I don't think it's that people don't want to pay, they just don't want to pay for content they don't use. It's *subscriptions* that don't work, not payment in gereal. I'm happy to pay for an article I want to read, but that doesn't mean I want to have a permanent subscription of $x/month. Those can really add up.
Personally, I don't mind at all paying for stuff on an "a la carte" basis. But, just like regular shopping, I want to walk into the store, pick out the thing I want, and buy just that.
I'm betting that, as usual, the first industry to take advantage of a working, widespread micropayment system will be the porn industry.
As I think we have all concluded, SCO knows they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever winning a dime in any lawsuit. Their strategy is very simple: delay, delay, delay. The longer they delay, the more they can run up their stock price so the execs can make millions.
That's precisely why they are dragging things out with IBM's discovery motions by filing incomplete, vague, and weasel-worded replies. They know they'll lose. They're just counting on the usual glacial pace of the legal system. If they can drag the suit out over a year or two - not at all difficult - they achieve their goal of artifically inflating the stock price.
They don't care about winning. They know they can't win. But they also know that perception is what matters, and that there are a lot of greedy people out there, salivating at the thought of owning stock in a company that claims to own Linux, who will buy the stock.
Look for SCO to face the "Mother Of All Investor Lawsuits" once the case is lost and the brutal sodomy of the average stockholder by the board of directos is expsoed.
Since I want my data to be readable for a long time, just like everyone else, I've been following this issue closely. I'm no scientist, though, and all the technical data makes my head hurt. But I have slogged through an awful lot of articles on this subject, and just to save everyone else like me some time, I thought I'd share my highly technical conclusion:
You get what you pay for. Buy cheap, shitty, spindle-mounted CD-R's for a dime each, and you'll get shitty data retntion. Pay more for good-quality blanks, and you'll get good data retention. This *is* one of those cases where higher price does equal higher quality.
You'd think this would be obvious, but it seems that a lot of people are trying to get something for nothing, have their cake and eat it too, or however you want to look at it.
If you want your data to last, don't be a cheapskate. Which would you rather have, your data readable in ten years, or the $10 you saved today by buying cheap blanks?
If one wants to put on the conspiracy hat - and with this example, that doesn't seem too unreasonable, since *someone* was trying to plan a backdoor - this is a very clear warning that the security of the Linux source code needs to be taken very, very seriously.
If - just hypothetically - some Huge Opeerating System Seller - really wanted to discredit not just Linux but the whole Open Source method, what better way than to plant something like this and then step back and say "Look! Open Source is insecure! Why, with all those strange foreign bohemian types working on it, who knows *what* one of them might slip in?"
Yes, you and I know all the holes in that argument, but the pointy-haired types wouldn't.
The stupidest thing in the world (for consumers) is that DVDs and audio CDs don't use caddys. Having a caddy (i.e., put the disc in a sealed cartridge) would prevent just about all damage from scratching.
Of course, the entertainment industry WANTS you to damage your discs so you have to buy new ones, so it's in their best interest to make them as vulnerable as possible.
It would be great of manufacturers made DVD and audio CD players that used caddys, but it would never catch on enough with the public without a huge marketing campaign. Really, this is something the public should be demanding, but as usual the public is dumber than dirt.
Adobe also recently bought Cool Edit, the best inexpensive audio editor out there. It's now called "Adobe Audition". They've discontinued the basic verison (Cool Edit 2000) and are now charging $300 for what use to be Cool Edit Pro.
Sucks to see a big company kill a great product like that. I guess they don't want the buinss of those of us who want a good basic editor but don't want to, or can't spent the money for their overpriceds version.
It's clear that Vivendi had extremely poor security. At a MINIMUM, they should have had both a central hardware firewall AND a good software firewall like Zone Alarm installed locally on each machine. Not only would ZA have probably kept the trojan out in the first place, but it would have alerted them to the outgoing traffic generated by the key logger.
Their IT people should probably be fired, unless the policy was to run software firewalls and the president shut his off.
