That depends on if you view it from a user or from a developer point of view. From a developer point of view, who distributes source, Linux is quite nice and Windows is pretty terrible. On the other side from a users point of view Linux is a pretty ugly nightmare for all software that isn't part of your distro and even for some that is part of your distro when it is to old or buggy, Windows on the other side is just a click on setup.exe.
IMHO a decent newsreader has a far superior interface.
Not really, most newsreader are pretty crap. This is especially an issue when you have multiple people with different newsreader participating in the same thread. Some readers will break the encoding, other the threading structure, yet some others will wreak the quoting, some will just post with incorrect message-id and a lot of other annoying issues. Resulting in quite a bit of mess and discussion on how this an that issue can be fixed. Forums are by no means perfect either, but at least they are consistent and they also happen to have ways to post pictures, change font style, notify the user on replies, a search function and other stuff that the user expects and that is often either problematic or impossible with Usenet. Forums also have the huge advantage of being freely accessible via the web, which Usenet isn't. A news reader is worth nothing without a Usenet provider, while a webbrowser can visit any forum you like.
Now given, I haven't checked Usenet seriously in a while, but those where big issues back in the day when Usenet was slowly dying and web forums gained dominance.
Why hasn't someone/Nintendo made a download cart and service?
They have, you can download NintendoDS demos with the Wii and then play them on the DS. Its of course limited to demos that fit into the DS RAM, not on a seperate flash card.
Just because something is there, doesn't mean you have to use it, if that is not the gaming experience you want.
In most cases you can't really do that, because the rest of the game just isn't adjusted to it, i.e. you get a description where you have to go, but its incredible vague that it just isn't much good without the quest marker and the communication interface of course doesn't provide a way to ask NPCs of where that location you have to go is.
When one wants a game without a map at all, it has to be designed around that way to be fun. Just ripping the automap out of a game that was designed around an automap does little good.
Not really, it takes you out of the experience and makes navigation way to easy. Sure, in a futuristic Sci-Fi game I don't mind all the auto-mapping I can get, because it fits the setting. But in an fantasy RPG I don't want that, I want to aquire maps by realistic means, i.e. for example by buying them in the game. And even after having bought them I don't want to get every item and enemy pop up on the map automatically. Going from A to B is something that can be interesting and challenging, in Gothic for example I once carelessly got lost in the woods at night without a torch at hand, it was a great experience getting out there back again, because it simply felt authentic. In WoW on the other side I solved the problem from going from A to B by placing a heavy thing on the W-key, not such a great gaming experience.
Adventure games certainly have some railroading in them, but not really half as much as many other games. Even in something as early as Maniac Mansion you can roam pretty freely around the house, sure there are doors and puzzles you have to solve to make progress, but at least in the good games you always have a handful of puzzles waiting to be solved in your queue. And when comparing it to todays games I really don't see the problem, Call of Duty 4 is incredible linear, Half Life 2 gives you little to no freedom, MetalGear4 is an really long cutscene that sometimes gets interrupted by a little gameplay and even something like GTAIV basically just goes from cutscene to cutscene, that you can drive inbetween doesn't change the fact that the underlying story really is just a railroad track that gives you close to zero freedom. From what I heard Bioshock doesn't have all that much freedom either. There are a tiny few games that give you freedom such as Oblivion, but they are really the rare exception. For most part most games are simply very linear.
I don't think that the Internet has much to do with this. Sure, it made it a lot easier to get a walkthrough in an easy and timely manner. But a walkthrough doesn't really do any harm. Sure it makes the game easier, but so what? Puzzle games are not just fun because they are hard, but because they feature interesting story and settings. A walkthrough simply eases the enjoyment of those and when you are really stuck a walkthrough might be the thing that stops you from throwing the game in the ditch.
I think the biggest problem is that the genre didn't evolve. FPS games got all pretty and used every bit of available CPU, while adventure games today are pretty much the same thing as 20 years ago. Graphics simply sell and the days when the adventure genre was the one with the impressive graphics are long gone.
