First, you can hold the mouse button down. I was ready to write the game off as pitifully annoying after having to click everywhere, but when held down, it's not really worse than any other movement -- probably better than keyboard arrows would have been, in fact.
Second, I'm on Dvorak, so this isn't going to be a problem for many of us, but WASD is not in anywhere near a decent place to be able to use Tycho's combo. Looking at your standard QWERTY layout, my W is where your comma is; my S is your semicolon; my D, your H, and A is in the same place.
The trick to this, of course, is that you are allowed to use the arrow keys instead. I feel stupid for having beat the game before I figured that out.
From your review:
Fruit Fuckers are over-represented. Why did they keep coming up after you wiped out the source? I think this was mostly for the collection aspect. Where else are you going to get parts? Not an excuse, just an observation.
As my roommate asked, why is Tycho ALWAYS reading a book? That seems realistic, and part of the humor. Tycho is, in fact, always reading a book.
The toilet humor. Fair enough. I don't think there's disproportionately more in the game than in the comic, though.
"Re-define 'broadband', what? Where's the second part of that sentence - what are we redefining it into? Translation: Make what we now consider to be "broadband" so commonplace that the term is redefined to mean "even faster than what we get for free in every library, school, and public park."
But Obama's plan is no better, and seems to revolve around a lot of vague words with not a lot of details. I don't know, do we really want more of the same?
And he did, very specifically, come out in favor of net neutrality. That's one very specific thing that might actually be enough for my vote... But there is actually plenty up on his website which spells out, very clearly, a number of things that nobody else even wants to talk about, even so much as to say "we're not going to touch that." Look at his plan for transparency in government.
I think that Net neutrality is something that we have to look at from time to time, but I don't want to see the wealthiest and most powerful [companies] crowd out the independents, which has really given [the Internet] its strength and vitality Don't you just love politicians?
It's "something that we have to look at from time to time," thus implying it's not an immediate threat. But, "I don't want to see the wealthiest and most powerful [companies] crowd out the independents."
So he pays lip service to understanding that the Internet's strength is in its diversity; in those independent companies. What's confusing is that he somehow thinks that regulation is a threat to that, rather than a necessity for that.
Care to explain why every obamabot out there is modding "-1 troll" any time someone stands up to speak the truth about him in this thread? Perhaps because most of them are spouting bullshit with no sources to back them up. Kind of like you.
Actually, no, wait, one of them did have a source. A source which was pretty obscenely racist, and cared more about Obama's skin tone than about his politics.
Have you ever met him, listened to him speak in "private" or the likes? Not that it's relevant, but have you?
Bill never really ran Microsoft, he was too much an idealist for business at that end. He did, however, put himself in a position where he could easily make decisions. In fact, he was CEO for awhile, right? That's essentially a position where your whole fucking job is making decisions. He's got, what, a hundred billion dollars for doing absolutely nothing?
His "business strategy" that I mentioned earlier was putting low cost PCs into the hands of the masses so that he could offer a universal system. That may have been the goal, if you believe him. I certainly can't deny that the way in which Microsoft screwed IBM early on was of benefit to everyone, in terms of how cheap hardware is now.
But that does not excuse what he, and Microsoft, have done before and since.
From what I remember, Microsoft's very first product was Altair BASIC. The reason they got the contract with Altair was a classic (perhaps the first?) example of vaporware:
Bill Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system.[5] Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo he and Allen developed the interpreter. Keep in mind, this was when Microsoft was Micro-Soft, a two-person company. Your argument that he "never really ran Microsoft" is not an excuse here -- he made the phone call, and he helped develop the software, with exactly one other person.
It warms my "zealot" heart to know that Microsoft was, quite literally, founded on a lie.
His DREAM was one of oneness. His ideal wasn't "open source" but one of "openly available to all who wanted to partake in the scene." For a small fee. He was certainly against sharing, and demonstrated very early on a complete lack of understanding of the free software community (this was before the term "open source") -- read "An open letter to hobbyists."
Oh, and... if his dream was of openness, why didn't the Bill&Melinda foundation donate to OLPC?
Now, I will say this carefully and as nicely as I can... Reading down, that's not particularly nicely.
This is of course a "driver" issue and therefore the fault of capitalism The rest of your post could be passed off as mere anecdote, with a bit of 12-year-old language, but this is a bit of a troll.
It's not capitalism at all. It's binary blobs in the kernel. The two are orthogonal -- plenty of very profit-driven companies have discovered that it is useful to have Linux support, and it is far less work to do so when you release source and let the community maintain it. Oh, and the drivers end up better, too.
