1 - As long as they are not distributing Blizzard artwork, or using Starcraft's trademarked name in their own product, they should legally be in the clear. Note that they must also avoid mentioning any trademarked properties directly also (Aiur? Tarsonis? Vespene Gas? Any one of those things may or may not be trademarked)
2 - It *will* be shut down (unless the authors are clever enough to obey #1, but they don't seem like it). Back in the day when I did mods for HL1, we had a term in the community: "foxed". It came from Fox being very zealous in shutting down mods of their properties. EVERYone making a licensed mod, whether it's Stargate, Star Wars, or just Dragonball Z, was foxed. This has NO chance.
I personally have zero sympathy for people who develop their own products on top of the work of others, whether intending to profit or not. Why waste your time and effort on something that will eventually be shut down, and will never see the light of day? (or if it DOES, will result in your ass sued from here to Norway?) Why not take your coding chops and make a Starcraft-inspired RTS of your own?
I admit I haven't been as on top of Obama and video games recently, but didn't he claim that he wanted to put legal teeth behind selling games to underaged kids? And that he is in favour of more parental education on game ratings? Neither of those things sound questionable to me, at all. If we uphold legal drinking, driving, and gambling ages, and we card our kids at the multiplex, why not at the game shop?
I'm a developer, and I am entirely on Apple hardware now. Obj-C is deliciously simple (and fast to boot) and now my language of choice for my own hackery, while the Linux-ness of it all makes it compatible with my day job. I can slap Windows on it for some good gaming, and some light Windows development work if I wish (though it hasn't come up recently).
Apple's IDE (Xcode) is a lot less polished than MSVC, but it's still leagues beyond any FOSS IDE I've ever used. It's also nice to be able to embed shell scripts into your build process (all without touching a single Makefile or configure). The tools are nice for someone who's familiar with your standard compile tools, but would rather be a bit more hands-off. At some point hacking makefiles get tiresome, and having the GUI option is sure nice.
The only difficult thing about porting software to/from the Mac is that its UI paradigm is decidedly different from Windows and Linux (which, barring slight differences, are essentially the same). The fact that windows don't have their own menus, the document-centric mentality (instead of MDIs), and a few other things make UI difficult to transplant between platforms.
It's not the fans. It's the damned DVD drive. You would think after making an excellent DVD drive (certainly superior to the rickety piece of crap in the PS2) for the Xbox, they'd do the same for the 360. Nooooooo. The machine itself is whisper quiet (while playikng XBLA games, for example), but once you let that disc spin up, boy, I'd rather be riding in a F-18, bet that's quieter.
VLC is... quite bad. I'm on OSX, and QuickTime isn't a great media player. There aren't that many choices when it comes to media players on Mac, and I'm stuck with VLC. It's constantly crashing, opening multiple videos starts screwing with the interface, the video will freeze and stop updating at random intervals (but the audio keeps going!), and the UI feels constantly sluggish. The last few versions have added a lot of fluff - smoothly fading into and out of fullscreen mode for example, but can we please nail the basics before we go to fancy schmancy eye candy?
Ugh, I would go back to QuickTime, but that buggy thing known as Leopard causes my QuickTime to crash even more often than VLC does. It's the lesser of two evils at this point. *sigh*
They (like GIMP) also need a lesson in usability. When I go File->Open Disc on a machine with a single disc drive, why does it present me with a dialog that only has one choice? Worse yet, why does it present my DEVICE NAME (/dev/blah/) in the choice box instead of printing something sane like "DVD Drive #1"? Urgh...
He scammed people. He stole a huge amount of money from innocent people. A guy rips off a convenience store, makes off with a few hundred bucks, and ends up in the slammer for 10 years. Does it make sense for a guy who stole millions to spend any less time in jail? Hell, if we crank up the punishment linearly by that logic, he should be spending the next 20 lifetimes in jail.
The statue may have been a gift from France, but it is a cultural symbol of America, not of the world. Much like how Wal Mart is an entirely American creation, but most of their products come from China.
You are appalled at this process in the military, I am glad. This isn't some tiny server farm you're running for kicks - when your systems are compromised or fail outright, people die. I for one am glad that there are certification processes in place to ensure that the code we are running in mission critical systems is SECURE. Sure, we have a *reasonable* expectation that Ubuntu is technically sound, won't go kaput at a moment's notice, and doesn't contain any Chinese communist espionage code... but we don't KNOW that. The security of a nation is not run on hunches and educated guesses.
