If the file contains garbage, that's surely the fault of the client and not the protocol?
Without a checksum the client has no way to detect the difference between garbage and the real data. And the Last-Modified header isn't good enough in practice, it might be missing, it might change on dynamically generated URLs, it might change when switching to a different server, etc. There are plenty ways to screw things up in practice, which is why you have all those "please check the md5sum manually" when downloading an.iso image or why you use a protocol like Bitorrent which does the checksumming instead.
The HTTP protocol is very simple, eminently debuggable, plus extensible both ways.
Simple, yes, but I'd say its a little to simple for its own good. For example I find it rather ridiculous that in 2010 I still can't reliably continue an interrupted download, as without any form of checksum the browser might just append new data to a file containing garbage and not even know it.
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears. To put that in classical terms: whenever the author of a book loses interest, it gets deleted from all the libraries in the world, doesn't sound right, but that is pretty much how the current Internet works. In this case its even more sinister, as Yahoo pulled the plug, not the original author.
Also your assertion that the AI problem would not require a groundbreaking solution is founded on what knowledge?
On the DARPA Grand Challenge they went from basically nothing to cars that can drive in an normal urban environment in just three years. Getting all that technology consumer ready might take another 10 or 20 years, but there really doesn't seem to be any fundamental problem with getting cars to drive themselves. The military will probably have driverless trucks in the next few years.
Does the AI in the first vehicle know it's winter and black ice may interfere with braking?
Yes, why wouldn't it? Companies can be stupid, but they probably figure out by themselves that their new AI driven car should be tested in winter and handle such obvious situations.
Does the AI know that if it turns away from the mountain to avoid the other vehicle that it could cause it to plummet to its doom?
That will probably be market clearly on the map and picked up by the LIDAR sensors.
it's a hilly region and the same scenario, turning toward the hill would cause the same risk of flipping, but turning away would probably be rough but survivable.
Do you really think a human is pandering all those option instead of just doing the next best thing he can do to avoid the other car?
And of course the main issue with your scenario: It was caused by a stupid human driver in the first place. If the other car would be AI controlled it would have known the current road conditions long before it got into trouble and would have driven at appropriate speed. Thus never coming in collision danger with the second AI car. And of course the cars might communicate with each other to coordinate the decisions in emergency situations, so they don't need to guess what the other car will do, they know it.
so, because you don't like what facebook is doing, it should be a law?
The issue isn't that I don't like what Facebook is doing, but that most users don't even know what Facebook is doing with their information. If you wanna collect tons of private information from users, I don't quite see the issue with making it crystal clear to them what is actually happening with that information and yes, privacy laws should enforce that.
Why should there ever be a law? Facebook is doing nothing wrong.
Facebook is doing nothing wrong exactly because we don't have a law against it, which is why we maybe should have a law against it.
I mean seriously, sure users should be educated, but just because users aren't clever enough to avoid Facebook, doesn't make what Facebook is doing acceptable.
Just because its "on the Internet" doesn't mean its viewable for anybody, my whole mail is "on the internet" after all and that is only viewable by me (and google). The problem with Facebook and social networking in general is that they are all extremely bad at telling the user what information is making it to the public or to the friends, so you end up with a lot of involuntary information leaks.
Uhh every game is written to make you return and keep playing.
Most regular single player games have a linear narrative and a clear end, once the end is reached there is nothing left to do. The game is over and you have seen everything that there is to see. Even games such as Tetris, without a narrative, have a clear end in the form of the Game Over screen, once there, you have to restart from scratch.
FarmVille is completly different, there is no end and there isn't even a clear objective nor stuff you can do. All you have is your farm which you can customize by buying items.
Where FarmVille gets sinister is in the way the virtual money is made. You get money by harvesting crops, planting crops cost money and crops take real time hours or days to grow. This means you actually can't play FarmVille for long hours, as there will be nothing to do while waiting for the crops to crow, instead you have to come back regularly each day. Of course the real kicker is that your crops will die if not harvested in time. So if you don't come back, you will lose some game progress.
