But then along comes Web 2.0 and user-supplied content and all that jazz. If you allow someone to post a comment on a forum, like, say, Slashdot, and allow any HTML code whatsoever, you are guaranteed to have parse errors. Someone, somewhere, is going to (maliciously or not) forget a closing tag, make at typo, forget a quotation mark, overlap a b and an i tag, nest something improperly, forgets a / in a self-closing tag like hr or br, etc. According to strict XHTML parsing rules, that is, XML parsing rules, the browser is then supposed to gag and refuse to show the page at all. I don't think Slashdot breaking every time an AC forgets to close his i tag is a good thing.:-)
Use Tidy, and suddenly you've got perfectly fine XHTML again.
While one could write a tidy program (and people have) that tries to clean up badly formatted code, they are no more perfect than the "guess what you mean" algorithms in the browser itself. It just moves the "guess what the user means" algorithm to the server instead of the browser. That's not much of an improvement.
You don't have to write one yourself, because W3C provides a perfectly good one, and there already is a large number of open source clones of Tidy. Writing it yourself would be stupid and prone to error. The existing ones are as good as "guess what you mean" can getm and that is an improvement, because you're not trusting wacky, unreliable browsers to turn the crap on your site into something valid, you're doing it yourself. You are in control! That is always an improvement.
PS: My Slashdot comments are perfectly valid XHTML snippets. (Not valid XML, because they don't have a root element. I'm trusting the Slashdot server to handle that for me.)
DTDs are dead and DOCTYPEs are not relevant except for some obscure things that are not related to this discussion. XHTML 5 doesn't even have one.
Probably because XHTML 5 doesn't even exist. XHTML is working on version 2 at the moment. Who knows, they might one day get to version 5, but at the current speed, that's going to be a while. HTML 5, on the other hand, most definitely does have a DOCTYPE. Or should have, if it expects to be recognised by browsers.
DOCTYPE is vital for validation and proper parsing.
Re:Bet there still isn't a decent "Stop!" button
on
HTML V5 and XHTML V2
·
· Score: 1
You are telling me all those CPAN modules handle the hundreds of ways you can inject HTML into the dozens of different browsers?
I know nothing about CPAN or what could possibly be the problem about HTML injection. (I mean, HTML comes from the server, right? So the server controls what it sends. At what point can anyone else inject anything you don't like?) However:
How many ways can you make an angle bracket and have it interpreted as a legit browser tag?
None. That is, sloppy html can contain all sorts of silly crap, but Tidied XHTML can not contain angle brackets except as part of a tag. > becomes >, which is harmless.
How many ways can you inject something to the end of a URL to close the double quote and inject your javascript?
None, as long as you ensure that it is a real URL. Use URLencode on anything that's supposed to be a URL. Besides, does javascript outside the double quote do anything? In XHTML you can't even have any kind of content outside the double quotes but between the < and >.
How many ways, including unicode, can you make a double quote?
Who cares? Tidy, encode, and it's harmless.
Dont forget, your implementation cannot strip out the Unicode like I've seen some filters do - I need the thing to handle every language! I would guess there are thousands of known ways to inject junk into your trusted HTML.
Not if you handle it properly.
Don't kid yourself and thinking filtering user generated content is easy. It is very, *very* hard.
Then don't filter it, but simply turn it into proper, correct XHTML. That will destroy anyhing that tries to abuse stupid loopholes in crappy browsers.
Honestly, all we need is a "Google Bank" sort of thing, managing microtransactions for everyone on the planet with zero-fuss international transactions. Google actually has the power to handle this.
Do you really want Google, of all institutions, to be the one handling the next generation of all financial transactions? You know they'll store and analyze your spending pattern, do you? Only for more effective advertising, ofcourse. Now that I think about it, I think it would be really smart for Google to get into the microtransaction business for exactly that reason, but I'm not so sure if I'd want them too.
Isn't Puzzle Quest simply the fantasy version of Puzzle Pirates? That was my impression anyway. I haven't played Puzzle Quest, and I don't doubt it's brilliant, but is it really that innovative compared to Puzzle Pirates?
Personally, I see the rapist-murderer combination as morally "higher" than the plain "rapist", because at least the rapist-murderer was humane enough to end the suffering of his victim.
You make murder sound so compasionate. I hope you don't mind if I think you're a sick bastard.
Most likely, the rapist-murderer was just getting rid of the witness. Nothing morally higher about that.
