### Keeping the old stuff around is, by definition, not completely switching the architechture.
Bullshit. In the case of the PS3, the PS2 stuff had nothing to do with anything the PS3 does, which is why they simply could rip it out completly without changing anything on the PS3 software side. The PS2 parts never were used for anything in PS3 games. Same with the GameboyMicro or NintendoDS, they simply could rip out the Z80 CPU, because it was used for nothing else then playing old Gameboy games.
### The wii has gamecube parts,
With the Wii its very different. The Wii consists of the same architecture as the Gamecube, they increased the clockspeed and added some RAM. If the Wii runs a Gamecube game, the clock speed is simply reduced to Gamecube level. But its the same CPU that runs Gamecube as well as the Wii games. And they also only increased RAM and clock by a factor around 2x, which isn't all that much for a five year jump in technology.
### Too many gamers have too much respect for hardware, and the games themselves mean very little.
Hardware, especially in consoles, always had great impact on which games you would get. You needed an N64 to play Mario64 and you did need an SNES to play Starfox, it just wouldn't have worked on an earlier console. Same is true this generation as well, lighting, physics engine, AI and such will change the games, but because the Wii just doesn't have enough power it can't follow some of the coming innovations. It of course might produce some of its own, sure, but it simply is in a completly different area then PS3 or XBox360.
### The simple fact that the PS3 and X360 have some form of backward compatibility means the architechture ISNT completely new.
The PS3 currently has no PS2 backward compability to the PS2, the earlier models that had them, had them because they had additional PS2 parts in them, Sony striped them for cost reduction. Maybe they'll add software emulation later on, we have to wait and see.
XBox360 compatibilty work is software emulation that doesn't work for half the games. Beside, it should be rather clear that going from a single core x86 CPU to a tri-core PPC CPU is a switch of architecture.
### It's common sense
Might be, that doesn't make it right. Backward compability in most cases works by simply keeping the old console around in addition to the new stuff, not by not switching the architecture (see Gameboy to GameboyAdvance or PSone to PS2 or PS2 to PS3). Only cases where the architecture stayed the same that spring to mind are Gameboy->GameboyColor and Gamecube->Wii.
### but it all comes down to market share,
When you are a stock holder maybe, when you are a gamer it comes down to games and nothing else.
Nintendo has marketed the Wii straight into a niche, for sure its a pretty huge niche, which is good for Nintendo, but it also means that the games coming to the Wii will be those that fit into that niche. Not good when you expect a more 'classic' selection of console games.
PS3 and XBox360 are completly new architectures and have little in common with their predecessors, the Wii is the exact same architecture as the Gamecube, just a bit higher clock and a bit more RAM.
### it offers a minute but significant blur at the subconscious between game and reality.
Most often those things burst any suspension of disbelieve, since instead of playing the game, you twiddle with the system clock to get the game to behave as you want, since well, having a game being always night, just because you happen to play it late after work gets annoying really quick.
For a flightsim or sports game it of course might be a nice additional option to have "Weather: Sunny, Rainy, Snowy, Current", but its really a rather tiny gimmick. Since for one, most games don't have realistic enough weather simulations to match the current weather and secondly, even if they do, its unlikely that they will match exactly the weather over your house.
And with WLAN data it gets even more pointless, since unlike weather, WLAN data isn't visible, so it can't enhance the atmosphere when all you get is random stuff.
I really don't see the point. What good is it to integrate data into your game that has no relation what so ever with your game? The only good use I can think of would be Dr. Kawashima making some witty comments when you are in a Wifi flooded area, but enemy formation and such? What would be the point in connecting that with random Wifi data?
### But why should you decide what I may or may not do with my writings?
Because laws are there for the good of society, not just to please the individual.
### However, I cannot in any respect see how copyright law is evil.
The idea behind copyright is a good one, since it encourages creation of new content, the current implementation however is god awful one and completly unusable in the day and age of the Internet. The only reason why society hasn't collapsed yet is because the copyright laws are hard to enforce. If you would enforce them you would end up with huge parts of society, especially the younger one, having big trouble with the law.
