Piracy is the excuse those companies are giving for putting all that DRM into our throats. If it doesn't stop piracy, why are they botering?
As far as physical media goes, both PS3 and Xbox360 are still DRM free. They contain copy protection and they make it impossible to run your own code, but they don't actively do DRM for their Blurays and DVDs, which is why selling a used PS3/Xbox360 game is still possible, while selling a Valve game is not.
Now of course in the next generation that might change, it shouldn't be that hard to just stick a serial number onto DVD or Bluray and Internet as a requirement might sooner or later happen as well.
And when you want a really creepy future vision: Imagine Xbox720 Kinect counting how many people watch a movie and stop playing it when to many are in the room...
And yet, piracy is rampant on the xbox 360 thanks to the ability to flash the dvd reader...
Yeah, but piracy is a quite different thing then homebrew. The thing with piracy is that it is hard to stop, the binaries are signed and official after all, so as long as you can somehow get the bytes into the machine, be it by hacked DVD firmware or whatever, you are fine and the pirate copy will run. Homebrew is much harder as even when you can get the data to the machine, it will simply be refused due to an invalid signature and working around that can be anything from quite tricky to being pretty much impossible.
That only works until they have all their holes plugged. See Xbox, homebrew on Xbox1 was extremely popular, homebrew on Xbox360 has a far harder time, as it doesn't work at all with modern Xbox360 and even with older models requires hardware modifications and that is with a console that has been on the market for five years. Sony will certainly have learned their lessons with PS3 and PSP and won't make the same mistakes again. So I wouldn't count to much on hackers breaking the security of whatever comes next, as past successes where in large parts based on the developers not really putting any real effort into the security, not on all security being breakable.
The most shocking part in all of this for me is that they didn't seem to have any kind of backup plan for the worst case. They seemed to have worked under the assumption that power will be restored in time and cooling will work, but it didn't and as a result the buildings filled up with hydrogen and blew up, something that was known, but even with a day of warning not prevented. From there on things got worse and worse. Dumping water with helicopters onto the plant seems a kind of helpless act, not something that was well planed right from the start. There also seemed to be a lack of surveillance, I mean they should have something in place to get a proper answer on if they have enough water or not (cameras, robots, whatever), but instead they never really seemed to be to sure about what the current situation is.
I agree that editors could simply add the references to reliable sources in the first place, but what if they won't unless the article or material in it may be deleted?
The point is: The deletionist contributes nothing of value. He is like the thieve that breaks into your house. Sure, he might force you secure your home, thus resulting in a safer home, but that doesn't stop it wrong being a fucking annoying waste of time. Back in the day when Wikipedia was awesome you'd simply stick a "citation missing" or whatever template on top of the article and call it a day. Deletions should be reserved for things where there is good reason to assume that the content is fraud, fake, copyright infringement or spam , not be abused for cases where the article is ok and just missing a bit here and there. If the deletionist doesn't like the article the way it is, he should fix it himself and not try to force others to do so under the thread of destroying their work.
Deletionism is a far bigger problem then vandalism ever was and it is sickening that it is accepted behavior. But hey, maybe I should just ignore it and stop caring, after all I have already pretty much given up on actually contributing to Wikipedia because of that.
Tagging a few photos seems harmless enough, the problem is when you scale it up and add some technology into the mix.
1) people tag photos 2) search engine registers your face from those photos 3) search engine goes tagging all photos on the Internet with you in it 4) search engine goes data mining all those photos, cross linking it with other information and creates a large and detailed profile of the last few years of your life
I am not saying that tagging should be illegal, but such harmless looking things can quickly spiral out of control and turn into a serious invasion of privacy. And its quite a different thing if whatever you do happens in "public" with a dozen people, who won't remember it a month later anyway, or in that "public" we call the Internet where it will be archived for the next few decades and easily search able for everybody.
It looks like the deletion policy makes sense, if it's what's needed to get editors to add reliable third-party sources.
No it doesn't, as that is pretty much a classic case of the broken window fallacy. The energy and effort wasted in those deletion debates could have been spend far better and the fallout of those deletions is rather horrible, as you always lose some authors in the process.
Otherwise, you are better off developing in OpenGL, where you can target PCs, PS3, iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, WebGL, industrial Unix (not all 3D apps are games, dontchaknow?). The only thing you can't do much with is the Xbox (technically possible, but deliberately closed by Microsoft).