There's one and only one cause of stuff like this incident: PEOPLE not taking security seriously. Maybe it was the IT people at Vivendi, or maybe it was the users. In any case, this was perfectly preventable if real security measures had been in place and people had been following them. Unforgivable in this day and age to let a trojan slip through. There are a thousand tools to prevent exactly that, and clearly they were not using one.
A very interesting article, but the author leaves out one very important point: the difficulty of writing a virus for Linux is much higher than writing one for Windows, so fewer people will do it. It takes much greater skill and effort to screw up a UNIX-based system than a winodws system because of the much clearer distinction between user files and system files. Today, a large percentage of Windows viruses are just slight modifications of others, and there even exist "virus toolkits" to generate viruses without much technical knowledge at all. In short, the "script kiddie" factor of relatively clueless people whipping up viruses based on a few instructions received in IRC is much less under UNIX.
The author does point out, quite correctly, that even if Linux viruses became more widespread, most of them would probably only affect the user space and not currupt the system itself.
Alas, the term "emergent" is sorely misused in gaming. Grand Theft Auto is NOT emergent, it displays no emergent behaviors. It is simply open-ended, or nonlinear. Emergent behavior is something completely different. Yes, some games do disply true emergent behavior, but that means something very different than just having more than one ending or a nonlinear path.
You can't write emergent behavior into a game. By definition, emergent behavior is behavior that is *not* coded anywhere. All you can do is write a complex system that you think is likely to produce emergent behaviors of some kind, but you can't predict ahead of time what those behaviors will be.
This is just yet another example of people misusing a word they don't understand and having the wrong definition start becoming common usage.
Do you always recommend to your junior staffers that they pick the most computationally complex example when learning a new topic? Or do you point them to "Hello World?"
Dude, that's why I picked Go - because it's simple. It has about 2 rules. It's probably the last complex strategy game you could have. You don't have to worry about enemy strengths, or tech trees, or bases, or paper-scissors-rock style attack and defense ratings, resource gathering, constructing new units, exploration, or any of the other million things a strategy game AI has to worry about. That's the point: that even a game with very, very simple rules is very hard to write an AI for.
Reaperbots are pretty simple creatures and can hardly even be said to have much of an AI. They don't really have to plan anything, just "shoot guys, and try to take cover when they shoot you." Their "AI" is simply a matter of distances, lines of sight, and other stuff that isn't too hard to code.
I disagree with you about there being too much of an overlap between physical enginnering and software engineering, but since it's completely a matter of opinion, there's no point really discussing it.
If you get into the game industry, you probably won't be writing an AI for Go, but you may wish you were.
You do know the engineering principle that the later you start development on an idea, the more it costs to implement? The general rule is that what costs $1 in the design phase costs $10 in the development phase, which costs $100 in the testing phase, which costs $1000 in the beta phase, and $10,000 in the release phase.
1) What is true in physical engineering is usually not true in software enginnering. Just because they're both called "engineering" does not mean that rules of thumb from one automatically apply to the other. It's dangerous to spread such guidelines between largely unrelated disciplines.
2) Just because it's cheapER and easiIER to do stuff early does not necessarily make it cheap or easy. No matter when you design it, game AI architecture will always be difficult to write and balance. Cost and schedule are only parts of the equation. You are mistakenly assuming that the earlier you start, the cheaper and easier it is. If that were true. then starting at the very beginning you could write one line of code for a buck and be done with it. There is a baseline for cost and time for this stuff, and the baseline is very high.
Simply saying "start earlier" isn't a solution to the problem. If you think that game developers alway leave AI to the last minute, get to then end of the project, and say "oh, whatever, let's just toss something in", you're mistaken. Oh, sure, sometimes it happens. There are dumbasses in every industry. But most developers aren't that stupid. They generally have detailed design documents before they start writing code.
The main problem, as I said before, is that AI in general, especially game AI, especially strategy game AI, is very, very difficult stuff to write. Anyone who thinks it isn't has never tried it.
