I think thats the plan behind UserLinux - to put Debian in a pretty dress. A spoonfull of sugar to make the apt-medicine go down. I run Debian on my desktop right now, and the installer I used wasn't pretty. Most anyone who's job isn't related to an understanding of computers would probably run for the hills, as would a number of those whose job qualifies.
That being said, there should be a difference between making it pleasant and making it Microsoft. There's a saying I once heard, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the masters, instead seek what they have sought." Sure, there's a short term advantage to pulling the UI directly from the most popular package around. But there's a set of problems with it that you should understand. Even the most popular package around is changing with every revision. And the UI is one of the areas most visible to potential customers as a differentiation; something that says, "This is not just a shitty version of something you can get elsewhere." So lifting design from Redmond may not be the best way out. But it certainly is a cop out.
To build my own mantra: Know what your strengths are, and promote them. Know what your weaknesses are, and amend them.
Unfortunately, its very difficult to automate the fitness function to include "stability" in GA circuit design. Even a binary "does it still work when I move it five feet from this CRT?" is time consuming, especially when you're planning on running large populations or generations.
The fact that these GAs are exploiting electric interference and other phonomena that aren't easily applied to design by humans to achieve new and lower cost designs isn't unexpected. But I don't envy the people whose job is to push the frontier of computer part design, and understand how these work.
Stability is a great idea, but measuring it automatically is equally difficult. I guess that just means more job security for those aforementioned researchers.
Interesting aspect, but I think you can say the same applies to computers as well. Only, their goal is "checkmate the opponent" rather than "take the queen's rook." If the computer thinks that rook is the only thing stopping it, then eventually it will take it.
They say there's a prohibitive number of states to consider to brute force chess. I agree that simply using some form of dynamic programming to build a large pattern matching database isn't very intelligent, but I can't help but think that eventually we'll be at a point where one can consider trying just that.
Risk - Its lifelike depiction of the globe and glorification of "world domination" may be a severe liability to Hasbro worldwide.
Monopoly - The day someone is inspired by the best strategies in this game will be the beginning of the end of mankind. Encouraging housing shortages, anticompetitive behavior and beauty contests are not desireable behaviors in our landlords.
Hungry Hungry Hippos- In today's world of fast food franchises being sued for causing obesity, any game encouraging eating all you can outside of a thirdworld country is asking for trouble.
Hi Ho Cherroy - Sure, most people think the most dangerous aspect of the game is children choking after actually eating the cherries. But they neglect the greater social consequence of stealing poor American farmer's fruits!
The game of life - Its encouragement of heterosexual marriages may be approved by the President, but that won't stop gay right's activists from petitioning stores to stop carrying it!
First, I must admit I'm horrible at chess. I've beaten other human players at it, but I suspect that doesn't make me not horrible at it, since I have also never defeated a computer opponent. Plus I actually moved my knight back once. =/
Now, its interesting that you say that you eliminate moves instantly because they're moving backwards rather than forwards and in fact never consider them. But how many people consider moving a pawn first, outside of the opening game? Very few, but they're probably grand masters (or possibly not too bright). Chess is an odd game, in that its possible to lose the game without losing more than one (or two if you count the king) pieces, and pretty early too. Of course, you'd have to suck pretty bad to lose to the four move checkmate. So on one hand, winning through slow attrition is not nessecary, and may not even work. But on the other hand, your pieces afford you some degree of protection, since the victory was credited to a superior pawn formation. I suspect most people focus on whittling their opponents down too much, but there's a benefit to having to think about less pieces (hopefully less than symmetric).
How do we even know that moving a piece to a certian place won't do us any good? In the case of your knight, we know because we just moved it forward. Because you just moved it a short while ago, you have some memory about where it is and isn't useful. Combine that with a knowledge of opening moves and the game of chess, and you'd more likely focus on moving it forward, or moving another piece.
