Acutally, by "marketing department", I meant the guys who are supposed to identify the market and specify what features should be included in the product to cater to that market. If Sony has such an entity, it is the one that failed to identify (or was overruled) that the market for a blu-ray player/console would also expect and HDMI output on such a product.
I guess it's common to mix up this definition of marketing department with that of the "public relations department", which would be responsible for doing the publicity for the product.
Initially, Sony was worried that if they put the HDMI in the lower version, some would complain about having to pay for something they don't want. Apparently they realized people would be more upset without it.
So they misevaluated their market, and the media backlash made them change their minds? Shouldn't this be the kind of element that should've been identified earlier on? As largely mentioned earlier, if they're pushing the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, it's pretty dumb to "forget" the HD output...
Wow, I keep being surprised by how their marketing department sucks. For a consumer-electronics company, I find this plainly catastrophic.
Or maybe the dept doesn't suck, but they're crushed under other interests, which is just as bad.
Could you elaborate a little further? Because with your short description, I can see the sense of the bank's position of preferring snail-mail to encrypted/signed email. Technically, encrypted/signed e-mail is a valid system, but so is snail-mail. Snail-mail has the advantage that it requires nothing extra to be installed from the consumer, who is already used to receiving smail from the bank. Furthermore, it'll cost more for a phisher (why do you think spam and phishing are so prevalent in e-mail and not in snail-mail? Because the costs to the sender are negligeable in e-mail) Sure, encryption (by which I mean encryption or signing, mostly through the OpenPGP standard) is accepted and common in techy and specialized circles. But then, I work in a large technology corporation, surrounded by engineers and where industrial secrets are important, and even here encyption use is marginal (maybe slowed by the administrative hassle of declaring your key, granted). I've long since dropped the idea of getting my parents or siblings to use encryption for sensitive communication. Sure, I've spooked them enough with the horror stories, but they just haven't caught on, despite me leveling the terrain. What's worse, if they *had* caught on to using the tools, I'm 100% certain that they won't pay attention to the signature of a forged e-mail from the bank. "Oh, the signature changed. Meh, they must've updated". Remember, don't mistake your values with those of the General Populace.
Of course, legacy support is vital if you want to keep your old customers. Say you just released a new version, System X, that's incompatible in some minor but vital ways with old System Y. Your customers will have to pay extra to also upgrade those other office and database applications to follow the upgrade. Maybe the office and database vendors offer an upgrade to the competitor's System Z for the same price as upgrading to System X. In this case, how can you be sure your customers will stay with you?
Upgrading is a constant compromise between compatibility with older versions and a cleaner, better system.
Now of course, there are a slew of applications that don't pass the compatibility checks, but I'd like to point out that being able to play The Incredible Machine (a 16-bit DOS game) on 32-bit Windows XP (which has a different approach to hardware) is quite a feat.
Apple has put a lot of effort in providing a proper emulation environment when it went through its hardware upgrades (68k to PPC, System9 to OSX, and now PPC to Intel). Their changes was major enough for legacy support in the new software to be impractical compared to emulation.
I just won't talk about Linux' legacy support, there's too much to say;)
PS: If God created the Universe in just 7 days, it's only thanks to the lack of existing user base
This isn't the first time our dear (cough) beloved (gak) President presses for a catch-up plan in the digital world. Remember he started a project to digitize our paper legacy, in an attempt to counter Google's similar but english-language project.
Now I can vaguely undestand the motivation behind such a move: present a counter force against english-language cultural domination. (considering how China is growing, I'm not sure american culture is the one to be feared in the coming century). This *is* a cultural problem on the internet. I'd rather we all speak a common language, but to each his own.
Maybe he's trying to get his name in the history books for starting such projects. People tend to try that when they get to that age. I could understand that too.
Of course, this project would be in direct competition with Google, such as it's presented. It strikes me as basic economic common sense that a trans-european politically-led project has not a snowball's chance in hell in any market competition.
Imagine every OEM doing this, and choosing different products. Imagine sitting down infront of a computer and no longer having a guaranteed set of tools to work with - different browser, email client, file explorer etc.
You mean the way Linux distributions do?/me runs away from the troll hunters
Because Google exists in a capitalist environment.