If you're not a programmer, sit down and think about the millions of variable in strategy. You and I see it pretty easily because the human brain is designed to see patterns and it's obvious "oh, the enemy has a large force over there, go attack it." It isn't so obvious to the computer. Nor is it obvious that if you send your main force to attack another, someone else could sneak into your undefended base. And so on, with the "if this, then that" stuff getting monstrous.
If you are a programmer, give it a shot. Sit down and try to write an AI for the game of Go. You can learn the rules in about ten seconds. Or write one for Othello. If you find it extremely difficult, you've learned something. And if you find a brilliant way to do it that no one's ever thought of before, that doesn't involve "cheating", and doesn't require a supercomputer to constantly calculate permutations and possibilities, you'll be a millionaire.
Would it really have been that difficult to come up with an AI that did not cheat by violating the fog of war?
Yes.
People who complain about the difficulty of video games (either too tough or too easy) are almost always unaware of 1) how tough it is to have variable "difficulty" settings in a game, and 2) the real-world restrictions that preclude what might seem like "common-sense" solutions to these problems - restrictions that game developers have to face.
First, what does "difficulty" mean? It's a completely variable term, since everyone has different skill levels, so what seems easy to some seems difficult to thers. There's no objective measure of "difficulty". There's no such thing as a "difficulty meter". In some games, difficulty is easy to adjust - in shooters, you give the player more hitpoints, stronger weapons, or powerups. Or you give the enemies less armor, or whatever. But what about an RPG? A strategy game? Should game designers have to come up with three or more seperate puzzles for each place in the story that calls for a puzzle? How does one gague how easy or difficult a puzzle is? Some people can solve word scrambles in a second, while others can hardly do them at all. Some people think very visually and have good spatial relations while others don't.
Second, there are a huge number of restrictions game developers work under - time and money, mostly. Every developer in the world would love to have the luxury of releasing games "when they're done". But unless you're Id, forget it. Sure, if you had a team of ten programmers with three years to do nothing but write AI code, you could come up with some very sophisticated AI for games, but that's hardly realistic. So games only have to have AI that's good enough to challenge most players most of the time. And often that means "cheating" by the AI. Ever tried to write AI? How would you design a game AI that could provide a good challenege to all players, with a variable difficulty level, without cheating, without spending ten years doing it, without requiring a supercomputer to do so?
Strategy AI is hard to write. If it was easy, the military would just write the Best AI Ever and let it run all the wars. Stategy, even basic strategy, is an incerdibly complex subject with a billion variables. Don't believe me? take a look at Chess, a game with extremely simple rules. It has taken decades of time and many supercomputers to write software to beat a human at chess, and even then it is only through brute force, by analyzing every possible move and permutation. Ever wonder why the game of Go doesn't have too many good computer versions? because writing AI for it is so damn hard. he rules are evn simpler than Chess, yet Go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe in terms of strategic complexity.
Second, there are very serious hardware limitations. Even on fast computers, AI chews up a LOT of CPU time. Programmers have to share the CPU time between all kinds of tasks, and the AI can't chew up 90% of the cycles. There's no point having a near-sentient AI if you the rest of the game runs like molasses. And as much as us high-end, hardcore gamers hate to admit it, a HUGE portion of the gamer audience still uses pretty old PCs. And they buy games, too - a lot of them.
As is so often the case, this issue is far more complex than it appears. Game design does not happen by itself, and every hour spent tweaking difficulty levels is one less hour spent making the game better in other ways. Every cycle the AI uses makes the game that much slower and that much less accessible to people on low-end machines. Every minute of programmer time spent on any of these things costs money and adds to the schedule.
In a perfect world, we'd have unlimited game developement budgets and cycles. Until then, compromises have to be made.
You might note that since Steam is still in beta, there are probably a LOT more changes being made than there will be in release.
No one is making you use Steam (yet). You decided to try it. You knew it was beta. Beta software gets tons of patches. That's the whole point. So quitcher bitchin.
This game is 3D for a very good reason: it would look like shit in 2D. Plus, 3D allows... wait for it... THREE dimensions, as opposed to two. I don't know about you, but I like looking at my bridge from all sides.
