No, you completely misunderstood my message. The point was that caller-ID is a bad analogy for their new system. True "caller ID" behaves like the old e-mail header. The new system works, as you said, completely differently.
Cute. Still, I do wonder why they even advertise this as "caller ID" - after all, everyone knows caller id can be spoofed. Really, the existing e-mail header is the same as caller ID. In theory it says who's calling, but anyone dedicated can get around it.
Why don't they just call it like it is? A secure substitute for the "source" field of the e-mail header.
You're confused. It was the Dreamcast that had analog throttle shoulder buttons, although I've only seen a handful of games that exploit that.
IMHO, the best gamepad layout is the PS2. First of all, the extra triggers are good for more complex games. Just 'cause children's gamedevs are too stupid to realize "you don't have to use all the buttons" doesn't mean that the pad shouldn't make them available to overcomplex games. Second, the dual-analog symmetry is so much nicer than the lopsided dual-analogs of the newer systems. Why are the analog sticks in different positions on the newer pads? It just works so well for so many gametypes - FPS? Leftanalog=aim, right=move, 4 triggers to jump, duck, shoot, etc. and all the old digital buttons are available for weapon switching and suchlike. Descent games even play like a dream on those. Meanwhile, playing FPS games on simpler pads results in a severe button shortage.
OTOH, the N64 pad also has wonderful features. First of all, it deserves credit for introducing the analog stick (although that one was a little rough and wore down easy). Second, the 3-prong layout allowed you to play games one-handed - something none of the newer pads allow. For simple racing games like cruis'n this was a dream.
Still, I just want people to bring back the Space Orb.
My problem is more the shortage of educational puzzle games. Remember Lemmings? The Incredible Machine? Humans? That one with the bouncing lasers? Those games are gone now. Now puzzle games are twitch games like Tetris and Chu Chu rocket, which, while teaching the kids new tricks, teach them subconsiously and don't actually teach true problem-solving.
When I was a kid, educational puzzle games were mainstream products. Everybody played Lemmings. Now they're kids games, and rare ones at that.
Instead, many kids games have become evercrack-style treadmill masturbation games like Pokemon. Nintendo's kids games are fun and exciting party games and I love them to death, but they have damn little educational value to a kid.
Bring back _real_ educational games. I want my Sim Earth back.
A) its hard to find. I turn on the radio to hear RIAA music. If I could find indie music that easily I would in a heartbeat. Indie music must be found through websites, local independant concert venues, etc. Much less convenient.
B) it is hard to find what you're looking for. Indy music is, like mainstream music, often very bad. Worse, as the barrier to entry is lower. So, it takes much more slogging through crap. Also, indie bands are often worse for try-before-you-buy. I know what Soundgarden sounds like. On the other hand, Band X I only know from the CD they advertise for sale on their website. If they don't have free mp3s to download, how do I know if they suck? ALso, even just going to their site to get their music is a comparative hassle - all I have to do to hear a dozen top 40 bands (over and over again) is turn on the radio. To find a dozen samples of indy bands, with a worse signal-noise ratio, I have to slog through a dozen different band websites.
Which isn't to say I don't try. I have a few indy CD's from local bands here in Hamilton (a one-man-act named Sel-Fish, a compilation called Mimes Ruin Everything, and a really, really good jam-band called Thanatopop who I wish I could see again) but its really just too much trouble for me.
End result? I don't listen to music anymore. At all. I just live without it. Sucks, n'est-ce-pas?
In that case, they should have sued Monsanto for contaminating their seeds with unusable seeds. Unless the supremes want to go searching through and picking out all the seeds with little "monsanto" labels on them so they can reseed.
Or maybe those supremes could pay for new seeds rather than just letting the farmers reseed themselves.
Well, from a strictly legal standpoint, the US foundations are much more solidly built around freedom than Canada. Canada does not guarantee many of the rights the US.
It is a testament to the incompetence of the American voter and electoral system that they've managed to cock it up so bad.
