UK is in a race to be the first "democratic" police state, who wants to join us and finish second?
It certainly seems that way doesn't it? For everything the Americans do that scream totalitarianism, you Brits have done one better. I'm just glad I live in Canada, where we receive everything at least a decade after you Brits and Americans (that goes for consumer electronics AND police states).
- Host all games on dedicated blizzard servers, including all the 2v8 comp stomps out there. This results in far more security and reduced cheating, but can you imagine the cost?
- Allow one player to be the host, which introduces host cheating issues, but assuming the host is reliable it drastically reduces the odds of a client cheating. But, if the serving player leaves, the whole game goes kaput (and in RTSes, players tend to leave a lot)
- Do peer to peer networking (a la the original SC), which introduces vast cheating issues to be overcome, but games will continue regardless of player joins and leaves.
You're assuming that each pirated copy would never have been a sale. Consider, though, that much of piracy (both in terms of counterfeit branded goods and software) involves unwitting consumers (the man who gets suckered into a Rolex deal that's too good to be true, for example). These are a lot grayer, and it could very well be that the consumer who bought the counterfeit goods would have bought the legit item if given the opportunity and the knowledge.
So yes, while I agree that piracy numbers are severely inflated but benefiting parties, it is not a victimless crime. There is a substantial dollar loss tied to it.
A cost-effective system might not be able to detect them, but there are ways to get a good idea about where this number may lie. 100% human-powered filtering of random clicksets? That would catch almost all fraudulent clicks, but be horrifyingly expensive to implement across the board, but by comparing results from a random human test to the machine system you can get some idea of how many you miss in the automated method.
This is also how we figure out QA numbers in manufacturing - not every bad device that goes out will be reported for warranty or otherwise exposed, so there are alternate ways to derive a good quality index out of mfg'ed goods.
There is a problem with the FPS client-server model: if your server dies you're screwed. Let's face it, Starcraft and other RTSes do not need an environment with as low latency as, say, Counter-Strike. At the same time, CS is only fun with a fair number of players, necessitating dedicated servers, while Starcraft has more potential for quick pick-up games between random people.
Which is to say... Nobody wants to connect to a dedicated server for a quick dirty RTS match, and if the hosting player quits (all too common in RTSes) nobody gets to finish the game. The beauty of the original Starcraft was that a player could drop and the rest could keep playing as if nothing happened.
Who says they're not doing an analysis of caught vs. un-caught fraudulent clicks? If they have a decently accurate percentage figure for fake clicks that manage to pass their system, then that IS money lost, since it WAS paid out.
You mean that the total cost of building a product is just the sum of its components, excluding research/development, manufacturing costs, shipping costs, and marketing costs? Shocking!
Allowing unfair products to exist in this way encourages producers to make more of the same - eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product, for all choices suffer from the same problem.
You do not understand the vast majority of laptop thefts. Sure, if this was a targeted hit and the perp is after some confidential data on the drive, then yes, they're likely to know every trick in the book. Keep in mind the average laptop thief is not even very technically savvy - they may know enough to wipe your personal settings, or even enough to reinstall the OS, but the VAST VAST majority will never crack the case open.
I've crossed paths with a few people who were selling hot laptops in university, these people were not technically savvy at all, the only thing they're really good at is swiping it, not what comes after. Most knew enough to pop the restore disc in, but that's only to clean the machine of personal information, and not to defeat any tracking devices.
... in the 360's Japanese coffin. Don't get me wrong, I love my 360, but clearly MS needed something big to bring some attention to itself in the Japanese marketplace. Eternal Sonata is a solid game (based on the demo I played), and certainly would've sold a few boxes in Japan. But losing this exclusive is just one more nail in the already-shut coffin that is the Xbox in Japan...
One problem that OSS still needs to overcome is backwards compatibility. I have no problems with converting to open source office apps, and help out the movement, so to speak, but I require back compatibility. That means Word and Excel documents that my peers create *must* work competently, and that inter-operability between the two apps must be near total.