The game runs fine on my system. Don't whine just because you are having a problem on your system, and don't automatically assume it's the game's fault.
But will it import Outlook?
on
Aethera 1.0
·
· Score: 1
Aethera looks very nice, but I think any open-soure PIM - at least any that plan to be cross-platform and compete with Outlook - will require a simple, one-step, "important Outlook mail, notes, contacts, and calendar" feature. If it can do that, people might be persuaded to give it a try. But if they have to retype all their contacts and appointments and lose their email archives, forget it.
It's hilarious to me that "advocating the overthrow of the US government" is illegal. The people who founded this country overthrew their government. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, all the founders were revolutionaries who spent years advocating the overthrow of their government. Some of them, Jefferson especially, wrote extensively about the need, the right, and the DUTY to overthrow governments when they became oppressive. They also wrote this little thing known as the First Amendment. Now we are told "well, it was OK for them, but you can't do it to us..."
"The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots"
- Thomas Jefferson
So go ahead, criticize the government, it's your consitutional right to do so... unless "They" decide that people might be actually listening to you. Then, it's "treason".
Not that I'm advocating such things, of course. Though I'm sure that my record, "enshrined in some little folder somewhere in Washington" is now a bit bigger, I guess.
If you have been modifying code that is licensed under the GPL, then it does NOT, as you say, "technically still belong to the company." That's the way the GPL works.
This is a great thing, and I hope China does it sooner rather than later, because maybe it would be another "Sputnik" event which would jolt America into getting serious about space and not twiddling around with a useless space station.
China is clever: they clearly want to not compete with us in "traditional" tech stuff but leapfrog into the Next Big Thing right away so they are well established when the rest of the world ctaches up. Maybe theyre' working just as hard on Nanotech.
The lack of originality in games isn't for lack of ideas, it's due to the same reasons as Hollywood: just try to get something original funded and published. If it's not a big license, a sequal to a big game, or at least smack in the middle of a traditional genre, prepare to be laughed out of the meeting with the publisher.
Developers WANT to make original games, but they can't afford to do it without a publishing deal, and publishers only want drivel.
Not feeding your cat any wet food is cruel and unhealthy. Besides the fact that cats *love* wet food (hey, *you* could live on granola, too, but would you WANT to?), wet food is much better for cats.
If you don't believe me, just think about it and use some common sense. Cats are carnivores. Evolution designed them over millions of years to eat fresh muscle meat. Not rice or corn meal - MEAT. Most dry foods are 90% rice or corn, many of the cheaper brands contain very unhealthy levels of ash, and even the "premium" brands that use lamb or fish meal still don't have the nutrition cats really need. Dry food doesn't have the natural oils, amino acids, and other ingredients cats need for maximum health. In short, cats are designed by nature to thrive on *protein*, not a steady diet of mostly carbohydrates.
Can cats live on only dry food? Of course. Will they as happy? I don't think so. Will they be as healthy and live as long? Not usually. Feed your cat wet food as well and watch how shiny and healthy his fur gets.
You don't have to feed your cat only wet food. Some dry food is fine. 50/50 is fine. But depriving them of wet food just because you're cheap, or lazy, or whatever, is not a nice thing to do to a cat. How would you like to have nothing to eat but dry, crunchy Human Chow for the rest of your life, even if it had enough nutrients artificaially added to it to keep you alive? Do you think you would be as healthy?
So, uh... are you implying that the "design issues" you're looking down your nose at are unimportant?
Without a good design, there's no reason to write one line of code. THAT is why people talk about "design issues" so much. The technical stuff is just a means to achieve the design.
Uhhhh... this news is at least ten years old. I know this because I was the system administrator who helped put up NARA's first web site back in the early 90's, and NARA's first webmaster. I remember putting the Constitution and Declaration exhibits online (though I didn't make the actual web pages).