Yeah, except he also posted it in a bunch've other threads. Its a troll. A rarity - a leftist troll, but a troll. Kind of embarrassing actually, as I agree with many of its sentiments. But its still a troll.
Oh, I know - we all go back to the days of the 1200 modem on the C64. I was just describing my first internet computer. I think you do mention the largest problem - Flash. All the other non-w3c webcrap you can live without - except Flash and Javascript, as a very large number of websites depend on those things to run.
Any modern ultralight browser will have to support those, and it won't be easy at all. I remember flash on my p166, and it wasn't pleasant. IMHO, people are right, Mozilla is such an extremely heavy program, it doesn't seem like the right framework to start from for a project with such ultralight goals. Besides, a Palm screen is fundamentally not the platform I want to browse a website with. As such, I would much rather have a program that butchers websites into a format I can comfortably scroll and navigate via Palm than a program that faithfully and accurately renders someone's overloaded website.
Re:Wow, only 64 MB of RAM?
on
Mozilla's Mini-Me
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Good god yes. Sometimes I think back and wonder where the hell all the software went. I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.
Whenever you look at an old fossil of a computer, remember this: at some point, that was considered so much power that we would never be able to find a use for it all. We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.
Screw it. Just set up a server system for a ".x" and revise the dns standard such that any requests for servers with undefined TLDs get.x appended to the end. Then require that all.x domain names have at least 4 characters. There. So I register foobar.x, and thus can sell "mywebsite.foobar" sites to people. Then, just don't make TLD's with over 3 characters, and the "true" TLD namespace is preserved and protected from the "x" namespace. The only exception would be.info.
I found that Star Craft was the best complete game, particularly for my discussion above: it allowed the players allarming creativity with ease-of-use in their bundled development tools. Besides that it had an excellent plot and good characters, which is very rare for an RTS.
Still, for raw play, TA stands head and shoulders above, I agree. If I had to pick a game that I would want to make maps for, tinker with, and play through the single player campaign, and enjoy every other aspect, I'd say StarCraft. If I was going to a LAN party, tho, I'd play TA - its just such good play, such polished, unique play.
Yes, it is beautiful. Why? 'cause it was written by a twelve year old who read a three page hand out her teacher gave her on "how to make a webpage", and she's been learning by tinkering since then.
People are not coders. People are users. Users want to just use things - not muck around with research, not have to learn whole new lexicons for each task, just get stuff done. HTML is practically the only pure-text system they seem to do that in anymore - everything else is covered in complex guis. To many people, html is the bridge to programming. With that bridge lost, they might never want to use anything that's not pure wzywig, and there aren't many programming languages like that.
Like it or not, HTML has become the learning ground for many budding computer users.
My CSS complaints came out wrong - what I was complaining about CSS was that originally, everything that could be done in CSS could be done in HTML as well. You could write proper, stripped HTML and use robust CSS, or you could just do the whole damn thing in ugly, ugly HTML, and still have access to the whole featureset. Now there are features that exist only in CSS beyond simply defining classes of things that already occur in HTML. So, newb html-only users end up with an incomplete feature set. If CSS was more intuitive this wouldn't be a problem, but currently it is far too cryptic to push onto an uninformed user. As a result, learning users stick to pure HTML, and thus are stuck with half a feature set.
WHile I have dabbled in Carnage Heart, yes, I played it, and yes, its good. Still, by "robot construction" I meant simple loadout configuration like in many Mech games, which allow more configurability than.. say... CounterStrike (Oooooh, I want the *other* rifle today!).
No, I mean Java (the full java) should be used as a scripting language while C++ code handles the heavy lifting. My problems with Java are twofold - a) it has some programming structure weaknesses to C++. Do they finally have templates-like systems yet? and b) it is slow. Fast compared to other languages, but still slow compared to real, native-compiled languages. When you're writing high-level logic and procedural arrangements, this is fine. But when people start trying to write nitty-gritty sorting algorithms and things like that in Java, then its speed starts to hurt. Hence, even though it is a "true" programming language, it should be used as a scripting language - that is, use it for all the high-level, user-created and portable content, and write the real system code in C. Every other interpreted language is used in this way, but Java developers stubbornly insist that anything Java must be *all* Java.
