This doesn't even count the fact that optical media is still subject to the same degradation and bitrot that tape is.

And anyone who thinks electromagnetic tape is "dead" is naive or just ignorant. People have been predicting the death of tape for decades, and it's no more true today than it was in the 70's. Modern EM tape is typically rated for 15 to 30 years of retention, and as long as it is not over-exposed to moisture during storage, it has proven to be able to last that long: otherwise, the manufacturers would be out of business because the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies - the majority of whom backup to tape and send it off-site - would have sued them to extinction.

On the other hand, according to archives.gov:

"CD/DVD experiential life expectancy is 2 to 5 years even though published life expectancies are often cited as 10 years, 25 years, or longer. However, a variety of factors discussed in the sources cited in FAQ 15, below, may result in a much shorter life span for CDs/DVDs."

Q.E.D., you are, then, part of problem, and have no right to whine or complain because you can't be bothered to help fix it. Go use Britannica, then... which was found as late as 2005 to be generally no more accurate or reliable than the Wikipedia, with broadly similar error levels. Or how about Nature, who themselves state that retractions in their journal have risen ten-fold in the last decade, even while the number of submissions has only increased 50%. Because they're utterly reliable and the peer-review process can't be subverted, right? How many times was that now-discredited MMR vaccination study reprinted as golden gospel, for how many years? How many times has an outsider to academia and private industry journals made a stunning breakthrough that might have come sooner if only some critical bit information had been publicly available, instead of buried in a back-issue of a private publication? How many millions or billions of dollars have been wasted re-reviewing science that was based on something once taken for truth by the major journal in its field, only to later be proven false?

Like any other information source, Wikipedia will only be as correct and factual as the people contributing to it can muster, and without the help of subject matter experts determined to make sure the truth is told, it will be bottomed on the knowledge available; the Wikipedia, however, has a much larger pool of knowledge and experience available to it - if people choose to take part - than any journal or trade magazine. If people who have and can source/prove/demonstrate the facts on developing, highly technical or contentious subjects would commit to contributing as much to making sure the Wikipedia is accurate as they do to closed academic journals that no one but academics ever read, then we'd be in a much better place, with a better educated populace, as a result of access to true and up-to-date information, as opposed to last year's conjecture and common wisdom. For that matter, how many times did Britannica, for example, choose not to cover a subject - or not cover one in as much detail as was available - in order to conform to demands of governments and corporations, which do not affect the Wikipedia? Somehow I doubt they'd have ever penned more than a footnote - much less an entire article - about FOGBANK... oh wait, look, not even a footnote.

What would lead you to believe that a group of 10 supposed experts in a field editing at a journal are infallible and never make mistakes, but 100 or 1000 people - some of whom may also be just as expert, or even the same experts - cannot come just as close to truth and fact? What makes you think the scientific and history communities have more than a few dozen things they can all settle on as incontrovertible, accepted fact that no one can reasonably debate? Let me guess, you're the same anonymous coward that was arguing a few weeks ago that nobody can make money on making open-source software and that all FOSS sucks because only large corporations get anything done?

How about show me an established article in the Wikipedia - and not a revision someone is vandalizing - that is purporting something to be "fact" that is provably just "public opinion", and wrong at that... and I'll show you an article you should have just fixed, assuming you can demonstrate said fact from a reliable, neutral source. Otherwise, I'm going to have to conclude you're just mad because someone reverted your edits on an article when you tried to assert a claim on a debatable subject and couldn't back it up.

I'd also really like to see this always-accurate-and-reliable source of information you seem to be purporting exists. You know, the one you can always count on absolutely to be so factually complete that you never need to cross-reference another source of information and research - as any good science or research demands - because it's all-inclusive and has settled all questions of science and history... oh wait, that doesn't exist. The Wikipedia is meant to be one more avenue TO research, not OF it. It contains information and references, and you're supposed to do your OWN research, not use the Wikipedia directly as a source for it. If you can't be bothered to flex your intellectual muscles and judge how accurate the information presented is for yourself, and then choose whether or not the information is reliable enough to warrant further investigation on your own, once again, the failing is yours, not the Wikipedia's: no one else can help you if you're too intellectually lazy to do research, and no source of information is reliable enough to simply spoon-feed you without any chance of error. If that's what you want, I suggest you find religion.

No, the answer is not for a bunch of people to elect another bunch of people via popularity contest to exercise power over everybody else, especially including the people who didn't want the people who got elected in the first place.

The better answer would be for people like yourself to, instead of throwing their hands in the air and blaming everybody but themselves for the problem, to actually get involved in efforts to combat those doing wrong, such as taking part in Wikipedia's anti-vandalism process, as opposed to just crying about evil corporations, etc.

Remember, governments aren't interested in people, they're interested in furthering themselves and their own authority. No matter the intentions they start with, democracies evolve into tyrannies nearly without fail: Plato pretty well nailed it with the Five Regimes. It's one thing when participation in a body with a government is voluntary, but when you propose to place everyone under your "protection", whether they want it or not, you're a mob with mafioso leanings at best.

