Email isn't going anywhere.... Everyone has an email account.
Sure; and everyone has a serial port, floppy disks and CRT monitors.
For anything to replace email, it will need to be decentralised. No company will trust facebook, twitter, google or anybody else with their private corporate data. It will also need to be obviously superior to email in almost every way. It needs to add features that people want.
The only serious contender for replacing email is Wave. I've been using it for the past 2-3 days and even as a beta I'm already preferring it over email. I'm honestly wishing everyone I need to talk to had a wave account already. Email will be around for at least 15 years. But I don't think it'll be around forever.
I could be wrong, but it would be prudent not to dismiss wave out of hand just yet.
To be fair, Wave is being developed as an open standard. Google is opening the protocol. They will also maintain an open source reference implementation for anyone to deploy in their own corner of the 'net.
I'm sure you mean well, but thats just FUD. How much bandwidth do you actually use? I very much doubt its anywhere near 250GB per month.
With a 250GB / month cap flash websites, windows updates and the once-a-month wow patch will not chew up your bandwidth. Those things will barely be noticeable.
250GB/month is around 8GB per day. Flash-based websites are usually no bigger than a meg or two. With 8GB per day you could download a fresh copy of windows vista every day, a 1GB world of warcraft patch and still have enough bandwidth left over for hundreds of flash-based websites.
250GB is a nutjob amount of bandwidth.
Even if you are a rabid torrenter, 8GB per day lets you download about 6 hours of video every day in HD.
As others have mentioned, your electricity is already metered and the world has not crumbled. Hard disks cost money and the world has not crumbled. Why? Because the prices are reasonable.
I share a 140GB internet connection with 5 other geeks and we manage just fine. We could pay more for more bandwidth if we wanted. But, we don't need to. Do we use the internet less because bandwidth costs money? Not really. I mean; who would want to download a new copy of windows vista every day?
I'm a 3rd party iPhone developer; and you're completely right.
However: You need to give us some time before anything amazing appears. The iPhone SDK only came out of beta 3 days ago. The best apps haven't been finished yet. Most of the apps in the Apple Store are still internally considered beta; they've just launched anyway to be first-to-market.
Mathematics isn't about memorising formulas needed to answer exam questions. Mathematics is about understanding particular formal systems and knowing how to bend, warp and multilate them when you need to.
In the real world you aren't given a list of the exact variables that the formula needs. Giving students such things in exams only tests whether they know the formula, not whether they know math.
Vista seizes the computer you will not be allowed to do any work what so ever until it's back ground processes which are running in normal mode are done.
Um, no, that doesn't happen at all.
'Twas the night before my thesis was due, and all through the room Only one creature was stirring, intent in that gloom
In 5 hours, my final year honours thesis was due. I was pulling an all-nighter to finish it. Had simulation data everywhere, excel spreadsheets open, half a dozen pdfs, latex stuff,... Maybe about 30 windows were open in all. I don't believe in restarting often.
I'm minding my own business fighting excel 2007's new interface and all of a sudden a few of my windows disappear. Excel asks me if I want to save... Maybe this is like god coming to noah just before the flood. Ok. Yes. Save please. Then excel closes too.
Suddenly my screen is replaced with a pleasant background and a message:
Windows is downloading updates. Please wait.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
Oh vista, why can't you tell that I'm using the computer; and that even though its 6 am, I don't want to install your updates right now but thanks? Even if you just asked me "Oh by the way - I kind of want to close all your programs and restart. You're not doing anything important, right?".
It wouldn't be so bad if word and excel didn't take 20 minutes to start up. (They decided it was important to 'configure for the first time' again).... But I am hopeful. Maybe vista will be good when its out of beta.
Most programmers who know C also know at least one other language.
Serious programmers who only know a single language are incredibly rare regardless of what that language is. I'm in my final year of a computer science degree and I know more languages than I have fingers. Between the last 3 casual jobs I've held I've used the majority of those languages; too.
I don't understand how people who only know a single language are employable these days.
Flash forward twenty nine years. Nowadays, programming environments are so complex that no mere human mind can easily encompass them in their entirety.
For me, this is the single biggest advantage.NET has over Java. The.NET library is incredibly minimalistic compared to java, and the result is a more consistant, better documented and more searchable API. In Java most of the time there's half a dozen ways to achieve the same effect. In.NET there's usually one and if there's two ways the documentation will explain when each method is appropriate.
