What to do if the patent is asserted? Hunt down the parties responsible and butcher them like cattle. I don't know anything about hiring assassins, but surely compared to the hundreds of millions (billions?) paid out in bullshit patent lawsuit settlements, buying the death of the head of every known patent troll company (and their lawyers) would be a drop in the bucket, and probably a net benefit to society aside. Imagine if RIM were run by the mafia - they'd have taken care of this years ago, and anyone left would be too terrified to troll patents today!
The inability of some people to put kneejerk emotional reactions aside and rationally consider whether it's reasonable to spend a considerable fraction of many people's total lifetime earnings for the sake of extending the life of a very sick person for a few months or years is disconcerting. It's fine and good to pretend money is no object when you aren't the one paying for it, nor the one suffering bedridden and perhaps barely conscious. When you consider your typical middle class American spends most of their life working to pay off a few hundred thousand dollar mortgage, burning through that much or more on a person with a terminal illness is in some sense like throwing the life's work of another person away. Unless you're willing to be that person, pipe down.
That's called resource pooling, and for small objects it's a workaround for a shitty GC. Why bother using a language with garbage collection if working around the GC makes life more difficult than manual memory management? In C or C++ you can treat small objects (points/vectors] as values and let the language copy them transparently, much like Java does with primitive types, and you'd have the best of both worlds. On PCs, a generational GC can be fast enough to not to noticeably impact real-time animation. On a slower device like a phone that's likely not automatically true, and you might have to specially tune the GC, or use an incremental GC (which sacrifices overall throughput to reduce/eliminate delays), but then I always thought running Java on resource-constrained devices was a bit brain-damaged anyway.
I'm surprised the current administration hasn't called the whole smart grid idea off. After all, won't it put tens of thousands of meter readers out of work? That probably hasn't occurred to them yet, but you just wait. Please, someone think of the meter readers!
I'm really fascinated by this stuff, as planning out how you're going to (ab)use the video hardware is key to getting the most out of these old machines - modern machines are so boring, with high resolution and unlimited colors, and no need for split screens and hblank trickery. I grew up on old Ataris but was too young (or too lame) to do anything but putter around in Basic at the time, and I love reading about the clever ways people have come up with to stretch the limits of the machine. I wish there were more graphic examples on the web demonstrating what you can do in these exotic modes.
Hardly surprising, considering Hildon really wasn't very good. Sluggish, clumsy, and tending to waste a lot of very precious screen real estate - not that I see how switching to Qt changes any of those things. Still, it sounds like they're basically throwing the whole UI and all the software written for it out, and that sucks. I've long been tempted to write a little music toy app to run on my N800, but I should probably just buy an iPhone or a Pre (given that I don't actually carry the N800 around anywhere anyway).
It appears you've taken a criticism of a collection of computer programs personally. Who said I was endorsing Windows? A general criticism of the state of Gnome or KDE does not constitute an endorsement of any alternative. Indeed, such a "you're either with us or against" mentality is antithetical to the spirit of choice. Whether I install Windows or Linux with Gnome, I end up with something very similar - a large, integrated collection of mediocre applications which I don't really want to use once the novelty has worn off. Ideally, I'd use neither. The specific choice between e.g. the faint aroma of evil lingering around Windows Media Player versus the bungling incompetence of "Totem" -- and again my answer is "neither" -- is left to your personal preference.
I just don't understand desktop environments like Gnome and KDE. Most of their efforts seems to go into building half-assed reimplementations of their previous half-assed reimplementations of various existing programs. I understand they want everything to fit together perfectly, with uniform look and feel, but most of their software just isn't very good, and I'm not interested in waiting another seven or eight years for them to "realize their vision" by rewriting every component a few more times. I'd rather use software that works today and, ideally, also worked yesterday and won't be arbitrarily discontinued and rewritten tomorrow.