Remember, capitalism is the economic system that's based on greed. It is the opposite of socialism, which is based on responsability and generosity. Guess which one worked out best? Capitalism is also pretty resistant to other negative human traits, like laziness. A lazy entity in a capitalist environment will soon be left out in the cold...
Don't kid yourselves, rules 1-10 AREN'T what brought google it's huge piles of cash. And now that they're publicly traded, I won't bet on the rules' longetivity. Ben & Jerry's also had some very nice rules of work. They ended up being bought by Unilever, the anti-thesis of their rules of work. Do you think they still follow all their rules?
Google is succesful, thus they can afford these rules, it's not the other way around.
I embraced IM early on when ICQ came out. However, it seems I'm part of the "old generation" that scorns those over-fancy windows and basically unused "webcam" features...
I was very partial to jabber two years ago. I really liked not being stuck to a single vendor/server whilst being able to communicate with my friends on other servers, the choice of IM clients, the gateways (transports) to other protocols, possibility to change your nick, be connected multiple times, etc...
Jabber combined the best of all worlds and added on top of that.
However, some time later I had to give in and throw in the towel. I changed servers a handful of times, thus losing all my contacts each time, because each server was unreliable. The transports were even more unreliable.
True enough, the base features work perfectly, but I didn't switch to Jabber for just "the base features".
Progress on the infrastructure isn't. How long has it been since Jabberd2 has been in the works and remains unstable? Could someone please point me out to an up-to-date and stable ICQ transport?
I've toyed with setting up my own server, but getting jabberd running correctly with the right transports remains a non-trivial task.
So I'd love to say "Use Jabber", but I'd have to add "if you can".
That said, Psi remains my all-time favorite IM application. It's lightweight (in a QT environment, otherwise add up the memory used by QT), and has a simple, cute, and very comfortable interface.
hy doesn't Microsoft extend that same logic to operating systems or applications? Similarly, why doesn't Jane do as Bob does? That's an easy one, even I can answer that.
Because they're completely different entities, with different motivations, interests, and constraints.
Besides, you're comparing apples to oranges: being open about the way you conducted a study and being open about your OS or apps are two completely different things!
It's a demographic problem: those who develop the Linux IM programs do it for themselves and their peer group, not for young teens, which they probably don't relate to much. The features that would interest young teens don't interest those who have a say in developing Free IM's.
However, it's true that Linux IM's in general lack good video and voice integration, but that aspect is related to hardware. I'm confident that these features will appear in time, however, as they *are* quite useful. SIP integration in Jabber maybe? hmmm...
Remember that a majority of office workers (was it 67%?) that use office suites get mixed up between kilobytes and megabytes. They find it confusing...
you do realize this is mainly some gratuitous back-patting on the part of the OSS community, right?
I'd like to have some nice graphs to show you, but the 'alternate' office suites represent less than a smidgeon on the pie graph of office suits.
Mr Yates is going to take that letter, and promptly trash it without even reading it. Then he'll return to his real job: lobbying the gov for them to use Office, in the sake of 'interoperability'. And chances aren't ridiculous that he'd win. This IS the gov that basically called off the antitrust suite.
This letter will have absolutely no influence whatsoever on Microsoft. Except if they manage to have it taken up by some major publication, it won't have any readership out of the already converted geek community, us.
The starting point of contention is a 'minor' technical one, about the codebase of KOffice being distinct from Star/OpenOffice...
(As a first side note, I think the GP2X is an interesting throw at an open handheld console.)
That was cute, but you forget one major aspect of humanity in general and geeks in particular:
We're lazy.
And that means we don't uphold our principals 100% of the time. Sure, I'm against closed standards. What's that? A dirt-cheap linux box, with a small (for a PC) form-factor, and they're all identical? I'll take three! What? Microsoft? Bah, you know they actually LOSE money on the X-Box hardware, don't you?
That said, you could hope the geek masses are more educated than the rest of the tarket market for consoles. Even so, we're a minuscule fraction of the effective market. You should have realized, by now, that the mass-market actually doesn't care about DRM! As long as they can play Dead Or Alive 5 they just bought on their latest consoles, they're happy.