If this is an issue of genuine concern to the Wikimedia Foundation and their leadership, they can alter their policies to combat it. I don't propose to know how best or even if they should do so, but they have the ability to respond as they see fit, and there are undoubtedly options they could pursue if the threat is great enough. Let them and their governing body choose whether to subject themselves to some other governing body or shielding organization, if they wish to abrogate their own control and responsibility, but to suggest everybody should be de facto subject to another group of people making decisions for nearly everyone else based on principles they may not share is how you get the mess we have with most of the world governments today.

Nice fallacy, namely your assertion that commercial vendors actually do any work, especially after-the-fact... you know, like all the updates MS has made to the registry editor over the years, or the extensive CLI functionality, and let us not forget their impressively powerful and flexible search/scheduling options they built into Outlook. /sarcasm

You keep using that word ("you")... but I do not think it means what you think it means. I believe the word you're looking for is "I", because if your assertion were true, Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, FreeBSD and many others wouldn't exist - or wouldn't exist as they do today - with a huge amount of software being continuously developed by people who are happy to keep doing it so they have the tools they want/need to do what they want to do.

Maybe *you* kept getting ripped off because you were doing it wrong. Meanwhile, I'm going to go have drinks with my buddies from Redhat who get paid perfectly well.

No it isn't. It's pronounced "les-ter".

Source: I've been there. Also, this.

Mod parent +5 Sane and Cogent.

They ignored the Mechwarrior: Living Legends (aka MWLL) developers, its community, and everything that came before in every previous Mechwarrior game. I've got significant other dirt I could share, but will refrain so as not to burn bridges and put other people in uncomfortable situations, but suffice it to say they have shown themselves to be underhanded enough to threaten people's careers and industry connections if anyone in the know should dare to actually tell the truth about their behavior.

In any event, there has never been even a hint of a reason to believe that PGI has any interest in learning from the successes and failures of anyone else, that they have any interest in listening to or heeding the demands of the community - without whom there is no reason for their game to exist, and so this should be their highest priority - or has any desire to do anything but milk the Mechwarrior property - that they muscled a large team of devoted volunteer developers out of making a free game in because they were intimidated by their ability to produce high-quality work for free - of all the money they can.

As for Garnaralf's diatribe above:

The fact that it's selling means nothing. It's the first commercial Mechwarrior game - a series with hundreds of novels to its credit and a fan base spanning 30 years - since the atrocity that was MechAssault (aka MechAssFault or MechsAsFail) so it was unquestionably going to attract a large number of downloads (which means nothing. I presume they count my player account towards their playerbase, and I've never actually done anything more than register my user name) and user registrations. Making a game free to play also means nothing, and has no reflection on the goodness of the company making it: it's a viable business model, nothing more.

The LONGSTANDING Mechwarrior community (almost 30 years old now) has by and large shown nothing but hate and derision for 3rd Person Views, at the very least since Mechwarrior IV, where it was well known to be a game ruiner: the MWLL team patently refused to consider it; 90% of MWO's players, by PGI's own polls, said they did not want a 3rd Person View, and made it clear that if there was to be such a mode, they did not want to play in the same match as other people using it due to the fact that it breaks immersion, changes the tactical mechanic, and provides an unfair advantage to those using it over those who don't. So what did PGI do? Ignore them, implement it anyway, then lied about separating 1st/3rd person players into different matches, repeatedly: that's not the sign of a "good company". I'm not sure what else you're basing your assessment on besides the fact that they make a game of which you are clearly a player, but if anyone needs to put down the crack pipe and do a more thorough investigation of reality, it's probably you.

Where was PGI's social consciousness BEFORE a player's daughter passed from cancer that obviously resulted in a social media campaign that they elected to pile on to to improve their image? You *do* realize that they get a HUGE tax break for that, right? The amount of money a game earns for a charity by pulling on players heartstrings and offering them up something that took almost no effort or time on their part (did I mention I'm a texture artist with significant CryEngine experience as well as friends and professional contacts at CryTek? There is, maybe 20 minutes of texture work, *tops*, on that Jenner, and 5 minutes of XML to edit the weapons config, plus 10 minutes to commit it to the build) in return for that charity donation is also not an indicator of a company's goodness: how much of their own profits did they donate? How much did the owner and executive officers pony up out of their own pockets? How much is the company going to be donating - regardless of charities - to cancer prevention every year from now on?

No, without going into excessive detail or listing my qualifications (I know I have them, I was there, I was involved), I can safely say I know enough about the issue, the company, and the arena in question to know that PGI is not, in fact, a good company, which is why I, as someone who has been playing Battletech since 1989, who has owned every prior Battletech-related video game, and has even worked as a developer on a Mechwarrior title, absolutely refuses to install their game on my computer and lend them any semblance of support or approval, for their game, it's design, or their company.

