If you download the actual specification, you can read the fulltext: "Applications must not require users to have unrestricted access (for example, Administrator privileges) to make changes to system or other files and settings. In other words, the application must function properly in a secure Windows environment. Complying with the previous requirements in this section will help to ensure that the application meets this requirement. " (Emphesis mine)
If the game is a hard limitation that requires administrator privilages for day-to-day use, then it is not compatible with Windows XP. Some copy protection systes ruin this certification (e.g. old versions of SecuROM, which doesn't support LUAs, and early versions f StarForce, which granted Admin privilages), which is why you don't see too many games designed for Windows XP.
They have never enforced the certifications. Does anyone bother to certify anymore.
That's actually a seperate issue.
While a lack of certification is not a problem itself, any application that does not attempt to meet the certification guidelines generally has quality on par with the early Windows 3.11 applications - even if you did have administrator privilages, you can most likely expect to have stability issues.
Just ask yourself the following question - do you want your immature sibling to have administrator privilages just because your parents say you have to allow him to play the game?
If it's so obvious, why can't they just make it a built-in part of the operating system anyway?
It already is - it involves either taking ownership of the folder in question or making sure that your account can read/write to that folder. This is the exact same thing that I did when I was using a hard drive caddy - if I couldn't access the folder, I adjusted the permissions. This is not done by default - there is no way that Windows can tell if it was an archaic configuration or an intended configuration.
If you instead belive the obvious fix is to grant read/write permissions to users on an external drive, then that means anyone can access it. Just remember that Windows XP and later are capable of supporting Remote Desktops, and with a special patch, allows remote desktops to run while a user is logged into the system. If you have an immature sibling, you can guess what happens next.
BTW, the word "obvious" was written by a journalist that is experienced with computers. Most people aren't - and even if they are, they cannot make the change using Windows XP Home (which comes with most OEM computers and laptops.)
They're simply different from the point-and-click interface paradigm that Windows has foisted on the computing public.
[...]
I think most people say "complex" when they mean "different from what I'm used to"...
In most cases, that is correct - one complaint about the Adom roguelike was that it was complex since it had 'd' for drink rather than for drop. (Or something else... I haven't played that game in a while, but I know the default keybindings are a bit different than what was considered "standard".)
However, there is such a thing as unnecessary complexity. Most OSS projects have something called a "configure" script that detects more exact information about the operating system - checking the size of a long, checking whether your system uses or . If you are running Windows, it means you have to obtain a copy of sh - alongside Mingw + MSys or Cygwin. In either case, you have to download a development envrionment rather than use MSVC's compiler kit.
As a worst case - the Fortune program in the BSD-Games package cannot be easily compiled under windows without doing bulk changes. This is caused by unnecessary complexity because it encapsulates every function prototype with a compiler-specific or library-specific macro that is not present on Windows or MSVC.
...exclusive concepts. However this is highly subjective since "quality software" is defined in different ways by different users.
There is no reason why "Ease of Use" and "Quality Software" is mutually exclusive. Any confusion on what meets those two conditions is open to debate, but that is a seperate issue.
As a straight-up example on why they can co-exist, take a look at your web-browser. Each is easy to use (mainly because they keep cloning each other's features), and has verying degrees of quality and flaws. For example, Explorer is closely linked to the operating system but has plenty of security holes, Mozilla has a large development team that quickly fixes flaws but cannot be easily repaired by it's users, and Opera can pass the Acid2 test but misses on some "standard" Javascript.
Any problems that prevent either of those two categories being met is caused by developer lazyness. A great example of software not meeting either of those categories would be most "Realtime Tactical Simulation" (RTS) games - which suffer from various micromanagement issues. For example, if you select a group of units and order them to attack a single unit, they all stop in their tracks the instant the enemy unit dies. (This is most severe in the older RTS games, which do not even come close to implementing an "attack-move" feature. )
FOSS doesn't exist to be popular. It exists to do a job and do it well.
FOSS exists only to prevent a paying a massive amount of money on software licenses for things that are generally considered trivial. It's "ease of use" and "quality" is just like any other commercial/shareware application - it's as good as the programmers make it to be.