Depends on where you are. In downtown Toronto the whole cell-tower triangulation can pin me down to a radius of roughly 10 feet, that's pretty frickin' good if you ask me, especially since it's designed so that you can search in your vicinity (restaurants, stores, etc) - anything that gets you within a block would do.
I love how that why-firefox-is-banned site has a gigantic, annoying, "flip-open" Flash ad on it... Yes... Even when appealing to its support base it cannot help but be greedy bastards...
Do you vent against The Man simply because you can? This is one of the *rare* cases where DRM is creating a legitimate market for a product, as opposed to merely tying the hands of consumers.
None of the usual anti-DRM arguments are valid here. You are NOT purchasing a permanent license to the work. It only lasts for the next 24 or 48h, so the usual arguments of inability to transcribe to another hardware's format is not valid here either. Unlike most DRM, the restrictions placed upon your purchase would be clearly defined to the consumer, who won't be suckered into buying something less than they expect (e.g. a song that only plays on a single device, with no means to transcribe, and a supposedly "permanent" license at the same time).
This seems like a win-win. I can rent a movie without going to the store, saving time, effort, and puts less carbon into the air! There are ways this can be abused, but as of right now it's a solid idea.
Hmm... What about the liquid ban? I used to take a large bottle of water with me in my carry-on - the dry stuffy air in the cabin does horrid things to me, and I often have a headache by the time I disembark. Now I have to keep bothering the stewardesses for water, when I could very well have brought my own.
What about the fact that it was supposed to be a TEMPORARY ban? But like all "temporary" and "emergency" measures, this one stuck around.
Or the fact that as a tech industry guy, I tend to carry a lot of electronics around with me (external HDD, USB hubs, a slew of power adapters, etc.) that gets me CONSTANT attention at security?
Flying has always been a pain, but in recent years it's gone from a dull ache to a full-on head-splitting headache. I loathe flying.
To the average user installing a different OS than what came in the box is akin to swapping out the engine on their own car. While enthusiasts can do it easily, it involves a great deal of learning on the part of the user, which is really time they should not have to spend. If your fridge's compressor broke, can you replace it? If your pipes were leaking, would you call the plumber? Or would you buy a stack of plumbing books and try to do it yourself?
Most of the world does not have computers for the sake of computing. They have them as a tool - whether to keep in touch with others via email, or research on the internet, or listen to music, whatever. The software and hardware they buy must allow them to do the things they want easily and without hassle - otherwise it has failed as a tool.
This is also why I've gotten my girlfriend a Mac. She's not terribly tech literate, she only needs to chat with her friends, surf, email, and watch movies/listen to music. Windows failed horribly as a tool for her - configuration of her webcam was a pain, drivers had to be updated by herself (she's not an IT professional, why should she be expected to be diligent enough to update her drivers?), and the necessity of anti-viruses plagued her system's performance. Now she's on a MacBook, which does everything she did before, with none of the worries, none of the headaches. She had to learn a new UI, but IMHO it was well worth the learning curve, not having to worry about anti-virus definitions, or drivers, or funky USB webcam config tools.
Side note: She also enjoys having a wireless mouse when on campus without haphazardly hanging a wireless receiver dongle off her USB port. Bluetooth ftw. I always wonder why Bluetooth is not a standard component on all laptops... it's been of enormous use to everyone I know who has it (Windows or Mac).
The general consensus I hear is that Google Apps are not reliable - if your internet connection goes kaput so does your ability to work. For companies hesitant to switch, maybe Google should offer some sort of Google-Apps-in-a-Box server that one can just plug into one's intranet and have it begin serving Google apps immediately? The odds of the entire intranet going down is a lot lower than the external connection... and it also creates less unknowns for companies - mostly they have control over their own internal networks.
To some this is reprehensible but to me the action of giving any company associated with the RIAA money is worse.
To not use their products at all (or as little as possible) is even better, thus making you not a freeloading thief, nor a supporter of the MAFIAA. That's what I do.
The retailing industry needs to be beaten with a big stick, that's what. If the retailers are so on board with this voluntary ratings system that's just like the movie industry, why is it that I got carded LOTS when I was a kid watching movies, and NEVER got carded once for games (including several M titles)? The ESRB ratings are poorly enforced, especially in non-big-box stores (who have reputations to protect). I was in Best Buy today and pleasantly surprised that an explanation of the ratings system was prominently displayed on the shelf with the games. This does not exist at EB, GameStop, or any other game store I've ever been to, nor do most game shops I know card.
Dammit, I don't agree with censorship or draconian nanny-state-ing like this, but seriously, let's stop giving people an excuse to censor us eh?
A lot of these are common threads between MANY games...
