Console games are demanding,' says Mike Snyder, a 33-year-old computer programmer in Wichita, Kan. 'With text games, you can sit there at the prompt, go make a sandwich, then come back and play more.'"
I fail to see the difference between the demand of the player's attention between a console game and a text-based game.
Not only that, but a computer programmer shouldn't see the difference either.
Then he might be refferring to MORPGs where you can't really pause unless you return to a safe location. If that's the case, good text base games will have the same feature where you can get attacked or robbed when you're idling.
I find the MORPG referral to be quite a stretch - but playing that genre of game generally requires a large chunk of time to begin with.
It may also be parody - take a look at The Frenetic Five series, where non-standard verbs were an essential puzzle of the game (and were considered one of the better portions of the game). This guess-the-verb puzzle did not detract from the game at all, although the first one in the series could have had a better implementation to get the required information.
Most of the replies to this topic come from sad ignorance. I don't mean that to be critical -- just an observation. Today's interactive fiction isn't what it was twenty years ago. At least, not the IF that people enjoy.
It's much easier to find a bad game than an easy one. Since IF Archives keep all freeware productions, usually without comment or associated rating, some people get frustrated with the genre.
At least you can decompile some games to see what is going on.
query: what's good at the IF Comp 05? Lots of titles and no descriptions (that I can find). Top 5?
Part of the competition rules is that you download the batch of games, and find out for yourself. You are not supposed to discuss things on a public forum (aside from technical issues involving getting the game to work.)
If you want good games in IF-Comp packages, check the archives and go for the highly-rated ones. Either that, or wait 24 hours before the results get released.
Wow! You're a born Unix person. Really. Windows was made for people who don't care how it works,
You have to figure it out anyway if you want to do anything serious.
In any case, Microsoft was learning how to write an GUI in the era of Windows - version 1.0 didn't even allow overlapping windows and still suffered from the 640KB barrier. This means that Windows was written initially to figure out how to get things working.
This is something common to most (if not all) operating systems, even the earliest versions of Unix, Dos, and whatever else was written.
P.S. I bookmarked at least one of those pages - something that I will look at in the future.
Tribes 1 would have recieved several GoTY awards, but it was overshadowed by Half-Life.
The main reason being that you don't have to be online or with friends to play Half-Life.
There's nothing wrong with an online-only game, but this requires players to be worthwhile. In addition, these players need to be welcoming to newcomers or the playerbase will eventually be choked. (In particular, a lot of Tribes servers had a mod to kick players out of weapon selection if they were holding it for more than ~10 seconds, telling them to use favorites - but you need to be on the server to configure favorites for the mod in question.)
As for AI quality, when is somebody going to mention Ghost Recon? It and FarCry are still the best, I think.
The AI quality in Ghost Recon, in my opinion, is comparable to Rainbow Six. The only difference is that the perfect-aim snap-shot was removed.
In one case, I set up my team to guard a central area while I scoured a building. IIRC, the guards managed to wipe out almost all of the enemies on half of the map (nearly running out of ammo) because they passed through one pathway.
At least they did react to attacks - of course, there is not much that can be done if you launch six grenades at the enemy, aside from running away.
It's not that effective AI is hard to design. It's that it would render the game completely unbeatable and ultimately unplayable.
Rainbow Six proves you wrong. The AI opponents in that game are considered dumb - and perform instant-kills on anything that enters LOS. In addition, there is no distinction between "trained" and "untrained" - all enemies attack identically.
Thief and Thief II have better AI. However, the game is still playable, since AI characters can be stunned, knocked out, distracted - and do not have the some abilities as the player does (although the inability to use ladders is a bug). This is in addition to having sensory limitations that prevent them from seeing the character (but they do react to bodies, blood, and other oddities.)
Farcry can be said to have an even better AI characters. It is still playable, as enemies don't have Rainbow Six accurracy.