I might go so far as to say that if there's anything holding back linux on the desktop, it's the clowns directing these desktop environments. Their perpetually half-implemented delusions of grandeur have for years been the public face of linux, with hopes of wooing people who don't want to use Windows but also don't want to learn anything new, and who become disillusioned when the whole barely-functional mess hardly works any better than it did when they tried it a couple years before. But rather than fixing the bugs and polishing the the software, these projects are too busy changing direction to follow their latest round of Great New Ideas, and never finish what they started. Worse, they just don't have the taste or discipline to resist pushing software that no one really wants, or simply isn't finished yet, and we end up with abominations like a Gnome-branded web browser, yet another lousy media player, a redundant xterm clone, and menus full of goofy, trivial applications that no one will ever use.
So, yeah. Keep up the good work!
Re:Ignoring the politics, the quality has changed
on
Replacing a Thinkpad?
·
· Score: 1
As an emacs user, I am particularly sensitive about the issue of laptop keyboard layout. I can immediately rule out 95% of the laptops I see as potential purchases just on account of poor keyboard layouts. Taking into consideration the absence of a second Alt key on the Macbook, and the addition of the useless "Windows" keys on the newer Thinkpad models which squashes all the modifier keys to an uncomfortable size, I may have to revise that figure to 100% and hope that my current T40p never dies. In any case, you have touched a nerve here:
> I have a few complaints about the Thinkpads:.. > 2) The Function / Control keys are swapped... again, I'm adjusting after using the Tecra keyboard.
NO! No, no, and no. God no. Adjust your expectations. The 'function' key has no business down there, and certainly not between Control and Alt. It isn't even that useful -- they could put it anywhere on the keyboard and you'd never care. Instead almost every laptop in the damn world sticks it right down there where you'll hit it by accident and wreak havoc with ten years of emacs training (and if you're not an emacs user, you can't possibly that sensitive to the keyboard layout anyway =p). Due to firmware magic you usually can't remap the stupid thing, in contrast with the Windows key of a desktop keyboard. In short, if you think that this is a noteworthy feature, please don't unduly dismiss my suggestion that a frontal lobotomy might do you some good.
Does a clock which automatically adjust for DST really make my life simpler? Let's see..
The clock on a "dumb" microwave doesn't understand daylight savings time, and I will have to adjust the time twice per year to correct it. A "smart" microwave will understand DST, so I won't have to correct it. Surely the "smart" device is more convenient, no?
Not so fast..
Let's say my power fails N times per year. Around here, N is probably around ten times. Every time my power fails, I have to reset the time on the microwave. On the "smart" microwave, I additionally have to re-enter the date.
In the case of the dumb microwave, I have to enter one number for each reset, or N+2 numbers per year (the +2 being the two times per year I must adjust for DST).
On the smart microwave, I don't have to adjust for DST, but every reset is twice as much work: I must enter 2 numbers per reset, or 2N numbers per year.
Looking at it that way, the "smart" clock, being aware of the date, will only save me effort if my power goes out (or the microwave is unplugged, etc) less than twice per year. Doesn't seem very realistic to me.
Microwaves: I wish someone had the sense to build one with just a big knob to set the time, a small knob to set the power level (clicking to an off position if you just want to use the timer), and a big start/stop button. Put the timer on a logarithmic scale up to whatever the maximum sane length of time you might run a microwave for is (or use a continuous encoder with some acceleration programmed in the software), and read the value out on the display as you spin it.
Monitors: It'd be handy on occasion to briefly adjust the brightness on my monitor, but the digital controls on all of them I've used lately are so stifling that I rarely bother. Just one little knob controlling brightness by default, or moving the cursor when in an onscreen menu, would be a hundredfold improvement. The monitors I use everyday are like minefields - sometimes the buttons aren't even labelled, and hitting the wrong one tends to make some terrible change in monitor state that takes five or ten seconds to undo, like the picture-in-picture on the bigger Dell screens, or the bizarre "highlight mode" on my old Samsung, which can't be toggled off, but instead requires digging through menus.
Sure, but by that logic you ought to be using Gaim 1.5. Basically every change to the UI in the 2.0 betas and Pidgin is a step backward. Their bizarre scheme for managing status is horrible and so confusing (and in the betas I've used, outright broken) that I've just stopped setting my status to away at all. They've added that useless Accounts menu to the buddy list, which makes the menu bar so wide that that you can't shrink the window down to a reasonable size without cutting it off (no, a 300 pixel wide window is not reasonable for presenting what is essentially a list of names under 20 characters). In the betas they did horrible things to the conversation window, with pieces misaligned and awkwardly jammed together, but that at least they appear to have cleaned up.