NARA was one of the first government agencies on the web, primarily at first to provide access to genealogical research.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's that people don't want to pay, they just don't want to pay for content they don't use. It's *subscriptions* that don't work, not payment in gereal. I'm happy to pay for an article I want to read, but that doesn't mean I want to have a permanent subscription of $x/month. Those can really add up.
Personally, I don't mind at all paying for stuff on an "a la carte" basis. But, just like regular shopping, I want to walk into the store, pick out the thing I want, and buy just that.
I'm betting that, as usual, the first industry to take advantage of a working, widespread micropayment system will be the porn industry.
As I think we have all concluded, SCO knows they don't have a snowball's chance in hell of ever winning a dime in any lawsuit. Their strategy is very simple: delay, delay, delay. The longer they delay, the more they can run up their stock price so the execs can make millions.
That's precisely why they are dragging things out with IBM's discovery motions by filing incomplete, vague, and weasel-worded replies. They know they'll lose. They're just counting on the usual glacial pace of the legal system. If they can drag the suit out over a year or two - not at all difficult - they achieve their goal of artifically inflating the stock price.
They don't care about winning. They know they can't win. But they also know that perception is what matters, and that there are a lot of greedy people out there, salivating at the thought of owning stock in a company that claims to own Linux, who will buy the stock.
Look for SCO to face the "Mother Of All Investor Lawsuits" once the case is lost and the brutal sodomy of the average stockholder by the board of directos is expsoed.
Since I want my data to be readable for a long time, just like everyone else, I've been following this issue closely. I'm no scientist, though, and all the technical data makes my head hurt. But I have slogged through an awful lot of articles on this subject, and just to save everyone else like me some time, I thought I'd share my highly technical conclusion:
You get what you pay for. Buy cheap, shitty, spindle-mounted CD-R's for a dime each, and you'll get shitty data retntion. Pay more for good-quality blanks, and you'll get good data retention. This *is* one of those cases where higher price does equal higher quality.
You'd think this would be obvious, but it seems that a lot of people are trying to get something for nothing, have their cake and eat it too, or however you want to look at it.
If you want your data to last, don't be a cheapskate. Which would you rather have, your data readable in ten years, or the $10 you saved today by buying cheap blanks?
If one wants to put on the conspiracy hat - and with this example, that doesn't seem too unreasonable, since *someone* was trying to plan a backdoor - this is a very clear warning that the security of the Linux source code needs to be taken very, very seriously.
If - just hypothetically - some Huge Opeerating System Seller - really wanted to discredit not just Linux but the whole Open Source method, what better way than to plant something like this and then step back and say "Look! Open Source is insecure! Why, with all those strange foreign bohemian types working on it, who knows *what* one of them might slip in?"
Yes, you and I know all the holes in that argument, but the pointy-haired types wouldn't.
Quadruple the cost? I strongly doubt that. From where did you get this number? I have a feeling I don't want to know 'cause it's a Smelly Place.
Moving parts? What, one spring? In any case, it would be trivial to design a case that could be opened and changed if something broke.
As for storage, a CD in a caddy is no bigger than a CD in a jewel box.
The stupidest thing in the world (for consumers) is that DVDs and audio CDs don't use caddys. Having a caddy (i.e., put the disc in a sealed cartridge) would prevent just about all damage from scratching.
Of course, the entertainment industry WANTS you to damage your discs so you have to buy new ones, so it's in their best interest to make them as vulnerable as possible.
It would be great of manufacturers made DVD and audio CD players that used caddys, but it would never catch on enough with the public without a huge marketing campaign. Really, this is something the public should be demanding, but as usual the public is dumber than dirt.
Adobe also recently bought Cool Edit, the best inexpensive audio editor out there. It's now called "Adobe Audition". They've discontinued the basic verison (Cool Edit 2000) and are now charging $300 for what use to be Cool Edit Pro.
:(
Sucks to see a big company kill a great product like that. I guess they don't want the buinss of those of us who want a good basic editor but don't want to, or can't spent the money for their overpriceds version.
Bye-bye, Cool Edit. You had a good run.