### The OS interface was pretty funky, and really designed for small children
I don't think so. Sure, it lacks a few features, like non-fullscreen window or the excessive menubars that you might see in 'real' applications, but its really not all that different, you still have a taskbar, a dock and all that stuff. They might look a little different, but the basic behavior is very much the same. Its a simplified interface, but I don't see anything that is specifically designed for small children, no cute Teddybears or other crap that you might find in other applications for children, just a simply, clean, black&white interface, not all that different then what you will find on other mobile devices as well.
### The more people playing the game, the more likely it is someone will spend resources on making expansions or updating it.
But do those make the game better or drive it only deeper down the path that I didn't like in the first place?
### If your hardcore l337 group of friends really likes a game with a steep learning curve that only a small subset of players enjoy, it's likely you'll still be playing that version of the game in 5 years.
Might be true, but flightsim that is ten years old still provides a ton more depth then I will ever get out of Ace Combat anything else released today. Seems to be the sad truth of the market that niche genres are disappearing or already gone.
### but since it doesn't work its about as useful as a brick
The point of bricking is that it stays that way and can't be fixed by any normal means, i.e. hardware it dead for good and a theoretical repair will likely cost as much as buying it new, if at all possible.
Lack of a booting Windows can certainly be very inconvenient, but its not bricking, not even close.
Look at EF2000 for a game without levels. It is a flightsim that simulates a complete war from start to finished. You still have missions that you have to fly which one could call levels, but the war simulation never stops and the missions aren't prescripted, all the tiny units are simulated all the time and missions simply emerge out of where the front lines currently are or you can even design them yourself. So there really isn't much of a real start and finish of a level, the difference is only if you sit in your plane or watch the tactical screen.
A different example is Operation Flashpoint, while this one does have clear predefined levels that reset the game world to a known state, the game world is completly open at all times, you can walk anywhere at any time in the game and approach missions objective any way you want. So while the levels are still there, the gameplay emerges for most part from the AI and not from the scripting or restrictions placed up on the player. This causes a mission to be played completely different basically each time you play it.
For one thing, you could easily undelete them as a user and had a clear record why it was deleted, this is currently not the case. But more importantly, it would give the community the power to decide what they want and what they don't want in Wikipedia, it no longer could be dictated by some boneheaded admins like it is today. One could still add an automatic purge system that would remove blank pages automatically after X month have passed if there is a concern with disk space or such (asuming of course that admins would be forbidden from locking a blank page till it is auto-purged).
Page deletion are from my point of view currently by far the biggest issue Wikipedia has and *far* more annoying and destructive then any vandal ever could hope to be. Especially in the german Wikipedia that behavior has resulted in completly intolerable behavior, just a few month ago for example the episode list of The Simpson was deleted. By which kind of twisted logic do such decisions even make remotely sense?
### So you would prefer a system whereby anyone can delete any article, or block any user, and page protection does nothing? "Wiki model" or not, that simply isn't feasible on a project of that size.
I wouldn't say admins have to go, but they definitvly should be stripped of some of their power. One of which is their privilege to delete articles which is *far* to often abused to just delete articles that are perfectly ok, but which the admin just happens to not care about (especially a problem in the german encyclopedia). The problem with deletions is that unlike edits, they are not undoable by a user, a deleted article is gone for good, with no easy trace that it was even there in the first place. There really isn't a good reason for this. Deletions should be limited to clear spam, copyright violation or vandalism, everything else should be handled as an undoable edits. If an admin abuses his power, he should be stripped of his privileges instantly.
Now user blocking and page protection, I don't know, never really had much of a problem with admins abusing those, but again, when an admin abuses his power he should be stripped of his privileges.
### The XO is not a computer. It's a teaching tool.
I don't think so. If anything its the software that teaches, not the hardware. The XO is much better for book reading, outdoor use and such as the Eee, but that doesn't make it a teaching tool, it simply makes it the better hardware for such environments.
Yes, most of my and quite a few other Free Software projects are coordinated almost exclusively via IRC, mailing list and Wiki are just there to collect whatever was discussed on IRC.