It's sad that AOL feels it necessary to harass developers of 3rd party clients. I don't know anyone who would use their service if they had to use the (absolutely terrible) official AIM client.
OTOH, the UI changes in Gaim 2.0 are so uniformly horrible that I'm deperate to find an alternative anyway. Combined with the name change, maybe the whole project will sink away into deserved obscurity.:)
Building up your character isn't much fun, since there are so few skills to choose from.
Doubly so given the scaling on monster difficulties, particularly if (as I did) you made poor choices in designing your character such that as you advance the monsters get more difficult. I stopped playing the game for ages just due to this demotivating me.
Isn't that a little crazy? There's less dialogue, but that's okay, because they wanted everything to be voice-acted. The NPCs do stupid things and engage each other in the same conversations over and over again, which breaks the suspension of disbelief, but it's cool because it's "Radiant AI".
And don't forget how they will switch between two or possibly three accents/voices in one conversation.:)
I'll admit I am to some extent suckered in by the gorgeous outdoor graphics, and at this point maybe I just have lowered expectations for these kind of games, but all around I still enjoyed Oblivion. YMMV.
Sadly I missed out on UO, but I agree - even after a decade and a half, U7 is still one of the most detailed virtual worlds created on a computer. I thought the age of virtual worlds at that level of detail was long gone due to the cost of developing modern games (in 3D, with fancy models instead of tiny sprites), but Oblivion proved me wrong. It's really the only thing I've played since U7 to approximate that virtual world feeling, and it only wears thin because after wandering the countryside for a few hours, you realize you're seeing the few caves/shrines/ruins repeated over and over. Well, that, and the characters have nothing interesting to say when you talk to them (but then it's probably totally infeasible to record voice for the amount of dialog that U7 contained). It might be less immersive, but we haven't outgrown textual dialog yet (and never will, until some major advances in speech synthesis occur). Still, Oblivion deserves a lot of credit for creating such a huge world at AAA production values.
That is very cool. I didn't realize Second Life was that sophisticated - now I understand why they are said to require vastly more processing power on the server side compared to many games.
The basic problem with MMORPGs games is that so few of them contain any real action or physics component. In something like WoW, you can run around in real time, but your interaction with the world is basically limited to whatever commands (attack, spells, etc) the developers program in. In something like GTA you get so-called "emergent gameplay" simply because you have some terrain and a physics engine, and it's a lot of fun just to race around trying to abuse it. Pedestrians, other vehicles, police, etc add an extra dimension of entertainment, but a mostly decorative one - fundamentally, GTA is fun because driving around insanely is fun, and everything else is just there to stimulate your imagination and placate that part of your mind that expects some context it can relate to. In most MMO games, the basic mechanics of the world don't enable much more than walking around and admiring the scenery. Gameplay in these environments is more contrived in the sense that it requires a greater mental investment in roleplaying and fabricating some motivating work-reward structure (which might be OCD trying to max your character out, social activity within a guild, or whatever).
Given an MMO with greater interactivity than the typical "run, click, watch animation" style, there are a lot of fun things you could do. A fine example of emergent gameplay within a very simple system, from my childhood playing the NES, was the game River City Ransom, which had just enough physics that two players could invent mini sports to play using the objects lying around, like baseball using a pipe and a rock, or a crude form of soccer by kicking a trash can around the map. There's an elemental simplicity to this that transcends the games of stat manipulation (decorated with pretty scenery and storylines) that RPGs typically offer.
If it sounds like I'm ragging on WoW, it's only because I'd rather be playing an MMO version of a game like Zelda.
How is having control over my own computer a security hole? Any malicious software I might download and run from the internet doesn't need magic kernel superpowers to do its harm. Everything I care about - my files, my running applications - is hanging right out there in userland, and this isn't going to change. Even running as the most limited user, if I click that email attachment and run it, it will free to delete all my personal files and mail them off to china, regardless of whether it can load a driver into the kernel. Either way, I'm screwed, and the machine needs to be wiped.
