And even that is fairly non-binding and has a proviso of "when their financial circumstances permit" apparently. I believe the first confidence pledged some serious amounts of assistance most of which never eventuated.

It doesn't really commit anyone to anything. It's mostly so they could get something out and not look like they'd just had a junket.

It's a by product of the UN requiring consensus from every nation to pass anything. The smaller nations know we're not going to stop increasing global carbon emissions (and maybe believe they can continue on mostly as usual) so hope they can get some money out of the process. And it's pretty convenient for the US as they can justify doing nothing on the basis of the UN being ineffectual. Meanwhile China says it doesn't apply to them (despite being the biggest global emitter) because they didn't get to poison the planet in the first place so they deserve their turn (In UN terms that's referred to as "equity"). I recommend http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RInrvSjW90U/ for the current numbers. Basically if we want a planet that looks remotely like the comfortable one we occupy now we'd need to peak carbon emissions soon (before 2020) and start reducing at unheard of rates. Instead most of the planet has no intention of stopping, some of the nations just want to get some money out of it, and a small group (15% of global emissions) are trying to cut their emissions by numbers that are a small fraction of what would be needed globally. We're pretty much guaranteed to blow through any manageable carbon trajectory in the next decade. Probably sooner because most of the news out of the climate scientists is bad and that they may have badly underestimated how sensitive the system is. Be thankful though, we'll basically get to watch mankind fumble their first highly probable global crisis (barring miracle discoveries or climate science being wrong in a good way) which should be entertaining. Given the current prediction is 4c by by 2050 (twice the "acceptably dangerous" level of 2c, 6c by 2100) we'll even get to see many of the effects start to kick in.

When I did my CS degree computer science was part of the science stream, was expected to be primarily a tool for the advancement of science and to have lots of scope for development in its application.

It was only later people realised the scope of computer use is a whole lot wider and that the main problem is dealing with the complexity of the systems. So it became less about the micro of clever algorithms and code and more about the macro of trying to get the product of large numbers of people to work cheaply and reliably.

In practice I suspect there's little difference beyond the name and self image. I'd expect CS people to understand the issues of large scale software development (as much as you can in a Uni). I'd expect SE people to understand the materials they work with and why software isn't reliably reproducible like stuff made from bolts and girders.

Fairly inevitable and if done well a good move, though a comeback is going to be really hard. Motorola believed it could compete on hardware differentiation and sweetheart deals (backed by exclusive features) with the networks. Thus completely missing the move towards the phone becoming a platform to run smart software and how that needs to tie into a rich eco-system of software services. And that pretty much needs a focus on software, third party software developers and a unified platform they didn't have.

Maybe if they can come up with something really innovative in terms of software they might survive. But it's so weird to remember it wasn't that long ago they saw their only competition as Nokia and believes they were on track to be number 1. Woops.

I also remember Padmasree Warrior (Motorola's cheap technology officer) explaining that the iPhone would never catch on because it's too hard to dial while driving. With technical leadership like that...

Been waiting for this for years. It was pretty obvious to me that the problem has always been the display. They can only get so large before they become unwieldy, heavy, fragile, power hungry and difficult to use away from a desk. With something like this you can have a big screen in a very small form factor and the phone can go back to being something easier to carry, though I'm still fine with it doing the computing. Add in a wireless chording keypad for power-user input and you've got a great platform for mobile computing. It's not really anything novel, the pieces have been around for years, but it needed someone to put them together, do the software layer and mass produce them to bring the price down.

It will still be niche, the vast majority don't even need all the computing power their phones contain, and it does look sort of silly... but the idea of being able to boot up linux (you know it will happen) on my sun-glasses is a sort of sublime perfection.

I think the correct answer is "it depends". Programming can cover an immense range of possibilities, some of which certainly use high level math and a lot of which don't. However it is also true that anything that requires a substantial amount of really high level mathematics should be written once as a library and then re-used.

In the end it doesn't really matter too much. Any solution would involve some negative economic effects and many of the governments have no intention of doing any such thing. China which considers economic advancement the key to social stability and the US which considers itself already losing a trade war with china. So the attack on the science is more about providing a distraction / excuse for why nothing substantial will be done at the political level.

The discussion of the science, and how it is mis-represented, is very interesting though. I found this youtube video series by potholer54 to be a pretty fascinating introduction to the subject, with good coverage of issues and links back to actual papers.

Steam is just a distribution service though. And it is unlikely they care about market segmentation (eg. gouging). However the content providers, the game companies, almost certainly pushed them into it with the thread of with-holding their games. The same for retail boxes costing less than on-line distribution.

If you're getting taken for a ride (and as an Australian gamer that's nearly always the case) the answer is to not the buy the game. In which case it doesn't really matter where you are not buying it from. As per my post it was COD that did this in Australia, initially good value in US$ then suddenly terrible value in AU$. And as a result I just wrote the game off and moved on.