Core code = native, high level portable code = interpreted. Java runs everything interpreted. This is not a good design paradigm for speed-obsessed applications like games.
Funny, your first half of your message was the exact opposite of my problem - games have gotten _too_ non-linear. I find that in many modern games I spend far, far too much time wandering around lost, hoping for some indication of anything that will help me progress. If a game is an action game, then I want action. I want to move forward into the next room and fight something exciting. Not wander around retracing my steps hoping to find something I missed because I've exausted all the possible action in the region.
IMHO, if gamedevs want to innovate, include more easy to use design tools within the game. Either as part of the gameplay (robot construction kits between missions) or outside (a nice, easy map editor for making deathmatch maps).
Star Craft had the best of this IMHO - the gameplay allows players to be very creative, and the mapping tool was easy to use, polished, and powerful enough for most amateurs (hardcore modders preferred Total Annihilation, as they should).
As networking gets better and the industry moves more towards easy design tools due to the insane effort needed to make modern game content, I expect to see more games like Second Life, where the player is surrounded and embellished in player-generated content from his peers.
IMHO, I want to see multiplayer online games where all you need to mod is patience, webspace to host, and imagination (and no, relying on text-editors and consoles are not acceptable options).
Excuse me, but can they stop overdesigning HTML? Its a freaking pseudo-layout language. The whole beauty of it is that complete newbs can learn to text-edit it. Now, with all the crufty front matter, its impossible to hand-write html that will pass a verifier. Many of the more useful layout features that don't have anything to do with style classes are being put into css instead of html proper. HTML is a dead simple concept, and as such should be a newbie tool. Instead, its just getting increasingly baroque. It really doesn't need more crap.
Now, the http system itself - that could do with some upgrades. More support for "push" content is what it needs - like slashdot telling _me_ when there is new news so my browser can refresh, and sending me a diff instead of the full new page. Or support for distributed file hosting. Or some way to recieve HTTP requests from behind a NAT (even if it requires an external name server to help you along) without forwarding ports to yourself (if thats at all possible). My knowledge of network topology is limited at best, but if I can get ICQ messages while behind a nat, why can't I serve HTML? Its still just receiving unrequested data - messages in one case, requests for content in the other.
There's only one catch: then it'd be Java. And Java, for all my experience in it, stinks. Its a poor and incomplete copy of C++ on a virtual machine. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it has this tendency to be used as a programming language instead of as a scripting language. As a scripting language it is fast, robust, and powerful. As a programming language it looks like crap next to C++.
Python coders at least know that Python is slow as shit, so if they need to do anything fast, they code it in C and expose hooks to Python. Java people don't tend to be as good at that.
Well, the PC gaming industry is in an unfortunate rut - because of the incredibly huge amount of wheel-reinventing it takes to make a game, the cost of development has risen to astronomical levels. While MS can't help with the labour it takes to make an acceptable model these days, they can try and expand into the engine and middleware level, taking some of the programming difficulty out.
Of course, the heterogeneity of hardware in PCs is one of the cheif draws, in my opinion. While the mainstream blockbusters focus on keyboard and mouse, there are extensive lists of games focused on flightsticks, VR headsets, and other equipment.
Still - this might be a good example for Linux gamedevs to follow - we need a single-package distribution of a gamedev platform to put all the Linux crap together. Right now its all over the place, and each platform has a half-assed implementation of each other platform. O.S. games are absolutely terrible at supporting joysticks, for example.
My wet dream is a real, full-featured, modern O.S. middleware gaming engine. -ogg and s3m for music, a stripped-down python interpreter for script, ogl for 3d, semi-transparent networking, and in-engine design tools, and a nice auto-downloading filesystem using http references right in the package names so downloading is from the package-maker and not bogging down the server on which you're playing.