If you want something truly portable you better have an abstraction layer in between your code and OpenGL so that you don't depend on OpenGL and you can swap it out to DirectX or something different when you like. I mean seriously, a little small homebrew project might only use OpenGL, but everything that is a little bigger will be based on an engine that happens to be more or less library agnostic, so this whole OpenGL vs DirectX talk is really kind of useless. You simply use whatever is the primary API for the platform you develop on.
can Linux systems cater to the average end-user who has no intention of ever understanding how the system works, without losing everything I love about Linux?
Yes, because those are different qualities. The average user simply wants stuff to work by default and the average tinkerer won't have a problem when stuff actually works. There are of course a few things that are hard to get right, hardware auto-detection for example is great when it works, but can lead to unpredictability and can be harder to fix then just manually loading a few kernel modules and getting the right set of configurability into an app is also tricky, but those are not really unsolvable problems, but simply hard ones.
The biggest issue is simply that getting software end user ready is a lot of work, work that most Open Source developers don't seem to be willing to spend, as they are happy when their software works and don't care much to also make it easy to use. This is especially true as a lot of "ease to use" comes from consistency and not many Open Source developers are willing to switch their software around to confirm to somebody else style guide.
Nvidia seems to have no problems, you speak of things you know nothing about.
Nvidia drivers for older cards have been broken on almost every single Ubuntu upgrade, they always got fixed a few weeks down the line, but not exactly "no problems".
What other engine do you recommend? What other major label releases engines of its five-year-old games under the GNU GPL?
How about something new that they have written themselves? Whats the point of demonstrating the supposedly next big thing in computer games with some obsolete five year old game? How are they ever going to get games written for raytracing if they can't even find somebody to put together a solid tech demo?
The core problem is that "raytracing" isn't a concrete thing or technology, its a general purpose technique. It can do pretty much anything from a few ugly shiny spheres to photo realistic rendering and rendering time might vary from fractions of a seconds to days. Just like good old polygonal graphics can do everything from basic stuff like Starfox to the latest Unreal Engine 3 tech demo or full photorealistic movies. Without any clear footage of actual games its really pointless to discuss the issue, especially considering that all the stuff that makes graphics actually look real (global illumination), is outside of basic raytracing and generally involves some kinds of hacks and shortcuts to get realtime speed.
Judging by these numbers it is probably closer to 50% (assuming thats a linear scale, which it might not be). Anyway that number is only the raw performance, which might matter a lot for videophile people, but for Average Joe it becomes far less important. What matters there is that the games can be play without suffering stuttering graphics or plain old incompatibilities and when that is taken into account, even a $70 graphics card will give you access to like 90% of the games, maybe only at medium setting and maybe without AA, but still perfectly tolerable and probably above what a console can do.
Off-the-shelf parts are far more expensive then a custom build solution in the long run, as off-the-shelf parts don't go down in cost, they simply become faster instead. That experiment was after all already tried on the Xbox1, didn't turn out so well, the console was a bit more powerful, but also expensive and while Nintendo was selling its custom hardware Gamecube at $99 for profit, Microsoft was losing money while selling it at $200 or something like that, as they couldn't get the cost down.
Also user do not want to upgrade, that just complicates things and provides no practical benefit. With current day consoles you get a constantly improving experience, as developers manage to optimize their code ever tighter for the architecture, with an upgradeable system on the other side you have a constantly worsening experience, as developers don't bother to support the old stuff and just move on, thus forcing you to upgrade.
The only reason why PC gaming is quite tolerable these days is because the consoles provide a baseline that developers have to target, if it has to run on an Xbox360, chance are it will also run on your three year old PC.
On the PS3 it is frequently not an option, but an actual requirement, can't play the game without install, in the worst case (Metal Gear 4), you can't even switch chapters in the game without a partial reinstall. Also half the time when I switch on my PS3 a new firmware or game upgrade is waiting, which needs to be installed. Downloads on the PS3 also need to be installed after being downloaded, the system doesn't do that automatically. Consoles are of course still easier to use, but they have become pretty horrible this generation, a PC running Steam isn't far of.
The main advantage however that consoles still have is that you don't have to care about the OS (aside from HDD getting full). Windows often gets funky and launches an IO heavy background process or something that can really wreak the gaming experience. So while the resolution is higher and the graphics better, I have far more issues with random stuttering in PC games then on consoles, time for a Vista reinstall I guess.