And finally, sadly, if a console is open, you can bet that the openness will be used 95% of the time to play pirated games, not homebrew ones. Quite simply because commercial games are of much higher quality than any homebrews! Why is that? see my first point...
Don't hope you'll get this on your desktop anytime soon. This is RTLinux. Know what RT meants? Real-Time. That's a system in which you can guarantee the responsiveness. But there's a catch: at development, you control all aspects (hardware and software) of that system. If just one component fails real-time requirements, you card castle crumbles. In a desktop system, you can't control all aspects. That video card you just bought just added a little latency to your system, and it's not realtime. What is that program? Never heard of it, but it fails RT requirement.
So, this is cool... but in the embedded systems field. Don't start comparing it to Windows XP and thinking you'll get it on a desktop Linux.
I have played the game, and I have loved the game, so I find it hard to see the highest moderated post about this game to be such an inflammatory critique, especially from someone who only tried the demo.
While I deeply appreciate their try to run on different platforms and have to admit I dislike anything remotely like RTS, I have a few points to note, stupid decisions, ultimately leading to me not suggesting someone give Darwinia a try, let alone pay 20 bucks for it.
If you have a bias against RTS games, which Darwinia is part of, somehow, it's hard to take your next opinions as being even partly objective. If you don't like RTS games, I'm surprised you even played the game.
Stupid decisions:
1. ALT+TAB to switch between units. How braindead can a developer be? Under WinXP, of course that brings up the real taskmanager... I have to say I'd have been really frightened if it didn't. So you have to click on the unit itself, because you cannot "tab" between them and clicking on their goddamn icon in the game menu (ALT) gives an error message.
The game's design is a metaphore around an operating system and you controlling programs. That they'd push the metaphore in the way you control the interface is a good decision, because it puts the gamer more into the atmosphere.
If you wish to use your OS's ALT-TAB, you can just press escape. Traditional ALT-TAB works fine in the menus. Besides, which version did you use for the in-game ALT-TAB not to work?
2. Mouse Gestures only to create units. It's slow and thus counterproductive, RTS-nuts will hate it and I have to ask "why?".
Well, admittedly mouse-gestures are a controvesial decision. I think it's good to try a new control interface like this, and the first impression in most people is 'wow!'. However, when you're under a heavy load, it can be annoying to have gestures skip. But once again, it is fitting with the game's overall gameplay. This is not a starcraft or TA-type in which winning is largely dependant on creating units quickly.
3. Navigation. WASD only + mouselook and up+down via QE or mousewheel, which works the wrong way around for me. Does the full version allow me to customze that? It's not hard to implement, you know?
Yes, you can change the controls in the full game, though not for the mouse, as far as I've peeked n the preferences.
4. Graphics, or lack thereof. I could easily accept the bad graphics and models from a freeware game, but honestly, it looks butt-ugly. The Darwinians are sprites! Why exactly does this game require a 3D-Card?
Now that's just unfair. The game's graphics are a huge part of its originality. It's borrowing from classics to create a retro-futuristic view of what it should look like in a computer (think Tron). Yes, I know that sounds corny:P. But then, one needs to know the classics to get the idea. It's fun to see how they use cutting-edge 3d (read shaders) to create just that retro feel. I think this is a welcome parting from the path of photo-realism the mainstream games are taking. Darwinia uses modern hardware in an interesting way.
5. The highly praised story. Er, excuse me? Story? The original Duke Nukem, Commander Keen and even Doom had more "story", their's usually filled more than one screen... Yeesh, if similar games usually have even less of it...
Of course, the demo doesn't give you any glimpse into the story. You'd want the full game for that.
In summary, a game that's graphically and audibly (hear those virii scream!) a step away from traditional gaming. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to try something a bit different, as well as the rest. That is, of course, if you are ready for a different perspective on how a game could look. If you are the kind to have Doom3 and HL2 on the top of your hit-list because of their graphics, you're in for a shock... Furthermore, the community is thriving, and mods are starting to flow in, thus giving it an excellent lifespan.
Need I say it only costs a third of what mainstream media charges you? And it all goes directly to the devs, not to the marketers.:)
Praytell how RAID in the CPU could boost gaming performance?