If a developer of commercial software can't deliver, his software won't go anywhere. The same applies to open source. As an example, there was an open-source author asking for help on his hangman game - the game itself contained so many flaws (especially considering that it was a small project) that it was probably could do a rewrite from scratch.
This is also generally why FOSS hasn't yet penetrated into Windows - most projects plop in a configure script that is only designed to scan for technicalities in Unix systems. Likewise, it's the same reason Windows Apps don't penetrate into the Unix world, since they usually hard-code themselves to use Windows API calls (instead of wrapping them inside an internal API.)
Also, new developments in technologies can be used to create a new plot aspects - for example, mass dissemination being used to compare the bullies to... something that would trigger Godwin's law.
Yes. As with most grade school courses, they teach the basics (e.g. the fact that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms exists), and enough so that you could get by. You can be sure that if this course was made mandatory, you'd see comments like "Why do we need this? I'm not going to break the law..."
Teaching kids who are otherwise not interested in programming is an inefficient use of school resources. Let's teach them to read, write and maybe collaborate using the new tools but let's not bog them down with nerd stuff.
Algebra should also be considered nerd stuff, since most people aren't going to use it in their day-to-day life. Does that mean we shouldn't force children to learn it?
I never understood the facination of ninja. I mean, it's just an art of assassination. Give me a long range rifle and cut the smoke screen, old man.
Ninjitsu is the art of stealthly killing people. Sniping is merely carrying and firing a long range rifle.
These are two different skill sets. While any monkey can use a firearm, it will not protect you against a trained assassin that observes your movements and launches a suprise attack.
BTW, smoke screens are known anti-sniper tactics. Sniper rifles that are capable of looking through smoke screens are not considered common, and is considered military grade (i.e. not available to commoners).
If the author can't afford $500 per year to get a driver signed, then it won't work in Vista 64.
Which is moot to everyone who does not require fancy-userfriendlyness.
WinZip and WinRAR can display the contents of an archive. It's not much of a jump to manually read the partition and display the contents in the same fashion - the only difference is that you write the code to work at the user level rather than a Kernel Level.
BTW, drivers need to be debugged somehow. From the site you linked to:
.
Q. Why doesn't Microsoft allow digital-signature enforcement to be turned off by using group policy or by allowing users to choose whether signing should be enforced on their systems? A. The mechanism for disabling the check requires interaction with the user and machine in a manner that cannot be circumvented easily or programmatically bypassed. For example, if a group policy registry flag were provided, malware could simply turn off the enforcement flag. In answer to questions about allowing automated forms of "opting out" without signing: Windows does not currently have convenient opt-out mechanisms that cannot be easily exploited by malware. Microsoft is considering additional enhancements in order to provide secure opt-out mechanisms that are not easily exploitable by malware. We are also exploring mechanisms that will make it easier for test labs to test a kernel mode component during the development cycle.
Feel free to call it BS, but drivers will need to be debugged and tested before they can be accepted by Microsoft for the WHQL stamp. If drivers are not signed, then you'd either have to trust all your developers not to leak the keys, or do a time consuming development process.
Reminds me of the lawsuit brought by that grandmother several months back over the whole "Hot Coffee" debacle. She apparently wasn't bothered by her grandson playing a game--clearly marked for the 17 and up crowd--that involved shooting cops and beating crack whores, but the moment she finds out there's a poorly-rendered naughty scene that can be viewed by any child enterprising enough to buy additional hardware and download hacks off the internet, there's grounds to seek a multimillion dollar judgment against Rock Star.
There's one subtle but critical difference between "M" and "AO", in the same way between "R" and "NC-17". The former is a soft restriction where it is not recommended, while the latter is a hard restriction because of pornography.
Having it rated as AO means you're effectivly selling pornography. Whether this should be considered porn is another story as there is no way to access it without using third-party hacks.