I completely agree with you! I played Quake 1 and loved every minute of it, but Quake 2 had a much looser feel to it that gave me the feeling of true freedom when running around fragging everyone. The weapons felts great, the maps were awesome, and the fun factor was always there. Who can forget jumping off a box, while twising in the air, and fraggin' someone with the rail-gun? Unbelievably fun. I still remember the bouncing heads after the kills...
*sigh* That was back when people designed games for most computers rather than only the fastest most expensive computers with the most bling-bling video card...
While it is true that you didn't need a newer whiz-bang computer for most games:
- A large chunk of these games were clamped to 580KB of conventional memory (except for protected mode games - but things were getting ridiculous when developers still clamped themselves to real mode and required 600KB.) - On a computer that could play Doom, you needed to upgrade if you wanted to play Quake (To a Pentium, or a 486DX2) - On a computer that could play Quake, you needed to upgrade if you wanted to play Quake 2 (To Win95, and a Pentium II or equiv.)
The only reason you didn't need to upgrade is because developers couldn't get around major design-flaws with Dos: Single tasking, No Standard Drivers, and Manual Memory Management.
Nowadays, developers still seem to be treating the most modern operating system as Single Tasking - you can't even properly ALT-TAB in some modern games.
Hmmm, what problems are you having in this respect? Although I've never had this problem personally I'd be happy to help you out.
I'm not the original poster, but I do have a problem with Databindings with VB.NET. I already know that this is a fault with the.NET implementation, as the Databindings system doesn't like adding a row to an empty DataSet. (Bindings are to individual controls, not a DataGrid.) Of course, this problem occurrs even in open source software, and is not local to.NET or MSWindows.
As for base Windows, the only changes I've seen is those old 16-bit functions being rendered obsolete, and the change in function various functions when crossing the 32-bit barrier (e.g. GetWindowLong() is replaced with GetWindowLongPtr()). Even then, there's the MS Compatibility toolkit that's supposed to take care of these functions.
Linux simply does not have as many (or in some cases) as good apps as there are for Windows.
It is expensive to write a "good" application. Many F/OSS programmers don't have the time to program for Open Source software, as they need an alternate job to cover their living expenses (and are demanded to have a social life, etc.)
As you know, Blender is considered 'open-source enough', but it didn't start as an open-source product.
Tell me, what is an easy way to remove red eye from photo's on Linux.
Take a black pixel-brush and fill in the pixels affected by red-eye. It will look like a black eye, but the red-eye problem is solved.:^)
Anyway, it's a tradeoff - redeye removal may be easier, but as you know, either pushes other features deeper, or makes the application look much more intimidating because of the larger number of options.
The reason is that Windows is incompatible with existing OS API standards. This makes it difficult to port apps to or from Windows, whereas getting an app that uses mostly POSIX APIs to work on any other operating system requires a lot less effort.
That's a non-issue. The Windows API already has QT available, taking care of the GUI. Curses is available anywhere (or you can write a wrapper so you don't have to deal with some shoddy implementations of Curses), thus terminals are non-issues.
The only things that can give trouble is IPC and multi-threading, but most applications haven't really exploited that to a significant extent. Besides, given the number of wrapper libraries that get used (even for single-platform products) that require extra effort in learning anyway, Windows programming isn't going to be that much tougher.
Even simpler is associating the xpi filetype with Firefox (IIRC you can load Thunderbird extentions directly from the extention dialog box), and opening the extention.
There's no need to do file associations - if you are in a situation where you need to save the file to the disk, just drag it onto one of the Mozilla windows. The XPI will install as expected.
Our stupid contest rule is that you have to perform a task to win. So contest in Quebec are the regular paper that you have to fill but with an easy mathematical question at the end so you had performed a task. Yes, answering 2 + 2 counts as a task.
IIRC, Quebec's restriction is based around language laws.
In any case, the "simple task" thing is merely a loophole to prevent people from having to do lottery registrations.
One of the most important things my parents did for me when I was young was prevent my school district from having me skip... well, about 10 grades. Not as fast as this child, but nonetheless.