The next Dreamfall iteration is happening as episodic releases named Dreamfall Chapters. However it indeed won't happen anytime soon because Ragnar and the rest of the Dreamfall team are busy with 'The Secret World' another Funcom MMORPG, which kind of sucks given how open ended and non-conclusive Dreamfall.
You can also kill him by first shooting his satellite dish, which will cause his TV to display noise and cause him to walk to the TV, giving you a chance to assassinate him. However that is among the only mission in GTAIV that had some puzzely thing to it, for most part the game is very linear, always telling you exactly where you have to go and how to approach a goal, when you try to be a little to creative you quickly run into issues. Most obvious and annoying in the last mission, where I tried to conquer the casino via the back entrance, which didn't work, since the door was locked. All the guards behind the casino that should have been there haven't yet spawned and even the bad guys motorboat couldn't be destroyed to spoil his escape, because it hasn't yet spawned either. GTAIV relies a lot on predefined scripted triggers and if your creative approach doesn't touch one, nothing will happen till you go back and actually touch it to spawn the cutscene and mission objects.
Lemmings plays perfectly fine with a controller, even back then on the SNES. What makes the modern variant worse are the graphics, which lack all the pixel-charm of the old day and also make things a lot harder to distinguish, since stuff that looks like background happens to be foreground, the undiggable steal plates no longer stand out as much and all kinds of other details. Exploding lemmings also look incredible boring.
But generally speaking they're built right into the storyline and you don't really notice that they're there.
Which kind of proves the articles point, doesn't it? Puzzles these days are so easy and obvious that you don't have to think much about them, you don't have much of an inventory to begin with, so they resolve around whatever is right next to you and how to use that one key with that one door isn't all that hard. Games like Half Life 2 are also incredible linear and one-way, so there is no backtracking to an earlier point to get an item that you need or anything like that. Puzzles these days are simply there to slow you down a little bit, not to get you something to actually think about.
The fun in most adventure games comes from getting an understanding of the world that surrounds you in the game. The fun in a puzzle isn't getting stuck on it, but gaining an understanding of the underlying mechanic and finding the solution or just in interacting with the world. The hard part of course is the balance between frustrating the player and actually giving him something he has to think about, which however can be worked around quite well by always having alternative puzzles the player can solve and by having a world that is actually interesting enough to explore.
The problem with todays games is that most games don't even try to create a good puzzle, either they are so easy that they are hardly noticeable or they are so stupid and non-integrated into the game that they just annoy ("Here is a locked door, go find the key"). The classic LucasArts adventure almost never had any puzzle of such blunt stupidity, instead you had to figure out how to dress a mummy to win a competition and other crazy fun stuff that integrated seamlessly into the story. There was no "play the game" or "watch a cutscene" separation, it was pretty much all the same thing.
Also the thing to realize is that puzzles are not only there to stop you from making progress, but also a means to explore the world, to touch it if you will. In an adventure game you can grab things, smell them, eat them, open them, talk to people and a lot of other stuff. In most mainstream games today on the other side you have the choice between shooting people in the head or blowing them up with a grenade, you have no way to talk to them and no way to use items in a meaningful way. Its all just run and gun without ever stopping and looking around and getting an idea what really is happening.
Now of course not every action game needs to be riddled with puzzles, but most of them really could need some calmer moments that departure from the standard run&gun.
Mario64 had a lot more puzzles then Galaxy, Galaxy was for most part a rather straight forward linear jump'n run, often closer to classic 2D jump'n runs then 3d ones, since your path was pretty much predefined.
Interestingly none of the issues you mentioned ever happened in the classic LucasArts adventure games, where puzzles were woven into a narrative instead of just a road block that stops you from the boss fight. And that is basically where todays games fail, instead of taking puzzles as an opportunity for the player to learn about his environment and the world around him, they are used just to slow him down or are so terribly designed that they just frustrate. A lot of lessons that got learned in the creation from adventure games seem to have been completly lost.
There is a world of difference between the kind of patience required to solve a hard puzzle and the kind of patience required to level your World of Warcraft. The first involves hard thinking, while the other involves nothing but running around from quest to quest and killing stuff, i.e. little to no thinking. World of Warcraft can for most part be played completly on auto-pilot, you simply run from quest marker to quest marker. In an old school adventure game you might not even know what to do unless you think and actually listen to the dialog, no blinking marker that tells you which item you have to pick up and where you have to go.