Locking down the security of the kernel on a single-user machine doesn't inherently secure the user, it only secures software in kernel mode from being tampered with by software in user mode. It seems plausible that if I had an antivirus program running in the kernel, I would want stop malicious programs in usermode from disabling it. However, if the antivirus is doing its job, shouldn't it have detected the virus/trojan/whatever before it even had a chance to attempt this? Note that Microsoft is locking the antivirus vendors out as well. This is assuming you even consider antivirus software a good idea, which is questionable, as it basically serves to make risky behavior (executing random software from the internet) somewhat less risky (but still a bad idea). This is due to the impossibility of having up to date signatures for 100% of all malicious software, or even of forming a universally accepted definition of what constitutes "malicious" (as anyone who has had basic utilities like "netcat" deleted by their antivirus software will no doubt agree).
You could argue that locking the kernel down also prevents the stealthy kernel-mode "rookits" that are currently all the rage (provided they don't have an exploit to circumvent the protections). I personally think this threat is greatly exaggerated, particularly when you don't have to be stealthy at all to hide from most users. Even if I'm wrong, read below.
It is widely (and cynically) said that the "security" provisions of the Windows Vista kernel have more to do with DRM (and preventing the user from interfering with it) than they do protecting the user from outside threats. I believe this to be an accurate assessment of Microsoft's intentions, and almost certainly this will be people's experience with it in practice. In fact, DRM and malicious software have surprisngly similar interests. Both are against the interests of the user, thus the need to protect themselves from user intervention. Whether you are a Jon Johansen working around DRM, a cracker disabling software protections, or a security researcher analyzing a piece of malicious software, you need this same level of control over your computer. Having the ability to control the machine from within the kernel is a real win if you need to inspect or manipulate a process that does not want you disturbing it. In any case, locking down the kernel takes away a valuable tool for these people. The difference is that the DRM or software cracker, doing marginally or outright illegal things anyway, won't mind using exploits to work around the protections. The legitimate developer or researching needing these same abilities is left out in the cold.
In the end, we cede control over our computers to Microsoft, in exchange for the ability to download music or video online in DRMed formats that artificially restrict what we are allowed to do with it. At the same time, I could load Visual Studio up right now, write a program that deleted every file in your documents folder, post it on the internet, and nothing any OS security measure can do would stop you from losing your documents if you ran it. In a couple days when the antivirus started recognizing it, I could just write a slightly different version that it didn't recognize. That doesn't leave me feeling any more secure.
> Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development.
Certainly that is interesting, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the article. "Rapid Development" (or development in general) is not comparable to scripting, and the ICFP contest tasks (which this year was to develop AI code governing ants in a colony) contrast sharply with the sort of scriping tasks in this shootout (compile a file if.o absent, invoke grep on some files, etc).
[aside]
This is not intended to rag on scripting or scripting languages, just to note that scripting embodies a largely distinct set of tasks from development in general (and a comparison involving OCaml or the ICFP contest is inappropriate). These sort of tasks that historically have been the domain of shell scripting, although perl seems to have taken over a lot of these things.
As a lot of what perl is best at is simplifying things that you could almost do from the unix shell (or might be able to do with a script, but would be a pain in the ass..), it always struck me as logical that perl should evolve toward becoming a viable replacement for the unix shell.
Sadly this doesn't seem to be on the agenda of the perl gods. Instead of evolving to better fill this niche, they seem to be gravitating toward becoming a sort of second-rate Java/Python immitator. I suspect that the underlying technologies they build with Parrot and the Perl 6 redesign will largely fail to convince many folks who aren't already perl users that perl is a useful substrate for developing real systems on top of. At the same time they will have neglected to improve in their original niche of quick and dirty sysadmin hacklets, while other languages will have continued to improve and build momentum.
Then again, I'm quite possibly wrong. We'll see what happens. Should be interesting..
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What to do if the patent is asserted? Hunt down the parties responsible and butcher them like cattle. I don't know anything about hiring assassins, but surely compared to the hundreds of millions (billions?) paid out in bullshit patent lawsuit settlements, buying the death of the head of every known patent troll company (and their lawyers) would be a drop in the bucket, and probably a net benefit to society aside. Imagine if RIM were run by the mafia - they'd have taken care of this years ago, and anyone left would be too terrified to troll patents today!