FTL travel = pseudo-Objectivist utopia = an excuse to explain why there are no "good guys" to help you, and to make you feel alone. (see: underground military base in Half-Life)
Psionics = Plasmids = excuse for you to do cool stuff (see: Mjolnir armor in Halo)
The Many = Splicers = random name for generic enemies (see: Geth in Mass Effect)
I wouldn't go as far as to say the Ken Levine simply re-used System Shock's concepts, more like they share the same concepts that all games do.
Honestly, while I lubs me Firefox, Opera, and Safari, I'd rather have an IE that worked, for the rest of the world. Firefox gains market share, but the majority of the world will never switch - after all, it works fine out of the box, they can check their email and surf the web, right? For the sake of web developers' sanity, a standards-compliant IE can only be a good thing.
Er... As another poster brought up, this was a video for a company Christmas party. Give it a break. Secondly, it IS the same voice actor. Thirdly, it's not CGI, it clearly comes out of the engine (look at the horrible normal mapping on Duke's pants). Fourth, it's got gameplay, albeit not a lot of it, but you can see a fair bit of in-engine in-game shots.
I don't get why the Slashdot groupthink is trashing this. It's been vaporware for way too long, I for one look forward to the possibility that it will get taken off the vaporware list in the foreseeable future.
Holy crap. That's a game I would like to play, regardless of graphical crappiness. That thing looks FUN.
This teaser... not so much, but... I have to admit it has my interest piqued again. If they can follow it up with a proper trailer, I'm pretty sure the buzz will go back up.
The attach rates affect 3rd party developer interest in the system. Nintendo, despite their words, have proven time and time again that they intend to make a system that support primarily their own games, not anyone else's. This has negatively impacted 3rd party participation (whether Nintendo cares or not is unknown) on the Wii, and failing attach rates will drive support down further. Whether this even matters in the Wii's meteoric success is unknown:P
The 360 and PS3 are a different story. These are consoles with few first-party franchises, and heavily reliant on 3rd party support. Attach rates directly determine which platforms games go to, though IMHO this only affects AA-titles. AAA titles are always developed in tandem anyway, so even the lower attach on the PS3 won't slow down software development.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to clarify...
1 - As long as they are not distributing Blizzard artwork, or using Starcraft's trademarked name in their own product, they should legally be in the clear. Note that they must also avoid mentioning any trademarked properties directly also (Aiur? Tarsonis? Vespene Gas? Any one of those things may or may not be trademarked)
2 - It *will* be shut down (unless the authors are clever enough to obey #1, but they don't seem like it). Back in the day when I did mods for HL1, we had a term in the community: "foxed". It came from Fox being very zealous in shutting down mods of their properties. EVERYone making a licensed mod, whether it's Stargate, Star Wars, or just Dragonball Z, was foxed. This has NO chance.
I personally have zero sympathy for people who develop their own products on top of the work of others, whether intending to profit or not. Why waste your time and effort on something that will eventually be shut down, and will never see the light of day? (or if it DOES, will result in your ass sued from here to Norway?) Why not take your coding chops and make a Starcraft-inspired RTS of your own?
I admit I haven't been as on top of Obama and video games recently, but didn't he claim that he wanted to put legal teeth behind selling games to underaged kids? And that he is in favour of more parental education on game ratings? Neither of those things sound questionable to me, at all. If we uphold legal drinking, driving, and gambling ages, and we card our kids at the multiplex, why not at the game shop?
I'm a developer, and I am entirely on Apple hardware now. Obj-C is deliciously simple (and fast to boot) and now my language of choice for my own hackery, while the Linux-ness of it all makes it compatible with my day job. I can slap Windows on it for some good gaming, and some light Windows development work if I wish (though it hasn't come up recently).
Apple's IDE (Xcode) is a lot less polished than MSVC, but it's still leagues beyond any FOSS IDE I've ever used. It's also nice to be able to embed shell scripts into your build process (all without touching a single Makefile or configure). The tools are nice for someone who's familiar with your standard compile tools, but would rather be a bit more hands-off. At some point hacking makefiles get tiresome, and having the GUI option is sure nice.
The only difficult thing about porting software to/from the Mac is that its UI paradigm is decidedly different from Windows and Linux (which, barring slight differences, are essentially the same). The fact that windows don't have their own menus, the document-centric mentality (instead of MDIs), and a few other things make UI difficult to transplant between platforms.
It's not the fans. It's the damned DVD drive. You would think after making an excellent DVD drive (certainly superior to the rickety piece of crap in the PS2) for the Xbox, they'd do the same for the 360. Nooooooo. The machine itself is whisper quiet (while playikng XBLA games, for example), but once you let that disc spin up, boy, I'd rather be riding in a F-18, bet that's quieter.
