curve on it, but there were a lot of very talented community designers who have produced *amazing* work. Adam Miller stands out in my mind for his work on the Dreamcatcher modules, but there are many great Persistent Worlds and dozens of great modules that rival the quality of a professional game. Adam's work was noticable largely because a lot of people considered it *better* than the OCs that had come out at the time. If you didn't play it, I'd recommend the Hordes of the Underdark expansion and campaign; it was the best of the 3, whereas the original was the worst of the 3. But I've probably played 15-20 home-grown modules and put a lot of hours into a particular persistent world. I think Bioware deserves a *lot* of credit for creating a game that was so immensely customizable. The best parts of the toolset require some programming ability, but otherwise, it's pretty amazing. (Also, note that they introduced a 'plot wizard' in a patch that helped a great deal, because it would autogenerate scripts for a lot of stuff, and someone in the community did a 'script generator' that did pretty good stuff)
Deere & Co v MTD Products, Inc was a competitor modifying Deere's mark in a 'humorous' way in order to both mock and identify the competitor for commercial purposes. It was a commercial message rather than the social commentary that one generally envisions when one thinks of satirized protected marks.
The Dallas Cowboys, Inc v Pussycat Cinema is, *again* a commercial case where "Debbie does Dallas" producers were enjoined from referring to the sports team in promotion of the film. Even trying to call that satire is a thin defense to begin with.
There are 3 tests commonly used to test the use of a trademark, however, see L.L. Bean, Inc. v. Drake Pubs., Inc., 811 F.2d 26, 31, 33 (1st Cir. 1987), where the First Circuit court protects the use of a trademark against an antidilution claim almost solely on the basis of the use being noncommercial. To quote: "The Constitution is not offended when the [Maine] antidilution statute is applied to prevent a defendant from using a trademark without permission in order to merchandise dissimilar products or services.... The Constitution does not, however, permit the range of the antidilution statute to encompass the unauthorized use of a trademark in a noncommercial setting such as an editorial or artistic context".
See also: Yankee Pub. Inc. v. News America Pub. Inc., 809 F. Supp. 267, 279 (S.D.N.Y. 1992) Simon & Schuster Inc. v. Dove Audio Inc. 936 F. Supp. 156, 164 n.4 (S.D.N.Y. 1996)
I don't see how the comments on libel are even relevant. The site was a parody and received a C&D only because of their use of trademarks. They did not allege libel, at least according to that story, and such a claim might also have to be evaluated in the context of political or social parody.
*Anything* is always legally actionable; that doesn't mean the cause of action is likely to prevail, and Wal-Mart was certainly unlikely to prevail in this instance.
This post is not meant to constitute legal advice; if you need advice for a specific legal situation, consult an attorney.
Can you cite where you're getting that from? They've released screenshots, and they're pretty damn good looking. They certainly don't look like recycled tech of yesteryore.
The OP point was that PC game designers should be designing to the lowest common denominator of PC hardware. My point is: why would a gaming enthusiast want to game on a console if they had a choice? Your answer is one - if you have a limited budget, consoles are certainly a great entry level way to game. But let's say we have 3 classes of people:
(1) Gamers with only consoles, or consoles superior to their PCs (2) Gamers with PCs only about as good as consoles (3) Gamers with PCs superior to consoles
The author suggests that game designers cater to (2). I believe that would happen at the expense of (3), and that (1) and (3) are going to be significantly larger than (2). People who want to game on the PC tend to get hardware better than is available in a console. At the time the XBox came out, it was roughly equivalent to good-but-not-great PC gaming, and it has since completely fallen off the map. That's unsurprising, because it's about to be replaced with a next gen box. But will the next XBox even reach the plateau where PC gaming is right now? The high end system of choice right now is an SLI rig with dual nvidias, and can probably crush even the next gen xbox, especially when cranking up the AA/AF for better looking graphics.
So if developers geared toward a baseline performance optimization by sacrificing the high end, they'd be abandoned by the enthusiasts who are their core market. If people are on a budget, they buy consoles. If people are short on technical know how, they're unlikely to be PC gamers. If someone has strong tech knowledge and a desire and even a moderate budget, they can likely grab a pre-owned PC and/or collect Fry's bargain hardware, and grab a nice but second-gen card and end up with a pretty good PC game system for only marginally more than a console and a few games.
The thing is, Turbine's future is not tied into Asheron's Call. Turbine is developing Dungeons and Dragons Online, and the D&D brand name has the potential to catapult them to the top of the heap if they can make a good game. By no means is the brand a guarantee of success - but it is a guarantee of attention. If the game's beta picks up good buzz, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see DDO enter the market with 250k subscribers.
