I totally agree, but I find it funny that you started by decrying the hype the series has received, and then almost immediately after claimed it to be one of the best pieces of journalism you've heard recently. :)
Ah I think it deserves the hype. But I got on the bandwagon just as it started...from my experience, the people who didn't catch it early on eagerly participated in the backlash...but that's just in media circles, where there's pressure to be either the first adopter or "too cool for school". To be fair, the number of podcasts that arose exclusively to cover meta-Serial was pretty obscene...imagine "The Walking Dead", except with "Talking Dead"-type shows on five different networks.
I don't understand the exclusivity outrage. It seems entirely fair to me for a platform holder to expect something in return for funding development of a game.
Consoles have had exclusives since time immemorial and no one seems to bat an eye when it happens. What makes this case special?
VR headsets aren't platforms in their own right with their own operating systems like consoles are, they're hardware peripherals. It would be like a company refusing to launch their game unless it detected the "right" controller plugged in to the computer. All of the game's code is being executed by the PC itself--that's why a shim like this was almost instantly thrown up to allow Oculus Store games to be played on the Vive, all they needed to do was translate the I/O from the Vive to the protocol that the game was expecting from a Rift. It's along the same lines as x360ce, a wrapper that lets you use any gamepad you want with games that only have official support for Xbox Controllers.
There are real differences in the Rift/Vive systems right now in terms of what they're capable of (Vive has touch controllers, Rift won't get them until a few months down the road), but hardcoding a check into your DRM that makes sure that you're using the correctly branded headset is just asinine. There's no real differences between the headsets themselves that justify it, it's just artificially trying to cut out competition.
All other things being equal, hardware exclusivity is terrible for consumers. Oculus is free to do whatever they want, "fair" or not, and consumers are free to vote with their wallets in return.
I think people have been particularly vocal here because a) the exclusivity ship sailed for consoles decades ago while the VR market is fresh, b) because the market for 1st-gen VR is mostly early adopters who pay attention to these things and have strong opinions, and c) because Oculus have seemingly been saying one thing and doing another.
Exclusivity has been horrible for consumers in the console market. Speaking for myself, I'd like to put my foot down and say "No, you aren't going to pull the same crap here". I personally really want VR, which means I want it done right. I fear that if it starts off on the wrong foot, it won't get anywhere.
Many people have batted many eyes about that. Those people typically are big fans of PC gaming, which happens to be the audience that Oculus is targeting. So Oculus is targeting the demographic amongst gamers which is the most opposed to exclusives.
By the way, Valve is supplying quite a bit of funding to VR developers as well but is somehow managing to do it without requiring exclusivity. At the very least, Oculus could require store exclusivity but not hardware exclusivity.
Finally, just because one demographic has gotten used to it (console gamers) doesn't mean it's right. Many folks understand the dangers of exclusives, and they want to prevent that from creeping into PC gaming.
> but is somehow managing to do it without requiring exclusivity. At the very least, Oculus could require store exclusivity but not hardware exclusivity.
Their massive share of teh PC gaming market via steam gives them more freedom.
Their massive share is the result of many years of operating fairly, while navigating the dangerous waters of drm. Valve built a lot of trust, and they are capitalizing on it.
That is, they behaved like they this even when they were not kings of the market, so the reasoning behind this is more akin to company culture than it is to market strategy.
It actually takes effort to port a game to a different system or OS. I'm not a fan of exclusives either, but at least sometimes there is a real reason (we did not code the PS4/PC/Mac/Linux/Wii/PowerPC/32bit version), but this is an entirely artificial and arbitrary restriction.
Edit: technical reasons aside, I guess there is no difference. But at least one excuse can fall back on semi-technical reasons... This sort of exclusivity is purely for marketing and contractual reasons. It actually requires more effort to make the game exclusive than it does to make it multi "platform".
It's hardly a peripheral though. VR games are incompatible with traditional displays, and the development requirements are quite a bit more strict (low latency, high framerate).
It's quite a stretch to say that VR is "just a new way to display a game," in my opinion.