Now of course adventure games quite often go a little to far and throw insane puzzle against the player, but on the other side many of todays games make is far to easy for the player. When I can finish todays game without once stopping and having to think for a bit, something just is wrong. The feeling for the environment gets completly lost and what might be an interesting story, becomes background noise in a constant chase form one blinking target waypoint to the next.
That you can't buy one is a really big problem in getting those things to the masses, especially now when Eee and other subnotebooks are taking over that market segment. However for those that really want to develop for the XO, there is the Developers Program over which one can get a device.
That the underlying philosophy is good doesn't change the fact that Sugar has still a lot of problems. The journal getting filled with tons of completly useless entries, which basically render it unusable, is just one of them, the other is that even a "Hello World"-app takes almost 10 seconds to start up, while it starts instantly when started from the terminal.
The good thing about total surveillance is that it will make the unjust laws stand out and expose them to the public. The bad thing is of course is that many people will get into trouble before the laws are adjusted back to fit reality.
When it comes to conference calls I found Mumble (open source) and Teamspeak (non-free, but has a Linux version) far superior to any of the classical VoIP software out there. For normal phone-like calls Ekiga is good enough, but overall I prefer text chat in combination with Mumble/Teamspeak.
For animations such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, it would theoretically be possible to provide the movie as source and render at the destination.
Actually even for those it would be impossible or at least not without a lot of additional work. Even when a movie scene is based on 3d models, the final result is always a 2D composition, not something that came directly out of the 3d renderer, some of the layers that where used in composition will be completly flat 2D. The 3d models are also incredible incomplete, everthing you don't see in on the screen, is for most part simply not there, it was never modeled. So if you could adjust your camera angel you would simply look into nothingness. So from the Hollywood side of things I wouldn't expect to see a 'real' 3D movie anytime soon. However the gaming industry is already doing it, for one thing there are plenty of homebrew machinima movies that are rendered in realtime in a game engine and then there are also games like MetalGear4 or Half Life 2, which allow you to navigate the camera around as you like in certain cutscenes. In the case of MetalGear4 its especially interesting, since you have things happening in multiple places and have the ability to split the screen into views of you navigating around and the predefined viewing angles. And there are of course games like Ico or Shadow of the Collosus, which don't give you as much freedom as the former, but still allow you to pan the camera around a little bit in all cutscenes.
Computing power isn't really that big of an issue, sure you can't just renderer a Pixar movie in realtime, but with todays 3D hardware you can get close enough. You might always be 10 years being what is possible in off-line rendering, but then movies 10 years ago where fun to watch too.
Checkout ccache, it caches compilation results and then on recompile it reuses the results when nothing has changed in the preprocessed file. Because it works on preprocessed files instead of the original source files it can ignore quite a few changes that would otherwise cause a recompile and thus can speed up recompilation a lot. It also happens to be very easy to use, just compile with "ccache gcc" instead of "gcc" and you are done.
When it comes to games I doubt that eye tracking would be used to trigger funny dances or other unrelated stuff, it just would be to high a learning curve to be practical for the masses, instead you could do for example face tracking and simply map whatever expression you currently have on to your game character. And when speaking about games I can definitively see the mouse go, after all it already happened in the console world and the keyboard went the away there too (or never was there in the first place). With voice chat being available everywhere there is little need for a keyboard left. However games are games, they are meant to be fun, not to get work done and they are also not meant to be played 8 hours a day for five days a week. So whatever control is good for swinging your characters sword, might not be precise enough or would simply exhaust you when doing CAD work and I don't expect to enter code via voice commands anytime soon either.
But all that said, I could definitvly see a lot of use for touchscreens, voice input, eye tracking and stuff as additional input or as input methods used in non-desktop areas, i.e. when you have a display on your fridge you don't want to have a keyboard there, you want touchscreen and voice input there and when entering a an email a little voice-recognition every now and then could make things faster.