It's clear that Vivendi had extremely poor security. At a MINIMUM, they should have had both a central hardware firewall AND a good software firewall like Zone Alarm installed locally on each machine. Not only would ZA have probably kept the trojan out in the first place, but it would have alerted them to the outgoing traffic generated by the key logger.
Their IT people should probably be fired, unless the policy was to run software firewalls and the president shut his off.
There's one and only one cause of stuff like this incident: PEOPLE not taking security seriously. Maybe it was the IT people at Vivendi, or maybe it was the users. In any case, this was perfectly preventable if real security measures had been in place and people had been following them. Unforgivable in this day and age to let a trojan slip through. There are a thousand tools to prevent exactly that, and clearly they were not using one.
A very interesting article, but the author leaves out one very important point: the difficulty of writing a virus for Linux is much higher than writing one for Windows, so fewer people will do it. It takes much greater skill and effort to screw up a UNIX-based system than a winodws system because of the much clearer distinction between user files and system files. Today, a large percentage of Windows viruses are just slight modifications of others, and there even exist "virus toolkits" to generate viruses without much technical knowledge at all. In short, the "script kiddie" factor of relatively clueless people whipping up viruses based on a few instructions received in IRC is much less under UNIX.
The author does point out, quite correctly, that even if Linux viruses became more widespread, most of them would probably only affect the user space and not currupt the system itself.
Alas, the term "emergent" is sorely misused in gaming. Grand Theft Auto is NOT emergent, it displays no emergent behaviors. It is simply open-ended, or nonlinear. Emergent behavior is something completely different. Yes, some games do disply true emergent behavior, but that means something very different than just having more than one ending or a nonlinear path.
You can't write emergent behavior into a game. By definition, emergent behavior is behavior that is *not* coded anywhere. All you can do is write a complex system that you think is likely to produce emergent behaviors of some kind, but you can't predict ahead of time what those behaviors will be.
This is just yet another example of people misusing a word they don't understand and having the wrong definition start becoming common usage.
Dude, that's why I picked Go - because it's simple. It has about 2 rules. It's probably the last complex strategy game you could have. You don't have to worry about enemy strengths, or tech trees, or bases, or paper-scissors-rock style attack and defense ratings, resource gathering, constructing new units, exploration, or any of the other million things a strategy game AI has to worry about. That's the point: that even a game with very, very simple rules is very hard to write an AI for.
Reaperbots are pretty simple creatures and can hardly even be said to have much of an AI. They don't really have to plan anything, just "shoot guys, and try to take cover when they shoot you." Their "AI" is simply a matter of distances, lines of sight, and other stuff that isn't too hard to code.
I disagree with you about there being too much of an overlap between physical enginnering and software engineering, but since it's completely a matter of opinion, there's no point really discussing it.
If you get into the game industry, you probably won't be writing an AI for Go, but you may wish you were.
1) What is true in physical engineering is usually not true in software enginnering. Just because they're both called "engineering" does not mean that rules of thumb from one automatically apply to the other. It's dangerous to spread such guidelines between largely unrelated disciplines.
2) Just because it's cheapER and easiIER to do stuff early does not necessarily make it cheap or easy. No matter when you design it, game AI architecture will always be difficult to write and balance. Cost and schedule are only parts of the equation. You are mistakenly assuming that the earlier you start, the cheaper and easier it is. If that were true. then starting at the very beginning you could write one line of code for a buck and be done with it. There is a baseline for cost and time for this stuff, and the baseline is very high.
Simply saying "start earlier" isn't a solution to the problem. If you think that game developers alway leave AI to the last minute, get to then end of the project, and say "oh, whatever, let's just toss something in", you're mistaken. Oh, sure, sometimes it happens. There are dumbasses in every industry. But most developers aren't that stupid. They generally have detailed design documents before they start writing code.
The main problem, as I said before, is that AI in general, especially game AI, especially strategy game AI, is very, very difficult stuff to write. Anyone who thinks it isn't has never tried it.