That's only a good decision if the school teaches the soft skills, "out-of-the-box" thinking, and basics.
In my case, going through a railroaded cirriculum interfered with my learning - I was at the stage where I could easily handle material that was presented to me (as long as it was not affected with the chronic case of writers block). Teaching the multiplication table when I've already got it permanently memorized is useless - a better alternative would be teaching how to solve those "how many goats and cows?" problems without doing every possible combination.
Simply that there are other things in life besides simply rushing through academics. There are issues which can't be handled simply from an academic perspective-- each day the engineers among us solve some new problem while thinking "outside the box," and this kid won't be able to do that. Because he doesn't have an "outside," he has what he's learned in books.
This sort of stuff is learned "outside the box" - completely detached from any School. Whether academics is skipped or not, this learned completely independantly.
It seems safer to me to send a precocious 8-year-old to college than middle school or high school.
It may be safer, but not necessarly wise. While it is true that any kid can become college material instantly, more often than not, the kid hasn't learned basics - because of this, I would do part-time college combined with part-time tutoring on places that are known to be weak (and that can be improved.)
I know that this doesn't pertain to academia, but this martial arts article states that any sloppiness in any basic information will bite you again in a few years time - I know this from personal experience.
Of course, you need a flexible definition of "basics": 4 * 9 = 36 is much less than basic for me, but is advanced math for Homer Simpson.
I would also very strongly encourage the kid to get involved in extra-curricular activies such as baseball with kids his own age.
Probably - but there's a chance that the kid might not like sports as it's simply a dumb game (although this could hint about the lack of rules being described about the game - as far as I remember, baseball wasn't anything more than whacking a ball, soccer was nothing other than kicking the ball into a large goal, basketball was simply bouncing a ball.)
Anyway, 8 years may be early for sports, but my opinion is based around the fact that most schools don't teach the rules until HS, and the fact that extra-curricular sports may be an expensive investment should the child not like the game.
The instant you want to do something outside of base 8, 10, or 16, sprintf won't be sufficient. Also, sprintf is designed to format strings, which results in a bit more overhead (parsing the format specifier, and then creating the string.)
While it is true that I don't need itoa directly in day-to-day use, being as fast as possible is necessary in contests such as UVA, SPOJ, and ZJU - you still need to squeeze as much performance as possible your solutions, as optimizing compilers are not in common use on those sites.
How about this: Late at night, I come in to work - notice that you are not at your desk, and attach a hardware keyboard sniffer to your keyboard. A few days later, I mosy over and disconnect it.
What do I have at that point? Enough info for a serious carreer boost!
True, but this can also backfire. While admins aren't paranoid enough to look for keyloggers 24/7, they do know what to look for. The instant they somehow spot the keylogger, you can expect it to be degaussed, fingerprinted, and bagged.
There are some career areas that require fingerprinting (e.g. Secret/Top Secret). It's possible to prosper without that, but it cuts off a major careeer path - the instant you need to give out fingers is the instant you get arrested.
Well, of course it all depends on the database. For those DBs that use autogenerated field types (i.e., SERIAL in PostGres, AUTOINC attribute in many others) getting the generated ID for the record you inserted is...problematic at best.
Microsoft Visual Studio generated the equivalent of the following for a connection to an MSDE server:
INSERT INTO table
(Value) VALUES (@Value);
SELECT ID, Value
FROM table
WHERE (Id = @@IDENTITY)
It may be non-standard, but it's hardly problematic.
The only other language that is plagues with inability to do normally expected stuff would be C (itoa is implemented in the Windows library, but not in GLibC.) But if it weren't for C, we'd be programming in BASI, PASAL, and OBOL.
Because no one has the time and financial ability to go up against Microsoft, Sony, etc.
Actually, people do. Just say that the CD is a shoddy piece of work that simply sends noise to the speakers/headphones/whatever. Be sure to recommend a better alternative as well, such as "Loud Noise Mix #36", some random Heavy Metal CD, or another compilation - preferably from another company.
