It'll only be a matter of time, I think, before the major publishers perk up and start to realize that these indie games are setting the trend, not them
In terms of graphic design aspects of, well, anything, I think this has been true for a long time. I first started seeing games that used photograps as sprites in the indie world long before Mortal Kombat and the like came out. Fashion trends always follow some subculture, && I've seen a lot of graphic styles used by demosceners make their way onto TV over time.
Palm makes an aluminum case for the Tungeten T series that I think is far superior to the leather cases.
It doesn't have any snazzy features like room for a notepad, but it does have storage for two SD cards, and you can expand the Palm without having to take it out of the case. And it's a whole lot stronger than anything else.
Only problem is, it would absolutely suck to use if you're a leftie.
The release version of X11, inclusion of some minor libraries and tools that add improved GNU compatibility, XCode (though I still don't understand why I can't install this (or X11 for that matter) on 10.2. Except maybe to force me to buy 10.3 =D
Possibly the solution is to revise patent law such that you must be able to demonstrate that you are marketing or developing a product that uses the invention covered by a patent. That should hopefully stop this asinine practise of buiding up massive portfolios of patents you never intend to use except in court. Besides, the whole point of patents is to encourage inventors to get new products on the market.
Spyware relies on being bundled along with software that would otherwise be at least almost legitimate.
If these companies want to continue to do business in the USA and sell products to U.S. customers, they will have to think twice about continuing with producing spyware or doing business with spyware companies.
I find that I have an easier time thinking when I'm listening to certain kinds of electronic music, such as some (say what you will) IDM.
I always figured the must be similar to the Mozart effect since a lot of the electronic music I like to listen to is structurally similar to various kinds of Classical music.
That would be a violation of the first law of car stereo dynamics: The price of the car stereo system is inversely proportional to the quality of music that it plays.
(On a side note, I'm curious if there's a way to create some sort of HERF gun that reliably disables subwoofers but nothing else. Is this even theoretically possible?)
I think this Hollywood story is a great example of how wrongheaded a lot of IP law is. Historically places with heavy restrictions on the freedom of information (like, say, the Soviet Union) have fallen behind other areas in economic productivity and quality of life. Whatever new technology someone is trying to control in a restrictive place just pops up somewhere else where those restrictions aren't as strong, as in the Hollywood case.
I believe the issue here is that in the long run monopoly is always bad for an economy. I realize that patents, copyrights, etc. are necessary to give inventors and innovators some incentive to put new products on the market, especially in the case of small inventors who would simply be gobbled up as soon as their bigger larger competitors reverse engineered their product (or co-opted their ideas in the case of copyright law.)
However, the point is to give just enough time that you promote innovation but not too much time so you don't stifle competition (in the case of patents) or cultural history (in the case of copyright). It's important to realize that the length of time that is appropriate here varies wildly from industry to industry. In the case of software patents (we'll assume for the moment that they aren't a stupid idea in the first place), for example, the industry moves so quickly that a patent shouldn't last any longer than two years. That's plenty of time for a piece of software to grab a niche in the market. It's also a good way to avoid stealth patents like this JPEG one. 20 years for something like an image compression algorithm is just ridiculous.
In the old days, folks could easily have gotten around this by just moving to a country where you can't patent something like a compression algorithm and continue to make improvements in signal compression technology. At the same time, the country that did allow that patent would suddenly find itself falling behind in the technology world because it enforces laws that stifle innovation.
Nowadays, the big countries are trying to escape this problem not by creating legal environments that encourage having an intelligent, innovative population but by trying to force their Faustian bargain on the whole world through international trade laws (which is how the USA got the DMCA). Which is sad - instead of saying, "hey, everyone else out there is growing really fast, maybe we should grow really fast, too", the western world has decreed that the entire species must grow slowly.
