Re:And now, for your delectation and delight...
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Lost children is a convenient explanation. I'm sure the park can't actually use the technology to see which bits of the park are most popular, where the best place to put concessions, what ride lengths need shortening to maximize throughput or anything like that. Oh no.
It's to track kids - never mind that it tracks everyone whether they have kids in tow or not.
But if it finds a few lost kids then great. Who can disagree with that? Unless of course it might substantially lessen a child's safety.
Why? Well the parents will be more inclined to leave a tagged child on his / her own because he / she can be tracked. As a consequence there are more separated children within the park. Even an unsophisticated abducter could just grab a random lone child and make a beeline for the exit - once out the park the RFID is no good. A smarter abductor would remove the RFID tag first. A smarter one yet might use the RFID to find out the where the parents were in order to avoid them before discarding it.
In other words, it's hard to see how an RFID helps that much at all. It will help in your everyday lost child situation, but it instills a false sense of security at the same time.
Perhaps it is better that kids are chaperoned by their parents rather than tracked by chips after all.
Yes, but now try the same with a mainstream site. The figure is still most likely 90% IE and 10% Mozilla, Firefox, Safari + others.
What I find funny are those sites that throw you off if you don't have IE - often when the site works fine using a faked user agent. They must have a lot of money to burn if they can turn away 10% of their revenue just for the sake of fixing a few (or no) broken pages.
... is impossible. Unless of course their emulator / JIT compiler starts in 0 seconds flat and recompiles / emulates the native code in 0 seconds with 0 byte memory footprint and 0 disk activity with 0% affect on performance.
If in fact, their software doesn't all of the above things the performace will take a hit. And not just a small hit either since it's not just the app that has to be translated at runtime but everything running underneath it - the C runtime, any system libs & APIs, X windows / Aqua / GDI etc. If that's the case, you might as well stick with an emulator and be done with it, or use something like WINE where it is appropriate.
Comparisons to WINE also begs another question. What's the point of running your Mac OS X application (e.g. Photoshop) on Linux if it requires you also have a large chunk of OS X to do it? Is a Linux user meant to buy an OS X licence in order to run this one app on their machine? Is an XP user meant to have yank half a Linux dist from somewhere to support the GIMP through X Windows?
It sounds like a recipe for licence hell and lawsuits to me.
I'm sure it's wonderful. It's just too bad that MS can't even produce cross-platform compatibility even within their own product line. For example, Windows Mobile uses.NET compact framework while XP uses the normal framework.
Despite their names, they are not binary compatible and barely source compatible as you'll soon find if you try to port even the simplest app.
Once you take away cross-platform "write once" functionality, what was the point of using a interpretive runtime again? You'd be better off you use a C++ compiler, or use a proper runtime Java where "write once, run anywhere" actually means something.
Well it's like this. SDL sits on top of DirectX where it makes sense to do so. If SDL is running on XP or XBox and there are APIs (in DirectX) to set the screen res for example, it makes sense to use them. If there are APIs to set the volume or create surfaces or play music or read bitmaps it makes sense to use them too.
On Linux it makes sense to hook into X extensions to negotiate screen res, ALSA / OSS for the sound and so on.
Whatever is going on underneath should be made as irrelevant as possible as far as the game is concerned. Abstraction protects the game from being tied to a particular OS in the same way that the NSPR prevents Mozilla being tied to windows. It doesn't mean platform specific code is done away with completely, but the more that isn't, the easier it is to port.
After all, people like EA simultaneously release their games on 3 or 4 major platforms at once. I'm guessing they can do this because they have written their own cross-platform APIs for doing a lot of stuff - loading models, playing music, menus and whatnot in an abstract fashion. All we're proposing is an non-proprietary library that has building blocks for doing the same. Microsoft can't dictate that you not use it any more than they can dictate EA dumps theirs.
OpenGL is just a 3D (and 2D) programming API. DirectX is 3D & 2D, screen management, sound, controllers, music, networking - the lot.
The only way that it will match the popularity of DirectX is if someone produces an SDL on steroids. Something that matches DirectX feature for feature but in an open source and cross-platform manner.
