Film set in present day about aliens attacking earth, destroying everything, then finally being killed off by a virus... Haven't we already had this with Independence Day?
There's a few things different with Independence Day: (Spoilers, but who cared anyway)
1. The alien mothership was only disabled by a virus - and it was a computer virus rather than a biological one. 2. The alien mothership was destroyed by a nuclear attack. In War of the Worlds (movie), the Alien vessles survive a direct nuclear attack. In the video game, the aliens were held back momentarely by artillery fire. In the book, I'm not sure how it turned out, but the aliens probably took a little damage as they invaded. 3. The aliens in Independance Day were attacking Earth for no known reason whatsoever. The aliens in War of the Worlds were attacking Earth because their home planet was dying, and they needed new ground (they choose to attack, since they thought Earth was a warmongering society). 4. The loss of the aliens in Independance Day is really far-fetched - an advanced race having an invulnerability device should obviously have had a bit more knowledge in how they could be attacked. The loss of the aliens in War of th Worlds (excluding the movie), although somewhat far-fetched, is actually legitimate. It is reasonable, but unlikely, that the alien race did not have experience with microbes causing massive sickness.
Loading a JPEG from a stream is IO-bound enough for bounds checking to be negligible.
Just because something is IO-bound doesn't mean that it is impervious to bounds checking.
There was a recent case where there was another bug with an image display system. The problem had to do with incorrect bounds checking, where the file with a negative value in the header would allow execution of arbitrary code.
Also, I'm working with a file format where it is very easy to have an omitted bounds checker allow for a crash (giving a reference of '-1' in the file will cause the program to access memory just before the block of memory that was allocated for some data.) Missing this form of bounds checking isn't a major implementation error, as it is generally assumed that a malformed file would fail to load anyway - especially if bounds checking is pervailent throught outher sections of the program.
Something like this is merely a minor oversight. It can happen in Linux and other open source software, even it happens to be very subtle.
I'm sometimes fairly accurate at predicting and estimating things, but I do have to have some prior experience or foreknowledge. Many of the questions were about UK history, geography, and politics, which brought my accuracy rating down considerably
I wouldn't mind a little bias towards UK, as long as those questions mention the UK.
For example, Question 28 asks "the number of MPs elected to the House of Commons at the 2001 General Election.". Given that Canada also uses the term "House of Commons", it makes the question ambiguous and have two answers. It's just like giving a multiple choice question asking for the boiling point of water in degrees, and including both 100, and 212 as possible answers.
Security through obscurity sucks just because it provides no security at all once everything is cracked. On the other side, security with cryptography/cyphers is mathematically proven to be safe.
Security with cryptography/cyphers is no different than ecurity through obscurity. Once you know what the key for encryption (it must be located in the timestamp client, meaning that it will be extracted), then the crypto layer has no advantage at all.
As long as there is some component trusting an untrustable client, the system will never be secure.
In FPS' Anyone who's been to a lan cafe has seen screen watching but it's little brother talking on the phone or using a voice comm program to communicate with teamates (while alive and dead).
I've seen some games that have fixed this problem. Firearms, for example, causes the screen to turn black as soon as you get killed (although you can still hear sounds.)
While Firearms is still vulnerable to the spectator issue where players can scout the map for last pieces of resistance, it's a simple change to require the players to do first-person spectating as well. These two systems combined will prevent any player from gaining knowledge that he should not have.
After extensive testing of the sounds in "Miles 2D positional" vs EAX 1/2 (emulation of course, being that it's not a creative sound card) I was SURPRISINGLY impressed with EAX - I'd always been a naysayer and general creative hater but I have to choke on my own words.
While ANY old sound card (nowadays) can output to 6 speakers and DirectSound3d (Doom 3) can give you surround sound without EAX - it's the EFFECTS that the EAX added to the audio that impressed me.
I've been in the opposite crowd, mainly because I only have a two speaker system. As far as I know, there doesn't seem to be advantage to using EAX offhand, other than the fact that it helps you perform effects without having to code the equivalent software.
I've took a look at one of the EAX demonstrations that came with one of my soundcard - in general, it was a simple footstep playback with modified effects for different surfaces or environments. These effects, as far as I could tell, were simple variations on a theme that used different methods of echoing, muffling and other things that could easily be implemented in software (even if there is more CPU overhead).
The same cam apply to video cards. Software rendering can produce images that look just as good as standard DirectX/OpenGL rendering (if not better.) The cost is that this rendering takes more time than the accellerated counterpart, but is still possible.
(Also, I heard something about Q-Sound as well with one of my 1996-era sound cards. There were differences, but not something that I could compare that easily in a personal sense - the only difference I remember would be a "demo" that showed some improved doppler effect for "Secert Weapons of the Luftwaffe". Likewise, this is just a simple adjustment in sound that can be done by software as well. )
B&W, on the other hand, is the worst game I have ever purchased. Awesome graphics (at the time) can not make up for bad gameplay, buggy code, and an AI that simply didn't work.
