The button is a perfect interface for this by people who clearly know what they're doing. Other things Harriet is advocating:
Emergency reigns to pull back on when your Prius stops responding to your orders. Extra large sceptres of power for small videoconferencing screens. Home witchburning kits with reduced carbon footprint. "Please Sir, Don't Hit Me." embroidered shirts for abuse victims. Big fluffy St Bernards with tiny barrels of hot chocolate around their neck for children lost in World of Warcraft.
As a console game developer, most players experience 100ms response times as a bad, sometimes nauseating lag. It's far enough behind to induce seasickness if you're not careful / use mitigating tricks. 50ms is about the most you'd ever want in terms of player delay, but it really should be below 20ms.
If your baseline ping is already 100ms, you're already at the point of a poor player experience. Hopefully for OnLive's sake, they've found ways to minimize pings.
Digital distribution lowers distribution costs to the point where $5 steam sales are possible. Gamespot, I'm guessing, would never put up with that, as they would have to take a loss on their meager margin. Which is to say, I doubt that the lack of sales is due to being "undercut" by used game sales in the retail space (which would, after all drive down prices). But rather by the realities of distribution costs and their lack of power over pricing.
The parent's point was that by purchasing a digital copy through this service, they have the legal right to do whatever. They can revoke legally purchased copies due to their mistake (1984), shut down validation servers on a whim (MSN Music), decide that your legally purchased copy was intended for a different country (Modern Warfare 2), suddenly decide they don't like the content and remove it from your phone (app store), etc. It has been shown time and time again, that within protected digital distribution channels the consumer currently has no rights.
So yes, the fear that the companies will engage in shortsighted anti consumer behavior for profit is completely founded. So far, the few competitors in this space know that their futures depend on adoption, and adoption depends on consumer trust. But once one service becomes dominant, then what? We've seen the ever tightening schedule of online multiplayer going dark, in an attempt to drive consumers towards purchasing new iterations of Sports Game X. Once a game has been out for a few years, why keep the validation servers up? Will OnLive keep old XP servers around once Windows 2015 comes out?
Will game developers find ways to subtly degrade the experience of older titles, in order to prop up sales of the new ones?
It sounds like you are actually buying and renting. 15$ per month covers remote processing charges, not the games themselves.
Considering the data that must flow and the server procs that must run hot, $15 a month doesn't sound crazy. But at those prices, upgrade your darned video card.
I'm rather shocked to be back in Grad School, and to see that everyone is here (without fail) to change careers. The people in my curriculum have zero experience and zero prior study in the field, they just didn't like the job their undergraduate degree got them. The first year of graduate school feels like a condensed version of a real undergraduate degree, for those people who probably should have read a book on this stuff before deciding to jump on the hot career.
I was expecting to find people who loved the subject. Instead, I find people unified in their hatred of whatever else they're doing.
If it is too heavy to download and install malware detection utilities over dial-up, I'm guessing they have no virus protection at all and are running unpatched versions of windows. This is fundamentally unsafe, and needs to be rectified immediately. They need to either deal with leaving their phone tied up for an hour a week running updates, or they need to get satellite internet access.
To the original poster, it's frequently more effective to find malware information by searching for the process name than by the application name.
So... you're advocating an inverse scale specifically to minimize the appearance of effectiveness of higher efficiency cars? And that most people are better at dealing with fractional ratios instead of integer ratios?
Microsoft doesn't seem to want to compete in the mobile space or with MP3 players. the Zune was a total waste of great hardware Apple doesn't seem to want to compete in the Enterprise Software market where MS likes to be these days
Microsoft just announced their revamped phone interface, which looks like they spent a lot of effort to go head-on with Apple. Their electronics division continues to pour money into the hole that is Zune: the Xbox 360 just got full Zune support.
Apple, on the other hand, by your comments about exchange is going after exactly the sort of corporate customers that would traditionally have been all-windows shops. They know nobody can compete for the e-mail server software itself, so they're offering hosted mail support.