1) working from behind a standard router is good, as you say. Any basic NAT will block most attacks.
2) you outline a problem - using anything but windows update for updating a machine is the domain of super-l33t windows geeks. Not normal people. I know my way around a windows box very very well, but trying to update anything on a win box without the updater I find nearly impossible. Yes, there are admin downloads, but I find them outright scary to slog through.
IMHO, they need something simpler - 2 things. a) a way to generate an updater CD to re-apply all windows update patches currently installed on your PC (for when you wipe) and b) up-to-date updater CD ISO's available to download for each currently supported MS OS for when you need to set up a friends computer. I recently set up a friends '98 box and it was a headache - a nice "download this disk and burn it for patching" that I could launch from XP would be ideal. If they're concerned about bandwidth, throw some of their mass of coders to make an MS torrent-a-like for said ISOs.
While I enjoyed Conker, the game helped me recognise something about Rare: I don't really enjoy their games. While often clever and interesting, I think they often turn out to be not really very much fun.
Conker is a neat game on the surface, but the problems gradually chased me away: it pushed the hardware too hard, making the game choppy and ugly (a problem that all the Rare games seem to suffer from). It was just plain ugly (again, common Rare problem) and the gameplay was painfully frustrating and often very slow. Slightly convoluted controls, slightly sticky view angles, other frustrating, clumsy little features. Thinking back to Diddy Kong racing and Golden Eye, I see the same problems.
Of course, ymmv - I personally find the continued popularity of Goldeneye utterly perplexing for what I find to be a mediocre - if groundbreaking - FPS. Dreamcast's Outtrigger stilll stands out to me as the best console FPS ever. Goldeneye is frustratingly painful in comparison. To me Goldeneye is the Wolfenstein of the console FPS world - yeah, it was the first, but I never want to touch it again.
Now lets be realistic - Rare's games are only really popular because of their groundbreaking natures and their hype. Donkey Kong Country (a very hyped game) for being the first large-scale rendered-graphics platformer, Diddy Racing (another hyped game) for being an adventure-kart hybrid, and Goldeneye for being the first console FPS. That, and they're always frustrating, and always very very long.
Of course, this is the perfect element for making games *memorable* - they break new ground, so people pick them up. They take forever, so the players pour lots of time into them. Also, they're frustrating, so the players really get emotionally involved in trying to succeed. This makes the games get carved into the mass psyche of players. I've gotten lost in many Rare titles. The games are such that your life gets sucked into them, so of course you become attached. No wonder everyone loves them so much.
But the fact I think about when I think back to them is: did I actually *enjoy* playing them? All too often, the answer is, well, no. They were more of a habit and a task, with small rewards to keep me going. But rarely actually fun. Sure, they have their moments, but they tend to be short and fleeting rewards for endless perseverance.
Other players may have different opinions, but I've come to mine, and I'm happy with it. Microsoft can have them.
Constant aspect ratio. You don't have to remake your posters/flyers depending on what sheet you intend to print on. 11/17 != 8.5/11. It also makes shipping easier. Basically the only reason to stick with imperial measurements is inertia, as always.
Actually, my understanding was they already had most of those things, which have since been blown up and will be rebuilt by contractors. For example - Iraq apparently still has a functioning GSM network. Yet somehow, the US has contracted a Bell subsidiary to build a new cell network in Iraq. Yay for looting the treasury and building new monopolies for the future of Iraq.
Exactly - although I'm certain any gamepad for it will be able to bind to keyboard keys. Gravis has been doing that since the 90s. Although I might prefer a trackball just so I can play in my lap. While I don't have the skillz myself, I've seen people mouseaim with a trackball as well as I can with a mouse, so I know its doable.
And don't stop at neolithic Half-Life - this thing could do UT.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you completely misunderstood my message. The point was that caller-ID is a bad analogy for their new system. True "caller ID" behaves like the old e-mail header. The new system works, as you said, completely differently.