This has no bearing on your criticism of AC at all, but as far as Turbine, DDO is their future, not AC.
Consoles are popular because most people are idiots, and if you give them choices, they get confused and inevitably fuck it up. This is further confused by marketspeak on new PCs, advertising things like, "WOW! Intel Super 3D GRAPHICS INTEGRATED!" and then people wonder why, if Intel (the only brand name they likely recognize and associate with quality) has this "Super" 3D chip, why does their PC game run like total crap, if at all?
In any event, most developers DO allow for older hardware. HL2 and Doom3 are known to run pretty nicely on even considerably older hardware. But those of us on the cutting edge get a lot of love, because part of what these companies do is advance the state of the art. If these games DID NOT cater to the cutting edge gaming enthusiasts, then who would be left to PC game at all? Everyone would be on the console for cheapness/ease of use, or just because "hey, the PC isn't any better".
Is having a Dual GeForce 6800 SLI setup overkill? Sure. As is the 2GB of ram, the 10k raptor SATA drives, and the overclocked AMD64. But when I go to play, I know that what I'm experiencing is as good as it gets. And given how many hours I spend playing games and how much I enjoy that after a hard day toiling away at code and such (and posting to Slashdot, too!), it's pretty damn enjoyable.
Honestly, who the hell wants to game on an XBox these days?
I have a friend who has been using the same gaming PC for coming up on 3 years in June, and his is *still* better than that. Meanwhile, look at what the PC does that the XBox does not (the list is endless).
On the other hand, I like the fact that the XBox is, fundamentally, PC hardware, as it encourages cross-platform games.
Of course, the real reason I'm not playing on consoles 99% of the time is that the interface remains clunky. The handheld controllers are not comfortable to use, and you can do a lot less. With a PC, I can comfortable control a mouse with 4 buttons and a wheel, plus easily access at least 15+ keyboard buttons and another 15 or more with a smidge of extra effort. The thought of trying to play an FPS game on a console is enough to give me nightmares.
And what the hell was Linus talking about? He can understand not wanting someone "riding on their coattails, solve the problem yourself" - what problem? A tool for pulling snapshots? This is not the vast mysteries of SCM being solved, this is a utility.
We know almost nothing about making programming more efficient and systems more secure and scalable. He characterizes our progress in programming efficiency as a "joke" compared to hardware.
It's definitely a joke - and the real joke is that it can't even be characterized as "progress". The programming of today is worse than it was a couple decades ago and consistently declines. I have talented friends who have dropped out of the industry in disgust over what passes as programming nowadays.
Maybe Vint Cert should be talking about the evils of "computer science" being taught around Java, or the fact that many CS programs have become little more than glorified job training.
Moglen has stated: "I do not believe that we will be reach consensus on this front, so I believe the license will have to accommodate options as to the question of Web services, but this must be squared with the ideological pursuit of freedom". [ref.]
And frankly, it's not really a loophole. Web services are not distributing software, they're running a service using software. That's obviously open to interpretation, but I haven't ever heard anyone distribute under the GPL and complain about someone using their software as a web service. There has been at least one derivative license which has addressed this issue.
In the end, GPL 3.0 will likely provide an optional provision which will 'trigger' GPL source distribution requirements for a web service, at the option of the copyright holder; that is really the best choice. Rather than getting into an enormous philosophical debate over whether the idea is "good" or "bad" or "punitive" or whatever, let's simply have two clear licenses and give the option to the copyright holders to decide under what terms they will license their property.
There's nothing to understand. You download bittorrent (The client). You install it. From then on, you can click on a torrent link on a web page, and bittorrent runs and grabs the file.
There is a richness you can give a game when you don't need art assets to deal with everything. In 1998, some friends and I completed the first phase of a mud, Avendar - the Crucible of Legends, now to become a pen & paper RPG project by a fledgling gaming company as well. We were all players coming from the venerable Carrion Fields, which remains popular to this day. We came to pursue our vision - with technological enhancements, an entirely original world, that remained high fantasy but got away from both Tolkienesque and the Arthurian sorts of settings. There are hundreds of areas, thousands of monsters, tens of thousands of distinct rooms, and an original history and lore that players add to as time goes by.
We had a vision, and it evolved as time went by, but as avid students and participants in both the fantasy genre and gaming in general, MUDs were powerful mediums both for Roleplay, and later storytelling. It was also a way to dig deeply into our bag of tricks and realize all sorts of things that are ludicrous to even imagine still in an MMORPG like everquest. Text gives you an amazing freedom to do a lot of things that would be difficult still to handle in a graphical sense - whether it is instantly whisking a pair of players into a pocket dimension for a duel, or having the city catch fire from invading bandits, both of which are things that can and do happen in Avendar, just to name a couple.