That settles it. Sanderson is now officially on my list of authors I really need to read.
Neal Stephenson is one of my favourite authors, and the only book he actually managed to give sort of an ending (Cryptonomicon) dethroned LotR as my favourite book ever. And author like that who can write a decent ending has to be one of the most brilliant authors ever.
There are a lot of writers who are terrible at writing a decent ending to their story (Neal Stephenson is another strong candidate here). Perhaps Sanderson should become a consultant to help all those other writers out there wrap up their stories.
What are they going to trade... These people have nothing, so they have nothing to trade.
They have plenty. The problem is that they aren't allowed to trade. Not in a fair way, anyway. We (Europe and the US) demand access to their internal market so we can dump our heaviliy subsidised food surplus below cost on their market, and their farmers can't compete with that, and don't get a chance to sell to our internal markets either. If you want to help these people, either leave them alone, or stop our subsidies and allow them onto our markets.
Which is exactly the problem; the XO project ignores the people most in need, and for those it doesn't ignore, it hands them a pound of cake instead of a hundred pounds of rice.
A hundred pounds of rice doesn't help anyone except those in immediate need of a hundred pounds of rice. The problem is, if you give the people in some poor African country free food, they won't buy any food from local farmers, those local farmers don't get any money, and they go bankrupt. So what did your free food accomplish? You've killed their ability to buy food, and now they're completely dependent on your next handout.
Education helps them much more. An infrastructure that allows them to exchange new farming techniques and new production techniques that work for their environment helps them a lot more. A new chance to earn money helps them a lot more. OLPC provides that without ruining the local economy.
It's very well possible that there are other, more effective ways to help them, but making them dependent on us is not one of them.
It's a hard point to argue if you had only two options, food, or a laptop, the food seems a better choice.
Seems, yes, but it isn't. In 99% of the cases, the laptop is the better choice, even if only because sending food does more harm than good. Sending food is only useful when there is a famine caused by a ruined harvest, and people are in immediate threat of starvation. This is only rarely the case, and usually it just bankrupts the local farmers and ruins the economy. Sending help that doesn't compete with their local economy and might even offer the occasional new opportunity is far better.
Ofcourse what they really need, is the same kind of access to our markets as we have to theirs. As it is, we can compete with them, but they're not allowed to compete with us. And as long as that is the case, they will always be poor and dependent on us. Either leave them alone, or give them real help.
OLPC is only a small gesture, and it probably won't help the majority of the world's poor, but it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than ruining their economy.
A lot of poor countries complain that "aid" is in effect a subsidy to western farmers plus product dumping, which completely destroys the market for their own local farmers.
Exactly. Locals don't need to buy food from local farmers, so the farmers go bankrupt. Most of the time, there's not a famine in most of Africa. There's just a crippled economy because we dump the excess of our subsidied farms below cost (ours and theirs) on their market. And we can do that because we threaten them with IMF/worldbank sanctions if they don't allow us access to their market, but we don't give them access to our markets, because we often wouldn't be able to compete with them.
Basically, we want everything and give them nothing, and we disguise it as philantropy. It's a real clever trick.
Having Greedo get off a shot (and miss at point-blank range) was cinematically retarded, but it didn't change Han's characterization one whit.
Missing at point blank range makes Greedo really stupid and not credible as a bounty hunter, and it makes Han just lucky. Pulling a trick and secretly shooting him first (under the table) makes Han smart, fast and devious.
I prefer a Han Solo who is smart and devious and has credible enemies over one who is just lucky for having incompetent enemies.
My company owns my email like they own the oxygen I breath while I am working. In other words- they don't.
If you are using company email servers and equipment, they do own the email. You don't get a free ride just because you work for the company. Everything you do on their systems has to follow their acceptable use policy, if they have one.
Not to mention the fact that the air you breath also comes from their AC units.
This is a disgrace if true. Basically this sounds like the 'clique' on the mailing list are in control *and* have the support of the foundation. There seems to be no discussion on preventing this. I would say the discussion and exposure of lists like this is very important.
Although in general I really like wikipedia, every once in a while I read some story that makes me wonder if it isn't time to start with a fresh slate, without all the old moderators. This is certainly one of them, and it comes way too soon after the recent wave of mass deletions.
I'm really getting the impression lately that wikipedia is being actively harmed by a group of people that happen to be in power there. It's not about free information and knowledge anymore, it's about controlling that information and knowledge. And about feeling powerful, I'm sure.
