nobody uses physical media anymore
"Nobody" is a strong word. People who pay $10 per GB for home Internet (sat, cell, or Iowa DSL) still use physical media.
there's zero reason not to stick the PC somewhere else and run an extra CAT-6 drop
Unless you're renting and the landlord won't let you modify the walls.
I don't like seeking after misery, so I avoided opening a Comcast account to begin with. They may own almost all the market, but there are still less obnoxious alternatives.
For you, did such avoidance involve finding a different city in which to work? Or did it involve dealing with sat or cell ISPs that charge $10 per GB?
"Fair use" does not actually make copying legal. Rather, it's a defense to the accusation of copyright infringement.
How so? I was under the impression that a defense to infringement makes certain forms of copying legal because it's a defense.
You still infringed the copyright
Then I must have misread the phrase "...is not an infringement of copyright" in 17 USC 107. What was it intended to mean?
Who the hell buys/uses CD's anymore?
People who are fans of recording artists who choose not to sell their music on Amazon MP3. For example, AC/DC and Garth Brooks are noted for their opposition to sales of downloadable singles. Other artists like the Beatles are exclusive to iTunes, which is fine if you use OS X or iOS but leaves, say, Android users behind.
[Online games and offline apps] are mutually exclusive.
True. Should I have instead split the two scenarios into separate comments?
An offline application can't know that validation has changed or there is an app update because it's offline. At that point, what do you do, toss out any data the user entered while they were offline?
In the case of an application with a substantial offline component, the server would handle the current version of the client and at least one previous version.
Even if I follow your approach, when the client and server versions mismatch because the user was offline they'll get the same pages of errors.
Granted, the user may see a few errors when server version n communicates with client n - 1, mostly related to the (hopefully small) schema changes between n - 1 and n. But ideally, this should introduce far fewer errors than if there had been no client-side pre-validation at all.
Boy, I hope your QA team has a large alcohol budget and the world's largest whiteboard for their validation testing matrix.
It's a bit easier when the testing matrix is a band matrix. If X is the client version and Y the server, the server only needs to gracefully handle a small number of client versions.
But now your client's validation doesn't match, unless you're going to go around and force all your clients to update. Maybe at gunpoint or something. Who knows.
Online games won't play unless at the latest patch level, for example.
offline use
if you need to do complicated validation why the heck are you doing it on the client? Just send it to the server
Because the user is using the application during a 2-hour period of having no access to the Internet.
and then let the server return an error
So your suggested workflow is just to let the user enter grossly invalid data for two hours then have the server present pages of error messages once a connection is reestablished.
Again, if this is the metric we're working on, I could just take it up one level and say everyone should learn JavaScript instead of Java
Hence the growth of Node.
I don't usually see server architectures and client architectures sharing too much in the way of logic code
Input validation logic and any logic related to offline use needs to be the same (or at least provably identically behaving) on server and client.
Various flavors of Survival Horror; from Alan Wake, that Slenderman game, Rust, etc.
I haven't played them. What do they add on top of the Alone in the Dark/Resident Evil/Silent Hill template?
Angry Birds
I played that back when it was called "Gorilla.bas".
There's also CtOS Mobile, which allows mobile players to engage with console players, a fairly new concept.
Apart from the fact that the whole concept of "console players" is an artifact of lockdown regimes, Pac-Man Vs. already did mobile vs. console.
Mass Effect 3 had some novel elements, such as the option to skip the action portions and basically turn the game into an interactive movie.
Isn't that what "FMV games" on Sega CD and 3DO did?
Also, 'annoyance games,' my term, in which I would classify crap like Flappy Bird and F*uck This Game, which seem designed to irritate the shit out of you.
Flappy Bird is a clone of Piou Piou, which is a clone of "Balloon Trip" in Balloon Fight, which is a clone of Joust. F*ck This Game is just WarioWare: each player in a split screen plays a one-button microgame.
the Rock Band/Guitar Hero genre was pretty novel.
They're also just Parappa with a plastic guitar.
Our OS who art in CPU, UNIX be thy name. Thy programs run, thy syscalls done, In kernel as it is in user!