If you're not a programmer, sit down and think about the millions of variable in strategy. You and I see it pretty easily because the human brain is designed to see patterns and it's obvious "oh, the enemy has a large force over there, go attack it." It isn't so obvious to the computer. Nor is it obvious that if you send your main force to attack another, someone else could sneak into your undefended base. And so on, with the "if this, then that" stuff getting monstrous.
If you are a programmer, give it a shot. Sit down and try to write an AI for the game of Go. You can learn the rules in about ten seconds. Or write one for Othello. If you find it extremely difficult, you've learned something. And if you find a brilliant way to do it that no one's ever thought of before, that doesn't involve "cheating", and doesn't require a supercomputer to constantly calculate permutations and possibilities, you'll be a millionaire.
Yes.
People who complain about the difficulty of video games (either too tough or too easy) are almost always unaware of 1) how tough it is to have variable "difficulty" settings in a game, and 2) the real-world restrictions that preclude what might seem like "common-sense" solutions to these problems - restrictions that game developers have to face.
First, what does "difficulty" mean? It's a completely variable term, since everyone has different skill levels, so what seems easy to some seems difficult to thers. There's no objective measure of "difficulty". There's no such thing as a "difficulty meter". In some games, difficulty is easy to adjust - in shooters, you give the player more hitpoints, stronger weapons, or powerups. Or you give the enemies less armor, or whatever. But what about an RPG? A strategy game? Should game designers have to come up with three or more seperate puzzles for each place in the story that calls for a puzzle? How does one gague how easy or difficult a puzzle is? Some people can solve word scrambles in a second, while others can hardly do them at all. Some people think very visually and have good spatial relations while others don't.
Second, there are a huge number of restrictions game developers work under - time and money, mostly. Every developer in the world would love to have the luxury of releasing games "when they're done". But unless you're Id, forget it. Sure, if you had a team of ten programmers with three years to do nothing but write AI code, you could come up with some very sophisticated AI for games, but that's hardly realistic. So games only have to have AI that's good enough to challenge most players most of the time. And often that means "cheating" by the AI. Ever tried to write AI? How would you design a game AI that could provide a good challenege to all players, with a variable difficulty level, without cheating, without spending ten years doing it, without requiring a supercomputer to do so?
Strategy AI is hard to write. If it was easy, the military would just write the Best AI Ever and let it run all the wars. Stategy, even basic strategy, is an incerdibly complex subject with a billion variables. Don't believe me? take a look at Chess, a game with extremely simple rules. It has taken decades of time and many supercomputers to write software to beat a human at chess, and even then it is only through brute force, by analyzing every possible move and permutation. Ever wonder why the game of Go doesn't have too many good computer versions? because writing AI for it is so damn hard. he rules are evn simpler than Chess, yet Go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe in terms of strategic complexity.
Second, there are very serious hardware limitations. Even on fast computers, AI chews up a LOT of CPU time. Programmers have to share the CPU time between all kinds of tasks, and the AI can't chew up 90% of the cycles. There's no point having a near-sentient AI if you the rest of the game runs like molasses. And as much as us high-end, hardcore gamers hate to admit it, a HUGE portion of the gamer audience still uses pretty old PCs. And they buy games, too - a lot of them.
As is so often the case, this issue is far more complex than it appears. Game design does not happen by itself, and every hour spent tweaking difficulty levels is one less hour spent making the game better in other ways. Every cycle the AI uses makes the game that much slower and that much less accessible to people on low-end machines. Every minute of programmer time spent on any of these things costs money and adds to the schedule.
In a perfect world, we'd have unlimited game developement budgets and cycles. Until then, compromises have to be made.
You might note that since Steam is still in beta, there are probably a LOT more changes being made than there will be in release.
No one is making you use Steam (yet). You decided to try it. You knew it was beta. Beta software gets tons of patches. That's the whole point. So quitcher bitchin.
This game is 3D for a very good reason: it would look like shit in 2D. Plus, 3D allows... wait for it... THREE dimensions, as opposed to two. I don't know about you, but I like looking at my bridge from all sides.