The brick and mortar stores helped grow steam, at least for PC users. Their extremely poor selection of PC titles as they chased the console market, their focus on second hand sales and their lack of interest in competition forced people to depend on services like steam. The actual change-over though will happen when companies focus on on-line distribution and don't limit how competitive steam can be for fear of angering the retailers. You can already see this with a lot of smaller titles (which would probably not get any retailer presence anyway) who are free to offer great prices and special deals on steam games. In turn this experimentation and possibility of smaller titles making some cash is widening the number of games available. In comparison there's things like Call of Duty where steam was forced to near double the price to preserve the ability of retailers to rip off Australian customers. That sort of thing leaves a pretty sour taste in the mouth.

Then look at something like Killing floor. Somewhere between a mod and a full game. Chance of getting it into EB without it already being huge (eg. counterstrike) near zero. However list it on steam, do things like this weekends free trial (easy to do on-line, impossible via retail) and maybe they'll make some money out of it.

Oh, and all my downloads cost me no quota. My ISP (iinet) mirrors steam's files and allows fast (1Mb/sec) and free downloads.

tl;dr. The sooner the game retailers die the better for gamers. Can buy the huge titles at regular stores and for anything specialised better it's on steam.

That was certainly a positive review. Overly positive in my opinion. This game is extremely shallow in terms of content and the questionable mechanics. There's actually a lot less decent character designs (unless you are making furries or robots), the power choices are narrow and repetitive and the gameplay often revolves down to using 3 powers (end builder, single target, AoE) for 40 levels. At which point you discover the end game has only been pencilled in. I mean it's not that bad, though the developers are doing there best to nerf it into the ground because they did little balancing during beta, and you can have some fun playing through it. But it's nothing special and actually less interesting in terms of gameplay than CoH (which at least nailed grouping with it's scaling instances, enough rewards to make it desirable and the MA).

This was what I wrote for a MMO gaming site to try and collect my thoughts after beta.

The champions NDA has just come down a week before the game is released. I quite liked City of Heroes, an older superhero MMO, so I applied and got into beta and have been playing it for a while. Sadly it's just not that great a game, IMO obviously. And some of the reasons for saying so are because the design made some questionable decisions, like:

1. Have a weak, derivative or inappropriate foundation for the game.

In the case of champions online the original design seemed to be most strongly formed by the console environment and existing material (Marvel ultimate alliance). These are fine as considerations or influences but the design process also has to address what the game will be adding that is new or has interesting gameplay possibilities. Like any large production getting this answer clearly defined in the early stages will save a lot of cost compared to trying to retro-fit a solution later.

The main gameplay influence was on a more action oriented environment, no doubt encouraged by the console gameplay. Goals included no downtime, high character mobility and more engaging combat in highly varied environments. In practice though some of these things are very hard to do in an MMO environment. And some of them have immediate costs. For example with no downtime how do you encourage a player to manage energy rather than just constantly use their biggest attack? How do you have engaging combat in an environment that has to deal with lag and the resulting uncertainty in character positions. Meanwhile having mobile characters immediately limits how interesting power animations can be. Solving these problems in an interesting way would provide a firm foundation for a game. Or you could...

2. Build the world first, worry about fun later.

It was fairly clear that they focused first on getting the engine and world working. When beta started the game world was in a reasonably advanced stage but the mechanics were still quite basic. It felt like they'd been farmed out to different staff members which really limited the cohesiveness of how the powers interacted to form good gameplay. In addition I can assume each developer had a fair amount of grunt work such as fleshing out powers or designing itemization. Faults in the game world, such as the chronically bad UI or massively undocumented powers are more obviously broken, and attract more fault reports, than global things like design weaknesses. This tends to distract developer attention without a core designer tying it all together.

However the two lead designers for this project were noticeable only by their absence. Major game mechanics remained unexplained and unclear even very late in the beta process. Information on design was more likely to come from Bill Roper doing publicity seeking interviews than any sort of interactions with the beta community. The "State of the game" posts which were probably meant to fill this function were often missing, outdated or more like annotated change notes than anything which would offer insight. It may have been that there was deep design work going on but the feeling was very much of a rudderless ship left to drift.