Oh, and this is just hilarious:
The wireless card stops running after 2 hours. Ubuntu makes a fine server, but geeze does it suck cocks as a desktop. WTF? Why does your desktop have a wireless card?
Aside from the law allowing faxed, but not emailed, documents, I'm also going to guess that a fax has far less likelihood of being intercepted and modified, or being forged altogether, than an email.
That's what he's referring to, that the story needs to come from the gameplay.... Cut scenes, etc, just remove us from the game and make the story and the game separate entities. TFA is saying that the two need to be the same thing. I'm not convinced yet that they can be "the same thing" -- after all, physics is very different than textures and artwork. There are, and will always be, different aspects of the game that are not the same thing.
The trick is, weaving the story into the game, rather than making it a completely separate entity. Take Half-Life 2 -- there were no cutscenes, but occasionally you'd be forced to sit around and watch characters interact -- the simple fact that you could still walk around and explore made it that much more immersive.
But I think it goes farther than that, and I've pretty much only seen Valve get it right, though I suspect others have come close: Tell the story without ever stopping the game. Being trapped in a room while Barney, Alyx, and Dr. Kleiner talk to each other is pretty much a cutscene -- it may not stop the gameplay, but it does stop the game.
A good example: The original Half-Life. A few scripted sequences, and a few items left lying around the environment, but after the initial experiment gone wrong, the story was pretty much told within the actual gameplay. I'm talking about things like finding the Houndeye kennels, and the shark tank, thus showing you that this isn't the first time we've seen these aliens. Or the Barney who wanted to tell you something (and was then shot by a ninja). Or the Marines who you think are coming to rescue you, and then they start shooting scientists.
Or the final boss battle -- nobody told you that was a boss battle, and there was pretty much no dialog at that point, but you knew. And the headcrab boss -- just looking at the thing, you understand that this is where headcrabs come from -- again, no dialog.
There are other neat tricks -- in Portal, many of the same things above are used, as well as the constant voice of GlaDOS -- which never really stops you from moving through the game. Narration is fine, but this isn't a cutscene.
There was even some custom Half-Life (1) map which told an interesting story using nothing but the computer in the HUD. Not as developed a plot, but scolding the player for moving through the normal storyline...
Note: All of the above games are pretty much linear. It's not that I don't want games to be on rails. It's that either way, the story can be told without pulling you out of the game. Cutscenes are movies, and Half-Life 2 "cutscenes" are basically 3D movies. Half-Life (original) and Portal are games with actual plots.
It's up to the industry to make it affordable, not the government. So there you go. If you don't already have copyright law equivalent to the basic American stuff, which makes filesharing a crime, implement that. Most likely, you already have enough.
Which means that anything you add on top of that is likely to be far too broad. For example, criminalizing the act of breaking copy protection makes it impossible to play DVDs with free software, in either sense of "free". Criminalizing illegal trackers makes it difficult to run a public tracker -- you're now making it the responsibility of the public forum to police its content.
About the best you could do, beyond basic copyright, is DMCA-style takedown notices.
But none of this will eliminate piracy. The government can't eliminate piracy, or significantly reduce it, without too many casualties. The industry can, by treating piracy as they would any other competitor.
distributing a program on hardware that blocks execution of modified software That, right there, is pretty much the definition of the GPLv3. To sum up: GPLv3 means that the end-user should be able to execute modified software as though it were the original software.
That's all. The rest of the GPLv3 is just a bunch of (somewhat readable) legalese attempting to prevent loopholes around this. But the idea is the same, and I've no sympathy for a company who can't grasp at least that much.
Probably the best answer, though a pain in the butt one, is to pay the various ISPs to have them host a media server in their data server so you can get a nice 10GBit data connection or something. This is called a CDN. Doesn't have to be directly at the ISP, just sufficiently distributed as to avoid bottlenecks.
Another way is to use something like Amazon S3 -- bandwidth is 17 cents per gig and falling.
If you want to get tricky, make the clients network aware so they'll share with each other if possible, assuming the ISP server doesn't exist, doesn't have the video, or is busy before going all the way back to the central servers Ala bittorrent. This is pretty much called BitTorrent. It is possible to get a client which will use zeroconf to detect peers on the same subnet, and there's also a feature called Distributed Hash Table. You still need an initial connection to a tracker, but once that's done, you can get additional peers without connecting.
Still, tracker bandwidth shouldn't be an issue, and you really want to be seeding fast anyway -- and again, Amazon S3 will do that.
Of course, the real solution is multicast, at least for the more popular stuff. If multicast had been better supported, BitTorrent would never have been invented, or it would look very different.