Justice, glorious justice.
The inability of some people to put kneejerk emotional reactions aside and rationally consider whether it's reasonable to spend a considerable fraction of many people's total lifetime earnings for the sake of extending the life of a very sick person for a few months or years is disconcerting. It's fine and good to pretend money is no object when you aren't the one paying for it, nor the one suffering bedridden and perhaps barely conscious. When you consider your typical middle class American spends most of their life working to pay off a few hundred thousand dollar mortgage, burning through that much or more on a person with a terminal illness is in some sense like throwing the life's work of another person away. Unless you're willing to be that person, pipe down.
You're an idiot.
That's called resource pooling, and for small objects it's a workaround for a shitty GC. Why bother using a language with garbage collection if working around the GC makes life more difficult than manual memory management? In C or C++ you can treat small objects (points/vectors] as values and let the language copy them transparently, much like Java does with primitive types, and you'd have the best of both worlds. On PCs, a generational GC can be fast enough to not to noticeably impact real-time animation. On a slower device like a phone that's likely not automatically true, and you might have to specially tune the GC, or use an incremental GC (which sacrifices overall throughput to reduce/eliminate delays), but then I always thought running Java on resource-constrained devices was a bit brain-damaged anyway.
Okay then, how do you protect against a logic bug?
No, Black Belts turn into Masters. Thieves turn into Ninjas.
I'm surprised the current administration hasn't called the whole smart grid idea off. After all, won't it put tens of thousands of meter readers out of work? That probably hasn't occurred to them yet, but you just wait. Please, someone think of the meter readers!
Mozilla's UI team has a ten year history of cluelessly grandiose blunders - so if it seems like they're doing the wrong thing, they probably are.
I'm really fascinated by this stuff, as planning out how you're going to (ab)use the video hardware is key to getting the most out of these old machines - modern machines are so boring, with high resolution and unlimited colors, and no need for split screens and hblank trickery. I grew up on old Ataris but was too young (or too lame) to do anything but putter around in Basic at the time, and I love reading about the clever ways people have come up with to stretch the limits of the machine. I wish there were more graphic examples on the web demonstrating what you can do in these exotic modes.
Hardly surprising, considering Hildon really wasn't very good. Sluggish, clumsy, and tending to waste a lot of very precious screen real estate - not that I see how switching to Qt changes any of those things. Still, it sounds like they're basically throwing the whole UI and all the software written for it out, and that sucks. I've long been tempted to write a little music toy app to run on my N800, but I should probably just buy an iPhone or a Pre (given that I don't actually carry the N800 around anywhere anyway).
Comedy gold!
It appears you've taken a criticism of a collection of computer programs personally. Who said I was endorsing Windows? A general criticism of the state of Gnome or KDE does not constitute an endorsement of any alternative. Indeed, such a "you're either with us or against" mentality is antithetical to the spirit of choice. Whether I install Windows or Linux with Gnome, I end up with something very similar - a large, integrated collection of mediocre applications which I don't really want to use once the novelty has worn off. Ideally, I'd use neither. The specific choice between e.g. the faint aroma of evil lingering around Windows Media Player versus the bungling incompetence of "Totem" -- and again my answer is "neither" -- is left to your personal preference.
I just don't understand desktop environments like Gnome and KDE. Most of their efforts seems to go into building half-assed reimplementations of their previous half-assed reimplementations of various existing programs. I understand they want everything to fit together perfectly, with uniform look and feel, but most of their software just isn't very good, and I'm not interested in waiting another seven or eight years for them to "realize their vision" by rewriting every component a few more times. I'd rather use software that works today and, ideally, also worked yesterday and won't be arbitrarily discontinued and rewritten tomorrow.