The AI wasn't the weak point of the game - in fact, it's the strong point. The trick in B&W is to learn how to adapt the AI to your needs, and not to mess things up. PlanetBlackAndWhite provides links to various sites describing how the creature works and how to get the creature to effectivly do your bidding without problem. (Unless you're referring to the AI opponents instead of the villager/creature AI - in that case, I'd agree.)
The code is not buggy - out of all the time I played B&W, the only case where the game crashed would be a driver issue (or equivalent thereof). The closest thing where buggy code could be affecting me would be the permanent state of sunset and permanent alignment setting. However, this could be a corrupted player file rather than a bug with the game - I've had random data corruption before with other games, something which could easily happen with B&W (usually caused by computer powering off or resetting while stuff is being written to the disk.)
The only weak point would be the gameplay mechanics, which were only caused by not identifing the extreme conditions that can arise. (For example, the 4000 belief buildup that can appear in one of the enemy villages - and that belief remaining around 4000 even if you replace 90% of the villagers within that town with your own missionaries.) This flaw occurrs in basically any game in the market, but is only a problem with B&W since the game's interface requires more micromanaging resources than usual.
In any case, it's a game that isn't easily picked up and learned within the first few minutes. The game needs a tutorial that tells you how to play the game (but it needs to be different than the forced tutorial - by providing useful information and how your creature will learn.)
But man, the last level was a bitch, I never actually finished it. I get the feeling the game was released unfinished. In fact, I'm sure it was death.... That's why I like console games better, at least there is an authority such as Sony or Nintendo that forces the devs and editors to actually FINISH the game before they release it. Villagers need food... On PC its free-for-all, "patch it later" mentality. Sad really.
I'd agree - however, there is a way to finish the mission.
Personally, the problem focuses around how the belief system works - and it couldn't be fixed unless the developers knew what to look for. In particular, some of the cities in Land 5 had massive amounts of belief - requiring at least 2000 belief to convert the town. It was more efficient to simply transfer the enemy villagers to your own towns, as an empty village does not have any belief - until you place your missionary in the town.
The cheating AI also made the game a bit more difficult. I'm suprised that it wasn't a bit more agressive in it's attempt to capture my villages - it seemed to prefer perfecting it's own towns first.
The "Death" whisper was removed in the very first patch.
That seems to be a bit strange - even though I installed the 1.1 patch, for some reason, I still hear the "death" whisper. (recently did the 1.2 patch - probably disapperared even though I don't remember.)
It is a good alert to let you know what's going on - you had to search for the cause, but you knew it was happening. Removing would make things worse, since you had no idea that an enemy creature was whacking your tribe/temple and therefore doing massive damaage to whatever you built up.
That's just the source code for the rendering engine. Evenything that was originally in Unreal Tournament was cored out, leaving you with just the renderer and some netcode. It's also not very useful unless you pay a *very* large license fee, with a minimum price of $350,000.
Even so, the release of the code at that level isn't really significant - it still possible to do major changes to the gameplay with the engine to write things like "Red Orchestra", "Alien Blast", and even "Unreal Annihilation". All that's needed to do this sort of stuff is a license of UT2004 (as long as it is a free distribution that doesn't include the binary.)
A cheaper alternative would either be the Quake engines (GPL or pay $10,000), or the Tribes 2 engine ($100 per developer.)
Myself, I am bullied at school as I'm considered as a geek and the same kids lon onto my blog.
In that case, require e-mail authentication. It's simple, and it works. The initial method simply requires the e-mail to be valid with no password required. From there, you can allow username/passwords for users that want to ensure that their postings can appear much more quickly. If it's a limitation of the blog software or blog server being used, then switch to something better.
Kuro5hin disabled anonymous posting for a reason - it only works on large self-managed websites such as Slashdot.
In Windows 98 setup it said,"You simply plug in a USB device and your system automatically configures itself. You don't even have to restart your computer"
Which is true. USB is hot-pluggable, meaning those devices can work the instant they are plugged in.
I've plugged in USB devices that prompted for a reboot.
That's a problem with device manufacturers requiring a "specialized" driver rather than attempting to use the more generalized system that is guarenteed to work. (The same was done with the batch of WinModems - they required a specialized driver to work under Windows.)
If anything, those manufacturers probably didn't design their driver correctly - probably by including a file that is tagged by Windows as "reboot" only. Later versions of Windows may have fixed this either by requiring a new set of drivers that comply to new standards, or by finding a way to squeeze the improper driver into memory. Problems like these are fixed by manufacturers actually testing their products on a completely new system.
Windows 98 setup also said that "Windows 98 is Year 2000 ready." But later Microsoft issued two patches to correct y2k problems in Windows 98.
Microsoft is correct here as well. Even on unpatched computers, Windows 98 does not mysteriously explode past the magical year 2000.