And the thing that gets me most of all is that the whole IP thing is so similar to a classic prisoner's dilemma that I can't believe it isn't more painfully obvious to people. Then again, maybe it is, and it's just that the people who get to make decisions about IP law aren't interested in being better off in an objective sense; they're just interested in making sure they will always do better than everyone below them.
Try not to forget that the foreign guerillas streaming into Iraq are human, too. I'm sure they see themselves as a resistance or a liberating force trying to help an ally against a common foe. (It's worth noting that they don't have to have the majority of Iraq be opposed to the American occupation to hold this point of view.) Talking this way about them is a step toward the same sort of hateful mindset that drives Al Qaeda. Yes, they do want you to "eat shit and die," but responding to this with the exact same attitude just escalates the conflict.
The best solution is the one that keeps as many people alive as possible on both sides of the fence in the long run. Granted, this opinion isn't very popular because it's a subtle one. It means that you look for tactics that try to stem the tide of guerillas into Iraq rather than one that waits and attacks them after they've already blown up a Humvee. On the other hand, it also means you can't play Santa Claus and let all prisoners free - many people can and will try to attack American soldiers and other Iraqis if they are released. They do need to be permanently imprisoned, or executed if necessary.
But just going in and hating and killing is a bad idea. Even if you don't find that attitude morally objectionable, it's simply a stupid policy for an occupying force to have. We learned this first hand in Vietnam, where approaching the war with this attitude ultimately caused us to lose it. Israel is currently learning this the hard way, too. It's just not possible to make people like you when you're holding them at gunpoint.
All that said, I do agree that I would rather see every Iraqi insurgent die than see one more American soldier or Iraqi civilian or police officer die. It's just that even more than that I'd like to see nobody dying.
Not every college says their computing resources are for academic use only. Honestly, such a policy is kind of ridiculous - with such an agreement, you've suddenly said your students aren't allowed to do a whole host of things, such as use their campus network connection (or campus e-mail account) to keep in touch with family and friends. You've also said your students can't use the campus network to download games and all sorts of other stuff that you really shouln't be disallowing people who live on campus from doing.
At the college I went to, the computer center understood that the campus network and internet connection weren't just an academic tool. They were also a student entertainment service and a way to attract kids. A college with a TOS that doesn't allow this or has a generally crappy low-bandwidth internet connection in the dorms stands to lose a lot of good applicants to well-wired schools. Which isn't to say that the network was totally unrestricted - there were bandwidth caps on traffic going through all the popular filesharing ports, for example, and all non-port-80 traffic in the dorms was restricted during peak hours.
I have seen such policies on computer labs (with the understanding that e-mail is okay), and that does make sense.
This is where a MMO game could really benefit from a BitTorrent style system for distributing large updates. Just write a similar engine into the game's software. Have anyone who is playing automatically help share the file, and make the transfer engine only use spare bandwidth, or turn off if the computer is on a low bandwidth connection.
If it's well done, the strain on the download servers could be nearly negligible after some seed time to get the first few copies of the update out the door.
The line "She'll make point five past lightspeed" always got me. I assume it means that the ship can travel at 1.5 times the speed of light in a vaccum, but in the movies trips between star systems appear to take only a few hours, maybe a day or two at the most. Assuming that the Star Wars galaxy is similar to our own, it would take light years to travel between stars, and at 1.5 times the speed of light the trip would still take years.
There's equipment on the back of the van for two reasons - sometimes there's already equipment on the front of the van, and sometimes you can't put it there because it would obstruct the driver's view.
I suppose all the highway quality monitors and road construction workers should change jobs to make room for you to drive like an asshole. Then it would be fun to see you complain that the highways are nothing but a mess of potholes and wonder why nobody is fixing them. Maybe the truckers can quit their jobs too, so we can watch you slowly starve to death because the supermarkets suddenly can't get any food.
My state, (Illinois) has a points system. From what I can see, its biggest failure is that folks (a couple of my friends, for example) will collect points until they're about to lose their licenses, then be good little children until their points are reset.