I might go so far as to say that if there's anything holding back linux on the desktop, it's the clowns directing these desktop environments. Their perpetually half-implemented delusions of grandeur have for years been the public face of linux, with hopes of wooing people who don't want to use Windows but also don't want to learn anything new, and who become disillusioned when the whole barely-functional mess hardly works any better than it did when they tried it a couple years before. But rather than fixing the bugs and polishing the the software, these projects are too busy changing direction to follow their latest round of Great New Ideas, and never finish what they started. Worse, they just don't have the taste or discipline to resist pushing software that no one really wants, or simply isn't finished yet, and we end up with abominations like a Gnome-branded web browser, yet another lousy media player, a redundant xterm clone, and menus full of goofy, trivial applications that no one will ever use.
So, yeah. Keep up the good work!
As an emacs user, I am particularly sensitive about the issue of laptop keyboard layout. I can immediately rule out 95% of the laptops I see as potential purchases just on account of poor keyboard layouts. Taking into consideration the absence of a second Alt key on the Macbook, and the addition of the useless "Windows" keys on the newer Thinkpad models which squashes all the modifier keys to an uncomfortable size, I may have to revise that figure to 100% and hope that my current T40p never dies. In any case, you have touched a nerve here:
..
> I have a few complaints about the Thinkpads:
> 2) The Function / Control keys are swapped... again, I'm adjusting after using the Tecra keyboard.
NO! No, no, and no. God no. Adjust your expectations. The 'function' key has no business down there, and certainly not between Control and Alt. It isn't even that useful -- they could put it anywhere on the keyboard and you'd never care. Instead almost every laptop in the damn world sticks it right down there where you'll hit it by accident and wreak havoc with ten years of emacs training (and if you're not an emacs user, you can't possibly that sensitive to the keyboard layout anyway =p). Due to firmware magic you usually can't remap the stupid thing, in contrast with the Windows key of a desktop keyboard. In short, if you think that this is a noteworthy feature, please don't unduly dismiss my suggestion that a frontal lobotomy might do you some good.
Does a clock which automatically adjust for DST really make my life simpler? Let's see..
The clock on a "dumb" microwave doesn't understand daylight savings time, and I will have to adjust the time twice per year to correct it. A "smart" microwave will understand DST, so I won't have to correct it. Surely the "smart" device is more convenient, no?
Not so fast..
Let's say my power fails N times per year. Around here, N is probably around ten times. Every time my power fails, I have to reset the time on the microwave. On the "smart" microwave, I additionally have to re-enter the date.
In the case of the dumb microwave, I have to enter one number for each reset, or N+2 numbers per year (the +2 being the two times per year I must adjust for DST).
On the smart microwave, I don't have to adjust for DST, but every reset is twice as much work: I must enter 2 numbers per reset, or 2N numbers per year.
N N+2 2N
0 2 0
1 3 2
2 4 4
3 5 6
4 6 8
5 7 10
6 8 12
Looking at it that way, the "smart" clock, being aware of the date, will only save me effort if my power goes out (or the microwave is unplugged, etc) less than twice per year. Doesn't seem very realistic to me.
I totally agree. My pet-button-peeves:
Microwaves: I wish someone had the sense to build one with just a big knob to set the time, a small knob to set the power level (clicking to an off position if you just want to use the timer), and a big start/stop button. Put the timer on a logarithmic scale up to whatever the maximum sane length of time you might run a microwave for is (or use a continuous encoder with some acceleration programmed in the software), and read the value out on the display as you spin it.
Monitors: It'd be handy on occasion to briefly adjust the brightness on my monitor, but the digital controls on all of them I've used lately are so stifling that I rarely bother. Just one little knob controlling brightness by default, or moving the cursor when in an onscreen menu, would be a hundredfold improvement. The monitors I use everyday are like minefields - sometimes the buttons aren't even labelled, and hitting the wrong one tends to make some terrible change in monitor state that takes five or ten seconds to undo, like the picture-in-picture on the bigger Dell screens, or the bizarre "highlight mode" on my old Samsung, which can't be toggled off, but instead requires digging through menus.
Digital plus/minus buttons suck.