The only thing the patches do is correct minor issues - however, just because those minor issues couldn't handle dates past 2000 doesn't mean that the entire product isn't year 2000 ready. Why? Cause "Year 2000" was hyped as the doomsday where computers all over the world would explode in a shower of sparks, causing powersurges throughout humans. The Year 2000 Ready thing just simply indicates that the computer won't create these kind of nuclear accidents.
Even the copy of Windows 95 on the living room computer (Pentium 133Mhz) is working without problem - and it's an unpatched first-edition product. Hell, even MS-DOS works fine after all these years.
(BTW, Y2K was blown out of proportion anyway - it seems that any date that happens to have a two digit year was declared incompatable, even if it was a 4 digit year displayed as 2 digits. The only instance where a millenial shift caused problems would be Y-Zero-K, causing certain religious figures had to stay a night in a stable.)
This is like saying "Let's kill off Dremel tools because they are too good. Here have a cheap imitation instead". Or "Let's kill off BMW. Have a Kia instead."
That's the incorrect analogy. What you are stating is that you kill off a expensive good car with a cheap average one.
While Dvorak didn't make good recommendations, his point is valid nonetheless. What he wants is to replace Microsoft Word with a better product - but hasn't done the basic research into other competitors in the field.
Until there are actual competitors who are:
a) as good as Word b) productive as Word c) has the advanced revisioning and editing features as Word d) can collaborate with my colleagues as well as Word (say for example, Team Editing features) e) all my clients have it f) * just works *
I can name one Commercial class Wordprocessing software package that has features a-d, possible even surpasses them. While it might not necessairly do stuff in the exact same way, it is much less vulnerable to security risks of hidden meta-data that Word relies on (e.g. people reading the word document history for track changes information).
Option 'e' is moot - the wordproccessor contains an option to emulate Microsoft Word's interface. Even better, it can emulate an older version of its own interface, for those who can't really adapt to new software.
Option 'f' is definatly true, even much better than Microsoft Word. For something that just works, I'll just point the average user to how lists are handled in both programs. Pretty soon, a user is converted instantly.
"My biggest annoyance with the current version is that it keeps reinstalling features, which requires me to reinsert the master disc over and over."I'm sorry, but from the moment he opens his mouth, this guy sounds like a PC n00b from the moment he opens his mouth. Leaving aside the fact that I've never had this problem, you might start to suspect that just maybe something in Word's inner workings got corrupted to cause that sort of problem. That's further supported by his next statement,
Even if he is a PC |\|0O6, it is a sentiment shared by all people. Nobody likes having to dis through their CD or software collection to retrieve the installation disk to reinstall a component - especially since CDs generally degrade over time.
If a component ins't functioning in MS Word, it means four things:
1. The installer isn't working correctly and doesn't keep the presistant record that it was installed - in which case, Microsoft should bring out a patch already. 2. The component is defective - As above, something that should be patched. 3. The persistant data indicating which components are installes is defective. In that case, the Installer should recognize this and make the appropritate corrections. 4. The component is being corruped by Hard Drive errors - but in that case, other applications would be messed up as well.
If Linux was a defective oprationg system that has a self-corrupting toolset, I'm sure you would also be complaining that you need to reinstall frequently. The same with Windows, Microsoft Office, and many other applications you have on your hard drive.
The funny thing is, I agree with the man that Word needs streamlined and overhauled, but not for the reasons this guy is citing. Over half of his story relates to an issue that is an obvious corruption in the program itself and really does need to be reinstalled. Something ate its lunch and it's time to repave over it. It happens.
Reinstallaion is generally considered a last-resort. As most people suspect (including experts), some installers are inconsistant about whether configuration settings are kept or not. However, since the standard says to delete the configuration with the program, all your work in setting up the perfect work environment is lost - you have to spend time redoing every single configuration change that you made.
Nobody in their right mind uses Word to create plain text files. You use Word to create Word docs and really that's it.
Actually, you use WordPerfect to create Word files.
Just so that you know, the reason MSWord can't create HTML as well as it could is because it's internal data format is littered with excess junk - for example, two tab Sets, two font redefinitions and various other tags just to create a list.
It's a good product if you don't use lists, but once you try something fancy, you begin to have problems.
I use OO at home, but it's not ready from prime-time. In a corporate environment, people use Word because you can automate it. VB/VBA is a security meltdown waiting to happen (thus the annoying "disable macros?" prompt)
VB/VBA is not a security risk by itself - however, the Platform API it has unrestricted access to is vulnerable.
This is one of the reasons I don't like Microsoft Word. In theory, it's possible to automate activities. However, doing so provides noticable slack time that the user preceived as an annoying prompt - while doing it manually is slower, the user doesn't recognize the manual tasks as slack because it follows a process.
Also, upon a somewhat default installation of Microsoft Word, there is no offline help installed to help you learn the basics of Microsoft Word Scripting. As a result, I know the language but not the procedure to have the "script" interface with the application.