Given that FarmVille really requires no skill other then playing it regularly, it is a hell of a lot closer to a Tamagotchi then it is to a regular game.
There is nothing wrong with making fun 2D games, quite the opposite, but that is not the business of Zynga, Zynga is in the business of depriving people of their money by employing pretty much every dirty psychological trick they can get away with (Skinner's Box, spaming your friends, selling you in-game money for real money, etc.). Their goal is to make games that require you to sink tons of time into them, not games that are fun.
The crimerates are mainly high because a lot of stuff is classified as crime which shouldn't. Stop the War on Drugs and a lot of problems with crime would solve themselves, giving cops time to deal with real criminals.
Just because it's a video game doesn't really change the fact that it's shitty to try and move up the ladder illegitimately.
The problem isn't if cheating is good or not, but that Blizzard is removing your rights as a consumer. Think you own what you buy? Nope, Blizzard does and can pull the plug whenever they want. And of course they go want step further and want to disallow that you can even use your computer for your own purposes. Wanna hack a game? Blizzard will send the police and base their claims on dubious EULA that nobody read to begin with.
The proper way to deal with cheating would be to have draconian punishment on official servers (aka block the account), but give the user the freedom to run dedicated servers themselves and do whatever the hell they want and of course keep that online crap away from single player completly.
What is the point to get achievement by cheating ? This is just worthless.
Yeah, but that is not the problem here. If Blizzard would just block or delete the achievements of cheaters, big deal, hardly anybody would care. What they are doing instead is suing the cheat tool builders via dubious EULA based restrictions.
That completly depends on the game, well done achievements give you a meta-game on top of the game itself, giving you a reason to try different tactics, use specific weapons, explore new areas, avoid to kill anybody and other things that you normally wouldn't do in normal gameplay. The bad achievements on the other side are the ones that just require you to waste tons of times in a game, without requiring changing the way you play at all. And of course there are the achievements that basically boil down to "buy all our DLC".
Thats for most part a myth, while there are exceptions of course, most cheats in the past where intentionally put in by the developers for the player, as it allows them to get a little extra press a few weeks/month after the release when they announce the cheats. Today cheats are frequently a normal part of the game, properly integrated into the game menus and all, so basically just a tool to increase replay value, instead of a hidden secret.
Full debugging and testing functions hardly ever make it into the final game.
The problem with the PSone, as well as most other 3D consoles, is that their graphics age extremely badly. NES still look quite ok, SNES games can even look pretty good, PSone games on the other side just look really ugly. Same goes for the controls, there is only so much you can do wrong in 2D with a Dpad, but in 3D things have improved a lot over the years and many PSone titles are borderline unplayable by todays standard, even the good ones.
Actually, no, there aren't, when it comes to scripting languages you have tons of stuff and when it comes to virtual machine based things you also have plenty, but for the real low level there really isn't much beside C++. Ada and Objective-C would be pretty much the only established competition and while D or Go might one day become interesting, they are still rather fresh.
So what your saying is, since I said I never paid more the $50 for a game, and most being $30-$50, that I should look it up because of my rose colored glasses?
You can't complain over the $60-$70 games today while at the same time ignoring the $60-$70 games of the past. If you don't want to spend no more then $50 for a game you can do that today just fine, just don't buy stuff at launch day and prices will drop quick. I hardly ever payed more then $30 for a game in the last few years.
All the price lists I have looked at say something different (price in DM, lists from 1985/1986 Germany): Apple II with prices up to $100 per game and Amiga games in normal PC price range, Spectrum and C64 prices tend to be a little cheaper then Amiga/Atari stuff, being in the $15-$30 range, but even on those systems there are a few games that have normal todays PC pricing, all that ignoring inflation.
I have yet to see a price list where games really are across the board substantially cheap then they are today.
