Which, given that Gartner has been caught making papers bought and paid for by MS before, makes sense. Microsoft is running behind, and has decided to announce that Vista is being slowed by lack of demand or something.
Actually the only thing that looks interesting to me is the Filessystem. The rest of it is incremental stuff that Linux may catch up with (or has passed already), XP can do via third party software, and Mac done passed already. The filesystem looks interesting.
Simpler - just use the icon information in the firefox bookmark file for a specific website or two. It's already text, easily readable, and I don't think it get's updated if the website changes. It's even something logical to have on a USB drive.
Probably a bad idea on further thought - something of a security through obscurity approach.
You would think so - but the evidence doesn't seem to indicate that most of the time. My own (2nd hand) experience was with a guy that embezzled and committed tax fraud. He actually encrypted his schemes, but used simple passphrases. Got caught when he left the company and the IT gut looked at the hard-drive before reformatting it and went "That's weird - why is he encrypting stuff?"
Started trying some obvious phrases that didn't work, then pulled his IE cache and used some of those. Then went "Holy Sh*t".
Criminals are, pretty much by definition, people that want more than they're making legally and lack either the imagination or the patience required to achieve the goal. This is not a personality type particularly conducive to not getting caught.
If intelligent design is not Creationism (As all ID advocates claim), then the Intelligent designer is not god.
In which case, the intelligent designer has to have come from somewhere.
The intelligent designer cannot have evolved, for the intelligent designer must be more complicated than the most complicated being designed. (Implicit in the theory)
The Intelligent designer must have been created by, according to it's assumptions, a "More Intelligent Designer".
This iteration cannot have evolved, that is, it must be more complicated than the Intelligent Designer.
It must have been designed by another "Even Smarter Intelligent Designer"
As there is no way out of this loop, the scale goes back, infinitely. Ulimately, one must posit a first cause - "The most intelligent Designer".
An entity of surpassing intelligence, existing before time as we know it, with the capability and ambition to design beings of lesser capabilities than itself.
Problem - we've just described God. That contrardicts our initial description/axiom that intelligent design is in fact distinguishable from creationism.
Intelligent design therefore logically reaches a conclusion that contradicts it's initial premises. I'm not a logician, and have no qualms about having this refined or refuted, but I believe I've achieved the required "Reductio ad Absurdum" - I.D. logically contradicts itself.
Actually, historically, the educated classes never thought the world was flat - the size of the world was calculated to within a percent or so by Eratosthenes of Cyrene somewhere around 250 BC, and Aristotle (Who, when he was right and when he was wrong, pretty much informed the educated populace until the 1500's) had a physical argument for a spherical Earth 100 years prior to that. Even Columbus's primarily had to contend with people that believed the Earth was about twice the radius he thought it was - and they were right! There were flatearther before Aristotle of course, but it wasn't until Bible study became a common pastime that the flat earth somehow became popular again. No shock there - the parts that imply a flat earth were written at times before Aristotle too, and everyone knew it was flat then. But it wasn't a matter of "Science".
As for Earth, Air, Wind, and Fire?
Well, they *are* scientific theories. Solid, Liquid, Gaseous, and Plasma - It's the same four states of matter you learned in school, and the only forms that exist on earth without technological intervention. Knowledge of these four states gives predictions, and these predictions are verfifable/falsifiable. Not as accurate as a knowledge of electron states and quantum physics of course, and derived in part from religious conventions of course, but it meets the basic criteria of science.
The problem is just that - Evolution *has* been caught on tape. And then you dismissed it "I'm not talking about microevolution", because it wasn't what you wanted to see.
And no - you can't falsify intelligent design, because the way the question is formed makes it unfalsifiable. Project: Prove that no intelligent being had a hand in the creation or evolution of life.
Can't be done - it's a textbook example of proving a negative - logically insoluble. The only way you can prove a negative is by empirical evidence - I don't *know* that we're not actually being held down by thousands of tiny invisible fairies flapping their wings, but I *do* know that things in a vacuum fall done at the same rate, and flapping wings can't help you fly in vacuum, so I consider this theory disproven, so empirically I can prove that no fairies meeting this description are causing the illusion of gravity.