But basic game tree search works pretty well about reasoning, despite your admonitions. You don't prune a search tree, perhaps, but you still consider a few options, examine what you think your opponent will do, and perhaps form a plan based on that. Thats the basis of game tree search, and some of the reasoning I go through. Rather than examine every individual move's consequence, I focus on the back row pieces, the stuff that feels like it has more impact.
I know a lot of people are going to suggest the Turing papers, and other more impact-of-computation-on-society type papers. Of course, they might be better off mentioning Seymour Papert, but I'd rather focus on some papers a little more concrete.
One of the problems with looking for original papers on CS is that the earliest were intensively focused on mathematical notation-- from the 1930's! For example, famous mathematician Church is accreddited with the definition of the lambda calculus denoting functions, which classes about programming languages use heavily. During such a class, our professor introduced us to a few papers, "Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages" by John Reynolds. The paper was originally published in 1972, so I'm not sure how he got ahold of it. But it's a great survey of the topic. If you're really interested in a specific topic, the easiest way, I find, to find foundational papers is to find a textbook on the topic with a thick bibliography. Then just try to trace out the citation geneology to an appropriate root. Eventually you'll work your way from something like "Designing autonomous robots to work independently in cellular networks" to something like "cooperative robotics." In this quest, Cite Seer can be a great tool. But it makes a poor starting place, as you mentioned.
On the contrary, I've been linguistically challenged for quite a while now! The other year I came up with the word evility, as an "adjective form of evil," as I recall thinking at the time. If simply screwing up single word in a late night posting is hilarious, then you should hang around, I'll be a regular laugh riot!
I agree that the intro scene looks a lot better on the n64 version. I can't recall if that's really how it was or the author mistook one for the other (down to misnaming the files). But I can tell you that if it's anything like the bonus disk to Wind Waker, the high res really does make a difference. They apply some nice filtering techniques on the textures, and I'm pretty sure they redid some of the main characters. In particular, I remember Link looking much better on the Cube. Thats not to say they can't screw up Majora's Mask. Just goes against my own tuition is all.
Agreed. Between not being able to get MSN running, they'll be heckled to read the manual, when it's clear the heckler hasn't either. If that's the kind of "community" support you get from Fedora, I'll stick elsewhere.
Perhaps because its the Windows users don't feel like putting up with your game, having a broader selection?
Hate to sound like a troll though. I think I saw another poster with the same sentiment while the comment form was loading. "Maybe because linux gamers are starved for games?"
How about using a journaled file system? They keep a log of recent writes and what not. So every time you commit the log, a new version is made. It'd be like a meta log. Which probably means it would suck =(
Another trick about Debian that is not well discussed (I'm beginning to think that nothing really is); stable is stable, and unstable is not so stable. Far more package rotation in unstable. Testing is sort of a happy middle ground. Also, I'm pretty sure that it won't install kernels as part of a "dist-upgrade." Thats the term for switching from stable to unstable or testing or whatever. After switcing to unstable, a lot of stuff visually improved, and drasticaly. Gaim upgraded by a lot, but its still about a month behind the curve. Of course, if you look at Gaim's track record of next day bug fixes, there might be a reason for that;).
As a user of Debian, I can tell you that Debian is not yet ready for the desktop market. I really do like it, and of the available technologies, Debian is probably the one that should be improved. But right now, the preferred method of installing things is the command line apt-get. The installer is ncurses based.
Don't get me wrong; there's several projects in the works to provide a more friendly, GUI based installer and dpkg frontend, but they're not primetime ready apparently. There's more to Linux than installing it. Maintainance is apt-get's territory. But there are still rough spots; updating config files is a difficult procedure. Often times its just a couple of new lines that add in some example comments, but if you've changed something over the default (like say, network configuration) then replacing that file can screw you out of your DHCP connection for a couple of examples commented out that were clearly unnessecary. Currently these sorts of things (as well as more outright failurs) rarely happen in the stable branch because they're found in the wide base who uses unstable.
