Why does the summary of this article, along with most articles on e-books, mention Kindles as if they're the only e-book reader out there? Are they really that prevalent? Personally, I love the concept of e-books but don't like the way Kindle is designed. So I have a Sony Reader that I'm very satisfied with. More publicity for the Readers, I say!
Except that Ballmer looks very silly in individual cases. Most of the time people see a person wearing a nice expensive suit, behaving adequately and giving speeches that, well, appear normal. So they can forgive individual cases of being weird. With Stallman, though, what the average person would see is a very casually dressed guy with a lot of hair and a huge beard. Very little about him would appear "respectable" to the average person and, like it or not, appearances matter in the real world.
While I agree it's possible that KDE will be rapidly eating into GNOME's market share, I'm pretty sure the Ubuntu community won't be the first to switch. And it shouldn't be. Ubuntu's implementation of KDE remains lackluster, even though I am using it myself. Still, it feels like Kubuntu never gets as much dev attention as vanilla Ubuntu. Distros like openSUSE and Mandriva implement KDE better into their distros.
I respect Stallman's consistency, energy and dedication. I agree with him on some points but these days I wish he could be as distant from free software as possible. Stallman is an idealist and a visionary. I'd much rather see practical improvements and results. I would like to see Linux adopted more widely and I believe that it should be getting improved from a practical standpoint. If it means non-free drivers or extra efforts to be compatible with proprietary software, that's okay.
Stallman isn't a great messenger for free software. To "normal" people who aren't involved with technology, he just appears to be a weirdo, and that sort of reaffirms the belief that all that "Linux stuff" is for geeks and weirdos. Stallman is a free-thinker that doesn't always even bother to conform to notions of politeness. I remember his article on BBC where he consistently refers to Bill Gates as "Gates", not once as "Mr Gates". Of course the latter would be more in line with today's polite writing. I understand that Stallman doesn't much care for such formalities, but again this does nothing to make him seem "normal" or acceptable to non-techies.
My real problem with Stallman, though, is that I view him as a hypocritical person. He mentions freedom at every chance he gets. Free software is free, proprietary is non-free, merely open source without FSF-defined rights is non-free, etc. At the same time, GNU policies don't much look like freedom to me. As seen here, Stallman doesn't want a GNU project to assist a non-free project in any way. GNU documentation, according to their standards shouldn't even mention most non-free software, shouldn't recommend software that itself recommends other non-free software. And the standards even say not to link to or mention sites that describe or recommend non-free software.
Those kinds of standards aren't about freedom. GNU/Stallman may view the existence of proprietary software as an ethical problem. It's an assessment I disagree with, but I can respect that opinion. It's an opinion that should, then, be supported with information and clearly showing the ethical advantages of free software, as opposed to "don't mention them" mentality.
Footnote: as for Stallman's political/ethical ideals, I don't think they're very compatible with today's reality. A lot of his ideas would be better off if all computer users had some interest in computers and the software they're using. I would prefer it that way, too. But the reality is that most people only want to know as much as they need to operate the computer, and that isn't going to change.
I actually agree with what you're saying for the most part. But part of the general criticism of Wikipedia comes because people on the outside see it as a single entity. Which is unsurprising. So whenever they see something bad/wrong/unlikeable, they are going to blame "the Wikipedia" as a whole. It's to be expected, really, most readers have never edited Wikipedia. According to TFA, the amount of active editors peaked at over 54k while last month the amount of unique visitors was 344m. Granted, more people than those 54k have ever made edits, but how many? 200k? A million? Even in that case it would be a very low percentage of readers, what I'm saying here is, to non-editors Wikipedia will be a single entity.
I see one big difference between Wikipedia and some other great collaborative projects like the Linux kernel, X11, Wine, Haiku, etc. For open-source programming projects, there's a fairly significant entry barrier. You have to know programming, you have to be able to figure out how the project works in general before you can contribute code. Essentially, by the time you can submit a code patch, you'll have learned a few things about the internal working, whether you like it or not. To edit Wikipedia, though, the entry barrier is much lower. If you're already reading Wikipedia, all you need to edit is the ability to write in whatever language you may want to edit in. That's it. So you can easily start editing without even knowing there are Wikipedia admins, without having any clue about the (by now fairly complex) internal organization of Wikipedia and its editors. And, of course, not knowing anything about the various "camps" of editors (deletionists vs inclusionists, anyone?).
As such, a fairly new editor to Wikipedia can go edit a few things and then be very surprised when they discover all the internal stuff, scaring them away.
And as a disclaimer, yes, I do overall think that Wikipedia is one of the greatest achievements of the Internet. It does seem rather US-centric, it does suffer from partisanship on articles regarding certain topics, etc., but on many, many subjects it's the best place for quick, all-in-one-place information.
Cursing or not, I can understand why people stop editing. I used to contribute stuff but stopped some 3 years ago. One problem is that Wikipedia has gotten very bogged down in its own bureaucracy. For making non-minor edits, there's the distinct impression that you're supposed to know a huge amount of rules and guidelines, proper procedures and whatnot. Then there's the problem with other editors that won't accept your edits as valid unless you can show them a citation they understand. Requiring citations is great, but if I'm making edits related to a fairly small European language only spoken in one country, what can I show? I can cite books or online resources written in that very language - citations that some editors don't find satisfying because they don't understand what it says.
I have fond memories of that one. On the subject of teaching and education...