One thing he's right about is the annoyance of the MSI re-installing features over and over. Home user? Yeah absolutely, what a pain in the butt. Corporate User? Make the IT guy fix it:)
The MSI re-installing features is a bug with Microsoft's design about while features are going to be the most commonly used. Turns out that in general, users will generally touch almost everything in an application and will consider the uninstalled features are a bug with the application.
Thus, if you want to install a copy of Microsoft Office, you have to make sure that absolutly every single component of the product is installed (minus the ones that you are certain nobody in your work area plans on using the features that you won't use.)
And it's still slow. Each time a new release comes out, people get into the debate of Java is slow vs. you moron did you actually test that? Well, after 1.4 I have given up on testing. It's slower than unoptimized C for all programs I have tested with. Probably this is because I use the wrong kind of tests (ranging from simple loops and calculations to simple chat servers and clients), but just the fact that there are such wrong programs tells something, IMO. And startup time and memory usage continue to amaze me.
The "wrong" programs aren't wrong - they are simply very small loops. If you couny count the time spent in the program from the start of the main function to the end of the main function, the JIT optimizations performed by the Java interpreter will cause the Java's speed efficieny to approach C's speed efficiency. The same applies if Java is compiled to native machine language rather than Java byte-code.
Also, Java implements two features that will slow down the program - bounds checking and garbage collection. If you remove these two features from Java (or add them to C), the speed differences would be fairly marginal.
If anything, I'd prefer the small speed loss of Java over what could happen in C. For example, one of the projects I was working on had a memory leak - an entire division on a binary tree. While this was caused by a malformed method on creating the tree to begin with, the memory leak will eventually cause the application to crash as it is unable to allocate any more memory.
MS hasn't included Basic, Visual or otherwise, with its operating systems since,I dunno, DOS 3.3?
Windows 95, actually. The copy that came with my computer had a folder in an "OldDos" directory that contained the latest verison of QBasic. The only reason I use it is if I'm trying to do something a bit more dirty than Perl. Perl gets used when I have to do mass processing of stuff, such as regular expressions or other means of searching.
Also, the programming languages that shipped with old computers were generally considered "essential" to use the operating system - there has been a shift away from that by having users switch over to a CLI or GUI rather than have them understand how programs work.
Nowadays, those programming languages are no longer necessairy - and perhaps that's a good thing. Although it was impressive that I could type 'Load "*",8,1' at the age of 2-3, it's something that could have been a bit simpler and faster with a GUI (assuming the had the processing power to support one.)
So, what do the rules say on that? If you accidentally kill your opponent, is that an automatic win for you, or what? (I just have to know.)
For an injury in a fencing match, an opponent is allowed a limited period of time to recover (I think it's 5 minutes for general injury or 1 hour if it draws blood.) If the opponent does not recover, the match is forfeited.
In cases where death occurrs, the same rules apply. There may be other reprocussions (such as a criminal investigation), but as far as the match is concerned, you were victorius by a default.
Actually, I think you'll find the sabres used don't have a sharp edge, so it would be bruising rather than bloodletting.
It doesn't mean that the weapon's aren't dangerous.
When I was younger, I was in fencing courses in a Saturday school (school does fit, but it's more like a set of classes for gifted children) One time, the coordinator of the school made the mistake of placing the fencing option in the 5-7 age group. The error was discovered on the first day when some children were playing Zorro with those swords.
Even though they are blunted, a hit to the back is very dangerous as the helmet doesn't cover that area. While mature players won't be doing things like that, the immature "Zorros" can't really be trusted.
I also have first hand experience with fencing accidents. I've had the tip of a foil hit the front of the fencing jacket, slide upward and touch my neck underneath the helmet. While there was no injury (or blood loss through cuts or brusing), it did hurt. However, if the sword broke or the rubber tip was worn down, it would have just as easily punctured the skin and sever either major arteries or the windpipe.
Blood drawing injuries are possible in Fencing. The only reason you don't hear about them that often is because the competitors are generally a bit more mature than what you see in Wrestling or Tackle-Football.
I think here it is adequate to mention, that these games usually have low ratings such as "E" despite some of these games feature weapons and violence, blood and bad language is suppressed somewhat..
Acutally, I'm finding that the ratings of games are generally inconsistant. The games containing blood and gore automatically receive an "M". Star Trek: Elite Forces revieves a Teen rating because of a lack of blood.
I suspect AA received an "E" because there is much less dependance on explosions and blood - in addition to the "miles" system lockdown that could be implemented within the client.
The cockpit of a plane should be inaccessible via the cabin. An airplane should carry two pilots and two co-pilots, and they would board the aircraft from a different hatch than everyone else; a hatch which only opens into the cockpit. Hijacking problem averted.
I'm quite suprised the moderator chose "Funny" - it is a completely valid recommendation, even if it might be a bit more expensive.