Sure, you can make arguements that say if manufacturers promoted and sold desktops with Linux installed, Linux would be on the desktop by very definition. But that doesn't really answer anything. On the other hand, discussing what will cause PC makers to support Linux preinstallations I do find enlightening. In order to successfully accomplish Linux on the desktop with Debian, manufacturers (or other developers) will need to invest time improving the code base for the kind of system consumers want, and create an internal testing process for the package tree and installation. I know my family wouldn't put up with the crap running linux on this computer that I get.
I wonder how many pilots have had to prove they can land an aircraft on "only 1 gear down, with half the engines off, and part of the control surfaces stuck" outside of a computer simulation. I'm hoping very few, because it endangers far less people. Plus, it helps with my point.
How will they implement the latencies and delays that commonly befall the internet.
Easy--they'll just make sure to build the network out of cheap (insert your least favorite brand here) routers, and pass the savings on to the professor's salaries!
Interesting view you have of Berkeley, and publishing secrecy. Berkeley professors have been placed in tough spots before, and I don't see any reason why this would be different. Absolute secrecy may not be needed for this sort of project, but the Homeland Defense group isn't the only people concerned about publication. You can expect that any paper to be published must be sent to the Homeland Defense and the NSF groups and approved, with about six months delay, depending on the scope and severity of the discoveries made.
On the other hand, if the Dept of Homeland Security doesn't like it for whatever reason, they'll likely try to stop publication, reguardless of what the grant says and doesn't say.
More like the visual style and cinematic presentation than any sort of symbolic plot. The lobby scene from the matrix is influenced by the scene with the spider tank. The difference is that there's background symbology in the violence, as the spider tank mauls one of those taxonomy trees accidentally. Another similarity is the constant choice of night as a setting. If it's not night, its at least dark and rainy in GITS.
On the other hand, your plot summar of GITS is somewhat flawed. "The chick" hardly thinks she's ordinary. In fact, she's very consious of how different she is. I think thats one of the plot themes of GITS, how she gets a chance to be normal for a while at the end. Of course, both The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell owe a lot to a common predecessor, Blade Runner. But then, thats true for nearly every sci-fi movie since it was released.
How about the fact that one of the landmark cases in gun rights (US vs Miller) ruled that if any evidence had been presented that his sawed off shotgun was used in a military, he would have been allowed to posses it?
More importantly, the 2nd amendment is a hedge against tyranny. A cruel, painful, dangerous and frightening hedge, but a crucial one nonetheless. If the progression of the modern English language has obscured this, perhaps a less unambiguous amendment is in order. Part of the beauty of the constitution is that it isn't set in stone. Some people feel that amending the constitution is sacrilige and goes against the founder's holy writ or some such. Instead of deifying the founders, I believe that people should realize the underlying rights that should be protected.
Rebellion is a fundamental need of society, just as political speech and personal affiliations are. Some day I'll find the initiative to read the Federalist Papers in their entirety. They have a lot to say not just about the theoretical moral right, but also about pragmatic utility of those rights.
Among game manufacturers, MS has the unique position that several of their top tier developers and titles were envisioned in English. They can begin development of the game in English, and not have to worry about alienating a significant number of game players who they could otherwise easily reach, nor do they need to worry about staffing people proficient in english. This comes at the cost of ignoring markets like Japan, which are smaller and have protective tarrifs in place.
Contrast this with Sony and Nintendo. They have a solid market in Japan, which they cannot simply ignore. There's less taxes, less headaches, and they have far more public access. But they cannot ignore the world market as much as the American film industry does. So they can either make the voice acting in all Japanese and leave it up to their foreign subsideraries to localize, they can alienate their home market and start out in English and do english only, or they can design to reduce the amount of localization needed.
This isn't just about voice, its about affordable universal appeal. One of the best movies ever was made in Japan, but the language in which it was filmed has certainly harmed its marketablity and audience appeal.
I think you just underestimate the power of prayer. Also a good number of people enjoy figuring out how to reduce the randomness through identification methods. Figure out which jewels are worthless, which spellbooks you can read without losing your mind, and which armors can be worn without negative consequences! A minor spoiler: the scroll of identify is the cheapest in the game. Shopkeepers will charge the average customer 26 gil for one (If I remember properly). I suggest not selling them, once he makes an offer.