Furthermore, I don't believe that Linux should not be the primary focus for this SDL on steroids - Win32, the XBox & PS2 should be. Why? Because obviously they're the platforms that games come out first. Get the games companies to program to this portable layer and it increases the chances that the port to Linux will appear some time after.
You'll be dumped on the Planet Vulcan and spend your first month skinning small animals, surveying for minerals and dancing for other players on a continuous macro loop. The space expansion will follow a year and a half later.
Einstein said "If I would be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find that modest degree of independence still available under present circumstances."
He was then granted an honorary membership of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union.
Writing a deskband on Win32 is easy. It's virtually identical to putting a bar into IE, except for what categories you register your activex object with. I've written a bar which runs in IE and on the desktop in this way.
The reason people don't do it boils down to - a) the documentation is poor, b) a deskband runs in the same address space as explorer.exe.
The problem of b) is that it is fine to put a light little control in there, but the bigger the functionality the more likely it is to crash and take the desktop with it. Deskbands are also harder to debug because they load up with the desktop so you're constantly killing and restarting the desktop when developing. Microsoft can probably get away with it because they have the QA (not to mention the Windows source) to ensure their deskband is stable, plus the fact that WMP is heavily modular using ActiveX so it would be easy to knock together a band that created a WMP control and connected it some buttons. WinAMP might not be modular in quite the same way requiring quite a bit of work to get it going. WMP is also available as an explorer bar in IE which is another variant on a deskband.
Anyway there is another reason that there are few deskbands - because c) users rarely bother with them anyway. Space is tight enough as it is. For that reason most media players usually shrink to a task icon which offers much the same thing anyway, but without the bother of ActiveX or running in the same address space as the desktop.
The NSPR offers similar functionality. Info about the NSPR is here.
I'm guessing by this stage that both the APR and NSPR are industrial strength libs to write cross-platforms against. Both have similar functionality because both underpin web servers (yes NSPR is used by the AOL/Sun iPlanet webserver, and not just Mozilla).
What it might boil down to in the end is which runtime's licence is most compatible with what you have in mind.
Will hardware and software makers actually make it easy to use the crypto?
If you use WEP at the moment, some operating systems will prompt you to enter the key. Not the passphrase, but the digested key. So even though I know the passphrase, I must type 26 characters of hexidecimal into my iPaq with a stylus. Linux is no better for wireless and the last time I looked required hex too. Linux is particularly lousy if you use more than one WLAN since all the dists I've tried only store the details for one of them.
It is absolutely ludicrous. XP doesn't do that and I doubt (though I haven't tried) that OS X would either.
Given that, it would not surprise me that of those who even know to enable crypto if half don't just give up or use MAC filters or no security at all.
My preference would be whatever standard they choose be mandated to use crypto by default - and by virtue of the even longer key length it will force software makers to improve their support for it.
Strangely though, I've never thought GNOME resembled MS Windows, or IE. Certainly it has influences of MS and some of them you can see (e.g. property panes, start menu etc.), but it has as many influences from classic Mac OS, (e.g. Mac like menu at the top in some configs, rounded corners, spatial desktop etc.). With that said, Evolution (GNOME candidate) is as blatant a ripoff of MS Outlook that you'd ever see.
So to me GNOME sits somewhere between the two.
To me KDE looks like 'flattened' MS Windows - the same behaviour, but with all basic and advanced functionality all shoved in your face at once. The control center is a usability disaster zone. Even the most polished KDE doesn't hold a candle to GNOME. I have Linspire 4.5 running in VMWare and even their best efforts can't make it as easy to use or administer as XP, let alone the Mac.
Not necessarily. For example Mozilla 1.4.1 might be more stable than Mozilla 1.7.2 but it doesn't contain a whole bucketload of security fixes that have happened in the last year (e.g. the XPI onload exploit, removing support for certain protocols). It wouldn't surprise me if hundreds of major and minor security fixes have gone into Mozilla since then.
And that's just one package. The same could be said for glibc, GNOME, XFree, CUPs, Samba, Apache - you name it.