It's an extremely complicated peripheral, but it's still a peripheral. It's a monitor with an intricate tracking system that allows it to tell the PC powering it its exact location and orientation within a limited area. Playing a VR game is nothing like playing a game on a 3D monitor, it feels like you've been transported to another dimension, but the hardware itself isn't doing anything to execute the game and is still "just" a peripheral like a keyboard, monitor, or gamepad. It's just being fed what it should display by the PC and feeding the PC back information about its location and orientation. That's why Oculus initially needed to put a hardware check into their DRM to block shims like this, there's no real technical reason you can't use one in place of the other once you translate its I/O.
Vr games work fine with traditional displays, I've seen plenty of screenshots on my traditional display. It isn't pleasant or immersive that WA, of course.
Some games purposely designed for both or originally designed for monitors and then ported to VR might be able to, but the vast majority of them are going to rely on the headset's position in real life to move the player character in the game. If it's developed for the Vive or Touch it'll also rely on motion controllers to interact with the game world. You could look at the game on the monitor, but you'd have no way to move or actually do anything in the game.
I think what OP is getting at is that you can drop the "if you are [side of the political spectrum]-leaning, then..." clause and lose nothing substantive from the argument. It's there exclusively to poke at the opposition while adding nothing of value.
It also doesn't help that he sets the tone of the article by patting himself on the back about how modern and sophisticated he is, with a bilingual family of academics that are citizens of the world.
It's only back-patting if you take it that way. Is he supposed to deny his own personal circumstances, or the notion that they'll have an effect on his outlook? Of course things like that shape the way you're likely to view the world, and surely it's best to be upfront about it. To my ears, it didn't come across as boastful at all.
I find the UI of Dwarf Fortress completely impenetrable, but am fascinated by the level of depth and granularity in the systems underlying the game.
If anyone is interested in the game, I recommend grabbing the Lazy Newb Pack[0] which comes with a few utilities that will make your experience slightly less infuriating.
Funny thing about Eve is that once you start playing it you realize it's... actually pretty "normal".
It's like the Australian Outback, you hear so many terrifying stories that you just assume every single thing in that place wants to kill you, but plenty of things live there.
Just like in Eve, your life in space will be pretty standard fare 99% of the time, even moving out to nullsec can be actually quite a... dare I say, mundane affair.
But it's that 1%... oh man, that 1%. The feuds, the rivalries, the deception, the betrayal.
It's almost like CCP are playing a cosmic version of Dwarf Fortress and the capsuleers are their dwarves.
What terrifying stories have you heard about the Australian Outback?
Having lived a large proportion of my life in what would be described as rural Australia, if not quite the Outback, I can't really think of anything that is actively trying to kill people.
People die because they were unlucky (trod on a poisonous snake perhaps) or they were stupid (traveling somewhere without adequate water and/or informing others of their whereabouts).
Snakes aren't actually trying to kill you, nor spiders, nor dingoes (unless you're a really small baby maybe), nor feral camels, nor kangaroos, nor the emus. The only think I can think of that maybe actively wants to kill you are the crocs, because they're top predator and have to eat. Also the vast majority of human deaths from croc attacks are also down to stupidity (swimming at night in a known crocodile area, for example). Even so, the crocs are in the north and I wouldn't necessarily call that the Outback either.
Anyway, genuinely curious about the terrifying stories and all the things trying to kill humans.
I never thought of eve and DF having anything in common, till I read your comment.
Upon further reflection, I only played both for the level of suffering involved in each. DF has the mantra "loosing is fun" and I played eve that same way.
That's one of the primary effects of having serious, permanent effects of death in a game, imho.
Perversely, it makes life / things / tasks less valuable. I used the example "there's only so much you'll do for one dwarf who might be killed by its own stupidity" vs "there's almost nothing a lot of people wouldn't do to acquire a for-the-rest-of-time legendary in WoW."
The first stage was simply to dig out a big hollow cavern, with walkways and a central pillar of stairs. A chap has given me an idea about a bridge over the volcano and I think I will have a drawbridge block off the entrance once the invaders are quite close, and then marksdwarves can shoot down on them. We expect people to dodge off and into the magma.
I play MasterworkDF, which adds a number of things such as guilds and castes, but LNP is a good place to start.
For anyone who is a bit scared by it, just persevere. Start simple. Seven dwarves. Dig a hole in the ground. Start a mushroom farm. Brew some wine. Get a carpenters workshop. Make some beds. And barrels. And take it from there.