The only thing I've enjoyed nearly as much as my work on Avendar - and I wrote 100,000 lines of C code to lay the technological I-beams for its ceration - was using the NWN toolset. While it was far more limited, it did have an enormous power and the ability for fans to add to its base of art by creating monsters, placeables, portraits, and so on gave it a flexibility that an MMO simply cannot have, which is probably why tens of thousands of people are still playing it. The persistent world I worked on, City of Arabel, still to this day is packed to the gills - the 55 slots on the server are nearly constantly filled.
Then again, for all the amateurs, it is easy to see why it is hard for it to flourish. There are so many incredibly *bad* gaming creations out there. They pursue some single-minded vision without considering the playing experience it introduces, and end up utterly devoid of fun. I've always liked Raph Koster for that reason - not so much his expertise, because his actually creations I haven't liked much - but for his focus.
I'd have to say that Jack Emmert is probably the new bearer of that standard, as he's taken "original story and vision" and mixed it with "fun play" remarkably well. I just hope his creation stays viable long enough for him to add all the other things he clearly wants to add.
In the mean time, if you've never tried a MUD, I strongly recommend you do.
Frankly, these lawsuits are becoming stupidly commonplace. Which is fine, soon companies will warn of every possible danger and predict their own total failure over and over again, just to set the bar low enough that they're guaranteed to cross over.
Obviously, there are companies which really hide incredibly significant facts, but EA only lowered its estimates by about 10% for the year. And it takes a much smaller change in gross revenues to effect that profit change, since their marginal production cost is fairly low. And, truth be told, they're only being sued over estimates! They switched from one forward-looking estimate to another forward-looking estimate. They haven't even produced an actual earnings number, since the fiscal year in question hasn't even ended yet.
When it comes down to it, a lot of class action securities lawsuits just amount to extortion... and the law firm in question isn't even the one which filed the case; they're just involved in the class recruitment/lead plaintiff recruitment feeding frenzy:
[...] To view a copy of the Complaint initiating the class action, which was not filed by Schatz & Nobel [...]
I'm surprised no one has filed a frivolous lawsuit against Slashdot for its incredible lax editorial process;)
Since I tend to have to do some SEO for sites, I tend to keep an eye on how search results are returned... one thing I've noticed is that Yahoo seems far more easily manipulated by URLs - ie, it seems to weight something like, "www.goats.com/goats" high for the term "goats" even when the site has little or nothing to do with goats.
Also, Yahoo and MSN both seem extremely poor about figuring out the "right" url to link to. It's almost as if they index the first thing on any domain they come across, instead of trying to figure out where on the site most people link to, so you'll often find yourself deep-linked into a site where you'd prefer to be looking at a higher-level page to start. Google deeplinks too, but it seems to be only when it's really more relevant to the content.
I don't use a9 much, but it seems like google with a different skin. I swear sometimes they're snarfing google's results and storing them. Not that this is all bad, since Google's results tend to be some of the best, but it's still eerie.
Actually, the/. blurb is wrong, too. Microsoft is seeking $46M, says the article, not $49M. So he has $4M in real debt, and "under $10M in assets", which could mean $9.9M, or it could mean he just raided the piggy bank in the empty office so he could get 7-layer burrito.
That said, given the "now the case moves to Denver", I'm going to guess that the bankruptcy filing has more to do with him wanting to relocate the case to Denver - since they're in Colorado - than it does with them being actually out of money. Obviously, all those spam dollars buy good lawyers.
Given a bunch of P2P programs, infringers of a feather are going to flock together. Even wit the best intentions of providing a legitimate service, one service will end up known as the 'best place' to trade copyrighted files, and people will go there.
You can shoot the messenger, but another will rise in its place.
Note to the RIAA/MPAA: profit from P2P, instead of trying to fight it. You've just had the most powerful and potentially convenient distribution method in the world dropped in your laps, and it costs you nothing to distribute content now. If you can't find a way to increase your profits in light of that, then you deserve extinction. Someone will rise to replace you, too.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm hanging out with one character in the shadow shard, the much-maligned place that it is. I have group fly and am hoping to even run the TFs there. Tons of people flood the new zones - the hollows is the most popular place for its level, and Striga is also quite popular, especially the TF.
Of course, this has nothing to do with SPAM, but since the Musical was previously announced on Slashdot, I thought readers would be interested in this followup.
You thought wrong.
