Comment: Re:needs to be entertainment. (Score 1) 204
... like arcade Gravitar. Where you can get wiped out on the menu screen.
Former Exec Says Electronic Arts "Is In the Wrong Business" 180
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
from the inspiring-internet-outrage-is-a-bad-business-model dept.
Mitch Lasky was the executive vice president of Mobile and Online at Electronic Arts until leaving the publisher to work at an investment firm. He now has some harsh things to say about how EA has been run over the past several years, in particular criticizing the decisions of CEO John Riccitiello. Quoting:
"EA is in the wrong business, with the wrong cost structure and the wrong team, but somehow they seem to think that it is going to be a smooth, two-year transition from packaged goods to digital. Think again. ... by far the greatest failure of Riccitiello's strategy has been the EA Games division. JR bet his tenure on EA's ability to 'grow their way through the transition' to digital/online with hit packaged goods titles. They honestly believed that they had a decade to make this transition (I think it's more like 2-3 years). Since the recurring-revenue sports titles were already 'booked' (i.e., fully accounted for in the Wall Street estimates) it fell to EA Games to make hits that could move the needle. It's been a very ugly scene, indeed. From Spore, to Dead Space, to Mirror's Edge, to Need for Speed: Undercover, it's been one expensive commercial disappointment for EA Games after another. Not to mention the shut-down of Pandemic, half of the justification for EA's $850MM acquisition of Bioware-Pandemic. And don't think that Dante's Inferno, or Knights of the Old Republic, is going to make it all better. It's a bankrupt strategy."
Comment: Re:Are CA's that stupid? (Score 1) 280
No, they're not that stupid.
But the standards around this aren't exactly models of clarity.
In general, *hostnames* must be characters. And DNS entries that point to websites should also conform to hostnames. But DNS strings can be *anything*. Yes, they can be arbitrary strings of bytes, as long as the top-level domain is valid. The null is legal. Keep in mind that the CA is signing a DNS entry, which may be used for something different than web security.
The problem, as actually stated in the summary, is in the clients. They think they have a character string - they don't. They have a byte buffer of a certain length, and the clients should not be using null-termination based software to process the buffer.