One of my math teachers once showed me the problem. The teacher knew I'm decent at math and would occasionally show me interesting or unusual problems. The interesting part is, the teacher told me to have a try at proving the proposition of this problem, without telling me that it's an unsolved problem. So I had a good amount of fun trying to prove this. Of course, it's not like I could make a proof with my high school knowledge, but it challenged my mind and was a fun thing to do. And had the teacher told me right away that it's an unsolved problem, I wouldn't have had the motivation to think about it, knowing beforehand that I wouldn't be able to find a proof.
That was one of my educational highlights, though. Way to provide a mental challenge!
I'm still amazed by how part of the problem's beauty is that it's easy to understand the actual proposition. That isn't true for most unsolved problems, after all. Take the recently proven Poincaré conjecture, just understanding what it states takes some math knowledge, though it has a nice approximation in layman's terms. As for the example of the Hodge conjecture, I probably don't know half the mathematical concepts required to understand the problem.
I have a (PC) gaming-related site. To my knowledge, the amount of IT-expert visitors isn't higher than among the general population, but obviously people who play PC games at least see the PC as something more than just a Web access device. So, over the last 6 months, I'm showing
Firefox 37% IE 35% Chrome 15% Safari 6% Opera 5%
Note that Chrome's share here is definitely higher than its overall market share. Also, IE6 is also quite unpopular. Out of IE's 35%, IE8 is 13%, IE7 is 17% with IE6 at a bit under 4%.
This is a serious WTF. I understand their predisposition towards fixed release cycles, but we're talking about possible data loss here. Just about every standard I know considers bugs that cause data loss/corruption to be of critical severity, meaning that you don't ship with it. Files that are >512MB in size aren't even that rare today. They say writing to such files is suspected to result in data corruption, and I do not find it likely that the devs believe this to be anything less than a critical bug.
that I'm not the only one who finds this creepy. But what do I know, I'm one of those curmudgeons that don't use any social networking sites. I just really hope that they allow relatives of deceased people to not just move accounts of the dead to the Facebook Cemetery, but also to have them removed completely. Maybe relatives don't want the deceased person's posts and pics to be available to everyone forever. Heck, maybe the deceased person themselves wanted his or her account removed in case of death.
Oh yes, sadly, I can only say that I have the same experience as the parent poster. Most Word documents sent to me render with minor issues in OO. Image alignment might be off, occasional problems with paragraph indentation, etc. Usually I can live with that. Documents with tables that are at least somewhat complex though (nested tables, numbered lists within tables, etc.) usually come out really screwed. Documents I create in OO and save in.doc format get mangled way too often, that happens most of the time for documents that go beyond simple formatting.
I'm a happy Ubuntu user, I like having open-source alternatives and all that. But several months ago, I finally gave up on OpenOffice and am now using Wine to run MS Office (by the way, kudos to Wine devs, Office runs really smoothly). Ultimately, OpenOffice wasn't just being an inconvenience with its compatibility issues, it made some people I send documents to think that my emails are unreliable because my documents would often be "damaged" (those are non-tech people that I guess haven't even heard of OO). I am willing to tolerate minor inconveniences to support open-source software, but when its use makes me unreliable in the eyes of others, it's time to consider other options.
XP users will have to abandon XP for hardware support if no other reason. MS can just stop releasing updates that prolong XP's life by adding support for new hardware. Gamers will have to upgrade because of DX10. We all know game tech advances rapidly, it won't be that long until games that require DX10. And despite some expectations to the contrary, nobody hacked together DX10 for XP. Then there's hardware like USB 3.0, no XP support for that has been promised and MS can decide not to implement any to accelerate XP's demise. Then there's the whole issue of RAM. The memory limit of 32-bit XP started to matter practically some time ago, and honestly switching to 64-bit XP wouldn't make much sense, it has serious driver and compatibility issues. XP really is old and if people weren't "persuaded" to abandon it purely for software reasons, they'll have to do so for hardware reasons.
Internet as a utility. That has got to happen. Wireless access to the Internet provided free of charge, in major cities (at first). Much like radio. Accessing the Internet via some device would still be up to you, but the wifi coverage would be there and free. The bandwidth specifications would be sufficient for most regular users, while those who need extra bandwidth would get dedicated connections from ISPs.
The summary is quite wrong, though I do not blame the submitter. All English and Russian language sources that I can find state that supposedly Real Host, an ISP, got cut off. That is not actually so.
Real Host is some company that is running fraudulent operations and other crap, making use of the Zeus botnet. Real Host rented servers from Junik, which is an ISP. They're a small ISP connected upstream via the Latvian branch of Telia. And the story now is that Junik cut off Real Host's access and revoked the servers they rented. Real Storm itself doesn't appear to be linked to Latvia in any real way. They use an address in Kazakhstan as the legal address from where the IP blocks are leased, the botnet itself is being linked to a Russian group of hackers. And they chose Latvian servers to rent, which doesn't make them a Latvia-based group.
I'm happy with XP, too (for the stuff I need Windows for anyway) but I'm also happy that Win7 might be a chance to upgrade without getting a crap OS instead. XP is actually a good OS after the SPs, it's stable and it does stuff. But it's nearly 8 years old and that's starting to show. There's tech out there that XP simply doesn't support. I'd like to enjoy my games in DirectX 10 since I have a video card supporting that but XP doesn't support DX10. I'll want to get myself >4 gigs of RAM sooner or later and 32-bit XP can't and won't support that, while with 64-bit XP you get crap stability and driver support anyway, that's worse than using Vista. USB 3.0 devices will be available next year and it's still unknown whether XP will support that.