Apple has had a cloud strategy for years with MobileMe. It hasn't had the penetration of Google's offerings, since Apple sought to charge for the service and Google earns through ads. But they have been throwing not inconsiderable weight behind what is becoming more and more a compelling cloud-based feature set.
I would agree. The Microsoft deal with Novell seemed to be a question of momentary face saving at a time when Microsoft seemed religiously opposed to open source. The Novell deal changed that perception to just being opposed to open source on financial grounds.
I'm not seeing, really, what Microsoft has to lose if Novell and SuSE fall down. "Saving Face" is not an underlinable financial statement, and nobody ever got rich saving face in front of the open source community. Microsoft could turn and partner with Red Hat for far less than it would cost to keep Novell on life support indefinitely.
I've spoken to DRM vendors before. Their goal was not perfect protection, or even what you'd consider normal protection. But a time-to-crack of 2 weeks.
That was it. They weren't trying to make a perpetual motion machine. They were attempting to make a machine whose motion lasted for 2 weeks. All they wanted was the initial sales spike to be as tall as possible. They were quite aware that what they were doing was delaying the game from being broadly available on torrent sites by a few days, in order to capture a few extra million dollars in sales. And after that, they knew it was basically useless.
Or hack the game to automatically write out item position to a file, then read from that file in the hacked executable. In the meantime, your server costs have gone through the roof.
To be fair, DRM is always in waves. You create game 1 with how new DRM system X! It is cracked in a day. You create game 2 with an updated version of DRM system X! It is cracked in two days. You careate game 3 with an updated version of DRMX... etc.
Like a lot of things, DRM is really difficult to get right the first time. Of course the new "uncrackable" system was cracked in a day. The engineers are probably smacking their faces at some random loose end they forgot to tie up. Each next iterations will all be more effective, until it plateaus at the 1 - 2 week mark.
It's like open source software, except extremely closed and people fix security flaws by beating you and draining your will to live.
The sheer volume of individual update patches and required user intervention just makes everyone numb to the questions. Either people click "yes" and just install absolutely everything onto their system, or they impulsively click "no" and leave themselves open. I had a client who was of the incessant "yes" clicking type, and didn't realize that she had a dialog pop up saying "Your computer appears to be under attack from a virus. Would you like to shut off the network connection?" One hour over the phone, a 20 minute drive, and 1 minute in person later, what she had clicked on became apparent.
I'd love a centralized pathway repository for patches, especially with the options of "patch automatically all signed packages from this company" and "always say 'no' and don't bother me.' Really, there is no reason why the end user should be prompted for backwards-compatible patches for most mainstream helper apps.
Apps that everyone has which seem to update every frick'in day on Windows:
1. Java (really? It changes that much?) 2. Adobe Reader (It's an ISO file format! This should patch once a year!) 3. iTunes / quicktime (and all of those patches don't seem to do it any good.)
Further things that not everybody has but always seems to update.
4. FileZilla (Glad to see that FTP standard advancing so quickly. One day it will probably catch on.) 5. KeePass (Hooray for security, but can we updated once a week rather than every day?). 6. Anything HP related (Mysterious, since they never stop being broken. What do they do, update every time you're supposed to replace the ink?) 7. uTorrent (It can't just update itself?) 8. Steam
They wanted to supplement the live traffic with test traffic to get an idea of the overall performance impact of the new launch on the entire infrastructure.
So the 77k hits per second wasn't their expected peak load, but their expected delta in peak load after opening online streaming in... (looks up) New Zealand. 77k hits per second for streaming in New Zealand doesn't sound that far off.
I hate to ask such a newbie question, but why is a completely general video container format actually useful? I don't mean the particulars of a decoder, but why a general purpose container rather than a file that is decoder specific?
WMV hosts a million different formats internally, which eventually break down to MP4 or AVI or MPG, or many other options. As far as I can tell, using WMV as a container format just means that you won't actually know if you can open a video file until after you've attempted to do it.