I find the argument of mouse/keyboard vs controller to pointless most of the time.
The argument gets especially pointless with modern games. In times of Quake and Unreal, sure, flinging the mouse around as fast as you can was part of the game, but many modern games try to actually model a real human being, with weight and all, not just a floating cylinder, thus turn speed, quite naturally is limited. Also I just love how PC gamers always ignore that the keyboard is an damn ugly control device, no analog support, no rumble, no analog triggers, button mappings often in hard to reach places, etc.
Whenever a PC game offers me to use the controller, I use the controller.
The game is well known in Germany at least and I would be surprised when almost every culture had some analog to it, as it is based around a core concept of game design, names and items might differ, but the rules are likely the same.
Your argument makes no sense. The only reason books are tangible is because nobody has scanned them yet and converted/released them to electronic form (Google's working on that). They are really not any different from the latest Killzone 3, which thanks to modern copy-protection, is also not that easy to duplicate (hackers and crackers are working on that).
.In trying to block the jailbreak USB dongles they killed many composite devices including early Mad Catz controllers.
The firmware update was to block counterfeit controller, not the jailbreak USB dongles. I am not sure on exactly which controller it broke and if Sony has fixed is in further firmware updates or just ignored the problems, but regular PC USB controller still work fine with the PS3 to this day and the blocking of controllers was a side effect not intentional.
And compared to Microsoft thats still harmless, as Microsoft not only block third party controllers out of the box, they also actively went against third party memory cards and blocked them.
1) It only covers music, are we going to have to pay another charge for videos and games? What about books, etc.? 2) Who decides how the money gets split? Would the money go to a big music cooperation even so I want to support Joe indie musician?
A more interesting system would be something like Flattr, where the $10 go into a pool that you yourself can then split and direct to the people you want to, but I doubt that'll be practical.
Back when the PS3 came out things looked a little different:
PS3: Supported Linux, lets you replace the HDD, supports generic USB controller, supports generic Bluetooth headsets, supports USB webcams, supports Flash, SD, etc. Xbox360: No Linux, proprietary HDD, proprietary controller (including special security to lock-out third parties), proprietary wireless protocol, proprietary memory cards and a heck of a lot of red-rings.
Basically the PS3 was extremely open for a mainstream console, far more so then basically anything else, Xbox360 on the other side was as locked down as possible. Sony looked to be on the right track with the PS3, what they hope to accomplish now with this witch hunt is beyond me, it won't put genie back in the bottle, but it goes a long way to ruin their image permanently.
He is using 1600x900 monitors and his numbers are for running games on only a single monitor, not all three. The HD5670 that he is using can do that, but only when it comes to games with low system requirements (i.e. console ports), with Crysis and other demanding games you of course don't stand much of a chance with that card on max settings.
pulling over for a fire truck that is trying to get down the road?
Not very difficult, as that isn't exactly an unforeseen situation, just add code that detects fire tracks and moves the car to the side.
what if the car is going up an icy road, and then it starts sliding backwards because it couldnt make it?
It detects the icy road early on and behaves properly, unlike a human driver who will have his car spin out of control. Ever seen those Youtube videos of dozens of car piling up on an icy road? A little radio communication between robotic cars could easily avoid that.
how about your wheel falls off?
Robot brings the car to a stop, thanks to better reaction time and sensor information, probably a lot better then a panicking human driver.
but maybe it should have been going slower in the first place.
Tell that to the thousands of humans causing crashes duo to speeding. A robot will can easily be made to act properly according to weather, light and traffic condition, human drivers aren't all that great at that.
they know the highway has a bad bump here
So does the robot, except he not only knows that there is a bump somewhere, he knows the exact coordinates and can thus handle it.
they are driving and their reaction times are bad.
They should have bought a nice robot car with better reaction times.
It will certainly take another few years or decades till robot cars become practical for the average consumer, but the road system mainly works by following some basic rules, not by being a master of improvisation.
It's no worse than the stock Linksys firmware in terms of how "hard" it is to setup..
The problem isn't how hard it is to setup when you already know what you want to do, but the bazillion of other options floating around in the interface that provide plenty of opportunity to get things wrong. Simply put, options that you don't understand are intimidating and confusing and DD-WRT has no shortage of those. All the other routers I have used, while not being fundamentally different in UI design, simply had substantially less options to play around with and focused more on what the average consumer actually used.
