This is very interesting. I played it when I was around 13 and I could get I think to level 4 and then at 15 and I could get to level 5 without cheating.
I never tried to replay the game now; your point that the game doesn't seem that hard is intriguing; could we, as adults, have better spatial awareness and analysis? Or maybe since we played many other games since then, we got better?
Your train of thought is good, but the analogy is wrong.
In real life, the demand for depictions of brutality (torture, murder, a.k.a. "snuff") is negligible - or at least I sincerely hope it is.
There are people willing to spend good money for the company on a child or at least some pics; (as an aside, last week in my country a drunk 18 years old raped and killed a 5 (yes, five) years old girl). The number of sick bastards who get it off by torturing and who would pay good money to see it, is an order of magnitude smaller.
Well, at least I hope I'm right and the world is not that sick and perverted.
1. Adobe Reader 8 launches almost instantly for me after the first run, when it optimizes its launch (and I always disable the startup option). Version 6 was awful but things have changed. I do agree that it's bloated (over 200Mb) but I had problems displaying complex/cmyk docs in Foxit. YMMV.
2. Flash - use AdBlock. The technology is not at fault as flash is pretty lightweight itself. It's the advertisers who think I'll click their stupid ads if they add annoying sounds and the webmasters who think that by cramming more ads there's a better chance of me clicking on one.
3. The update agent is slow 'cause it downloads only when the connection is idle. I do agree that it's annoying for it to ask to close almost all programs when updating.
5. You do realize that camera and mic are turned off by default, don't you? You need to expressly enable them on a site-by-site basis.
So there you have it.
That's not to say that I don't hate Adobe myself for other things: - activation is a pain in the ass, especially if you don't get the chance to deactivate the software first from the old computer and activate on the new one (happened to me after a hdd crash). - the software is artificially segmented in some cases, e.g. Premiere and After Effects should be one software, or Illustrator and Indesign (CorelDraw acts as a combination between the two).
You mix copyrights and patents. Neither of these concepts is inherently bad or evil.
I am a semi-pro photographer (meaning that I earn some good money from doing commercial photography) but it's a side-job. I like being in control of my work, meaning that if you want to use a photo I made, you should ask for permission - after all I had to invest in equipment and it took considerable amount of time to create that photo; if you want to use that photo in a magazine or for advertising, you better pay up. Without that protection, I may not be doing this. If anyone could copy my work with no consequences, photography would remain strictly hobby for me.
In other cases, IMO sometimes photographers abuse their position. For example, some wedding photographers would take photos at weddings for the customer, but retain the copyrights, so the client goes to the photographer each time they want a new set. A "work for hire" style of agreement would work better - the client pays a fee and then the photos (slides, RAWs, whatever) is their.
In the same vein, if I'm a publishing house and decide to print Harry Potter, it's perfectly fine for the author to be compensated. Same goes for Mickey Mouse. Things get muddy when we start talking about derivative works. If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?
Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work, but limiting the time to 2 years, requiring a working prototype, banning patents on concepts (algorithms, practices) would do wonders.
You probably don't know Netscape's history. Netscape's engine couldn't scale -- it was such a horrific mess that probably very few things could be salvaged.
Netscape 3 was great for its days. Then Netscape 4 came and it was simply a pile of shit in terms of stability and bugs (I'm not even mentioning standards compliance - remember the layer and ilayer tags?). There were so many rendering bugs it woulld make IE6 seem immaculate. It's been 10 years since I've had the displeasure of developing for it, but I still remember how I needed to add an invisible border to a div in order for it to be positioned correctly.
So in this respect, they got it right by creating a new, modern rendering engine, one that can scale in the future.
Yeah, I never heard of Speed Racer either, although I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid, from Transformers to Thundercats (although I lived under a communist regime, I had a sat dish and I watched anything that was on Sky Channel [later Sky One] and the german RTL).
After watching several trailers on Rotten Tomatoes, Speed Racer left me unimpressed and slightly annoyed. Too colourful and no story to speak of.
Take "Cars" for example. My 3-year old loves them. It has excitement, fun, it's colourful and joyful, but it also has a nice story (not incredibly deep, but it's not bad either). Somehow, I don't think Speed Racer will match it.
I happened to me - do a search on Google for "serious magic" (I knew it's a chroma-keying software, but not much else).
First result (paid) on Google, is Serious Magic fxhome.com/compositelab Special Effects On Your Desktop Simple Powerful Software. Try Now!