On top of that, who wants to play an RPG where all your stats are maxed out? Go play a shooter or something if you don't want to level up. There's a fine line between creating a story, and having a game in there somewhere.
Starting as a badass does in no mean require your stats to be maxed out. In a well-designed system, there should be plenty of room to advance from "badass" to "better badass", "even bigger badass", and "badass with more diversity". Plenty of paper RPGs do that. Why can't CRPGs? Because the creators are only familiar with CRPGs or at best D&D, that's why.
You create the game you are insisting on, and you no longer have an rpg, you have Doom. A supersoldier who can use any weapon/item/armor, at any time, as long as you find it on the ground.
How about a super soldier who's an expert with his preferred firearm, but has only limited experience with random weapons he finds on the ground? What about someone who is competent enough to do (and have done) some really hard missions, yet is still capable of failing them?
It's just that everyone's going on about the brilliant story, and yet completely missing the fact that in order to shoehorn it into a traditional RPG engine, they've had to bend it all out of shape. Why would you make your elite troops buy their own guns with their own money? Because hoarding gold and trading it for stuff has been a mainstay of D&D since pencil and paper days. Why would you issue special forces soldiers with guns that overheat after firing three rounds? Because shitty starter weapons are generic to the classic RPG advancement-based structure. Doesn't fit the storyline at all, but it's a tired old staple of the genre, so just make the player do it.
And all that while there are plenty of excellent pen & paper RPGs that do not require you to start as weak nobodies with crappy equipment. In GURPS, for example, it's not uncommon to start your fresh character as a highly trained specialist with excellent equipment. And yet there's still lots of room for improvement.
The problem is that many CRPG experience systems have very coarse granularity and a low ceiling, and try to emulate the Star Wars/LotR-style from farmboy to hero story. Which is fine when the
story is about a farmboy who becomes a hero. But if the story is about highly trained professionals who get even better at what they're already good at, you need more diversity and more room to improve even very good skills, and not make each level-up turn you into a superman compared to the monsters that could easily kill you just a moment ago. In other words: a shallower power curve.
And again, it's actually worse than it sounds, because most people just reloaded until they won all battles even if they sucked at the game. There were disproportionately fewer people who saw the planets and story along the "lose" arcs.
It would be slightly more balanced if it were "win for the good" and "win for the evil" arcs, instead of "win" and "lose". But not by much. Basically now almost everyone will see the left and right edges of that triangle, but almost noone will see the centre.
4. The fact remains that, by your idea and Origin's too, a lot of paths will lead to a "lose" state. Whether you kill the player early or let him play to the end of the "you lost" arc, it's still giving people a camouflaged "shoot yourself in the foot" option. Which tends to be less fun than it sounds.
5. Especially killing off the player, you have to realize that it's just making the game linear again, only this time in a non-fun way. You've just turned the triangle into a pair of trousers, so to speak, instead of just one tube. Decisions taken early on will force him down one leg or the other, which is linear again. And being killed for not following the tube is one of the least fun ways to be forced along the tracks.
If you want to prevent this triangle or "trousers" (somehow I seem to recall the phrase "trousers of fate", but I have no idea where I heard that), what you could do is make it 3 paths with lots of choices to jump from one path to another. One path could represent "good", one is "evil" and one is "undecided", and the decisions where you jump from one to the other are repenting, falling to the dark side, etc.
So instead of:
1
|\
2 3
|\|\
4 5 6
|\|\|\ ...
You'd get:
1
|\
2 3
|\|\
4 5 6
|X|X|
7 8 9
|X|X|
A B C ...
You can also do this with only two paths, ofcourse. But at least this way people can have a really different experience when they play "good", "evil", "undecided", "switch from good to evil", "choose evil, then repent", etc.
I think the trick is not to have the game truly branch, with each choice opening a set of quests completely disjunct from what you get with a different choice, but to have more subtle interactions between the quests.
In Vampire Bloodlines, for example, there are 5 different endings possible, but they all consist of pretty much the same set of elements except for some differences in dialogue and a different cutscene at the end. And for some ending you may not have to do some particular quests.
But which endings you can choose, is determined by your behaviour during earlier quests. Were you nice to the Anarchs and fulfill their quests? Then you can choose the Anarch ending. Did you always obey LaCroix? Then you can do his ending. If you do a faction's quests, you can do their ending, unless you screwed them over.