Bonus for the ISPs - they can oversell their external bandwidth more without pissing off their customers Actually, it just means they'd piss off a smaller subset. Not everyone wants bandwidth solely for movies.
Naw, for blu-ray he was proposing double that, or 1.4 GB. For an hour and a halfish film, using an *advanced* codec that compresses stuff enough that you actually need a fairly grunty chip* to process it for display, I can see it. The most I've seen them compressed is to DVD-5 size. This makes sense, as it would be easier to burn to a DVD-5 as a Blu-Ray disc (or whatever they call their DVD-5-compatible mode), and it still looks pretty good at 720p.
However...
AS for bandwidth, I'll point out that fiber and 10mbit data connections are going into more and more homes Well, if I remember right, the max speed for Blu-Ray is 48 mbits, maximum. I have 100 mbit fiber going into my home. Granted, it may not always get that fast, and it's nice to not suck down all the bandwidth, but I bet you can compress it down to 20 mbits and still work well.
The trouble is likely going to be the bandwidth at the other end, although I can see that being resolved in time.
I totally agree that physical media is on the way out, but who exactly would want an HD movie if they didn't have a HD TV? People who have a computer monitor. It's hard to buy a new computer with a resolution that isn't at least a little bit more than standard definition. I'm operating under the assumption that scaling down looks better than scaling up.
Granted, most people like to watch movies on their TVs anyway. But the kind of people who would watch anything other than YouTube on a computer are also the kind of people I'd expect to either have an HDTV, or have a setup where they can comfortably watch a computer monitor.
If I only have access to a kiosk, I won't login. To anything, even Slashdot. And that's ignoring trusting a third-party to run said web interface.
It might be useful -- maybe -- if it was run on my own server, over https, and I only connected to it from trusted devices (meaning devices I control pretty much entirely). But if that last part is true, then said devices already have an ssh client which likely works better.
It might be useful if the Internet connection is firewalled to oblivion. In that case, if they allow port 443, it should work to simply run an SSH server on that port, on a spare IP address -- and if they only allow port 80, it should be possible to run something like HTTP tunnel, and again, a real SSH connection on top of that.
Are these posted by the same people who say that Open Source's strength lies in its diversity? Doesn't mean that every project is useful. Having both GNOME and KDE is a good thing. Having both Beryl and Compiz was pretty useless.
However, in this case, I think it's possible to answer your paraphrased question:
"why use this when we've got a terminal (with a few scripts)" Because not everyone has such a terminal, and said terminal is not as portable. That alone justifies its existence, though there may be other reasons.
Ah, now I get it -- though I suspect Bluetooth is much more likely here (and probably already included).
Of course, the killer app would then be small, portable adapters to convert to VGA, RCA, and S-Video.
And I would love something like that -- but at a minimum, it'd have to be Android. If you're going to call it a portable computer, it pretty much has to be at least as flexible as a laptop.
I understand what a syn flood is, but that's not even relevant -- I was simply pointing out that it's possible to crush people with raw bandwidth. I suspect MediaDefender has a bigger pipe than Rev3, so I don't see anything Rev3 can do (by themselves) to even block a ping flood.
I mean, yes, they could keep their servers up if they use syncookies. Maybe -- 8k packets per second is quite a lot. But they'd still effectively be DoS'd, as they'd have no bandwidth left to serve legitimate customers.
The only difference is the word "me". That is a very big difference. It's the difference between suicide and homocide. The difference between ownership and theft. The difference between masturbation, sex, and rape all have to do with the word "me".
The knowledge that you cannot control the entire Internet to your whim makes me happy (i.e. there always will be shaping). WTF?
Shaping other people's traffic would, indeed, be that "control the entire Internet to your whim" philosophy. I only want to control what happens to my own bandwidth, which I pay for.
The grocery store analogy sucks even more than a car analogy would (highway & cars). Got a better one?
We are talking lag in the range of 13 to 47 ms. Hardly noticeable unless you are doing a systematic analysis. I am talking about ping to Google in the range of about 18 ms, sustained. As I'm not always running a torrent, and I've never seen that ping go down to 5 ms, I have to assume the torrent isn't even causing that much lag.
Slashdot Mirror
There are at least two things to learn here:
First, you can hold the mouse button down. I was ready to write the game off as pitifully annoying after having to click everywhere, but when held down, it's not really worse than any other movement -- probably better than keyboard arrows would have been, in fact.
Second, I'm on Dvorak, so this isn't going to be a problem for many of us, but WASD is not in anywhere near a decent place to be able to use Tycho's combo. Looking at your standard QWERTY layout, my W is where your comma is; my S is your semicolon; my D, your H, and A is in the same place.