Cute. Still, I do wonder why they even advertise this as "caller ID" - after all, everyone knows caller id can be spoofed. Really, the existing e-mail header is the same as caller ID. In theory it says who's calling, but anyone dedicated can get around it.
Why don't they just call it like it is? A secure substitute for the "source" field of the e-mail header.
You're confused. It was the Dreamcast that had analog throttle shoulder buttons, although I've only seen a handful of games that exploit that.
IMHO, the best gamepad layout is the PS2. First of all, the extra triggers are good for more complex games. Just 'cause children's gamedevs are too stupid to realize "you don't have to use all the buttons" doesn't mean that the pad shouldn't make them available to overcomplex games. Second, the dual-analog symmetry is so much nicer than the lopsided dual-analogs of the newer systems. Why are the analog sticks in different positions on the newer pads? It just works so well for so many gametypes - FPS? Leftanalog=aim, right=move, 4 triggers to jump, duck, shoot, etc. and all the old digital buttons are available for weapon switching and suchlike. Descent games even play like a dream on those. Meanwhile, playing FPS games on simpler pads results in a severe button shortage.
OTOH, the N64 pad also has wonderful features. First of all, it deserves credit for introducing the analog stick (although that one was a little rough and wore down easy). Second, the 3-prong layout allowed you to play games one-handed - something none of the newer pads allow. For simple racing games like cruis'n this was a dream.
Still, I just want people to bring back the Space Orb.
My problem is more the shortage of educational puzzle games. Remember Lemmings? The Incredible Machine? Humans? That one with the bouncing lasers? Those games are gone now. Now puzzle games are twitch games like Tetris and Chu Chu rocket, which, while teaching the kids new tricks, teach them subconsiously and don't actually teach true problem-solving.
When I was a kid, educational puzzle games were mainstream products. Everybody played Lemmings. Now they're kids games, and rare ones at that.
Instead, many kids games have become evercrack-style treadmill masturbation games like Pokemon. Nintendo's kids games are fun and exciting party games and I love them to death, but they have damn little educational value to a kid.
Bring back _real_ educational games. I want my Sim Earth back.
The problem is twofold.
A) its hard to find. I turn on the radio to hear RIAA music. If I could find indie music that easily I would in a heartbeat. Indie music must be found through websites, local independant concert venues, etc. Much less convenient.
B) it is hard to find what you're looking for. Indy music is, like mainstream music, often very bad. Worse, as the barrier to entry is lower. So, it takes much more slogging through crap. Also, indie bands are often worse for try-before-you-buy. I know what Soundgarden sounds like. On the other hand, Band X I only know from the CD they advertise for sale on their website. If they don't have free mp3s to download, how do I know if they suck? ALso, even just going to their site to get their music is a comparative hassle - all I have to do to hear a dozen top 40 bands (over and over again) is turn on the radio. To find a dozen samples of indy bands, with a worse signal-noise ratio, I have to slog through a dozen different band websites.
Which isn't to say I don't try. I have a few indy CD's from local bands here in Hamilton (a one-man-act named Sel-Fish, a compilation called Mimes Ruin Everything, and a really, really good jam-band called Thanatopop who I wish I could see again) but its really just too much trouble for me.
End result? I don't listen to music anymore. At all. I just live without it. Sucks, n'est-ce-pas?
In that case, they should have sued Monsanto for contaminating their seeds with unusable seeds. Unless the supremes want to go searching through and picking out all the seeds with little "monsanto" labels on them so they can reseed.
Or maybe those supremes could pay for new seeds rather than just letting the farmers reseed themselves.
Well, from a strictly legal standpoint, the US foundations are much more solidly built around freedom than Canada. Canada does not guarantee many of the rights the US.
It is a testament to the incompetence of the American voter and electoral system that they've managed to cock it up so bad.