You can't compare yesterdays indie games with todays commercial AAA titles, you have to compare like with like, and indie titles are plenty on the iPhone or XboxLive indie section and sell for like $1-$5, no price increase there, meanwhile the big titles on the C64 where just as expensive as todays PC titles.
Have you ever looked at the software? There is still a lot of areas that are simply incomplete. The button to view source for example still hasn't been implemented as far as I know, the pressure sensitive areas left and right from the touchpad that can be used for writing with a pen remain unused as well. I haven't seen a good book reading application for the thing either and the whole Journal still feels like an unusable mess.
Or like radio, yeah, remember how TV killed radio?
You can't watch TV while driving a car, but you can listed to radio just fine, which I guess is one of the main reasons why radio still exists. I haven't listened to radio outside a car in ages. Same with VCR and cinema, different tools, different purposes, just with a bit of overlap.
eBook vs paper books on the other side is different, same job, same requirements, really no fundamental difference. eBooks still have to become a bit faster and cheaper to fully compete with regular books, but once there, there is really not much reason left to get a regular book.
An Atari 2600 game would entertain you for what? Half an hour maybe? Even your average NES or SNES game could be beaten in like two hours. That's hardly more value then your 6-8 hour action game today.
Sure with RPGs the situation is a little different, but those still take you 30h-100h today.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that "common wisdom" says games are trending more expensive.
The problem with the common wisdom is that it is rather short sighted. There was an increase in game prices going from the Xbox1/Playstation2 to the Xbox360/Playstation3, namely going from $50-$60 to $60-$70, but that seems all that people remember. It is easily ignored that game prices now seem to drop faster then ever, the used game market is full of cheap stuff and 20 years ago prices where pretty much the same as they are today anyway.
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If the file contains garbage, that's surely the fault of the client and not the protocol?
Without a checksum the client has no way to detect the difference between garbage and the real data. And the Last-Modified header isn't good enough in practice, it might be missing, it might change on dynamically generated URLs, it might change when switching to a different server, etc. There are plenty ways to screw things up in practice, which is why you have all those "please check the md5sum manually" when downloading an .iso image or why you use a protocol like Bitorrent which does the checksumming instead.
The HTTP protocol is very simple, eminently debuggable, plus extensible both ways.
Simple, yes, but I'd say its a little to simple for its own good. For example I find it rather ridiculous that in 2010 I still can't reliably continue an interrupted download, as without any form of checksum the browser might just append new data to a file containing garbage and not even know it.
There's been a growing counter sentiment that I think is correct. Not only is it wrong that we must preserve everything, we should probably forget most things.
The problem with this case and the Internet in general, isn't so much that it forgets things, but how it forgets them. Instead of the unused content disappearing, content disappears whenever its host disappears. To put that in classical terms: whenever the author of a book loses interest, it gets deleted from all the libraries in the world, doesn't sound right, but that is pretty much how the current Internet works. In this case its even more sinister, as Yahoo pulled the plug, not the original author.
Also your assertion that the AI problem would not require a groundbreaking solution is founded on what knowledge?
On the DARPA Grand Challenge they went from basically nothing to cars that can drive in an normal urban environment in just three years. Getting all that technology consumer ready might take another 10 or 20 years, but there really doesn't seem to be any fundamental problem with getting cars to drive themselves. The military will probably have driverless trucks in the next few years.
Does the AI in the first vehicle know it's winter and black ice may interfere with braking?
Yes, why wouldn't it? Companies can be stupid, but they probably figure out by themselves that their new AI driven car should be tested in winter and handle such obvious situations.
Does the AI know that if it turns away from the mountain to avoid the other vehicle that it could cause it to plummet to its doom?
That will probably be market clearly on the map and picked up by the LIDAR sensors.
it's a hilly region and the same scenario, turning toward the hill would cause the same risk of flipping, but turning away would probably be rough but survivable.
Do you really think a human is pandering all those option instead of just doing the next best thing he can do to avoid the other car?