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Piracy is the excuse those companies are giving for putting all that DRM into our throats. If it doesn't stop piracy, why are they botering?
As far as physical media goes, both PS3 and Xbox360 are still DRM free. They contain copy protection and they make it impossible to run your own code, but they don't actively do DRM for their Blurays and DVDs, which is why selling a used PS3/Xbox360 game is still possible, while selling a Valve game is not.
Now of course in the next generation that might change, it shouldn't be that hard to just stick a serial number onto DVD or Bluray and Internet as a requirement might sooner or later happen as well.
And when you want a really creepy future vision: Imagine Xbox720 Kinect counting how many people watch a movie and stop playing it when to many are in the room...
And yet, piracy is rampant on the xbox 360 thanks to the ability to flash the dvd reader...
Yeah, but piracy is a quite different thing then homebrew. The thing with piracy is that it is hard to stop, the binaries are signed and official after all, so as long as you can somehow get the bytes into the machine, be it by hacked DVD firmware or whatever, you are fine and the pirate copy will run. Homebrew is much harder as even when you can get the data to the machine, it will simply be refused due to an invalid signature and working around that can be anything from quite tricky to being pretty much impossible.
That only works until they have all their holes plugged. See Xbox, homebrew on Xbox1 was extremely popular, homebrew on Xbox360 has a far harder time, as it doesn't work at all with modern Xbox360 and even with older models requires hardware modifications and that is with a console that has been on the market for five years. Sony will certainly have learned their lessons with PS3 and PSP and won't make the same mistakes again. So I wouldn't count to much on hackers breaking the security of whatever comes next, as past successes where in large parts based on the developers not really putting any real effort into the security, not on all security being breakable.
The most shocking part in all of this for me is that they didn't seem to have any kind of backup plan for the worst case. They seemed to have worked under the assumption that power will be restored in time and cooling will work, but it didn't and as a result the buildings filled up with hydrogen and blew up, something that was known, but even with a day of warning not prevented. From there on things got worse and worse. Dumping water with helicopters onto the plant seems a kind of helpless act, not something that was well planed right from the start. There also seemed to be a lack of surveillance, I mean they should have something in place to get a proper answer on if they have enough water or not (cameras, robots, whatever), but instead they never really seemed to be to sure about what the current situation is.
I agree that editors could simply add the references to reliable sources in the first place, but what if they won't unless the article or material in it may be deleted?
The point is: The deletionist contributes nothing of value. He is like the thieve that breaks into your house. Sure, he might force you secure your home, thus resulting in a safer home, but that doesn't stop it wrong being a fucking annoying waste of time. Back in the day when Wikipedia was awesome you'd simply stick a "citation missing" or whatever template on top of the article and call it a day. Deletions should be reserved for things where there is good reason to assume that the content is fraud, fake, copyright infringement or spam , not be abused for cases where the article is ok and just missing a bit here and there. If the deletionist doesn't like the article the way it is, he should fix it himself and not try to force others to do so under the thread of destroying their work.
Deletionism is a far bigger problem then vandalism ever was and it is sickening that it is accepted behavior. But hey, maybe I should just ignore it and stop caring, after all I have already pretty much given up on actually contributing to Wikipedia because of that.
Tagging a few photos seems harmless enough, the problem is when you scale it up and add some technology into the mix.
1) people tag photos
2) search engine registers your face from those photos
3) search engine goes tagging all photos on the Internet with you in it
4) search engine goes data mining all those photos, cross linking it with other information and creates a large and detailed profile of the last few years of your life
I am not saying that tagging should be illegal, but such harmless looking things can quickly spiral out of control and turn into a serious invasion of privacy. And its quite a different thing if whatever you do happens in "public" with a dozen people, who won't remember it a month later anyway, or in that "public" we call the Internet where it will be archived for the next few decades and easily search able for everybody.
It looks like the deletion policy makes sense, if it's what's needed to get editors to add reliable third-party sources.
No it doesn't, as that is pretty much a classic case of the broken window fallacy. The energy and effort wasted in those deletion debates could have been spend far better and the fallout of those deletions is rather horrible, as you always lose some authors in the process.
Otherwise, you are better off developing in OpenGL, where you can target PCs, PS3, iPhone, iPad, Mac OS X, WebGL, industrial Unix (not all 3D apps are games, dontchaknow?). The only thing you can't do much with is the Xbox (technically possible, but deliberately closed by Microsoft).