Likewise, the kernel is 2.4.19 based and therefore wouldn't pick up any driver or security fixes that have appeared since. Perhaps Sun / SuSE have retrofitted critical patches, you're still left with a heavily forked and obsolete kernel used by no one else. There have been eight 2.4.x releases since, and already most other dists are on 2.6.x with a 2.4.x fallback if need be.
And perhaps the update mechanism itself is less friendly than other systems causing users to ignore it. It's fairly trivial to update SuSE or RH, but apparantly you have to type your serial number to update in JDS. Who is going to bother with that?
Also, JDS has a bunch of proprietary Sun code sitting on top for network deployment & management. Who's to say what remote exploits are lurking within it since no one has had the chance to review it?
So old doesn't imply secure. Of course the same could be said for Red Hat, but to be honest, their QA and hardware support is miles better, upgrading is easy, and their tools are open source and can be reviewed by any one.
... Red Hat or SuSE, both of which have frequent security bulletins
But anyone with half a brain in their IT department would know that is a good thing. And they should have evaulated those systems as a matter of course. I'm sure both companies would offer 24/7 support if you paid them for it.
I don't run JDS - I can't because it has the suckiest hardware support since Corel Linux and I wouldn't due the licence - so I have no idea of how good their security bulletins are. What I do know is that if there are few or none, that it is a cause to be extremely, extremely worried. After all, JDS is just an old SuSE with UI sprinkles and some extra Sun stuff. I consider it highly implausible that it is all immune to the issues that would face a older generic SuSE, or that the Sun stuff is perfect and bug free in every way.
Still, like you say Sun could be a tier 1 supplier for the NHS with an existing support contract. If so I wouldn't be surprised if Sun tossed 5000 licences at them just to drum up hardware sales. Even so, JDS bears every indication of being a lemon, so I'd be reluctant to sign a piece of paper committing myself to it, no matter how many copies sun threw my way.
... or a datakit you can often copy.mid files over to the phone and use them as ringtones.
They're easy enough to find, e.g. here, but a web search for your favourite artist / song + "mid" will find them quickly enough on plenty of sites. Some sites even make them available by WAP so you can grab them straight to your phone with no PC.
Or be a chump. Most of the lowest common denominator tabloids are filled with full page ads where you can download ringtones and wallpaper for 4.50 / £3.00 each. You probably end up with the same MIDI file that the operator found on one of the free sites. I very much doubt that the artist gets a slice of that so why hand out money for something you can have for free?
That's what it was - a glorified doll's house with little visible purpose to it whatsoever.
Perhaps by expansion pack ten or whatever it was a decent game, but the original which I owned was terminally boring - design a house, put things in it, and spend the rest of the game making your sims cook, wash, sleep and go to the toilet because they were too stupid to do those things for themselves.
After an hour of this tedium, the mind naturally gravitates towards ways to torture and generally fuck with the minds of your sims. I managed to get one balding fellow to marry three women simultaneously, most of whom spent their lives in tears because of it. What the hell do they expect if they live in Sim Utah?
Still, the torture isn't as fun as it was in the Creature's series where you could actually teach your pets to enjoy pain and inflict it on each other.
But anyway, back to the Sims. My belief is that anyone who initially buys the sequel is crazy. Why not wait a year for the dozens of extra expansion packs to be sold as a single 'deluxe' edition? By then it will also become apparent if it is as deathly dull as its predecessor or actually worth buying.
Not content with raping the childhood memories of fans of the original movies, he's now doing the same for fans of the prequels. All seventeen of them.
I never knew that, so thank you for your correction. I've got it downloading now (through some dubious IE-only downloader from Gamespot.com), so I'll see what happens once I've grabbed all 1.9gb of it.
Okay, I played the game for about a month so perhaps I didn't 'get' it all but I'll lay down my impressions.
First the good. You could download the game and play for free to see if you liked it. This is a very, very good thing. That the Star Wars Galaxies & others don't do this says a lot. There is also a Linux client.