The last time I opened a Word 2004 doc in OpenOffice the result was a complicated mess. Stylings were messed up, spacing was messed up, fonts were changed, sizes were changed... That document would've taken ages to clean up into presentable format in OpenOffice, and that's time that I simply do not have. If you want people to seriously convert, you need to allow them to Open->Save As with almost NO perceivable visual and organization difference in their documents!
I would be GLAD to migrate all of my legacy Word files into OpenOffice, but I do not want to hand-fix ALL of them.
Nonetheless, this is going to backfire hard on Universal. Whether they (and we) like it or not iPod is clearly *the* most popular player on this continent, and offering their music in any format not compatible with it is suicide. I imagine Universal will cite the lack of sales as evidence that evil pirates are stealing their music more and more.
SK's claims of sabotage are unprovable, and really is a waste of the court's time. What is pertinent is whether or not Epic missed the promised 360-binary deadline. If they did, then this case is very clear-cut.
I fully expect our government to get off their ass and develop a means to enforce our territorial claims, though you're right, at this point we've got a bunch of Inuits with old bolt-action rifles riding around on snowmobiles.
That being said, few militaries in the world are equipped to fight a war in those environmental conditions...
... massive change (think multiples not percentages) over the existing routes and is the reason why the EU and US are already pushing for it to be an international (rather than Canadian) trade route.
And why should Canada's sovereign territory being pieced apart? If it suddenly became globally advantageous to cross shipments through most of the US, the EU and the rest of the world would be perfectly justified in making it international territory as well?
You people can just fly/ship your people/things with our blessings (and taxes), the land and airspace belongs to us.
Nah. The government only has two real ways to control its citizenry: policing, and sabotage of the education system. The latter takes some time (years upon years) to take effect, so to affect any sort of short to mid term control there is only the option of sending cops as your henchmen to do your dirty work, either brutal suppression of speech, or just regular enforcing of asinine laws.
No, indeed, the government doesn't control its citizens, corporations do. Or rather, the two work in tandem, but it is the corporation that interacts directly with the population, rarely the government. Want to project a pro-war message? Movies, music, toys, books, all influenced by the government, but in the end produced by corporations.
We need a new word for this, because really it isn't the people controlling government controlling corporations, no, government and corporation are now more or less the same thing. Look at the executives in the American government, all of them in cahoots with all sorts of private enterprise. "Govcorp" is more like it. So in the end it is Govcorp controlling the citizens.
Er... As far as we can tell this thing runs the exact same hardware (CPU, RAM, etc) as the iPhone. We already know it has a subset of the OS X API available, and there's "plenty" of RAM (64MB I believe) and a decently fast x86 CPU. How is this limited programming capacity? Especially when compared to other PDAs on the market?
The MAFIAA claims ridiculous damages in their lawsuits, two wrongs don't make a right. If the courts decide that $10M is proper punishment AND compensation, then so be it, but if it's frivolous I'd hope they'd throw it out.
I used to be a huge LAN gamer myself, but eventually the hassle of shoving a tower, monitor, keyboard, mice, etc, into your trunk (making sure they don't get jostled around TOO much) and driving it all over to someone's place is simply too much to do often. As compared to console gaming, where you just plug in 4 controllers (worst case scenario everyone brings their own, but I've never had that problem) and off you go.
Console LANs are fun, 16 player Halo in the same room with 4 TVs is something else. But like PC LAN parties they take some effort to set up, so it's not as simple as calling up a buddy and having him bring beer and controllers.
Which brings up a good point: how big of a house do you need to do a 16-player LAN effectively? The most I could ever do back in my LAN days was 8 players, and that was a very sizable house. I know a 16-player Halo "console LAN" can be done in a relatively large living room, which makes it advantageous.