Less choice is regularly one of Microsoft's more dubious features but for me, when programming I find it a godsend. [despite how much my karma will suffer for saying so]
Most tailgaters I see (including myself, of course) have legitimate gripes. They might have legitimate gripes but there are extremely good reasons why tailgating is dangerous and (at least here) illegal. Its very simple: The person in front of you can see more than you can If a child walks out on the road, you won't notice. The car in front of you will see the child and brake suddenly. You will run into the back of their car and push them into the child. No matter how inconvenient slow drivers are, there is no excuse to tailgate.
And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
Warden doesn't disable access to the hard drive. Instead, as soon as the client connects to the realm server the blizzard server crafts a special warden packet which contains the warden program itself. This executable data which is loaded into memory and executed. Throughout the world of warcraft executable there are a number of function stubs which are overwritten with warden code and executed when needed. Warden then periodically sends information about the client to blizzard, including a list with checksums of all other programs running on the system. Is this a security vulnerability? Not really - if blizzard wants to run arbitrary, nasty code on your machine they can already by updating the wow executable with a patch. Man in the middle attacks are impossible because the server proves to the client it knows the user's password as part of the login process.
The irony of it all? The fact that a talented programmer with burp or some other styled network tool and use linux on a routing box to intercept packets and change them to give him position hacks.
Blizzard thought of that. The world of warcraft packet headers (packet type ID and packet size) is encrypted using a stream cypher. The session key is decided using a zero-knowledge protocol (SRP) during login. Acquiring that key from a network trace of the login is impossible. Key material is leaked over time, but if you don't know the packet size or packet type its tricky to find the encrypted packet headers amongst all the other junk.
In short, this is a cat and mouse game of Blizzard vs the cheaters. For the moment, at least, blizzard appears to be winning.
> > And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
> That's trivial to get around. Run it under VMWare or qemu.
I don't know about qemu but VMWare doesn't give direct access to the video card, so the game runs unplayably slowly.
There isn't a way for the client to say 'Put this character at position x,y', there is only a way for a client to request to move along a vector. The server then reports the current position back to the client.
Actually, your parent poster is right. There are some things which the client has direct control over. Movement is one of them - game hacks do allow you to access otherwise inaccessible content. There was a case a few weeks ago of an entire guild being banned because they used a client-side hack to fall through the floor of a dungeon and skip a large amount of content to just fight the boss at the end.
Actually its language progressing. Evolution has nothing to do with it.
Modern linguistic theory has discarded the idea of an absolute correctness when it comes to languages. All languages change over time. Let this disgust you if you must but really, natural language is only meaningful through its expression and interpretation. If you don't think languages should change, please be aware your comment would be almost unparsable by people only a handful of generations ago. Words like "pwn" appearing in common speech is part of this ongoing process. Fight it if you want, but history implies you'll just get pwned.
If they believe this, then is it not a theological statement? No. It takes more than smacking "believe" into a statement to make it theological. I believe my shell script is be free of bugs. There's no theology involked in that statement; I'm just using "believe" as a weak form of "know". For the logically adventurous, I believe this sentence uses the word "believe" without involking theology.
Consider this: how many people were killed as a result of the Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist regimes in the last 100 years? How many people were killed by "religion" in the last 100 years?
Lets start with acknowledging that War was the big killer of people here. I find anyone who's moral views support wars potentially dangerious. Christianity (at least in the old testament) actively supports wars. If a person is christian and uses the bible as their primary source of moral teachings I can't help but be wary of them from a purely pragmatic point of view.
...but Australia (newcastle university) just beat Australia (university of new south wales) in the finals of the 4-legged league of the robotic world cup for the first ever all-australian final match.
The challenge is to program sony AIBO dogs. Every year the finalists' code is publically released so the bar rises every year. (since everyone can use the winners' ideas in their own submissions).
I ordered my macbook pro last night; and this morning got a pleasant email:
Dear Apple Store Customer,
Today we announced that this week Apple will begin shipping the new 15.4-inch MacBook Pro featuring the Intel Core Duo processor, a built-in iSight, Front Row with Apple Remote and more. The reception of the MacBook Pro has been tremendous and we are working hard to ship as many units as fast as possible. Better still, prior to shipment we've improved the entire MacBook Pro family with configurations starting at 1.83Ghz up to 2.16GHz.