Fact is, most people who like XP won't be able to stick with it forever. Win7 is looking pretty good so far. Might not be a big step up from Vista in terms of the underlying tech but it does seem to be a modern, stable 64-bit OS with acceptable performance so far. And if Win7 fares better than Vista than everyone wins except the ideology zealots who just want MS and/or Windows to die.
At least Russia now says that the satellite isn't in orbit. Not that they're a neutral party, but they have somewhat different interests than NATO. In the absence of neutral parties with sufficient equipment, this confirmation may be as good as it gets.
Interestingly, the KDE developers almost said plainly that 4.2 is finally KDE 4 ready for most people and usable. The release announcement on dot.kde.org says that this is "a compelling choice for the majority of end users", whereas the previous versions were "targeting enthusiasts".
As for my own anecdotal experience, I've been running 4.2 RC and upgraded to the final build a couple of hours ago, and it's definitely improved. Fixed a bunch of rendering issues I experienced, Plasma is more functional, Wine-installed apps go where they should in the traditional launcher and the new power manager seems good. And yes, after I installed 4.0 a year ago, I actually felt as if jokes about Vista are biting me in the ass, I really wanted to use 4.0 but had to go return to 3.5 because 4.0 just didn't work.
So don't make other characters tell you to "press the A button". If you don't relegate the tutorial to a separate, optional, level, try to do it in an immersive fashion. I guess a tutorial can't be 100% immersive but it doesn't have to be such an immersion breaker. Say, I do find it silly when I'm playing a FPS game where my character is some elite soldier, and the game starts with an instructor telling him how move and how to use the scope on his rifle. An example of how to it better - Fallout 3. The opening part is essentially a tutorial, but, storytelling wise, it's a series of flashbacks. So when you're learning to walk, it's a flashback to you at the age of 1, which certainly makes more sense.
Also, choice of words is important. Half-Life 2 teaches you through what other characters say, generally, and the words are really well-selected on a few occasions. When you get the gravity gun, for instance, you're told to use the primary trigger to push or release objects and the secondary trigger to grab them. It's immediately obvious what you need to do, yet it avoids an immersion-breaker such as Alyx saying "press the left mouse button to push objects".
Very fair post, I'll go over some of your complaints briefly.
1) Too easy on noble (and lower). As in, without doing anything particularly interesting, you end up outteching the AI by progressively larger margins, and they don't have much of an army to stop you. At some point, you can just roll in with a small stack of gunpowder units and wipe out all the enemy civs.
First of all, levels below Noble are supposed to be easy. So that's fine. Now, you'd be surprised as to how many players are the really casual type - most seem to dabble at a level below Noble for quite a while, even after figuring the basics out. But Noble also isn't the level for hardcore players, yeah, it's quite forgiving. I'd guess from your post that you know a thing or two about games, so Nobble should get easy for someone as you quickly. You may think you're not doing much but if you're outteching the AI on Noble, it's a guarantee that you're using many game systems right.
2) Surrendering to Switzerland. A number of times I've been beating the snot out of a civ, and offered it vassalage, which it would refuse. I'd beat on it some more, then it would surrender to a random third party that neither of us are at war with.
This is in fact more of a design issue than an AI issue. The vassalage system is designed in pretty odd ways that can seem counterintuitive. If your enemy surrenders to a 3rd party, he's either at war with it (and the 3rd party has done enough damage) or that 3rd party likes the victim and doesn't like you much. It's supposed to be a big guy taking a small guy into his protection. But no, I don't like the particulars of the vassal system too much myself.
3) On Monarch and higher, the game makes these obscene superstacks of units for the AI. As in, there'll be 30 or 40 tanks or knights or whatever on one city, and 10 to 20 units on all the other cities. If a human is at the point where it can kill such a stack, he's going to win eventually, but it requires an amazingly tedious amount of time to do so, and the AI appears to be able to pull massive amounts of military units out of its ass, and apparently without paying upkeep. Or if it is paying upkeep, then it's certainly a bug, since it'll get even more out-teched since it can't afford research.
You think that's big? I've seen AI stacks of up to 100 units;) But here you are talking about one of the fundamental problems in Civ. It's not even an AI problem alone, it's a problem with how the game works. In war, there's a certain point where you break the enemy's main force (or take a crucial city) and it really gets much easier from there. At the same time, overcoming an enemy can become tedious. All I can say is, I hope a future iteration works around this someday. As for the Civ4 AI specifically, it follows the logic that at least its huge-ass stack might give you enough punishment. Huge-ass stacks have proven repeatedly to be the best combat tactic, it's just more effective. A good human will always have such a stack, and here spreading out would actually be weaker because the only thing that counters such a stack is a bigger stack. Yes, you can see the deficiencies of the combat system here.
The AI is paying upkeep, though, and it never gets free units (except at high levels at the start of the game). However, upkeep is reduced at higher difficulty levels and also note that upkeep is pretty low as long as units stay in territory, so the defending force never spends too much in upkeep costs.
4) The AI's lacking in basic tactics sometimes. It'll suicide entire stacks of 20 units against a trio of fortified machine gunners, won't use terrain intelligently (well, some of the time it will), doesn't use spies to take out critical resources (like a lone copper or horse resource, instead attacking horses in the tank era or a resource that I already have 3 of).
Some of that still happens sadly. But such extreme
Give me a better option. I worked on Civ4 and the expansions. And I think that generally, the right approach to difficulty was taken.
The AI is only going to be this smart. Fact is, most players actually play at below-average difficulties. But what makes Civ hard? Your competition, the AI ultimately. We all want a better and stronger AI but there are limits to what you can do. Specifically, it's never going to be as effective in using its units as a competent human player. Therefore, the AI needs more units to be competitive against a human.