My job is collecting data about highways, mostly pavement quality. It's done from a platform (van) moving at highway speeds, and can involve a fair amount of erratic driving.
Tailgaters are a serious problem for me, as are all the other kinds of "me-first" assholes I have to deal with all day every single work day. I won't even start on drunk drivers (except maybe to point out that Tennessee and Georgia, among others, really need get their acts in gear w/r/t DUI). Thanks to folks like this, car wrecks are a fact of life for me, and there's little I can do to avoid it except take comfort in the fact that my van is heavy enough that it is almost guaranteed to clean house in a fight with most any other car on the road.
What I find most amazing about these people is that absolutely nothing can get them to change their driving habits. Even with the van blinking and flashing like a Christmas tree from Hell and a huge sign on the back warning people to stay the fuck back because of sudden braking and such, a lot of folks still like to ride my bumper.
Only they aren't even riding my bumper, because to get to the bumper you'd have to make it through all the equipment that bristles from the van. Which makes the whole tailgating thing really amazing to me. I don't expect people to know that rear-ending me would result in their being responsible for a six (possibly even seven, depending on what gets broken) digit repair bill, but I do find it amazing that there are so many people who are too stupid to realize that their front bumper is only a few feet away from something they probably can't afford to bang a car into. I'm especially perturbed by the fact that weather conditions don't seem to have much effect on their ability to come to this realization, either
(I also think that most people must be a whole to more rich than me, because there is almost nothing that rolls down the highway that I could afford to bang my car into.)
So yeah, I don't think that these smart cat-eyes will have any noticeable impact on the way people drive.
I can't see the true spirit of friendship and cooperation ever infecting the vast majority of humanity - at least not here in the USA - so I imagine the only thing that would make folks drive in a more sane manner is to create some sort of consistently enforced and difficult to avoid method of punishing bad drivers or rewarding good drivers. Cops and speed traps don't help much because there are very few of them and they generally can't easily catch stuff like tailgating and reckless driving. The only thing I can think of is some sort of omnipresent Big Brother system that can always see every car, at least on major roads.
I'd also like to see better punishments. Speeding tickets hurt a lot if you don't have a whole lot of money, but are little more than a slap on the wrist for other people. I'd rather see something that is directly related to driving (thus keeping a better associating with driving habits, which would hopefully increase the salience of the punishment for behavior-changing purposes). For example, folks who get two moving violations in a year could be banned from using the interstate highway system for 1 or more years.
For as long as there's a need to be able write anything in assembler or a decent system programming language, there will be a need for some modicum of protection in hardware.
Though I do gotta say, if you ever write a device driver in Java I'd love to see it.
A lot of college students get their computers as high school graduation presents from their family. Others get their parents' old computer when they buy a new one. All in all, at school I didn't know a whole lot of kids who bought their own computers.
Also, being college students most of them pay for the rest of that stuff with a cocktail of student loans, work/study, more of their parents' cash, and the like.
And even if you have a few hundred bucks in the bank, $100 is a fairly prohibitive cost when you're putting only a couple thou a year in your pocket, tops.
And even if you can afford it, gcc is still a hell of a lot cheaper than the MS dev tools.
A fair number of folks get into FOSS because they can't afford the dev tools. Intel releases a free C++ compiler that runs on Windows, but it also runs on Linux so there's a potential switching-over point there. Making their compiler free is a halfhearted attempt to stop this potential customer leak. It's the same reason why the copy protection on their dev tools is historically weak - in the long run they're better off having Visual Studio get pirated by _everyone_ if it keeps them from losing geeks and developers to competitors.
At college, I knew one student in the CS department who owned a legal copy of Visual Studio, and it had been purchased for him by a contract employer. All the other Windows kids pirated it; the only folks who used Dev-C++ and the like were primarily Linux and MacOS people.