We have automatically upgraded your MacBook Pro from a 1.83Ghz processor to a 2.0Ghz processor at no additional cost! Our systems will reflect the change to your order by February 15. Please visit http://www.apple.com/au/support/store/orderstatus. html for the most up-to-date shipping information on your upgraded order.
To learn more about the most recent upgrades to the MacBook Pro family, please visit http://www.apple.com/macbookpro. You might be interested to know that Apple is offering an even faster processor the 2.16GHz as custom configured option at an additional cost.
There was an old view in the security world about making security like a nut, hard shell on the outside but once you're in access becomes a piece of cake....
This is well and good in the academic world where people see crypto as *100%* secure but in the real world with all the vulnerabilities in software these days minimising damage from attacks is just as important as defending the network borders.
I've got a friend who works in a call centre here in Australia. I'm not sure if its the same over there; here they have very strict procedures to deal with your hold-and-wait dilemma. As soon as they get put on hold they start a stopwatch. If they're on hold for more than 1 minute they hang up and mark the person as "call back later".
You aren't escaping being called; and you aren't annoying the call centre workers much either (1 minute isn't much lost productivity).
And how can we forget Noise In Space? Just tonight on SG:Atlantis, when a ship blew up, you could hear the explosion on other ships.
When a ship blows up little bits of burnt ship would fly outwards in all directions, presumably hitting said other ships and vibrating their hulls, making noise.
Ok. Software is hard and complex; but I disagree with many of your points.
Unreal 2004 has over 2 million lines of code. Monkey island (~1989) had in the viscinity of 50 000. Thats a big difference; IMO bigger than the difference in most computing projects.
Tools - You talk about databases being complex... there are pre-existing solutions for databases that are functionally mostly complete (postgresql, berkdb, etc) and viewing software (phpMyAdmin, etc). Try making an arbitrarily large 3d world in 3d studio max. Try adding arbitrary tokens around the place. Try adding multiple mesh detail levels. Try adding a sound source and then outputting the whole thing into a custom file format. Ok; so its gotten better but there's still a long way to go for games. Most professional game developers have to write a complete set of tools just so their designers can give their game content. If you've ever used the NeverWinterNights Module builder you'll understand the complexity I'm talking about. That thing is nearly as complex as the game itself.
Workflow Issues - What do large projects do to cut down on complexity and compilation time? They have interfaces. The hardest thing about game development is making the complex code run *fast*. That means no stupidly complex interfaces - every cycle counts. You often want your modules to talk directly to each other. Multiple platforms are problematic? How often writing a database program do you need it to run on 5 archetectures; each with a different interface and different bottlenecks? These days you can mostly get away with just windows or windows/linux/macos. In game development you don't just have to write code for multiple platforms but they all have to be optimised differently (different spec'ed machines). Even PCs need seperate code for different video cards. Doom3 has 5 rendering pipelines or something stupid just because of the range of hardware it has to run on; and has to run *fast* on.
3rd party components - fine game dev isn't the only one.
Domain Specific requirements - A good game developer arguably has to know: DirectX, Opengl, AI theory (fuzzy logic, learning algorithms, etc), Assembler, 3d theory, Linear Algebra and Calculus, The video pipeline, Sound, Optimisation theory, Game theory, threading, interface design, Networking, compression, encryption, security, etc. You have to learn all that stuff then you have to learn to do it all fast. So other computing projects are hard too; Game development is just way more complicated than most.
Profiling - Profiling is hard globally huh? Well try doing 3d. Maybe half your slowdown is the 3d card. You can't really profile the 3d card... if your framerate is half what it should be on one particular system its really difficult to know whats going wrong. Some cards struggle with large numbers of pixels and others struggle more with verticies. What quality of shaders can you use? Modern games watch the framerate and dynamically tweak small visual elements. The average application is allowed to run slowly if you have a slow system. Games must be playable with any (modern) computer and have better visual quality if the system can manage it. That means different code paths. Identifying bottlenecks requires a great deal of user interaction huh? Not in games. Warcraft3 does it with almost no interaction whatsoever.
Welcome to the game industry. Please leave your sanity at the door.