Ok, sure, RAID can help the loading times in the game, but they aren't so prevalent compared to the actual gaming time.
Has "gaming performance" become such a catch-phrase?
Or are people so jumpy now that they can't stand the load time at the beginning of the level?
(obviously, I'm a bit jumpy on the submit button...)
Furthermore, what does RAID and gaming have to do with laptops?
What is a laptop supposed to be used for? Computing on the move. Important aspects: weight, battery time, comfort. But power for gaming? and RAID for god's sake? RAID has nothing to do with laptops! If this chip was also intended for the desktop market, I'd have an inkling of understanding. But here? No.
They're nuts. Or maybe they're right, and the market's nuts.
Intel has a goal of centralizing functions in their CPUs. MMX and SSE came in to boost the CPU's multimedia performance, so that people would be less tempted to take an extra, non-intel, chip to do that (for which they failed...). The Centrino was an all-in-one Intel bundle so that you wouldn't buy somewhere else to get Wifi on your laptop. Now it's RAID. I'm surprised, though, that they'd consider RAID a big enough market to include it in their chip. Or is it rapidly expanding with home-users?
So of course, it seems that google supports other Jabber clients, like Gaim. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to GAIM (my sinuses get all clogged up)... And I seem to be having trouble with my favourite client: Psi. For a client to operate with google talk, I saw this from Google Talk's FAQ:
* DNS SRV records are not configured for the service at this time
* Client applications should connect to host talk.google.com on port 5222
* TLS is required
* The only supported authentication mechanism is SASL PLAIN
When I have SSL disabled (contrary to what they ask, see the TLS requirement), Psi gives me "Authentication error: Unable to Login" but the actual XML response from the server includes: "Server does not support PLAIN"
With SSL enabled, I get "Authentication Error: No appropriate mechanism available for given security settings"...
Anyone have an idea whether Psi can work with this, or if it just lacks the necessary features? If it can work, what are the options?
Would one not prefer a broken DRM scheme that we can break, rather than build our own perfect prison?
That said, remember another thing about DRM: to work, it has to be a complete chain, starting at the DRM'ed media file. It'll won't prevent you from playng a non-DRM file*. So speak with your wallet, folks, and don't go around making the marketers believe people will accept DRM. (iTunes)
*Except of course if the device will only play that type of file. But who'd be stupid enough to buy one?...
Actually, it seems to be more of a case of fanbase going wild. From the article:
I'm Rob, the Senior Producer on the Jamie Kane game. A couple of people have emailed the BBC asking for an official response to the Jamie Kane/Wikipedia thing. If you guys still have space for it, would you mind adding in the following, as there seems to be some confusion:
"Just to confirm, the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much. The follow up posting was made by a fan of the game who happens to work for the BBC and was made without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing."
First of all, it a dupe with another article in the games section.
Then it's wrong. The article isn't from wikipedia.
Finally, nice sensationalist terms: - Oh noes, this code locked out GNU/Linux! Bad Microsoft! - Hah, Microsoft can't even write 512 bytes of code without bugs!
Oh, and that last part was only the subtitle of the article, not the real title. But no thanks for pointing it out.
Read the interesting linked article, or the comments on the original post on games.slashdot, but this article here is exactly what I don't like seeing on Slashdot.
This is not a problem of disclosing a major vulnerabilty before the vulnerable company could react.
The flaw had been privately disclosed a few months ago. Cisco, for its own reasons, didn't intend to distribute a fix before long (next year!). Too major a flaw? Publicity? Too much work already? Internal politics?
Obviously, Michael Lynn couldn't live with the idea of leaving this flaw open, and decided to disclose it publicly, thus forcing Cisco to aknowledge it and fix it. Also obviously, this wasn't the only reason. He seemed disgusted by the industry's approach to this kind of problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Acutally, by "marketing department", I meant the guys who are supposed to identify the market and specify what features should be included in the product to cater to that market. If Sony has such an entity, it is the one that failed to identify (or was overruled) that the market for a blu-ray player/console would also expect and HDMI output on such a product.
I guess it's common to mix up this definition of marketing department with that of the "public relations department", which would be responsible for doing the publicity for the product.