It revolves around strength in numbers - the more people you can convince that the music company in question is substandard, the better. In fact, you could provide them with alternate sources of music (e.g. legal downloads, or iTunes, etc.)
However, the SOFTWARE will not be used at any time to collect any personal information from you, whether stored on YOUR COMPUTER or otherwise.
IANAL, but you aren't one either.
If you want to be technical about it, then this is exactly the line your argument fails (which you also quoted). The licence clearly states that it will not be used at any time to collect personal information.
This is a completely false statement - as described in many other Slashdot postings, it facilitates trojans and worm distribution by allowing themselves to prepend $sys$ to their name. Given that hiding those files is a primary purpose of the DRM, there is no case where Sony can declare such situations to be unexpected - at best, they can deflect damages to whatever fly-by-night company that developed the DRM in the first place.
Most of the time critics can't even get it through their fucking skulls that the games they find such a terrible influence on children are almost always rated 'M', and NEVER MEANT FOR CHILDREN IN THE FIRST PLACE.
That is correct. However, the difference between the 'M' and 'T' ratings is generally considered to be the quantity of red pixels - this is the actual problem why the ESRB doesn't have a great reputation among players. As an example, compare Star Trek: Elite Forces to Operation Flashpoint. One has a 'T', while the other has an 'M'. They are both First Person Shooters. One has blood, the other does not (a.k.a. Red Pixel Syndrome.) The 'T' game inolves shooting a larger number of bad guys. This has produces a few jokes where a person in a cut-scene gets a nose bleed, suddenly causing the game to become Mature (although we both know that probably isn't the primary indicator of the rating..)
There's also a wide age gap between 'M' and 'T' followed by a tiny one from 'M' to 'AO'. Even though there is a valid and significant distinction between the two highest ratings, a quick glance makes things look like it's a single year difference. After reading comments, I do know the intended difference between the two, but it is still something that is used as ammunition. This is one case where I sugest changing 'M' from 17+ to 16+, but that might dramatically reduce its impact.
The rating system may be working fine, but there are rating combinations that product these problems. Most likely, ESRB needs to product a more mature system that prevents these inconsistancies from arising in the future - until then, ESRB won't look like the best rating system.
He has more impact on the Hill than you do, that's what.
And that impact is in jeopardy. As you know, The National Institute on Media and the Family has distanced themselves from Jack Thompson.
When he also attempted to attack Penny Arcade, readers sided with the Comic Strip instantly because of their much more professional persona (because they tactically controlled their use of profanity and insults much more than you-know-who.) The general reply was a suprising quantity of letters citing very specific violations of the Florida code of conduct, the removal of the e-mail addressees on you-know-what, and the closure of both JT's e-mail addresses.
There's also the fact that he is attempting to write a law similar to those that got stuck down. When it does, it just shows that policitians are wasting money on laws that quickly get struck down (especially since minors can just as easily pirate the game.)
Besides, Market self-regulation can work fine: Microsoft Windows Vista is including an operating system featre that can restrict access to games based on ESRB ratings (along with a closer finetuning.)
Because however unlikely it is to occur at any point microsoft could outlaw open source being generated with its tools.
And in doing so, kill any benefit that the compiler might have.
There's already CygWin and MiniGW, both of which can compile for Windows - even if they may have trouble under Windows Vista or Windows x64, it's not too difficult to produce a compiler. (In case it does become hard, it will just encourage Linux or otherwise harm the computer industry.)
And also, MFC is a C++ library that stands for Microsoft Foundation Classes. These are Classes that wrap around the Windows API - it may be difficult to port them to Unix, but once done, the program would hardly care less about the platform it is running on. Consider this to be the same thing as QT Development libraries or whatever is the GUI system de-jour.
This is also ignoring the fact that some Macintosh Operating systems did not use X11 in the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Not only that, but a computer programmer shouldn't see the difference either.