I once had a user call because he "couldn't get into his e-mail." After about half an hour of being stonewalled on the phone, it turns out that: 1. He couldn't load his e-mail because he couldn't run his e-mail application. 2. He couldn't run his e-mail application because he couldn't run windows. 3. He couldn't run windows because his computer wouldn't turn on. 4. His computer wouldn't turn on because he had yanked out the previous motherboard, stuck in a new one (without a CPU, of course), and just assumed everything would work. 5. Seeing as how this was painfully stupid, he didn't actually tell the tech support this for fear that the tech support would figure out what he had done wrong. 6. And, instead of calling the hardware manufacturer's help line, he called his ISP.
My second favorite tech support call was a user who was having trouble getting online, and no matter how many settings we changed nothing seemed to fix it. "Hardware problem" you suggest? Yup. Over the weekend someone had bulldozed the wall with her network jack.
No matter how bad things might get at my current job, at least I'm not doing tech support.
As a game designer, and sometime game UI designer, I feel your pain.
The best way to get people to read your error messages is to have very few of them. People just tune them out. If you're tossing up error messages for things like synchronizing to network shares before the user really needs to, or connecting to 3rd party tools that the individual tool can handle the error for, cut those. They'll get to those errors later anyway, or the problem will be fixed by then. The only error messages should happen when it is impossible to do what the user asked.
The ones that you do have should be 7 words or less, and should be both meaningful and in plain english (even for engineers). "Uninitialized Data" is technobabble, and "It Didn't Work" doesn't tell you anything. "Couldn't connect to the mail server" is much better, as it tells the user exactly what was wrong, but within a small enough space that by glancing at the textbox the user has already read it.
Icons are most likely going to confuse your users unless they directly relate to the error at hand. "Warning: Trojan Detected [panda kicking a soccer ball]" might be cute, but if people are already confused they're going to have a hard time remembering even the soccer ball. The conflict of visual imagery just muddies the water. Throw a needle on the screen, and everybody will remember in a panic that the error had a needle up there, but not what the text said. If that snippet of information is not enough to work from, you'll need to find a different solution.
aBrowserOrderTop5.sort(RandomSort); (they repeat this twice for some reason)... function RandomSort (a,b) {
return (0.5 - Math.random()); }
This takes the browser's built-in sorting function, tells it to sort by an essentially random criteria, and hopes that it all works out. Unfortunately, this is highly dependent on the implementation of the built-in sort function, and that's up to the browser designer to create. The only constraint on the structure of sort is that it must successfully order comprehensible data, which does not mean that it will properly randomize data when provided. Essentially, they overloaded a black-box function that wasn't designed for randomization in the hopes that it would work.
For an instance of why this wouldn't work, consider the case of the last item. Say that you're sorting a list of 5 letters. Now say that you're most of the way through the list, having properly sorted the first 4 letters into "A, B, D, E", with just the 5th letter C left. So you step through. Does C come before E? Yes. Does C come before D? Yes. Does C come before B? No. C must go between B and D, and the list will look like "A , B , C , D , E." It will be sorted correctly every time.
Now let's throw that randomization into the middle there. Let's start again with the list, though since we're randomizing let's call them item 1, 2, 3, and 4. If we're properly randomly sorting the last item 5 into the list, it should have equal chances of showing up everywhere. But remember, we're still using the sorting algorithm from above, we're just flipping a coin at each question instead of actually comparing. So what we get is:
Does 5 come before 4? 50% yes, or stop Does 5 come before 3? 50% yes, or stop Does 5 come before 2? 50% yes, or stop
etc. But because it's iterative, those 50% chances stack. You only get to the second question half of the time, so you only get to the third question half of that half of the time. And essentially what you wind up with is a % chance of the last number being sorted into each of the slots as: 3%, 6%, 12%, 25%, 50%. This is obviously not a random distribution curve.