Yeah, except he also posted it in a bunch've other threads. Its a troll. A rarity - a leftist troll, but a troll. Kind of embarrassing actually, as I agree with many of its sentiments. But its still a troll.
Oh, I know - we all go back to the days of the 1200 modem on the C64. I was just describing my first internet computer. I think you do mention the largest problem - Flash. All the other non-w3c webcrap you can live without - except Flash and Javascript, as a very large number of websites depend on those things to run.
Any modern ultralight browser will have to support those, and it won't be easy at all. I remember flash on my p166, and it wasn't pleasant. IMHO, people are right, Mozilla is such an extremely heavy program, it doesn't seem like the right framework to start from for a project with such ultralight goals. Besides, a Palm screen is fundamentally not the platform I want to browse a website with. As such, I would much rather have a program that butchers websites into a format I can comfortably scroll and navigate via Palm than a program that faithfully and accurately renders someone's overloaded website.
Good god yes. Sometimes I think back and wonder where the hell all the software went. I browsed the internet with Windows 3.1, trumpet Winsock, and Netscape on my 486 DX/66 that had a screaming 16 megs of ram.
Whenever you look at an old fossil of a computer, remember this: at some point, that was considered so much power that we would never be able to find a use for it all. We can't even blame MS - Linux gear is just as bloated.
Screw it. Just set up a server system for a ".x" and revise the dns standard such that any requests for servers with undefined TLDs get .x appended to the end. Then require that all .x domain names have at least 4 characters. There. So I register foobar.x, and thus can sell "mywebsite.foobar" sites to people. Then, just don't make TLD's with over 3 characters, and the "true" TLD namespace is preserved and protected from the "x" namespace. The only exception would be .info.
I found that Star Craft was the best complete game, particularly for my discussion above: it allowed the players allarming creativity with ease-of-use in their bundled development tools. Besides that it had an excellent plot and good characters, which is very rare for an RTS.
Still, for raw play, TA stands head and shoulders above, I agree. If I had to pick a game that I would want to make maps for, tinker with, and play through the single player campaign, and enjoy every other aspect, I'd say StarCraft. If I was going to a LAN party, tho, I'd play TA - its just such good play, such polished, unique play.
Yes, it is beautiful. Why? 'cause it was written by a twelve year old who read a three page hand out her teacher gave her on "how to make a webpage", and she's been learning by tinkering since then.
People are not coders. People are users. Users want to just use things - not muck around with research, not have to learn whole new lexicons for each task, just get stuff done. HTML is practically the only pure-text system they seem to do that in anymore - everything else is covered in complex guis. To many people, html is the bridge to programming. With that bridge lost, they might never want to use anything that's not pure wzywig, and there aren't many programming languages like that.
Like it or not, HTML has become the learning ground for many budding computer users.
My CSS complaints came out wrong - what I was complaining about CSS was that originally, everything that could be done in CSS could be done in HTML as well. You could write proper, stripped HTML and use robust CSS, or you could just do the whole damn thing in ugly, ugly HTML, and still have access to the whole featureset. Now there are features that exist only in CSS beyond simply defining classes of things that already occur in HTML. So, newb html-only users end up with an incomplete feature set. If CSS was more intuitive this wouldn't be a problem, but currently it is far too cryptic to push onto an uninformed user. As a result, learning users stick to pure HTML, and thus are stuck with half a feature set.
WHile I have dabbled in Carnage Heart, yes, I played it, and yes, its good. Still, by "robot construction" I meant simple loadout configuration like in many Mech games, which allow more configurability than.. say... CounterStrike (Oooooh, I want the *other* rifle today!).
No, I mean Java (the full java) should be used as a scripting language while C++ code handles the heavy lifting. My problems with Java are twofold - a) it has some programming structure weaknesses to C++. Do they finally have templates-like systems yet? and b) it is slow. Fast compared to other languages, but still slow compared to real, native-compiled languages. When you're writing high-level logic and procedural arrangements, this is fine. But when people start trying to write nitty-gritty sorting algorithms and things like that in Java, then its speed starts to hurt. Hence, even though it is a "true" programming language, it should be used as a scripting language - that is, use it for all the high-level, user-created and portable content, and write the real system code in C. Every other interpreted language is used in this way, but Java developers stubbornly insist that anything Java must be *all* Java.