I find the MORPG referral to be quite a stretch - but playing that genre of game generally requires a large chunk of time to begin with.
It may also be parody - take a look at The Frenetic Five series, where non-standard verbs were an essential puzzle of the game (and were considered one of the better portions of the game). This guess-the-verb puzzle did not detract from the game at all, although the first one in the series could have had a better implementation to get the required information.
It's much easier to find a bad game than an easy one. Since IF Archives keep all freeware productions, usually without comment or associated rating, some people get frustrated with the genre.
At least you can decompile some games to see what is going on.
Part of the competition rules is that you download the batch of games, and find out for yourself. You are not supposed to discuss things on a public forum (aside from technical issues involving getting the game to work.)
If you want good games in IF-Comp packages, check the archives and go for the highly-rated ones. Either that, or wait 24 hours before the results get released.
You have to figure it out anyway if you want to do anything serious.
In any case, Microsoft was learning how to write an GUI in the era of Windows - version 1.0 didn't even allow overlapping windows and still suffered from the 640KB barrier. This means that Windows was written initially to figure out how to get things working.
This is something common to most (if not all) operating systems, even the earliest versions of Unix, Dos, and whatever else was written.
P.S. I bookmarked at least one of those pages - something that I will look at in the future.
The main reason being that you don't have to be online or with friends to play Half-Life.
There's nothing wrong with an online-only game, but this requires players to be worthwhile. In addition, these players need to be welcoming to newcomers or the playerbase will eventually be choked. (In particular, a lot of Tribes servers had a mod to kick players out of weapon selection if they were holding it for more than ~10 seconds, telling them to use favorites - but you need to be on the server to configure favorites for the mod in question.)
Tribes 2, was choked by a buggy release.
The AI quality in Ghost Recon, in my opinion, is comparable to Rainbow Six. The only difference is that the perfect-aim snap-shot was removed.
In one case, I set up my team to guard a central area while I scoured a building. IIRC, the guards managed to wipe out almost all of the enemies on half of the map (nearly running out of ammo) because they passed through one pathway.
At least they did react to attacks - of course, there is not much that can be done if you launch six grenades at the enemy, aside from running away.
Rainbow Six proves you wrong. The AI opponents in that game are considered dumb - and perform instant-kills on anything that enters LOS. In addition, there is no distinction between "trained" and "untrained" - all enemies attack identically.
Thief and Thief II have better AI. However, the game is still playable, since AI characters can be stunned, knocked out, distracted - and do not have the some abilities as the player does (although the inability to use ladders is a bug). This is in addition to having sensory limitations that prevent them from seeing the character (but they do react to bodies, blood, and other oddities.)
Farcry can be said to have an even better AI characters. It is still playable, as enemies don't have Rainbow Six accurracy.
While it is true that you didn't need a newer whiz-bang computer for most games:
- A large chunk of these games were clamped to 580KB of conventional memory (except for protected mode games - but things were getting ridiculous when developers still clamped themselves to real mode and required 600KB.)
- On a computer that could play Doom, you needed to upgrade if you wanted to play Quake (To a Pentium, or a 486DX2)
- On a computer that could play Quake, you needed to upgrade if you wanted to play Quake 2 (To Win95, and a Pentium II or equiv.)
The only reason you didn't need to upgrade is because developers couldn't get around major design-flaws with Dos: Single tasking, No Standard Drivers, and Manual Memory Management.
Nowadays, developers still seem to be treating the most modern operating system as Single Tasking - you can't even properly ALT-TAB in some modern games.
You need to upgrade to the latest version of the compiler.
If you need to use the older compiler, you have to use __int64, as the newer standard was not available at the time of MSVC release.
I'm not the original poster, but I do have a problem with Databindings with VB.NET. I already know that this is a fault with the
As for base Windows, the only changes I've seen is those old 16-bit functions being rendered obsolete, and the change in function various functions when crossing the 32-bit barrier (e.g. GetWindowLong() is replaced with GetWindowLongPtr()). Even then, there's the MS Compatibility toolkit that's supposed to take care of these functions.