Actually, NSF does ocasionally offer grants to CS professors. One of my professors is part of the NSF funded Open Source Quality project. Several others have been awarded NSF grants as well. In fact, few have research directly for the DoD. A couple do have grants from popular defense contractors, like Honeywell, and I presume there are some strings attached.
The real question is why you'd bother playing all those games listed when, really, there's about five seperate games going through evolutions. Sure, you could play Herzog Zwei through Warcraft 3, but I think a decent game designer can get by without noticing that the Tiberian Sun is just a shitty rip off of Dune, which they lost the liscence to. In a similar vein, you can probably get by without having played "Mojib Ribbon" or "Rez."
What really irks me is the attempt to cannonize the games, even though its barely possible to classify a game. Example: System Shock and thief are RPGs, but Deus Ex is an FPS.
Really, games shouldn't be about making "Zelda, only in cyberspace," but about something else. Everyone is following the same single player, level based model, when its becoming clear that with every generation of hardware, designing levels by hand will be harder, and require more attention to detail. Often times designers don't even recognize the tricks that make such a game interesting to players! 20 levels of how Marius Stomp runs, jumps and fireballs his way to the finish won't be interesting. Instead, quality games focus on a steady growth of options, to keep the game interesting with every step. Labelling your game with a genre has the double edged effect of giving you a set of predefined game play elements, while also limiting your gameplay elements. When someone gets the ingenius idea to combine two genres, it's like a freaking ephiphany to everyone. Mario Golf for handheld, uniting the two least likely to meet players: sports fans and RPG enthusiasts. I must admit though, that I did like the game, but the multiplayer suffers from more experienced players 0wning newer ones.
Anyways, I think I'm done ranting, better eat while the eating's good.
Slashdot Mirror
I think thats the plan behind UserLinux - to put Debian in a pretty dress. A spoonfull of sugar to make the apt-medicine go down. I run Debian on my desktop right now, and the installer I used wasn't pretty. Most anyone who's job isn't related to an understanding of computers would probably run for the hills, as would a number of those whose job qualifies.
That being said, there should be a difference between making it pleasant and making it Microsoft. There's a saying I once heard, "Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the masters, instead seek what they have sought." Sure, there's a short term advantage to pulling the UI directly from the most popular package around. But there's a set of problems with it that you should understand. Even the most popular package around is changing with every revision. And the UI is one of the areas most visible to potential customers as a differentiation; something that says, "This is not just a shitty version of something you can get elsewhere." So lifting design from Redmond may not be the best way out. But it certainly is a cop out.
To build my own mantra: Know what your strengths are, and promote them. Know what your weaknesses are, and amend them.
Unfortunately, its very difficult to automate the fitness function to include "stability" in GA circuit design. Even a binary "does it still work when I move it five feet from this CRT?" is time consuming, especially when you're planning on running large populations or generations.
The fact that these GAs are exploiting electric interference and other phonomena that aren't easily applied to design by humans to achieve new and lower cost designs isn't unexpected. But I don't envy the people whose job is to push the frontier of computer part design, and understand how these work.
Stability is a great idea, but measuring it automatically is equally difficult. I guess that just means more job security for those aforementioned researchers.
And you know what? That didn't stop my university from blocking all packets over the bittorrent protocol! Bastards.
Interesting aspect, but I think you can say the same applies to computers as well. Only, their goal is "checkmate the opponent" rather than "take the queen's rook." If the computer thinks that rook is the only thing stopping it, then eventually it will take it.
They say there's a prohibitive number of states to consider to brute force chess. I agree that simply using some form of dynamic programming to build a large pattern matching database isn't very intelligent, but I can't help but think that eventually we'll be at a point where one can consider trying just that.
Risk - Its lifelike depiction of the globe and glorification of "world domination" may be a severe liability to Hasbro worldwide.
Monopoly - The day someone is inspired by the best strategies in this game will be the beginning of the end of mankind. Encouraging housing shortages, anticompetitive behavior and beauty contests are not desireable behaviors in our landlords.