Core code = native, high level portable code = interpreted. Java runs everything interpreted. This is not a good design paradigm for speed-obsessed applications like games.
Funny, your first half of your message was the exact opposite of my problem - games have gotten _too_ non-linear. I find that in many modern games I spend far, far too much time wandering around lost, hoping for some indication of anything that will help me progress. If a game is an action game, then I want action. I want to move forward into the next room and fight something exciting. Not wander around retracing my steps hoping to find something I missed because I've exausted all the possible action in the region.
IMHO, if gamedevs want to innovate, include more easy to use design tools within the game. Either as part of the gameplay (robot construction kits between missions) or outside (a nice, easy map editor for making deathmatch maps).
Star Craft had the best of this IMHO - the gameplay allows players to be very creative, and the mapping tool was easy to use, polished, and powerful enough for most amateurs (hardcore modders preferred Total Annihilation, as they should).
As networking gets better and the industry moves more towards easy design tools due to the insane effort needed to make modern game content, I expect to see more games like Second Life, where the player is surrounded and embellished in player-generated content from his peers.
IMHO, I want to see multiplayer online games where all you need to mod is patience, webspace to host, and imagination (and no, relying on text-editors and consoles are not acceptable options).
Excuse me, but can they stop overdesigning HTML? Its a freaking pseudo-layout language. The whole beauty of it is that complete newbs can learn to text-edit it. Now, with all the crufty front matter, its impossible to hand-write html that will pass a verifier. Many of the more useful layout features that don't have anything to do with style classes are being put into css instead of html proper. HTML is a dead simple concept, and as such should be a newbie tool. Instead, its just getting increasingly baroque. It really doesn't need more crap.
Now, the http system itself - that could do with some upgrades. More support for "push" content is what it needs - like slashdot telling _me_ when there is new news so my browser can refresh, and sending me a diff instead of the full new page. Or support for distributed file hosting. Or some way to recieve HTTP requests from behind a NAT (even if it requires an external name server to help you along) without forwarding ports to yourself (if thats at all possible). My knowledge of network topology is limited at best, but if I can get ICQ messages while behind a nat, why can't I serve HTML? Its still just receiving unrequested data - messages in one case, requests for content in the other.
There's only one catch: then it'd be Java. And Java, for all my experience in it, stinks. Its a poor and incomplete copy of C++ on a virtual machine. But that's not the real problem. The real problem is that it has this tendency to be used as a programming language instead of as a scripting language. As a scripting language it is fast, robust, and powerful. As a programming language it looks like crap next to C++.
Python coders at least know that Python is slow as shit, so if they need to do anything fast, they code it in C and expose hooks to Python. Java people don't tend to be as good at that.
Well, the PC gaming industry is in an unfortunate rut - because of the incredibly huge amount of wheel-reinventing it takes to make a game, the cost of development has risen to astronomical levels. While MS can't help with the labour it takes to make an acceptable model these days, they can try and expand into the engine and middleware level, taking some of the programming difficulty out.
Of course, the heterogeneity of hardware in PCs is one of the cheif draws, in my opinion. While the mainstream blockbusters focus on keyboard and mouse, there are extensive lists of games focused on flightsticks, VR headsets, and other equipment.
Still - this might be a good example for Linux gamedevs to follow - we need a single-package distribution of a gamedev platform to put all the Linux crap together. Right now its all over the place, and each platform has a half-assed implementation of each other platform. O.S. games are absolutely terrible at supporting joysticks, for example.
My wet dream is a real, full-featured, modern O.S. middleware gaming engine. -ogg and s3m for music, a stripped-down python interpreter for script, ogl for 3d, semi-transparent networking, and in-engine design tools, and a nice auto-downloading filesystem using http references right in the package names so downloading is from the package-maker and not bogging down the server on which you're playing.