Intelligent Design has no such empirical test - the theory that we're being pulled down by tiny invisible fairies is in fact a scientific theory in a way that I.D. isn't, because I can design a test to disprove it. Go through enough iterations of my testing the theory, and modifying the theory to fit the new test (They're unbreathing fairies, with tiny 'lil rubberbands holding them down), and we'll find that eventually I have 'fairies' that look astonishingly like gravitons. Personally, Physics is easier than stubbornly staying with the fairies theory, but the nature of the scientific method means I will, after many iterations, home in on the same truths.
Not all Truths are reachable in this fashion. Godel's theorem would seem to me to indicate that there are truths unreachable through any scientific method, just like there are unreachable truths in any other axiomatic method.
But if Intelligent design is in that range, then it doesn't belong in a science course by definition. The very fact that Intelligent design is being put forward as an alternative to the falsifiable and scientific theory of evolution seems to indicate that it's not among that rarified group of unscientific things that still happen to be true.
A) The Kalishnokov Rifle. Obvious, yet true. Predates (I believe) Stalin.
B) Define Success Story. Poverty rates? Access to health care? Education? Literacy Rates? Ability to spend time with your family? All measurements that the U.S. tends to fall short of compared to 'Socialist' economies like Sweden, the U.K., Canada, France, et al.
Of course, if your measure of success is the capability for Bill Gates to amass a fortune 1 and 1/3 million times the average U.S. Salary because for his efforts, or the average CEO salary to be 400 times as much as the average salary of the workers that produce the product they sell, then you're undoubtably right, there's nothing quite like U.S. Capitalism.
My problem is that I didn't find Civ III to be that addictive, and the frustating part is I can't quite say why. By all objective measurements, it was better than Civ II, but it was too smooth and polished or something.
It may simply have been the ease you could twiddle with Civ II versus III - I remember making a variation in Civ II that was basically the "Federation Space" version of Star Fleet Battles. Was it good and polished - No. But it was doable in MS-Paint and notepad. And that was missing in Civ III somehow. The utilities they gave didn't quite have the fun to them as just modding it.
Civ IV may be going back to that with the XML and python, or so I hope. I guess we'll see.
This may be a fallacy on my own thinking, but one of the more interesting insights in my business courses involved the fact that if you were in the business of extending credit, and you always got paid, it indicated that you weren't actually extending enough credit. Since you made a profit on credit over and above the price of the item, you wanted to keep extending credit until the marginal profit was (close to) zero. Sure, some people were getting away with murder, but *you* are making more money, so what do you care! (Which BTW also illustrates the fundamental flaw in the Bankruptcy Bill. The eact same number of people will end up taking advantage of credit cards et al as before - because the credit card companies are geared to keep sending out new cards till they have quit making profit on the margin. But (ahem) I digress.)
This seems to me to be a pretty close analogy with the RIAA, MPAA, BSF, and Games Industry ongoing problems with trying to reduce piracy to zero. The problem is that they've gotten distracted with the fact that somebody, somewhere, is getting away with murder, and forgotten that their profit on the margin STILL GOES UP!
The publishing industries need to figure out what their profit on the margin is from piracy - additional sales generated, word of mouth advertising, percentage of people that will buy an original after testing it from a pirated copy and AIM for that point where the marginal profit is zero. Because right now, they don't know *where* that point is, and it's costing them revenue and customers.
That's purely aside from the effects of annoying their customer base of course - that's an additional loss.
This is more a matter of getting called out on the third strike after 45 games (levels) of there being 6 strikes. And then the Ref says "It's always been three".
"But the gut over there just had five?"
"IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THREE -READ THE RULES!"
"But while we're talking, the other Ref's gave that guy 12 strikes?"
"Listen, you want banned?"
"Well, is there a rules committee I can talk too?"