So they misevaluated their market, and the media backlash made them change their minds? Shouldn't this be the kind of element that should've been identified earlier on? As largely mentioned earlier, if they're pushing the PS3 as a Blu-Ray player, it's pretty dumb to "forget" the HD output...
Wow, I keep being surprised by how their marketing department sucks. For a consumer-electronics company, I find this plainly catastrophic.
Or maybe the dept doesn't suck, but they're crushed under other interests, which is just as bad.
Could you elaborate a little further? Because with your short description, I can see the sense of the bank's position of preferring snail-mail to encrypted/signed email. Technically, encrypted/signed e-mail is a valid system, but so is snail-mail. Snail-mail has the advantage that it requires nothing extra to be installed from the consumer, who is already used to receiving smail from the bank. Furthermore, it'll cost more for a phisher (why do you think spam and phishing are so prevalent in e-mail and not in snail-mail? Because the costs to the sender are negligeable in e-mail)
Sure, encryption (by which I mean encryption or signing, mostly through the OpenPGP standard) is accepted and common in techy and specialized circles. But then, I work in a large technology corporation, surrounded by engineers and where industrial secrets are important, and even here encyption use is marginal (maybe slowed by the administrative hassle of declaring your key, granted).
I've long since dropped the idea of getting my parents or siblings to use encryption for sensitive communication. Sure, I've spooked them enough with the horror stories, but they just haven't caught on, despite me leveling the terrain.
What's worse, if they *had* caught on to using the tools, I'm 100% certain that they won't pay attention to the signature of a forged e-mail from the bank. "Oh, the signature changed. Meh, they must've updated".
Remember, don't mistake your values with those of the General Populace.
Y'know, those who prefer security to liberty...
Of course, legacy support is vital if you want to keep your old customers.
;)
Say you just released a new version, System X, that's incompatible in some minor but vital ways with old System Y. Your customers will have to pay extra to also upgrade those other office and database applications to follow the upgrade. Maybe the office and database vendors offer an upgrade to the competitor's System Z for the same price as upgrading to System X. In this case, how can you be sure your customers will stay with you?
Upgrading is a constant compromise between compatibility with older versions and a cleaner, better system.
Now of course, there are a slew of applications that don't pass the compatibility checks, but I'd like to point out that being able to play The Incredible Machine (a 16-bit DOS game) on 32-bit Windows XP (which has a different approach to hardware) is quite a feat.
Apple has put a lot of effort in providing a proper emulation environment when it went through its hardware upgrades (68k to PPC, System9 to OSX, and now PPC to Intel). Their changes was major enough for legacy support in the new software to be impractical compared to emulation.
I just won't talk about Linux' legacy support, there's too much to say
PS: If God created the Universe in just 7 days, it's only thanks to the lack of existing user base
Been Jabber, done that...
Seriously, why wouldn't a company want a secure flexible internal IM system, for free, instead of an expensive proprietary system?
Disclaimer: I'm (mostly) french.
This isn't the first time our dear (cough) beloved (gak) President presses for a catch-up plan in the digital world. Remember he started a project to digitize our paper legacy, in an attempt to counter Google's similar but english-language project.
Now I can vaguely undestand the motivation behind such a move: present a counter force against english-language cultural domination. (considering how China is growing, I'm not sure american culture is the one to be feared in the coming century). This *is* a cultural problem on the internet. I'd rather we all speak a common language, but to each his own.
Maybe he's trying to get his name in the history books for starting such projects. People tend to try that when they get to that age. I could understand that too.
Of course, this project would be in direct competition with Google, such as it's presented. It strikes me as basic economic common sense that a trans-european politically-led project has not a snowball's chance in hell in any market competition.
Maybe as an academic project?...
Oh god I can't resist..
/me runs away from the troll hunters
Imagine every OEM doing this, and choosing different products. Imagine sitting down infront of a computer and no longer having a guaranteed set of tools to work with - different browser, email client, file explorer etc.
You mean the way Linux distributions do?
Because Google exists in a capitalist environment.
Remember, capitalism is the economic system that's based on greed. It is the opposite of socialism, which is based on responsability and generosity. Guess which one worked out best?
Capitalism is also pretty resistant to other negative human traits, like laziness. A lazy entity in a capitalist environment will soon be left out in the cold...