It is expensive to write a "good" application. Many F/OSS programmers don't have the time to program for Open Source software, as they need an alternate job to cover their living expenses (and are demanded to have a social life, etc.)
As you know, Blender is considered 'open-source enough', but it didn't start as an open-source product.
Take a black pixel-brush and fill in the pixels affected by red-eye. It will look like a black eye, but the red-eye problem is solved.
Anyway, it's a tradeoff - redeye removal may be easier, but as you know, either pushes other features deeper, or makes the application look much more intimidating because of the larger number of options.
That's a non-issue. The Windows API already has QT available, taking care of the GUI. Curses is available anywhere (or you can write a wrapper so you don't have to deal with some shoddy implementations of Curses), thus terminals are non-issues.
The only things that can give trouble is IPC and multi-threading, but most applications haven't really exploited that to a significant extent. Besides, given the number of wrapper libraries that get used (even for single-platform products) that require extra effort in learning anyway, Windows programming isn't going to be that much tougher.
There's no need to do file associations - if you are in a situation where you need to save the file to the disk, just drag it onto one of the Mozilla windows. The XPI will install as expected.
IIRC, Quebec's restriction is based around language laws.
In any case, the "simple task" thing is merely a loophole to prevent people from having to do lottery registrations.
Turning off the lights in the room makes the game easier to see. You probably mean setting the lightbulbs to maximum intensity.
That's only a good decision if the school teaches the soft skills, "out-of-the-box" thinking, and basics.
In my case, going through a railroaded cirriculum interfered with my learning - I was at the stage where I could easily handle material that was presented to me (as long as it was not affected with the chronic case of writers block). Teaching the multiplication table when I've already got it permanently memorized is useless - a better alternative would be teaching how to solve those "how many goats and cows?" problems without doing every possible combination.
This sort of stuff is learned "outside the box" - completely detached from any School. Whether academics is skipped or not, this learned completely independantly.
It may be safer, but not necessarly wise. While it is true that any kid can become college material instantly, more often than not, the kid hasn't learned basics - because of this, I would do part-time college combined with part-time tutoring on places that are known to be weak (and that can be improved.)
I know that this doesn't pertain to academia, but this martial arts article states that any sloppiness in any basic information will bite you again in a few years time - I know this from personal experience.
Of course, you need a flexible definition of "basics": 4 * 9 = 36 is much less than basic for me, but is advanced math for Homer Simpson.
Probably - but there's a chance that the kid might not like sports as it's simply a dumb game (although this could hint about the lack of rules being described about the game - as far as I remember, baseball wasn't anything more than whacking a ball, soccer was nothing other than kicking the ball into a large goal, basketball was simply bouncing a ball.)
Anyway, 8 years may be early for sports, but my opinion is based around the fact that most schools don't teach the rules until HS, and the fact that extra-curricular sports may be an expensive investment should the child not like the game.
The instant you want to do something outside of base 8, 10, or 16, sprintf won't be sufficient. Also, sprintf is designed to format strings, which results in a bit more overhead (parsing the format specifier, and then creating the string.)
While it is true that I don't need itoa directly in day-to-day use, being as fast as possible is necessary in contests such as UVA, SPOJ, and ZJU - you still need to squeeze as much performance as possible your solutions, as optimizing compilers are not in common use on those sites.
True, but this can also backfire. While admins aren't paranoid enough to look for keyloggers 24/7, they do know what to look for. The instant they somehow spot the keylogger, you can expect it to be degaussed, fingerprinted, and bagged.
There are some career areas that require fingerprinting (e.g. Secret/Top Secret). It's possible to prosper without that, but it cuts off a major careeer path - the instant you need to give out fingers is the instant you get arrested.
Microsoft Visual Studio generated the equivalent of the following for a connection to an MSDE server:
INSERT INTO table
(Value)
VALUES (@Value);
SELECT ID, Value
FROM table
WHERE (Id = @@IDENTITY)
It may be non-standard, but it's hardly problematic.