Didn't Microsoft go to a great deal of effort to like . . . combine two previous OS's that looked similar but ran with different feature sets into one OS that ran stuff pretty consistently but had the security of the other one?
I seem to recall hearing about this somewhere.
Pug
Microsoft - no longer innovating new and different mistakes, just exacerbating old ones
1) Just eliminate "default permits" - don't use anything that you haven't used before. There's no reason any of your people will need anything else, because everything useful has already been written.
Anything new that is useful can be cleared by the sysadmin, who will have plenty of time to check every individual program needed by every individual user, having eliminated all security flaws on the network.
2) Enumerate goodness - follows exactly from eliminating default permit (to be fair, all his stuff pretty much does). Since you know exactly what's on your network, you don't need to leave any wiggle-room for changes.
3) Write it right the first time! Because all those Unix and Windows junkies that wrote the original holes did so because they weren't paying attention and wanted to promote their job security by discovering the buffer overflow. By the way, all possible security holes have now been discovered - there are no new ones out there being caused by modern coding techniques waiting to be discovered. Because they've been perfected now.
4) Hacking is not cool. People who take things apart to see how they work are inherently bad, not a feature that can be used for good or ill, nor do those that use it for ill ever mature past it to redeem themselves. Glad that's settled.
5) Educating users is dumb. Just hire ones that already know what they're doing. Because someone else will educate them. Or they'll educate themselves. Something like that.
6) Inaction is better than action. Never be an early adopter. Noone . EVER!!!!!!!
Sorry - 5 & 6 fail the "What if every did exactly what he advised" test.
4 completely ignores that hacking is a learning experience that follows from the curiosity of a working mind and leads to, well, educated users that you don't need to train. No hackers means there are no users educating themselves, and you don't have to worry about being an early adopter because no ones designing anything new anyway.
3 is a platitude. True, yet silly. Yes, code needs to be written better, particularly at the OS level. Known mistakes are avoidable, and things that should be acceptable as applications programs should be avoided at deeper level, but that's a matter of sane training and review.
1 & 2 are complementary, obvious, and according to him easy. I've never had the benefit of working on a network or computer, windows or linux, in which it was feasible to both clamp down on every program and port, and yet leave individual users with the ability to deal with the unforeseen. I've seen places that have done exactly that and decided users don't need to do anything outside the defined scope of their jobs, at least on the network. These are the same places that don't understand that the reason their people don't go above and beyond is because they've gone to so much effort to make it impossible to do so.
Or perhaps my lack of vision is why I'm not making the big bucks. It's conceivable.
It would seem to be a well kept secret since, in the two decades since laserdiscs have been around, this is the first time I've ever heard someone say that.
I thought we were still on "How dare those corporation's try to ban using links on the internet" and being ticked at people writing scripts to prevent hotlinking and deeplinking.
I don't mind the Hypocrisy, but will someone please make sure I'm on the list so I'm informed that we've completely changed the agenda, to prevent these little embarrassing commentaries from being posted?
Just so I'm still on the same page - we all still hate Microsoft and love Google no matter what they do right?
I haven't tried the games leading up to it (Daggerfall et al), but Morrowind is one of the two or three best RPG's I've seen on the computer. Incredibly hackable, you can design magical items to fit your needs, design spells, create potions . . . and it takes place on a 'continent' about the size of Greenland.
It has weaknesses - Graphics could be better, not bad by any means, and sometimes beautiful, but certain things look way to similar after awhile (and there are some sweet hacks to improve exactly that). Melee combat is weak, no other way of putting it, and I don't really think that's fixable with how the game is designed. And the sheer size of the game combined with some weak interactions and the graphics means that many NPC's start feeling 'generic' after awhile - you have the same conversations over and over.
I really don't care that much about the graphics, and I'd love for melee to improve, but I'm willing to forgive that for the storytelling, but the blandness of the NPC's detracts from it's best strength which is the storyline. I would really love to see the next chapter give the NPC's more distinct personalities and dialogue, and in an ideal world something that could create sentences that varied but carried the same info and a text to speech engine that could give each character a unique delivery of that info.