How in the world can someone make it to an upper-level CS class and still not have the basic skills it takes to discover what format a file extension stands for and go about finding an application that will open it?
Reminds me of when I was a TA in the CS dept. at my college. Students would regularly come to the help sessions with programs that wouldn't compile so I could more or less read the compiler's error and warning messages to them verbatim.
Student: "Why won't this compile?" TA: "Well, let's try to compile it so I can see what's up. Oh, the compiler says that there's a parse error on line 40. So look at line 40 and see if you can find anything wrong." Student: "Ummm. . . " TA: "Look at the end of the line." Student: "Oh look, I forgot a closing parenthesis."
Alls I can say is that if CS majors have problems like this with compiling C source, I have my doubts that the battle over file formats will ever amount to something more of a holy war where I'm doomed to fail but obligated to fight.
I do the same, although I'm not in a company so I don't make it sound as official. I usually respond with a blurb either saying that I don't have Word so I can't read their documents and explaining how to save in a different format (most my Windows-using friends aren't really even clueful enough to know that RTF exists, let alone how to choose formats in Word).
If I feel like taking more time, I explain that I don't use Word documents because they are a known vector for virus transfer and encourage so-and-so to use a non-*.doc format for file interchange with other people, too.
Give Photopia or Metamorphoses a try. They both run on Infocom interpreters, and I'd say they are definitely literature. Metamorphoses even manages a great deal of depth despite an immense amount of work on being very simulationist and free form. No, neither of them are Notes from Underground, but they aren't Zork, either.
Also, dice-throws aren't a major component of text adventures. Some of them use a random element, but I've mostly noticed that be for the activity of NPC's such as the thief in Zork.
Slashdot Mirror
It'll only be a matter of time, I think, before the major publishers perk up and start to realize that these indie games are setting the trend, not them
In terms of graphic design aspects of, well, anything, I think this has been true for a long time. I first started seeing games that used photograps as sprites in the indie world long before Mortal Kombat and the like came out. Fashion trends always follow some subculture, && I've seen a lot of graphic styles used by demosceners make their way onto TV over time.
Palm makes an aluminum case for the Tungeten T series that I think is far superior to the leather cases.
It doesn't have any snazzy features like room for a notepad, but it does have storage for two SD cards, and you can expand the Palm without having to take it out of the case. And it's a whole lot stronger than anything else.
Only problem is, it would absolutely suck to use if you're a leftie.
The release version of X11, inclusion of some minor libraries and tools that add improved GNU compatibility, XCode (though I still don't understand why I can't install this (or X11 for that matter) on 10.2. Except maybe to force me to buy 10.3 =D
Possibly the solution is to revise patent law such that you must be able to demonstrate that you are marketing or developing a product that uses the invention covered by a patent. That should hopefully stop this asinine practise of buiding up massive portfolios of patents you never intend to use except in court. Besides, the whole point of patents is to encourage inventors to get new products on the market.
Spyware relies on being bundled along with software that would otherwise be at least almost legitimate.
If these companies want to continue to do business in the USA and sell products to U.S. customers, they will have to think twice about continuing with producing spyware or doing business with spyware companies.
If a car does not behave as advertised, customers raise a shitfit and the company ends up eating a lot of their own dog food.
If software does not behave as advertised, that's par for the course.
As we say in Wisconsin, what the fuck?
I find that I have an easier time thinking when I'm listening to certain kinds of electronic music, such as some (say what you will) IDM.
I always figured the must be similar to the Mozart effect since a lot of the electronic music I like to listen to is structurally similar to various kinds of Classical music.
That would be a violation of the first law of car stereo dynamics: The price of the car stereo system is inversely proportional to the quality of music that it plays.
(On a side note, I'm curious if there's a way to create some sort of HERF gun that reliably disables subwoofers but nothing else. Is this even theoretically possible?)