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That depends on if you view it from a user or from a developer point of view. From a developer point of view, who distributes source, Linux is quite nice and Windows is pretty terrible. On the other side from a users point of view Linux is a pretty ugly nightmare for all software that isn't part of your distro and even for some that is part of your distro when it is to old or buggy, Windows on the other side is just a click on setup.exe.
The real fun only starts when you try to build one.
IMHO a decent newsreader has a far superior interface.
Not really, most newsreader are pretty crap. This is especially an issue when you have multiple people with different newsreader participating in the same thread. Some readers will break the encoding, other the threading structure, yet some others will wreak the quoting, some will just post with incorrect message-id and a lot of other annoying issues. Resulting in quite a bit of mess and discussion on how this an that issue can be fixed. Forums are by no means perfect either, but at least they are consistent and they also happen to have ways to post pictures, change font style, notify the user on replies, a search function and other stuff that the user expects and that is often either problematic or impossible with Usenet. Forums also have the huge advantage of being freely accessible via the web, which Usenet isn't. A news reader is worth nothing without a Usenet provider, while a webbrowser can visit any forum you like.
Now given, I haven't checked Usenet seriously in a while, but those where big issues back in the day when Usenet was slowly dying and web forums gained dominance.
Why hasn't someone/Nintendo made a download cart and service?
They have, you can download NintendoDS demos with the Wii and then play them on the DS. Its of course limited to demos that fit into the DS RAM, not on a seperate flash card.
Just because something is there, doesn't mean you have to use it, if that is not the gaming experience you want.
In most cases you can't really do that, because the rest of the game just isn't adjusted to it, i.e. you get a description where you have to go, but its incredible vague that it just isn't much good without the quest marker and the communication interface of course doesn't provide a way to ask NPCs of where that location you have to go is.
When one wants a game without a map at all, it has to be designed around that way to be fun. Just ripping the automap out of a game that was designed around an automap does little good.
Automatic mapmaking is great.
Not really, it takes you out of the experience and makes navigation way to easy. Sure, in a futuristic Sci-Fi game I don't mind all the auto-mapping I can get, because it fits the setting. But in an fantasy RPG I don't want that, I want to aquire maps by realistic means, i.e. for example by buying them in the game. And even after having bought them I don't want to get every item and enemy pop up on the map automatically. Going from A to B is something that can be interesting and challenging, in Gothic for example I once carelessly got lost in the woods at night without a torch at hand, it was a great experience getting out there back again, because it simply felt authentic. In WoW on the other side I solved the problem from going from A to B by placing a heavy thing on the W-key, not such a great gaming experience.
Adventure games certainly have some railroading in them, but not really half as much as many other games. Even in something as early as Maniac Mansion you can roam pretty freely around the house, sure there are doors and puzzles you have to solve to make progress, but at least in the good games you always have a handful of puzzles waiting to be solved in your queue. And when comparing it to todays games I really don't see the problem, Call of Duty 4 is incredible linear, Half Life 2 gives you little to no freedom, MetalGear4 is an really long cutscene that sometimes gets interrupted by a little gameplay and even something like GTAIV basically just goes from cutscene to cutscene, that you can drive inbetween doesn't change the fact that the underlying story really is just a railroad track that gives you close to zero freedom. From what I heard Bioshock doesn't have all that much freedom either. There are a tiny few games that give you freedom such as Oblivion, but they are really the rare exception. For most part most games are simply very linear.
I don't think that the Internet has much to do with this. Sure, it made it a lot easier to get a walkthrough in an easy and timely manner. But a walkthrough doesn't really do any harm. Sure it makes the game easier, but so what? Puzzle games are not just fun because they are hard, but because they feature interesting story and settings. A walkthrough simply eases the enjoyment of those and when you are really stuck a walkthrough might be the thing that stops you from throwing the game in the ditch.
I think the biggest problem is that the genre didn't evolve. FPS games got all pretty and used every bit of available CPU, while adventure games today are pretty much the same thing as 20 years ago. Graphics simply sell and the days when the adventure genre was the one with the impressive graphics are long gone.
The next Dreamfall iteration is happening as episodic releases named Dreamfall Chapters. However it indeed won't happen anytime soon because Ragnar and the rest of the Dreamfall team are busy with 'The Secret World' another Funcom MMORPG, which kind of sucks given how open ended and non-conclusive Dreamfall.