This is not necessarily the sort algorithm that Microsoft uses in I.E. (The 50% chance of staying as the last element is a bit suspicious, though, as is running their code twice). But it does point out unequivocably that you can't overload an off-the-shelf sort algorithm with a randomizing comparator and expect the outcome to follow a genuinely random distribution curve. They really ought to have an in-house random sort algorithm that their developers can pull from.
(Thanks to another poster for finding the first google hit that describes this method.).
Leaving the random number generator unseeded can sometimes produce skewed results. It used to be that you were almost guaranteed to get the same output sequence, especially in optimized languages, as the default seed was some fixed value. This isn't as much of an issue these days, as most get properly pre-seeded with the time or some other variable. But it is still good practice to properly pre-seed your code, especially for old systems / guaranteed randomness / stodgy old manness.
While in Microsoft's native browser (which would happen the first time), Internet Explorer is given a full %64 chance of receiving one of the coveted 2 edge positions. Considering that antitrust courts were involved in the creation of this screen, you'd think that getting "random" right would be a development priority, especially considering it should have taken a competent programmer exactly the same amount of time to do it right as to do it wrong. If this takes even one hour of lawyer time to ponder, it would have been much cheaper to send the programmer back to fix it.
A 50% chance of getting a particular slot that should be %20 is not "99.99% random." It's just wrong. And when you're talking about the cost of antitrust regulation, it's really, really wrong.
I'm glad this is being brought up on Slashdot. There is a lot of misunderstanding about how to create randomness in systems. Even on a basic level, people frequently ask for "random" when they actually want jukebox random. In this case, though, it just seems like a basic misunderstanding of statistics, which is not surprising given the moderate code complexity and likelihood this screen was given to an intern or jr programmer.
Slashdot Mirror
I was wondering about that. They want to destroy the credibility of wikileaks by... publicly arresting the people who leak?
This strikes me as either a fake report, or a really terrible summary.
The button is a perfect interface for this by people who clearly know what they're doing. Other things Harriet is advocating:
Emergency reigns to pull back on when your Prius stops responding to your orders.
Extra large sceptres of power for small videoconferencing screens.
Home witchburning kits with reduced carbon footprint.
"Please Sir, Don't Hit Me." embroidered shirts for abuse victims.
Big fluffy St Bernards with tiny barrels of hot chocolate around their neck for children lost in World of Warcraft.
Speaking of line-of-site, other than bandwidth what is the difference between networked LED signaling and a TV remote control?
As a console game developer, most players experience 100ms response times as a bad, sometimes nauseating lag. It's far enough behind to induce seasickness if you're not careful / use mitigating tricks. 50ms is about the most you'd ever want in terms of player delay, but it really should be below 20ms.
If your baseline ping is already 100ms, you're already at the point of a poor player experience. Hopefully for OnLive's sake, they've found ways to minimize pings.
Digital distribution lowers distribution costs to the point where $5 steam sales are possible. Gamespot, I'm guessing, would never put up with that, as they would have to take a loss on their meager margin. Which is to say, I doubt that the lack of sales is due to being "undercut" by used game sales in the retail space (which would, after all drive down prices). But rather by the realities of distribution costs and their lack of power over pricing.
The parent's point was that by purchasing a digital copy through this service, they have the legal right to do whatever. They can revoke legally purchased copies due to their mistake (1984), shut down validation servers on a whim (MSN Music), decide that your legally purchased copy was intended for a different country (Modern Warfare 2), suddenly decide they don't like the content and remove it from your phone (app store), etc. It has been shown time and time again, that within protected digital distribution channels the consumer currently has no rights.
So yes, the fear that the companies will engage in shortsighted anti consumer behavior for profit is completely founded. So far, the few competitors in this space know that their futures depend on adoption, and adoption depends on consumer trust. But once one service becomes dominant, then what? We've seen the ever tightening schedule of online multiplayer going dark, in an attempt to drive consumers towards purchasing new iterations of Sports Game X. Once a game has been out for a few years, why keep the validation servers up? Will OnLive keep old XP servers around once Windows 2015 comes out?