FASA Interactive has long been dead, with no new Mech games for a number of years and certainly none on the horizon at any point after MW4. It's sad, that all traces of Battletech have been wiped off the face of the Earth - between the death of FASA itself and now its spinoff companies. I really wished someone would do something great with those properties - even Mech Commander wasn't such a bad game despite its flaws.
I really do wish someone would translate the original Battletech table top game into computer form, but with some concessions made for easy multiplay and quicker learning - i.e. something X-Com style.
What is in Halo that you cannot get from playing online with Counter Strike, Half Life, Day of Defeat, or America's Army?
Being in the same room as your opponent. If you're someone who values hanging out with his friends as much as gaming in and of itself, this is a very huge bonus indeed. I don't play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and other such PC multiplayer games for the same reason I don't play Halo on Xbox Live - the legions of smacktards who are simply no fun to play with. I do, however, relish an opportunity to sit down with my friends and kill each other, trash-talking the whole way.
Yes, you can accomplish sort of the same thing with a LAN party, but that's really not the same you know.
Halo multiplayer is about the social aspect. While co-op isn't new by any stretch of the imagination, you couldn't before sit down with a friend in front of the TV and play it. Not unless he stuffs his machine in the trunk and drives it over to your place anyway. I hate to generalize, but if you're a lone gamer type, you won't enjoy Halo much at all. It's a game that truly shines when you have multiple people over and the fragging gets intense, which you simply cannot do in the PC world.
To add to that, it's not just Halo. My friends and I had an absolute blast with Black Hawk Down, another game that allowed split-screen co-op. It was a mediocre game by all measures, but somehow none of that mattered very much when you were killing terrorists with buddies.
The Vita Chamber was just being prototyped and introduced when Fontaine crashed the New Year's Eve party. As such it was not for public use and was keyed to Ryan's personal genetic signature, which you learn works for you, since you're his son.
Is this a problem with bad employees, or a problem with a cut-throat management style that will kick anyone to the curb for failing to make absurd sales numbers?
Slashdot Mirror
It certainly seems that way doesn't it? For everything the Americans do that scream totalitarianism, you Brits have done one better. I'm just glad I live in Canada, where we receive everything at least a decade after you Brits and Americans (that goes for consumer electronics AND police states).
And it leaves Blizzard two choices:
- Host all games on dedicated blizzard servers, including all the 2v8 comp stomps out there. This results in far more security and reduced cheating, but can you imagine the cost?
- Allow one player to be the host, which introduces host cheating issues, but assuming the host is reliable it drastically reduces the odds of a client cheating. But, if the serving player leaves, the whole game goes kaput (and in RTSes, players tend to leave a lot)
- Do peer to peer networking (a la the original SC), which introduces vast cheating issues to be overcome, but games will continue regardless of player joins and leaves.
You're assuming that each pirated copy would never have been a sale. Consider, though, that much of piracy (both in terms of counterfeit branded goods and software) involves unwitting consumers (the man who gets suckered into a Rolex deal that's too good to be true, for example). These are a lot grayer, and it could very well be that the consumer who bought the counterfeit goods would have bought the legit item if given the opportunity and the knowledge.
So yes, while I agree that piracy numbers are severely inflated but benefiting parties, it is not a victimless crime. There is a substantial dollar loss tied to it.
A cost-effective system might not be able to detect them, but there are ways to get a good idea about where this number may lie. 100% human-powered filtering of random clicksets? That would catch almost all fraudulent clicks, but be horrifyingly expensive to implement across the board, but by comparing results from a random human test to the machine system you can get some idea of how many you miss in the automated method.
This is also how we figure out QA numbers in manufacturing - not every bad device that goes out will be reported for warranty or otherwise exposed, so there are alternate ways to derive a good quality index out of mfg'ed goods.
There is a problem with the FPS client-server model: if your server dies you're screwed. Let's face it, Starcraft and other RTSes do not need an environment with as low latency as, say, Counter-Strike. At the same time, CS is only fun with a fair number of players, necessitating dedicated servers, while Starcraft has more potential for quick pick-up games between random people.