### Between the scams/spam/abuse, why bother?
Spam happens, but very seldomly, i.e. once a month, not every five minutes, at least on irc.freenode.net
That said, I use IRC very targeted: To chat with my co-workers or random volunteers about one of my projects, not for random social chit-chat about the weather.
Now I don't know what IRC was like 10 years ago, but it seems to be running quite fine for my uses, unlike say the Usenet, that became mostly useless for me since most of the interesting talk has moved over into web forums.
When you consider IRC as dead, what do you think replaced it?
True, but on the other side relying on a single hash leaves you with a single point of failure, if the hash function is compromised, you don't have anything trusted left to check against. If on the other side you have two hash function you have a good chance that you figure out that one of your hash functions isn't secure any more and thus have enough time to replace it with something new, since there is always that second, still secure, function left.
An MD5 checksum file alone serves no other purpose then to check that the download is correct, since an attacker that can upload a changed file could also just change the MD5 checksum file. Things look a little different if you get the MD5 from a different trusted source or when the MD5 file is signed by a GPG key.
### The attacker does not need access to good.exe.
He *does* need access to good.exe. You can't generate a file that matches a given MD5, what you however can is generate two files that have the same MD5 and different content, both good.exe and evil.exe contain appended data to make the sums match. Its still a weakness, but a much less critical one then being able to generate a file for a given MD5.
Unless I am missing something this is really nothing new. The same has been demonstrated with a webpage and javascript years ago, i.e. two different webpages producing the same MD5, doing it again with an.exe doesn't really sound all that interesting, especially since the attacker still needs to manipulate both the good.exe and the evil.exe and when he has access to the good.exe you are toast anyway.
This of course doesn't mean we should continue to use MD5, but the attack is really of rather theoretical nature.
### there still are some substantial goals of the GFDL that are being given up.
Which would that be? Wikipedia doesn't make use of invariant sections, cover text and all that other stuff as far as I know and those pieces seem to be the only real difference between CC-by-sa and GFDL.
I don't think this has all that much to do with deadlines and more with objects being just as inflexible as what we did before them, i.e. as soon as an object wants to do anything useful beside very basic stuff it has to interface with some other object and unless you happen to have an object that has that interface you are dead in the water.
Where objects help is in keeping related code together, but that is more syntactic sugar for stuff you would expect in a clean program anyway.
Not really, libraries are an implementation, not a ISO/ANSI/DIN/whatever standard, so their behavior is defined for most part by implementation, not by specification. So you don't find an independent implementation of GTK or QT or most other stuff, aside from a few libraries that clones other libraries (i.e. lesstif vs motif, Wine, etc.), but even there its not following a defined standard but just cloning things as best as you can.
The only part of programming that follows standards is the core language itself, but those often solve only a very tiny fraction of what you need to write real world programs.
I think that is a huge problem, not only are the standard libraries to small, but they are often also terrible buggy and outdated, i.e. string handling in C is a total garbage, you have function like gets() which will cause buffer/heap overflows no matter what you do, you can't use that function correctly. And the alternatives like fgets() and such are cumbersome to use so that everybody ends up building its own little string library. I think in a day and age where security updates are installed on a weekly basis it would really help a lot to extend the standards a little more often instead of just every ten years, so that often used parts are more easily available and don't have to be reinvented each and every time. This would also help a lot in making libraries more compatible to each other, since you wouldn't need to convert forward and backward between types that are basically identical in their design.
While I agree that crashes and bugs can be a big problem and should get much more coverage from the gaming press. I don't think it would be fair to factor them to much into the gaming score unless it actually interferes with the gameplay itself and there is no hope for a patch, since well, I want to now how good a game is when it runs, not how bad it is when it doesn't, since there really isn't a good way to quantify that. If it doesn't work you wait for a patch or bring it back to the shop.
Slashdot Mirror
By that definition an aim-bot is by far the best controller you can get.