The trick to this, of course, is that you are allowed to use the arrow keys instead. I feel stupid for having beat the game before I figured that out.
And he did, very specifically, come out in favor of net neutrality. That's one very specific thing that might actually be enough for my vote... But there is actually plenty up on his website which spells out, very clearly, a number of things that nobody else even wants to talk about, even so much as to say "we're not going to touch that." Look at his plan for transparency in government.
It's "something that we have to look at from time to time," thus implying it's not an immediate threat. But, "I don't want to see the wealthiest and most powerful [companies] crowd out the independents."
So he pays lip service to understanding that the Internet's strength is in its diversity; in those independent companies. What's confusing is that he somehow thinks that regulation is a threat to that, rather than a necessity for that.
Actually, no, wait, one of them did have a source. A source which was pretty obscenely racist, and cared more about Obama's skin tone than about his politics.
Still thinking "warehouse" falls outside the realm of "desktop", but I concede the point.
But that does not excuse what he, and Microsoft, have done before and since.
From what I remember, Microsoft's very first product was Altair BASIC. The reason they got the contract with Altair was a classic (perhaps the first?) example of vaporware: Bill Gates called the creators of the new microcomputer, MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems), offering to demonstrate an implementation of the BASIC programming language for the system.[5] Gates had neither an interpreter nor an Altair system, yet in the eight weeks before the demo he and Allen developed the interpreter. Keep in mind, this was when Microsoft was Micro-Soft, a two-person company. Your argument that he "never really ran Microsoft" is not an excuse here -- he made the phone call, and he helped develop the software, with exactly one other person.
It warms my "zealot" heart to know that Microsoft was, quite literally, founded on a lie. His DREAM was one of oneness. His ideal wasn't "open source" but one of "openly available to all who wanted to partake in the scene." For a small fee. He was certainly against sharing, and demonstrated very early on a complete lack of understanding of the free software community (this was before the term "open source") -- read "An open letter to hobbyists."
Oh, and... if his dream was of openness, why didn't the Bill&Melinda foundation donate to OLPC? Now, I will say this carefully and as nicely as I can... Reading down, that's not particularly nicely.
And you still haven't said much of substance.
It's not capitalism at all. It's binary blobs in the kernel. The two are orthogonal -- plenty of very profit-driven companies have discovered that it is useful to have Linux support, and it is far less work to do so when you release source and let the community maintain it. Oh, and the drivers end up better, too.
Oh, and this is just hilarious: The wireless card stops running after 2 hours. Ubuntu makes a fine server, but geeze does it suck cocks as a desktop. WTF? Why does your desktop have a wireless card?
Aside from the law allowing faxed, but not emailed, documents, I'm also going to guess that a fax has far less likelihood of being intercepted and modified, or being forged altogether, than an email.
The trick is, weaving the story into the game, rather than making it a completely separate entity. Take Half-Life 2 -- there were no cutscenes, but occasionally you'd be forced to sit around and watch characters interact -- the simple fact that you could still walk around and explore made it that much more immersive.
But I think it goes farther than that, and I've pretty much only seen Valve get it right, though I suspect others have come close: Tell the story without ever stopping the game. Being trapped in a room while Barney, Alyx, and Dr. Kleiner talk to each other is pretty much a cutscene -- it may not stop the gameplay, but it does stop the game.
A good example: The original Half-Life. A few scripted sequences, and a few items left lying around the environment, but after the initial experiment gone wrong, the story was pretty much told within the actual gameplay. I'm talking about things like finding the Houndeye kennels, and the shark tank, thus showing you that this isn't the first time we've seen these aliens. Or the Barney who wanted to tell you something (and was then shot by a ninja). Or the Marines who you think are coming to rescue you, and then they start shooting scientists.
Or the final boss battle -- nobody told you that was a boss battle, and there was pretty much no dialog at that point, but you knew. And the headcrab boss -- just looking at the thing, you understand that this is where headcrabs come from -- again, no dialog.
There are other neat tricks -- in Portal, many of the same things above are used, as well as the constant voice of GlaDOS -- which never really stops you from moving through the game. Narration is fine, but this isn't a cutscene.
There was even some custom Half-Life (1) map which told an interesting story using nothing but the computer in the HUD. Not as developed a plot, but scolding the player for moving through the normal storyline...
Note: All of the above games are pretty much linear. It's not that I don't want games to be on rails. It's that either way, the story can be told without pulling you out of the game. Cutscenes are movies, and Half-Life 2 "cutscenes" are basically 3D movies. Half-Life (original) and Portal are games with actual plots.