Something I'd also love to see is quests where you play on a different side of the quest. If you side with faction A at some point, you get the "Steal The MacGuffin for Faction A" quest. Do you side with faction B, you get the "Steal The MacGuffin for Faction B" quest. Are you independent, you can still steal it but decide later who to give/trade/sell it to. It should be possible to reuse cleverly designed quests this way.
Ofcourse the holy grail would be a game where high-quality quests are generated dynamically depending on all soorts of subtle balanced in the game, and where your performance during that quest has an impact on those balances. This idea of mine goes back to when I played Elite/Frontier. Some worlds were (according to their description) on the brink of civil war. If you decide to smuggle 100 tons of weapons to that planet, that should have some impact, right? Especially if you can decide to sell it to the rebels. I want a game that takes that sort of thing into account, and if nobody else is going to write it, I will. Some day.
I have no experience with HL2, but the engine isn't all that matters. It could be that Bloodlines has more detailed models or has a lot of extra code to run for various stuff, but I really don't know. Besides, 17 fps, while sufficient, isn't spectacular either. It's on the edge on what you might start to notice. Get swamped by a horde, and your fps might halve, and the game gets jerky just at the moment when you need it to be smooth and responsive.
Maybe I should try to play HL2 on my laptop to see how that plays. Come to think of it, I did turn some of the detail and particles down a bit when I had too much other programs running in the background, and while I didn't notice any significant graphics changes, the game did seem to get a bit smoother after that. You might want to give that a try.
It already works that way. If you write bad shows/movies that don't get watched, the show gets canceled and you're out of a job. Shows that don't get watched don't get rerun and don't sell DVDs, so no residuals either.
This is not always true. Firefly got canceled during the first season, but the DVDs sold like crazy. It makes sense that writers still want to get paid if their creation does better on DVD than on TV.
While the video is interesting, it does not show moving rocks. It merely presents one of the theories (the disproven one, according to TFA) as fact.
Also, the video doesn't say the rocks are pushed by water, but dragged by ice which is pushed by the wind. Water, ice and wind are all mentioned in the article.
So while your video is cool, your presentation of it sucks.
Which version of the unofficial patch was it? The latest one is 4.3, and stuff is still getting fixed. There was a lot broken, but now they're up to some really subtle and obscure bugs.
Not sure what caused your jerky framerate. It works fine on my cheapo Dell laptop. Not the smoothest gameplay ever, perhaps, but I thought that was just because I suck at twitch games. I still managed to kill all bad guys, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Use Tidy, and suddenly you've got perfectly fine XHTML again.
You don't have to write one yourself, because W3C provides a perfectly good one, and there already is a large number of open source clones of Tidy. Writing it yourself would be stupid and prone to error. The existing ones are as good as "guess what you mean" can getm and that is an improvement, because you're not trusting wacky, unreliable browsers to turn the crap on your site into something valid, you're doing it yourself. You are in control! That is always an improvement.
PS: My Slashdot comments are perfectly valid XHTML snippets. (Not valid XML, because they don't have a root element. I'm trusting the Slashdot server to handle that for me.)
Probably because XHTML 5 doesn't even exist. XHTML is working on version 2 at the moment. Who knows, they might one day get to version 5, but at the current speed, that's going to be a while. HTML 5, on the other hand, most definitely does have a DOCTYPE. Or should have, if it expects to be recognised by browsers. DOCTYPE is vital for validation and proper parsing.
I know nothing about CPAN or what could possibly be the problem about HTML injection. (I mean, HTML comes from the server, right? So the server controls what it sends. At what point can anyone else inject anything you don't like?) However:
None. That is, sloppy html can contain all sorts of silly crap, but Tidied XHTML can not contain angle brackets except as part of a tag. > becomes >, which is harmless.
None, as long as you ensure that it is a real URL. Use URLencode on anything that's supposed to be a URL. Besides, does javascript outside the double quote do anything? In XHTML you can't even have any kind of content outside the double quotes but between the < and >.
Who cares? Tidy, encode, and it's harmless.
Not if you handle it properly.
Then don't filter it, but simply turn it into proper, correct XHTML. That will destroy anyhing that tries to abuse stupid loopholes in crappy browsers.
Do you really want Google, of all institutions, to be the one handling the next generation of all financial transactions? You know they'll store and analyze your spending pattern, do you? Only for more effective advertising, ofcourse. Now that I think about it, I think it would be really smart for Google to get into the microtransaction business for exactly that reason, but I'm not so sure if I'd want them too.