### Keeping the old stuff around is, by definition, not completely switching the architechture.
Bullshit. In the case of the PS3, the PS2 stuff had nothing to do with anything the PS3 does, which is why they simply could rip it out completly without changing anything on the PS3 software side. The PS2 parts never were used for anything in PS3 games. Same with the GameboyMicro or NintendoDS, they simply could rip out the Z80 CPU, because it was used for nothing else then playing old Gameboy games.
### The wii has gamecube parts,
With the Wii its very different. The Wii consists of the same architecture as the Gamecube, they increased the clockspeed and added some RAM. If the Wii runs a Gamecube game, the clock speed is simply reduced to Gamecube level. But its the same CPU that runs Gamecube as well as the Wii games. And they also only increased RAM and clock by a factor around 2x, which isn't all that much for a five year jump in technology.
### Too many gamers have too much respect for hardware, and the games themselves mean very little.
Hardware, especially in consoles, always had great impact on which games you would get. You needed an N64 to play Mario64 and you did need an SNES to play Starfox, it just wouldn't have worked on an earlier console. Same is true this generation as well, lighting, physics engine, AI and such will change the games, but because the Wii just doesn't have enough power it can't follow some of the coming innovations. It of course might produce some of its own, sure, but it simply is in a completly different area then PS3 or XBox360.
### The simple fact that the PS3 and X360 have some form of backward compatibility means the architechture ISNT completely new.
The PS3 currently has no PS2 backward compability to the PS2, the earlier models that had them, had them because they had additional PS2 parts in them, Sony striped them for cost reduction. Maybe they'll add software emulation later on, we have to wait and see.
XBox360 compatibilty work is software emulation that doesn't work for half the games. Beside, it should be rather clear that going from a single core x86 CPU to a tri-core PPC CPU is a switch of architecture.
### It's common sense
Might be, that doesn't make it right. Backward compability in most cases works by simply keeping the old console around in addition to the new stuff, not by not switching the architecture (see Gameboy to GameboyAdvance or PSone to PS2 or PS2 to PS3). Only cases where the architecture stayed the same that spring to mind are Gameboy->GameboyColor and Gamecube->Wii.
### but it all comes down to market share,
When you are a stock holder maybe, when you are a gamer it comes down to games and nothing else.
Nintendo has marketed the Wii straight into a niche, for sure its a pretty huge niche, which is good for Nintendo, but it also means that the games coming to the Wii will be those that fit into that niche. Not good when you expect a more 'classic' selection of console games.
PS3 and XBox360 are completly new architectures and have little in common with their predecessors, the Wii is the exact same architecture as the Gamecube, just a bit higher clock and a bit more RAM.
### it offers a minute but significant blur at the subconscious between game and reality.
Most often those things burst any suspension of disbelieve, since instead of playing the game, you twiddle with the system clock to get the game to behave as you want, since well, having a game being always night, just because you happen to play it late after work gets annoying really quick.
For a flightsim or sports game it of course might be a nice additional option to have "Weather: Sunny, Rainy, Snowy, Current", but its really a rather tiny gimmick. Since for one, most games don't have realistic enough weather simulations to match the current weather and secondly, even if they do, its unlikely that they will match exactly the weather over your house.
And with WLAN data it gets even more pointless, since unlike weather, WLAN data isn't visible, so it can't enhance the atmosphere when all you get is random stuff.
I really don't see the point. What good is it to integrate data into your game that has no relation what so ever with your game? The only good use I can think of would be Dr. Kawashima making some witty comments when you are in a Wifi flooded area, but enemy formation and such? What would be the point in connecting that with random Wifi data?
### But why should you decide what I may or may not do with my writings?
Because laws are there for the good of society, not just to please the individual.
### However, I cannot in any respect see how copyright law is evil.
The idea behind copyright is a good one, since it encourages creation of new content, the current implementation however is god awful one and completly unusable in the day and age of the Internet. The only reason why society hasn't collapsed yet is because the copyright laws are hard to enforce. If you would enforce them you would end up with huge parts of society, especially the younger one, having big trouble with the law.