Which is to say... Nobody wants to connect to a dedicated server for a quick dirty RTS match, and if the hosting player quits (all too common in RTSes) nobody gets to finish the game. The beauty of the original Starcraft was that a player could drop and the rest could keep playing as if nothing happened.
Who says they're not doing an analysis of caught vs. un-caught fraudulent clicks? If they have a decently accurate percentage figure for fake clicks that manage to pass their system, then that IS money lost, since it WAS paid out.
You mean that the total cost of building a product is just the sum of its components, excluding research/development, manufacturing costs, shipping costs, and marketing costs? Shocking!
Allowing unfair products to exist in this way encourages producers to make more of the same - eventually created a market where you *must* buy the product, for all choices suffer from the same problem.
You do not understand the vast majority of laptop thefts. Sure, if this was a targeted hit and the perp is after some confidential data on the drive, then yes, they're likely to know every trick in the book. Keep in mind the average laptop thief is not even very technically savvy - they may know enough to wipe your personal settings, or even enough to reinstall the OS, but the VAST VAST majority will never crack the case open.
I've crossed paths with a few people who were selling hot laptops in university, these people were not technically savvy at all, the only thing they're really good at is swiping it, not what comes after. Most knew enough to pop the restore disc in, but that's only to clean the machine of personal information, and not to defeat any tracking devices.
... in the 360's Japanese coffin. Don't get me wrong, I love my 360, but clearly MS needed something big to bring some attention to itself in the Japanese marketplace. Eternal Sonata is a solid game (based on the demo I played), and certainly would've sold a few boxes in Japan. But losing this exclusive is just one more nail in the already-shut coffin that is the Xbox in Japan...
One problem that OSS still needs to overcome is backwards compatibility. I have no problems with converting to open source office apps, and help out the movement, so to speak, but I require back compatibility. That means Word and Excel documents that my peers create *must* work competently, and that inter-operability between the two apps must be near total.
The last time I opened a Word 2004 doc in OpenOffice the result was a complicated mess. Stylings were messed up, spacing was messed up, fonts were changed, sizes were changed... That document would've taken ages to clean up into presentable format in OpenOffice, and that's time that I simply do not have. If you want people to seriously convert, you need to allow them to Open->Save As with almost NO perceivable visual and organization difference in their documents!
I would be GLAD to migrate all of my legacy Word files into OpenOffice, but I do not want to hand-fix ALL of them.
Nonetheless, this is going to backfire hard on Universal. Whether they (and we) like it or not iPod is clearly *the* most popular player on this continent, and offering their music in any format not compatible with it is suicide. I imagine Universal will cite the lack of sales as evidence that evil pirates are stealing their music more and more.
SK's claims of sabotage are unprovable, and really is a waste of the court's time. What is pertinent is whether or not Epic missed the promised 360-binary deadline. If they did, then this case is very clear-cut.
I fully expect our government to get off their ass and develop a means to enforce our territorial claims, though you're right, at this point we've got a bunch of Inuits with old bolt-action rifles riding around on snowmobiles.
That being said, few militaries in the world are equipped to fight a war in those environmental conditions...
... massive change (think multiples not percentages) over the existing routes and is the reason why the EU and US are already pushing for it to be an international (rather than Canadian) trade route.And why should Canada's sovereign territory being pieced apart? If it suddenly became globally advantageous to cross shipments through most of the US, the EU and the rest of the world would be perfectly justified in making it international territory as well?
You people can just fly/ship your people/things with our blessings (and taxes), the land and airspace belongs to us.
Nah. The government only has two real ways to control its citizenry: policing, and sabotage of the education system. The latter takes some time (years upon years) to take effect, so to affect any sort of short to mid term control there is only the option of sending cops as your henchmen to do your dirty work, either brutal suppression of speech, or just regular enforcing of asinine laws.