And of course the main issue with your scenario: It was caused by a stupid human driver in the first place. If the other car would be AI controlled it would have known the current road conditions long before it got into trouble and would have driven at appropriate speed. Thus never coming in collision danger with the second AI car. And of course the cars might communicate with each other to coordinate the decisions in emergency situations, so they don't need to guess what the other car will do, they know it.
so, because you don't like what facebook is doing, it should be a law?
The issue isn't that I don't like what Facebook is doing, but that most users don't even know what Facebook is doing with their information. If you wanna collect tons of private information from users, I don't quite see the issue with making it crystal clear to them what is actually happening with that information and yes, privacy laws should enforce that.
Why should there ever be a law? Facebook is doing nothing wrong.
Facebook is doing nothing wrong exactly because we don't have a law against it, which is why we maybe should have a law against it.
I mean seriously, sure users should be educated, but just because users aren't clever enough to avoid Facebook, doesn't make what Facebook is doing acceptable.
Just because its "on the Internet" doesn't mean its viewable for anybody, my whole mail is "on the internet" after all and that is only viewable by me (and google). The problem with Facebook and social networking in general is that they are all extremely bad at telling the user what information is making it to the public or to the friends, so you end up with a lot of involuntary information leaks.
Uhh every game is written to make you return and keep playing.
Most regular single player games have a linear narrative and a clear end, once the end is reached there is nothing left to do. The game is over and you have seen everything that there is to see. Even games such as Tetris, without a narrative, have a clear end in the form of the Game Over screen, once there, you have to restart from scratch.
FarmVille is completly different, there is no end and there isn't even a clear objective nor stuff you can do. All you have is your farm which you can customize by buying items.
Where FarmVille gets sinister is in the way the virtual money is made. You get money by harvesting crops, planting crops cost money and crops take real time hours or days to grow. This means you actually can't play FarmVille for long hours, as there will be nothing to do while waiting for the crops to crow, instead you have to come back regularly each day. Of course the real kicker is that your crops will die if not harvested in time. So if you don't come back, you will lose some game progress.
Given that FarmVille really requires no skill other then playing it regularly, it is a hell of a lot closer to a Tamagotchi then it is to a regular game.
its a good thing to have more 2D fun games.
There is nothing wrong with making fun 2D games, quite the opposite, but that is not the business of Zynga, Zynga is in the business of depriving people of their money by employing pretty much every dirty psychological trick they can get away with (Skinner's Box, spaming your friends, selling you in-game money for real money, etc.). Their goal is to make games that require you to sink tons of time into them, not games that are fun.
Why are the crime rates too high?
The crimerates are mainly high because a lot of stuff is classified as crime which shouldn't. Stop the War on Drugs and a lot of problems with crime would solve themselves, giving cops time to deal with real criminals.
Be aware of Printer steganography, which makes it easy to detect that you forged all your receipts with the same printer.
Just because it's a video game doesn't really change the fact that it's shitty to try and move up the ladder illegitimately.
The problem isn't if cheating is good or not, but that Blizzard is removing your rights as a consumer. Think you own what you buy? Nope, Blizzard does and can pull the plug whenever they want. And of course they go want step further and want to disallow that you can even use your computer for your own purposes. Wanna hack a game? Blizzard will send the police and base their claims on dubious EULA that nobody read to begin with.
The proper way to deal with cheating would be to have draconian punishment on official servers (aka block the account), but give the user the freedom to run dedicated servers themselves and do whatever the hell they want and of course keep that online crap away from single player completly.
What is the point to get achievement by cheating ? This is just worthless.
Yeah, but that is not the problem here. If Blizzard would just block or delete the achievements of cheaters, big deal, hardly anybody would care. What they are doing instead is suing the cheat tool builders via dubious EULA based restrictions.
Who cares about "achievements" anyway?