### The OS interface was pretty funky, and really designed for small children
I don't think so. Sure, it lacks a few features, like non-fullscreen window or the excessive menubars that you might see in 'real' applications, but its really not all that different, you still have a taskbar, a dock and all that stuff. They might look a little different, but the basic behavior is very much the same. Its a simplified interface, but I don't see anything that is specifically designed for small children, no cute Teddybears or other crap that you might find in other applications for children, just a simply, clean, black&white interface, not all that different then what you will find on other mobile devices as well.
### The more people playing the game, the more likely it is someone will spend resources on making expansions or updating it.
But do those make the game better or drive it only deeper down the path that I didn't like in the first place?
### If your hardcore l337 group of friends really likes a game with a steep learning curve that only a small subset of players enjoy, it's likely you'll still be playing that version of the game in 5 years.
Might be true, but flightsim that is ten years old still provides a ton more depth then I will ever get out of Ace Combat anything else released today. Seems to be the sad truth of the market that niche genres are disappearing or already gone.
### but since it doesn't work its about as useful as a brick
The point of bricking is that it stays that way and can't be fixed by any normal means, i.e. hardware it dead for good and a theoretical repair will likely cost as much as buying it new, if at all possible.
Lack of a booting Windows can certainly be very inconvenient, but its not bricking, not even close.
Look at EF2000 for a game without levels. It is a flightsim that simulates a complete war from start to finished. You still have missions that you have to fly which one could call levels, but the war simulation never stops and the missions aren't prescripted, all the tiny units are simulated all the time and missions simply emerge out of where the front lines currently are or you can even design them yourself. So there really isn't much of a real start and finish of a level, the difference is only if you sit in your plane or watch the tactical screen.
A different example is Operation Flashpoint, while this one does have clear predefined levels that reset the game world to a known state, the game world is completly open at all times, you can walk anywhere at any time in the game and approach missions objective any way you want. So while the levels are still there, the gameplay emerges for most part from the AI and not from the scripting or restrictions placed up on the player. This causes a mission to be played completely different basically each time you play it.
### How would that help anything?
For one thing, you could easily undelete them as a user and had a clear record why it was deleted, this is currently not the case. But more importantly, it would give the community the power to decide what they want and what they don't want in Wikipedia, it no longer could be dictated by some boneheaded admins like it is today. One could still add an automatic purge system that would remove blank pages automatically after X month have passed if there is a concern with disk space or such (asuming of course that admins would be forbidden from locking a blank page till it is auto-purged).
Page deletion are from my point of view currently by far the biggest issue Wikipedia has and *far* more annoying and destructive then any vandal ever could hope to be. Especially in the german Wikipedia that behavior has resulted in completly intolerable behavior, just a few month ago for example the episode list of The Simpson was deleted. By which kind of twisted logic do such decisions even make remotely sense?
Or how about Construo, which seems to be rather close in terms of gameplay to Goo and is Free Software as well.
PS: Sorry, shameless advertisment.
### So you would prefer a system whereby anyone can delete any article, or block any user, and page protection does nothing? "Wiki model" or not, that simply isn't feasible on a project of that size.
I wouldn't say admins have to go, but they definitvly should be stripped of some of their power. One of which is their privilege to delete articles which is *far* to often abused to just delete articles that are perfectly ok, but which the admin just happens to not care about (especially a problem in the german encyclopedia). The problem with deletions is that unlike edits, they are not undoable by a user, a deleted article is gone for good, with no easy trace that it was even there in the first place. There really isn't a good reason for this. Deletions should be limited to clear spam, copyright violation or vandalism, everything else should be handled as an undoable edits. If an admin abuses his power, he should be stripped of his privileges instantly.
Now user blocking and page protection, I don't know, never really had much of a problem with admins abusing those, but again, when an admin abuses his power he should be stripped of his privileges.
### The XO is not a computer. It's a teaching tool.
I don't think so. If anything its the software that teaches, not the hardware. The XO is much better for book reading, outdoor use and such as the Eee, but that doesn't make it a teaching tool, it simply makes it the better hardware for such environments.