However, when I clicked on the link, I realized the site had nothing to do with the software I was looking for.
If I were the maker of Serious Magic (they've been bought by Adobe) I would have been pissed off too. I don't have anything against FXHome, but advertising using a competitor's brand name as keyword and impersonating them is not ethical.
How would you feel if, when searching for "ubuntu", the first result would be
Get Ubuntu Now Award-winning Operating System microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/
This is what is often missed and it happened to me. I made a search for "serious magic" (a video f/x software). The first link on Google was paid, and it appeared to from the makers of the said software so I clicked on it. Imagine my confusion when I realized the site I landed on was a competitor's. This is really not OK in my book.
Just a few months ago we had to build a small custom CMS for a client, that had to be PHP/MySQL. The specs were very specific so it had to be custom-built. Since it was a relatively small work and we were involved in some bigger projects, we hired a contractor. Good references, a few years of experience, knew javascript, so we handled the project to him.
To his credit, the site actually worked and seemed fine, until you had a peek at the PHP code, which was truly horrific. I could overlook the nonsensical use of POST for things were GET was better suited or the crap variable naming, or the generally inefficient way of doing things - but what really got me was the complete absence of ANY input checking.
Simply put, the whole thing was completely vulnerable to SQL injection of the worst kind. I even checked his other works - all sites he'd ever done were vulnerable.
In the end, I had to spend a few more days myself just to clean the mess.
So, dear reader, if you don't know what SQL injections are - stop coding in whatever language you're using, right now. It doesn't matter if it's Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET. Please, please learn to do things properly. Security is not something you can learn later.
A while ago on Slashdot someone was complaining that expressing his height in feet more natural... guess what, for me it feels more natural to think in meters.
Having the 0 as the melting/freezing point makes a good reference point, same for boiling point, because I can easily make analogies.
If I'm looking at the weather forecast and I see 2C, I know how cold it is, and even you - without being used to the system, can say "damn, it's nearly freezing"; whereas if you tell me it's 50F, I have no idea (I know that 37C ~ 100F and that's it).
One example: I have a subdomain for phpMyAdmin, e.g. phpmyadmin.myserver.com. I used to type "php" and it was right there at the top. Now, when I type "php", I get all sorts of results like "http://www.randomserver.com/index.php".
It's stupid, annoying and clearly a step backaward.
When a new feature is hated by 50% of your user base, it's time to either abandon it or at LEAST provide an option to disable it.
I never understood why so many people loved their shiny Triniton monitors
Because they rock! I am a graphic designer and photographer. My last CRT was an IBM P78 I think, using the Trinitron tube. Here's why I loved it:
Great contrast range; solid blacks, excellent reproduction of shades of grey;
Brilliant, accurate colors
At 100-125Hz, flicker was invisible
Very sharp (compared to other CRTs)
Like others, I caved in and got a fancy LCD (I brought my laptop to the store and asked the sale person to test the monitors until I found one that I liked). LCDs suck at contrast. It's difficult to get nice black; many can't distinguish between very light shades or very dark shades; the color varies with viewing angle (not as bad as in the past, but it still happens); color reproduction is poor to fair (cheap LCDs tend to have blue-ish colors to appear brighter). I could go on...
If it weren't for the size and power consumption, I'd still be using my Trinitron CRT...
Let me get this straight: do you honestly think that something being Open Source will magically protect you? I was going to mod you but there's no "-1 Naive".
There are enough malware targeted specifically at Firefox - I've seen them in action. The good thing with Firefox is that it gets patched pretty quickly, by the time an exploit has been written, hopefully we'll all have 2.0.13 installed.
Still, that's no excuse. It saddens me to say that the quality of Firefox (2.x.x branch) is steadily declining. It's slow, eating too many resources, and it crashes - on some sites it just constantly crashes. If it weren't for all the extensions, I'd dump it in a heartbeat and move to Opera.
Just to reinforce: Norton tools were for DOS what Sysinternals are for Windows, and more.
Norton Commander's interface has been copied by almost every file manager. Disk Editor helped me learn how file systems work (FAT/FAT32, but still); There were many incredibly useful apps (Norton Disk Doctor), even partititon-encryption (DiskReet) plus a ton of command-line utils.
Just to clarify - Coelho was very popular long before his blog. I know some of his fans, and none of them even knows he has a blog. Come to think of it, I don't even think his target audience is into reading blogs.
I am willing to bet that releasing the books in electronic format for free hasn't increased his popularity by more than 1%.