There's a lot of content you can access at 50. You can exemp down to play with anyone doing anything (although doing TFs on exemp can be frustrating if anyone has a bad link). And now there's the Arena - I've had it keep me up until 4am twice this week so far. And then there's alts. I have all 8 slots on Virtue filled and I want more. *Especially* with PvP, which motivates me even more to want to play with different builds. There's also badge collecting, souvenir collecting, and I5 will add skills - the "non combat system". I don't know what they'll do, but undoubtedly it's another thing you can play with.
And there's content - I4 is actually the *least* content filled expansion which I'm willing to forgive, because PvP is such a big thing. But there has been a new area every other issue - or several - and more.
I agree compeltely. I did run 30 hami raids, but:
;)), and a lot of these raids consist of my (muted) laptop running on my desk with me auto-following a targeter with my fire blast on autofire. Look. I. Am. So. Leet. I don't really think the fact that I can autofollow a raid leader and autofire a blast qualifies me for much of anything; it's just convenient that I have the computing power and work environment (aka, my home office) that allows me to have a game running while I work.
(1) I did it to keep up with the Joneses. Given the choice between getting the HOs or sucking, I will get the HOs. But I'd prefer it not be an issue, and on the CoH forums, I publically advocate nerfing HOs even if it nerfs mine too. There are people with 100+ raids under their belt but I've done enough that I obviously have a stake.
(2) For me at least, it's a bit of a joke. My Hami raider is a fire/dev (Plasma on Virtue, in case there are any virtue players hangin' out
I want PvP to be *inclusive*, and inclusive does not work if people need a huge cache of hami-Os to be competitive. And the different with/without them is just astounding.
The Arena is fun, I'll give it that. The intuitive easy gameplay remains. There's a bit of a fly in the ointment, in the sense that right now, there's "loot" unbalancing the game. Specifically, "Hamidon Enhancements". Enhancements boost a power in CoH, and come in 3 varieties: the +8.3%, the +16.6%, and +33.3% variety, available as you get higher level. The raid reward enhancement (for killing the Hamidon) is +50% to *2* aspects. So the best enhancement available to most L22+ players is, say +33% accuracy or +33% damage. A "Hami-O", as they're called, could be +50%dmg&+50% acc.
I have about 30 myself. Experimentation has shown that when I'm fighting in a lower weight class, the power of the hami-Os may scale down, but they're still obviously WAY too good and I absolutely terrorize people I shouldn't be able to.
So for the casual player vs the hami-O laden veteran, there's a serious mismatch.
Otherwise, it's a blast.
There are definitely some great new options in the costume department - lots of jackets, several types of martial arts gear - pants, shirts, even kung fu shoes.
There's a lot of crying over nerfs right now, as scrappers took a hit to their defenses in I4 for the most part, but game balance has improved if you ask me.
Really, while the arena is great, it is obviously also laying ground and gathering data for City of Villains, which has Villain vs Hero pvp as a real theme. It's not mandatory, but it will obviously play an important part for those who are interested. This is a good first step to making sure that is not unbalanced.
What frightens me is that the Chinese simply don't realize they're being censored. Recently when Zhao Ziyang passed away in China, news of this was muted and response to it suppressed. And that's for something the Chinese clearly wanted a modicum of information to be released for.
The thing is, the vast majority of the Chinese have no idea they're being censored. It's not as though a huge red screen pops up saying, "THIS INFORMATION IS CENSORED BY YOUR GOVERNMENT". If we were being censored, how would we know?
We see little things - like Bush using "planted" reporters to rig questioning at the White House. How long before another step is taken?
Scary stuff. Eternal vigilance is the price.
The author ignores a number of inconvenient facts.
First, and foremost, SCO's bluster about Linux and copyright infringement predates their lawsuit against IBM. Whether or not IBM violated its contract with SCO is not the community's beef with SCO; the community is up in arms because SCO had the gall to suggest that Linux was a big ripoff of SCO's proprietary unix code and began to do things like sell linux licenses, as if it had some right to collect that money. So this is not merely a "simple contract dispute".
Moreover, he is skewing the origin of Linux. Regardless of the author's qualifications, the two people most able to state whether or not Linux was or was not dervied from Minix or contained Minix code would certainly be Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tannenbaum. Tannenbaum said, "I told [Ken Brown, President of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution] that MINIX had clearly had a huge influence on Linux in many ways, from the layout of the file system to the names in the source tree, but I didn't think Linus had used any of my code." Eric Raymond may have been citing this to make a point, but when Linus and Andrew both are clear on the point that Linux did not use Minix code, then I believe take their assertions on that point.