For the Beyond the Sword expansion, one of the best Civ4 players out there had a contract to work on the AI. It was improved dramatically and, interestingly, the bonuses it gets on higher difficulties were actually decreased compared to the original game. Still, despite some great programming and LOTS of playtester attention to the AI, it's obviously not as smart as human players. So yes, higher difficulties have to give the AI some bonuses to compensate. Immortal (it's the 2nd highest) and Deity are designed for a very small minority of players who just need a challenge against all odds. It's not a level meant to be fun for everyone, just like Settler is a level specifically designed for people who don't know what they're doing at all.
The only other approach would be to make the AI behaviour smarter at high levels. But if you write a smarter AI algorithm, why leave it enabled only for the higher levels? Let it be everywhere. I strongly opposed the notion of having silly AI behaviour on lower levels. It can bite you in the ass. Higher levels may be warranted in being more aggressive, but not smarter. Because if you make higher levels smarter than you're at the same time denying lower levels these smart algorithms, which is a bad thing.
As a side note, BtS has a revamped "Aggressive AI" setting which is more like "ruthless AI". It's not plain-out aggression, it just plays a more hardcore game and expects a more ruthless human opponent.
Yeah, excellent points. Here's my take on what game designers should do and some clever tricks from a few titles.
1) Saves. 90% of games benefit from letting the player save whenever he wants. Some restrictions work in a number of games, but saving restrictions can be frustrating. As an example of where I enjoyed restrictions, Call of Duty 4. Checkpoints worked well in the game and mainly because there was a sufficient number. Checkpoint after an in-game cutscene, checkpoint after a big battle. If you die, you only have to replay the last battle or the last battle plus one minor battle before it. Throughout the game there were literally only a couple of places where I think checkpoints should have been but weren't.
Another example of limited saves - SWAT 4, an excellent tactical shooter. In fact, it offers no saves whatsoever during a mission but I found that I liked it due to the nature of the game. It's a game about doing things the slow and careful away in an environment where one mistake does usually mean you're screwed. That was well done.
Finally, one more way of limiting saves is to allow saves anywhere except in combat. That's usually okay, like in Mass Effect - nothing preventing you from saving after every battle or every three steps when there are no enemies around, but saveless combat is okay.
And people, use rotating quicksaves! Many gamers, myself included, fall to the sin of using only quicksaves to complete a game. I usually remember to make a "regular" save once or twice but that's it. The problem is, of course, that you may quicksave half a second before a grenade explodes under your feet, some games even allow you to quicksave by accident when you're already dead. In these cases, it means loading the last autosave, which is at the start of the level. So do what Valve does - keep two quicksaves instead of one so that when you quicksave, your previous quicksave is still available from the load menu. Given how straightforward it is to implement, I can't understand why so few games have the feature.
Out of recent games, Tom Clancy's Advanced Warfighter was one that I had to abandon because of its save system. It uses checkpoints. Sparsely placed checkpoints, in fact. Towards the end of the game, I finally got through a hard battle after my 4th or 5th try. No checkpoint! I go on and get killed by a machinegunner hiding in the dark, whom there's practically no way to anticipate other than dying to him. Upon seeing the game reload itself from a point before the previous difficult battle, I uninstalled it. And frankly, even getting that far was an exercise in frustration some of the time.
2) Include some kind of a hint mode for games. It ca be helpful to the more casual players. Allow players to press a button that will display a hint on what to do next, like Bioshock does. Maybe let an arrow point to where you must go next. Don't make the game hold your hand by default, like Oblivion does, but do allow the option. Back in the day when I was playing games with no Net access, I spent a lot of time wandering around the same place until I finally noticed what I was supposed to do. I still remember being stuck for hours in Half-Life.
3) The more puzzles make sense, the better. Designing good puzzles is hard as hell. If you have an action-oriented game, though, puzzles are supposed to be a break from the action, not a snag that players hit and get stuck for an hour. Given modern game technology, I like puzzles that somehow relate to what you would do in real life. Look at Half-Life 2 here, it uses puzzles oriented around physics which do kinda mimic what you would do in reality for similar situations. Bioshock also made fairly good use of common sense in puzzles (and combat puzzles), it's fairly obvious that fire would work to melt ice and that water + electricity = nasty.
For games that make more use of puzzles, it's a good idea to let you select puzzle difficulty separately, like Silent Hill starting with SH2. "Normal" puzzles there are mostly solvable with a little bit of thinking for most people.
Not exactly what TFA is talking about, but I dislike how the very real threat of asteroids is trivialized in the public mind. Every time astronomers discover a remotely threatening asteroid, anything that hits 1 on Torino scale, journalists warn of a dangerous collision that could wipe out a continent, yadda yadda, while further observation of the asteroid over the next weeks shows that there's no chance of collision. So the public hears these stories about asteroids at least once a year and many thus think that it's a bogus threat because, oh, whenever journalists warn of a possible collision it turns out to be a non-threat, so it will never be a threat, right?
Makes me wish that journalists would just shut up about any objects lower than 3 on the Torino Scale.
But if he wants to convince other people (and he does), rms should be a bit more thoughtful when it comes to choice of words. He has enough followers among the free software people,/. readers and similar. If rms wants to preach to the masses, he should talk in a way that wouldn't make the masses dismiss him as a nutter. Using a commonly accepted polite title in the article would only help his case.
Given that news articles are full of Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Ahmadinejad, rms could get over himself here. Of course he usually doesn't, which is one of his problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does the summary of this article, along with most articles on e-books, mention Kindles as if they're the only e-book reader out there? Are they really that prevalent? Personally, I love the concept of e-books but don't like the way Kindle is designed. So I have a Sony Reader that I'm very satisfied with. More publicity for the Readers, I say!