What was the research topic again? Was it where a group of 100 was split into two groups, one playing a GTA game and the other playing a Simpson's game, and the GTA players had a higher level of social tolerance to alcohol? If so, a reasonable person can conclude that the Simpsons game reduces the social tolerance for alcohol. While I haven't played the game in question, I do know that The Simpsons TV show ridicules drunks by the portrayal of Barney: "Haay, com 'n' joine dah partee! *BUUUUURRRRPPPP*"
(For the above, I'm assuming that the results are trustable - which they are not. The correlation study has not included the control group that did not play video games - without this third point of reference, the research can easily be backwards without noticing it. Unless this is really a preliminary study that is intended to lead up to more research, in that case this is okay. )
Every one who had it working was running a bootlegged / pirate copy.
No suprise - most bootlegs of software products are 1:1 copies of the installation directory, and a quick script to make it think that it is fully installed.
I've heard from a friend that MS VS.NET does not run on OEM coppies of Windows.
I have an OEM version of windows, and it works for me. WXPH has no problem with MSVC - although limited user accounts are not capable of debugging applications (meaning you need to launch them manually or switch to an Administrator account.)
The only critical issue is a problem with the autorun installer where it was unable to detect one of the installed prerequisites - nothing that a little digging around the DVD for an alternate install system can't fix. Don't remember how I did it, but short-circuting the autorun got the stuff working.
So what would happen if you have a legitimate copy of windows but were not connected to the internet? Would it annoy you anyway? Would it pop up with your dial up connection dialog to connect you?
If there is a dial-up connection or no internet connection, then it would do the same thing as every other shareware application would do. It would pop-up a "please register" window.
Microsoft even planned for something like this since Windows XP, where there is a number that you can dial to obtain the registration key. If by some chance you don't have a phone line, then send out a letter to them and have it resolved by snail-mail. If by some chance you don't have access to snail-mail, then you probably wouldn't be worrying about using Windows in the first place.
Let's face it. Game studios have many reasons to release buggy betas, and zero reason to provide us with finished games. So why should they? As long as we buy their buggy betas, this won't stop.
Actually, they can release finished products.
They just need to find a trick so that the amateur cracks miss a copy-protection that occurrs at the 75% mark of the game. Even if the game is still possible at that point, it will be much harder to complete. (Just make sure that normal users aren't bitten.)
Or failing that, have the patches add on extra content or performance enhancements (e.g. improved multiplayer performance, rendering speed, or rendering quality.) As an alernative, release a Director's cut version of the game as a freely downloadable patch (but the original will still be available.)
I think I've finally decided that copyright should die with the artist. I'm so sick of family trying to squeeze the last nickel out of the corpse of someone creative.
That would generally cause a bit more problems - it just takes one "accident" to kill the effective revenue stream for the product, more so if the artist dies just after the first print comes out of the printing house. The competition would immediatly make cheap copies of the story and not have any obligation to compensate the artist.
Using the infamous "real-world analogy", this is equivalent of looting a corpse of a person who got hit in a car accident.
That's generally why you see copyright laws have extensions past the artist's death. While 90 years is a bit excessive, these extensions are a necessary evil to prevent normal copyright law from being messed up.
This doens't take into account the ever-increasing cost of game production. How can it be getting both easier and more expensive to produce games?
It gets easier and easier to use photoshop/3DSMaX after each iteration (ha, as if), but the current "demand" requires creating highly detailed artwork (which still takes a lot of time.)
Surely if this were the case, we'd be seeing an exponential increase in quality? If we are, it's going right over my head (with a beautifully rendered motion blur, I might add).
Actually, the quality bottleneck involves softer factors. For example, a plot hole (e.g. you wipe out armies of enemies but get nailed by a predictable ambush containing two weaklings) would be a quality issue that cannot be resolved by easy-to-use tools.
While a five-year-old could spot this issue, this is only a small-scale example. In reality, much more problematic plot-holes slow things down by a few months as you have to re-write the storyline and rebuild the environment.
I gotta go with Ebert on this one. Games aren't true art... yet. Aside from the previously mentioned Deus Ex, I can't name one other game I've played that has actually stimulated genuine critical thought.
I have one question: Is this art? If so, why are three simple striped considered art while the narrative properties of video games are considered substandard?