Don't kid yourselves, rules 1-10 AREN'T what brought google it's huge piles of cash. And now that they're publicly traded, I won't bet on the rules' longetivity. Ben & Jerry's also had some very nice rules of work. They ended up being bought by Unilever, the anti-thesis of their rules of work. Do you think they still follow all their rules?
Google is succesful, thus they can afford these rules, it's not the other way around.
I embraced IM early on when ICQ came out. However, it seems I'm part of the "old generation" that scorns those over-fancy windows and basically unused "webcam" features...
I was very partial to jabber two years ago. I really liked not being stuck to a single vendor/server whilst being able to communicate with my friends on other servers, the choice of IM clients, the gateways (transports) to other protocols, possibility to change your nick, be connected multiple times, etc...
Jabber combined the best of all worlds and added on top of that.
However, some time later I had to give in and throw in the towel. I changed servers a handful of times, thus losing all my contacts each time, because each server was unreliable. The transports were even more unreliable.
True enough, the base features work perfectly, but I didn't switch to Jabber for just "the base features".
Progress on the infrastructure isn't. How long has it been since Jabberd2 has been in the works and remains unstable? Could someone please point me out to an up-to-date and stable ICQ transport?
I've toyed with setting up my own server, but getting jabberd running correctly with the right transports remains a non-trivial task.
So I'd love to say "Use Jabber", but I'd have to add "if you can".
That said, Psi remains my all-time favorite IM application. It's lightweight (in a QT environment, otherwise add up the memory used by QT), and has a simple, cute, and very comfortable interface.
hy doesn't Microsoft extend that same logic to operating systems or applications?
Similarly, why doesn't Jane do as Bob does? That's an easy one, even I can answer that.
Because they're completely different entities, with different motivations, interests, and constraints.
Besides, you're comparing apples to oranges: being open about the way you conducted a study and being open about your OS or apps are two completely different things!
It's a demographic problem: those who develop the Linux IM programs do it for themselves and their peer group, not for young teens, which they probably don't relate to much.
The features that would interest young teens don't interest those who have a say in developing Free IM's.
However, it's true that Linux IM's in general lack good video and voice integration, but that aspect is related to hardware. I'm confident that these features will appear in time, however, as they *are* quite useful. SIP integration in Jabber maybe? hmmm...
Remember that a majority of office workers (was it 67%?) that use office suites get mixed up between kilobytes and megabytes. They find it confusing...
And you would ask them to use LaTeX?
This is sad to say, but...
you do realize this is mainly some gratuitous back-patting on the part of the OSS community, right?
I'd like to have some nice graphs to show you, but the 'alternate' office suites represent less than a smidgeon on the pie graph of office suits.
Mr Yates is going to take that letter, and promptly trash it without even reading it. Then he'll return to his real job: lobbying the gov for them to use Office, in the sake of 'interoperability'. And chances aren't ridiculous that he'd win. This IS the gov that basically called off the antitrust suite.
This letter will have absolutely no influence whatsoever on Microsoft. Except if they manage to have it taken up by some major publication, it won't have any readership out of the already converted geek community, us.
The starting point of contention is a 'minor' technical one, about the codebase of KOffice being distinct from Star/OpenOffice...
Back to work, guys.
(As a first side note, I think the GP2X is an interesting throw at an open handheld console.)
That was cute, but you forget one major aspect of humanity in general and geeks in particular:
We're lazy.
And that means we don't uphold our principals 100% of the time. Sure, I'm against closed standards. What's that? A dirt-cheap linux box, with a small (for a PC) form-factor, and they're all identical? I'll take three!
What? Microsoft? Bah, you know they actually LOSE money on the X-Box hardware, don't you?
That said, you could hope the geek masses are more educated than the rest of the tarket market for consoles. Even so, we're a minuscule fraction of the effective market.
You should have realized, by now, that the mass-market actually doesn't care about DRM! As long as they can play Dead Or Alive 5 they just bought on their latest consoles, they're happy.
And finally, sadly, if a console is open, you can bet that the openness will be used 95% of the time to play pirated games, not homebrew ones. Quite simply because commercial games are of much higher quality than any homebrews! Why is that? see my first point...