Except that Ballmer looks very silly in individual cases. Most of the time people see a person wearing a nice expensive suit, behaving adequately and giving speeches that, well, appear normal. So they can forgive individual cases of being weird. With Stallman, though, what the average person would see is a very casually dressed guy with a lot of hair and a huge beard. Very little about him would appear "respectable" to the average person and, like it or not, appearances matter in the real world.
While I agree it's possible that KDE will be rapidly eating into GNOME's market share, I'm pretty sure the Ubuntu community won't be the first to switch. And it shouldn't be. Ubuntu's implementation of KDE remains lackluster, even though I am using it myself. Still, it feels like Kubuntu never gets as much dev attention as vanilla Ubuntu. Distros like openSUSE and Mandriva implement KDE better into their distros.
I respect Stallman's consistency, energy and dedication. I agree with him on some points but these days I wish he could be as distant from free software as possible. Stallman is an idealist and a visionary. I'd much rather see practical improvements and results. I would like to see Linux adopted more widely and I believe that it should be getting improved from a practical standpoint. If it means non-free drivers or extra efforts to be compatible with proprietary software, that's okay.
Stallman isn't a great messenger for free software. To "normal" people who aren't involved with technology, he just appears to be a weirdo, and that sort of reaffirms the belief that all that "Linux stuff" is for geeks and weirdos. Stallman is a free-thinker that doesn't always even bother to conform to notions of politeness. I remember his article on BBC where he consistently refers to Bill Gates as "Gates", not once as "Mr Gates". Of course the latter would be more in line with today's polite writing. I understand that Stallman doesn't much care for such formalities, but again this does nothing to make him seem "normal" or acceptable to non-techies.
My real problem with Stallman, though, is that I view him as a hypocritical person. He mentions freedom at every chance he gets. Free software is free, proprietary is non-free, merely open source without FSF-defined rights is non-free, etc. At the same time, GNU policies don't much look like freedom to me. As seen here, Stallman doesn't want a GNU project to assist a non-free project in any way. GNU documentation, according to their standards shouldn't even mention most non-free software, shouldn't recommend software that itself recommends other non-free software. And the standards even say not to link to or mention sites that describe or recommend non-free software.
Those kinds of standards aren't about freedom. GNU/Stallman may view the existence of proprietary software as an ethical problem. It's an assessment I disagree with, but I can respect that opinion. It's an opinion that should, then, be supported with information and clearly showing the ethical advantages of free software, as opposed to "don't mention them" mentality.
Footnote: as for Stallman's political/ethical ideals, I don't think they're very compatible with today's reality. A lot of his ideas would be better off if all computer users had some interest in computers and the software they're using. I would prefer it that way, too. But the reality is that most people only want to know as much as they need to operate the computer, and that isn't going to change.
I actually agree with what you're saying for the most part. But part of the general criticism of Wikipedia comes because people on the outside see it as a single entity. Which is unsurprising. So whenever they see something bad/wrong/unlikeable, they are going to blame "the Wikipedia" as a whole. It's to be expected, really, most readers have never edited Wikipedia. According to TFA, the amount of active editors peaked at over 54k while last month the amount of unique visitors was 344m. Granted, more people than those 54k have ever made edits, but how many? 200k? A million? Even in that case it would be a very low percentage of readers, what I'm saying here is, to non-editors Wikipedia will be a single entity.
I see one big difference between Wikipedia and some other great collaborative projects like the Linux kernel, X11, Wine, Haiku, etc. For open-source programming projects, there's a fairly significant entry barrier. You have to know programming, you have to be able to figure out how the project works in general before you can contribute code. Essentially, by the time you can submit a code patch, you'll have learned a few things about the internal working, whether you like it or not. To edit Wikipedia, though, the entry barrier is much lower. If you're already reading Wikipedia, all you need to edit is the ability to write in whatever language you may want to edit in. That's it. So you can easily start editing without even knowing there are Wikipedia admins, without having any clue about the (by now fairly complex) internal organization of Wikipedia and its editors. And, of course, not knowing anything about the various "camps" of editors (deletionists vs inclusionists, anyone?).
As such, a fairly new editor to Wikipedia can go edit a few things and then be very surprised when they discover all the internal stuff, scaring them away.
And as a disclaimer, yes, I do overall think that Wikipedia is one of the greatest achievements of the Internet. It does seem rather US-centric, it does suffer from partisanship on articles regarding certain topics, etc., but on many, many subjects it's the best place for quick, all-in-one-place information.
Cursing or not, I can understand why people stop editing. I used to contribute stuff but stopped some 3 years ago. One problem is that Wikipedia has gotten very bogged down in its own bureaucracy. For making non-minor edits, there's the distinct impression that you're supposed to know a huge amount of rules and guidelines, proper procedures and whatnot. Then there's the problem with other editors that won't accept your edits as valid unless you can show them a citation they understand. Requiring citations is great, but if I'm making edits related to a fairly small European language only spoken in one country, what can I show? I can cite books or online resources written in that very language - citations that some editors don't find satisfying because they don't understand what it says.
Don't worry, the power levels required for planet-consuming black holes will be reached right on schedule, on December 22nd.
I have fond memories of that one. On the subject of teaching and education...