The proposed solution *WILL* prevent hijackers from using aircraft to destroy landmarks - while they can still control the aircraft, the best they can do is determine the general area where the plane will be guided. No sane pilot would obey an order by a hijacker to ram a specific building.
Then we can return to our regularly scheduled NOT BEING SO FUCKING AFRAID OF EVERYTHING.
Actually, being afraid of everything is still possible, , even if it is a remote Tom Clancy's style of worst case scenario.
All I can say is.. lighters and matches are not banned while smoking is, no one in the government has bothered to explain or do anything about this,
Actually, they have.
Smoking is banned in aircraft because cigarette smoke has a high chance of harming other people in an aircraft (which has it's own internal air that is not cycled with outside air), especially those with respritory conditions such as Asimov.
Lighters and matches are not banned because they do not cause this problem and aren't considered to be much of a threat under terms of weaponry. ("Give me control of the plane or I'll burn you with this lighter.") However, a small pocket/nailclipper knife is considered a threat since most are designed to inflict damage and cause injury (something a pen or pencil could do as well but not as effectivly.)
Is sandbox really a good term to use for video games?
It is, but not in the context used.
Traditionally, a "sandbox" in a computer is an isolated portion of a computer where absolutly anything can happen but is incapable of inflicting damage on either other computers or on other parts of the system. This is quite similar to the honeypot concept.
In a video game, a sandbox is a free-style area where anything can happen without having to worry about outside effects or changes to the outside. Normally, such a sandbox is used if you want to experiment with how monsters can react or to play with each individual item within the game to see their results.
This is different than the context used in the article, where such "sandboxes" are free-for-all stuff that *DOES* impact other portions of the game. For example, the Grand Theft Auto - if you shoot everything in sight, the cops will go after you more. This is not an ideal sandbox envrionment as there isn't really a way to isolate your experimentation (aside from saved games, but those technically don't count.)
While I'm not blaming StarForce for anything, there are problems with a significant number of copyprotection systems currently available on the market. These are fully legitimate complaints - all of them have to do with the game begin defective (as being cited from the "Designed for Windows XP Application Specification". )
- S1.6, among other things, describes procedures on how to implement a system if the CD is not in the drive. In the first paragraph, it is clearly stated that the game should continue to run without having the user to restart the game. Most games simply state "Please Insert correct CD-ROM, click OK, and restart application." - In the same section but next paragraph, the spec describes that games should hanle changed in CD drives and/or drive letters. A significant number of games only check the first or first few letters before giving up. - 3.4 describes that applications must run successfully under a limited user account. Certain systems used in games such as Empire Earth require admin privilages to get past the protection (but in this case, the game thinks the CD is not in the drive rather than a lack of privilages.) The installers immediatly failing when there is no admin privilages is bad enough, especially if it doesn't try to confirm if the user can legitimatly install the product anyway.
While I am okay with copy-protection systems, it becomes a major problem the moment it violates the specification, even if it is the more minor infractions as listed above. The issue with Starforce is that it might require administrator privilages to run as it needs to load a driver into memory - I haven't confirmed this, but I'd be suprised if it didn't.
In fact, to play on a local LAN, steam accounts and internet access are REQUIRED.
The only thing required would be the Steam Accounts. Just recently, Valve updated their system so that Steam can maintain a session without having to reconnect to the internet. (It will attempt to do so, but won't consider that to be a logout - you will be running on offline mode instead.)
This is all ignoring a major advantage from Steam that was not provided with any other game or system - you can download and install it anywhere without having to worry about lugging around or keeping your CDs or CD-Keys. Just grab the installer, select which games you want to download, and you are ready to play in 30 minutes (during which time you complain on the steampowered.com forums complaining about whatever.)
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There's a few things different with Independence Day: (Spoilers, but who cared anyway)
1. The alien mothership was only disabled by a virus - and it was a computer virus rather than a biological one.
2. The alien mothership was destroyed by a nuclear attack. In War of the Worlds (movie), the Alien vessles survive a direct nuclear attack. In the video game, the aliens were held back momentarely by artillery fire. In the book, I'm not sure how it turned out, but the aliens probably took a little damage as they invaded.
3. The aliens in Independance Day were attacking Earth for no known reason whatsoever. The aliens in War of the Worlds were attacking Earth because their home planet was dying, and they needed new ground (they choose to attack, since they thought Earth was a warmongering society).
4. The loss of the aliens in Independance Day is really far-fetched - an advanced race having an invulnerability device should obviously have had a bit more knowledge in how they could be attacked. The loss of the aliens in War of th Worlds (excluding the movie), although somewhat far-fetched, is actually legitimate. It is reasonable, but unlikely, that the alien race did not have experience with microbes causing massive sickness.
There was a recent case where there was another bug with an image display system. The problem had to do with incorrect bounds checking, where the file with a negative value in the header would allow execution of arbitrary code.