Under the definition of provoking genuine critical thought, most pieces of art would be treated as "fake art". Cubism, for one, doesn't promote critical thought, but instead causes people to become confused about the image. Action Painting doesn't provoke critical thinking and relies solely on reaching subconscious emotion. However, just like the Voice of Fire, it is somehow considered artistic even if it is something that can be created by a four-year-old.
Most games with this "Saved Games" option have something called "Save Points."
I find that it is a 50/50 split - some saves use the save-point system, some others use full quick saves. For the PC, the games that go by save-points are generally less popular than the quick save counterparts. There are exceptions (e.g. FarCry and to a lesser extent, PainKiller), but these are generally more common with console games (or on old computer systems.)
My family bought it's first pc back in 1979, a TRS80 Model 1. My dad loved computer games back then, but he hated how long it took to get anywhere. He said, "why doesn't someone come up with a game where you can define how long you have to play, and it will make sure you finish something meaningful in that amount of time." Well, no one has made anything like that, and now he doesn't play games.
Most games nowadays implement something called "Saved Games". Good or bad, you can save the game at any time after doing whatever accomplishments you wanted to do.
While there might not be as much accomplished in five minutes (especially in real-time strategy games where you have to remember what you were doing), it is still something where you can resume from your last location.
From my experience, most games are geared towards at least 15 minute sessions. In that time, you can at least see significant progress - with the exception of grinds (e.g. some nameless RPGs.)
Giving out any information about your plans can be used against you by a smart opponent, even if you disguise it with "not". To continue with the example we are playing with, only a foolish general would send his whole army to stand guard all night because of an intercepted message. But a wise general would know something was being planned and double his guards on all the gates for the whole week, send out extra patrols and take whatever precautions he could.
As I said, leaving your troops out for the night will leave them fatigued.
The point of good cryptography is to prevent any information from getting to the enemy.
Sending messages gives information to the enemy, regardless of cryptography - it shows that something is being planned. Encryption is only meant to obscure what it could mean - no more, no less.
The mafia boss in question used Caesar this since it was simple and did enough of a job to prevent some random person who intercepts it from thinking that it is criminal activity.
Telegraph operators encountered this all the time - a simple substitution cipher protected a gold claim. In this case, encryption prevents the telegraph operators from leaking the data.
Since the Chinese use a pictographic alphabet, you could probably extract information even if you didn't have a selection of poles to try. You're still going to see the characters for "attack", "south", "gate" and "night" on the strip.
It's trivial to construct your writing so that glancing at those four words would cause a decoy. (Of course, I wonder if the tech level at the time let people worry about this, but that's another story.)
For example, go south and attack the gate after night.
If you mis-read that since you didn't decode the message properly, your troops will be fatigued once dawn approaches.
...wasn't that he was using an obsolete code, but that the Italian alphabet is missing k, j, w, x, and y.
Just how the heck can they express themselves without those letters? That must leave pretty big holes in their keyboards!
For this, I turn to the advise of Mark Twain:
A Plan for the Improvement of English Spelling
by Mark Twain
For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all. Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli. Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.
He is completely correct - there's no need for letters if they sound like others. Bekause of this, I suggest that we should follow in his footsteps.
He is just like any other technical layman. He had a false sense of security by using some form of security.
No, he just wanted it so that layman who steal the letters (e.g. couriers) won't be able to leak information based on quick glances of the letter. That, and the Caesar cipher is easy to encrypt and decode - and is not prone to errors that can occurr with more complex substitution/transposition ciphers.
The police already have a brute force decryption method that can break any encryption, regardless of key size or technical complexity. While rubber hose cryptanalysis doesn't work in constant time, it is still highly effective.
I dont know how many managers, executives, or non IT type people I have talked to that think once the firewall is in place we never have to think about it again. Or now that we have an antivirus we can go and do whatever we want and not worry about downloads and such again.
All a lower level tech has to do is mention about bit rot where random bits inside the computer gradually rot over time - thus requiring general maintainence and performance testing. In most cases, the problem is solved.
Slashdot Mirror
Section 3.4?