One of my math teachers once showed me the problem. The teacher knew I'm decent at math and would occasionally show me interesting or unusual problems. The interesting part is, the teacher told me to have a try at proving the proposition of this problem, without telling me that it's an unsolved problem. So I had a good amount of fun trying to prove this. Of course, it's not like I could make a proof with my high school knowledge, but it challenged my mind and was a fun thing to do. And had the teacher told me right away that it's an unsolved problem, I wouldn't have had the motivation to think about it, knowing beforehand that I wouldn't be able to find a proof.
That was one of my educational highlights, though. Way to provide a mental challenge!
I'm still amazed by how part of the problem's beauty is that it's easy to understand the actual proposition. That isn't true for most unsolved problems, after all. Take the recently proven Poincaré conjecture, just understanding what it states takes some math knowledge, though it has a nice approximation in layman's terms. As for the example of the Hodge conjecture, I probably don't know half the mathematical concepts required to understand the problem.
I have a (PC) gaming-related site. To my knowledge, the amount of IT-expert visitors isn't higher than among the general population, but obviously people who play PC games at least see the PC as something more than just a Web access device. So, over the last 6 months, I'm showing
Firefox 37%
IE 35%
Chrome 15%
Safari 6%
Opera 5%
Note that Chrome's share here is definitely higher than its overall market share. Also, IE6 is also quite unpopular. Out of IE's 35%, IE8 is 13%, IE7 is 17% with IE6 at a bit under 4%.
This is a serious WTF. I understand their predisposition towards fixed release cycles, but we're talking about possible data loss here. Just about every standard I know considers bugs that cause data loss/corruption to be of critical severity, meaning that you don't ship with it. Files that are >512MB in size aren't even that rare today. They say writing to such files is suspected to result in data corruption, and I do not find it likely that the devs believe this to be anything less than a critical bug.
that I'm not the only one who finds this creepy. But what do I know, I'm one of those curmudgeons that don't use any social networking sites. I just really hope that they allow relatives of deceased people to not just move accounts of the dead to the Facebook Cemetery, but also to have them removed completely. Maybe relatives don't want the deceased person's posts and pics to be available to everyone forever. Heck, maybe the deceased person themselves wanted his or her account removed in case of death.
Oh yes, sadly, I can only say that I have the same experience as the parent poster. Most Word documents sent to me render with minor issues in OO. Image alignment might be off, occasional problems with paragraph indentation, etc. Usually I can live with that. Documents with tables that are at least somewhat complex though (nested tables, numbered lists within tables, etc.) usually come out really screwed. Documents I create in OO and save in .doc format get mangled way too often, that happens most of the time for documents that go beyond simple formatting.
I'm a happy Ubuntu user, I like having open-source alternatives and all that. But several months ago, I finally gave up on OpenOffice and am now using Wine to run MS Office (by the way, kudos to Wine devs, Office runs really smoothly). Ultimately, OpenOffice wasn't just being an inconvenience with its compatibility issues, it made some people I send documents to think that my emails are unreliable because my documents would often be "damaged" (those are non-tech people that I guess haven't even heard of OO). I am willing to tolerate minor inconveniences to support open-source software, but when its use makes me unreliable in the eyes of others, it's time to consider other options.
XP users will have to abandon XP for hardware support if no other reason. MS can just stop releasing updates that prolong XP's life by adding support for new hardware. Gamers will have to upgrade because of DX10. We all know game tech advances rapidly, it won't be that long until games that require DX10. And despite some expectations to the contrary, nobody hacked together DX10 for XP. Then there's hardware like USB 3.0, no XP support for that has been promised and MS can decide not to implement any to accelerate XP's demise. Then there's the whole issue of RAM. The memory limit of 32-bit XP started to matter practically some time ago, and honestly switching to 64-bit XP wouldn't make much sense, it has serious driver and compatibility issues. XP really is old and if people weren't "persuaded" to abandon it purely for software reasons, they'll have to do so for hardware reasons.
Internet as a utility. That has got to happen. Wireless access to the Internet provided free of charge, in major cities (at first). Much like radio. Accessing the Internet via some device would still be up to you, but the wifi coverage would be there and free. The bandwidth specifications would be sufficient for most regular users, while those who need extra bandwidth would get dedicated connections from ISPs.
The summary is quite wrong, though I do not blame the submitter. All English and Russian language sources that I can find state that supposedly Real Host, an ISP, got cut off. That is not actually so.
Real Host is some company that is running fraudulent operations and other crap, making use of the Zeus botnet. Real Host rented servers from Junik, which is an ISP. They're a small ISP connected upstream via the Latvian branch of Telia. And the story now is that Junik cut off Real Host's access and revoked the servers they rented. Real Storm itself doesn't appear to be linked to Latvia in any real way. They use an address in Kazakhstan as the legal address from where the IP blocks are leased, the botnet itself is being linked to a Russian group of hackers. And they chose Latvian servers to rent, which doesn't make them a Latvia-based group.
I'm happy with XP, too (for the stuff I need Windows for anyway) but I'm also happy that Win7 might be a chance to upgrade without getting a crap OS instead. XP is actually a good OS after the SPs, it's stable and it does stuff. But it's nearly 8 years old and that's starting to show. There's tech out there that XP simply doesn't support. I'd like to enjoy my games in DirectX 10 since I have a video card supporting that but XP doesn't support DX10. I'll want to get myself >4 gigs of RAM sooner or later and 32-bit XP can't and won't support that, while with 64-bit XP you get crap stability and driver support anyway, that's worse than using Vista. USB 3.0 devices will be available next year and it's still unknown whether XP will support that.