Also, I'm working with a file format where it is very easy to have an omitted bounds checker allow for a crash (giving a reference of '-1' in the file will cause the program to access memory just before the block of memory that was allocated for some data.) Missing this form of bounds checking isn't a major implementation error, as it is generally assumed that a malformed file would fail to load anyway - especially if bounds checking is pervailent throught outher sections of the program.
Something like this is merely a minor oversight. It can happen in Linux and other open source software, even it happens to be very subtle.
For example, Question 28 asks "the number of MPs elected to the House of Commons at the 2001 General Election.". Given that Canada also uses the term "House of Commons", it makes the question ambiguous and have two answers. It's just like giving a multiple choice question asking for the boiling point of water in degrees, and including both 100, and 212 as possible answers.
As long as there is some component trusting an untrustable client, the system will never be secure.
While Firearms is still vulnerable to the spectator issue where players can scout the map for last pieces of resistance, it's a simple change to require the players to do first-person spectating as well. These two systems combined will prevent any player from gaining knowledge that he should not have.
I've took a look at one of the EAX demonstrations that came with one of my soundcard - in general, it was a simple footstep playback with modified effects for different surfaces or environments. These effects, as far as I could tell, were simple variations on a theme that used different methods of echoing, muffling and other things that could easily be implemented in software (even if there is more CPU overhead).
The same cam apply to video cards. Software rendering can produce images that look just as good as standard DirectX/OpenGL rendering (if not better.) The cost is that this rendering takes more time than the accellerated counterpart, but is still possible.
(Also, I heard something about Q-Sound as well with one of my 1996-era sound cards. There were differences, but not something that I could compare that easily in a personal sense - the only difference I remember would be a "demo" that showed some improved doppler effect for "Secert Weapons of the Luftwaffe". Likewise, this is just a simple adjustment in sound that can be done by software as well. )
The code is not buggy - out of all the time I played B&W, the only case where the game crashed would be a driver issue (or equivalent thereof).
The closest thing where buggy code could be affecting me would be the permanent state of sunset and permanent alignment setting. However, this could be a corrupted player file rather than a bug with the game - I've had random data corruption before with other games, something which could easily happen with B&W (usually caused by computer powering off or resetting while stuff is being written to the disk.)
The only weak point would be the gameplay mechanics, which were only caused by not identifing the extreme conditions that can arise. (For example, the 4000 belief buildup that can appear in one of the enemy villages - and that belief remaining around 4000 even if you replace 90% of the villagers within that town with your own missionaries.) This flaw occurrs in basically any game in the market, but is only a problem with B&W since the game's interface requires more micromanaging resources than usual.
In any case, it's a game that isn't easily picked up and learned within the first few minutes. The game needs a tutorial that tells you how to play the game (but it needs to be different than the forced tutorial - by providing useful information and how your creature will learn.)
Personally, the problem focuses around how the belief system works - and it couldn't be fixed unless the developers knew what to look for. In particular, some of the cities in Land 5 had massive amounts of belief - requiring at least 2000 belief to convert the town. It was more efficient to simply transfer the enemy villagers to your own towns, as an empty village does not have any belief - until you place your missionary in the town.
The cheating AI also made the game a bit more difficult. I'm suprised that it wasn't a bit more agressive in it's attempt to capture my villages - it seemed to prefer perfecting it's own towns first.
It is a good alert to let you know what's going on - you had to search for the cause, but you knew it was happening. Removing would make things worse, since you had no idea that an enemy creature was whacking your tribe/temple and therefore doing massive damaage to whatever you built up.
That's just the source code for the rendering engine. Evenything that was originally in Unreal Tournament was cored out, leaving you with just the renderer and some netcode. It's also not very useful unless you pay a *very* large license fee, with a minimum price of $350,000.
Even so, the release of the code at that level isn't really significant - it still possible to do major changes to the gameplay with the engine to write things like "Red Orchestra", "Alien Blast", and even "Unreal Annihilation". All that's needed to do this sort of stuff is a license of UT2004 (as long as it is a free distribution that doesn't include the binary.)
A cheaper alternative would either be the Quake engines (GPL or pay $10,000), or the Tribes 2 engine ($100 per developer.)
Kuro5hin disabled anonymous posting for a reason - it only works on large self-managed websites such as Slashdot.
That's a problem with device manufacturers requiring a "specialized" driver rather than attempting to use the more generalized system that is guarenteed to work. (The same was done with the batch of WinModems - they required a specialized driver to work under Windows.)
If anything, those manufacturers probably didn't design their driver correctly - probably by including a file that is tagged by Windows as "reboot" only. Later versions of Windows may have fixed this either by requiring a new set of drivers that comply to new standards, or by finding a way to squeeze the improper driver into memory. Problems like these are fixed by manufacturers actually testing their products on a completely new system.
Microsoft is correct here as well. Even on unpatched computers, Windows 98 does not mysteriously explode past the magical year 2000.