The game runs fine on my system. Don't whine just because you are having a problem on your system, and don't automatically assume it's the game's fault.
Aethera looks very nice, but I think any open-soure PIM - at least any that plan to be cross-platform and compete with Outlook - will require a simple, one-step, "important Outlook mail, notes, contacts, and calendar" feature. If it can do that, people might be persuaded to give it a try. But if they have to retype all their contacts and appointments and lose their email archives, forget it.
It's hilarious to me that "advocating the overthrow of the US government" is illegal. The people who founded this country overthrew their government. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Ben Franklin, all the founders were revolutionaries who spent years advocating the overthrow of their government. Some of them, Jefferson especially, wrote extensively about the need, the right, and the DUTY to overthrow governments when they became oppressive. They also wrote this little thing known as the First Amendment. Now we are told "well, it was OK for them, but you can't do it to us..."
"The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots"
- Thomas Jefferson
So go ahead, criticize the government, it's your consitutional right to do so... unless "They" decide that people might be actually listening to you. Then, it's "treason".
Not that I'm advocating such things, of course. Though I'm sure that my record, "enshrined in some little folder somewhere in Washington" is now a bit bigger, I guess.
If you have been modifying code that is licensed under the GPL, then it does NOT, as you say, "technically still belong to the company." That's the way the GPL works.
This is a great thing, and I hope China does it sooner rather than later, because maybe it would be another "Sputnik" event which would jolt America into getting serious about space and not twiddling around with a useless space station.
China is clever: they clearly want to not compete with us in "traditional" tech stuff but leapfrog into the Next Big Thing right away so they are well established when the rest of the world ctaches up. Maybe theyre' working just as hard on Nanotech.
The lack of originality in games isn't for lack of ideas, it's due to the same reasons as Hollywood: just try to get something original funded and published. If it's not a big license, a sequal to a big game, or at least smack in the middle of a traditional genre, prepare to be laughed out of the meeting with the publisher.
Developers WANT to make original games, but they can't afford to do it without a publishing deal, and publishers only want drivel.
"Automatically separate sticky pages"? Finally I can digitize my Playboy collection!
Not feeding your cat any wet food is cruel and unhealthy. Besides the fact that cats *love* wet food (hey, *you* could live on granola, too, but would you WANT to?), wet food is much better for cats.
If you don't believe me, just think about it and use some common sense. Cats are carnivores. Evolution designed them over millions of years to eat fresh muscle meat. Not rice or corn meal - MEAT. Most dry foods are 90% rice or corn, many of the cheaper brands contain very unhealthy levels of ash, and even the "premium" brands that use lamb or fish meal still don't have the nutrition cats really need. Dry food doesn't have the natural oils, amino acids, and other ingredients cats need for maximum health. In short, cats are designed by nature to thrive on *protein*, not a steady diet of mostly carbohydrates.
Can cats live on only dry food? Of course. Will they as happy? I don't think so. Will they be as healthy and live as long? Not usually. Feed your cat wet food as well and watch how shiny and healthy his fur gets.
You don't have to feed your cat only wet food. Some dry food is fine. 50/50 is fine. But depriving them of wet food just because you're cheap, or lazy, or whatever, is not a nice thing to do to a cat. How would you like to have nothing to eat but dry, crunchy Human Chow for the rest of your life, even if it had enough nutrients artificaially added to it to keep you alive? Do you think you would be as healthy?
So, uh... are you implying that the "design issues" you're looking down your nose at are unimportant?
Without a good design, there's no reason to write one line of code. THAT is why people talk about "design issues" so much. The technical stuff is just a means to achieve the design.
Uhhhh... this news is at least ten years old. I know this because I was the system administrator who helped put up NARA's first web site back in the early 90's, and NARA's first webmaster. I remember putting the Constitution and Declaration exhibits online (though I didn't make the actual web pages).
NARA was one of the first government agencies on the web, primarily at first to provide access to genealogical research.
Clearly this poster is lying.
A Slashdot reader with a girlfriend? Puh-lease!