The free period has some restrictions on what you can do, but it gives a good taster for the game. So I paid for an extra month and played during that period.
Additionally the play world is truly massive. You can wander around, find a spot by the river and start building a little village. Join a guild and everyone can start communal factories specialising in one thing or another. In theory therefore you have a little community and you could barter with another community, specialise in one particular thing and so forth. Still, you have to good at doing something and that means a lot of time is spent producing 'things' to trade with.
If you become bored by the constant grind of producing items you can become an artist or a politician. For example a politician can have laws enacted into the game (e.g. rotten flax becomes public property after 20 minutes). An artist can make sculptures that others can rate. There is also points to be had for leading newbies through their initial tests, so you'll find yourself being helped as soon as you enter the game.
As the world as a whole advances you can contribute surplus items to advance the world's technology. For example give enough of one thing and oil suddenly becomes available and with it items that require oil as a component.
Did I mention there was no killing? Yup the whole game is communally based, although there was a ritualised combat game (think Yuh-gi-oh) you could play, though I never did.
Now the bad. The intent of the game is that you wander the desert and set up shop where you start weaving, baking bricks etc. This becomes exceptionally tedious. Making anything is extremely long winded. Collect straw and mud to make bricks, dry bricks on a rack (made from wood you gathered and planed), make a kiln, pour water on mud to get clay, spin clay into pots, fire pots, use pots to collect water to make more pots. Look forward to this because this is your life. If you're not doing that you're growing flax, collecting thorns to make a flax comb etc. Did I mention it is tedious? If you're lucky, you find some generous soul has donated some equipment such as kilns and forges to the community. If you're unlucky you'll have to make them from scratch too. The tedium can be broken by creating works of art, or fishing or other pursuits, but this game is one long Skinner box. That's not to say other MMPORGs are any different, but ATITD turns it into an artform.
Now the world is massive, but it looks the same. The graphics are pretty sucky too. I'm sure the real Egypt is grass and sand too, but it could still be made more interesting than it is. Wandering from one end of the world to the other to collect seeds or fungus, takes ages and is also very tedious even when you gain waypoints
So all in all, ATITD feels more like a brave but failed attempt to produce a communal game.
It's hard to tell what the second version is like without downloading it (the screenshots are postage stamp size), but my opinion is that ATITD2 would be better if it included:
More eye candy to while away the time. More scenery, wildlife (bugs, birds, crocs etc.), interesting architecture, seasons, weather, clouds, meteorites, unique ruins in the desert etc.
Dump the skinner box attitude. A better approach would be if you could tell your person to make 10 pots and he goes about it automatically without the monotony of clicking through every bloody dialog to do it.
Throw in some cities, with interesting architecture, NPC traders, markets etc. to wander through.
Fighting. I know the game is communal, but Egypt still needs warriors. Perhaps certain parts such as the borders and coastli
They're all congenitally innumerate - some kind of inherited numerical dyslexia that they all suffer from.
Think about it, this study assumes a tribe can't count because they don't have words for numbers.
Or perhaps the reason they don't have words for numbers because none of the tribe can count and therefore have no concept on which to construct a word. They can't count and neither could their parents or there parents' parents etc.
I have a first generation Dakota Digital (that I bought while in the US) and it uses 2 AA batteries. There is even a normal hatch to replace the batteries. I have no intention of ever returning the camera so it will be truly recyclable as far as I'm concerned.
I intend to fashion a USB connection for it and throw the thing into the car glove box. Then I can take pictures when I go places even if I forget my regular (and expensive) digital.
1MP isn't great but it will be better than nothing.
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It's to track kids - never mind that it tracks everyone whether they have kids in tow or not.
But if it finds a few lost kids then great. Who can disagree with that? Unless of course it might substantially lessen a child's safety.
Why? Well the parents will be more inclined to leave a tagged child on his / her own because he / she can be tracked. As a consequence there are more separated children within the park. Even an unsophisticated abducter could just grab a random lone child and make a beeline for the exit - once out the park the RFID is no good. A smarter abductor would remove the RFID tag first. A smarter one yet might use the RFID to find out the where the parents were in order to avoid them before discarding it.