You can also kill him by first shooting his satellite dish, which will cause his TV to display noise and cause him to walk to the TV, giving you a chance to assassinate him. However that is among the only mission in GTAIV that had some puzzely thing to it, for most part the game is very linear, always telling you exactly where you have to go and how to approach a goal, when you try to be a little to creative you quickly run into issues. Most obvious and annoying in the last mission, where I tried to conquer the casino via the back entrance, which didn't work, since the door was locked. All the guards behind the casino that should have been there haven't yet spawned and even the bad guys motorboat couldn't be destroyed to spoil his escape, because it hasn't yet spawned either. GTAIV relies a lot on predefined scripted triggers and if your creative approach doesn't touch one, nothing will happen till you go back and actually touch it to spawn the cutscene and mission objects.
Lemmings plays perfectly fine with a controller, even back then on the SNES. What makes the modern variant worse are the graphics, which lack all the pixel-charm of the old day and also make things a lot harder to distinguish, since stuff that looks like background happens to be foreground, the undiggable steal plates no longer stand out as much and all kinds of other details. Exploding lemmings also look incredible boring.
But generally speaking they're built right into the storyline and you don't really notice that they're there.
Which kind of proves the articles point, doesn't it? Puzzles these days are so easy and obvious that you don't have to think much about them, you don't have much of an inventory to begin with, so they resolve around whatever is right next to you and how to use that one key with that one door isn't all that hard. Games like Half Life 2 are also incredible linear and one-way, so there is no backtracking to an earlier point to get an item that you need or anything like that. Puzzles these days are simply there to slow you down a little bit, not to get you something to actually think about.
The fun in most adventure games comes from getting an understanding of the world that surrounds you in the game. The fun in a puzzle isn't getting stuck on it, but gaining an understanding of the underlying mechanic and finding the solution or just in interacting with the world. The hard part of course is the balance between frustrating the player and actually giving him something he has to think about, which however can be worked around quite well by always having alternative puzzles the player can solve and by having a world that is actually interesting enough to explore.
The problem with todays games is that most games don't even try to create a good puzzle, either they are so easy that they are hardly noticeable or they are so stupid and non-integrated into the game that they just annoy ("Here is a locked door, go find the key"). The classic LucasArts adventure almost never had any puzzle of such blunt stupidity, instead you had to figure out how to dress a mummy to win a competition and other crazy fun stuff that integrated seamlessly into the story. There was no "play the game" or "watch a cutscene" separation, it was pretty much all the same thing.
Also the thing to realize is that puzzles are not only there to stop you from making progress, but also a means to explore the world, to touch it if you will. In an adventure game you can grab things, smell them, eat them, open them, talk to people and a lot of other stuff. In most mainstream games today on the other side you have the choice between shooting people in the head or blowing them up with a grenade, you have no way to talk to them and no way to use items in a meaningful way. Its all just run and gun without ever stopping and looking around and getting an idea what really is happening.
Now of course not every action game needs to be riddled with puzzles, but most of them really could need some calmer moments that departure from the standard run&gun.
Mario64 had a lot more puzzles then Galaxy, Galaxy was for most part a rather straight forward linear jump'n run, often closer to classic 2D jump'n runs then 3d ones, since your path was pretty much predefined.
You can buy a modern remake of Lemmings in the Playstation3 Shop or for PSP. It however isn't as good as the old one.
Interestingly none of the issues you mentioned ever happened in the classic LucasArts adventure games, where puzzles were woven into a narrative instead of just a road block that stops you from the boss fight. And that is basically where todays games fail, instead of taking puzzles as an opportunity for the player to learn about his environment and the world around him, they are used just to slow him down or are so terribly designed that they just frustrate. A lot of lessons that got learned in the creation from adventure games seem to have been completly lost.
There is a world of difference between the kind of patience required to solve a hard puzzle and the kind of patience required to level your World of Warcraft. The first involves hard thinking, while the other involves nothing but running around from quest to quest and killing stuff, i.e. little to no thinking. World of Warcraft can for most part be played completly on auto-pilot, you simply run from quest marker to quest marker. In an old school adventure game you might not even know what to do unless you think and actually listen to the dialog, no blinking marker that tells you which item you have to pick up and where you have to go.