If you download the actual specification, you can read the fulltext: "Applications must not require users to have unrestricted access (for example, Administrator privileges) to make changes to system or other files and settings. In other words, the application must function properly in a secure Windows environment. Complying with the previous requirements in this section will help to ensure that the application meets this requirement. " (Emphesis mine)
If the game is a hard limitation that requires administrator privilages for day-to-day use, then it is not compatible with Windows XP. Some copy protection systes ruin this certification (e.g. old versions of SecuROM, which doesn't support LUAs, and early versions f StarForce, which granted Admin privilages), which is why you don't see too many games designed for Windows XP.
That's actually a seperate issue.
While a lack of certification is not a problem itself, any application that does not attempt to meet the certification guidelines generally has quality on par with the early Windows 3.11 applications - even if you did have administrator privilages, you can most likely expect to have stability issues.
Just ask yourself the following question - do you want your immature sibling to have administrator privilages just because your parents say you have to allow him to play the game?
It already is - it involves either taking ownership of the folder in question or making sure that your account can read/write to that folder. This is the exact same thing that I did when I was using a hard drive caddy - if I couldn't access the folder, I adjusted the permissions. This is not done by default - there is no way that Windows can tell if it was an archaic configuration or an intended configuration.
If you instead belive the obvious fix is to grant read/write permissions to users on an external drive, then that means anyone can access it. Just remember that Windows XP and later are capable of supporting Remote Desktops, and with a special patch, allows remote desktops to run while a user is logged into the system. If you have an immature sibling, you can guess what happens next.
BTW, the word "obvious" was written by a journalist that is experienced with computers. Most people aren't - and even if they are, they cannot make the change using Windows XP Home (which comes with most OEM computers and laptops.)
In most cases, that is correct - one complaint about the Adom roguelike was that it was complex since it had 'd' for drink rather than for drop. (Or something else... I haven't played that game in a while, but I know the default keybindings are a bit different than what was considered "standard".)
However, there is such a thing as unnecessary complexity. Most OSS projects have something called a "configure" script that detects more exact information about the operating system - checking the size of a long, checking whether your system uses or . If you are running Windows, it means you have to obtain a copy of sh - alongside Mingw + MSys or Cygwin. In either case, you have to download a development envrionment rather than use MSVC's compiler kit.
As a worst case - the Fortune program in the BSD-Games package cannot be easily compiled under windows without doing bulk changes. This is caused by unnecessary complexity because it encapsulates every function prototype with a compiler-specific or library-specific macro that is not present on Windows or MSVC.
There is no reason why "Ease of Use" and "Quality Software" is mutually exclusive. Any confusion on what meets those two conditions is open to debate, but that is a seperate issue.
As a straight-up example on why they can co-exist, take a look at your web-browser. Each is easy to use (mainly because they keep cloning each other's features), and has verying degrees of quality and flaws. For example, Explorer is closely linked to the operating system but has plenty of security holes, Mozilla has a large development team that quickly fixes flaws but cannot be easily repaired by it's users, and Opera can pass the Acid2 test but misses on some "standard" Javascript.
Any problems that prevent either of those two categories being met is caused by developer lazyness. A great example of software not meeting either of those categories would be most "Realtime Tactical Simulation" (RTS) games - which suffer from various micromanagement issues. For example, if you select a group of units and order them to attack a single unit, they all stop in their tracks the instant the enemy unit dies. (This is most severe in the older RTS games, which do not even come close to implementing an "attack-move" feature. )
FOSS exists only to prevent a paying a massive amount of money on software licenses for things that are generally considered trivial. It's "ease of use" and "quality" is just like any other commercial/shareware application - it's as good as the programmers make it to be.
If a developer of commercial software can't deliver, his software won't go anywhere. The same applies to open source. As an example, there was an open-source author asking for help on his hangman game - the game itself contained so many flaws (especially considering that it was a small project) that it was probably could do a rewrite from scratch.
This is also generally why FOSS hasn't yet penetrated into Windows - most projects plop in a configure script that is only designed to scan for technicalities in Unix systems. Likewise, it's the same reason Windows Apps don't penetrate into the Unix world, since they usually hard-code themselves to use Windows API calls (instead of wrapping them inside an internal API.)