Disclaimer: I can't really stand his novels. They are pretty light, claiming and trying to seem deeper and more meaningful. Umberto Eco he clearly ain't.
Where are you from? I grew up in communist Europe too and we too received basic first-aid notions by the time we were 12. There were even contests for kids called something like "Junior Paramedics" (not an exact translation).
At that time, it seems inconceivable to see a road accident and not stop and provide some basic help. How times have changed...
I'm appalled by some of the comments that imply that the poster may not be fit for the job.
A few years back I had to maintain a large module written in C#. I had about 200K lines of code, 50 classes, zero documentation, zero comments, zero error logging support, and I was expected to find and fix bugs and add functionality the day after the module was handled over.
So if you were never in this position, just STFU. Yeah, the code is there, but is this flag for? Is this part really used, or is obsolete? What are the side-effects of using that method? And so on...
Eventually, I learned it, especially after some intensive debugging sessions, but it was frustrating to say the least. I would have loved to have some aiding tools.
If you want to understand the difference between a tech demo and a movie - and how the evolution of a story teaches you mastery of your craft - you need look no farther than this: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 [Blu-Ray $20]
My thoughts exactly. If you want a taste of witty, crazy little story, just do a search for "Geri's Game". I think it's on Pixar's website.
Corel's flagship is CorelDraw, which is a actually a very capable illustration software. Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint used to be on par and sometimes above competitors' products (Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand; Photo-Paint was at least as capable as Photoshop in 2000).
They stopped innovating. The last Corel Draw suite was released in 2005 (they issued 2 service packs). Photo-Paint remained untouched for years, now lagging behind Photoshop in many areas.
Such a shame. The products used to be really good in terms of features and UI. Now they've buried everything.
Slashdot Mirror
This is very interesting. I played it when I was around 13 and I could get I think to level 4 and then at 15 and I could get to level 5 without cheating.
I never tried to replay the game now; your point that the game doesn't seem that hard is intriguing; could we, as adults, have better spatial awareness and analysis? Or maybe since we played many other games since then, we got better?
Your train of thought is good, but the analogy is wrong.
In real life, the demand for depictions of brutality (torture, murder, a.k.a. "snuff") is negligible - or at least I sincerely hope it is.
There are people willing to spend good money for the company on a child or at least some pics; (as an aside, last week in my country a drunk 18 years old raped and killed a 5 (yes, five) years old girl). The number of sick bastards who get it off by torturing and who would pay good money to see it, is an order of magnitude smaller.
Well, at least I hope I'm right and the world is not that sick and perverted.
Intentionally or not - you're trolling.
1. Adobe Reader 8 launches almost instantly for me after the first run, when it optimizes its launch (and I always disable the startup option). Version 6 was awful but things have changed. I do agree that it's bloated (over 200Mb) but I had problems displaying complex/cmyk docs in Foxit. YMMV.
2. Flash - use AdBlock. The technology is not at fault as flash is pretty lightweight itself. It's the advertisers who think I'll click their stupid ads if they add annoying sounds and the webmasters who think that by cramming more ads there's a better chance of me clicking on one.
3. The update agent is slow 'cause it downloads only when the connection is idle. I do agree that it's annoying for it to ask to close almost all programs when updating.
5. You do realize that camera and mic are turned off by default, don't you? You need to expressly enable them on a site-by-site basis.
So there you have it.
That's not to say that I don't hate Adobe myself for other things:
- activation is a pain in the ass, especially if you don't get the chance to deactivate the software first from the old computer and activate on the new one (happened to me after a hdd crash).
- the software is artificially segmented in some cases, e.g. Premiere and After Effects should be one software, or Illustrator and Indesign (CorelDraw acts as a combination between the two).
You mix copyrights and patents.
Neither of these concepts is inherently bad or evil.
I am a semi-pro photographer (meaning that I earn some good money from doing commercial photography) but it's a side-job. I like being in control of my work, meaning that if you want to use a photo I made, you should ask for permission - after all I had to invest in equipment and it took considerable amount of time to create that photo; if you want to use that photo in a magazine or for advertising, you better pay up. Without that protection, I may not be doing this. If anyone could copy my work with no consequences, photography would remain strictly hobby for me.
In other cases, IMO sometimes photographers abuse their position. For example, some wedding photographers would take photos at weddings for the customer, but retain the copyrights, so the client goes to the photographer each time they want a new set. A "work for hire" style of agreement would work better - the client pays a fee and then the photos (slides, RAWs, whatever) is their.