Sure, but by that logic you ought to be using Gaim 1.5. Basically every change to the UI in the 2.0 betas and Pidgin is a step backward. Their bizarre scheme for managing status is horrible and so confusing (and in the betas I've used, outright broken) that I've just stopped setting my status to away at all. They've added that useless Accounts menu to the buddy list, which makes the menu bar so wide that that you can't shrink the window down to a reasonable size without cutting it off (no, a 300 pixel wide window is not reasonable for presenting what is essentially a list of names under 20 characters). In the betas they did horrible things to the conversation window, with pieces misaligned and awkwardly jammed together, but that at least they appear to have cleaned up.
It's sad that AOL feels it necessary to harass developers of 3rd party clients. I don't know anyone who would use their service if they had to use the (absolutely terrible) official AIM client.
:)
OTOH, the UI changes in Gaim 2.0 are so uniformly horrible that I'm deperate to find an alternative anyway. Combined with the name change, maybe the whole project will sink away into deserved obscurity.
Doubly so given the scaling on monster difficulties, particularly if (as I did) you made poor choices in designing your character such that as you advance the monsters get more difficult. I stopped playing the game for ages just due to this demotivating me.
Isn't that a little crazy? There's less dialogue, but that's okay, because they wanted everything to be voice-acted. The NPCs do stupid things and engage each other in the same conversations over and over again, which breaks the suspension of disbelief, but it's cool because it's "Radiant AI".And don't forget how they will switch between two or possibly three accents/voices in one conversation. :)
I'll admit I am to some extent suckered in by the gorgeous outdoor graphics, and at this point maybe I just have lowered expectations for these kind of games, but all around I still enjoyed Oblivion. YMMV.
Sadly I missed out on UO, but I agree - even after a decade and a half, U7 is still one of the most detailed virtual worlds created on a computer. I thought the age of virtual worlds at that level of detail was long gone due to the cost of developing modern games (in 3D, with fancy models instead of tiny sprites), but Oblivion proved me wrong. It's really the only thing I've played since U7 to approximate that virtual world feeling, and it only wears thin because after wandering the countryside for a few hours, you realize you're seeing the few caves/shrines/ruins repeated over and over. Well, that, and the characters have nothing interesting to say when you talk to them (but then it's probably totally infeasible to record voice for the amount of dialog that U7 contained). It might be less immersive, but we haven't outgrown textual dialog yet (and never will, until some major advances in speech synthesis occur). Still, Oblivion deserves a lot of credit for creating such a huge world at AAA production values.
That is very cool. I didn't realize Second Life was that sophisticated - now I understand why they are said to require vastly more processing power on the server side compared to many games.
The basic problem with MMORPGs games is that so few of them contain any real action or physics component. In something like WoW, you can run around in real time, but your interaction with the world is basically limited to whatever commands (attack, spells, etc) the developers program in. In something like GTA you get so-called "emergent gameplay" simply because you have some terrain and a physics engine, and it's a lot of fun just to race around trying to abuse it. Pedestrians, other vehicles, police, etc add an extra dimension of entertainment, but a mostly decorative one - fundamentally, GTA is fun because driving around insanely is fun, and everything else is just there to stimulate your imagination and placate that part of your mind that expects some context it can relate to. In most MMO games, the basic mechanics of the world don't enable much more than walking around and admiring the scenery. Gameplay in these environments is more contrived in the sense that it requires a greater mental investment in roleplaying and fabricating some motivating work-reward structure (which might be OCD trying to max your character out, social activity within a guild, or whatever).
Given an MMO with greater interactivity than the typical "run, click, watch animation" style, there are a lot of fun things you could do. A fine example of emergent gameplay within a very simple system, from my childhood playing the NES, was the game River City Ransom, which had just enough physics that two players could invent mini sports to play using the objects lying around, like baseball using a pipe and a rock, or a crude form of soccer by kicking a trash can around the map. There's an elemental simplicity to this that transcends the games of stat manipulation (decorated with pretty scenery and storylines) that RPGs typically offer.
If it sounds like I'm ragging on WoW, it's only because I'd rather be playing an MMO version of a game like Zelda.
How is having control over my own computer a security hole? Any malicious software I might download and run from the internet doesn't need magic kernel superpowers to do its harm. Everything I care about - my files, my running applications - is hanging right out there in userland, and this isn't going to change. Even running as the most limited user, if I click that email attachment and run it, it will free to delete all my personal files and mail them off to china, regardless of whether it can load a driver into the kernel. Either way, I'm screwed, and the machine needs to be wiped.