They *weren't* spawned on screen - with care you could sneak in, figure out where they were, and attack first with bows or magic.
I was never terribly impressed with Dungeon Siege - the graphics were good and hit "frackin' gorgeous" on occasion, but it is *the* most linear game I ever saw. There was no particular need to ever talk to an NPC twice - gone through section, sell loot, go forward . . . oh look, a side quest, kill monsters, back to main quest . . .
And btw, any kitten a thousand miles from home will easily rape a dragon that was near the house in the home village. No particular reason, 'cept they were 'Desert Kittens' or 'Winter Puppies', or some such.
Now, having played Morrowind, that's a good RPG. Waiting on Oblivion!
You say that as if there not active development on the C-64!
I'll admit, that it's insane that people do so, but it has active development. Plus a gorgeous Geek babe suitable for lowering IQ's! Do Freespire and BeOS have gorgeous geekbabes? I think not!
Ah - you've been to Dubai, or interact with people who are there?
I (oddly enough) do interact with people in Dubai. There are Imams there that speak out against terrorism (alternatively, I'm being lied to by people in Dubai). They get about as much airplay as the pro-evolution minister that taught in my college.
Guess what - Sane people spouting reasonable thoughts don't get airplay.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but is that "Egomaniac: -1" or +1?
Which, given that Gartner has been caught making papers bought and paid for by MS before, makes sense. Microsoft is running behind, and has decided to announce that Vista is being slowed by lack of demand or something.
Pug
Actually the only thing that looks interesting to me is the Filessystem. The rest of it is incremental stuff that Linux may catch up with (or has passed already), XP can do via third party software, and Mac done passed already. The filesystem looks interesting.
Pug
The new Triple ROT-13 encryption in endorsed by the NSA, and considerably more secure. Particularly recommended for important data like passwords.
Combined with double XOR bitflippling, easily one of the most powerful and useful schemes in place.
Frankly, until Truecrypt supports these, I just don't see the point in using it.
Pug
Simpler - just use the icon information in the firefox bookmark file for a specific website or two. It's already text, easily readable, and I don't think it get's updated if the website changes. It's even something logical to have on a USB drive.
Probably a bad idea on further thought - something of a security through obscurity approach.
You would think so - but the evidence doesn't seem to indicate that most of the time. My own (2nd hand) experience was with a guy that embezzled and committed tax fraud. He actually encrypted his schemes, but used simple passphrases. Got caught when he left the company and the IT gut looked at the hard-drive before reformatting it and went "That's weird - why is he encrypting stuff?"
Started trying some obvious phrases that didn't work, then pulled his IE cache and used some of those. Then went "Holy Sh*t".
Criminals are, pretty much by definition, people that want more than they're making legally and lack either the imagination or the patience required to achieve the goal. This is not a personality type particularly conducive to not getting caught.
Pug
Curses! Foiled Again! Yes, we were teaching them how to raise the undead hordes for us.
You don't happen to have a wife or girlfriend - I need to find some railroad tracks!
Pug
If intelligent design is not Creationism (As all ID advocates claim), then the Intelligent designer is not god.
In which case, the intelligent designer has to have come from somewhere.
The intelligent designer cannot have evolved, for the intelligent designer must be more complicated than the most complicated being designed. (Implicit in the theory)
The Intelligent designer must have been created by, according to it's assumptions, a "More Intelligent Designer".
This iteration cannot have evolved, that is, it must be more complicated than the Intelligent Designer.
It must have been designed by another "Even Smarter Intelligent Designer"
As there is no way out of this loop, the scale goes back, infinitely. Ulimately, one must posit a first cause - "The most intelligent Designer".
An entity of surpassing intelligence, existing before time as we know it, with the capability and ambition to design beings of lesser capabilities than itself.
Problem - we've just described God. That contrardicts our initial description/axiom that intelligent design is in fact distinguishable from creationism.