Hungry Hungry Hippos- In today's world of fast food franchises being sued for causing obesity, any game encouraging eating all you can outside of a thirdworld country is asking for trouble.
Hi Ho Cherroy - Sure, most people think the most dangerous aspect of the game is children choking after actually eating the cherries. But they neglect the greater social consequence of stealing poor American farmer's fruits!
The game of life - Its encouragement of heterosexual marriages may be approved by the President, but that won't stop gay right's activists from petitioning stores to stop carrying it!
First, I must admit I'm horrible at chess. I've beaten other human players at it, but I suspect that doesn't make me not horrible at it, since I have also never defeated a computer opponent. Plus I actually moved my knight back once. =/
Now, its interesting that you say that you eliminate moves instantly because they're moving backwards rather than forwards and in fact never consider them. But how many people consider moving a pawn first, outside of the opening game? Very few, but they're probably grand masters (or possibly not too bright). Chess is an odd game, in that its possible to lose the game without losing more than one (or two if you count the king) pieces, and pretty early too. Of course, you'd have to suck pretty bad to lose to the four move checkmate. So on one hand, winning through slow attrition is not nessecary, and may not even work. But on the other hand, your pieces afford you some degree of protection, since the victory was credited to a superior pawn formation. I suspect most people focus on whittling their opponents down too much, but there's a benefit to having to think about less pieces (hopefully less than symmetric).
How do we even know that moving a piece to a certian place won't do us any good? In the case of your knight, we know because we just moved it forward. Because you just moved it a short while ago, you have some memory about where it is and isn't useful. Combine that with a knowledge of opening moves and the game of chess, and you'd more likely focus on moving it forward, or moving another piece.
But basic game tree search works pretty well about reasoning, despite your admonitions. You don't prune a search tree, perhaps, but you still consider a few options, examine what you think your opponent will do, and perhaps form a plan based on that. Thats the basis of game tree search, and some of the reasoning I go through. Rather than examine every individual move's consequence, I focus on the back row pieces, the stuff that feels like it has more impact.
I know a lot of people are going to suggest the Turing papers, and other more impact-of-computation-on-society type papers. Of course, they might be better off mentioning Seymour Papert, but I'd rather focus on some papers a little more concrete.
One of the problems with looking for original papers on CS is that the earliest were intensively focused on mathematical notation-- from the 1930's! For example, famous mathematician Church is accreddited with the definition of the lambda calculus denoting functions, which classes about programming languages use heavily. During such a class, our professor introduced us to a few papers, "Definitional Interpreters for Higher-Order Programming Languages" by John Reynolds. The paper was originally published in 1972, so I'm not sure how he got ahold of it. But it's a great survey of the topic. If you're really interested in a specific topic, the easiest way, I find, to find foundational papers is to find a textbook on the topic with a thick bibliography. Then just try to trace out the citation geneology to an appropriate root. Eventually you'll work your way from something like "Designing autonomous robots to work independently in cellular networks" to something like "cooperative robotics." In this quest, Cite Seer can be a great tool. But it makes a poor starting place, as you mentioned.
On the contrary, I've been linguistically challenged for quite a while now! The other year I came up with the word evility, as an "adjective form of evil," as I recall thinking at the time. If simply screwing up single word in a late night posting is hilarious, then you should hang around, I'll be a regular laugh riot!
I agree that the intro scene looks a lot better on the n64 version. I can't recall if that's really how it was or the author mistook one for the other (down to misnaming the files). But I can tell you that if it's anything like the bonus disk to Wind Waker, the high res really does make a difference. They apply some nice filtering techniques on the textures, and I'm pretty sure they redid some of the main characters. In particular, I remember Link looking much better on the Cube. Thats not to say they can't screw up Majora's Mask. Just goes against my own tuition is all.
Agreed. Between not being able to get MSN running, they'll be heckled to read the manual, when it's clear the heckler hasn't either. If that's the kind of "community" support you get from Fedora, I'll stick elsewhere.