I think this Hollywood story is a great example of how wrongheaded a lot of IP law is. Historically places with heavy restrictions on the freedom of information (like, say, the Soviet Union) have fallen behind other areas in economic productivity and quality of life. Whatever new technology someone is trying to control in a restrictive place just pops up somewhere else where those restrictions aren't as strong, as in the Hollywood case.
I believe the issue here is that in the long run monopoly is always bad for an economy. I realize that patents, copyrights, etc. are necessary to give inventors and innovators some incentive to put new products on the market, especially in the case of small inventors who would simply be gobbled up as soon as their bigger larger competitors reverse engineered their product (or co-opted their ideas in the case of copyright law.)
However, the point is to give just enough time that you promote innovation but not too much time so you don't stifle competition (in the case of patents) or cultural history (in the case of copyright). It's important to realize that the length of time that is appropriate here varies wildly from industry to industry. In the case of software patents (we'll assume for the moment that they aren't a stupid idea in the first place), for example, the industry moves so quickly that a patent shouldn't last any longer than two years. That's plenty of time for a piece of software to grab a niche in the market. It's also a good way to avoid stealth patents like this JPEG one. 20 years for something like an image compression algorithm is just ridiculous.
In the old days, folks could easily have gotten around this by just moving to a country where you can't patent something like a compression algorithm and continue to make improvements in signal compression technology. At the same time, the country that did allow that patent would suddenly find itself falling behind in the technology world because it enforces laws that stifle innovation.
Nowadays, the big countries are trying to escape this problem not by creating legal environments that encourage having an intelligent, innovative population but by trying to force their Faustian bargain on the whole world through international trade laws (which is how the USA got the DMCA). Which is sad - instead of saying, "hey, everyone else out there is growing really fast, maybe we should grow really fast, too", the western world has decreed that the entire species must grow slowly.
And the thing that gets me most of all is that the whole IP thing is so similar to a classic prisoner's dilemma that I can't believe it isn't more painfully obvious to people. Then again, maybe it is, and it's just that the people who get to make decisions about IP law aren't interested in being better off in an objective sense; they're just interested in making sure they will always do better than everyone below them.
Try not to forget that the foreign guerillas streaming into Iraq are human, too. I'm sure they see themselves as a resistance or a liberating force trying to help an ally against a common foe. (It's worth noting that they don't have to have the majority of Iraq be opposed to the American occupation to hold this point of view.) Talking this way about them is a step toward the same sort of hateful mindset that drives Al Qaeda. Yes, they do want you to "eat shit and die," but responding to this with the exact same attitude just escalates the conflict.
The best solution is the one that keeps as many people alive as possible on both sides of the fence in the long run. Granted, this opinion isn't very popular because it's a subtle one. It means that you look for tactics that try to stem the tide of guerillas into Iraq rather than one that waits and attacks them after they've already blown up a Humvee. On the other hand, it also means you can't play Santa Claus and let all prisoners free - many people can and will try to attack American soldiers and other Iraqis if they are released. They do need to be permanently imprisoned, or executed if necessary.
But just going in and hating and killing is a bad idea. Even if you don't find that attitude morally objectionable, it's simply a stupid policy for an occupying force to have. We learned this first hand in Vietnam, where approaching the war with this attitude ultimately caused us to lose it. Israel is currently learning this the hard way, too. It's just not possible to make people like you when you're holding them at gunpoint.
All that said, I do agree that I would rather see every Iraqi insurgent die than see one more American soldier or Iraqi civilian or police officer die. It's just that even more than that I'd like to see nobody dying.
It depends on if this stuff improves abrasion resistance - if it's not better than Kevlar, you're better off just adding another layer of the stuff.
Granted, if it thickens enough with a small enough amount of force, it might be terribly useful in protecting a motorcyclist from broken bones.