Will game developers find ways to subtly degrade the experience of older titles, in order to prop up sales of the new ones?
It sounds like you are actually buying and renting. 15$ per month covers remote processing charges, not the games themselves.
Considering the data that must flow and the server procs that must run hot, $15 a month doesn't sound crazy. But at those prices, upgrade your darned video card.
I'm rather shocked to be back in Grad School, and to see that everyone is here (without fail) to change careers. The people in my curriculum have zero experience and zero prior study in the field, they just didn't like the job their undergraduate degree got them. The first year of graduate school feels like a condensed version of a real undergraduate degree, for those people who probably should have read a book on this stuff before deciding to jump on the hot career.
I was expecting to find people who loved the subject. Instead, I find people unified in their hatred of whatever else they're doing.
If it is too heavy to download and install malware detection utilities over dial-up, I'm guessing they have no virus protection at all and are running unpatched versions of windows. This is fundamentally unsafe, and needs to be rectified immediately. They need to either deal with leaving their phone tied up for an hour a week running updates, or they need to get satellite internet access.
To the original poster, it's frequently more effective to find malware information by searching for the process name than by the application name.
So... you're advocating an inverse scale specifically to minimize the appearance of effectiveness of higher efficiency cars? And that most people are better at dealing with fractional ratios instead of integer ratios?
Microsoft doesn't seem to want to compete in the mobile space or with MP3 players. the Zune was a total waste of great hardware
Apple doesn't seem to want to compete in the Enterprise Software market where MS likes to be these days
Microsoft just announced their revamped phone interface, which looks like they spent a lot of effort to go head-on with Apple. Their electronics division continues to pour money into the hole that is Zune: the Xbox 360 just got full Zune support.
Apple, on the other hand, by your comments about exchange is going after exactly the sort of corporate customers that would traditionally have been all-windows shops. They know nobody can compete for the e-mail server software itself, so they're offering hosted mail support.
Apple has had a cloud strategy for years with MobileMe. It hasn't had the penetration of Google's offerings, since Apple sought to charge for the service and Google earns through ads. But they have been throwing not inconsiderable weight behind what is becoming more and more a compelling cloud-based feature set.
I would agree. The Microsoft deal with Novell seemed to be a question of momentary face saving at a time when Microsoft seemed religiously opposed to open source. The Novell deal changed that perception to just being opposed to open source on financial grounds.
I'm not seeing, really, what Microsoft has to lose if Novell and SuSE fall down. "Saving Face" is not an underlinable financial statement, and nobody ever got rich saving face in front of the open source community. Microsoft could turn and partner with Red Hat for far less than it would cost to keep Novell on life support indefinitely.
I've spoken to DRM vendors before. Their goal was not perfect protection, or even what you'd consider normal protection. But a time-to-crack of 2 weeks.
That was it. They weren't trying to make a perpetual motion machine. They were attempting to make a machine whose motion lasted for 2 weeks. All they wanted was the initial sales spike to be as tall as possible. They were quite aware that what they were doing was delaying the game from being broadly available on torrent sites by a few days, in order to capture a few extra million dollars in sales. And after that, they knew it was basically useless.
Three years down the road, who is going to remember enough about the game to patch it? How about ten?
Who, exactly, is going to care that much about an old game when they're busy looking for a new job?
Or hack the game to automatically write out item position to a file, then read from that file in the hacked executable. In the meantime, your server costs have gone through the roof.
To be fair, DRM is always in waves. You create game 1 with how new DRM system X! It is cracked in a day. You create game 2 with an updated version of DRM system X! It is cracked in two days. You careate game 3 with an updated version of DRMX... etc.
Like a lot of things, DRM is really difficult to get right the first time. Of course the new "uncrackable" system was cracked in a day. The engineers are probably smacking their faces at some random loose end they forgot to tie up. Each next iterations will all be more effective, until it plateaus at the 1 - 2 week mark.