You can't. The 80's movie series is based around cultural events around that time - but a remake can be updated to reflect modern events.
As a starting point: http://slashdot.org/search.pl?tid=&query=Hellmout
Also, new developments in technologies can be used to create a new plot aspects - for example, mass dissemination being used to compare the bullies to... something that would trigger Godwin's law.
Yes. As with most grade school courses, they teach the basics (e.g. the fact that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms exists), and enough so that you could get by. You can be sure that if this course was made mandatory, you'd see comments like "Why do we need this? I'm not going to break the law..."
Algebra should also be considered nerd stuff, since most people aren't going to use it in their day-to-day life. Does that mean we shouldn't force children to learn it?
Can you provide a link to a download for vi?
Vi clones do not count - If I wanted a clone, I'd be using ViM because it makes interface improvements over the original program.
Are you sure? "gcc *.cpp" is much easier than compiling a single file in MSVC 2003 without a loaded project.
While the MSVC editor is quite good, the fact that it is recent does not mean it is better.
Ninjitsu is the art of stealthly killing people. Sniping is merely carrying and firing a long range rifle.
These are two different skill sets. While any monkey can use a firearm, it will not protect you against a trained assassin that observes your movements and launches a suprise attack.
BTW, smoke screens are known anti-sniper tactics. Sniper rifles that are capable of looking through smoke screens are not considered common, and is considered military grade (i.e. not available to commoners).
Which is moot to everyone who does not require fancy-userfriendlyness.
WinZip and WinRAR can display the contents of an archive. It's not much of a jump to manually read the partition and display the contents in the same fashion - the only difference is that you write the code to work at the user level rather than a Kernel Level.
BTW, drivers need to be debugged somehow. From the site you linked to:
Feel free to call it BS, but drivers will need to be debugged and tested before they can be accepted by Microsoft for the WHQL stamp. If drivers are not signed, then you'd either have to trust all your developers not to leak the keys, or do a time consuming development process.
There's one subtle but critical difference between "M" and "AO", in the same way between "R" and "NC-17". The former is a soft restriction where it is not recommended, while the latter is a hard restriction because of pornography.
Having it rated as AO means you're effectivly selling pornography. Whether this should be considered porn is another story as there is no way to access it without using third-party hacks.
But it is a symptom of causation.
What was the research topic again? Was it where a group of 100 was split into two groups, one playing a GTA game and the other playing a Simpson's game, and the GTA players had a higher level of social tolerance to alcohol? If so, a reasonable person can conclude that the Simpsons game reduces the social tolerance for alcohol. While I haven't played the game in question, I do know that The Simpsons TV show ridicules drunks by the portrayal of Barney: "Haay, com 'n' joine dah partee! *BUUUUURRRRPPPP*"
(For the above, I'm assuming that the results are trustable - which they are not. The correlation study has not included the control group that did not play video games - without this third point of reference, the research can easily be backwards without noticing it. Unless this is really a preliminary study that is intended to lead up to more research, in that case this is okay. )
No suprise - most bootlegs of software products are 1:1 copies of the installation directory, and a quick script to make it think that it is fully installed.
I have an OEM version of windows, and it works for me. WXPH has no problem with MSVC - although limited user accounts are not capable of debugging applications (meaning you need to launch them manually or switch to an Administrator account.)
The only critical issue is a problem with the autorun installer where it was unable to detect one of the installed prerequisites - nothing that a little digging around the DVD for an alternate install system can't fix. Don't remember how I did it, but short-circuting the autorun got the stuff working.
If there is a dial-up connection or no internet connection, then it would do the same thing as every other shareware application would do. It would pop-up a "please register" window.
Microsoft even planned for something like this since Windows XP, where there is a number that you can dial to obtain the registration key. If by some chance you don't have a phone line, then send out a letter to them and have it resolved by snail-mail. If by some chance you don't have access to snail-mail, then you probably wouldn't be worrying about using Windows in the first place.
Actually, they can release finished products.
They just need to find a trick so that the amateur cracks miss a copy-protection that occurrs at the 75% mark of the game. Even if the game is still possible at that point, it will be much harder to complete. (Just make sure that normal users aren't bitten.)