Intelligent design therefore logically reaches a conclusion that contradicts it's initial premises. I'm not a logician, and have no qualms about having this refined or refuted, but I believe I've achieved the required "Reductio ad Absurdum" - I.D. logically contradicts itself.
And now I get to put up those cool letters - QED
Pug
Actually, historically, the educated classes never thought the world was flat - the size of the world was calculated to within a percent or so by Eratosthenes of Cyrene somewhere around 250 BC, and Aristotle (Who, when he was right and when he was wrong, pretty much informed the educated populace until the 1500's) had a physical argument for a spherical Earth 100 years prior to that. Even Columbus's primarily had to contend with people that believed the Earth was about twice the radius he thought it was - and they were right! There were flatearther before Aristotle of course, but it wasn't until Bible study became a common pastime that the flat earth somehow became popular again. No shock there - the parts that imply a flat earth were written at times before Aristotle too, and everyone knew it was flat then. But it wasn't a matter of "Science".
As for Earth, Air, Wind, and Fire?
Well, they *are* scientific theories. Solid, Liquid, Gaseous, and Plasma - It's the same four states of matter you learned in school, and the only forms that exist on earth without technological intervention. Knowledge of these four states gives predictions, and these predictions are verfifable/falsifiable. Not as accurate as a knowledge of electron states and quantum physics of course, and derived in part from religious conventions of course, but it meets the basic criteria of science.
So basically - you haven't the foggiest.
Pug
The problem is just that - Evolution *has* been caught on tape. And then you dismissed it "I'm not talking about microevolution", because it wasn't what you wanted to see.
And no - you can't falsify intelligent design, because the way the question is formed makes it unfalsifiable.
Project: Prove that no intelligent being had a hand in the creation or evolution of life.
Can't be done - it's a textbook example of proving a negative - logically insoluble. The only way you can prove a negative is by empirical evidence - I don't *know* that we're not actually being held down by thousands of tiny invisible fairies flapping their wings, but I *do* know that things in a vacuum fall done at the same rate, and flapping wings can't help you fly in vacuum, so I consider this theory disproven, so empirically I can prove that no fairies meeting this description are causing the illusion of gravity.
Intelligent Design has no such empirical test - the theory that we're being pulled down by tiny invisible fairies is in fact a scientific theory in a way that I.D. isn't, because I can design a test to disprove it. Go through enough iterations of my testing the theory, and modifying the theory to fit the new test (They're unbreathing fairies, with tiny 'lil rubberbands holding them down), and we'll find that eventually I have 'fairies' that look astonishingly like gravitons. Personally, Physics is easier than stubbornly staying with the fairies theory, but the nature of the scientific method means I will, after many iterations, home in on the same truths.
Not all Truths are reachable in this fashion. Godel's theorem would seem to me to indicate that there are truths unreachable through any scientific method, just like there are unreachable truths in any other axiomatic method.
But if Intelligent design is in that range, then it doesn't belong in a science course by definition. The very fact that Intelligent design is being put forward as an alternative to the falsifiable and scientific theory of evolution seems to indicate that it's not among that rarified group of unscientific things that still happen to be true.
Anything else is just sloppy thinking.
A) The Kalishnokov Rifle. Obvious, yet true. Predates (I believe) Stalin.
B) Define Success Story. Poverty rates? Access to health care? Education? Literacy Rates? Ability to spend time with your family? All measurements that the U.S. tends to fall short of compared to 'Socialist' economies like Sweden, the U.K., Canada, France, et al.
Of course, if your measure of success is the capability for Bill Gates to amass a fortune 1 and 1/3 million times the average U.S. Salary because for his efforts, or the average CEO salary to be 400 times as much as the average salary of the workers that produce the product they sell, then you're undoubtably right, there's nothing quite like U.S. Capitalism.
Yay.
(Yeah I'm off topic. He started it!)
Pug
My problem is that I didn't find Civ III to be that addictive, and the frustating part is I can't quite say why. By all objective measurements, it was better than Civ II, but it was too smooth and polished or something.