The assertions about due diligence are equally off-base, as the Open Source Risk Management company is offering insurance against claims of copyright infringement. It is basically absurd to suggest they could get millions and millions of dollars of insurance underwritten without due diligence against the product they were insuring - which, in this case, is the code that comprises Linux.
Finally, the author completely ignores how unclean SCO is with its own source management. They distributed a version of Linux for quite some time, and continued to distribute it even after they had made public claims. If they had discovered claims but continued to distribute the code, one could quite easily argue (and surely IBM will) that they have themselves have placed whatever code is in question under the GPL.
This only touches on the number of issues he manages to gloss over in a few brief pages. By no means do I think that David Boies would have been involved on contingency unless he felt he had some chance of winning, but the fact is, SCO is bleeding money like tomorrow's bacon, and it is hard to imagine how anyone would care to purchase a real product from SCO in the future, given their propensity to do things like, say, sue their customers.
Certainly, at this point, Canopy can only be hoping that the payoff from the lawsuit against IBM and other actions will be sufficient to justify flushing the company. But even *if* SCO managed to prove IBM contributed tainted code, there's a mountain of counterclaims to deal with and SCO has to try to establish damages, and it's hard to see how SCO can justify damages that are a significant multiple of its own market capitalization at the time the offense occurred. It would be like Harold Welte suing Asus for $2B or such. It may sound like a nice round number, and SCO can say that it wants "infinity times infinity" for damages, but that doesn't give it a snowball's chance in hell of actually seeing such damages.
As I see it, one of the problems with this is simply determining where "phone" services begin and end. For example, while Vonage or Lingo may be a real 'phone replacement' and for 99.9% of users should be able to do 911 service, how about Skype? If you only use Skypeout and you only use it via a headset on a laptop, is that VoIP? It certainly *is* "Voice over IP", but does that make it a phone service that should need 911 service?
If they start classifying things like Skype as a voice telecommunications service and requiring 911 calls to function, then what's next? 911 requirements for Teamspeak?
Maybe a VoIP "phone" is one which can place a call which eventually gets circuit switched on one end, even if 99% of the transit is packet switched.
It seems to me that what really needs to happen is a revamping of the 911 system to deal with the portability of numbers. You want 911? Fine, go somewhere and configure your address any time you move the phone around. When you dial 911, it transmits your entered address. Possibly the hardware/software acting as your phone also monitors the MAC address of its default gateway after you change the address associated; if the MAC address changes but the address has not, a warning goes out to emergency services that notes that there is reason to believe the address may not be completely reliable (and thus, hopefully an emergency operator can confirm it with you when you call).
Lots of little things rely on the phone network. My house alarm, for example, will freak out completely if I cut my phone service entirely, because it uses the phone line to keep in touch with the alarm monitoring service.
I've got a bit of an erratic history with Bioware games. The first Baldur's Gate left me a bit cold... it felt like a good idea badly executed and hindered by a determination to be a bit nastier to the player than was strictly necessary. Baldur's Gate 2, on the other hand, felt a lot more polished and I must have played it through half a dozen times. Neverwinter Nights was a huge let-down for me; the toolkit demanded more time and effort to use properly than I was willing to put in and the campaign basically sucked. KOTOR, on the other hand, was awesome. Then KOTOR 2 came along (yes, I know it's not strictly Bioware) and it just felt flat. The writing in particular was pretty horrible and the total bugfest didn't help either.
FYI, Bioware *really* had almost nothing to do with KotoR2; it just used their engine. I'm sure obsidian GOT the job because they're in good with Greg & Ray from the days when Black Isle (run by Feargus, who's now running Obsidian) was their publisher/partner. But it wasn't "co-developed"; it was just a double licensing deal with Lucas and Bioware for the IP and Engine, respectively.
Likewise, Obsidian is developing NWN2, but again, Bioware is only "periodically advising", and the deal is with Bioware for the engine (which, unlike KotoR2, is getting a HUGE revamp) and Atari for the D&D license and publication.
That said, I think Baldur's Gate was largely an attempt to simulate this huge, mostly nonlinear PnP game we always wished we could play, and in that, it succeeded. It does a great job of giving you a LOT to explore and do and slowly send you through a plot, without dragging you from place to place. The nonlinearity and the robust implementation of D&D play was the best part. Certainly, BG2 was better, far better, with a great story, it was larger, it was grander, the NPC dialogue was even more priceless, and so on.