Don't hope you'll get this on your desktop anytime soon. This is RTLinux. Know what RT meants? Real-Time. That's a system in which you can guarantee the responsiveness.
But there's a catch: at development, you control all aspects (hardware and software) of that system. If just one component fails real-time requirements, you card castle crumbles.
In a desktop system, you can't control all aspects. That video card you just bought just added a little latency to your system, and it's not realtime. What is that program?
Never heard of it, but it fails RT requirement.
So, this is cool... but in the embedded systems field. Don't start comparing it to Windows XP and thinking you'll get it on a desktop Linux.
I have played the game, and I have loved the game, so I find it hard to see the highest moderated post about this game to be such an inflammatory critique, especially from someone who only tried the demo.
:P. But then, one needs to know the classics to get the idea.
:)
While I deeply appreciate their try to run on different platforms and have to admit I dislike anything remotely like RTS, I have a few points to note, stupid decisions, ultimately leading to me not suggesting someone give Darwinia a try, let alone pay 20 bucks for it.
If you have a bias against RTS games, which Darwinia is part of, somehow, it's hard to take your next opinions as being even partly objective. If you don't like RTS games, I'm surprised you even played the game.
Stupid decisions:
1. ALT+TAB to switch between units. How braindead can a developer be? Under WinXP, of course that brings up the real taskmanager... I have to say I'd have been really frightened if it didn't. So you have to click on the unit itself, because you cannot "tab" between them and clicking on their goddamn icon in the game menu (ALT) gives an error message.
The game's design is a metaphore around an operating system and you controlling programs. That they'd push the metaphore in the way you control the interface is a good decision, because it puts the gamer more into the atmosphere.
If you wish to use your OS's ALT-TAB, you can just press escape. Traditional ALT-TAB works fine in the menus.
Besides, which version did you use for the in-game ALT-TAB not to work?
2. Mouse Gestures only to create units. It's slow and thus counterproductive, RTS-nuts will hate it and I have to ask "why?".
Well, admittedly mouse-gestures are a controvesial decision. I think it's good to try a new control interface like this, and the first impression in most people is 'wow!'. However, when you're under a heavy load, it can be annoying to have gestures skip. But once again, it is fitting with the game's overall gameplay. This is not a starcraft or TA-type in which winning is largely dependant on creating units quickly.
3. Navigation. WASD only + mouselook and up+down via QE or mousewheel, which works the wrong way around for me. Does the full version allow me to customze that? It's not hard to implement, you know?
Yes, you can change the controls in the full game, though not for the mouse, as far as I've peeked n the preferences.
4. Graphics, or lack thereof. I could easily accept the bad graphics and models from a freeware game, but honestly, it looks butt-ugly. The Darwinians are sprites! Why exactly does this game require a 3D-Card?
Now that's just unfair. The game's graphics are a huge part of its originality. It's borrowing from classics to create a retro-futuristic view of what it should look like in a computer (think Tron). Yes, I know that sounds corny
It's fun to see how they use cutting-edge 3d (read shaders) to create just that retro feel.
I think this is a welcome parting from the path of photo-realism the mainstream games are taking. Darwinia uses modern hardware in an interesting way.
5. The highly praised story. Er, excuse me? Story? The original Duke Nukem, Commander Keen and even Doom had more "story", their's usually filled more than one screen... Yeesh, if similar games usually have even less of it...
Of course, the demo doesn't give you any glimpse into the story. You'd want the full game for that.
In summary, a game that's graphically and audibly (hear those virii scream!) a step away from traditional gaming. I strongly recommend it to anyone who wants to try something a bit different, as well as the rest. That is, of course, if you are ready for a different perspective on how a game could look. If you are the kind to have Doom3 and HL2 on the top of your hit-list because of their graphics, you're in for a shock...
Furthermore, the community is thriving, and mods are starting to flow in, thus giving it an excellent lifespan.
Need I say it only costs a third of what mainstream media charges you? And it all goes directly to the devs, not to the marketers.
(obviously, I'm a bit jumpy on the submit button...)
Furthermore, what does RAID and gaming have to do with laptops?
What is a laptop supposed to be used for? Computing on the move. Important aspects: weight, battery time, comfort.