Perhaps because its the Windows users don't feel like putting up with your game, having a broader selection?
Hate to sound like a troll though. I think I saw another poster with the same sentiment while the comment form was loading. "Maybe because linux gamers are starved for games?"
How about using a journaled file system? They keep a log of recent writes and what not. So every time you commit the log, a new version is made. It'd be like a meta log. Which probably means it would suck =(
Another trick about Debian that is not well discussed (I'm beginning to think that nothing really is); stable is stable, and unstable is not so stable. Far more package rotation in unstable. Testing is sort of a happy middle ground. Also, I'm pretty sure that it won't install kernels as part of a "dist-upgrade." Thats the term for switching from stable to unstable or testing or whatever. After switcing to unstable, a lot of stuff visually improved, and drasticaly. Gaim upgraded by a lot, but its still about a month behind the curve. Of course, if you look at Gaim's track record of next day bug fixes, there might be a reason for that ;).
As a user of Debian, I can tell you that Debian is not yet ready for the desktop market. I really do like it, and of the available technologies, Debian is probably the one that should be improved. But right now, the preferred method of installing things is the command line apt-get. The installer is ncurses based.
Don't get me wrong; there's several projects in the works to provide a more friendly, GUI based installer and dpkg frontend, but they're not primetime ready apparently. There's more to Linux than installing it. Maintainance is apt-get's territory. But there are still rough spots; updating config files is a difficult procedure. Often times its just a couple of new lines that add in some example comments, but if you've changed something over the default (like say, network configuration) then replacing that file can screw you out of your DHCP connection for a couple of examples commented out that were clearly unnessecary. Currently these sorts of things (as well as more outright failurs) rarely happen in the stable branch because they're found in the wide base who uses unstable.
Sure, you can make arguements that say if manufacturers promoted and sold desktops with Linux installed, Linux would be on the desktop by very definition. But that doesn't really answer anything. On the other hand, discussing what will cause PC makers to support Linux preinstallations I do find enlightening. In order to successfully accomplish Linux on the desktop with Debian, manufacturers (or other developers) will need to invest time improving the code base for the kind of system consumers want, and create an internal testing process for the package tree and installation. I know my family wouldn't put up with the crap running linux on this computer that I get.
You mean like HTTP resume support? The killer feature of IE 6 that had been in Opera for fucking years?
I wonder how many pilots have had to prove they can land an aircraft on "only 1 gear down, with half the engines off, and part of the control surfaces stuck" outside of a computer simulation. I'm hoping very few, because it endangers far less people. Plus, it helps with my point.
How will they implement the latencies and delays that commonly befall the internet.
Easy--they'll just make sure to build the network out of cheap (insert your least favorite brand here) routers, and pass the savings on to the professor's salaries!
Interesting view you have of Berkeley, and publishing secrecy. Berkeley professors have been placed in tough spots before, and I don't see any reason why this would be different. Absolute secrecy may not be needed for this sort of project, but the Homeland Defense group isn't the only people concerned about publication. You can expect that any paper to be published must be sent to the Homeland Defense and the NSF groups and approved, with about six months delay, depending on the scope and severity of the discoveries made.
On the other hand, if the Dept of Homeland Security doesn't like it for whatever reason, they'll likely try to stop publication, reguardless of what the grant says and doesn't say.
More like the visual style and cinematic presentation than any sort of symbolic plot. The lobby scene from the matrix is influenced by the scene with the spider tank. The difference is that there's background symbology in the violence, as the spider tank mauls one of those taxonomy trees accidentally. Another similarity is the constant choice of night as a setting. If it's not night, its at least dark and rainy in GITS.
On the other hand, your plot summar of GITS is somewhat flawed. "The chick" hardly thinks she's ordinary. In fact, she's very consious of how different she is. I think thats one of the plot themes of GITS, how she gets a chance to be normal for a while at the end. Of course, both The Matrix and Ghost in the Shell owe a lot to a common predecessor, Blade Runner. But then, thats true for nearly every sci-fi movie since it was released.