One of the prime edicts of journalism is that you write for your audience, at a level your audience can understand; if you put math in it, less than 1% of the people reading the article, even in the NYT, are going to take anything useful from it besides whatever claim the headline or opening paragraph asserts.

In general, this means that for reporting intended to be consumed by the masses - as opposed to that published in specialized industry journals where certain assumptions can be made about the reader's education level - we write at a 9th to 10th grade reading level. There was even a small amount of noise a while back about one of Obama's speeches that was written even further down at about an 8th grade level.

In effect, this means no, you don't publish articles in the NYT or even WSJ that rely on what is, even for most college-educated readers, NP-hard mathematics that will make no sense to most readers and do absolutely nothing but confuse everyone else, thus failing to communicate the ideas the story is trying to convey in the first place and defeating the purpose of having published it outside of academic journals. You publish in the NYT or the like to reach and spread your message to the widest possible readership, not to reach the handful of specialists in your field who understand the math in question. He's trying to educate people and get them to think, sure, but that doesn't mean that he realistically expect any non-trivial percentage of the intended audience to possess the education or background to be able to make use of anything but generalities and concepts, as opposed to the fine mathematical mechanics underlying his assertion.

I'm better educated than most of my peers - in general, anyway - and quite literate in scientific theories and principles, but I'm also not an engineer, physicist or mathematician, and if you write an article that relies high-order maths to explain its premise, not even I am going to get anything but the gist: I most certainly am not going to grok it any better for the inclusion of math. Of my group of friends, peers and co-workers, only a very small portion of even that bright group of people would benefit from it, at which point you're talking about a readership that is significantly less than 0.25% of the population.

Q.E.D., no, articles written for general or popular consumption that are not inherently targeted at a narrow readership with relevant expertise should not be founded or premised upon the use of math to explain or convey concepts.

Because this is a valid, independent 3rd-party poll that can't be manipulated by the government, so its data *must* be relevant... right???

LOL... "muck about", he says, as if that is relevant.

At least Unity lets you create and publish games, and for free at that. Go ahead and "muck about" in CryEngine, get something like the basis of a game conceptualized, start building and importing assets and writing code. Let me know how relevant or useful that is when you realize you need more than $1 million USD per license for CryEngine and everything you learned "mucking about" has no bearing on development processes or standards in an engine you can actually afford to release in without being owned by a AAA-class publisher or succeeding in a record-breaking Kickstarter. There's a REASON indie devs don't use CryEngine.

Because otherwise, CryEngine has little to no bearing on developing in any other engine. How do I know this? By spending 3 years as a member of the dev team for Mechwarrior: Living Legends, as well as being a developer at my own studio, working in... you guessed it, Unity3D. After the MWLL project wound down, a group of us set out to start our own studio, and even with numerous, highly-placed contacts at CryTek, we *still* chose Unity for a reason: value, because Unity is actually affordable by us merely mortal developers without Chris Roberts-like bank accounts and industry connections and multi-million dollar Kickstarters.

I could release a game in Unity tomorrow. It might look like crap and have bugs, but I can release and publish a game in 24 hours. CryEngine? HAH, good luck with that. At best, it still won't work or look any better than my Unity game would, due mainly to the quality and quantity of art that I could produce, which the engine has nothing to do with, and the amount of code I could pump out, which CryEngine doesn't just automagically make better. If you've never *worked* with CryEngine (ala, more than just "mucking about"), you simply aren't qualified to comment about features being locked away or unavailable in Unity, much less things just working, because no matter the features CryEngine might let you "muck about" with, they're not relevant if you can't afford the engine license in the first place. Despite what the fanboys think, CryEngine is not some shining bastion of game engine perfection that can do no wrong: and it is a giant square peg that fits in a giant square hole, filling a purpose, whereas Unity is a little more like a bunch of legos - the starter kit for which is FREE - that, when assembled, fit a series of differently shaped, if generally smaller holes, and it fits them well.

I doubt anyone who has actually published a title in CryEngine AND Unity would say this is is really anything more than and apples and oranges comparison at best, as they are different engines with different strengths and weaknesses, and they fill different niches within the game development community.

Nastygram sent to custserv@games-workshop.com telling them what I think of their parsimonious self-aggrandizement.

It's one thing to know you're annoying, it's another thing when the people you count on to buy your products start flooding your inbox TELLING you you're being obnoxious.

After all, the FCC says that a complaint from one person is the equivalent of 50,000 people (or somesuch ridiculous figure) who are just as upset but didn't or couldn't send a complaint, right? In any event, I'll not be buying their products until they can stop acting like greedy little children who think they own everything they can lay hands on or claim to, and I'll be encouraging others to do the same.

Indeed! What's not to LOVE about the idea of building a multi-billion dollar piece of scientific equipment whose scale qualifies it for one of the most mammoth--yet still delicate--engineering projects in human history, which depends critically on the entire thing staying in one piece (usually built below-ground) and in perfect alignment...

in one of the most seismologically active countries on the planet.

Brilliant!