The only thing the patches do is correct minor issues - however, just because those minor issues couldn't handle dates past 2000 doesn't mean that the entire product isn't year 2000 ready. Why? Cause "Year 2000" was hyped as the doomsday where computers all over the world would explode in a shower of sparks, causing powersurges throughout humans. The Year 2000 Ready thing just simply indicates that the computer won't create these kind of nuclear accidents.
Even the copy of Windows 95 on the living room computer (Pentium 133Mhz) is working without problem - and it's an unpatched first-edition product. Hell, even MS-DOS works fine after all these years.
(BTW, Y2K was blown out of proportion anyway - it seems that any date that happens to have a two digit year was declared incompatable, even if it was a 4 digit year displayed as 2 digits. The only instance where a millenial shift caused problems would be Y-Zero-K, causing certain religious figures had to stay a night in a stable.)
While Dvorak didn't make good recommendations, his point is valid nonetheless. What he wants is to replace Microsoft Word with a better product - but hasn't done the basic research into other competitors in the field.
I can name one Commercial class Wordprocessing software package that has features a-d, possible even surpasses them. While it might not necessairly do stuff in the exact same way, it is much less vulnerable to security risks of hidden meta-data that Word relies on (e.g. people reading the word document history for track changes information).
Option 'e' is moot - the wordproccessor contains an option to emulate Microsoft Word's interface. Even better, it can emulate an older version of its own interface, for those who can't really adapt to new software.
Option 'f' is definatly true, even much better than Microsoft Word. For something that just works, I'll just point the average user to how lists are handled in both programs. Pretty soon, a user is converted instantly.
The product in question: Corel WordPerfect.
Even if he is a PC |\|0O6, it is a sentiment shared by all people. Nobody likes having to dis through their CD or software collection to retrieve the installation disk to reinstall a component - especially since CDs generally degrade over time.
If a component ins't functioning in MS Word, it means four things:
1. The installer isn't working correctly and doesn't keep the presistant record that it was installed - in which case, Microsoft should bring out a patch already.
2. The component is defective - As above, something that should be patched.
3. The persistant data indicating which components are installes is defective. In that case, the Installer should recognize this and make the appropritate corrections.
4. The component is being corruped by Hard Drive errors - but in that case, other applications would be messed up as well.
If Linux was a defective oprationg system that has a self-corrupting toolset, I'm sure you would also be complaining that you need to reinstall frequently. The same with Windows, Microsoft Office, and many other applications you have on your hard drive.
Reinstallaion is generally considered a last-resort. As most people suspect (including experts), some installers are inconsistant about whether configuration settings are kept or not. However, since the standard says to delete the configuration with the program, all your work in setting up the perfect work environment is lost - you have to spend time redoing every single configuration change that you made.
Just so that you know, the reason MSWord can't create HTML as well as it could is because it's internal data format is littered with excess junk - for example, two tab Sets, two font redefinitions and various other tags just to create a list.
It's a good product if you don't use lists, but once you try something fancy, you begin to have problems.
VB/VBA is not a security risk by itself - however, the Platform API it has unrestricted access to is vulnerable.
This is one of the reasons I don't like Microsoft Word. In theory, it's possible to automate activities. However, doing so provides noticable slack time that the user preceived as an annoying prompt - while doing it manually is slower, the user doesn't recognize the manual tasks as slack because it follows a process.
Also, upon a somewhat default installation of Microsoft Word, there is no offline help installed to help you learn the basics of Microsoft Word Scripting. As a result, I know the language but not the procedure to have the "script" interface with the application.
The MSI re-installing features is a bug with Microsoft's design about while features are going to be the most commonly used. Turns out that in general, users will generally touch almost everything in an application and will consider the uninstalled features are a bug with the application.
Thus, if you want to install a copy of Microsoft Office, you have to make sure that absolutly every single component of the product is installed (minus the ones that you are certain nobody in your work area plans on using the features that you won't use.)
The "wrong" programs aren't wrong - they are simply very small loops. If you couny count the time spent in the program from the start of the main function to the end of the main function, the JIT optimizations performed by the Java interpreter will cause the Java's speed efficieny to approach C's speed efficiency. The same applies if Java is compiled to native machine language rather than Java byte-code.
Also, Java implements two features that will slow down the program - bounds checking and garbage collection. If you remove these two features from Java (or add them to C), the speed differences would be fairly marginal.
If anything, I'd prefer the small speed loss of Java over what could happen in C. For example, one of the projects I was working on had a memory leak - an entire division on a binary tree. While this was caused by a malformed method on creating the tree to begin with, the memory leak will eventually cause the application to crash as it is unable to allocate any more memory.
Also, the programming languages that shipped with old computers were generally considered "essential" to use the operating system - there has been a shift away from that by having users switch over to a CLI or GUI rather than have them understand how programs work.