VLC is... quite bad. I'm on OSX, and QuickTime isn't a great media player. There aren't that many choices when it comes to media players on Mac, and I'm stuck with VLC. It's constantly crashing, opening multiple videos starts screwing with the interface, the video will freeze and stop updating at random intervals (but the audio keeps going!), and the UI feels constantly sluggish. The last few versions have added a lot of fluff - smoothly fading into and out of fullscreen mode for example, but can we please nail the basics before we go to fancy schmancy eye candy?
Ugh, I would go back to QuickTime, but that buggy thing known as Leopard causes my QuickTime to crash even more often than VLC does. It's the lesser of two evils at this point. *sigh*
They (like GIMP) also need a lesson in usability. When I go File->Open Disc on a machine with a single disc drive, why does it present me with a dialog that only has one choice? Worse yet, why does it present my DEVICE NAME (/dev/blah/) in the choice box instead of printing something sane like "DVD Drive #1"? Urgh...
He scammed people. He stole a huge amount of money from innocent people. A guy rips off a convenience store, makes off with a few hundred bucks, and ends up in the slammer for 10 years. Does it make sense for a guy who stole millions to spend any less time in jail? Hell, if we crank up the punishment linearly by that logic, he should be spending the next 20 lifetimes in jail.
The statue may have been a gift from France, but it is a cultural symbol of America, not of the world. Much like how Wal Mart is an entirely American creation, but most of their products come from China.
Why statues of liberty? Why not a more universal symbol of freedom, as opposed to an entirely American one?
You are appalled at this process in the military, I am glad. This isn't some tiny server farm you're running for kicks - when your systems are compromised or fail outright, people die. I for one am glad that there are certification processes in place to ensure that the code we are running in mission critical systems is SECURE. Sure, we have a *reasonable* expectation that Ubuntu is technically sound, won't go kaput at a moment's notice, and doesn't contain any Chinese communist espionage code... but we don't KNOW that. The security of a nation is not run on hunches and educated guesses.
Depends on where you are. In downtown Toronto the whole cell-tower triangulation can pin me down to a radius of roughly 10 feet, that's pretty frickin' good if you ask me, especially since it's designed so that you can search in your vicinity (restaurants, stores, etc) - anything that gets you within a block would do.
I love how that why-firefox-is-banned site has a gigantic, annoying, "flip-open" Flash ad on it... Yes... Even when appealing to its support base it cannot help but be greedy bastards...
Do you vent against The Man simply because you can? This is one of the *rare* cases where DRM is creating a legitimate market for a product, as opposed to merely tying the hands of consumers.
None of the usual anti-DRM arguments are valid here. You are NOT purchasing a permanent license to the work. It only lasts for the next 24 or 48h, so the usual arguments of inability to transcribe to another hardware's format is not valid here either. Unlike most DRM, the restrictions placed upon your purchase would be clearly defined to the consumer, who won't be suckered into buying something less than they expect (e.g. a song that only plays on a single device, with no means to transcribe, and a supposedly "permanent" license at the same time).
This seems like a win-win. I can rent a movie without going to the store, saving time, effort, and puts less carbon into the air! There are ways this can be abused, but as of right now it's a solid idea.
Hmm... What about the liquid ban? I used to take a large bottle of water with me in my carry-on - the dry stuffy air in the cabin does horrid things to me, and I often have a headache by the time I disembark. Now I have to keep bothering the stewardesses for water, when I could very well have brought my own.
What about the fact that it was supposed to be a TEMPORARY ban? But like all "temporary" and "emergency" measures, this one stuck around.
Or the fact that as a tech industry guy, I tend to carry a lot of electronics around with me (external HDD, USB hubs, a slew of power adapters, etc.) that gets me CONSTANT attention at security?
Flying has always been a pain, but in recent years it's gone from a dull ache to a full-on head-splitting headache. I loathe flying.
To the average user installing a different OS than what came in the box is akin to swapping out the engine on their own car. While enthusiasts can do it easily, it involves a great deal of learning on the part of the user, which is really time they should not have to spend. If your fridge's compressor broke, can you replace it? If your pipes were leaking, would you call the plumber? Or would you buy a stack of plumbing books and try to do it yourself?
Most of the world does not have computers for the sake of computing. They have them as a tool - whether to keep in touch with others via email, or research on the internet, or listen to music, whatever. The software and hardware they buy must allow them to do the things they want easily and without hassle - otherwise it has failed as a tool.