### Does anyone really even bother with it now?
Yes, most of my and quite a few other Free Software projects are coordinated almost exclusively via IRC, mailing list and Wiki are just there to collect whatever was discussed on IRC.
### Between the scams/spam/abuse, why bother?
Spam happens, but very seldomly, i.e. once a month, not every five minutes, at least on irc.freenode.net
That said, I use IRC very targeted: To chat with my co-workers or random volunteers about one of my projects, not for random social chit-chat about the weather.
Now I don't know what IRC was like 10 years ago, but it seems to be running quite fine for my uses, unlike say the Usenet, that became mostly useless for me since most of the interesting talk has moved over into web forums.
When you consider IRC as dead, what do you think replaced it?
True, but on the other side relying on a single hash leaves you with a single point of failure, if the hash function is compromised, you don't have anything trusted left to check against. If on the other side you have two hash function you have a good chance that you figure out that one of your hash functions isn't secure any more and thus have enough time to replace it with something new, since there is always that second, still secure, function left.
### The malicious web site would have obtained the executable from the originating download site
No, it would have to *modify* the original file on the original server to make this work.
An MD5 checksum file alone serves no other purpose then to check that the download is correct, since an attacker that can upload a changed file could also just change the MD5 checksum file. Things look a little different if you get the MD5 from a different trusted source or when the MD5 file is signed by a GPG key.
### The attacker does not need access to good.exe.
He *does* need access to good.exe. You can't generate a file that matches a given MD5, what you however can is generate two files that have the same MD5 and different content, both good.exe and evil.exe contain appended data to make the sums match. Its still a weakness, but a much less critical one then being able to generate a file for a given MD5.
Unless I am missing something this is really nothing new. The same has been demonstrated with a webpage and javascript years ago, i.e. two different webpages producing the same MD5, doing it again with an .exe doesn't really sound all that interesting, especially since the attacker still needs to manipulate both the good .exe and the evil .exe and when he has access to the good .exe you are toast anyway.
This of course doesn't mean we should continue to use MD5, but the attack is really of rather theoretical nature.
### there still are some substantial goals of the GFDL that are being given up.
Which would that be? Wikipedia doesn't make use of invariant sections, cover text and all that other stuff as far as I know and those pieces seem to be the only real difference between CC-by-sa and GFDL.
I don't think this has all that much to do with deadlines and more with objects being just as inflexible as what we did before them, i.e. as soon as an object wants to do anything useful beside very basic stuff it has to interface with some other object and unless you happen to have an object that has that interface you are dead in the water.
Where objects help is in keeping related code together, but that is more syntactic sugar for stuff you would expect in a clean program anyway.
### That is basically what libraries are, right?
Not really, libraries are an implementation, not a ISO/ANSI/DIN/whatever standard, so their behavior is defined for most part by implementation, not by specification. So you don't find an independent implementation of GTK or QT or most other stuff, aside from a few libraries that clones other libraries (i.e. lesstif vs motif, Wine, etc.), but even there its not following a defined standard but just cloning things as best as you can.
The only part of programming that follows standards is the core language itself, but those often solve only a very tiny fraction of what you need to write real world programs.
I think that is a huge problem, not only are the standard libraries to small, but they are often also terrible buggy and outdated, i.e. string handling in C is a total garbage, you have function like gets() which will cause buffer/heap overflows no matter what you do, you can't use that function correctly. And the alternatives like fgets() and such are cumbersome to use so that everybody ends up building its own little string library. I think in a day and age where security updates are installed on a weekly basis it would really help a lot to extend the standards a little more often instead of just every ten years, so that often used parts are more easily available and don't have to be reinvented each and every time. This would also help a lot in making libraries more compatible to each other, since you wouldn't need to convert forward and backward between types that are basically identical in their design.
While I agree that crashes and bugs can be a big problem and should get much more coverage from the gaming press. I don't think it would be fair to factor them to much into the gaming score unless it actually interferes with the gameplay itself and there is no hope for a patch, since well, I want to now how good a game is when it runs, not how bad it is when it doesn't, since there really isn't a good way to quantify that. If it doesn't work you wait for a patch or bring it back to the shop.