That completly depends on the game, well done achievements give you a meta-game on top of the game itself, giving you a reason to try different tactics, use specific weapons, explore new areas, avoid to kill anybody and other things that you normally wouldn't do in normal gameplay. The bad achievements on the other side are the ones that just require you to waste tons of times in a game, without requiring changing the way you play at all. And of course there are the achievements that basically boil down to "buy all our DLC".
Thats for most part a myth, while there are exceptions of course, most cheats in the past where intentionally put in by the developers for the player, as it allows them to get a little extra press a few weeks/month after the release when they announce the cheats. Today cheats are frequently a normal part of the game, properly integrated into the game menus and all, so basically just a tool to increase replay value, instead of a hidden secret.
Full debugging and testing functions hardly ever make it into the final game.
The problem with the PSone, as well as most other 3D consoles, is that their graphics age extremely badly. NES still look quite ok, SNES games can even look pretty good, PSone games on the other side just look really ugly. Same goes for the controls, there is only so much you can do wrong in 2D with a Dpad, but in 3D things have improved a lot over the years and many PSone titles are borderline unplayable by todays standard, even the good ones.
There are some really great languages out there,
Actually, no, there aren't, when it comes to scripting languages you have tons of stuff and when it comes to virtual machine based things you also have plenty, but for the real low level there really isn't much beside C++. Ada and Objective-C would be pretty much the only established competition and while D or Go might one day become interesting, they are still rather fresh.
So what your saying is, since I said I never paid more the $50 for a game, and most being $30-$50, that I should look it up because of my rose colored glasses?
You can't complain over the $60-$70 games today while at the same time ignoring the $60-$70 games of the past. If you don't want to spend no more then $50 for a game you can do that today just fine, just don't buy stuff at launch day and prices will drop quick. I hardly ever payed more then $30 for a game in the last few years.
All the price lists I have looked at say something different (price in DM, lists from 1985/1986 Germany): Apple II with prices up to $100 per game and Amiga games in normal PC price range, Spectrum and C64 prices tend to be a little cheaper then Amiga/Atari stuff, being in the $15-$30 range, but even on those systems there are a few games that have normal todays PC pricing, all that ignoring inflation.
I have yet to see a price list where games really are across the board substantially cheap then they are today.
You can't compare yesterdays indie games with todays commercial AAA titles, you have to compare like with like, and indie titles are plenty on the iPhone or XboxLive indie section and sell for like $1-$5, no price increase there, meanwhile the big titles on the C64 where just as expensive as todays PC titles.
Have you ever looked at the software? There is still a lot of areas that are simply incomplete. The button to view source for example still hasn't been implemented as far as I know, the pressure sensitive areas left and right from the touchpad that can be used for writing with a pen remain unused as well. I haven't seen a good book reading application for the thing either and the whole Journal still feels like an unusable mess.
Or like radio, yeah, remember how TV killed radio?
You can't watch TV while driving a car, but you can listed to radio just fine, which I guess is one of the main reasons why radio still exists. I haven't listened to radio outside a car in ages. Same with VCR and cinema, different tools, different purposes, just with a bit of overlap.
eBook vs paper books on the other side is different, same job, same requirements, really no fundamental difference. eBooks still have to become a bit faster and cheaper to fully compete with regular books, but once there, there is really not much reason left to get a regular book.
An Atari 2600 game would entertain you for what? Half an hour maybe? Even your average NES or SNES game could be beaten in like two hours. That's hardly more value then your 6-8 hour action game today.
Sure with RPGs the situation is a little different, but those still take you 30h-100h today.
First party Nintendo titles, most stuff in your list, always has been a good $10-$20 cheaper then third party titles.
I find it incredibly hard to believe that "common wisdom" says games are trending more expensive.
The problem with the common wisdom is that it is rather short sighted. There was an increase in game prices going from the Xbox1/Playstation2 to the Xbox360/Playstation3, namely going from $50-$60 to $60-$70, but that seems all that people remember. It is easily ignored that game prices now seem to drop faster then ever, the used game market is full of cheap stuff and 20 years ago prices where pretty much the same as they are today anyway.