Isn't Puzzle Quest simply the fantasy version of Puzzle Pirates? That was my impression anyway. I haven't played Puzzle Quest, and I don't doubt it's brilliant, but is it really that innovative compared to Puzzle Pirates?
You make murder sound so compasionate. I hope you don't mind if I think you're a sick bastard.
Most likely, the rapist-murderer was just getting rid of the witness. Nothing morally higher about that.
That settles it. Sanderson is now officially on my list of authors I really need to read.
Neal Stephenson is one of my favourite authors, and the only book he actually managed to give sort of an ending (Cryptonomicon) dethroned LotR as my favourite book ever. And author like that who can write a decent ending has to be one of the most brilliant authors ever.
There are a lot of writers who are terrible at writing a decent ending to their story (Neal Stephenson is another strong candidate here). Perhaps Sanderson should become a consultant to help all those other writers out there wrap up their stories.
They have plenty. The problem is that they aren't allowed to trade. Not in a fair way, anyway. We (Europe and the US) demand access to their internal market so we can dump our heaviliy subsidised food surplus below cost on their market, and their farmers can't compete with that, and don't get a chance to sell to our internal markets either. If you want to help these people, either leave them alone, or stop our subsidies and allow them onto our markets.
A hundred pounds of rice doesn't help anyone except those in immediate need of a hundred pounds of rice. The problem is, if you give the people in some poor African country free food, they won't buy any food from local farmers, those local farmers don't get any money, and they go bankrupt. So what did your free food accomplish? You've killed their ability to buy food, and now they're completely dependent on your next handout.
Education helps them much more. An infrastructure that allows them to exchange new farming techniques and new production techniques that work for their environment helps them a lot more. A new chance to earn money helps them a lot more. OLPC provides that without ruining the local economy.
It's very well possible that there are other, more effective ways to help them, but making them dependent on us is not one of them.
Seems, yes, but it isn't. In 99% of the cases, the laptop is the better choice, even if only because sending food does more harm than good. Sending food is only useful when there is a famine caused by a ruined harvest, and people are in immediate threat of starvation. This is only rarely the case, and usually it just bankrupts the local farmers and ruins the economy. Sending help that doesn't compete with their local economy and might even offer the occasional new opportunity is far better.
Ofcourse what they really need, is the same kind of access to our markets as we have to theirs. As it is, we can compete with them, but they're not allowed to compete with us. And as long as that is the case, they will always be poor and dependent on us. Either leave them alone, or give them real help.
OLPC is only a small gesture, and it probably won't help the majority of the world's poor, but it's better than nothing, and it's certainly better than ruining their economy.
Exactly. Locals don't need to buy food from local farmers, so the farmers go bankrupt. Most of the time, there's not a famine in most of Africa. There's just a crippled economy because we dump the excess of our subsidied farms below cost (ours and theirs) on their market. And we can do that because we threaten them with IMF/worldbank sanctions if they don't allow us access to their market, but we don't give them access to our markets, because we often wouldn't be able to compete with them.
Basically, we want everything and give them nothing, and we disguise it as philantropy. It's a real clever trick.
And never good dialogue.
Missing at point blank range makes Greedo really stupid and not credible as a bounty hunter, and it makes Han just lucky. Pulling a trick and secretly shooting him first (under the table) makes Han smart, fast and devious.
I prefer a Han Solo who is smart and devious and has credible enemies over one who is just lucky for having incompetent enemies.
Not to mention the fact that the air you breath also comes from their AC units.
Flash memory is nearly indestructible. People have tried.
Although in general I really like wikipedia, every once in a while I read some story that makes me wonder if it isn't time to start with a fresh slate, without all the old moderators. This is certainly one of them, and it comes way too soon after the recent wave of mass deletions.
I'm really getting the impression lately that wikipedia is being actively harmed by a group of people that happen to be in power there. It's not about free information and knowledge anymore, it's about controlling that information and knowledge. And about feeling powerful, I'm sure.
Starting as a badass does in no mean require your stats to be maxed out. In a well-designed system, there should be plenty of room to advance from "badass" to "better badass", "even bigger badass", and "badass with more diversity". Plenty of paper RPGs do that. Why can't CRPGs? Because the creators are only familiar with CRPGs or at best D&D, that's why.
How about a super soldier who's an expert with his preferred firearm, but has only limited experience with random weapons he finds on the ground? What about someone who is competent enough to do (and have done) some really hard missions, yet is still capable of failing them?