1) working from behind a standard router is good, as you say. Any basic NAT will block most attacks.
2) you outline a problem - using anything but windows update for updating a machine is the domain of super-l33t windows geeks. Not normal people. I know my way around a windows box very very well, but trying to update anything on a win box without the updater I find nearly impossible. Yes, there are admin downloads, but I find them outright scary to slog through.
IMHO, they need something simpler - 2 things.
a) a way to generate an updater CD to re-apply all windows update patches currently installed on your PC (for when you wipe) and b) up-to-date updater CD ISO's available to download for each currently supported MS OS for when you need to set up a friends computer. I recently set up a friends '98 box and it was a headache - a nice "download this disk and burn it for patching" that I could launch from XP would be ideal. If they're concerned about bandwidth, throw some of their mass of coders to make an MS torrent-a-like for said ISOs.
While I enjoyed Conker, the game helped me recognise something about Rare: I don't really enjoy their games. While often clever and interesting, I think they often turn out to be not really very much fun.
Conker is a neat game on the surface, but the problems gradually chased me away: it pushed the hardware too hard, making the game choppy and ugly (a problem that all the Rare games seem to suffer from). It was just plain ugly (again, common Rare problem) and the gameplay was painfully frustrating and often very slow. Slightly convoluted controls, slightly sticky view angles, other frustrating, clumsy little features. Thinking back to Diddy Kong racing and Golden Eye, I see the same problems.
Of course, ymmv - I personally find the continued popularity of Goldeneye utterly perplexing for what I find to be a mediocre - if groundbreaking - FPS. Dreamcast's Outtrigger stilll stands out to me as the best console FPS ever. Goldeneye is frustratingly painful in comparison. To me Goldeneye is the Wolfenstein of the console FPS world - yeah, it was the first, but I never want to touch it again.
Now lets be realistic - Rare's games are only really popular because of their groundbreaking natures and their hype. Donkey Kong Country (a very hyped game) for being the first large-scale rendered-graphics platformer, Diddy Racing (another hyped game) for being an adventure-kart hybrid, and Goldeneye for being the first console FPS. That, and they're always frustrating, and always very very long.
Of course, this is the perfect element for making games *memorable* - they break new ground, so people pick them up. They take forever, so the players pour lots of time into them. Also, they're frustrating, so the players really get emotionally involved in trying to succeed. This makes the games get carved into the mass psyche of players. I've gotten lost in many Rare titles. The games are such that your life gets sucked into them, so of course you become attached. No wonder everyone loves them so much.
But the fact I think about when I think back to them is: did I actually *enjoy* playing them? All too often, the answer is, well, no. They were more of a habit and a task, with small rewards to keep me going. But rarely actually fun. Sure, they have their moments, but they tend to be short and fleeting rewards for endless perseverance.
Other players may have different opinions, but I've come to mine, and I'm happy with it. Microsoft can have them.
Constant aspect ratio. You don't have to remake your posters/flyers depending on what sheet you intend to print on. 11/17 != 8.5/11. It also makes shipping easier. Basically the only reason to stick with imperial measurements is inertia, as always.
Lets hope its USB so I can just plug a full keyboard and mouse in.
Actually, my understanding was they already had most of those things, which have since been blown up and will be rebuilt by contractors. For example - Iraq apparently still has a functioning GSM network. Yet somehow, the US has contracted a Bell subsidiary to build a new cell network in Iraq. Yay for looting the treasury and building new monopolies for the future of Iraq.
Exactly - although I'm certain any gamepad for it will be able to bind to keyboard keys. Gravis has been doing that since the 90s. Although I might prefer a trackball just so I can play in my lap. While I don't have the skillz myself, I've seen people mouseaim with a trackball as well as I can with a mouse, so I know its doable.
And don't stop at neolithic Half-Life - this thing could do UT.