NWN has become a "love it or hate it" affair; Bioware did botch the NWN OC in many ways. Everyone had their objections, from "uncompelling story" to just "too many boxes/chests to open". People apparently were not real fond of the 1 character+1 henchman setup. I certainly enjoyed it but it was nowhere near as compelling as BG2. However, where NWN shined was in the toolset. You may not have liked the learning curve on it, but there were a lot of very talented community designers who have produced *amazing* work. Adam Miller stands out in my mind for his work on the Dreamcatcher modules, but there are many great Persistent Worlds and dozens of great modules that rival the quality of a professional game. Adam's work was noticable largely because a lot of people considered it *better* than the OCs that had come out at the time. If you didn't play it, I'd recommend the Hordes of the Underdark expansion and campaign; it was the best of the 3, whereas the original was the worst of the 3. But I've probably played 15-20 home-grown modules and put a lot of hours into a particular persistent world. I think Bioware deserves a *lot* of credit for creating a game that was so immensely customizable. The best parts of the toolset require some programming ability, but otherwise, it's pretty amazing. (Also, note that they introduced a 'plot wizard' in a patch that helped a great deal, because it would autogenerate scripts for a lot of stuff, and someone in the community did a 'script generator' that did pretty good stuff)
Deere & Co v MTD Products, Inc was a competitor modifying Deere's mark in a 'humorous' way in order to both mock and identify the competitor for commercial purposes. It was a commercial message rather than the social commentary that one generally envisions when one thinks of satirized protected marks.
... The Constitution does not, however, permit the range of the antidilution statute to encompass the unauthorized use of a trademark in a noncommercial setting such as an editorial or artistic context".
The Dallas Cowboys, Inc v Pussycat Cinema is, *again* a commercial case where "Debbie does Dallas" producers were enjoined from referring to the sports team in promotion of the film. Even trying to call that satire is a thin defense to begin with.
There are 3 tests commonly used to test the use of a trademark, however, see L.L. Bean, Inc. v. Drake Pubs., Inc., 811 F.2d 26, 31, 33 (1st Cir. 1987), where the First Circuit court protects the use of a trademark against an antidilution claim almost solely on the basis of the use being noncommercial. To quote: "The Constitution is not offended when the [Maine] antidilution statute is applied to prevent a defendant from using a trademark without permission in order to merchandise dissimilar products or services.
See also:
Yankee Pub. Inc. v. News America Pub. Inc., 809 F. Supp. 267, 279 (S.D.N.Y. 1992)
Simon & Schuster Inc. v. Dove Audio Inc. 936 F. Supp. 156, 164 n.4 (S.D.N.Y. 1996)
I don't see how the comments on libel are even relevant. The site was a parody and received a C&D only because of their use of trademarks. They did not allege libel, at least according to that story, and such a claim might also have to be evaluated in the context of political or social parody.
*Anything* is always legally actionable; that doesn't mean the cause of action is likely to prevail, and Wal-Mart was certainly unlikely to prevail in this instance.
This post is not meant to constitute legal advice; if you need advice for a specific legal situation, consult an attorney.
Can you cite where you're getting that from? They've released screenshots, and they're pretty damn good looking. They certainly don't look like recycled tech of yesteryore.
The OP point was that PC game designers should be designing to the lowest common denominator of PC hardware. My point is: why would a gaming enthusiast want to game on a console if they had a choice? Your answer is one - if you have a limited budget, consoles are certainly a great entry level way to game. But let's say we have 3 classes of people:
(1) Gamers with only consoles, or consoles superior to their PCs
(2) Gamers with PCs only about as good as consoles
(3) Gamers with PCs superior to consoles
The author suggests that game designers cater to (2). I believe that would happen at the expense of (3), and that (1) and (3) are going to be significantly larger than (2). People who want to game on the PC tend to get hardware better than is available in a console. At the time the XBox came out, it was roughly equivalent to good-but-not-great PC gaming, and it has since completely fallen off the map. That's unsurprising, because it's about to be replaced with a next gen box. But will the next XBox even reach the plateau where PC gaming is right now? The high end system of choice right now is an SLI rig with dual nvidias, and can probably crush even the next gen xbox, especially when cranking up the AA/AF for better looking graphics.
So if developers geared toward a baseline performance optimization by sacrificing the high end, they'd be abandoned by the enthusiasts who are their core market. If people are on a budget, they buy consoles. If people are short on technical know how, they're unlikely to be PC gamers. If someone has strong tech knowledge and a desire and even a moderate budget, they can likely grab a pre-owned PC and/or collect Fry's bargain hardware, and grab a nice but second-gen card and end up with a pretty good PC game system for only marginally more than a console and a few games.
The thing is, Turbine's future is not tied into Asheron's Call. Turbine is developing Dungeons and Dragons Online, and the D&D brand name has the potential to catapult them to the top of the heap if they can make a good game. By no means is the brand a guarantee of success - but it is a guarantee of attention. If the game's beta picks up good buzz, I wouldn't at all be surprised to see DDO enter the market with 250k subscribers.