But power for gaming? and RAID for god's sake? RAID has nothing to do with laptops!
If this chip was also intended for the desktop market, I'd have an inkling of understanding. But here? No.
They're nuts. Or maybe they're right, and the market's nuts.
Praytell how RAID in the CPU could boost gaming performance?
Ok, sure, RAID can help the loading times in the game, but they aren't so prevalent compared to the actual gaming time.
Has "gaming performance" become such a catch-phrase?
Or are people so jumpy now that they can't stand the load time at the beginning of the level?
Intel has a goal of centralizing functions in their CPUs.
MMX and SSE came in to boost the CPU's multimedia performance, so that people would be less tempted to take an extra, non-intel, chip to do that (for which they failed...).
The Centrino was an all-in-one Intel bundle so that you wouldn't buy somewhere else to get Wifi on your laptop.
Now it's RAID. I'm surprised, though, that they'd consider RAID a big enough market to include it in their chip. Or is it rapidly expanding with home-users?
So of course, it seems that google supports other Jabber clients, like Gaim. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to GAIM (my sinuses get all clogged up)... And I seem to be having trouble with my favourite client: Psi.
For a client to operate with google talk, I saw this from Google Talk's FAQ:
* DNS SRV records are not configured for the service at this time
* Client applications should connect to host talk.google.com on port 5222
* TLS is required
* The only supported authentication mechanism is SASL PLAIN
When I have SSL disabled (contrary to what they ask, see the TLS requirement), Psi gives me "Authentication error: Unable to Login" but the actual XML response from the server includes: "Server does not support PLAIN"
With SSL enabled, I get "Authentication Error: No appropriate mechanism available for given security settings"...
Anyone have an idea whether Psi can work with this, or if it just lacks the necessary features? If it can work, what are the options?
An odd thought occurs:
Would one not prefer a broken DRM scheme that we can break, rather than build our own perfect prison?
That said, remember another thing about DRM: to work, it has to be a complete chain, starting at the DRM'ed media file. It'll won't prevent you from playng a non-DRM file*. So speak with your wallet, folks, and don't go around making the marketers believe people will accept DRM. (iTunes)
*Except of course if the device will only play that type of file. But who'd be stupid enough to buy one?...
Extra Extra! Read all about it!
Actually, it seems to be more of a case of fanbase going wild. From the article:
I'm Rob, the Senior Producer on the Jamie Kane game. A couple of people have emailed the BBC asking for an official response to the Jamie Kane/Wikipedia thing. If you guys still have space for it, would you mind adding in the following, as there seems to be some confusion:
"Just to confirm, the BBC would never use Wikipedia as a marketing tool. The first posting was simply a case of a fan of the game getting into the spirit of alternative reality a little too much. The follow up posting was made by a fan of the game who happens to work for the BBC and was made without the knowledge of anyone in the Jamie Kane Team or BBC Marketing."
Wow. Was it something in the coffee this morning?
First of all, it a dupe with another article in the games section.
Then it's wrong. The article isn't from wikipedia.
Finally, nice sensationalist terms:
- Oh noes, this code locked out GNU/Linux! Bad Microsoft!
- Hah, Microsoft can't even write 512 bytes of code without bugs!
Oh, and that last part was only the subtitle of the article, not the real title. But no thanks for pointing it out.
Read the interesting linked article, or the comments on the original post on games.slashdot, but this article here is exactly what I don't like seeing on Slashdot.
Shit.. Making games these days must be as exciting as working on a fucking assembly line screwing the tops on bottles.
*ring*
Hello EA? Yeah, I'd like an innovative, fun game to play. What do you mean, explain that in terms of screwing tops on bottles?
*click*
This is not a problem of disclosing a major vulnerabilty before the vulnerable company could react.
The flaw had been privately disclosed a few months ago. Cisco, for its own reasons, didn't intend to distribute a fix before long (next year!). Too major a flaw? Publicity? Too much work already? Internal politics?
Obviously, Michael Lynn couldn't live with the idea of leaving this flaw open, and decided to disclose it publicly, thus forcing Cisco to aknowledge it and fix it. Also obviously, this wasn't the only reason. He seemed disgusted by the industry's approach to this kind of problem.