Its also unarguably harder to write UT2004 in flash than it is in C/C++
Some things may be nice and elegant but at 1280x1024 boring 2d vector graphics lag in flash. For commercial games (which is what the article was referring to) this just isn't an option.
Slashdot Mirror
Email isn't going anywhere. ... Everyone has an email account.
Sure; and everyone has a serial port, floppy disks and CRT monitors.
For anything to replace email, it will need to be decentralised. No company will trust facebook, twitter, google or anybody else with their private corporate data. It will also need to be obviously superior to email in almost every way. It needs to add features that people want.
The only serious contender for replacing email is Wave. I've been using it for the past 2-3 days and even as a beta I'm already preferring it over email. I'm honestly wishing everyone I need to talk to had a wave account already. Email will be around for at least 15 years. But I don't think it'll be around forever.
I could be wrong, but it would be prudent not to dismiss wave out of hand just yet.
To be fair, Wave is being developed as an open standard. Google is opening the protocol. They will also maintain an open source reference implementation for anyone to deploy in their own corner of the 'net.
I'm sure you mean well, but thats just FUD. How much bandwidth do you actually use? I very much doubt its anywhere near 250GB per month.
With a 250GB / month cap flash websites, windows updates and the once-a-month wow patch will not chew up your bandwidth. Those things will barely be noticeable.
250GB/month is around 8GB per day. Flash-based websites are usually no bigger than a meg or two. With 8GB per day you could download a fresh copy of windows vista every day, a 1GB world of warcraft patch and still have enough bandwidth left over for hundreds of flash-based websites.
250GB is a nutjob amount of bandwidth.
Even if you are a rabid torrenter, 8GB per day lets you download about 6 hours of video every day in HD.
As others have mentioned, your electricity is already metered and the world has not crumbled. Hard disks cost money and the world has not crumbled. Why? Because the prices are reasonable.
I share a 140GB internet connection with 5 other geeks and we manage just fine. We could pay more for more bandwidth if we wanted. But, we don't need to. Do we use the internet less because bandwidth costs money? Not really. I mean; who would want to download a new copy of windows vista every day?
I'm a 3rd party iPhone developer; and you're completely right.
However: You need to give us some time before anything amazing appears. The iPhone SDK only came out of beta 3 days ago. The best apps haven't been finished yet. Most of the apps in the Apple Store are still internally considered beta; they've just launched anyway to be first-to-market.
Be patient. Great things are afoot.
I disagree completely.
Mathematics isn't about memorising formulas needed to answer exam questions. Mathematics is about understanding particular formal systems and knowing how to bend, warp and multilate them when you need to.
In the real world you aren't given a list of the exact variables that the formula needs. Giving students such things in exams only tests whether they know the formula, not whether they know math.
'Twas the night before my thesis was due, and all through the room
Only one creature was stirring, intent in that gloom
In 5 hours, my final year honours thesis was due. I was pulling an all-nighter to finish it. Had simulation data everywhere, excel spreadsheets open, half a dozen pdfs, latex stuff,... Maybe about 30 windows were open in all. I don't believe in restarting often.
I'm minding my own business fighting excel 2007's new interface and all of a sudden a few of my windows disappear. Excel asks me if I want to save... Maybe this is like god coming to noah just before the flood. Ok. Yes. Save please. Then excel closes too.
Suddenly my screen is replaced with a pleasant background and a message:
Windows is downloading updates. Please wait.
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHH!
Oh vista, why can't you tell that I'm using the computer; and that even though its 6 am, I don't want to install your updates right now but thanks? Even if you just asked me "Oh by the way - I kind of want to close all your programs and restart. You're not doing anything important, right?".
It wouldn't be so bad if word and excel didn't take 20 minutes to start up. (They decided it was important to 'configure for the first time' again).
Serious programmers who only know a single language are incredibly rare regardless of what that language is. I'm in my final year of a computer science degree and I know more languages than I have fingers. Between the last 3 casual jobs I've held I've used the majority of those languages; too.
I don't understand how people who only know a single language are employable these days.
For me, this is the single biggest advantage
Less choice is regularly one of Microsoft's more dubious features but for me, when programming I find it a godsend. [despite how much my karma will suffer for saying so]
The person in front of you can see more than you can
If a child walks out on the road, you won't notice. The car in front of you will see the child and brake suddenly. You will run into the back of their car and push them into the child. No matter how inconvenient slow drivers are, there is no excuse to tailgate.