This has no bearing on your criticism of AC at all, but as far as Turbine, DDO is their future, not AC.
Consoles are popular because most people are idiots, and if you give them choices, they get confused and inevitably fuck it up. This is further confused by marketspeak on new PCs, advertising things like, "WOW! Intel Super 3D GRAPHICS INTEGRATED!" and then people wonder why, if Intel (the only brand name they likely recognize and associate with quality) has this "Super" 3D chip, why does their PC game run like total crap, if at all?
In any event, most developers DO allow for older hardware. HL2 and Doom3 are known to run pretty nicely on even considerably older hardware. But those of us on the cutting edge get a lot of love, because part of what these companies do is advance the state of the art. If these games DID NOT cater to the cutting edge gaming enthusiasts, then who would be left to PC game at all? Everyone would be on the console for cheapness/ease of use, or just because "hey, the PC isn't any better".
Is having a Dual GeForce 6800 SLI setup overkill? Sure. As is the 2GB of ram, the 10k raptor SATA drives, and the overclocked AMD64. But when I go to play, I know that what I'm experiencing is as good as it gets. And given how many hours I spend playing games and how much I enjoy that after a hard day toiling away at code and such (and posting to Slashdot, too!), it's pretty damn enjoyable.
Honestly, who the hell wants to game on an XBox these days?
* 733 Mhz Intel process
* GeForce 3 (mostly)
* 64MB RAM
* 10GB Drive
I have a friend who has been using the same gaming PC for coming up on 3 years in June, and his is *still* better than that. Meanwhile, look at what the PC does that the XBox does not (the list is endless).
On the other hand, I like the fact that the XBox is, fundamentally, PC hardware, as it encourages cross-platform games.
Of course, the real reason I'm not playing on consoles 99% of the time is that the interface remains clunky. The handheld controllers are not comfortable to use, and you can do a lot less. With a PC, I can comfortable control a mouse with 4 buttons and a wheel, plus easily access at least 15+ keyboard buttons and another 15 or more with a smidge of extra effort. The thought of trying to play an FPS game on a console is enough to give me nightmares.
And what the hell was Linus talking about? He can understand not wanting someone "riding on their coattails, solve the problem yourself" - what problem? A tool for pulling snapshots? This is not the vast mysteries of SCM being solved, this is a utility.
We know almost nothing about making programming more efficient and systems more secure and scalable. He characterizes our progress in programming efficiency as a "joke" compared to hardware.
It's definitely a joke - and the real joke is that it can't even be characterized as "progress". The programming of today is worse than it was a couple decades ago and consistently declines. I have talented friends who have dropped out of the industry in disgust over what passes as programming nowadays.
Maybe Vint Cert should be talking about the evils of "computer science" being taught around Java, or the fact that many CS programs have become little more than glorified job training.
Moglen has stated: "I do not believe that we will be reach consensus on this front, so I believe the license will have to accommodate options as to the question of Web services, but this must be squared with the ideological pursuit of freedom". [ref.]
And frankly, it's not really a loophole. Web services are not distributing software, they're running a service using software. That's obviously open to interpretation, but I haven't ever heard anyone distribute under the GPL and complain about someone using their software as a web service. There has been at least one derivative license which has addressed this issue.
In the end, GPL 3.0 will likely provide an optional provision which will 'trigger' GPL source distribution requirements for a web service, at the option of the copyright holder; that is really the best choice. Rather than getting into an enormous philosophical debate over whether the idea is "good" or "bad" or "punitive" or whatever, let's simply have two clear licenses and give the option to the copyright holders to decide under what terms they will license their property.
Maybe you need to check your upstream or ISP or something. I downloaded ISOs this morning, and bitorrent was saturating my T1 for the d/l.
There's nothing to understand. You download bittorrent (The client). You install it. From then on, you can click on a torrent link on a web page, and bittorrent runs and grabs the file.
There is a richness you can give a game when you don't need art assets to deal with everything. In 1998, some friends and I completed the first phase of a mud, Avendar - the Crucible of Legends, now to become a pen & paper RPG project by a fledgling gaming company as well. We were all players coming from the venerable Carrion Fields, which remains popular to this day. We came to pursue our vision - with technological enhancements, an entirely original world, that remained high fantasy but got away from both Tolkienesque and the Arthurian sorts of settings. There are hundreds of areas, thousands of monsters, tens of thousands of distinct rooms, and an original history and lore that players add to as time goes by.