Now of course adventure games quite often go a little to far and throw insane puzzle against the player, but on the other side many of todays games make is far to easy for the player. When I can finish todays game without once stopping and having to think for a bit, something just is wrong. The feeling for the environment gets completly lost and what might be an interesting story, becomes background noise in a constant chase form one blinking target waypoint to the next.
That you can't buy one is a really big problem in getting those things to the masses, especially now when Eee and other subnotebooks are taking over that market segment. However for those that really want to develop for the XO, there is the Developers Program over which one can get a device.
That the underlying philosophy is good doesn't change the fact that Sugar has still a lot of problems. The journal getting filled with tons of completly useless entries, which basically render it unusable, is just one of them, the other is that even a "Hello World"-app takes almost 10 seconds to start up, while it starts instantly when started from the terminal.
The good thing about total surveillance is that it will make the unjust laws stand out and expose them to the public.
The bad thing is of course is that many people will get into trouble before the laws are adjusted back to fit reality.
When it comes to conference calls I found Mumble (open source) and Teamspeak (non-free, but has a Linux version) far superior to any of the classical VoIP software out there. For normal phone-like calls Ekiga is good enough, but overall I prefer text chat in combination with Mumble/Teamspeak.
For animations such as Toy Story or Finding Nemo, it would theoretically be possible to provide the movie as source and render at the destination.
Actually even for those it would be impossible or at least not without a lot of additional work. Even when a movie scene is based on 3d models, the final result is always a 2D composition, not something that came directly out of the 3d renderer, some of the layers that where used in composition will be completly flat 2D. The 3d models are also incredible incomplete, everthing you don't see in on the screen, is for most part simply not there, it was never modeled. So if you could adjust your camera angel you would simply look into nothingness. So from the Hollywood side of things I wouldn't expect to see a 'real' 3D movie anytime soon. However the gaming industry is already doing it, for one thing there are plenty of homebrew machinima movies that are rendered in realtime in a game engine and then there are also games like MetalGear4 or Half Life 2, which allow you to navigate the camera around as you like in certain cutscenes. In the case of MetalGear4 its especially interesting, since you have things happening in multiple places and have the ability to split the screen into views of you navigating around and the predefined viewing angles. And there are of course games like Ico or Shadow of the Collosus, which don't give you as much freedom as the former, but still allow you to pan the camera around a little bit in all cutscenes.
Computing power isn't really that big of an issue, sure you can't just renderer a Pixar movie in realtime, but with todays 3D hardware you can get close enough. You might always be 10 years being what is possible in off-line rendering, but then movies 10 years ago where fun to watch too.
America is a bit bigger then 150k men.
Checkout ccache, it caches compilation results and then on recompile it reuses the results when nothing has changed in the preprocessed file. Because it works on preprocessed files instead of the original source files it can ignore quite a few changes that would otherwise cause a recompile and thus can speed up recompilation a lot. It also happens to be very easy to use, just compile with "ccache gcc" instead of "gcc" and you are done.
When it comes to games I doubt that eye tracking would be used to trigger funny dances or other unrelated stuff, it just would be to high a learning curve to be practical for the masses, instead you could do for example face tracking and simply map whatever expression you currently have on to your game character. And when speaking about games I can definitively see the mouse go, after all it already happened in the console world and the keyboard went the away there too (or never was there in the first place). With voice chat being available everywhere there is little need for a keyboard left. However games are games, they are meant to be fun, not to get work done and they are also not meant to be played 8 hours a day for five days a week. So whatever control is good for swinging your characters sword, might not be precise enough or would simply exhaust you when doing CAD work and I don't expect to enter code via voice commands anytime soon either.
But all that said, I could definitvly see a lot of use for touchscreens, voice input, eye tracking and stuff as additional input or as input methods used in non-desktop areas, i.e. when you have a display on your fridge you don't want to have a keyboard there, you want touchscreen and voice input there and when entering a an email a little voice-recognition every now and then could make things faster.