In the same vein, if I'm a publishing house and decide to print Harry Potter, it's perfectly fine for the author to be compensated. Same goes for Mickey Mouse. Things get muddy when we start talking about derivative works. If I want to write a book about the Adventures of Young Gandalf, should I pay up?
Patents are a whole different matter. Scrapping them completely wouldn't really work, but limiting the time to 2 years, requiring a working prototype, banning patents on concepts (algorithms, practices) would do wonders.
You probably don't know Netscape's history.
Netscape's engine couldn't scale -- it was such a horrific mess that probably very few things could be salvaged.
Netscape 3 was great for its days. Then Netscape 4 came and it was simply a pile of shit in terms of stability and bugs (I'm not even mentioning standards compliance - remember the layer and ilayer tags?). There were so many rendering bugs it woulld make IE6 seem immaculate. It's been 10 years since I've had the displeasure of developing for it, but I still remember how I needed to add an invisible border to a div in order for it to be positioned correctly.
So in this respect, they got it right by creating a new, modern rendering engine, one that can scale in the future.
I think you meant "Disk Editor" (de.exe), which was indeed amazing and made me learn the FAT filesystem.
No - if you disable it instead of deleting the entry, it'll stay away.
It's the first thing I do after installing stuff - disabling stupid startup items.
If no one's using it, how will it become mainstream?
It's interesting to note that the pseudo-monopoly happens 'organically', without any intervention; new users simply pick whatever their friends use.
Everyone I know in UK uses MSN. Meanwhile, everyone here in Romania uses Yahoo.
This is also true with other social networking, as here everyone is on hi5; myspace is seldom used while facebook is unheard of.
Yeah, I never heard of Speed Racer either, although I watched a lot of cartoons as a kid, from Transformers to Thundercats (although I lived under a communist regime, I had a sat dish and I watched anything that was on Sky Channel [later Sky One] and the german RTL).
After watching several trailers on Rotten Tomatoes, Speed Racer left me unimpressed and slightly annoyed. Too colourful and no story to speak of.
Take "Cars" for example. My 3-year old loves them. It has excitement, fun, it's colourful and joyful, but it also has a nice story (not incredibly deep, but it's not bad either). Somehow, I don't think Speed Racer will match it.
Same here (Romania).
We say "to xerox something".
Likewise, we use "adidas" for any sneakers, including constructs like "I bought some Puma adidas"
I happened to me - do a search on Google for "serious magic" (I knew it's a chroma-keying software, but not much else).
First result (paid) on Google, is
Serious Magic
fxhome.com/compositelab Special Effects On Your Desktop Simple Powerful Software. Try Now!
However, when I clicked on the link, I realized the site had nothing to do with the software I was looking for.
If I were the maker of Serious Magic (they've been bought by Adobe) I would have been pissed off too. I don't have anything against FXHome, but advertising using a competitor's brand name as keyword and impersonating them is not ethical.
How would you feel if, when searching for "ubuntu", the first result would be
Get Ubuntu Now
Award-winning Operating System
microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/
Bingo!
This is what is often missed and it happened to me. I made a search for "serious magic" (a video f/x software). The first link on Google was paid, and it appeared to from the makers of the said software so I clicked on it. Imagine my confusion when I realized the site I landed on was a competitor's. This is really not OK in my book.
Just a few months ago we had to build a small custom CMS for a client, that had to be PHP/MySQL. The specs were very specific so it had to be custom-built. Since it was a relatively small work and we were involved in some bigger projects, we hired a contractor. Good references, a few years of experience, knew javascript, so we handled the project to him.
To his credit, the site actually worked and seemed fine, until you had a peek at the PHP code, which was truly horrific. I could overlook the nonsensical use of POST for things were GET was better suited or the crap variable naming, or the generally inefficient way of doing things - but what really got me was the complete absence of ANY input checking.
Simply put, the whole thing was completely vulnerable to SQL injection of the worst kind. I even checked his other works - all sites he'd ever done were vulnerable.
In the end, I had to spend a few more days myself just to clean the mess.
So, dear reader, if you don't know what SQL injections are - stop coding in whatever language you're using, right now. It doesn't matter if it's Ruby on Rails or ASP.NET. Please, please learn to do things properly. Security is not something you can learn later.
It's all a matter of what you've been used to.
A while ago on Slashdot someone was complaining that expressing his height in feet more natural... guess what, for me it feels more natural to think in meters.