We had a vision, and it evolved as time went by, but as avid students and participants in both the fantasy genre and gaming in general, MUDs were powerful mediums both for Roleplay, and later storytelling. It was also a way to dig deeply into our bag of tricks and realize all sorts of things that are ludicrous to even imagine still in an MMORPG like everquest. Text gives you an amazing freedom to do a lot of things that would be difficult still to handle in a graphical sense - whether it is instantly whisking a pair of players into a pocket dimension for a duel, or having the city catch fire from invading bandits, both of which are things that can and do happen in Avendar, just to name a couple.
The only thing I've enjoyed nearly as much as my work on Avendar - and I wrote 100,000 lines of C code to lay the technological I-beams for its ceration - was using the NWN toolset. While it was far more limited, it did have an enormous power and the ability for fans to add to its base of art by creating monsters, placeables, portraits, and so on gave it a flexibility that an MMO simply cannot have, which is probably why tens of thousands of people are still playing it. The persistent world I worked on, City of Arabel, still to this day is packed to the gills - the 55 slots on the server are nearly constantly filled.
Then again, for all the amateurs, it is easy to see why it is hard for it to flourish. There are so many incredibly *bad* gaming creations out there. They pursue some single-minded vision without considering the playing experience it introduces, and end up utterly devoid of fun. I've always liked Raph Koster for that reason - not so much his expertise, because his actually creations I haven't liked much - but for his focus.
I'd have to say that Jack Emmert is probably the new bearer of that standard, as he's taken "original story and vision" and mixed it with "fun play" remarkably well. I just hope his creation stays viable long enough for him to add all the other things he clearly wants to add.
In the mean time, if you've never tried a MUD, I strongly recommend you do.
Frankly, these lawsuits are becoming stupidly commonplace. Which is fine, soon companies will warn of every possible danger and predict their own total failure over and over again, just to set the bar low enough that they're guaranteed to cross over.
;)
Obviously, there are companies which really hide incredibly significant facts, but EA only lowered its estimates by about 10% for the year. And it takes a much smaller change in gross revenues to effect that profit change, since their marginal production cost is fairly low. And, truth be told, they're only being sued over estimates! They switched from one forward-looking estimate to another forward-looking estimate. They haven't even produced an actual earnings number, since the fiscal year in question hasn't even ended yet.
When it comes down to it, a lot of class action securities lawsuits just amount to extortion... and the law firm in question isn't even the one which filed the case; they're just involved in the class recruitment/lead plaintiff recruitment feeding frenzy:
[...] To view a copy of the Complaint initiating the class action, which was not filed by Schatz & Nobel [...]
I'm surprised no one has filed a frivolous lawsuit against Slashdot for its incredible lax editorial process
I think the coolest thing here is to enter "search engine" so you can compare what they think of each other easily ;)
Since I tend to have to do some SEO for sites, I tend to keep an eye on how search results are returned... one thing I've noticed is that Yahoo seems far more easily manipulated by URLs - ie, it seems to weight something like, "www.goats.com/goats" high for the term "goats" even when the site has little or nothing to do with goats.
Also, Yahoo and MSN both seem extremely poor about figuring out the "right" url to link to. It's almost as if they index the first thing on any domain they come across, instead of trying to figure out where on the site most people link to, so you'll often find yourself deep-linked into a site where you'd prefer to be looking at a higher-level page to start. Google deeplinks too, but it seems to be only when it's really more relevant to the content.
I don't use a9 much, but it seems like google with a different skin. I swear sometimes they're snarfing google's results and storing them. Not that this is all bad, since Google's results tend to be some of the best, but it's still eerie.
Actually, the /. blurb is wrong, too. Microsoft is seeking $46M, says the article, not $49M. So he has $4M in real debt, and "under $10M in assets", which could mean $9.9M, or it could mean he just raided the piggy bank in the empty office so he could get 7-layer burrito.
That said, given the "now the case moves to Denver", I'm going to guess that the bankruptcy filing has more to do with him wanting to relocate the case to Denver - since they're in Colorado - than it does with them being actually out of money. Obviously, all those spam dollars buy good lawyers.
Given a bunch of P2P programs, infringers of a feather are going to flock together. Even wit the best intentions of providing a legitimate service, one service will end up known as the 'best place' to trade copyrighted files, and people will go there.
You can shoot the messenger, but another will rise in its place.
Note to the RIAA/MPAA: profit from P2P, instead of trying to fight it. You've just had the most powerful and potentially convenient distribution method in the world dropped in your laps, and it costs you nothing to distribute content now. If you can't find a way to increase your profits in light of that, then you deserve extinction. Someone will rise to replace you, too.