Warden doesn't disable access to the hard drive. Instead, as soon as the client connects to the realm server the blizzard server crafts a special warden packet which contains the warden program itself. This executable data which is loaded into memory and executed. Throughout the world of warcraft executable there are a number of function stubs which are overwritten with warden code and executed when needed. Warden then periodically sends information about the client to blizzard, including a list with checksums of all other programs running on the system. Is this a security vulnerability? Not really - if blizzard wants to run arbitrary, nasty code on your machine they can already by updating the wow executable with a patch. Man in the middle attacks are impossible because the server proves to the client it knows the user's password as part of the login process.
Blizzard thought of that. The world of warcraft packet headers (packet type ID and packet size) is encrypted using a stream cypher. The session key is decided using a zero-knowledge protocol (SRP) during login. Acquiring that key from a network trace of the login is impossible. Key material is leaked over time, but if you don't know the packet size or packet type its tricky to find the encrypted packet headers amongst all the other junk.
In short, this is a cat and mouse game of Blizzard vs the cheaters. For the moment, at least, blizzard appears to be winning.
> > And how do you protect Warden from it itself being hacked? You design it kind of like a root kit--that is the user shouldn't be able to alter or disable Warden & they lose the domain over that tiny bit of functionality of their hard drive.
> That's trivial to get around. Run it under VMWare or qemu.
I don't know about qemu but VMWare doesn't give direct access to the video card, so the game runs unplayably slowly.
Actually, your parent poster is right. There are some things which the client has direct control over. Movement is one of them - game hacks do allow you to access otherwise inaccessible content. There was a case a few weeks ago of an entire guild being banned because they used a client-side hack to fall through the floor of a dungeon and skip a large amount of content to just fight the boss at the end.
Actually its language progressing. Evolution has nothing to do with it.
Modern linguistic theory has discarded the idea of an absolute correctness when it comes to languages. All languages change over time. Let this disgust you if you must but really, natural language is only meaningful through its expression and interpretation. If you don't think languages should change, please be aware your comment would be almost unparsable by people only a handful of generations ago. Words like "pwn" appearing in common speech is part of this ongoing process. Fight it if you want, but history implies you'll just get pwned.
If they believe this, then is it not a theological statement?
No. It takes more than smacking "believe" into a statement to make it theological. I believe my shell script is be free of bugs. There's no theology involked in that statement; I'm just using "believe" as a weak form of "know". For the logically adventurous, I believe this sentence uses the word "believe" without involking theology.
Consider this: how many people were killed as a result of the Nazi, Soviet, and Maoist regimes in the last 100 years? How many people were killed by "religion" in the last 100 years?
Lets start with acknowledging that War was the big killer of people here. I find anyone who's moral views support wars potentially dangerious. Christianity (at least in the old testament) actively supports wars. If a person is christian and uses the bible as their primary source of moral teachings I can't help but be wary of them from a purely pragmatic point of view.
...but Australia (newcastle university) just beat Australia (university of new south wales) in the finals of the 4-legged league of the robotic world cup for the first ever all-australian final match.
0 06 ] but its a lot.
I don't know how many different countries competed [ http://www.tzi.de/4legged/bin/view/Website/Teams2
The challenge is to program sony AIBO dogs. Every year the finalists' code is publically released so the bar rises every year. (since everyone can use the winners' ideas in their own submissions).
I ordered my macbook pro last night; and this morning got a pleasant email:
. html for the most
Dear Apple Store Customer,
Today we announced that this week Apple will begin shipping the new
15.4-inch MacBook Pro featuring the Intel Core Duo processor, a built-in
iSight, Front Row with Apple Remote and more. The reception of the
MacBook Pro has been tremendous and we are working hard to ship as many
units as fast as possible. Better still, prior to shipment we've
improved the entire MacBook Pro family with configurations starting at
1.83Ghz up to 2.16GHz.
We have automatically upgraded your MacBook Pro from a 1.83Ghz
processor to a 2.0Ghz processor at no additional cost! Our systems
will reflect the change to your order by February 15. Please visit
http://www.apple.com/au/support/store/orderstatus
up-to-date shipping information on your upgraded order.