In other words, it's hard to see how an RFID helps that much at all. It will help in your everyday lost child situation, but it instills a false sense of security at the same time.
Perhaps it is better that kids are chaperoned by their parents rather than tracked by chips after all.
What I find funny are those sites that throw you off if you don't have IE - often when the site works fine using a faked user agent. They must have a lot of money to burn if they can turn away 10% of their revenue just for the sake of fixing a few (or no) broken pages.
If in fact, their software doesn't all of the above things the performace will take a hit. And not just a small hit either since it's not just the app that has to be translated at runtime but everything running underneath it - the C runtime, any system libs & APIs, X windows / Aqua / GDI etc. If that's the case, you might as well stick with an emulator and be done with it, or use something like WINE where it is appropriate.
Comparisons to WINE also begs another question. What's the point of running your Mac OS X application (e.g. Photoshop) on Linux if it requires you also have a large chunk of OS X to do it? Is a Linux user meant to buy an OS X licence in order to run this one app on their machine? Is an XP user meant to have yank half a Linux dist from somewhere to support the GIMP through X Windows?
It sounds like a recipe for licence hell and lawsuits to me.
Despite their names, they are not binary compatible and barely source compatible as you'll soon find if you try to port even the simplest app.
Once you take away cross-platform "write once" functionality, what was the point of using a interpretive runtime again? You'd be better off you use a C++ compiler, or use a proper runtime Java where "write once, run anywhere" actually means something.
He also stated there would be no Star Wars DVDs until all the prequels were done. George says a lot of crazy shit.
On Linux it makes sense to hook into X extensions to negotiate screen res, ALSA / OSS for the sound and so on.
Whatever is going on underneath should be made as irrelevant as possible as far as the game is concerned. Abstraction protects the game from being tied to a particular OS in the same way that the NSPR prevents Mozilla being tied to windows. It doesn't mean platform specific code is done away with completely, but the more that isn't, the easier it is to port.
After all, people like EA simultaneously release their games on 3 or 4 major platforms at once. I'm guessing they can do this because they have written their own cross-platform APIs for doing a lot of stuff - loading models, playing music, menus and whatnot in an abstract fashion. All we're proposing is an non-proprietary library that has building blocks for doing the same. Microsoft can't dictate that you not use it any more than they can dictate EA dumps theirs.
The only way that it will match the popularity of DirectX is if someone produces an SDL on steroids. Something that matches DirectX feature for feature but in an open source and cross-platform manner.
Furthermore, I don't believe that Linux should not be the primary focus for this SDL on steroids - Win32, the XBox & PS2 should be. Why? Because obviously they're the platforms that games come out first. Get the games companies to program to this portable layer and it increases the chances that the port to Linux will appear some time after.
You'll be dumped on the Planet Vulcan and spend your first month skinning small animals, surveying for minerals and dancing for other players on a continuous macro loop. The space expansion will follow a year and a half later.
He was then granted an honorary membership of the Plumbers and Steamfitters Union.
The reason people don't do it boils down to - a) the documentation is poor, b) a deskband runs in the same address space as explorer.exe.
The problem of b) is that it is fine to put a light little control in there, but the bigger the functionality the more likely it is to crash and take the desktop with it. Deskbands are also harder to debug because they load up with the desktop so you're constantly killing and restarting the desktop when developing. Microsoft can probably get away with it because they have the QA (not to mention the Windows source) to ensure their deskband is stable, plus the fact that WMP is heavily modular using ActiveX so it would be easy to knock together a band that created a WMP control and connected it some buttons. WinAMP might not be modular in quite the same way requiring quite a bit of work to get it going. WMP is also available as an explorer bar in IE which is another variant on a deskband.
Anyway there is another reason that there are few deskbands - because c) users rarely bother with them anyway. Space is tight enough as it is. For that reason most media players usually shrink to a task icon which offers much the same thing anyway, but without the bother of ActiveX or running in the same address space as the desktop.