Not every college says their computing resources are for academic use only. Honestly, such a policy is kind of ridiculous - with such an agreement, you've suddenly said your students aren't allowed to do a whole host of things, such as use their campus network connection (or campus e-mail account) to keep in touch with family and friends. You've also said your students can't use the campus network to download games and all sorts of other stuff that you really shouln't be disallowing people who live on campus from doing.
At the college I went to, the computer center understood that the campus network and internet connection weren't just an academic tool. They were also a student entertainment service and a way to attract kids. A college with a TOS that doesn't allow this or has a generally crappy low-bandwidth internet connection in the dorms stands to lose a lot of good applicants to well-wired schools. Which isn't to say that the network was totally unrestricted - there were bandwidth caps on traffic going through all the popular filesharing ports, for example, and all non-port-80 traffic in the dorms was restricted during peak hours.
I have seen such policies on computer labs (with the understanding that e-mail is okay), and that does make sense.
This is where a MMO game could really benefit from a BitTorrent style system for distributing large updates. Just write a similar engine into the game's software. Have anyone who is playing automatically help share the file, and make the transfer engine only use spare bandwidth, or turn off if the computer is on a low bandwidth connection.
If it's well done, the strain on the download servers could be nearly negligible after some seed time to get the first few copies of the update out the door.
The line "She'll make point five past lightspeed" always got me. I assume it means that the ship can travel at 1.5 times the speed of light in a vaccum, but in the movies trips between star systems appear to take only a few hours, maybe a day or two at the most. Assuming that the Star Wars galaxy is similar to our own, it would take light years to travel between stars, and at 1.5 times the speed of light the trip would still take years.
There's equipment on the back of the van for two reasons - sometimes there's already equipment on the front of the van, and sometimes you can't put it there because it would obstruct the driver's view.
I suppose all the highway quality monitors and road construction workers should change jobs to make room for you to drive like an asshole. Then it would be fun to see you complain that the highways are nothing but a mess of potholes and wonder why nobody is fixing them. Maybe the truckers can quit their jobs too, so we can watch you slowly starve to death because the supermarkets suddenly can't get any food.
My state, (Illinois) has a points system. From what I can see, its biggest failure is that folks (a couple of my friends, for example) will collect points until they're about to lose their licenses, then be good little children until their points are reset.
...that Windows users think they know jack now?
This is the case in Quake, but in TFC I remember getting much better results firing the rocket at the peak of my jump.
My job is collecting data about highways, mostly pavement quality. It's done from a platform (van) moving at highway speeds, and can involve a fair amount of erratic driving.
Tailgaters are a serious problem for me, as are all the other kinds of "me-first" assholes I have to deal with all day every single work day. I won't even start on drunk drivers (except maybe to point out that Tennessee and Georgia, among others, really need get their acts in gear w/r/t DUI). Thanks to folks like this, car wrecks are a fact of life for me, and there's little I can do to avoid it except take comfort in the fact that my van is heavy enough that it is almost guaranteed to clean house in a fight with most any other car on the road.
What I find most amazing about these people is that absolutely nothing can get them to change their driving habits. Even with the van blinking and flashing like a Christmas tree from Hell and a huge sign on the back warning people to stay the fuck back because of sudden braking and such, a lot of folks still like to ride my bumper.
Only they aren't even riding my bumper, because to get to the bumper you'd have to make it through all the equipment that bristles from the van. Which makes the whole tailgating thing really amazing to me. I don't expect people to know that rear-ending me would result in their being responsible for a six (possibly even seven, depending on what gets broken) digit repair bill, but I do find it amazing that there are so many people who are too stupid to realize that their front bumper is only a few feet away from something they probably can't afford to bang a car into. I'm especially perturbed by the fact that weather conditions don't seem to have much effect on their ability to come to this realization, either
(I also think that most people must be a whole to more rich than me, because there is almost nothing that rolls down the highway that I could afford to bang my car into.)
So yeah, I don't think that these smart cat-eyes will have any noticeable impact on the way people drive.