I found that learning how one aspect (mining, farming, food, booze, fortifications, military, trading, etc) at a time helped.
I'd figure out how to get one aspect working (starting with the farming -> food/booze aspect), then something Fun would happen. I'd start a new game, figure out how to avoid that type of Fun, then get clobbered by another sort :D
I'm sure the Adams would disagree, but to me, the impenetrability is part of what makes it work so well as a game. A lot of basic tasks feel rewarding because they're hard to master.
What I don't get is while they add "depth" in a few selected areas (simulating stuff like dwarf organ function?) their choice of that awful ASCII UI means the entire game runs on a grid of really huge cubes. So while it's simulating a dwarf's digestion, nothing really can exist in the game that's less than, say, 5'x5'. Perplexing design choice.
Reminds me of how leftPad and rightPad were added to D a day or two after the npm story exploded and I thought it was poking fun at the situation but the pull request was actually created many months prior and the person who merged it was unaware of the npm drama. Just a humorous coincidence.
I'm sorry you received downvotes for asking a question.
Based on the url (test.html), I would imagine this was just someone's quick one-off attempt to see if something worked that ended up getting left behind.
Edit: Looks like this was already answered downthread in the time that I took reading the comments. Whoops.
Interesting enough for you to spend 5 minutes of your life commenting. I agree that it's a bit low on nutrition though. Funny to see stuff like this once in a while, but I wouldn't want the front page to get clogged up with this kind of nonsense.
My problem with the news feed is how non-deterministic the results are. There have been so many cases where I will see a post/photo/video that I find interesting, but fuck me if I ever want to find it again on a different device or at some point in the future if I didn't bookmark it or remember who posted it and when. It always seems like a random shuffling of the deck when I load the page, and it's incredibly frustrating.
Not only that, on mobile, I'll follow a link from FB, read an article, and go back. The mobile page reloads, and shows a completely different set of articles. FFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUU.
My biggest problem seems to be a bug, not sure if it is FB or browser. But from time to time as you scroll down the news feed, FB displays the stuff you have already seen from the beginning. Sounds like a problem with request firing off and not able to retrieve and populate stuff from the beginning again.
There is also no way to "remember this" unless you like the post.
Click the little drop down arrow at the top right of each post. On many of them (maybe not all -- I can't check right now), there's now a "Save" option.
Yup that bug is really annoying. I have observed it only kicks if you open a photo in the photo viewer and then go back to the home feed by closing the photo viewer.
Came here to complain about this so I upvoted you instead. It would be great, too, if their search could actually show posts.. My usual go-to when I'm trying to find something again is to go to the person's profile, but sometimes I forget who posted it and in that case there's basically no hope in finding the post again...
In case anyone shares my confusion: they aren't talking about unlocking in the sense of removing carrier restrictions, but rather in the sense of disabling the security features of the device to access the data stored on it.
I was similarly confused. While the HN title accurately reflects the Reuters title, I think it'd be reasonable to retitle the submission to something along the lines of "Apple: breaking encryption on devices running iOS 8 and newer 'would be impossible'", or something (point being to highlight that we're talking about the encryption issue, not carrier).
That's what I got from the article, the key was wiped because of X many tries so Apple can't "unlock" the data on the device (excluding everything backed up to apple cloud).
In the future they will use shady FinFisher iTunes and other exploits to grab the data then seize the phone.
iPhone user here, and my first thought upon reading the headline was "unlocking" in the sense of carrier locks. Given that Apple sells unlocked phones in the first place, my mind immediately switched to the actual meaning of the headline. But still, there was a moment of confusion.
iOS devices have a "lock screen" where to use the device you have to enter a passcode or password or fingerprint to gain access to the device. Usually if you pick up someone's phone this is the screen that you see.
Note the "slide to unlock" message at the bottom. If you asked most users what it means to unlock a phone, this is what they would think of, as they see it every day.
What possible citation could be better than the one provided? Apple has sold over 1 billion of these devices and they all share the same lock screen UI; 500,000 search results on Google pales in comparison as a citation.
Edit: I understand your point and agree that unlocking a device would not mean exactly the same thing to all people. I just don't agree that the parent needed an additional citation.