Or failing that, have the patches add on extra content or performance enhancements (e.g. improved multiplayer performance, rendering speed, or rendering quality.) As an alernative, release a Director's cut version of the game as a freely downloadable patch (but the original will still be available.)
That would generally cause a bit more problems - it just takes one "accident" to kill the effective revenue stream for the product, more so if the artist dies just after the first print comes out of the printing house. The competition would immediatly make cheap copies of the story and not have any obligation to compensate the artist.
Using the infamous "real-world analogy", this is equivalent of looting a corpse of a person who got hit in a car accident.
That's generally why you see copyright laws have extensions past the artist's death. While 90 years is a bit excessive, these extensions are a necessary evil to prevent normal copyright law from being messed up.
It gets easier and easier to use photoshop/3DSMaX after each iteration (ha, as if), but the current "demand" requires creating highly detailed artwork (which still takes a lot of time.)
Actually, the quality bottleneck involves softer factors. For example, a plot hole (e.g. you wipe out armies of enemies but get nailed by a predictable ambush containing two weaklings) would be a quality issue that cannot be resolved by easy-to-use tools.
While a five-year-old could spot this issue, this is only a small-scale example. In reality, much more problematic plot-holes slow things down by a few months as you have to re-write the storyline and rebuild the environment.
I have one question: Is this art? If so, why are three simple striped considered art while the narrative properties of video games are considered substandard?
Under the definition of provoking genuine critical thought, most pieces of art would be treated as "fake art". Cubism, for one, doesn't promote critical thought, but instead causes people to become confused about the image. Action Painting doesn't provoke critical thinking and relies solely on reaching subconscious emotion. However, just like the Voice of Fire, it is somehow considered artistic even if it is something that can be created by a four-year-old.
I find that's overly generous - most games just have humans as completely average with no bonuses or penalties.
I find that it is a 50/50 split - some saves use the save-point system, some others use full quick saves. For the PC, the games that go by save-points are generally less popular than the quick save counterparts. There are exceptions (e.g. FarCry and to a lesser extent, PainKiller), but these are generally more common with console games (or on old computer systems.)
Most games nowadays implement something called "Saved Games". Good or bad, you can save the game at any time after doing whatever accomplishments you wanted to do.
While there might not be as much accomplished in five minutes (especially in real-time strategy games where you have to remember what you were doing), it is still something where you can resume from your last location.
From my experience, most games are geared towards at least 15 minute sessions. In that time, you can at least see significant progress - with the exception of grinds (e.g. some nameless RPGs.)
As I said, leaving your troops out for the night will leave them fatigued.
Sending messages gives information to the enemy, regardless of cryptography - it shows that something is being planned. Encryption is only meant to obscure what it could mean - no more, no less.
The mafia boss in question used Caesar this since it was simple and did enough of a job to prevent some random person who intercepts it from thinking that it is criminal activity.
Telegraph operators encountered this all the time - a simple substitution cipher protected a gold claim. In this case, encryption prevents the telegraph operators from leaking the data.
It's trivial to construct your writing so that glancing at those four words would cause a decoy. (Of course, I wonder if the tech level at the time let people worry about this, but that's another story.)
For example, go south and attack the gate after night.
If you mis-read that since you didn't decode the message properly, your troops will be fatigued once dawn approaches.
For this, I turn to the advise of Mark Twain:
He is completely correct - there's no need for letters if they sound like others. Bekause of this, I suggest that we should follow in his footsteps.
No, he just wanted it so that layman who steal the letters (e.g. couriers) won't be able to leak information based on quick glances of the letter. That, and the Caesar cipher is easy to encrypt and decode - and is not prone to errors that can occurr with more complex substitution/transposition ciphers.
The police already have a brute force decryption method that can break any encryption, regardless of key size or technical complexity. While rubber hose cryptanalysis doesn't work in constant time, it is still highly effective.
All a lower level tech has to do is mention about bit rot where random bits inside the computer gradually rot over time - thus requiring general maintainence and performance testing. In most cases, the problem is solved.