I can't see the true spirit of friendship and cooperation ever infecting the vast majority of humanity - at least not here in the USA - so I imagine the only thing that would make folks drive in a more sane manner is to create some sort of consistently enforced and difficult to avoid method of punishing bad drivers or rewarding good drivers. Cops and speed traps don't help much because there are very few of them and they generally can't easily catch stuff like tailgating and reckless driving. The only thing I can think of is some sort of omnipresent Big Brother system that can always see every car, at least on major roads.
I'd also like to see better punishments. Speeding tickets hurt a lot if you don't have a whole lot of money, but are little more than a slap on the wrist for other people. I'd rather see something that is directly related to driving (thus keeping a better associating with driving habits, which would hopefully increase the salience of the punishment for behavior-changing purposes). For example, folks who get two moving violations in a year could be banned from using the interstate highway system for 1 or more years.
For as long as there's a need to be able write anything in assembler or a decent system programming language, there will be a need for some modicum of protection in hardware.
Though I do gotta say, if you ever write a device driver in Java I'd love to see it.
A lot of college students get their computers as high school graduation presents from their family. Others get their parents' old computer when they buy a new one. All in all, at school I didn't know a whole lot of kids who bought their own computers.
Also, being college students most of them pay for the rest of that stuff with a cocktail of student loans, work/study, more of their parents' cash, and the like.
And even if you have a few hundred bucks in the bank, $100 is a fairly prohibitive cost when you're putting only a couple thou a year in your pocket, tops.
And even if you can afford it, gcc is still a hell of a lot cheaper than the MS dev tools.
A fair number of folks get into FOSS because they can't afford the dev tools. Intel releases a free C++ compiler that runs on Windows, but it also runs on Linux so there's a potential switching-over point there. Making their compiler free is a halfhearted attempt to stop this potential customer leak. It's the same reason why the copy protection on their dev tools is historically weak - in the long run they're better off having Visual Studio get pirated by _everyone_ if it keeps them from losing geeks and developers to competitors.
At college, I knew one student in the CS department who owned a legal copy of Visual Studio, and it had been purchased for him by a contract employer. All the other Windows kids pirated it; the only folks who used Dev-C++ and the like were primarily Linux and MacOS people.
How in the world can someone make it to an upper-level CS class and still not have the basic skills it takes to discover what format a file extension stands for and go about finding an application that will open it?
Reminds me of when I was a TA in the CS dept. at my college. Students would regularly come to the help sessions with programs that wouldn't compile so I could more or less read the compiler's error and warning messages to them verbatim.
Student: "Why won't this compile?"
TA: "Well, let's try to compile it so I can see what's up. Oh, the compiler says that there's a parse error on line 40. So look at line 40 and see if you can find anything wrong."
Student: "Ummm. . . "
TA: "Look at the end of the line."
Student: "Oh look, I forgot a closing parenthesis."
Alls I can say is that if CS majors have problems like this with compiling C source, I have my doubts that the battle over file formats will ever amount to something more of a holy war where I'm doomed to fail but obligated to fight.
I do the same, although I'm not in a company so I don't make it sound as official. I usually respond with a blurb either saying that I don't have Word so I can't read their documents and explaining how to save in a different format (most my Windows-using friends aren't really even clueful enough to know that RTF exists, let alone how to choose formats in Word).
If I feel like taking more time, I explain that I don't use Word documents because they are a known vector for virus transfer and encourage so-and-so to use a non-*.doc format for file interchange with other people, too.
Give Photopia or Metamorphoses a try. They both run on Infocom interpreters, and I'd say they are definitely literature. Metamorphoses even manages a great deal of depth despite an immense amount of work on being very simulationist and free form. No, neither of them are Notes from Underground, but they aren't Zork, either.
Also, dice-throws aren't a major component of text adventures. Some of them use a random element, but I've mostly noticed that be for the activity of NPC's such as the thief in Zork.