How about the fact that one of the landmark cases in gun rights (US vs Miller) ruled that if any evidence had been presented that his sawed off shotgun was used in a military, he would have been allowed to posses it?
More importantly, the 2nd amendment is a hedge against tyranny. A cruel, painful, dangerous and frightening hedge, but a crucial one nonetheless. If the progression of the modern English language has obscured this, perhaps a less unambiguous amendment is in order. Part of the beauty of the constitution is that it isn't set in stone. Some people feel that amending the constitution is sacrilige and goes against the founder's holy writ or some such. Instead of deifying the founders, I believe that people should realize the underlying rights that should be protected.
Rebellion is a fundamental need of society, just as political speech and personal affiliations are. Some day I'll find the initiative to read the Federalist Papers in their entirety. They have a lot to say not just about the theoretical moral right, but also about pragmatic utility of those rights.
Among game manufacturers, MS has the unique position that several of their top tier developers and titles were envisioned in English. They can begin development of the game in English, and not have to worry about alienating a significant number of game players who they could otherwise easily reach, nor do they need to worry about staffing people proficient in english. This comes at the cost of ignoring markets like Japan, which are smaller and have protective tarrifs in place.
Contrast this with Sony and Nintendo. They have a solid market in Japan, which they cannot simply ignore. There's less taxes, less headaches, and they have far more public access. But they cannot ignore the world market as much as the American film industry does. So they can either make the voice acting in all Japanese and leave it up to their foreign subsideraries to localize, they can alienate their home market and start out in English and do english only, or they can design to reduce the amount of localization needed.
This isn't just about voice, its about affordable universal appeal. One of the best movies ever was made in Japan, but the language in which it was filmed has certainly harmed its marketablity and audience appeal.
I think you just underestimate the power of prayer. Also a good number of people enjoy figuring out how to reduce the randomness through identification methods. Figure out which jewels are worthless, which spellbooks you can read without losing your mind, and which armors can be worn without negative consequences! A minor spoiler: the scroll of identify is the cheapest in the game. Shopkeepers will charge the average customer 26 gil for one (If I remember properly). I suggest not selling them, once he makes an offer.
Actually, NSF does ocasionally offer grants to CS professors. One of my professors is part of the NSF funded Open Source Quality project. Several others have been awarded NSF grants as well. In fact, few have research directly for the DoD. A couple do have grants from popular defense contractors, like Honeywell, and I presume there are some strings attached.
The real question is why you'd bother playing all those games listed when, really, there's about five seperate games going through evolutions. Sure, you could play Herzog Zwei through Warcraft 3, but I think a decent game designer can get by without noticing that the Tiberian Sun is just a shitty rip off of Dune, which they lost the liscence to. In a similar vein, you can probably get by without having played "Mojib Ribbon" or "Rez."
What really irks me is the attempt to cannonize the games, even though its barely possible to classify a game. Example: System Shock and thief are RPGs, but Deus Ex is an FPS.
Really, games shouldn't be about making "Zelda, only in cyberspace," but about something else. Everyone is following the same single player, level based model, when its becoming clear that with every generation of hardware, designing levels by hand will be harder, and require more attention to detail. Often times designers don't even recognize the tricks that make such a game interesting to players! 20 levels of how Marius Stomp runs, jumps and fireballs his way to the finish won't be interesting. Instead, quality games focus on a steady growth of options, to keep the game interesting with every step. Labelling your game with a genre has the double edged effect of giving you a set of predefined game play elements, while also limiting your gameplay elements. When someone gets the ingenius idea to combine two genres, it's like a freaking ephiphany to everyone. Mario Golf for handheld, uniting the two least likely to meet players: sports fans and RPG enthusiasts. I must admit though, that I did like the game, but the multiplayer suffers from more experienced players 0wning newer ones.
Anyways, I think I'm done ranting, better eat while the eating's good.
Still, you can't help but feel that if both these gentlemen's name had been Tinkerbell, a more "Xtreme" name would have been chosen.