Fact is, most people who like XP won't be able to stick with it forever. Win7 is looking pretty good so far. Might not be a big step up from Vista in terms of the underlying tech but it does seem to be a modern, stable 64-bit OS with acceptable performance so far. And if Win7 fares better than Vista than everyone wins except the ideology zealots who just want MS and/or Windows to die.
At least Russia now says that the satellite isn't in orbit. Not that they're a neutral party, but they have somewhat different interests than NATO. In the absence of neutral parties with sufficient equipment, this confirmation may be as good as it gets.
Interestingly, the KDE developers almost said plainly that 4.2 is finally KDE 4 ready for most people and usable. The release announcement on dot.kde.org says that this is "a compelling choice for the majority of end users", whereas the previous versions were "targeting enthusiasts".
As for my own anecdotal experience, I've been running 4.2 RC and upgraded to the final build a couple of hours ago, and it's definitely improved. Fixed a bunch of rendering issues I experienced, Plasma is more functional, Wine-installed apps go where they should in the traditional launcher and the new power manager seems good. And yes, after I installed 4.0 a year ago, I actually felt as if jokes about Vista are biting me in the ass, I really wanted to use 4.0 but had to go return to 3.5 because 4.0 just didn't work.
So don't make other characters tell you to "press the A button". If you don't relegate the tutorial to a separate, optional, level, try to do it in an immersive fashion. I guess a tutorial can't be 100% immersive but it doesn't have to be such an immersion breaker. Say, I do find it silly when I'm playing a FPS game where my character is some elite soldier, and the game starts with an instructor telling him how move and how to use the scope on his rifle. An example of how to it better - Fallout 3. The opening part is essentially a tutorial, but, storytelling wise, it's a series of flashbacks. So when you're learning to walk, it's a flashback to you at the age of 1, which certainly makes more sense.
Also, choice of words is important. Half-Life 2 teaches you through what other characters say, generally, and the words are really well-selected on a few occasions. When you get the gravity gun, for instance, you're told to use the primary trigger to push or release objects and the secondary trigger to grab them. It's immediately obvious what you need to do, yet it avoids an immersion-breaker such as Alyx saying "press the left mouse button to push objects".
...all software is free because, really, who the hell buys it when the piracy industry is so well developed?
Very fair post, I'll go over some of your complaints briefly.
1) Too easy on noble (and lower). As in, without doing anything particularly interesting, you end up outteching the AI by progressively larger margins, and they don't have much of an army to stop you. At some point, you can just roll in with a small stack of gunpowder units and wipe out all the enemy civs.
First of all, levels below Noble are supposed to be easy. So that's fine. Now, you'd be surprised as to how many players are the really casual type - most seem to dabble at a level below Noble for quite a while, even after figuring the basics out. But Noble also isn't the level for hardcore players, yeah, it's quite forgiving. I'd guess from your post that you know a thing or two about games, so Nobble should get easy for someone as you quickly. You may think you're not doing much but if you're outteching the AI on Noble, it's a guarantee that you're using many game systems right.
2) Surrendering to Switzerland. A number of times I've been beating the snot out of a civ, and offered it vassalage, which it would refuse. I'd beat on it some more, then it would surrender to a random third party that neither of us are at war with.
This is in fact more of a design issue than an AI issue. The vassalage system is designed in pretty odd ways that can seem counterintuitive. If your enemy surrenders to a 3rd party, he's either at war with it (and the 3rd party has done enough damage) or that 3rd party likes the victim and doesn't like you much. It's supposed to be a big guy taking a small guy into his protection. But no, I don't like the particulars of the vassal system too much myself.
3) On Monarch and higher, the game makes these obscene superstacks of units for the AI. As in, there'll be 30 or 40 tanks or knights or whatever on one city, and 10 to 20 units on all the other cities. If a human is at the point where it can kill such a stack, he's going to win eventually, but it requires an amazingly tedious amount of time to do so, and the AI appears to be able to pull massive amounts of military units out of its ass, and apparently without paying upkeep. Or if it is paying upkeep, then it's certainly a bug, since it'll get even more out-teched since it can't afford research.
You think that's big? I've seen AI stacks of up to 100 units ;) But here you are talking about one of the fundamental problems in Civ. It's not even an AI problem alone, it's a problem with how the game works. In war, there's a certain point where you break the enemy's main force (or take a crucial city) and it really gets much easier from there. At the same time, overcoming an enemy can become tedious. All I can say is, I hope a future iteration works around this someday. As for the Civ4 AI specifically, it follows the logic that at least its huge-ass stack might give you enough punishment. Huge-ass stacks have proven repeatedly to be the best combat tactic, it's just more effective. A good human will always have such a stack, and here spreading out would actually be weaker because the only thing that counters such a stack is a bigger stack. Yes, you can see the deficiencies of the combat system here.
The AI is paying upkeep, though, and it never gets free units (except at high levels at the start of the game). However, upkeep is reduced at higher difficulty levels and also note that upkeep is pretty low as long as units stay in territory, so the defending force never spends too much in upkeep costs.
4) The AI's lacking in basic tactics sometimes. It'll suicide entire stacks of 20 units against a trio of fortified machine gunners, won't use terrain intelligently (well, some of the time it will), doesn't use spies to take out critical resources (like a lone copper or horse resource, instead attacking horses in the tank era or a resource that I already have 3 of).
Some of that still happens sadly. But such extreme
Give me a better option. I worked on Civ4 and the expansions. And I think that generally, the right approach to difficulty was taken.
The AI is only going to be this smart. Fact is, most players actually play at below-average difficulties. But what makes Civ hard? Your competition, the AI ultimately. We all want a better and stronger AI but there are limits to what you can do. Specifically, it's never going to be as effective in using its units as a competent human player. Therefore, the AI needs more units to be competitive against a human.