As an example the beta community was fairly unified (barring the inevitable fangirls trying to become the developers best friends) in strongly disliking the limit of having less than 7 powers hot keys. The precise number varied a little as some of the 7 slots were at times used for passives or required utilities but the end result was a very small number of powers. This led to heavily repetitive combat and the bizarre situation where you'd get powers due to levelling but be unable to actually gain anything from them due to not having any slots to put them in. This was almost certainly a result of the games console goals despite some impressive smoke-screening from the developers where they suggested it was due to university studies on the limits of memory. The valid argument that the study related to memorizing abstract information (phone numbers I believe) and that more importantly their customers are used to having larger numbers of active hot keys were ignored for months. Some people were even banned for being too agressive in demanding an answer. Eventually the developers promised to explain why a small number of hot keys made for better gaming. This never occurred and shortly before release they doubled the number of hotkeys in addition to moving some powers into passive slots. However all the powers were designed on the basis of having a very small number of active powers so this last minute change also had negative gameplay interactions.

There were quite a lot of bizarre gameplay decisions that really gave the feeling they were making it up as they went. For example in order to meet their "no downtime" goal they introduced an endurance pool that started largely empty and was filled by using a trivial damage attack (different by power set) to fill it before you could use your larger attacks. This added nothing to gameplay because you had no tactical options, if you had power you would never use your power building attack since it was very weak. If you did not have power you could do nothing but use the power building attack. The end result is it did not add any tactical depth because there was no choice and it removed the ability to do things like alpha strikes or resource management and destroyed the flow of combat. This system was modified in the last weeks of beta so that the power bar started full (enabling alpha strikes) but would empty faster.

The powers themselves were another issue. Because of the small number of hot keys each power set (eg. fire, single blade) had to cover all the basics but gained little from duplication. Thus each power set would have an end builder, a ranged single target attack, an AoE and then maybe some minor variations such as a charge up single target attack or a cone AoE. Almost all of the powers were about doing damage probably to support the "action-RPG" design goal. The end result however is that a lot of the power sets felt very similar in play. Zapping things with lightning, fire, force, bullets and such was ultimately all about a difference in special effects and minor game mechanics. And given their goal of total customisation people were free to cherry pick the best powers for each need reducing gameplay variety even more. The first problem was never fixed, the power list is actually far more limited than the number of powers might lead you to believe. The second was solved by making powers interact such that you were heavily encouraged to focus on one power set. For example a gun use power that made all gun use powers half energy cost but all other powers double cost.

The small number of active powers, similarity in the powers (and strongly DPS focused), holds and heals being nerfed for PvP balance and mob hitpoints being steadily boosted to slow progression and increase challenge led to some very repetitive combat. You'll spend a lot of time alternating between end builder and either AoE or single target damage to grind the opponent down. Mob AI and powers are likewise fairly basic. The much vaunted "run & gun" is largely useless because ducking out of sight simply stops your power regeneration due to the need to have constant line of sight for the attack. Strangely using cover worked better in City of Heroes where you could make the tactical decision to gain some endurance and let powers refresh by running and hiding.

3. Consider the beta a promotional tool

The Champions online beta was frequently labelled as a product "preview" and this felt about right. Despite the importance of balance in making the game enjoyable the beta was run in a very casual fashion. The game was up for very limited periods of time, even in the last weeks of beta only running for 2 sessions a week. Testing was rarely focused to any useful extent. Testing tools like being able to re-pick powers or level up in order to test power builds were absent for the majority of beta and then quickly removed or weakened when introduced. Things like introducing end-game content and then doing a character wipe 2 weeks later ensured that testing was much less useful than it could have been.

In addition the game mechanics were so clearly in flux, and developer communication so poor, that it was very hard to have a baseline to give bugs against. For example the might powerset was felt to be very weak, the passive defences too strong and a huge variety of other obvious imbalances. But without some idea of what the balance goal is meaningful feedback is impossible. It was further discouraged by the developers putting "powers are imbalanced" as a known issue that was in place up throughout beta. In many cases the beta testers could barely determine what the power was supposed to do since the only documentation was algorithmically generated from the power mechanics and generally incomprehensible. Heavy balance changes were put in at the last moment with no opportunity to get feedback or iterate on it. This process of power balancing will almost certainly continue into live.

4. Launch content light and expect to generate it live

This is probably the biggest problem with the game. The game has effectively 5 zones consisting of one city zone and four outdoor areas (desert, snow, forest, underwater). Levelling is done in a wowlike fashion with each zone having a sprinking of points of interest which often badly conflict with one another. Having an alien invasion, snow demons, a canadian uprising and an air disaster all within a kilometer of one another makes the environments feel more like a theme park than real places. Each location will have a number of quests of the traditional kill this, collect those and escort him type. These quests are the only meaningful way to progress as mob XP is very low. There are Warhammer style open quests but these are often imbalanced and the reward for doing them poor which combined with the bad grouping mechanics and shard design (no servers, multiple instances of the zone with quite low populations) means they're frequently laying idle.