Having the 0 as the melting/freezing point makes a good reference point, same for boiling point, because I can easily make analogies.
If I'm looking at the weather forecast and I see 2C, I know how cold it is, and even you - without being used to the system, can say "damn, it's nearly freezing"; whereas if you tell me it's 50F, I have no idea (I know that 37C ~ 100F and that's it).
Actually, my USB flash memory got infected when I went to a nearby service office to print something.
My AV (Bitdefender) caught it. It was an executable and autorun.inf
Subsequently, I disabled autorun for all drives.
I agree that the new system is incredibly stupid.
One example: I have a subdomain for phpMyAdmin, e.g. phpmyadmin.myserver.com. I used to type "php" and it was right there at the top. Now, when I type "php", I get all sorts of results like "http://www.randomserver.com/index.php".
It's stupid, annoying and clearly a step backaward.
When a new feature is hated by 50% of your user base, it's time to either abandon it or at LEAST provide an option to disable it.
Because they rock! I am a graphic designer and photographer.
My last CRT was an IBM P78 I think, using the Trinitron tube.
Here's why I loved it:
Like others, I caved in and got a fancy LCD (I brought my laptop to the store and asked the sale person to test the monitors until I found one that I liked).
LCDs suck at contrast. It's difficult to get nice black; many can't distinguish between very light shades or very dark shades; the color varies with viewing angle (not as bad as in the past, but it still happens); color reproduction is poor to fair (cheap LCDs tend to have blue-ish colors to appear brighter). I could go on...
If it weren't for the size and power consumption, I'd still be using my Trinitron CRT...
Let me get this straight: do you honestly think that something being Open Source will magically protect you? I was going to mod you but there's no "-1 Naive".
There are enough malware targeted specifically at Firefox - I've seen them in action. The good thing with Firefox is that it gets patched pretty quickly, by the time an exploit has been written, hopefully we'll all have 2.0.13 installed.
Still, that's no excuse. It saddens me to say that the quality of Firefox (2.x.x branch) is steadily declining. It's slow, eating too many resources, and it crashes - on some sites it just constantly crashes. If it weren't for all the extensions, I'd dump it in a heartbeat and move to Opera.
Just to reinforce: Norton tools were for DOS what Sysinternals are for Windows, and more.
Norton Commander's interface has been copied by almost every file manager.
Disk Editor helped me learn how file systems work (FAT/FAT32, but still);
There were many incredibly useful apps (Norton Disk Doctor), even partititon-encryption (DiskReet) plus a ton of command-line utils.
Just to clarify - Coelho was very popular long before his blog. I know some of his fans, and none of them even knows he has a blog. Come to think of it, I don't even think his target audience is into reading blogs.
I am willing to bet that releasing the books in electronic format for free hasn't increased his popularity by more than 1%.
Disclaimer: I can't really stand his novels. They are pretty light, claiming and trying to seem deeper and more meaningful. Umberto Eco he clearly ain't.
Where are you from? I grew up in communist Europe too and we too received basic first-aid notions by the time we were 12. There were even contests for kids called something like "Junior Paramedics" (not an exact translation).
At that time, it seems inconceivable to see a road accident and not stop and provide some basic help. How times have changed...
I'm appalled by some of the comments that imply that the poster may not be fit for the job.
A few years back I had to maintain a large module written in C#. I had about 200K lines of code, 50 classes, zero documentation, zero comments, zero error logging support, and I was expected to find and fix bugs and add functionality the day after the module was handled over.
So if you were never in this position, just STFU. Yeah, the code is there, but is this flag for? Is this part really used, or is obsolete? What are the side-effects of using that method? And so on...
Eventually, I learned it, especially after some intensive debugging sessions, but it was frustrating to say the least. I would have loved to have some aiding tools.
My thoughts exactly. If you want a taste of witty, crazy little story, just do a search for "Geri's Game". I think it's on Pixar's website.
Unfortunately it's not just their office.
Corel's flagship is CorelDraw, which is a actually a very capable illustration software.
Corel Draw and Corel Photo-Paint used to be on par and sometimes above competitors' products (Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Freehand; Photo-Paint was at least as capable as Photoshop in 2000).
They stopped innovating. The last Corel Draw suite was released in 2005 (they issued 2 service packs). Photo-Paint remained untouched for years, now lagging behind Photoshop in many areas.
Such a shame. The products used to be really good in terms of features and UI. Now they've buried everything.