For the Beyond the Sword expansion, one of the best Civ4 players out there had a contract to work on the AI. It was improved dramatically and, interestingly, the bonuses it gets on higher difficulties were actually decreased compared to the original game. Still, despite some great programming and LOTS of playtester attention to the AI, it's obviously not as smart as human players. So yes, higher difficulties have to give the AI some bonuses to compensate. Immortal (it's the 2nd highest) and Deity are designed for a very small minority of players who just need a challenge against all odds. It's not a level meant to be fun for everyone, just like Settler is a level specifically designed for people who don't know what they're doing at all.
The only other approach would be to make the AI behaviour smarter at high levels. But if you write a smarter AI algorithm, why leave it enabled only for the higher levels? Let it be everywhere. I strongly opposed the notion of having silly AI behaviour on lower levels. It can bite you in the ass. Higher levels may be warranted in being more aggressive, but not smarter. Because if you make higher levels smarter than you're at the same time denying lower levels these smart algorithms, which is a bad thing.
As a side note, BtS has a revamped "Aggressive AI" setting which is more like "ruthless AI". It's not plain-out aggression, it just plays a more hardcore game and expects a more ruthless human opponent.
Yeah, excellent points. Here's my take on what game designers should do and some clever tricks from a few titles. 1) Saves. 90% of games benefit from letting the player save whenever he wants. Some restrictions work in a number of games, but saving restrictions can be frustrating. As an example of where I enjoyed restrictions, Call of Duty 4. Checkpoints worked well in the game and mainly because there was a sufficient number. Checkpoint after an in-game cutscene, checkpoint after a big battle. If you die, you only have to replay the last battle or the last battle plus one minor battle before it. Throughout the game there were literally only a couple of places where I think checkpoints should have been but weren't. Another example of limited saves - SWAT 4, an excellent tactical shooter. In fact, it offers no saves whatsoever during a mission but I found that I liked it due to the nature of the game. It's a game about doing things the slow and careful away in an environment where one mistake does usually mean you're screwed. That was well done. Finally, one more way of limiting saves is to allow saves anywhere except in combat. That's usually okay, like in Mass Effect - nothing preventing you from saving after every battle or every three steps when there are no enemies around, but saveless combat is okay. And people, use rotating quicksaves! Many gamers, myself included, fall to the sin of using only quicksaves to complete a game. I usually remember to make a "regular" save once or twice but that's it. The problem is, of course, that you may quicksave half a second before a grenade explodes under your feet, some games even allow you to quicksave by accident when you're already dead. In these cases, it means loading the last autosave, which is at the start of the level. So do what Valve does - keep two quicksaves instead of one so that when you quicksave, your previous quicksave is still available from the load menu. Given how straightforward it is to implement, I can't understand why so few games have the feature. Out of recent games, Tom Clancy's Advanced Warfighter was one that I had to abandon because of its save system. It uses checkpoints. Sparsely placed checkpoints, in fact. Towards the end of the game, I finally got through a hard battle after my 4th or 5th try. No checkpoint! I go on and get killed by a machinegunner hiding in the dark, whom there's practically no way to anticipate other than dying to him. Upon seeing the game reload itself from a point before the previous difficult battle, I uninstalled it. And frankly, even getting that far was an exercise in frustration some of the time. 2) Include some kind of a hint mode for games. It ca be helpful to the more casual players. Allow players to press a button that will display a hint on what to do next, like Bioshock does. Maybe let an arrow point to where you must go next. Don't make the game hold your hand by default, like Oblivion does, but do allow the option. Back in the day when I was playing games with no Net access, I spent a lot of time wandering around the same place until I finally noticed what I was supposed to do. I still remember being stuck for hours in Half-Life. 3) The more puzzles make sense, the better. Designing good puzzles is hard as hell. If you have an action-oriented game, though, puzzles are supposed to be a break from the action, not a snag that players hit and get stuck for an hour. Given modern game technology, I like puzzles that somehow relate to what you would do in real life. Look at Half-Life 2 here, it uses puzzles oriented around physics which do kinda mimic what you would do in reality for similar situations. Bioshock also made fairly good use of common sense in puzzles (and combat puzzles), it's fairly obvious that fire would work to melt ice and that water + electricity = nasty. For games that make more use of puzzles, it's a good idea to let you select puzzle difficulty separately, like Silent Hill starting with SH2. "Normal" puzzles there are mostly solvable with a little bit of thinking for most people.
Not exactly what TFA is talking about, but I dislike how the very real threat of asteroids is trivialized in the public mind. Every time astronomers discover a remotely threatening asteroid, anything that hits 1 on Torino scale, journalists warn of a dangerous collision that could wipe out a continent, yadda yadda, while further observation of the asteroid over the next weeks shows that there's no chance of collision. So the public hears these stories about asteroids at least once a year and many thus think that it's a bogus threat because, oh, whenever journalists warn of a possible collision it turns out to be a non-threat, so it will never be a threat, right?
Makes me wish that journalists would just shut up about any objects lower than 3 on the Torino Scale.
But if he wants to convince other people (and he does), rms should be a bit more thoughtful when it comes to choice of words. He has enough followers among the free software people, /. readers and similar. If rms wants to preach to the masses, he should talk in a way that wouldn't make the masses dismiss him as a nutter. Using a commonly accepted polite title in the article would only help his case.
Given that news articles are full of Mr. Mugabe and Mr. Ahmadinejad, rms could get over himself here. Of course he usually doesn't, which is one of his problems.