The only other language that is plagues with inability to do normally expected stuff would be C (itoa is implemented in the Windows library, but not in GLibC.) But if it weren't for C, we'd be programming in BASI, PASAL, and OBOL.
Actually, people do. Just say that the CD is a shoddy piece of work that simply sends noise to the speakers/headphones/whatever. Be sure to recommend a better alternative as well, such as "Loud Noise Mix #36", some random Heavy Metal CD, or another compilation - preferably from another company.
It revolves around strength in numbers - the more people you can convince that the music company in question is substandard, the better. In fact, you could provide them with alternate sources of music (e.g. legal downloads, or iTunes, etc.)
IANAL, but you aren't one either.
If you want to be technical about it, then this is exactly the line your argument fails (which you also quoted). The licence clearly states that it will not be used at any time to collect personal information.
This is a completely false statement - as described in many other Slashdot postings, it facilitates trojans and worm distribution by allowing themselves to prepend $sys$ to their name. Given that hiding those files is a primary purpose of the DRM, there is no case where Sony can declare such situations to be unexpected - at best, they can deflect damages to whatever fly-by-night company that developed the DRM in the first place.
That is correct. However, the difference between the 'M' and 'T' ratings is generally considered to be the quantity of red pixels - this is the actual problem why the ESRB doesn't have a great reputation among players. As an example, compare Star Trek: Elite Forces to Operation Flashpoint. One has a 'T', while the other has an 'M'. They are both First Person Shooters. One has blood, the other does not (a.k.a. Red Pixel Syndrome.) The 'T' game inolves shooting a larger number of bad guys. This has produces a few jokes where a person in a cut-scene gets a nose bleed, suddenly causing the game to become Mature (although we both know that probably isn't the primary indicator of the rating..)
There's also a wide age gap between 'M' and 'T' followed by a tiny one from 'M' to 'AO'. Even though there is a valid and significant distinction between the two highest ratings, a quick glance makes things look like it's a single year difference. After reading comments, I do know the intended difference between the two, but it is still something that is used as ammunition. This is one case where I sugest changing 'M' from 17+ to 16+, but that might dramatically reduce its impact.
The rating system may be working fine, but there are rating combinations that product these problems. Most likely, ESRB needs to product a more mature system that prevents these inconsistancies from arising in the future - until then, ESRB won't look like the best rating system.
And that impact is in jeopardy. As you know, The National Institute on Media and the Family has distanced themselves from Jack Thompson.
When he also attempted to attack Penny Arcade, readers sided with the Comic Strip instantly because of their much more professional persona (because they tactically controlled their use of profanity and insults much more than you-know-who.) The general reply was a suprising quantity of letters citing very specific violations of the Florida code of conduct, the removal of the e-mail addressees on you-know-what, and the closure of both JT's e-mail addresses.
There's also the fact that he is attempting to write a law similar to those that got stuck down. When it does, it just shows that policitians are wasting money on laws that quickly get struck down (especially since minors can just as easily pirate the game.)
Besides, Market self-regulation can work fine: Microsoft Windows Vista is including an operating system featre that can restrict access to games based on ESRB ratings (along with a closer finetuning.)
And in doing so, kill any benefit that the compiler might have.
There's already CygWin and MiniGW, both of which can compile for Windows - even if they may have trouble under Windows Vista or Windows x64, it's not too difficult to produce a compiler. (In case it does become hard, it will just encourage Linux or otherwise harm the computer industry.)
And also, MFC is a C++ library that stands for Microsoft Foundation Classes. These are Classes that wrap around the Windows API - it may be difficult to port them to Unix, but once done, the program would hardly care less about the platform it is running on. Consider this to be the same thing as QT Development libraries or whatever is the GUI system de-jour.
This is also ignoring the fact that some Macintosh Operating systems did not use X11 in the past.