And all that while there are plenty of excellent pen & paper RPGs that do not require you to start as weak nobodies with crappy equipment. In GURPS, for example, it's not uncommon to start your fresh character as a highly trained specialist with excellent equipment. And yet there's still lots of room for improvement.
The problem is that many CRPG experience systems have very coarse granularity and a low ceiling, and try to emulate the Star Wars/LotR-style from farmboy to hero story. Which is fine when the story is about a farmboy who becomes a hero. But if the story is about highly trained professionals who get even better at what they're already good at, you need more diversity and more room to improve even very good skills, and not make each level-up turn you into a superman compared to the monsters that could easily kill you just a moment ago. In other words: a shallower power curve.
If you want to prevent this triangle or "trousers" (somehow I seem to recall the phrase "trousers of fate", but I have no idea where I heard that), what you could do is make it 3 paths with lots of choices to jump from one path to another. One path could represent "good", one is "evil" and one is "undecided", and the decisions where you jump from one to the other are repenting, falling to the dark side, etc.
So instead of:
...
You'd get:
...
1
|\
2 3
|\|\
4 5 6
|\|\|\
1
|\
2 3
|\|\
4 5 6
|X|X|
7 8 9
|X|X|
A B C
You can also do this with only two paths, ofcourse. But at least this way people can have a really different experience when they play "good", "evil", "undecided", "switch from good to evil", "choose evil, then repent", etc.
I think the trick is not to have the game truly branch, with each choice opening a set of quests completely disjunct from what you get with a different choice, but to have more subtle interactions between the quests.
In Vampire Bloodlines, for example, there are 5 different endings possible, but they all consist of pretty much the same set of elements except for some differences in dialogue and a different cutscene at the end. And for some ending you may not have to do some particular quests.
But which endings you can choose, is determined by your behaviour during earlier quests. Were you nice to the Anarchs and fulfill their quests? Then you can choose the Anarch ending. Did you always obey LaCroix? Then you can do his ending. If you do a faction's quests, you can do their ending, unless you screwed them over.
Something I'd also love to see is quests where you play on a different side of the quest. If you side with faction A at some point, you get the "Steal The MacGuffin for Faction A" quest. Do you side with faction B, you get the "Steal The MacGuffin for Faction B" quest. Are you independent, you can still steal it but decide later who to give/trade/sell it to. It should be possible to reuse cleverly designed quests this way.
Ofcourse the holy grail would be a game where high-quality quests are generated dynamically depending on all soorts of subtle balanced in the game, and where your performance during that quest has an impact on those balances. This idea of mine goes back to when I played Elite/Frontier. Some worlds were (according to their description) on the brink of civil war. If you decide to smuggle 100 tons of weapons to that planet, that should have some impact, right? Especially if you can decide to sell it to the rebels. I want a game that takes that sort of thing into account, and if nobody else is going to write it, I will. Some day.
I have no experience with HL2, but the engine isn't all that matters. It could be that Bloodlines has more detailed models or has a lot of extra code to run for various stuff, but I really don't know. Besides, 17 fps, while sufficient, isn't spectacular either. It's on the edge on what you might start to notice. Get swamped by a horde, and your fps might halve, and the game gets jerky just at the moment when you need it to be smooth and responsive.
Maybe I should try to play HL2 on my laptop to see how that plays. Come to think of it, I did turn some of the detail and particles down a bit when I had too much other programs running in the background, and while I didn't notice any significant graphics changes, the game did seem to get a bit smoother after that. You might want to give that a try.
This is not always true. Firefly got canceled during the first season, but the DVDs sold like crazy. It makes sense that writers still want to get paid if their creation does better on DVD than on TV.
While the video is interesting, it does not show moving rocks. It merely presents one of the theories (the disproven one, according to TFA) as fact.
Also, the video doesn't say the rocks are pushed by water, but dragged by ice which is pushed by the wind. Water, ice and wind are all mentioned in the article.
So while your video is cool, your presentation of it sucks.
Which version of the unofficial patch was it? The latest one is 4.3, and stuff is still getting fixed. There was a lot broken, but now they're up to some really subtle and obscure bugs. Not sure what caused your jerky framerate. It works fine on my cheapo Dell laptop. Not the smoothest gameplay ever, perhaps, but I thought that was just because I suck at twitch games. I still managed to kill all bad guys, though.