No, indeed, the government doesn't control its citizens, corporations do. Or rather, the two work in tandem, but it is the corporation that interacts directly with the population, rarely the government. Want to project a pro-war message? Movies, music, toys, books, all influenced by the government, but in the end produced by corporations.
We need a new word for this, because really it isn't the people controlling government controlling corporations, no, government and corporation are now more or less the same thing. Look at the executives in the American government, all of them in cahoots with all sorts of private enterprise. "Govcorp" is more like it. So in the end it is Govcorp controlling the citizens.
Except PS3 back-compat has gone straight to hell with the new 80GB PS3's that use emulation instead of embedded PS2 hardware...
Er... As far as we can tell this thing runs the exact same hardware (CPU, RAM, etc) as the iPhone. We already know it has a subset of the OS X API available, and there's "plenty" of RAM (64MB I believe) and a decently fast x86 CPU. How is this limited programming capacity? Especially when compared to other PDAs on the market?
The MAFIAA claims ridiculous damages in their lawsuits, two wrongs don't make a right. If the courts decide that $10M is proper punishment AND compensation, then so be it, but if it's frivolous I'd hope they'd throw it out.
I used to be a huge LAN gamer myself, but eventually the hassle of shoving a tower, monitor, keyboard, mice, etc, into your trunk (making sure they don't get jostled around TOO much) and driving it all over to someone's place is simply too much to do often. As compared to console gaming, where you just plug in 4 controllers (worst case scenario everyone brings their own, but I've never had that problem) and off you go.
Console LANs are fun, 16 player Halo in the same room with 4 TVs is something else. But like PC LAN parties they take some effort to set up, so it's not as simple as calling up a buddy and having him bring beer and controllers.
Which brings up a good point: how big of a house do you need to do a 16-player LAN effectively? The most I could ever do back in my LAN days was 8 players, and that was a very sizable house. I know a 16-player Halo "console LAN" can be done in a relatively large living room, which makes it advantageous.
FASA Interactive has long been dead, with no new Mech games for a number of years and certainly none on the horizon at any point after MW4. It's sad, that all traces of Battletech have been wiped off the face of the Earth - between the death of FASA itself and now its spinoff companies. I really wished someone would do something great with those properties - even Mech Commander wasn't such a bad game despite its flaws.
I really do wish someone would translate the original Battletech table top game into computer form, but with some concessions made for easy multiplay and quicker learning - i.e. something X-Com style.
Being in the same room as your opponent. If you're someone who values hanging out with his friends as much as gaming in and of itself, this is a very huge bonus indeed. I don't play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and other such PC multiplayer games for the same reason I don't play Halo on Xbox Live - the legions of smacktards who are simply no fun to play with. I do, however, relish an opportunity to sit down with my friends and kill each other, trash-talking the whole way.
Yes, you can accomplish sort of the same thing with a LAN party, but that's really not the same you know.
Halo multiplayer is about the social aspect. While co-op isn't new by any stretch of the imagination, you couldn't before sit down with a friend in front of the TV and play it. Not unless he stuffs his machine in the trunk and drives it over to your place anyway. I hate to generalize, but if you're a lone gamer type, you won't enjoy Halo much at all. It's a game that truly shines when you have multiple people over and the fragging gets intense, which you simply cannot do in the PC world.
To add to that, it's not just Halo. My friends and I had an absolute blast with Black Hawk Down, another game that allowed split-screen co-op. It was a mediocre game by all measures, but somehow none of that mattered very much when you were killing terrorists with buddies.
SPOILERS BELOW:
The Vita Chamber was just being prototyped and introduced when Fontaine crashed the New Year's Eve party. As such it was not for public use and was keyed to Ryan's personal genetic signature, which you learn works for you, since you're his son.
Is this a problem with bad employees, or a problem with a cut-throat management style that will kick anyone to the curb for failing to make absurd sales numbers?