It's like open source software, except extremely closed and people fix security flaws by beating you and draining your will to live.
The sheer volume of individual update patches and required user intervention just makes everyone numb to the questions. Either people click "yes" and just install absolutely everything onto their system, or they impulsively click "no" and leave themselves open. I had a client who was of the incessant "yes" clicking type, and didn't realize that she had a dialog pop up saying "Your computer appears to be under attack from a virus. Would you like to shut off the network connection?" One hour over the phone, a 20 minute drive, and 1 minute in person later, what she had clicked on became apparent.
I'd love a centralized pathway repository for patches, especially with the options of "patch automatically all signed packages from this company" and "always say 'no' and don't bother me.' Really, there is no reason why the end user should be prompted for backwards-compatible patches for most mainstream helper apps.
Apps that everyone has which seem to update every frick'in day on Windows:
1. Java (really? It changes that much?)
2. Adobe Reader (It's an ISO file format! This should patch once a year!)
3. iTunes / quicktime (and all of those patches don't seem to do it any good.)
Further things that not everybody has but always seems to update.
4. FileZilla (Glad to see that FTP standard advancing so quickly. One day it will probably catch on.)
5. KeePass (Hooray for security, but can we updated once a week rather than every day?).
6. Anything HP related (Mysterious, since they never stop being broken. What do they do, update every time you're supposed to replace the ink?)
7. uTorrent (It can't just update itself?)
8. Steam
They wanted to supplement the live traffic with test traffic to get an idea of the overall performance impact of the new launch on the entire infrastructure.
So the 77k hits per second wasn't their expected peak load, but their expected delta in peak load after opening online streaming in... (looks up) New Zealand. 77k hits per second for streaming in New Zealand doesn't sound that far off.
I hate to ask such a newbie question, but why is a completely general video container format actually useful? I don't mean the particulars of a decoder, but why a general purpose container rather than a file that is decoder specific?
WMV hosts a million different formats internally, which eventually break down to MP4 or AVI or MPG, or many other options. As far as I can tell, using WMV as a container format just means that you won't actually know if you can open a video file until after you've attempted to do it.
The guy was capable of pulling out an old motherboard. I'll give him that. But calling him an "average user" might be giving him too much credit.
I once had a user call because he "couldn't get into his e-mail." After about half an hour of being stonewalled on the phone, it turns out that:
1. He couldn't load his e-mail because he couldn't run his e-mail application.
2. He couldn't run his e-mail application because he couldn't run windows.
3. He couldn't run windows because his computer wouldn't turn on.
4. His computer wouldn't turn on because he had yanked out the previous motherboard, stuck in a new one (without a CPU, of course), and just assumed everything would work.
5. Seeing as how this was painfully stupid, he didn't actually tell the tech support this for fear that the tech support would figure out what he had done wrong.
6. And, instead of calling the hardware manufacturer's help line, he called his ISP.
My second favorite tech support call was a user who was having trouble getting online, and no matter how many settings we changed nothing seemed to fix it. "Hardware problem" you suggest? Yup. Over the weekend someone had bulldozed the wall with her network jack.
No matter how bad things might get at my current job, at least I'm not doing tech support.
As a game designer, and sometime game UI designer, I feel your pain.
The best way to get people to read your error messages is to have very few of them. People just tune them out. If you're tossing up error messages for things like synchronizing to network shares before the user really needs to, or connecting to 3rd party tools that the individual tool can handle the error for, cut those. They'll get to those errors later anyway, or the problem will be fixed by then. The only error messages should happen when it is impossible to do what the user asked.
The ones that you do have should be 7 words or less, and should be both meaningful and in plain english (even for engineers). "Uninitialized Data" is technobabble, and "It Didn't Work" doesn't tell you anything. "Couldn't connect to the mail server" is much better, as it tells the user exactly what was wrong, but within a small enough space that by glancing at the textbox the user has already read it.