It may simply have been the ease you could twiddle with Civ II versus III - I remember making a variation in Civ II that was basically the "Federation Space" version of Star Fleet Battles. Was it good and polished - No. But it was doable in MS-Paint and notepad. And that was missing in Civ III somehow. The utilities they gave didn't quite have the fun to them as just modding it.
Civ IV may be going back to that with the XML and python, or so I hope. I guess we'll see.
Pug
Saving games? You mean, like, quiting the game and coming back to it later instead of playing 27 hours straight?
When did Civ introduce this feature - I wish I'd known about this when I was in college!
Pug
This may be a fallacy on my own thinking, but one of the more interesting insights in my business courses involved the fact that if you were in the business of extending credit, and you always got paid, it indicated that you weren't actually extending enough credit. Since you made a profit on credit over and above the price of the item, you wanted to keep extending credit until the marginal profit was (close to) zero. Sure, some people were getting away with murder, but *you* are making more money, so what do you care! (Which BTW also illustrates the fundamental flaw in the Bankruptcy Bill. The eact same number of people will end up taking advantage of credit cards et al as before - because the credit card companies are geared to keep sending out new cards till they have quit making profit on the margin. But (ahem) I digress.)
This seems to me to be a pretty close analogy with the RIAA, MPAA, BSF, and Games Industry ongoing problems with trying to reduce piracy to zero. The problem is that they've gotten distracted with the fact that somebody, somewhere, is getting away with murder, and forgotten that their profit on the margin STILL GOES UP!
The publishing industries need to figure out what their profit on the margin is from piracy - additional sales generated, word of mouth advertising, percentage of people that will buy an original after testing it from a pirated copy and AIM for that point where the marginal profit is zero. Because right now, they don't know *where* that point is, and it's costing them revenue and customers.
That's purely aside from the effects of annoying their customer base of course - that's an additional loss.
Just a thought - Pug
This is more a matter of getting called out on the third strike after 45 games (levels) of there being 6 strikes. And then the Ref says "It's always been three".
"But the gut over there just had five?"
"IT'S ALWAYS BEEN THREE -READ THE RULES!"
"But while we're talking, the other Ref's gave that guy 12 strikes?"
"Listen, you want banned?"
"Well, is there a rules committee I can talk too?"
"NO"
"What about a senior Referee?"
"NO"
"What about . . " "NO. No Appeal either."
Pug
Didn't Microsoft go to a great deal of effort to like . . . combine two previous OS's that looked similar but ran with different feature sets into one OS that ran stuff pretty consistently but had the security of the other one?
I seem to recall hearing about this somewhere.
Pug
Microsoft - no longer innovating new and different mistakes, just exacerbating old ones
We only get so many mod points at a time. We work them around and save them for you.
I get to mod you down next thursday again!
Pug
1) Just eliminate "default permits" - don't use anything that you haven't used before. There's no reason any of your people will need anything else, because everything useful has already been written.
Anything new that is useful can be cleared by the sysadmin, who will have plenty of time to check every individual program needed by every individual user, having eliminated all security flaws on the network.
2) Enumerate goodness - follows exactly from eliminating default permit (to be fair, all his stuff pretty much does). Since you know exactly what's on your network, you don't need to leave any wiggle-room for changes.
3) Write it right the first time! Because all those Unix and Windows junkies that wrote the original holes did so because they weren't paying attention and wanted to promote their job security by discovering the buffer overflow. By the way, all possible security holes have now been discovered - there are no new ones out there being caused by modern coding techniques waiting to be discovered. Because they've been perfected now.
4) Hacking is not cool. People who take things apart to see how they work are inherently bad, not a feature that can be used for good or ill, nor do those that use it for ill ever mature past it to redeem themselves. Glad that's settled.
5) Educating users is dumb. Just hire ones that already know what they're doing. Because someone else will educate them. Or they'll educate themselves. Something like that.
6) Inaction is better than action. Never be an early adopter. Noone . EVER!!!!!!!
Sorry - 5 & 6 fail the "What if every did exactly what he advised" test.