If you want something truly portable you better have an abstraction layer in between your code and OpenGL so that you don't depend on OpenGL and you can swap it out to DirectX or something different when you like. I mean seriously, a little small homebrew project might only use OpenGL, but everything that is a little bigger will be based on an engine that happens to be more or less library agnostic, so this whole OpenGL vs DirectX talk is really kind of useless. You simply use whatever is the primary API for the platform you develop on.
can Linux systems cater to the average end-user who has no intention of ever understanding how the system works, without losing everything I love about Linux?
Yes, because those are different qualities. The average user simply wants stuff to work by default and the average tinkerer won't have a problem when stuff actually works. There are of course a few things that are hard to get right, hardware auto-detection for example is great when it works, but can lead to unpredictability and can be harder to fix then just manually loading a few kernel modules and getting the right set of configurability into an app is also tricky, but those are not really unsolvable problems, but simply hard ones.
The biggest issue is simply that getting software end user ready is a lot of work, work that most Open Source developers don't seem to be willing to spend, as they are happy when their software works and don't care much to also make it easy to use. This is especially true as a lot of "ease to use" comes from consistency and not many Open Source developers are willing to switch their software around to confirm to somebody else style guide.
Nvidia seems to have no problems, you speak of things you know nothing about.
Nvidia drivers for older cards have been broken on almost every single Ubuntu upgrade, they always got fixed a few weeks down the line, but not exactly "no problems".
What other engine do you recommend? What other major label releases engines of its five-year-old games under the GNU GPL?
How about something new that they have written themselves? Whats the point of demonstrating the supposedly next big thing in computer games with some obsolete five year old game? How are they ever going to get games written for raytracing if they can't even find somebody to put together a solid tech demo?
The core problem is that "raytracing" isn't a concrete thing or technology, its a general purpose technique. It can do pretty much anything from a few ugly shiny spheres to photo realistic rendering and rendering time might vary from fractions of a seconds to days. Just like good old polygonal graphics can do everything from basic stuff like Starfox to the latest Unreal Engine 3 tech demo or full photorealistic movies. Without any clear footage of actual games its really pointless to discuss the issue, especially considering that all the stuff that makes graphics actually look real (global illumination), is outside of basic raytracing and generally involves some kinds of hacks and shortcuts to get realtime speed.
Judging by these numbers it is probably closer to 50% (assuming thats a linear scale, which it might not be). Anyway that number is only the raw performance, which might matter a lot for videophile people, but for Average Joe it becomes far less important. What matters there is that the games can be play without suffering stuttering graphics or plain old incompatibilities and when that is taken into account, even a $70 graphics card will give you access to like 90% of the games, maybe only at medium setting and maybe without AA, but still perfectly tolerable and probably above what a console can do.
Off-the-shelf parts are far more expensive then a custom build solution in the long run, as off-the-shelf parts don't go down in cost, they simply become faster instead. That experiment was after all already tried on the Xbox1, didn't turn out so well, the console was a bit more powerful, but also expensive and while Nintendo was selling its custom hardware Gamecube at $99 for profit, Microsoft was losing money while selling it at $200 or something like that, as they couldn't get the cost down.
Also user do not want to upgrade, that just complicates things and provides no practical benefit. With current day consoles you get a constantly improving experience, as developers manage to optimize their code ever tighter for the architecture, with an upgradeable system on the other side you have a constantly worsening experience, as developers don't bother to support the old stuff and just move on, thus forcing you to upgrade.
The only reason why PC gaming is quite tolerable these days is because the consoles provide a baseline that developers have to target, if it has to run on an Xbox360, chance are it will also run on your three year old PC.
On the PS3 it is frequently not an option, but an actual requirement, can't play the game without install, in the worst case (Metal Gear 4), you can't even switch chapters in the game without a partial reinstall. Also half the time when I switch on my PS3 a new firmware or game upgrade is waiting, which needs to be installed. Downloads on the PS3 also need to be installed after being downloaded, the system doesn't do that automatically. Consoles are of course still easier to use, but they have become pretty horrible this generation, a PC running Steam isn't far of.
The main advantage however that consoles still have is that you don't have to care about the OS (aside from HDD getting full). Windows often gets funky and launches an IO heavy background process or something that can really wreak the gaming experience. So while the resolution is higher and the graphics better, I have far more issues with random stuttering in PC games then on consoles, time for a Vista reinstall I guess.