Icons are most likely going to confuse your users unless they directly relate to the error at hand. "Warning: Trojan Detected [panda kicking a soccer ball]" might be cute, but if people are already confused they're going to have a hard time remembering even the soccer ball. The conflict of visual imagery just muddies the water. Throw a needle on the screen, and everybody will remember in a panic that the error had a needle up there, but not what the text said. If that snippet of information is not enough to work from, you'll need to find a different solution.
The relevant code is in their Javascript:
aBrowserOrderTop5.sort(RandomSort); (they repeat this twice for some reason) ...
function RandomSort (a,b)
{
return (0.5 - Math.random());
}
This takes the browser's built-in sorting function, tells it to sort by an essentially random criteria, and hopes that it all works out. Unfortunately, this is highly dependent on the implementation of the built-in sort function, and that's up to the browser designer to create. The only constraint on the structure of sort is that it must successfully order comprehensible data, which does not mean that it will properly randomize data when provided. Essentially, they overloaded a black-box function that wasn't designed for randomization in the hopes that it would work.
For an instance of why this wouldn't work, consider the case of the last item. Say that you're sorting a list of 5 letters. Now say that you're most of the way through the list, having properly sorted the first 4 letters into "A, B, D, E", with just the 5th letter C left. So you step through.
Does C come before E? Yes.
Does C come before D? Yes.
Does C come before B? No.
C must go between B and D, and the list will look like "A , B , C , D , E." It will be sorted correctly every time.
Now let's throw that randomization into the middle there. Let's start again with the list, though since we're randomizing let's call them item 1, 2, 3, and 4. If we're properly randomly sorting the last item 5 into the list, it should have equal chances of showing up everywhere. But remember, we're still using the sorting algorithm from above, we're just flipping a coin at each question instead of actually comparing. So what we get is:
Does 5 come before 4? 50% yes, or stop
Does 5 come before 3? 50% yes, or stop
Does 5 come before 2? 50% yes, or stop
etc. But because it's iterative, those 50% chances stack. You only get to the second question half of the time, so you only get to the third question half of that half of the time. And essentially what you wind up with is a % chance of the last number being sorted into each of the slots as: 3%, 6%, 12%, 25%, 50%. This is obviously not a random distribution curve.
This is not necessarily the sort algorithm that Microsoft uses in I.E. (The 50% chance of staying as the last element is a bit suspicious, though, as is running their code twice). But it does point out unequivocably that you can't overload an off-the-shelf sort algorithm with a randomizing comparator and expect the outcome to follow a genuinely random distribution curve. They really ought to have an in-house random sort algorithm that their developers can pull from.
(Thanks to another poster for finding the first google hit that describes this method.).
Leaving the random number generator unseeded can sometimes produce skewed results. It used to be that you were almost guaranteed to get the same output sequence, especially in optimized languages, as the default seed was some fixed value. This isn't as much of an issue these days, as most get properly pre-seeded with the time or some other variable. But it is still good practice to properly pre-seed your code, especially for old systems / guaranteed randomness / stodgy old manness.
While in Microsoft's native browser (which would happen the first time), Internet Explorer is given a full %64 chance of receiving one of the coveted 2 edge positions. Considering that antitrust courts were involved in the creation of this screen, you'd think that getting "random" right would be a development priority, especially considering it should have taken a competent programmer exactly the same amount of time to do it right as to do it wrong. If this takes even one hour of lawyer time to ponder, it would have been much cheaper to send the programmer back to fix it.
A 50% chance of getting a particular slot that should be %20 is not "99.99% random." It's just wrong. And when you're talking about the cost of antitrust regulation, it's really, really wrong.
I'm glad this is being brought up on Slashdot. There is a lot of misunderstanding about how to create randomness in systems. Even on a basic level, people frequently ask for "random" when they actually want jukebox random. In this case, though, it just seems like a basic misunderstanding of statistics, which is not surprising given the moderate code complexity and likelihood this screen was given to an intern or jr programmer.