To learn more about the most recent upgrades to the MacBook Pro family,
please visit http://www.apple.com/macbookpro. You might be interested
to know that Apple is offering an even faster processor the 2.16GHz as
custom configured option at an additional cost.
Mod parent up.
There was an old view in the security world about making security like a nut, hard shell on the outside but once you're in access becomes a piece of cake....
This is well and good in the academic world where people see crypto as *100%* secure but in the real world with all the vulnerabilities in software these days minimising damage from attacks is just as important as defending the network borders.
I've got a friend who works in a call centre here in Australia. I'm not sure if its the same over there; here they have very strict procedures to deal with your hold-and-wait dilemma. As soon as they get put on hold they start a stopwatch. If they're on hold for more than 1 minute they hang up and mark the person as "call back later".
You aren't escaping being called; and you aren't annoying the call centre workers much either (1 minute isn't much lost productivity).
When a ship blows up little bits of burnt ship would fly outwards in all directions, presumably hitting said other ships and vibrating their hulls, making noise.
I'm a student at one of the biggest universities in Sydney; and right across Australia we're seeing just the same trend.
:)
You're correct; the article's conclusions don't necessarily follow from the data they have, but they're still right
Advantages
- Not compatible with iPod mini.
Sold!
Ok. Software is hard and complex; but I disagree with many of your points.
Unreal 2004 has over 2 million lines of code. Monkey island (~1989) had in the viscinity of 50 000. Thats a big difference; IMO bigger than the difference in most computing projects.
Tools - You talk about databases being complex... there are pre-existing solutions for databases that are functionally mostly complete (postgresql, berkdb, etc) and viewing software (phpMyAdmin, etc). Try making an arbitrarily large 3d world in 3d studio max. Try adding arbitrary tokens around the place. Try adding multiple mesh detail levels. Try adding a sound source and then outputting the whole thing into a custom file format. Ok; so its gotten better but there's still a long way to go for games. Most professional game developers have to write a complete set of tools just so their designers can give their game content. If you've ever used the NeverWinterNights Module builder you'll understand the complexity I'm talking about. That thing is nearly as complex as the game itself.
Workflow Issues - What do large projects do to cut down on complexity and compilation time? They have interfaces. The hardest thing about game development is making the complex code run *fast*. That means no stupidly complex interfaces - every cycle counts. You often want your modules to talk directly to each other.
Multiple platforms are problematic? How often writing a database program do you need it to run on 5 archetectures; each with a different interface and different bottlenecks? These days you can mostly get away with just windows or windows/linux/macos. In game development you don't just have to write code for multiple platforms but they all have to be optimised differently (different spec'ed machines). Even PCs need seperate code for different video cards. Doom3 has 5 rendering pipelines or something stupid just because of the range of hardware it has to run on; and has to run *fast* on.
3rd party components - fine game dev isn't the only one.
Domain Specific requirements -
A good game developer arguably has to know:
DirectX, Opengl, AI theory (fuzzy logic, learning algorithms, etc), Assembler, 3d theory, Linear Algebra and Calculus, The video pipeline, Sound, Optimisation theory, Game theory, threading, interface design, Networking, compression, encryption, security, etc. You have to learn all that stuff then you have to learn to do it all fast. So other computing projects are hard too; Game development is just way more complicated than most.
Profiling -
Profiling is hard globally huh? Well try doing 3d. Maybe half your slowdown is the 3d card. You can't really profile the 3d card... if your framerate is half what it should be on one particular system its really difficult to know whats going wrong. Some cards struggle with large numbers of pixels and others struggle more with verticies. What quality of shaders can you use? Modern games watch the framerate and dynamically tweak small visual elements. The average application is allowed to run slowly if you have a slow system. Games must be playable with any (modern) computer and have better visual quality if the system can manage it. That means different code paths. Identifying bottlenecks requires a great deal of user interaction huh? Not in games. Warcraft3 does it with almost no interaction whatsoever.
Welcome to the game industry. Please leave your sanity at the door.
True.
Its also unarguably harder to write UT2004 in flash than it is in C/C++
Some things may be nice and elegant but at 1280x1024 boring 2d vector graphics lag in flash. For commercial games (which is what the article was referring to) this just isn't an option.