In general to get to the level cap you will need to do pretty much all the quests in all the zones. There is some switching between zones, for example the city fills a small segment of levelling between upper and lower desert quests, but you are going to be spending a lot of time in these areas. Any characters after the first can expect to follow pretty much exactly the same path with minimal variation. Nor are the quests interesting enough that they avoid blurring into each other and people just batch processing them.

More seriously the game is missing 20% of the content it was meant to launch with. In theory the max level is actually 50 but the game will launch with the level cap at 40 and release new content soon after release. However this line was used before the development process was extended by 3-4 months which should have been enough time for it to be included. It is more reasonable to assume this content is only in its very early stages and not close to being release ready.

The end-game (well, not really since it's level 40 content) which might bridge this gap and stop bored people cancelling is at a primitive state. It was only introduced in the last weeks of beta and consists of 5 daily solo instances. These instances are featureless maps with a sprinkling of mobs which have clearly been rushed out. Doing 5 of these gives you one additional mission. The rewards from these missions can be used to buy access to one of two group instances or gear / costume rewards. It's almost completely untested and the solo instances are dull, involve a lot of travelling and have minimal challenge.

In addition there's no real reason to bother. In general you'll have all your core powers long before you reach maximum level. These powers can be enhanced with upto 5 points you also get from levelling. So your character is already complete. The end game content offers you gear which due to poor itemisation and stat mechanics is of minimal interest, especially since gear from questing is sufficient. You can also buy new weapon models and vanity cloaks which many players will have very limited interest in (how many cloaks do you need? most people will only want a single weapon model that fits their character image).

Itemisation is weak for a couple of reasons. One of them is the use of algorithmically generated names for both crafted and found drops. A piece of eye-wear (by icon, gear slots are actually generic) called "Energized Torpedoes" does not make you care much about the item. Most items will have a 1-3 stats on them but the influence of stats on the game are so indirect and obscure (and in some cases known to be minimal) its quite hard to care. This pretty much destroys crafting as well other than the ability to make bags.

In short people will game the quest system for rapid progression. They can't slow it down much because there's no content to support a longer levelling curve. This will quickly lead them into an end-game which has little interest, challenge or reward.

5. Launch with bad design decisions because you were rushed.

This is sort of the catch-all section. But it also reflects that beta feedback is pretty useless if the developers barely have time to glue the bits together and make the game minimally saleable. There has to be time for the "is this fun?" test before you release it and it seems a lot of games companies just don't feel they have the time for that. Anyway, some smaller results of that.

• Trying to balance PvP and PvE with the same ruleset. That just doesn't work. Blizzard are still failing for this reason and most companies can't afford to waste that much energy. For that matter don't expect PvP to make up for having no end game content unless your game does something really special in the PvP context.
• Remove release content to stock an in-game store when your game is already content-lite. Buying the box should be the price payed for the content developed at that point.
• Make a character creator which uses 3D objects extensively but has very poor texture usage. So the furries and robot fetishists like it (especially since everything can be made shiny) but trying to make a traditional super hero is very limited. And the 3D models are pretty crude.
• Low detail models. Many of the objects in this game are really basic. For example the jet used for transport or ships in the harbor are just simple geometric shapes. The wolves in alaska are almost painfully bad with their fur chipped out of fresh plastic. This combines with generally bad animation (watching an NPC talk looks like someone in the throes of a facial spasm).
• Highly derivative environment. From monster island being directly ripped off from the island of Dr. Moreau, underwater environment from various atlantis stories and city gangs ripped off from clockwork orange. It just feels really lazy and excessive. The champions lore clearly only gave them a bunch of uninteresting heroes to use as quest hubs... though foxbat comes close to having an actual presence, even if it is hugely geeky and comic-relief.
• An entirely underwater zone. It always sounds like a good idea, it inevitably isn't.
• The much vaunted nemesis system is extremely basic. Design the appearance of the boss, a text and power set and then have random ambushes by his minions and a couple of missions with that design applied to the mission boss. End result is not much different from running normal missions.
• The unity system, barely in place at the end of beta, is meant to be the end-game content. However in practice it's an awe inspiring piece of grind. Half hearted daily quests leading to two high level instances. And you'd have to run the same content for somewhere between 3 months and 1.5 years to gear yourself up.

Witty press people love using the line about how can google justify self-censorship and resisting the American government at the same time. But while it looks like some sort of conflict they seem incredibly different to me. In one case the US government is asking for google to give information it considers both private and possibly revealing personal details about its users. In other words its a privacy concern. In the other case its about google offering reduced service due to local laws and customs.

Is anyone hurt by the first? potentially, both as individuals and because the data will be used in the formation of laws to control society. Is anyone hurt in the second? Not really, some google is better than no google as long as you know the service is restricted, and I don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone that the Chinese government is heavily into such control.

I don't see the two as remotely similar, and I think google can easily argue that "do as much good as you can" is compatible with their corporate quote.