I'm guessing by this stage that both the APR and NSPR are industrial strength libs to write cross-platforms against. Both have similar functionality because both underpin web servers (yes NSPR is used by the AOL/Sun iPlanet webserver, and not just Mozilla).
What it might boil down to in the end is which runtime's licence is most compatible with what you have in mind.
Thanks for sharing your elitist prick attitude with the rest of us.
If you use WEP at the moment, some operating systems will prompt you to enter the key. Not the passphrase, but the digested key. So even though I know the passphrase, I must type 26 characters of hexidecimal into my iPaq with a stylus. Linux is no better for wireless and the last time I looked required hex too. Linux is particularly lousy if you use more than one WLAN since all the dists I've tried only store the details for one of them.
It is absolutely ludicrous. XP doesn't do that and I doubt (though I haven't tried) that OS X would either.
Given that, it would not surprise me that of those who even know to enable crypto if half don't just give up or use MAC filters or no security at all.
My preference would be whatever standard they choose be mandated to use crypto by default - and by virtue of the even longer key length it will force software makers to improve their support for it.
So to me GNOME sits somewhere between the two.
To me KDE looks like 'flattened' MS Windows - the same behaviour, but with all basic and advanced functionality all shoved in your face at once. The control center is a usability disaster zone. Even the most polished KDE doesn't hold a candle to GNOME. I have Linspire 4.5 running in VMWare and even their best efforts can't make it as easy to use or administer as XP, let alone the Mac.
And that's just one package. The same could be said for glibc, GNOME, XFree, CUPs, Samba, Apache - you name it.
Likewise, the kernel is 2.4.19 based and therefore wouldn't pick up any driver or security fixes that have appeared since. Perhaps Sun / SuSE have retrofitted critical patches, you're still left with a heavily forked and obsolete kernel used by no one else. There have been eight 2.4.x releases since, and already most other dists are on 2.6.x with a 2.4.x fallback if need be.
And perhaps the update mechanism itself is less friendly than other systems causing users to ignore it. It's fairly trivial to update SuSE or RH, but apparantly you have to type your serial number to update in JDS. Who is going to bother with that?
Also, JDS has a bunch of proprietary Sun code sitting on top for network deployment & management. Who's to say what remote exploits are lurking within it since no one has had the chance to review it?
So old doesn't imply secure. Of course the same could be said for Red Hat, but to be honest, their QA and hardware support is miles better, upgrading is easy, and their tools are open source and can be reviewed by any one.
But anyone with half a brain in their IT department would know that is a good thing. And they should have evaulated those systems as a matter of course. I'm sure both companies would offer 24/7 support if you paid them for it.
I don't run JDS - I can't because it has the suckiest hardware support since Corel Linux and I wouldn't due the licence - so I have no idea of how good their security bulletins are. What I do know is that if there are few or none, that it is a cause to be extremely, extremely worried. After all, JDS is just an old SuSE with UI sprinkles and some extra Sun stuff. I consider it highly implausible that it is all immune to the issues that would face a older generic SuSE, or that the Sun stuff is perfect and bug free in every way.
Still, like you say Sun could be a tier 1 supplier for the NHS with an existing support contract. If so I wouldn't be surprised if Sun tossed 5000 licences at them just to drum up hardware sales. Even so, JDS bears every indication of being a lemon, so I'd be reluctant to sign a piece of paper committing myself to it, no matter how many copies sun threw my way.
Tactical deployment means finding 5000 machines in the whole of the NHS that will actually install and boot JDS.
They're easy enough to find, e.g. here, but a web search for your favourite artist / song + "mid" will find them quickly enough on plenty of sites. Some sites even make them available by WAP so you can grab them straight to your phone with no PC.
Or be a chump. Most of the lowest common denominator tabloids are filled with full page ads where you can download ringtones and wallpaper for 4.50 / £3.00 each. You probably end up with the same MIDI file that the operator found on one of the free sites. I very much doubt that the artist gets a slice of that so why hand out money for something you can have for free?