Nowadays, those programming languages are no longer necessairy - and perhaps that's a good thing. Although it was impressive that I could type 'Load "*",8,1' at the age of 2-3, it's something that could have been a bit simpler and faster with a GUI (assuming the had the processing power to support one.)
For an injury in a fencing match, an opponent is allowed a limited period of time to recover (I think it's 5 minutes for general injury or 1 hour if it draws blood.) If the opponent does not recover, the match is forfeited.
In cases where death occurrs, the same rules apply. There may be other reprocussions (such as a criminal investigation), but as far as the match is concerned, you were victorius by a default.
When I was younger, I was in fencing courses in a Saturday school (school does fit, but it's more like a set of classes for gifted children) One time, the coordinator of the school made the mistake of placing the fencing option in the 5-7 age group. The error was discovered on the first day when some children were playing Zorro with those swords.
Even though they are blunted, a hit to the back is very dangerous as the helmet doesn't cover that area. While mature players won't be doing things like that, the immature "Zorros" can't really be trusted.
I also have first hand experience with fencing accidents. I've had the tip of a foil hit the front of the fencing jacket, slide upward and touch my neck underneath the helmet. While there was no injury (or blood loss through cuts or brusing), it did hurt. However, if the sword broke or the rubber tip was worn down, it would have just as easily punctured the skin and sever either major arteries or the windpipe.
Blood drawing injuries are possible in Fencing. The only reason you don't hear about them that often is because the competitors are generally a bit more mature than what you see in Wrestling or Tackle-Football.
Acutally, I'm finding that the ratings of games are generally inconsistant. The games containing blood and gore automatically receive an "M". Star Trek: Elite Forces revieves a Teen rating because of a lack of blood.
I suspect AA received an "E" because there is much less dependance on explosions and blood - in addition to the "miles" system lockdown that could be implemented within the client.
The proposed solution *WILL* prevent hijackers from using aircraft to destroy landmarks - while they can still control the aircraft, the best they can do is determine the general area where the plane will be guided. No sane pilot would obey an order by a hijacker to ram a specific building.
Actually, being afraid of everything is still possible, , even if it is a remote Tom Clancy's style of worst case scenario.
Smoking is banned in aircraft because cigarette smoke has a high chance of harming other people in an aircraft (which has it's own internal air that is not cycled with outside air), especially those with respritory conditions such as Asimov.
Lighters and matches are not banned because they do not cause this problem and aren't considered to be much of a threat under terms of weaponry. ("Give me control of the plane or I'll burn you with this lighter.") However, a small pocket/nailclipper knife is considered a threat since most are designed to inflict damage and cause injury (something a pen or pencil could do as well but not as effectivly.)
Traditionally, a "sandbox" in a computer is an isolated portion of a computer where absolutly anything can happen but is incapable of inflicting damage on either other computers or on other parts of the system. This is quite similar to the honeypot concept.
In a video game, a sandbox is a free-style area where anything can happen without having to worry about outside effects or changes to the outside. Normally, such a sandbox is used if you want to experiment with how monsters can react or to play with each individual item within the game to see their results.
This is different than the context used in the article, where such "sandboxes" are free-for-all stuff that *DOES* impact other portions of the game. For example, the Grand Theft Auto - if you shoot everything in sight, the cops will go after you more. This is not an ideal sandbox envrionment as there isn't really a way to isolate your experimentation (aside from saved games, but those technically don't count.)
While I'm not blaming StarForce for anything, there are problems with a significant number of copyprotection systems currently available on the market. These are fully legitimate complaints - all of them have to do with the game begin defective (as being cited from the "Designed for Windows XP Application Specification". )
- S1.6, among other things, describes procedures on how to implement a system if the CD is not in the drive. In the first paragraph, it is clearly stated that the game should continue to run without having the user to restart the game. Most games simply state "Please Insert correct CD-ROM, click OK, and restart application."
- In the same section but next paragraph, the spec describes that games should hanle changed in CD drives and/or drive letters. A significant number of games only check the first or first few letters before giving up.
- 3.4 describes that applications must run successfully under a limited user account. Certain systems used in games such as Empire Earth require admin privilages to get past the protection (but in this case, the game thinks the CD is not in the drive rather than a lack of privilages.) The installers immediatly failing when there is no admin privilages is bad enough, especially if it doesn't try to confirm if the user can legitimatly install the product anyway.
While I am okay with copy-protection systems, it becomes a major problem the moment it violates the specification, even if it is the more minor infractions as listed above. The issue with Starforce is that it might require administrator privilages to run as it needs to load a driver into memory - I haven't confirmed this, but I'd be suprised if it didn't.
This is all ignoring a major advantage from Steam that was not provided with any other game or system - you can download and install it anywhere without having to worry about lugging around or keeping your CDs or CD-Keys. Just grab the installer, select which games you want to download, and you are ready to play in 30 minutes (during which time you complain on the steampowered.com forums complaining about whatever.)