Locking down the security of the kernel on a single-user machine doesn't inherently secure the user, it only secures software in kernel mode from being tampered with by software in user mode. It seems plausible that if I had an antivirus program running in the kernel, I would want stop malicious programs in usermode from disabling it. However, if the antivirus is doing its job, shouldn't it have detected the virus/trojan/whatever before it even had a chance to attempt this? Note that Microsoft is locking the antivirus vendors out as well. This is assuming you even consider antivirus software a good idea, which is questionable, as it basically serves to make risky behavior (executing random software from the internet) somewhat less risky (but still a bad idea). This is due to the impossibility of having up to date signatures for 100% of all malicious software, or even of forming a universally accepted definition of what constitutes "malicious" (as anyone who has had basic utilities like "netcat" deleted by their antivirus software will no doubt agree).
You could argue that locking the kernel down also prevents the stealthy kernel-mode "rookits" that are currently all the rage (provided they don't have an exploit to circumvent the protections). I personally think this threat is greatly exaggerated, particularly when you don't have to be stealthy at all to hide from most users. Even if I'm wrong, read below.
It is widely (and cynically) said that the "security" provisions of the Windows Vista kernel have more to do with DRM (and preventing the user from interfering with it) than they do protecting the user from outside threats. I believe this to be an accurate assessment of Microsoft's intentions, and almost certainly this will be people's experience with it in practice. In fact, DRM and malicious software have surprisngly similar interests. Both are against the interests of the user, thus the need to protect themselves from user intervention. Whether you are a Jon Johansen working around DRM, a cracker disabling software protections, or a security researcher analyzing a piece of malicious software, you need this same level of control over your computer. Having the ability to control the machine from within the kernel is a real win if you need to inspect or manipulate a process that does not want you disturbing it. In any case, locking down the kernel takes away a valuable tool for these people. The difference is that the DRM or software cracker, doing marginally or outright illegal things anyway, won't mind using exploits to work around the protections. The legitimate developer or researching needing these same abilities is left out in the cold.
In the end, we cede control over our computers to Microsoft, in exchange for the ability to download music or video online in DRMed formats that artificially restrict what we are allowed to do with it. At the same time, I could load Visual Studio up right now, write a program that deleted every file in your documents folder, post it on the internet, and nothing any OS security measure can do would stop you from losing your documents if you ran it. In a couple days when the antivirus started recognizing it, I could just write a slightly different version that it didn't recognize. That doesn't leave me feeling any more secure.
> Interesting that ICFP contests lately pronounced OCaml as the winner for rapid development.
.o absent, invoke grep on some files, etc).
Certainly that is interesting, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the subject of the article. "Rapid Development" (or development in general) is not comparable to scripting, and the ICFP contest tasks (which this year was to develop AI code governing ants in a colony) contrast sharply with the sort of scriping tasks in this shootout (compile a file if
[aside]
This is not intended to rag on scripting or scripting languages, just to note that scripting embodies a largely distinct set of tasks from development in general (and a comparison involving OCaml or the ICFP contest is inappropriate). These sort of tasks that historically have been the domain of shell scripting, although perl seems to have taken over a lot of these things.
As a lot of what perl is best at is simplifying things that you could almost do from the unix shell (or might be able to do with a script, but would be a pain in the ass..), it always struck me as logical that perl should evolve toward becoming a viable replacement for the unix shell.
Sadly this doesn't seem to be on the agenda of the perl gods. Instead of evolving to better fill this niche, they seem to be gravitating toward becoming a sort of second-rate Java/Python immitator. I suspect that the underlying technologies they build with Parrot and the Perl 6 redesign will largely fail to convince many folks who aren't already perl users that perl is a useful substrate for developing real systems on top of. At the same time they will have neglected to improve in their original niche of quick and dirty sysadmin hacklets, while other languages will have continued to improve and build momentum.
Then again, I'm quite possibly wrong. We'll see what happens. Should be interesting..
What's so great about your UID? Look at mine. =p