This is also why I've gotten my girlfriend a Mac. She's not terribly tech literate, she only needs to chat with her friends, surf, email, and watch movies/listen to music. Windows failed horribly as a tool for her - configuration of her webcam was a pain, drivers had to be updated by herself (she's not an IT professional, why should she be expected to be diligent enough to update her drivers?), and the necessity of anti-viruses plagued her system's performance. Now she's on a MacBook, which does everything she did before, with none of the worries, none of the headaches. She had to learn a new UI, but IMHO it was well worth the learning curve, not having to worry about anti-virus definitions, or drivers, or funky USB webcam config tools.
Side note: She also enjoys having a wireless mouse when on campus without haphazardly hanging a wireless receiver dongle off her USB port. Bluetooth ftw. I always wonder why Bluetooth is not a standard component on all laptops... it's been of enormous use to everyone I know who has it (Windows or Mac).
The general consensus I hear is that Google Apps are not reliable - if your internet connection goes kaput so does your ability to work. For companies hesitant to switch, maybe Google should offer some sort of Google-Apps-in-a-Box server that one can just plug into one's intranet and have it begin serving Google apps immediately? The odds of the entire intranet going down is a lot lower than the external connection... and it also creates less unknowns for companies - mostly they have control over their own internal networks.
They *are* working on reducing the energy consumption of cars. But every bit counts.
To not use their products at all (or as little as possible) is even better, thus making you not a freeloading thief, nor a supporter of the MAFIAA. That's what I do.
The retailing industry needs to be beaten with a big stick, that's what. If the retailers are so on board with this voluntary ratings system that's just like the movie industry, why is it that I got carded LOTS when I was a kid watching movies, and NEVER got carded once for games (including several M titles)? The ESRB ratings are poorly enforced, especially in non-big-box stores (who have reputations to protect). I was in Best Buy today and pleasantly surprised that an explanation of the ratings system was prominently displayed on the shelf with the games. This does not exist at EB, GameStop, or any other game store I've ever been to, nor do most game shops I know card.
Dammit, I don't agree with censorship or draconian nanny-state-ing like this, but seriously, let's stop giving people an excuse to censor us eh?
The GP clearly said "afford to be treated". Bankruptcy is kind of on the opposite side of the scale as affordability.
A lot of these are common threads between MANY games...
FTL travel = pseudo-Objectivist utopia = an excuse to explain why there are no "good guys" to help you, and to make you feel alone. (see: underground military base in Half-Life)
Psionics = Plasmids = excuse for you to do cool stuff (see: Mjolnir armor in Halo)
The Many = Splicers = random name for generic enemies (see: Geth in Mass Effect)
I wouldn't go as far as to say the Ken Levine simply re-used System Shock's concepts, more like they share the same concepts that all games do.
20 years seems too heavy. $5000 seems too lenient. IMHO stupidity on this level is worth at least a few days in a cell to mull it over.
Honestly, while I lubs me Firefox, Opera, and Safari, I'd rather have an IE that worked, for the rest of the world. Firefox gains market share, but the majority of the world will never switch - after all, it works fine out of the box, they can check their email and surf the web, right? For the sake of web developers' sanity, a standards-compliant IE can only be a good thing.
Er... As another poster brought up, this was a video for a company Christmas party. Give it a break. Secondly, it IS the same voice actor. Thirdly, it's not CGI, it clearly comes out of the engine (look at the horrible normal mapping on Duke's pants). Fourth, it's got gameplay, albeit not a lot of it, but you can see a fair bit of in-engine in-game shots.
I don't get why the Slashdot groupthink is trashing this. It's been vaporware for way too long, I for one look forward to the possibility that it will get taken off the vaporware list in the foreseeable future.
Holy crap. That's a game I would like to play, regardless of graphical crappiness. That thing looks FUN.
This teaser... not so much, but... I have to admit it has my interest piqued again. If they can follow it up with a proper trailer, I'm pretty sure the buzz will go back up.
The attach rates affect 3rd party developer interest in the system. Nintendo, despite their words, have proven time and time again that they intend to make a system that support primarily their own games, not anyone else's. This has negatively impacted 3rd party participation (whether Nintendo cares or not is unknown) on the Wii, and failing attach rates will drive support down further. Whether this even matters in the Wii's meteoric success is unknown :P
The 360 and PS3 are a different story. These are consoles with few first-party franchises, and heavily reliant on 3rd party support. Attach rates directly determine which platforms games go to, though IMHO this only affects AA-titles. AAA titles are always developed in tandem anyway, so even the lower attach on the PS3 won't slow down software development.