Which means that anything you add on top of that is likely to be far too broad. For example, criminalizing the act of breaking copy protection makes it impossible to play DVDs with free software, in either sense of "free". Criminalizing illegal trackers makes it difficult to run a public tracker -- you're now making it the responsibility of the public forum to police its content.
About the best you could do, beyond basic copyright, is DMCA-style takedown notices.
But none of this will eliminate piracy. The government can't eliminate piracy, or significantly reduce it, without too many casualties. The industry can, by treating piracy as they would any other competitor.
That's all. The rest of the GPLv3 is just a bunch of (somewhat readable) legalese attempting to prevent loopholes around this. But the idea is the same, and I've no sympathy for a company who can't grasp at least that much.
Another way is to use something like Amazon S3 -- bandwidth is 17 cents per gig and falling. If you want to get tricky, make the clients network aware so they'll share with each other if possible, assuming the ISP server doesn't exist, doesn't have the video, or is busy before going all the way back to the central servers Ala bittorrent. This is pretty much called BitTorrent. It is possible to get a client which will use zeroconf to detect peers on the same subnet, and there's also a feature called Distributed Hash Table. You still need an initial connection to a tracker, but once that's done, you can get additional peers without connecting.
Still, tracker bandwidth shouldn't be an issue, and you really want to be seeding fast anyway -- and again, Amazon S3 will do that.
Of course, the real solution is multicast, at least for the more popular stuff. If multicast had been better supported, BitTorrent would never have been invented, or it would look very different. Bonus for the ISPs - they can oversell their external bandwidth more without pissing off their customers Actually, it just means they'd piss off a smaller subset. Not everyone wants bandwidth solely for movies.
However... AS for bandwidth, I'll point out that fiber and 10mbit data connections are going into more and more homes Well, if I remember right, the max speed for Blu-Ray is 48 mbits, maximum. I have 100 mbit fiber going into my home. Granted, it may not always get that fast, and it's nice to not suck down all the bandwidth, but I bet you can compress it down to 20 mbits and still work well.
The trouble is likely going to be the bandwidth at the other end, although I can see that being resolved in time.
Granted, most people like to watch movies on their TVs anyway. But the kind of people who would watch anything other than YouTube on a computer are also the kind of people I'd expect to either have an HDTV, or have a setup where they can comfortably watch a computer monitor.
Given that commands are verbs, I hesitate to speculate what "woman" as a verb would mean.
They certainly don't seem to like it. Check out their robots.txt -- very little is explicitly allowed, and almost everything is explicitly disallowed.
So their API tools might be acceptable, but I doubt things like wget querying via the Web interface would be.
If I only have access to a kiosk, I won't login. To anything, even Slashdot. And that's ignoring trusting a third-party to run said web interface.
It might be useful -- maybe -- if it was run on my own server, over https, and I only connected to it from trusted devices (meaning devices I control pretty much entirely). But if that last part is true, then said devices already have an ssh client which likely works better.
It might be useful if the Internet connection is firewalled to oblivion. In that case, if they allow port 443, it should work to simply run an SSH server on that port, on a spare IP address -- and if they only allow port 80, it should be possible to run something like HTTP tunnel, and again, a real SSH connection on top of that.
However, in this case, I think it's possible to answer your paraphrased question: "why use this when we've got a terminal (with a few scripts)" Because not everyone has such a terminal, and said terminal is not as portable. That alone justifies its existence, though there may be other reasons.
Ah, now I get it -- though I suspect Bluetooth is much more likely here (and probably already included).
Of course, the killer app would then be small, portable adapters to convert to VGA, RCA, and S-Video.
And I would love something like that -- but at a minimum, it'd have to be Android. If you're going to call it a portable computer, it pretty much has to be at least as flexible as a laptop.
I understand what a syn flood is, but that's not even relevant -- I was simply pointing out that it's possible to crush people with raw bandwidth. I suspect MediaDefender has a bigger pipe than Rev3, so I don't see anything Rev3 can do (by themselves) to even block a ping flood.
I mean, yes, they could keep their servers up if they use syncookies. Maybe -- 8k packets per second is quite a lot. But they'd still effectively be DoS'd, as they'd have no bandwidth left to serve legitimate customers.
Shaping other people's traffic would, indeed, be that "control the entire Internet to your whim" philosophy. I only want to control what happens to my own bandwidth, which I pay for. The grocery store analogy sucks even more than a car analogy would (highway & cars). Got a better one?
So, someone upload their resume in ODF. If he's at all serious about transparency in government, his staff will be able to read it.