Perhaps by expansion pack ten or whatever it was a decent game, but the original which I owned was terminally boring - design a house, put things in it, and spend the rest of the game making your sims cook, wash, sleep and go to the toilet because they were too stupid to do those things for themselves.
After an hour of this tedium, the mind naturally gravitates towards ways to torture and generally fuck with the minds of your sims. I managed to get one balding fellow to marry three women simultaneously, most of whom spent their lives in tears because of it. What the hell do they expect if they live in Sim Utah?
Still, the torture isn't as fun as it was in the Creature's series where you could actually teach your pets to enjoy pain and inflict it on each other.
But anyway, back to the Sims. My belief is that anyone who initially buys the sequel is crazy. Why not wait a year for the dozens of extra expansion packs to be sold as a single 'deluxe' edition? By then it will also become apparent if it is as deathly dull as its predecessor or actually worth buying.
Not content with raping the childhood memories of fans of the original movies, he's now doing the same for fans of the prequels. All seventeen of them.
I never knew that, so thank you for your correction. I've got it downloading now (through some dubious IE-only downloader from Gamespot.com), so I'll see what happens once I've grabbed all 1.9gb of it.
First the good. You could download the game and play for free to see if you liked it. This is a very, very good thing. That the Star Wars Galaxies & others don't do this says a lot. There is also a Linux client.
The free period has some restrictions on what you can do, but it gives a good taster for the game. So I paid for an extra month and played during that period.
Additionally the play world is truly massive. You can wander around, find a spot by the river and start building a little village. Join a guild and everyone can start communal factories specialising in one thing or another. In theory therefore you have a little community and you could barter with another community, specialise in one particular thing and so forth. Still, you have to good at doing something and that means a lot of time is spent producing 'things' to trade with.
If you become bored by the constant grind of producing items you can become an artist or a politician. For example a politician can have laws enacted into the game (e.g. rotten flax becomes public property after 20 minutes). An artist can make sculptures that others can rate. There is also points to be had for leading newbies through their initial tests, so you'll find yourself being helped as soon as you enter the game.
As the world as a whole advances you can contribute surplus items to advance the world's technology. For example give enough of one thing and oil suddenly becomes available and with it items that require oil as a component.
Did I mention there was no killing? Yup the whole game is communally based, although there was a ritualised combat game (think Yuh-gi-oh) you could play, though I never did.
Now the bad. The intent of the game is that you wander the desert and set up shop where you start weaving, baking bricks etc. This becomes exceptionally tedious. Making anything is extremely long winded. Collect straw and mud to make bricks, dry bricks on a rack (made from wood you gathered and planed), make a kiln, pour water on mud to get clay, spin clay into pots, fire pots, use pots to collect water to make more pots. Look forward to this because this is your life. If you're not doing that you're growing flax, collecting thorns to make a flax comb etc. Did I mention it is tedious? If you're lucky, you find some generous soul has donated some equipment such as kilns and forges to the community. If you're unlucky you'll have to make them from scratch too. The tedium can be broken by creating works of art, or fishing or other pursuits, but this game is one long Skinner box. That's not to say other MMPORGs are any different, but ATITD turns it into an artform.
Now the world is massive, but it looks the same. The graphics are pretty sucky too. I'm sure the real Egypt is grass and sand too, but it could still be made more interesting than it is. Wandering from one end of the world to the other to collect seeds or fungus, takes ages and is also very tedious even when you gain waypoints
So all in all, ATITD feels more like a brave but failed attempt to produce a communal game.
It's hard to tell what the second version is like without downloading it (the screenshots are postage stamp size), but my opinion is that ATITD2 would be better if it included:
Think about it, this study assumes a tribe can't count because they don't have words for numbers.
Or perhaps the reason they don't have words for numbers because none of the tribe can count and therefore have no concept on which to construct a word. They can't count and neither could their parents or there parents' parents etc.
I intend to fashion a USB connection for it and throw the thing into the car glove box. Then I can take pictures when I go places even if I forget my regular (and expensive) digital.
1MP isn't great but it will be better than nothing.
A camera that eats batteries thanks to a colour LCD on the back can hardly be called environmentally friendly.