4 completely ignores that hacking is a learning experience that follows from the curiosity of a working mind and leads to, well, educated users that you don't need to train. No hackers means there are no users educating themselves, and you don't have to worry about being an early adopter because no ones designing anything new anyway.
3 is a platitude. True, yet silly. Yes, code needs to be written better, particularly at the OS level. Known mistakes are avoidable, and things that should be acceptable as applications programs should be avoided at deeper level, but that's a matter of sane training and review.
1 & 2 are complementary, obvious, and according to him easy. I've never had the benefit of working on a network or computer, windows or linux, in which it was feasible to both clamp down on every program and port, and yet leave individual users with the ability to deal with the unforeseen. I've seen places that have done exactly that and decided users don't need to do anything outside the defined scope of their jobs, at least on the network. These are the same places that don't understand that the reason their people don't go above and beyond is because they've gone to so much effort to make it impossible to do so.
Or perhaps my lack of vision is why I'm not making the big bucks. It's conceivable.
Pug
It would seem to be a well kept secret since, in the two decades since laserdiscs have been around, this is the first time I've ever heard someone say that.
Pug
I thought we were still on "How dare those corporation's try to ban using links on the internet" and being ticked at people writing scripts to prevent hotlinking and deeplinking.
I don't mind the Hypocrisy, but will someone please make sure I'm on the list so I'm informed that we've completely changed the agenda, to prevent these little embarrassing commentaries from being posted?
Just so I'm still on the same page - we all still hate Microsoft and love Google no matter what they do right?
I haven't tried the games leading up to it (Daggerfall et al), but Morrowind is one of the two or three best RPG's I've seen on the computer. Incredibly hackable, you can design magical items to fit your needs, design spells, create potions . . . and it takes place on a 'continent' about the size of Greenland.
It has weaknesses - Graphics could be better, not bad by any means, and sometimes beautiful, but certain things look way to similar after awhile (and there are some sweet hacks to improve exactly that). Melee combat is weak, no other way of putting it, and I don't really think that's fixable with how the game is designed. And the sheer size of the game combined with some weak interactions and the graphics means that many NPC's start feeling 'generic' after awhile - you have the same conversations over and over.
I really don't care that much about the graphics, and I'd love for melee to improve, but I'm willing to forgive that for the storytelling, but the blandness of the NPC's detracts from it's best strength which is the storyline. I would really love to see the next chapter give the NPC's more distinct personalities and dialogue, and in an ideal world something that could create sentences that varied but carried the same info and a text to speech engine that could give each character a unique delivery of that info.
That would be a helluva game - .
Pug
They *weren't* spawned on screen - with care you could sneak in, figure out where they were, and attack first with bows or magic.
I was never terribly impressed with Dungeon Siege - the graphics were good and hit "frackin' gorgeous" on occasion, but it is *the* most linear game I ever saw. There was no particular need to ever talk to an NPC twice - gone through section, sell loot, go forward . . . oh look, a side quest, kill monsters, back to main quest . . .
And btw, any kitten a thousand miles from home will easily rape a dragon that was near the house in the home village. No particular reason, 'cept they were 'Desert Kittens' or 'Winter Puppies', or some such.
Now, having played Morrowind, that's a good RPG. Waiting on Oblivion!
Pug
You say that as if there not active development on the C-64!
I'll admit, that it's insane that people do so, but it has active development. Plus a gorgeous Geek babe suitable for lowering IQ's! Do Freespire and BeOS have gorgeous geekbabes? I think not!
Pug
Feed it the entries in the "obfuscated C" competition - if it works for that, it oughta work for anything.
Pug
Ah - you've been to Dubai, or interact with people who are there?
I (oddly enough) do interact with people in Dubai. There are Imams there that speak out against terrorism (alternatively, I'm being lied to by people in Dubai). They get about as much airplay as the pro-evolution minister that taught in my college.
Guess what - Sane people spouting reasonable thoughts don't get airplay.
Well, occasionally NPR, but that's it.
Pug