I find the argument of mouse/keyboard vs controller to pointless most of the time.
The argument gets especially pointless with modern games. In times of Quake and Unreal, sure, flinging the mouse around as fast as you can was part of the game, but many modern games try to actually model a real human being, with weight and all, not just a floating cylinder, thus turn speed, quite naturally is limited. Also I just love how PC gamers always ignore that the keyboard is an damn ugly control device, no analog support, no rumble, no analog triggers, button mappings often in hard to reach places, etc.
Whenever a PC game offers me to use the controller, I use the controller.
The game is well known in Germany at least and I would be surprised when almost every culture had some analog to it, as it is based around a core concept of game design, names and items might differ, but the rules are likely the same.
Your argument makes no sense. The only reason books are tangible is because nobody has scanned them yet and converted/released them to electronic form (Google's working on that). They are really not any different from the latest Killzone 3, which thanks to modern copy-protection, is also not that easy to duplicate (hackers and crackers are working on that).
Provide a place where you can actually meet real people.
.In trying to block the jailbreak USB dongles they killed many composite devices including early Mad Catz controllers.
The firmware update was to block counterfeit controller, not the jailbreak USB dongles. I am not sure on exactly which controller it broke and if Sony has fixed is in further firmware updates or just ignored the problems, but regular PC USB controller still work fine with the PS3 to this day and the blocking of controllers was a side effect not intentional.
And compared to Microsoft thats still harmless, as Microsoft not only block third party controllers out of the box, they also actively went against third party memory cards and blocked them.
Two problems with this proposal:
1) It only covers music, are we going to have to pay another charge for videos and games? What about books, etc.?
2) Who decides how the money gets split? Would the money go to a big music cooperation even so I want to support Joe indie musician?
A more interesting system would be something like Flattr, where the $10 go into a pool that you yourself can then split and direct to the people you want to, but I doubt that'll be practical.
Back when the PS3 came out things looked a little different:
PS3: Supported Linux, lets you replace the HDD, supports generic USB controller, supports generic Bluetooth headsets, supports USB webcams, supports Flash, SD, etc.
Xbox360: No Linux, proprietary HDD, proprietary controller (including special security to lock-out third parties), proprietary wireless protocol, proprietary memory cards and a heck of a lot of red-rings.
Basically the PS3 was extremely open for a mainstream console, far more so then basically anything else, Xbox360 on the other side was as locked down as possible. Sony looked to be on the right track with the PS3, what they hope to accomplish now with this witch hunt is beyond me, it won't put genie back in the bottle, but it goes a long way to ruin their image permanently.
He is using 1600x900 monitors and his numbers are for running games on only a single monitor, not all three. The HD5670 that he is using can do that, but only when it comes to games with low system requirements (i.e. console ports), with Crysis and other demanding games you of course don't stand much of a chance with that card on max settings.
pulling over for a fire truck that is trying to get down the road?
Not very difficult, as that isn't exactly an unforeseen situation, just add code that detects fire tracks and moves the car to the side.
what if the car is going up an icy road, and then it starts sliding backwards because it couldnt make it?
It detects the icy road early on and behaves properly, unlike a human driver who will have his car spin out of control. Ever seen those Youtube videos of dozens of car piling up on an icy road? A little radio communication between robotic cars could easily avoid that.
how about your wheel falls off?
Robot brings the car to a stop, thanks to better reaction time and sensor information, probably a lot better then a panicking human driver.
but maybe it should have been going slower in the first place.
Tell that to the thousands of humans causing crashes duo to speeding. A robot will can easily be made to act properly according to weather, light and traffic condition, human drivers aren't all that great at that.
they know the highway has a bad bump here
So does the robot, except he not only knows that there is a bump somewhere, he knows the exact coordinates and can thus handle it.
they are driving and their reaction times are bad.
They should have bought a nice robot car with better reaction times.
It will certainly take another few years or decades till robot cars become practical for the average consumer, but the road system mainly works by following some basic rules, not by being a master of improvisation.
It's no worse than the stock Linksys firmware in terms of how "hard" it is to setup..
The problem isn't how hard it is to setup when you already know what you want to do, but the bazillion of other options floating around in the interface that provide plenty of opportunity to get things wrong. Simply put, options that you don't understand are intimidating and confusing and DD-WRT has no shortage of those. All the other routers I have used, while not being fundamentally different in UI design, simply had substantially less options to play around with and focused more on what the average consumer actually used.